Zioshmooze vs. Plain English

 

The Zionist philosophizes that the Palestinian is not a human (Israel was a land without a people). The Anti-Zionist argues that the Palestinian is a human being. So what is the moderate viewpoint? The Palestinian is a quasi-human? Is this the American Progressive Jewish position?


Polite Discussion on Zionism: Is it Possible?
Karin Friedemann
April 25, 2007
World View News Service
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/wvns/message/7271


I found http://www.realisticdove.org/ very interesting because it is the first time I have come across a progressive Jew so honest about his racism. Usually when confronted, these confused souls just get indignant and refuse to speak to you for a few months. I always wondered how a person could think that Israel has a "right"to "security" and shrug off this amazing assumption with the accusation that anyone who has questions about his definitions is accusing him of being an evil murderer. Why would any sane person think that he has the right to live unharrassed on someone else's stolen property? Even the cute kids waving Israeli flags are participating in a criminally insane political ideology.

Progressive Jews want to make the bottom line "Jews are nice people." But that is not the bottom line. As Hillel mentioned, the bottom line is that you don't do to others what you don't want others to do to you. What would we expect if our neighbor, with or without warning, bulldozed our house?

First, we would call the police. If the man with the bulldozer failed to stop bulldozing the house, the police officer would have the duty to disable the vehicle and he might even shoot him. I'm talking about American law. The primary concept of civil rights is that you and your neighbor are sharing the same set of laws and punishments. The bulldozer man would be stopped. Hewould be considered a criminal. He would be put on trial. He would go to prison. If he had killed people in the process of bulldozing the house, he might even be executed. The owner of the house that was bulldozed would be entitled to damages plus extra for pain and suffering. The law requires that his property be restored to the original state that it was in. That includes replanting the trees and fixing the pavement around the house.

The emotional defensiveness of Jews is actually quite amusing, where they want to argue that the bulldozer man was not evil, he was not a murderer. The family that moved into the stolen property are just innocent idealists. They may be misguided, or mistaken, but for some reason Jews want to argue that they are not evil. What they are really saying is that they don't want Jews to be held legally accountable for their actions. They want to enjoy the privilege of being "protected" from the laws that apply to other people.

A law does not cover the "evilness" of a criminal. It covers actions and consequences.

If international law were followed, the Israeli "government' would never have kicked out any Palestinians. The entire existence of Israel is based on the condition made by the UN that Palestinians would remain in their homes and receive equal citizenship in the new nation state. That condition was not followed. Therefore, there is no legal basis for any assumption that Israel has a right to exist according to the UN. In fact, Israel does not really exist. It is a figment of imagination, the defensive mechanism of the neurotic Jewish collective consciousness. I agree that we need to stop arguing about isms but the next step is to solve the problems. Don't wait for the world community to force Israel to do it. Why don't we, as Jews, just do it? Why are Progressive Jews wasting their time feeling emotionally threatened by a one state solution? The real problem is that we are feeling emotionally threatened by any solution. Because a solution means that Jews need to be prosecuted.

The refugees must be given back their property with extra for damages. Even if they fled their homes because Arab leaders told them to get out of the fighting zone in 1948, they have the legal right to return to their homes as soon as the fighting stops. Small wonder why Israel continues to attack people day after day. The refugees must be given full civil rights. Full water rights, full road rights, and the full right to prosecute every Jewish family in America that has any property in the Holy Land as part of an organized crime network. Especially if both the Palestinian and the Jewish persons are American citizens. For example one friend of mine, after her family was forced off their land by gunpoint, New York Jews bought the land, bulldozed everything, and planted orange trees. She knows where they live. She knows their names. Anyone who buys or sells stolen property is a criminal who needs to be prosecuted. Any Jew who owns Palestinian property in the Holy Land should have his property seized, including their US assets, just like we did to the rum smugglers who funded Jewish terrorism in the 1920s, and Progressive Jews should insist on it instead of doing these mental "I'm not evil" gymnastics.

The Jews need to give back what they stole. I am not sure why that is so confusing to people. There needs to be a world tribunal like the Nuremburg trials to determine what was done and who was responsible, and to put an end to this nonsense. But failing that, the US legal system could solve the problem within a year if we just prosecuted this obnoxious real estate mafia. Why are Progressive Jews not lobbying for criminal penalties on Jews who invest in property that was cleared of its original owners by force in the Holy Land? There is enough room in Bush's new prisons for all these shady real estate agents. This is a simple matter of holding people legally accountable for the harm they cause others and for undermining the security of the United States in the process. It is exactly the same issue with dispute over the Roxbury Mosque in Boston. Some shady white (Jewish) real estate dealers were furious that the black community benefited from this piece of land next to the subway station that they wanted to develop, so now they are engaging in extra-legal trickery and character assassination to try to get that piece of real estate away from the people who own it. Once the Palestinians get their land back and all the Zionist organizations' assets are confiscated to repair the damage they have done, then we can talk about whether or not "the Jewish People" have the right to "self-determination" in the form of an ethnocentric nation state.

I learned when I was a kid that the way to get self-determination - i.e., the ability to do what you want when you want how you want - is to behave yourself. The Jews are not behaving themselves, and there is nothing okay about it. When a Progressive Jew avoids discussion by whining, "You think I'm evil!!" he or she breaks the heart of the human being who is trying to have peace with this person. It ends all rational discussion. It ends all hope for peace.

Sometimes Palestinians find it easier to deal with right wing Zionists than left wing because at least they are honest. A Palestinian can say to a right wing Jew, "You stole my property." The right wing Jew will say, "Yeah, and what are you going to do about it? My religion says I can steal your property." Then the Muslim can with dignity say, "Well my religion says that God curses the man who puts another man out of his home, and that I have the right to fight you." That actually can be done in the context of a polite dialogue. A peace plan is even potentially possible. Because then the Jew can say, "Well, I don't want you to kill me and I can see why you would think that I deserved it, because if you did the same thing to me I would certainly kill you. So let's make a deal. I'll let you live in the garage." This is still insulting behavior, but it's in the process of becoming less sadistic.

On the other hand, if a Palestinian says to a Progressive Jew, "You stole my property!" the Progressive Jew will usually shut down entirely. I have seen a fifty year old man start crying and insisting he's not evil. This is the behavior of someone who is guilty as sin. Like when you accuse your husband of adultery and he starts guilt-tripping you about how you don't believe in him (hypothetical but common scenario).

