Why Study Yiddish Culture?

The Foundations of Modern Europe

by Joachim Martillo (ThorsProvoni@aol.com)

 

From Paul Kriwaczek, Yiddish Civilization, The Rise and Fall of a Forgotten Nation, pp 5-6.

We have forgotten that Yiddish-speaking Jews were no mere religious or linguistic minority but formed one of Europe's nations, ultimately more populous than many others -- eventually to outnumber Bosnians, Croats, Danes, Estonians, Latvians, Slovaks, Slovenians and Swiss, not to mention the Irish, the Scots and the Welsh. What is more, their contribution to central and eastern Europe's economic, social and intellectual development was utterly disproportionate to their numbers. The Yiddish people must be counted among the founder nations of Europe. (Please take note Ireland, Spain, Italy and Poland, who have pressed for "the Christian roots of the continent" to be proclaimed in the constitution of the European Union.)

In other words, we cannot understand modern Europe without studying the history of ethnic Ashkenazim.

For this reason the Martillo Hypothesis (Les origines des juifs actuels , The Origins of Modern Jewry) ranks in importance with the complementary Pirenne Thesis (Mahomet et Charlegmagne) and with the equally complementary proposals of Crone, Cooke, Nevo, and Koren about the development of early Islam (Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World by Patricia Crone and Michael Cook, Crossroads to Islam by Yehuda Nevo and Judith Koren, Islamic Marcionism in Malaysia).

The disproportionate contribution of ethnic Ashkenazim to the development of Europe resulted from higher levels of education and disposable income.

Unfortunately, the same combination made it possible for ethnic Ashkenazim to do a lot of damage when they became disaffected as happened in Czarist Russia in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Pointing out the harm that ethnic Ashkenazim have done and continue to do* is no more racist or illegitimate than pointing out that Germans wracked tremendous havoc in the first half of the twentieth century.

In fact, the importance of the Jewish political economic elite in the USA has created a categorical imperative to bring up this issue (the dark side of Yiddish culture) however much American Jews whine that the discussion is anti-Semitic.

I recommend Kriwaczek's book up to Chapter 13, which seems too dependent on Martin Gilbert, who either has not gone beyond old political propaganda or who simply lies.

 

Kriwaczek apparently does not have enough Russian to analyze Soviet Yiddish culture or to discuss the role of Soviet Ashkenazim as the quintessential Soviet class. He probably should have addressed American Jewish, Soviet Jewish, and Israeli Jewish cultures as three daughter currents of Yiddish civilization.

 

[See P. Wexler, On the Schizoid Nature of Modern Hebrew: A Slavic Language in Search of a Semitic Past (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1990), http://www.zuckermann.org/pdf/new-vision.pdf, and http://www.tau.ac.il/humanities/semitic/emergence.pdf.]

 

Notes

 

* Here is the short list.

• Jews were the leading and most important element of the Russian Communist movement. Without Communist Ashkenazim there would have been no Soviet Union.
• Jewish communists tried to take over the Bavarian state after WW1.
• Subversive and genocidal Zionists murdered Arab Palestine and made major contributions to wrecking the British Empire.
• American Jewish Communists served the Soviet Union while Jabotinskian Zionist Neocons have manipulated the USA into genocidal anti-Arab anti-Muslim policies that will harm the USA for decades.
  

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Why Study Pre-State Zionism?

A Cornucopia of Modern Historical Process

by Joachim Martillo (ThorsProvoni@aol.com)

 

From Historiography of Pre-State Zionism (a lecture from 2002).

 

Genuine pre-state Zionist histories should investigate issues of

·         development of a sense of ethnic identity,

·         fabrication or obliteration of "national" memory and

·         the creation of an imagined community.

As these processes take place in the case of Zionism particularly late in the history of European nationalism and with copious documentation, the study of pre-State Zionism can perhaps provide insight not only into the specifically European phenomena but also into general global phenomena or at least into some similar non-European situations like the development of Sikh ethnonational identity in Punjab.

Besides any global or generalizable implications, the study of pre-State Zionism provides a unique window onto Central and Eastern European politics at one of the most critical periods in modern history as well as a magnifying glass on a racist Eastern European settler colonist movement and on the Eastern European settler colonists themselves in their interactions with a non-Western population.  Not only may analysis of the history of Zionist aggression in Palestine aid in understanding Czarist colonial imperialism and Russian expansionist aspirations in Central and Southwest Asia, but comparison with Zionist settlement activities may serve to illuminate French colonialist imperialist endeavors in Algeria.

