All the other groups are protected by hate speech laws and hate crime laws — who knows, there may even be some hate thought laws on the books. All that is needed is some Jewish invention that reads minds and, like desert flowers after a rain, thought laws will bloom in every civilized nation.
[Note: You may have to watch the video more than once to get all of it because this is a speedy narrator. A narrator on speed? One talking real fast before he high tails it to the bomb shelter? Someone from New York City talking at his normal rate?]
Without the Jews we’d have to turn against some other weird faction of humanity. Maybe people with freckles? Or how about the curly-haired? I’ve always hated those who are
Here’s the thing: the ugly reality is that we’re stuck with the Jews. No matter what we do to them — pogroms, attempts at extermination, exclusions, boycotts, social shunning, academic quotas — nothing works. Those creatures just keep on reproducing and creating green oases where once there was only desert. We all know they're ony doing it to make the rest of us look bad.
Face it, we’re stuck with them. We’ll have to keep on accepting their smarty pants inventions, their technology, their moral philosophers, their scientists and doctors, even their damned charities that bring aid to those who hate them.
Besides…
- - - - - - - - -
The Arabs simply cannot survive without the existence of Jews in the Middle East. If Israel didn’t exist right where it is within easy firing distance, the Arabs would be forced to turn on one another — and then the real blood baths would begin. But there wouldn’t be any great technological inventions to go with their internecine slaughter, just one headless body piled on another as far as the eye could see.
Nah, better they should keep Israel — a worried, anxious Israel in situ fighting for its existence — than have to deal with the devils who would invade the vacuum left if Israel ceased to exist. Those demons who enter moral vacuums in the Middle East don't pay attention to hate crime laws and they especially don't like the Arabs.
Hat Tip: P.A. in Denmark
24 comments:
Some people from ME are also fed up and make fun of it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=CZ&hl=cs&v=BlsjaG2ovQY
I don't know what it is about Jews that makes it so difficult for people to treat them just like everybody else. There is a large body of people who hate Jews as a matter of principle, and there are also some who at times attribute a Jewish origin to all kinds of ideas, in many cases when this is true and in some cases when it is not true. I had a conversation with a Jewish gentleman last year who said that the Jewish and Judaic roots of many concepts and words in Western languages have been downplayed in favor of a Greek (or these days Islamic) origin. That may well be true, but he also suggested that the West got the concept of law from Judaism. I disagree slightly with that. Or rather, it depends upon what kind of law we are talking about.
Christianity, the dominant religion of the European world for most of the past two thousand years, is deeply rooted in Judaism but it is not identical to it. Christianity, starting with the Romanized Jew Saint Paul, who shaped Christianity more than any other person apart from Jesus himself, adopted secular Roman law instead of Jewish religious law that governs all aspects of life. Christianity also adopted some aspects and concepts from Greek philosophy which faced stronger resistance among Jews, as well as the Greek artistic legacy.
Christianity may have been a Jewish child, but it was born into and shaped by a Greco-Roman environment. In fact, for those of us who live in the parts of northern and eastern Europe that never were a part of the Roman Empire, the Greco-Roman legacy came to us as a package deal together with Christianity, so closely had the two become intertwined.
One idea that definitely came from Judaism and shaped the entire history of the European and Western world in the post-roman era was that of progress towards a specific goal. Here is the book Gods and Men - The Origins of Western Culture:
"The most significant feature of the Jewish heritage, however, was its view of history. Other ancient peoples had believed in a golden age, but had always located it in the past at the beginning of time. Israel alone looked forward to a golden age in the future and interpreted history as a meaningful and progressive movement toward this Messianic consummation. Originating in tribalistic loyalty, and reflecting the determination of a weak people to retain its identity in spite of conquest and enslavement, the Messianic hope was given universal scope by the prophets and became the end toward which all earthly events were moving. In various manifestations, religious and secular, spiritual and materialistic, it became one of those dynamic social myths which give meaning and direction to human life and which have more influence on human action than any rational philosophy. Unless its importance is understood, the development not merely of the Jewish people but also of the whole Western world becomes unintelligible."