The other reaction is to get maliciously angry and start doing character assassination via gossip so that none of the other Progressive Jews will greet that person who brought up the "touchy" subject. They will be told that this person is an "enemy of peace" - so that it will be politically correct to shun them the same way that we avoid eye contact with skinheads and Bible thumpers. Progressive Jews are the most amazingly idealistic people on the planet. They want to be able to continue to sit on someone else's stolen property (or at least vacation on it) and not only do they think they have a "right" to travel around unharmed, ride the buses, shop and eat pizza while the people they made homeless have no water or food - but they want their victims to LIKE them. The Jews are the only conquerors in the history of the planet that expected the conquered people to LIKE them! If they don't like us, we feel offended and outraged. And what Jews consider as "liking behavior" is never mentioning the property they stole.

I've discussed some of this with Avigail Abarbanel, an ex-Israeli psychiatrist in Australia. She views Zionism as a mental illness that can be treated. But Zionism is just a symptom of a deeper problem, the delusional belief that you have "rights" which do not exist. Like a kid thinking he has the right to hit his sister. It's a failure to apply the Golden Rule to one's personal sense of responsibility in certain situations. The inner conflict that arises from these "situational ethics" certainly does create a clinically diagnosable mental inability to process certain types of information that trigger the neurotic or sometimes even psychotic defensive reaction.

Unfortunately, when it comes to Israel, Jews are defensive in the sense that they cannot process the type of information that is necessary to create peaceful behaviors. For example, if a Jew and Palestinian live next door to each other in New Jersey, the Jew being the "owner" of a condo built on the Palestinian person's property, don't you think the Jew should offer to give it back, if he expects the other's friendship? If the Palestinian, as is normal, invites the Jew over for tea and politely doesn't bring up the subject, does the Jew feel that this means it's OK what he did? That he can forgive himself? That is what Jews want after all. We want to be forgiven without apology for everything we have done AND everything we are about to do.

Is this a rational approach to peace? Is it working?

*********************************************************************

WORLD VIEW NEWS SERVICE

To subscribe to this group, send an email to:wvns-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

NEWS ARCHIVE IS OPEN TO PUBLIC VIEWhttp://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/wvns/

Need some good karma? Appreciate the service?Please consider donating to WVNS today.Email ummyakoub@yahoo.com for instructions.

To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:wvns-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

Sphere: Related Content

Time to interrogate Jacoby

Why does the Globe waste an op-ed column with material that should be a paid advertisement?

Joachim Martillo (ThorsProvoni@aol.com)

Dear Editor:

Jeff Jacoby argues in "New questions for the [Islamic Society of Boston (ISB)]" (The Boston Globe, April 25, 2007, http://tinyurl.com/2egahh) that a November 2000 payment by check, which was signed by an ISB director and which was made out to a third party with the memo "Travel for speaker Abdurahman Alamoudi -- 11/10/00 - 11/12/00," belies contentions by the ISB that "[Alamoudi] has had no role in, or affiliation with, the ISB for approximately 20 years."

The check to a third party is a thin thread on which to hang a claim of a connection between Alamoudi and the ISB at a time period when Alamoudi was often meeting with Hillary Clinton, George W. Bush, and conservative tax reformer Grover Norquist. Lots of people associated with him both publicly and also frequently, but when I search news reports from the November 2000 time frame, I find no mention of Alamoudi in any way linked with the ISB.

In his March 21, 2007 column entitled Defeating radical Islam (http://tinyurl.com/2qzfta), Jacoby wrote, "On 9/11, many Americans woke up to the fact that a deadly enemy is arrayed against us and that effective counterterrorism is critical to our national security. But even more critical is the need to delegitimize the Islamist message that resonates with so many Muslims. To permanently end the 'war on terrorism,' we must defeat the ideology that motivates the terrorists."

Jacoby is wrong. To end the war on terrorism, we must replace the uncivil invective, which Jacoby and similar ideologues fling at Muslims, with civil discussion of issues. The ISB offered genuine dialogue and mediation, but the defendants in the ISB lawsuit rejected it. Jacoby debases American social political discourse when he serves as a mouthpiece for the dubious insinuations that the defendants have cobbled together from discovery materials.

When he aids the defendants in their ongoing campaign of demonization and defamation to prevent Muslim Americans from exercising their basic civil rights, Jacoby becomes the real threat to America because he is participating in a racist subversion of the US Constitution under cover of a vigilante anti-terrorist witch-hunt.

Joachim Martillo

Sphere: Related Content

If you liked Iraq, you will love Sudan

Open letter to Michael Capuano, Representative to Congress, 8th District, MA

by Joachim Martillo (ThorsProvoni@aol.com)

Dear Representative Capuano:

I have been attending many Darfur-related events and meetings in the Boston area. Because I have found that much of the leadership the Save Darfur movement has associations with the David Project or the American Anti-Slavery Group, which were both founded by Charles Jacobs (http://tinyurl.com/yp78gr), I am concerned about hate-mongering and anti-Arab or anti-Muslim incitement that can only have negative implications for homeland security within the Bay State and for the whole country.

I have put together an article about Darfur activism that includes three news reports of local Darfur meetings and the complete text of a statement that I read in abridged form to the Massachusetts Public Service Committee during a joint hearing to collect testimony with regard to pending Sudan divestment legislation (S1474). You can find the article at http://tinyurl.com/344gxh.

I hypothesize

1. that Darfur activism is a very successful viral marketing campaign, which has been created by a local Boston extremist Israel advocacy group, and
2. that the Save Darfur movement connects to the upper echelons of the Neocons.

The organized Jewish community with guidance from Neocon leaders is making a show of political force as well as trying to control human rights and genocide discourse by means of the Sudan issue.

[Note that the phrase organized Jewish community refers to the network of Jewish communal organizations to which professional Jews belong. Professional Jews are people like Abraham Foxman of the ADL or David Harris of the AJC. I do not mean Jewish doctors or Jewish lawyers, whom I would call Jewish professionals.]

If you do not have the time to read my article, here is the punch-line from the first news report.

Altogether the information provided by the presenters indicates that a clique from the most extremist racist segment of the Boston Jewish community has with the resources of the [Jewish Council for Public Affairs (JCPA)] and local [Jewish Community Relations Councils (JCRCs)] transformed Darfur activism into a highly effective viral marketing program. The JCPA has developed a program that local JCRCs use in Jewish Community Centers, at media update sessions, at college events, and at interfaith sessions.

Then from the Jewish community the Darfur campaign has spread even further through American intellectual and political culture with the aid of academic falsifiers and media pundits like Samantha Powers,

• who is the Anna Lindh Professor of Practice of Global Leadership and Public Policy at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government,
• who was the founding director of Carr Center for Human Rights Policy (1998-2002),
• who has been heavily involved in misinforming the public about Darfur (see http://www.ksg.harvard.edu/cchrp/research/audiovideo.php) and
• whose Pulitzer Prize winning book A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide panders ethnic Ashkenazi Americans by conveniently ignoring both
  • the mass murders, ethnic cleansing and genocide architected or executed by Bolshevik Ashkenazim during the Russian Revolution and the first 25 years of the Soviet Union and also
  • the premeditated genocide of the Palestinian population that Zionist Ashkenazim plotted during the late 19th and first half of the twentieth century, that they began in 1947, and that they continue to execute to this very day.

Just as a biological epidemic initially does its harm locally and then spreads rapidly over larger distances, the Darfur campaign has spread like an influenza outbreak as Jewish bloggers and Jewish community activists spread the propaganda to the media, to academia, throughout the government, to the clergy, to business,[7] throughout society, and finally internationally.

At first, the Save Darfur movement only poisoned human rights discourse within the USA, then it began threatening Sudan with an armed invasion practically guaranteed to recreate the Iraq disaster, lately it has complicated US relations with Arab as well as Muslim states, and now it is beginning to interfere with US-China politics as Darfur activists have begun to target the Chinese Olympics.

Please note that I am not denying the large number of civilian deaths in Darfur.

Such an assertion would be like claiming that Georgians did not die during Sherman's March through Georgia.

I am just arguing

1. that genocide is not taking place and
2. that some very important Neocons and certain elements within the organized Jewish community are trying to incite a Sudan intervention, which can only be a disaster for the Sudanese and for America.

I know a lot about the Sudan. I surveyed the country in the early 1990s for the purpose of implementing and upgrading the then existing telephone network to modern standards, but I could not tell you whether the USA should support Omar al-Bashir (Islamist) or Hasan al-Turabi (more Islamist but more innovative within Islamic traditions).

To the first approximation intervention would be a choice to replace Omar al-Bashir with Hasan al-Turabi or someone from Turabi's political faction (the National Islamic Front; Arabic: الجبهة الإسلامية القومية). I am not sure what that would mean. I am not sure anyone can guess.

Unfortunately, once we start calling the civil war in Darfur a genocide, we cut off all rational discussion because the supporters of intervention are good guy humanitarians while intervention opponents are the bad guys, who refuse to fight genocide.

The Save Darfur movement is part of a program to manipulate the US into taking military action in the Sudan and then later against Iran with the justification that Ahmadi-Nejad is inciting genocide and will obtain nuclear weapons unless the USA acts.

For the good of Americans and the peoples of Africa and the Middle East, we have to discuss the interventionist subtext in addition to the crisis for civilians in Darfur. Otherwise, the ultimate disaster will be worse than Iraq. Until we Americans come to a decision by rational and open discussion, we should focus primarily on helping Darfuran civilians through organizations like Islamic Relief Worldwide.

The Darfur Advocacy groups are raising money for political lobbying for intervention. They are not helping Darfuran civilians at all and are probably worsening conditions for all noncombatants in the region.

Sincerely yours,

Joachim Martillo

Sphere: Related Content

Holoexaleipsis, Holocaust, Holosphage and Holodomor

Nazi Holocaust in Context of Soviet Holosphage and Zionist Holoexaleipsis
by Joachim Martillo

A lot of the people attending the Iran Holocaust Conference were unsavory (and most of the attendees identified in the news reports have little or no qualifications as genuine historians⁺), but ignoring or slighting the importance of the presence of representatives from the Orthodox Jewish Neturei Karta movement is a mistake.

Before the government of the State of Israel found ways to enmesh and co-opt large numbers of religious Jews, anti-Zionist Jewish groups like Neturei Karta used to represent the mainstream in religious Jewish thinking. The few remaining religious anti-Zionist Jewish organizations and communities have maintained their integrity by rejecting all Israeli government subsidization. Like Ahmedinejad and some Holocaust studies specialists, they are concerned

1. that the Holocaust of popular discourse is misused to justify Israeli oppression of Palestinians and
2. that common media representations of the Holocaust rarely correspond to the facts.

Both Neturei Karta and Ahmedinejad have a point. Since the opening of Soviet and Eastern European archives to Western researchers, there has been a revolution in scholarly understanding of the beginnings and early history of the Soviet Union.

Soviet mass murder, genocide and ethnic cleansing becomes for all intents and purposes an assembly line phenomenon long before Hitler took power in Germany. The Holocaust and German Nazism itself are only comprehensible in terms of Central and Eastern European fear of the Soviet Union and awareness of Soviet atrocities. Careful analysis of Soviet archival data shows that the Central and Eastern European popular identification of ethnic Ashkenazim with the Soviet Union was quite rational, for Soviet ethnic Ashkenazim formed the quintessential Soviet class and generally filled the leading roles in planning and executing Soviet crimes like the Great Starvation (Holodomor) in the Ukraine, collectivization, dekulakization, the mass shootings by the secret police, ethnic cleansing, and genocide.^*

Because the mentality of Soviet Ashkenazim and Zionist Ashkenazim is so similar in many regards, it is hardly surprising that alienization, which made entire Soviet ethnic groups aliens in their own lands, has strong similarities to the Zionist process of dispossessing, murdering, ethnic cleansing and genociding the native population of historic Palestine.

While the Eastern block data does in fact suggest that even the preeminent Holocaust scholar Raul Hilberg may have overestimated Jewish mortality in the Holocaust, the new information is more important because it indicates that much of the mass murder of Jews during WW2 was unjustified but very understandable reaction to or collective revenge on Jews for the part that a very large segment of the Eastern European and Russian Jewish population played in the commission of Soviet mass murder and atrocities. By the 1940s a lot of Eastern European and oppressed Soviet ethnic groups were more than willing to kill Jews without any incitement from the Germans, and they did, and this killing probably represents approximately half the number of Jewish casualties from mass murder during WW2.