Fj-
A minor disagreement. Yes, Paul was a Roman citizen but he was very much a Hellenized Jew in his thinking -- as opposed to the original center of the Christ Jews, in Jerusalem, who did not approve of Paul.
Just one comment...
"All the other groups are protected by hate speech laws and hate crime laws."
lol
(though maybe you meant Israeli(Jew)s?)
Last but not least let's not forget all great jewish humorists and comedians, many of them very brilliant. Here's one of them:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yu2NqfISm9k
Feel free to add some more. :)
The Golden age of Christianity was the redeeming projection of Jesus Christ in this world.
Further expectations are simply projections of Jesus Christ in an individual soul.
The old Jewish expectation of Messiah was closer to MarKokhba or even Mo - an armed polit guy. Very incomprehensible - if you bring Jesus Christ.
Was the land of Israel sort of inividual soul from their point of view? This would be strange. But for some Christians acceptable.
We should not forget Christianity run in Aramaic - much closer to the Hebrew vocabulary which gets lost in the Greek translation (heavily). For ex. various different words for "prayer" have one equivalent only in New Test. Greek.
Right now Assyrians come to your countries from Iraq, try to find more. We know very little about Judaism, there is no way to go around their terminology apparatus.
For ex. Adam is mostly "humanity", not a person...in Hebrew.
Christianity is a serious problem for Judaism, viceversa it is like a flower growing from a pot.
The other question is how indepted is J. to various ME cult(ures)?
Could be a lot - Uruq/Iraq. Angels from Persians?
In Greek and Persian angel is simply "messanger". In islam you have messenger of allah who is not angel of allah. See the game of words.
Dymphna: Yes, but Christianity was to a large extent founded by Hellenized and Romanized Jews. The relationship between the Roman state and the new religion was quite complex. A number of the early Christians, starting with Jesus himself and possibly Paul and Peter, were executed by Roman authorities. Yet in the end, it would be fair to claim that Christianity was a Roman religion. Not only was it born into, and grew within, the Roman Empire, but in the process it assimilated and adopted a number of aspects of Greco-Roman culture, from secular Roman law to a Greek philosophical vocabulary. Here is a quote from the book Religion and State by L. Carl. Brown
"Islam and Judaism both place great emphasis on the law. Both religious systems conceive of a comprehensive religio-legal system covering all aspects of the individual’s relations to others and of the individual’s relation to God. Everything is taken into account and set out in detail – times of prayer, foods that may be eaten and manner of ritual slaughter of animals, almsgiving, inheritance, and even such minor details as the use of a toothpick. The emphasis on the religious law in both Islam and Judaism is to be contrasted with the Christian concept of liberation from the curse of the law (Galatians 3:13) and of justification through faith alone, all this being especially the theological contribution of Saint Paul."
This was of great importance for the future. In medicine, there is the concept of "transplant rejection," which happens when an organ is transplanted into another body and that body's immune system rejects it as an alien intrusion. This is a useful analogy to keep in mind when assessing how Muslims and Christians treated the Greek philosophical heritage during the Middle Ages. Muslims did engage the Greek philosophical heritage but only parts of it, and eventually, even this limited acceptance was rejected by conservative theologians such as al-Ghazali. The Islamic immune system thus engaged Greek ideas, found them to be an alien intrusion and ultimately rejected them. For Christianity, the Greek philosophical heritage was not an alien intrusion. On some level, Christianity was Greco-Roman from the very beginning, which is why a successful synthesis could be more easily achieved among Christians than among Muslims.
It is likely that even Jesus knew some Greek, in addition to Aramaic and probably some Hebrew.
Fj--
I don't disagree with what you say. My only point ws that Paul was only nominally Roman. He used his citizenship to avoid crucifixion.
But he was a Hellene Jew in his thinking. In comparison to Peter, et al, he was urbane, rabbinic, and had a world view vastly different from that of the original Apostles.
He took it upon himself the label "Apostle to the Gentiles" but it didn't go over very well back at the home base. He was simply too sophisticated for their tastes and they feared his inclusion of the wider world.
To see the difference, compare Acts 15 (I think) to Galatians 2. These are reports of the same event. Acts (which is a continuation of Luke) describes things very differently than Paul's version in Galatians.