We in America really do have to rethink and revise our understanding of the Holocaust, and if we need to identify an archetypal genocide to use as the measure of all other modern genocides, the Holoexaleipsis, which is the Great Erasure that includes the Palestinian Nakba or Catastrophe, provides the best model. It was planned in cold-blood by racist Eastern Europeans during the late 19th century, the first major mass murders and ethnic cleansing took place during 1947-8, and it continues to this day right before our eyes. The Holoexaleipsis includes wholesale demonization of Arabs and Muslims along with the erasure of whole fields of scholarship (including Jewish as well as Arabic and Islamic studies) so that they can be rewritten to justify Zionist and American depredations on the peoples of the Middle East.

⁺ St. Francis Xavier University Professor Shiraz Dossa was an exception. He presented a paper on the misuse of the Holocaust in the justification for the war on terror.

^* The totality of these Soviet crimes constitute the Soviet Holosphage, which is mass slaughter in the effort to fit the populations of the Russian Empire into a Marxist ideological framework by the crudest Procrustean means.

Sphere: Related Content

The Boston Globe's Problem with Muslims

Is Islamophobia the New Anti-Semitism?

Artistic Rendering of Mosque under Construction in Roxbury Crossing
Joachim Martillo & Karin Friedemann
January 12, 2007

For several years the news media have reported increasing numbers of controversies involving Muslim communities throughout the USA as well as in Europe. Recently, Representative Goode and US Holocaust Museum Memorial Museum Council member Dennis Prager objected to US Representative Ellison’s use of a Quran during the congressional oath-taking ceremony. Since Ellison’s election, Goode and many other politicians and pundits have been demanding changes in immigration law to decrease or to stop the immigration of Muslims to the USA as if the Ellison’s ancestors have not been residing in the territory of the USA since the eighteenth century. Such proposals constitute an unsubtle statement that Muslims have no place in America. Muslims seem to us somewhat exotic, and are therefore easy to stereotype. Dumping on Muslims is fun, cheap, and easy.

The unwillingness of American and Western societies in general to confront naked Islamophobic incitement recalls so many catastrophic failures to act during the development of modern anti-Semitism in Central and Eastern Europe that we Americans must ask ourselves whether Islamophobia is the New Anti-Semitism.

Unabashed Islamophobe Robert Spencer (http://www.jihadwatch.org/spencer/), who has strong associations with Neocon organizations and leaders, routinely mischaracterizes Islamic religion and cultures. The title of his book, Islam Unveiled, is strongly reminiscent of Eisenmenger's classic anti-Jewish text entitled Entdecktes Judentum (Judaism Unmasked). He recently visited Temple Emanuel in Newton, Massachusetts at the invitation of this synagogue's Israel Action Forum in order to assist in the ongoing defamation of the Islamic Society of Boston (ISB, http://www.isboston.org). (See "Report on Robert Spencer and the Boston Anti-Islamic Controversy" by Joachim Martillo: http://tinyurl.com/2uqqo8.)

Other scribblers of anti-Islamic screeds have begun to cast Muslim owned and managed businesses like the Islamic Development Bank, from which the ISB obtained a mortgage, in the role of sinister malevolent entities just as nineteenth and twentieth century anti-Semites used to depict Jewish owned and managed financial institutions like the Rothschild or Bleichroeder banks as forces of darkness and exploitation. The Boston Globe ran two perfect examples of such anti-Semitism on January 10, 2007: “The Boston mosque’s Saudi connection” by Jeff Jacoby (http://tinyurl.com/ykv6h9) and “Saudi bank’s role in mosque is questioned” by Charles A. Radin and Stephen Kurkjian (http://tinyurl.com/y6o7yd).

The analogy between contemporary Islamophobia and classical anti-Semitism is not merely literary. Most Globe readers probably connected the anti-Mosque confrontation described in reporter Colin Nickerson’s Jan. 9 front page Boston Globe article, “As a mosque rises, a dispute flares in Berlin,” (http://tinyurl.com/y5yjz8) with the Roxbury Mosque conflict. The article uses classic anti-Semitic verbal tactics to make Islamophobia appear as a virtuous activity. The headline cites the Syrian-born Arab studies specialist Bassam Tibi with an Otto Weininger-esque quotation: “Europeans have used tolerance as the excuse for not confronting intolerance.” One hopes that the author has taken Professor Tibi’s words out of context, for the eminent scholar is certainly out of his field. Germans simply are not known for being particularly tolerant and have a strong history of racist violence and bigotry, which continues to this day. As if there were no history of decades of expressions of anti-Muslim and anti-Turkish hatred in Germany, Nickerson defines traditional German prejudice as a new willingness to confront Muslims.

The problem in the Globe’s coverage of Muslims arises from the continuous stream of poisonous accusations and insinuations provided by pro-Israel advocacy organizations like the David Project (http://www.davidproject.org) and its affiliates. Like many other US newspapers the Boston Globe is giving license to journalists, who found their entry level jobs at the ethnic Jewish press or who are otherwise enmeshed with the organized Jewish community, to repeat talking points and press releases circulated on the Internet by people like David Project founder Charles Jacobs when a good reporter would be doing serious investigative journalism or at least fact-checking.

As the cost of the Israel-American alliance becomes more obvious, the David Project and similar Israel advocacy organizations are finding it more and more difficult to control discourse or to win debates about US Middle East policy. From the standpoint of the David Project, it makes much more sense to marginalize, to demonize, and to delegitimize Muslims in order to deflect criticism than to engage in a debate with the American public that it is likely to lose.

In the Jan. 10 Boston Globe, reporters Charles Radin and Stephen Kurkjian raised questions about the funding of the Roxbury mosque project. Again. The funding of the Roxbury mosque is not only not news; it’s old news. The Islamic Society of Boston (ISB, http://www.isboston.org/) has simply obtained a loan to finance construction of its Islamic center just as many Americans do when they build their homes. The libelers, casting suspicion on the ISB for (gasp!) getting a mortgage, are counting on members of the American public to be unaware that banks are multinational corporations. When you get a loan from Citibank, a lot of that money comes from the United Arab Emirates. Such cash flow is normal. The ISB is limited in its choice of mortgage providers because it must obtain a loan that conforms to Islamic law. The ISB already submitted their financial information to the Globe and to the David Project but the Globe refused to print the clarifications. An apology would have been in order.

The Globe willfully chose to create a fake story even while it had the facts. What is the reason? Subverting American news media is an important aspect of the David Project’s self-declared mission ("diminishing the impact of Israel’s detractors"). We have looked at the court filings and personal defamation suits directed at the David Project and friends. There is evidence to support the contention that various news media including the Boston Herald and Fox News, have conspired with the David Project in a campaign to make us fear the mosque.

We, who have followed the demonization of the Islamic Society of Boston by the David Project, Charles Jacobs, and his motley crew of anti-Arab anti-Muslim true believers, are tired of the harassment of our friends and neighbors by bigoted, malicious know-nothings. The ISB is by any standard a completely apolitical faith organization, whose members are very nice people as anyone can learn by attending one of the ISB’s public dinners. The members of the ISB, its directors and staff are completely law-abiding American citizens. The ISB has never even made any public statements on Israel. The ISB unlike many Boston-area synagogues and Jewish community centers only flies the American flag.

Debates on foreign policy have no relevance to the Roxbury Mosque controversy except that Charles Jacobs is coordinating various pro-Israel organizations to defame American Muslims. Conspiracy to deprive American citizens of their Constitutional rights to assemble freely to worship is a federal crime. It is an indication of the power of the Israel Lobby and the level of moral corruption to which the USA has sunk under the Bush administration that Charles Jacobs and his co-conspirators have not been indicted. If the American political leadership does not have the courage to stand up to those that try to normalize Islamophobia, our democracy will be lost because the enemies of freedom will not stop with American Muslims.

It is time for the Israel advocacy propagandists to be scrutinized. We have looked at their public filings, and the David Project appears to be at the center of an obscure network of connections among power brokers in Boston-area academia, in the Massachusetts Republican Party and in the Massachusetts Democratic Party as well as in the local real estate and financial industries. (For details see http://www.eaazi.org/ThorsProvoni/mosque.htm.) This type of non-transparent cabal among the powers that be can easily develop into a threat to American democracy and become a mechanism to deprive groups of American citizens of their legal protections.

By suppressing public debate on important issues, Israel advocates put all Americans at risk of financial disaster or worse as policy makers more loyal to Israel than to the US manipulate America into waging pointless wars instead of engaging in a civil dialogue with the rest of the world on matters of worldwide concern. Well, guess what! There is no constitutional requirement for Americans whether Muslim or non-Muslim to love Israel. The Boston news media and the FBI should be investigating the David Project, which is the genuine threat to America.

Afterword

Jan. 12, 2007 the Boston Globe published a Reuters article ("Islam urged to accept Enlightenment”), in which the German Interior Minister Wolfgang Schäuble expresses Islamophobic innuendo duplicating classic 18th and 19th century exhortations from Judeophobes and anti-Semites that Jews must assimilate enlightened Christian values.

Sphere: Related Content

Linguistics, Islam and the Beatitudes

Blessed are the Meek for they shall inherit the Land

by Joachim Martillo -- thorsprovoni@aol.com

March 27, 2007

In a lecture at the Harvard Divinity School two decades ago, Hans Küng pointed out that Islam provides a true witness to the life of Jesus — not the edited gentile Hellenistic version, but a genuine Semitic tradition that probably preserves the Jamesian perspective that was naturally closest to the reality of Jesus.

Evangelicals often work hard to learn scripture in Hebrew and Greek, but unless they actually learn and study the Quran in Arabic, they will never truly understand Jesus and his messianic mission, for the Quran in Arabic represents the oldest least tampered tradition of Jesus.

Closely reading verses of the Christian and Hebrew Bibles along with ayas of the Quran can elucidate the plain meaning of all three texts and show unexpected connections.

Here is a typical English translation (New International Version) of Matthew 5:5:

Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.

[Note that in some versions of the Christian Bible Matthew verses 5:5 and 5:4 interchange.]

The above English translation is sloppy as both the Syriac Peshitta and also the Greek version of the New Testament show.

Where the English Bibles usually have the phrase the earth, the Peshitta uses the word ar`a (Hebrew haaretz), and the Greek New Testament has the phrase ten gen, which means primarily the land and not the earth. (See versions of the verse at the end of the article.) Aramaic speakers at the time of Jesus would almost certainly have understood ar`a idiomatically as the Land of Israel or the Promised Land.

Matthew 5:5 translates into Arabic as:

al-barakatu lilmuslimina fasawfa yarithuna-l-arda. [native Arabic speaker's translation]

tas`adu-l-muslimuna fasawfa yarithuna-l-arda. [Joachim Martillo]

The people of the land (am-haaretz) recognized that Jesus was the messiah (but not God). In return for their love, Jesus conferred upon his peasant followers the covenant of the land in a restatement of the promise to Abraham. He told the humble people (al-muslimuna, ha`anawim) that they would inherit the land (al-ard, ha'aretz) once the local religious-political elites, the local fanatics, and the imperial Romans had finished slaughtering each other.

The Quran expresses this covenantal concept explicitly in Sura 21:105.


wa-laqad katabnaa fi-l-zabur min ba`di-l-dhikri anna-l-arda yarithuha `ibadiya-l-salihuna 105

We have decreed in the Psalms, from beside (in addition to) the reminder, that the land shall be inherited by My righteous (pious — salihuna) servants.

The aya is a clear reference both to Psalms 37:11 and to the allusion that Jesus makes to this verse in the beatitudes.

יא וַעֲנָוִים יִירְשׁוּ-אָרֶץ; וְהִתְעַנְּגוּ, עַל-רֹב שָׁלוֹם.

11. wa`anawim yirshu aretz; wehit`annagu `al rov shalom

11. But the humble shall inherit the land (i.e. Palestine), and delight themselves in the abundance of peace.

The phrase abundance of peace (rov shalom) is a contrast to the violence, recklessness or foolishness (jahl) of the powerful, whose empty pointless hatreds (sin'at hinam) and conflicts victimized and ruined the peasantry. (See Ibn Ezra's commentary on this verse in the Mikra'ot Gedolot.)

The phrase rov shalom suggests Islam, which is the opposite of jahl or jahiliyya (the age of ignorance that precedes Islam).

Righteousness or piety is not an attribute that Jesus associates with the rich or the powerful, who rarely perform as many good works (as-salihat) as they could.

It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God. (Matthew 19:24)

By the 3rd century CE a large part of the peasantry of Palestine were followers of Jesus and practiced a form of Christian Judaism in which Jesus was Messiah but neither God nor son of God. For this reason the Talmud is consistently contemptuous of the humble people, who comprised the am-haaretz, and am-haaretz is a derogatory epithet in Talmudic, Yiddish and Modern Israeli Hebrew idiom.