For example, Paul claims he went to Jerusalem to meet with them of his own accord. Acts says he was ordered (more or less) to come.
Paul's defensive reactivity lay in the fact that he had not known Christ before the Crucifixion. However, he considered being knocked off his horse on the road to Damascus and being spoken sharply to by a Voice (plus the fact that he was blind for maybe 2 years after his accident) gave him enough authority to follow his own discernment.
As I've said before, I do wonder what would have happened to Christianity if Jerusalem hadn't been destroyed in 70 AD. What would have happened to the early sects in the Middle East if the Muslims hadn't wiped them out some centuries later.
The Latin rite prospered partly because the Muslims killed most of the competition.
Robin Shadowes--
We're lazy...please use the html form at the top of the comment box to build a live link. That way people don't have to cut and paste:
Hitler Rap
Yes, there is some classic Jewish humor. You could start with the Marx Brothers.
And Russian humor. And Irish humor. And American black humor.
Oppression offers the opportunity to sublimate suffering...
...funny, though. Feminists claim to be oppressed and their stuff isn't all that amusing. Unless bashing men is a form of wit.
And don't forget the great music that came out of Tin Pan Alley. Mostly first generation American Jews...there were a few WASP exceptions like those Indiana boys, Hoagy Carmichael and Cole Porter. But again, they owe much to American jazz, a black phenomenon.
What a great swirl of talent, all mixed together...
Producing long lists of Jewish and Israeli accomplishments on video or in text is pointless. People do not care about Nobel Prizes when it comes to matters related to justice. Being able to demonstrate that one is in the right is what matters. Even if your opponents will say anything to discredit you, the more rock-solid arguments you have the worse the liars will look.
The Byzantine Greeks never stopped studying all Hellenic sources available in depth.
It went to such an extent that it was inappropriate to use other place names than original Hellenic ones.
What we call Renaissance was an integral part of their education without any interruption...
Dymphna, Fjordman et al, one interesting way to look a the Peter vs Paul approach is to consider it from a strategic perspective. Peter and the apostles picked up by Jesus were mostly uneducated men - that is, they weren't rabbis. They were culturally steeped in the law and customs of the jewish culture but if you'd asked them to try and explain that to non-jews they would have had a hard time because they understood it implicitly. It was idiomatic to them. When they spoke of Jesus and his works amongst the nation of Israel, the people they were speaking to would understand all of the cultural background to that.
Paul, on the other hand, understood jewish beliefs on an abstract level as well, having been educated in them. He was, if we read the text carefully, being groomed to take a seat on the Sanhedrin when he had his conversion experience. Assuming that there was a spiritual strategic imperative behind the movements of the apostles, and that this strategy was to bring the word of God to the entire world, Paul was far better suited to the task than Peter. He was able to explain the roots of Jewish thought and religion, all of the contextual information that people needed to understand the full message of Jesus and what it meant.
I found one!
I think I'd read some oif this guy a long time ago. He's got a quick rundown of the argument from a jewish perspective.
"He was better suited"...yes and no.
Moving to the (more) intellectual level...is moving down. It can be a side-blessing or side-crash as well.
We come to the intersection of intellectual and spiritual. And automatically many get EX-cluded.
The subtle tool should bring us back to the spiritual. Does it?
"Educated" is like "trained".
Trained in what exactly?
It is impossible to have a full understanding of the message of Jesus unless you first have an understanding of the laws and customs of the Jewish people of that day. That's why I said Paul was better suited - he could articulate these laws and customs through his education in a way that Peter and the other apostles wouldn't have been able to do.
@islam o'phobe
Producing long lists of Jewish and Israeli accomplishments on video or in text is pointless...
I disgree, io'p. That list is an amazement of accomplishment and many people are in ignorance of the breadth and depth of what Israel accomplished.
As for justice, it can't be had where there is no love (in the philia sense, not eros). The two are in tandem.
The notion of martial jihad is, at its base, about the destruction of justice and love. Thus, those concepts are irrelevant to jihadists. In the face of their programmed "destroy them all" procedures, knowledge can be a valuable tool.