Nevertheless, we have reason to believe (including one origin story of the Ge'ez or classical Ethiopic translation of the Bible) that the beliefs of Palestinian Christian Judaism spread to Hijaz where they prepared the people for Muhammad's apostleship. When Umar al-Faruq opened Palestine to Islam, the humble people of the land (am haaretz) saw the fulfillment of the promise of Jesus in the religion of Islam, which means humility or meekness and which was a minor variant of the religion that they already practiced. As the Jewish Aramaic prayer says, yekum purqan min shemayya. Salvation shall come from the heavens. Hence the Quran which was brought down from heaven by Jibril/Gabriel is called al-furqan. [Note that Hebrew/Aramaic p becomes f in Arabic.]

By supporting the theft of Palestine from the native Palestinian peasantry and the removal or ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian peasants from their land, Zionists reject the explicit words of the Quran, the clear statement in the Hebrew Bible and the affirmation of Jesus as recorded in the Gospels. Obviously only God decides who burns in Hell for all eternity, but it is hard to conceive of extenuating circumstances for Zionists.

---

Notes

Peshitta

ܛܽܘܒ݂ܰܝܗܽܘܢ ܠܡܰܟ݁ܺܝܟ݂ܶܐ ܕ݁ܗܶܢܽܘܢ ܢܺܐܪܬ݂ܽܘܢ ܠܰܐܪܥܳܐ

tubihun limkika dehenun ni'rtun le'ar`a

To the meek their happiness as they will inherit the land.

Greek New Testament


Makarioi hoi praeis hoti autoi kleronomesousin ten gen.

Fortunate are the humble, because they will themselves inherit the land.

New Testament translated into Hebrew

אַשְׁרֵי הָעֲנָוִים כִּי־הֵם יִירְשׁוּ־הָאָרֶץ׃
ashrei ha`anawim ki-hem yirshu haaretz
happy are the humble because them will inherit the land.

Biblia Vulgata

5:4 Beati mites: quoniam ipsi possidebunt terram.

The Latin redactors of the Vulgate often selected the least plausible least idiom-aware translation of the Greek New Testament. Those that have translated the Vulgate into English have generally managed to obscure the original text even more. In this case, a reasonable idiomatic English translation is the following.

5:4 Happy are the meek because they themselves will possess land/a land/the land/earth/the earth.

I have given the possible translations of terram in order of plausibility. [Note that Latin has neither indefinite nor definite article.]

Martin Luther's Translation

[5.5] Selig sind die Sanftmütigen; denn sie werden das Erdreich besitzen.

[5.5] Blessed are the meek; for they will possess the kingdom of earth.

The translation Erdreich (kingdom of earth) is simply unjustifiable from any of the ancient sources.

A more correct German translation resulting from a reconciliation with the Jerusalem Bible (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerusalem_Bible) translates the verse into German as follows:

[5.5] Selig sind die Sanftmütigen; denn sie werden das Land besitzen.

[5.5] Blessed are the meek; for they will possess the land.

References

There Is No Crime For Those Who Have Christ: Religious Violence in the Christian Roman Empire by Michael Gaddis

Imperialism and Jewish Society: 200 B.C.E. to 640 C.E. (Jews, Christians, and Muslims from the Ancient to the Modern World) (Paperback) by Seth Schwartz

James, the Brother of Jesus by Robert Eisenman
The author writes a lot of nonsense, but he does seem to scour the primary sources.

Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World by Patricia Crone and Michael Cook
The book is often cited in order to refute it. The authors attempt to construct a coherent history of early Islam without the use of any traditional Islamic sources.

Crossroads to Islam by Yehuda Nevo and Judith Koren
The authors seem to have the intent of "debunking" Islam, but the information the book supplies tends to support the hypothesis of a connection between Christian Judaism and the mission of Muhammad.

The Beginnings of Jewishness by Shaye Cohen
The author provides some useful background information, but the book is uneven. Cohen may confuse cause and effect. He dates some phenomena too late and others too early.

The oeuvre of Jacob Neusner also provides useful information about the Talmudic form of Judaism in the Greco-Roman period through the 10th century CE, but he takes texts at face value much too much. Seth Schwartz provides some correction to Neusner's uncritical assumptions.

Sphere: Related Content

The Passion of Roxbury

Muslim-bashing hurts all Americans
by Karin Friedemann
karima4483@aol.com
March 27, 2007

Current State of Roxbury Mosque

Alumni of Boston-area colleges and universities decided to contribute something to the city of their almae matres. Do they have the right to erect a place of worship in Boston? They are American citizens. Does it matter that they purchased the property with a price reduction commensurate with their willingness to provide services and other benefits to municipal institutions?

The corner where the Roxbury mosque is located used to be a trash-littered area in a dangerous neighborhood. Now, it’s a place through which people drive the long way home just so they can glimpse the mosque-in-progress. Roxbury’s new mosque is an appropriate edifice for the major world intellectual and cultural center that Boston represents. This tasteful combination of red brick and gold expresses the sincere desire of Boston’s Muslims to give back to the community of which they are a part.

Boston’s grand mosque is the last work of the late Hasan Fathi, who is one of the great architects of the 20th century. The Egyptian architect, known for his environmentally appropriate buildings, created a Bostonian “look” for this premiere mosque that sparkles yet blends into its surroundings harmoniously. It complements the nearby churches, some of which are more than
200 years old. When the Roxbury Mosque is completed, it will attract visitors from all over the world to a section of Boston that desperately needs tourist dollars.

There are some who feel threatened by the inclusion of Muslims in the melting pot of American society. The Roxbury mosque project has been subject to intense scrutiny because of empty, malicious accusations in the media against the Islamic Development Bank, probably the world’s most respected Sharia-compliant financial institution. Simple fairness requires exposure of an Islamophobic agenda, which incites religious and race hatred to marginalize American Muslims.

Conspiracy to deprive Americans of their constitutional rights is despicable. The media’s vigilante effort to defame the Islamic Society of Boston, its leadership and its membership deprives us, the American public, of the ability to hear important points of view and is probably illegal. Demonizing Islamic finance closes the USA to financial investments from the Arab world.

Venture capital can flow away from our region in the blink of an eye if international investors conclude that fanatic racists and Islamophobes dominate city and state politics. This campaign against the Roxbury mosque will probably cost the Massachusetts economy tens of billions of dollars of investment capital in the short term. The long-range loss will be enormous.

Notes

To learn about the Boston Globe's problem with Muslims, see http://tinyurl.com/yayd4n.

Design drawing: Plan, roof plan, elevation, sections

Design drawing: Plan, elevation


Another recent photograph of the Roxbury Mosque

Sphere: Related Content

Report on Robert Spencer and the Boston Anti-Islamic Controversy

Anti-Islamic and anti-Arab talks/propaganda sessions that have been taking place with increasing frequency in the USA since the beginning of February seem to be coordinated (at least in the Boston and the New York/New Jersey area where I spend most of my time). The current increase in defamation of Arab and Muslim spokesmen throughout the USA and the world is probably connected with such indoctrination sessions. Robert Spencer's February 3rd talk, which took place in Newton, Massachusetts, and which is discussed below, is fairly typical. *

Spencer spoke a little about the Roxbury Mosque and tried to identify as jihadists some people, who in the past had some association with the Islamic Society of Boston, but most of the talk was a sort of rambling attack on Islam that cherry-picked verses from the Quran, commentaries, ahadith, historical incidents, cultural practices, Islamic legal theory, fatawa of various degrees of importance, and various historical, philosophical and political works by Muslim intellectuals over the last millennium. If you want to get an idea of the nature of the talk, you could peruse Islam Unveiled: Disturbing Questions About the World's Fastest Growing Faith at the library. Please do not buy it. Or if you do so, get it secondhand so that he gets no royalty.

Spencer's approach was similar to the anti-Jewish polemic that was common in Germany and Eastern Europe in the late 19th century and early 20th century. (To be honest, I consider Rohling's Der Talmudjude to have been a good deal more coherent and erudite albeit equally wrong and malicious.**) Spencer made a big deal about taqiyah even though Maimonides gives in the Mishneh Torah exactly the same sort of permission to dissemble in the same way under exactly the same circumstances. Spencer has more or less recreated the anti-Semitic calumny that Jews give themselves permission to lie every year during the kol nidrei prayer at Yom Kippur and transformed it into an anti-Muslim slander.

Spencer does not like the Quranic verse that assigns authority to men over women even though Abraham Geiger correctly pointed out over 100 years ago that the verse is practically identical to traditional Jewish interpretations of the punishment of Eve in Genesis. Spencer also fussed that the Quran characterizes Sabbath-breakers as apes and pigs and that this language creeps into anti-Israel and Zionist polemic. Perhaps, American Jews are sensitive about the issue because 90% of them are Sabbath breakers, but the Hebrew Bible records in Numbers that Moses ordered the summary execution of a Sabbath breaker. Name calling is mild by comparison. I do agree that the terminology is probably inappropriate when attacking Israel and Zionism. Identifying Zionist colonizers as murderous genocidal racist thieves and interlopers corresponds much more closely to my observations of Zionist behavior in Stolen Palestine (pre-1967 Israel) and Occupied Palestine (the lands conquered in 1967).

Spencer ranted for a while about dhimma even though this area of Islamic jurisprudence is quite similar to the canon law and halakhic rules about nonbelievers under Christian or Jewish authority. In any case, the rules for dealing with nonbelievers in all three religions have historically been mostly theoretical because Jews have only rarely been in a situation where they held sovereignty over non-Jews in recent times, and the major Christian and Islamic political entities over the last 500 years have usually used ad hoc systems in place of the specific ordinances of religious law.

He cited out of context a lot of verses that discussed struggle with idolaters or unbelievers and tried to argue that Islam was incompatible with the idea of universal human rights (as if Zionism is). He also cited Kabbani and another Sheikh (probably out of context) in a sort of ipse dixit argument.

Later during questioning he tried to demonize as uniquely evil the desire of ibn Khaldun for the expansion of Sharia throughout the world as if ideas like manifest destiny, mission civilatrice and the white man's burden did not express a similar mentality in the most positive interpretation and a very racist mentality in a more realistic interpretation.

Over all, Spencer seems to have intended to use the talk to rally the troops against the Mosque and Islam or Muslims in general. Many of the Jewish attendees were quite offended by the thrust and the content. Several questioned Spencer's competence in interpreting the texts and asked why he cited questionable Orientalist literature instead of asking Muslim scholars. Two compared Spencer's talk with traditional anti-Jewish polemics. The reaction was to some degree correlated with age. The older people seemed somewhat more anti-Muslim, but on the whole amount of criticism from the audience suggested that anti-Mosque activity is probably on the decline.

There was a suggestion that there should be an open debate or discussion between Spencer and a Muslim scholar. The proposal is questionable. Spencer can pack an amazing number of lies and misrepresentations into 10 seconds, and the answer to each point would probably require several minutes.

The idea that Muslims must somehow prove themselves worthy to Jews, Zionists or their panderers is simply offensive, and part of the required proof seems to include an affirmation of the legitimacy of Israel even though I can cite hundreds of prominent Rabbinical and Karaite scholars as well as eminent Jewish intellectuals of various ethnicities, who will state unequivocally that Zionism is a vile idea that is either racist or runs counter to the last 1000 years of Rabbinic and Karaite Jewish thought.

If this idea of an open discussion goes forward, the format should provide equality. If Spencer is going to interrogate a Muslim scholar about various religious, cultural, communal, historical, social and political aspects of Islam or about the behavior of Muslims from various ethnic groups or states, the Muslim scholar should be able to pose similar queries to Spencer about various aspects of Judaica, for ethnic Ashkenazi Zionist Neocons have done a tremendous amount of damage to the USA in manipulating the government to make war on Iraq for the sake of Israel. Why does Spencer focus on Arab and Muslim Americans, who have proven time again to be one of the most patriotic Americans, while he ignores the obvious disloyalty of the wealthy and influention Ashkenazi American ethnic group, whose members identify far more with Zionist colonizers than with their fellow Americans?

Spencer seems to fixate on certain aspects of the Quranic text, a few specific commentaries, a very narrow portion of Islamic law, certain cultural practices, and the opinions of representatives of political or fundamentalist Islam. Identifying exactly comparable areas in which to question Spencer would be tricky.

Modern Rabbinic Judaism is historically more the religion of the Talmud than the religion of the Hebrew Bible, but today for most American Jews Jewish religion seems primarily a combination of Holocaust fixation, worship of the State of Israel and ethnic narcissism.