Besides, we need to fight propaganda with fact. We need to take charge of the conversation rather than become defensive about the evil Jooos.
@Czechmade --
"Educated" is like "trained".
Trained in what exactly?
There are several connotations for "education" and more or less two root words: educare and educere.
I was taught in grade school that the first meant "to make a disciple of", or "to lead out of doubt" while the second term was limited to the kinds of training you mention -- e.g., learning equations, or how to parse a sentence.
It's like the distinction between information and knowledge.
For example Pat Condell is very smart; he has read widely and has lots of information about various religions. However, his information remains on an intellectual level, the heart is not a paart of it. Paul's direct experience Paul grasped his whole being.
A Christian might respond to Mr. Condell's contempt by saying that he had explored only a part of the elephant.
Information leads to a collection of facts; knowledge, otoh, *can* in some cases, lead to an apprehending of what is, at its root, an ineffable experience. Afer devoting his life to theology, Thomas Aquinas put down his pen and said "it is all straw".
The experience of the numinous can only be partially explained -- rather like trying to get across the idea of "blue" to a blind man. You can tell him where it appears on the spectrum of light etc, but the blind man then has only information. Due to cortical deficits he can never experience blue.
Pascal put it best: "the heart has its reasons that Reason knows not of".
IOW, religious arguments are useless.
Archonix--
Fascinating link. Where do you find this stuff?
And since you seem to be good at uncovering these things, do you know of a website that discusses the flowering of Christianity in the Middle East before the onslaught of the Muslim massacres?
It is amazing to me that small pockets remain: the Assyrians, the Copts, etc. Christian monasticism got its toehold in this area through the work of Pachomius, before moving west with Benedict.
The tiny remainder of Christian monks -- say the ones in Egypt and Turkey -- are under constant assault.In the west, we killed off monasticism by more intellectual means...but the result is the same. THe difference is that monasteries in the West are politely permitted to die off.
Anyone know of websites or books on the subject(s)?
I don't know if anyone else is having this problem, but Blooger is really messing up comments. Be sure to copy yours to the clipboard before you hit "publish".
I don't rightly remember how I found it. I tend to go around searching for christian esoterica on the web now and then and just stumble across these odd thinkers.
I've read trinkets and tidbits about the church in the east, but I can't remember when or where off hand either. The only book I have that deals with the subject is The Penguin History of the Church book one "The Early Church" - which I keep in the bathroom and read now and then - that deals with the church up to around 650 AD and covers the rise of the monastic movement.
If I find a website that covers the period I'll let you know.
No laughing, either.
Jews invented the first joke.
(I'll let people guess what it was...)
I think that the Jewish innovation that has had the longest and broadest influence in the west is the idea that:
1) Morality can be described as a set of laws, and
2) That those laws have to be reasoned about logically to be applied to mundane affiars
I remain convinced that the Greeks, and specifically Aristotle arrived at the connection between ethics and logic independently, and indeed approached the issue from a different angle.
Nonetheless, I think that the Jewish legalistic approach to morality and moralistic approach to the law has had a broad and basic influence on western thinking.
Dymphna,
I meant it as a rhetoric question.
Thanks for info on edaucare/educere.
I think it would be very difficult to define what "they" teach us...
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Fascinating post and discourse.
absurd thought -
God of the Universe says
blame your failings on the Jews
for a few more thousand years
they are Earth's scapegoats
absurd thought -
God of the Universe says
give Israel away
to appease her enemies
dishonor ALL Jews
absurd thought -
God of the Universe says
it's all the Jews' fault
fifteen million Earthly Jews
control all the planets
absurd thought -
God of the Universe says
be a primitive fool
continue to blame the Jews
through ancient insanity
absurd thought -
God of the Universe says
go ahead and blame the Jews
IslamoFascists and YOU
believe the same crazy sh*t
absurd thought -
God of the Universe says
blame a small population
deflect your people's anger
let them feel superior
.
All real freedom starts with freedom of speech. Without freedom of speech there can be no real freedom.
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Philosophy of Liberty Cartoon
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Help Stop Terrorism Today!
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USpace
:)
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