While ethnic Muslim identity exists in Eastern Europe among Polish-Lithuanian Tatar Muslims and among Bosnians, Muslims constitute much more a community of faith than do American Jews or Zionist colonizers. When Muslims use the term Jew, they mean a community that follows the tawrat musa. Before Zionism became the dominant ideology among ethnic Ashkenazim, Ashkenazim typically used Jew (Yid in Yiddish) to mean a member of the Ashkenazi ethnic group, which represents something like 98% of American Jews. In order to legitimize the theft of Palestine from the native population Zionists reinterpreted the Ashkenazi ethnic group as the pan-Judaic ethnonational group of anyone whose ancestors practiced some form of Judaic religion. As a consequence political Islamism is probably much more comparable to Zionism, which Nordau, one of the founding Zionist leaders, called Muskeljudentum (Muscle Judaism).

If Spencer wants to question the role that Saudis play in spreading specifically Saudi forms of Islam, his Muslim counterpart might want to discuss the role that Jewish Hollywood executives play in spreading ideas about male-female relations that seem to have developed in the specifically Eastern European Ashkenazi social context (including the Frankist Jewish heresy that encouraged adultery and promiscuity).

To be frank, Spencer really did not seem to have much in the way of qualifications to write or to discuss Islam, and I do not know of any Muslim scholar that would have sufficient command of Judaica to provide a reasonable counterpoint. A discussion or debate between Spencer and a Muslim scholar would probably generate more heat than light and might even give extra life to the anti-Mosque campaign, which seems to be dying.

* Announcing the event: Thursday, February 3, 2005 8:00 PM The Boston Mosque: Does Tolerance and Diversity Go Both Ways? Robert Spencer, Director of Jihad Watch will discuss the Boston Mosque controversy and why it should be a matter of concern for every defender of Israel and believer in universal human rights. Sponsored by the Temple Emanuel Israel Action Forum. Contact: Denise Telio, 617-558-8100. Free and open to the public.

** Even the titles of books that belong to the modern American anti-Islamic/anti-Muslim polemic are similar to the titles of books that belong to the historic Central and Eastern European anti-Jewish polemic. Robert Spencer's Islam Unveiled is a clear echo of Eisenmenger's Entdecktes Judentum (Judaism/Jewry Unmasked). Sphere: Related Content

How to talk about Zionism, a new improved guide

While Israeli law is generally phrased with the use of the terms Jew or Jewish people,(*) Zionism is almost wholly a production of ethnic Ashkenazim.(**) Polish or Russian Jews of Tatar/Turkic, Persian or Georgian ethnicity were not involved in the development of Zionist ideology and generally have not gotten along particularly well with ethnic Ashkenazim even if in recent times racist ethnic Ashkenazim have managed to co-opt, recruit and enmesh Jews of other ethnicities into Zionist crimes.

The point is important because Zionist propaganda reinterprets the Ashkenazi ethnic group as the pan-Judaic ethnonational group in order to make a ridiculous primordialist claim to Palestine just as German Nazi propaganda equated modern Germans to ancient Teutonic and Gothic tribes in order to claim that only pure Germans had a right to reside in German territories. Neither primordialist claim has a shred of truth, but it is worthwhile to remember that the basic ideas of both German Nazi and also Zionist primordialism developed together in the common fields of Central and Eastern European blood and soil nationalism. The poisonous weeds of German Nazism and Zionism cross fertilized each other.

Modern Germans probably have more Celtic, Slavic and Turkic ancestry than they have ancient Teutonic or ancient Gothic ancestry.

Ethnic Ashkenazim have no ancestral connection to Palestine. The culture, language and religion of Roman period Palestinian Galileans, Judeans and Idumeans were completely unlike those of modern ethnic Ashkenazim.

Progressives should not give any legitimacy to Zionist (really ethnic Ashkenazi Nazi) terminology by using the racist language of Zionism. In 1948 racist ethnic Ashkenazim stole Palestine with concommittant plundering and ethnic cleansing of the native Palestinian population. Today, racist ethnic Ashkenazim and racist Zionist colonizers manipulate the US political system to the detriment of the USA for the sake of Israel. These racists squander American wealth and lives to the benefit of their racist tribalism.

Avoiding the terms Jew, Jewish, Judaism etc. provides many benefits.

Ignorant Christians often believe that because the foregoing terms have some sort of etymological relationship to Judea, Jews have some sort of overriding right to claim Palestine. The idea is moronic because the use of the term Roman in Roman Catholic certainly does not give Roman Catholic Irish the right to steal Rome from the residents of Rome.

Furthermore, when people argue that all decent people should criticize, oppose and denounce racist Jews for what they do (stealing Palestine or supporting the theft of Palestine), many worry that such criticism comes too close to criticizing Jews for being Jews, which is a bad thing. When people argue that all decent people should criticize racist Ashkenazim and racist Zionist colonizers for what they do (stealing Palestine or supporting the theft of Palestine), there is no difference between such criticism and the criticism of German racists during the 30s and 40s for ethnic cleansing, invading Poland, and mass murdering. Most people consider criticism of German racists and German Nazis at that time period to have been a good thing. Likewise today criticizing ethnic Ashkenazi racists and Zionist colonizers is also a good thing. Everyone should do it (especially antiracist ethnic Ashkenazim, who can neutralize bogus accusations of anti-Semitism by taking the vanguard position in demanding the abolition of the State of Israel and the eradication of Zionism/ethnic Ashkenazi Nazism).

(*) In a similar fashion German Nazi law was usually phrased with the use of the terms Aryan or Aryan race. Modern Israeli Hebrew does not make a distinction between people or race, and the words used correspond best to German Volk.

(**) Likewise German Nazism was almost wholly a production of ethnic Germans and not every group that the German Nazis defined to be Aryans. Houston Stewart Chamberlain is one of those few non-Germans (actually half Germans) that made a fairly large contribution to German Nazi thinking. The Polish nationalist poet Mickiewicz made some similar and early contributions to Zionist thinking among ethnic Ashkenazim. Just as Chamberlain had some German ancestry, Mickiewicz had some ethnic Ashkenazi ancestry, but it is not hard to find cases of wholly non-German individuals that supported German Nazism as well as wholly non-Jewish people that support Zionism. During the 30s German Nazis that sympathized with Zionism and Zionists that sympathized with German Nazism were not uncommon. Sphere: Related Content