Better histories of Zionism could have predictive value in the current Palestine conflict.  Zionists have never been particularly imaginative.[ii]  The treatment of Arafat today parallels the Zionist demonization of al-Haj Amin al-Hussayni, the Mufti of Jerusalem during the Mandatory period.  Zionist propaganda transformed the rather compliant Hussayni into a bogeyman.  As a result Zionists could avoid dealing with any of the difficult ethical questions of their aggression against the native population because dealing with the bogeyman took precedence.  The Barghouti trial is merely an attempt to reprise the trial of Eichmann, a Nazi war criminal, who was captured by Israeli spies and then brought to Israel to be tried.  That case could have been concluded within two weeks, but Ben-Gurion wanted to make a show trial to mobilize world opinion and the Israeli Jewish population.  The Barghouti trial has the same purpose.  Even the election of Sharon himself shows the inability of Zionists to develop new ideas in response to new situations, for the Israeli Jewish electorate facing difficult questions has chosen to depend on a member of the generation of ethnic cleansers from 50 years ago and not to rely on their current leadership.[6] 

Sharon himself simply follows the logic of the "Iron Wall" that Jabotinsky, one of the primary pre-State Zionist leaders, articulated from 1916 through 1923.  This idea assumes "What is impossible is voluntary agreement."  Zionists must work for "the establishment in Palestine of a force that will in no way be influenced by Arab pressure.  In other words, the only way to achieve a settlement in the future is total avoidance of attempts to arrive at a settlement in the present."  This strategy, as first clearly articulated by Jabotinsky 80 years ago[iii] and as reiterated by Sharon today is, completely incompatible with the goal of globalization as espoused and supported by the USA.

It is hard for an educated American even to notice the recourse of Israeli Jews to outmoded and failed strategies. Because of the laziness of textbook writers or because of Zionist manipulation, in the USA the historiography of the ME at least at the high school and to a large extent at university level conforms to Zionist ideology.  American academic description of the history of Zionism has little factual basis and even less interpretive value.  One could say that the discourse on the ME in the USA is Zionist through and through.  It is a serious problem in a republic that must depend on an informed citizenry.

As long as US strategic foreign policy is hitched to Israel, whether an American citizen supports the alliance between the USA and Israel or opposes it, he must be distressed by the inadequacy of Jewish studies in America because a good background in Judaica is necessary in order to make an informed judgment on this policy.  The discipline of Jewish studies, which is dominated by racists, tribalists and Zionists, has simply failed the obligation to educate Americans.[iv]  The wrong issues are debated while important questions are not posed.

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Obama versus the Israel Lobby

Israel Lobby, New Jewish Elite, Organized Jewish Community

by Joachim Martillo (ThorsProvoni@aol.com)

 

On Jan. 28 & 29, Phil Weiss made the following two important blog entries at Mundoweiss respectively.

1. Obama vs. Clinton: Code for Anti-Israel Lobby vs. Pro?
2. Will Obama's 'Jewish Problem' Allow Media to Talk about Israel Lobby?

The second article makes the important point that "Obama's problem with Jewish voters" is simply code for "Obama's problem with Jewish donors," who worry that Obama just might sympathize with Palestinians and act upon that sympathy however much he swears fealty to the State of Israel, grovels before the Israel Lobby, and kisses the feet of the wealthiest Zionist Jewish campaign contributors.

 

The first article mentions Obama's groveling but then continues by discussing Israel Lobby attacks on Robert Malley and Samantha Power, who are members of Obama's policy team.

 

I was very slightly acquainted with Robert Malley at Yale. His father Simon Malley was a prominent Jewish Arab Francophone journalist. I believe his mother was an ethnic Ashkenazi American. Robert had no connection with the Yale Jewish community. Like his father he was a PLO supporter, but when he has spoken at MIT, he fully articulates the ahistorical American pragmatic approach that fails to acknowledge that in some cases basic issues of justice and principle cannot be ignored.

 

Phil makes the following comment about Samantha Power.

American Prospect reports that the Commentary crowd is going after author/adviser Samantha Powers for once uttering the words Israel and Iraq and "special interest" in the same breath. The quote from SamPo:

Another longstanding foreign policy flaw is the degree to which special interests dictate the way in which the "national interest" as a whole is defined and pursued . . . America's important historic relationship with Israel has often led foreign policy decision-makers to defer reflexively to Israeli security assessments, and to replicate Israeli tactics, which, as the war in Lebanon last summer demonstrated, can turn out to be counter-productive.... So greater regard for international institutions along with less automatic deference to special interests–especially when it comes to matters of life and death and war and peace–seem to be two take-aways from the war in Iraq. [Emphasis mine]

The American Prospect argues that Commentary is distorting Powers's meaning. She wasn't really talking about the Israel lobby. I hope she was. Aren't you sick of all the code here? Let the issue come out.

The attack on Power looks like poetic justice, for she has been prostituting herself to the Jewish media elite and organized Jewish community for a long time. Check out  Killing Muslims Under Humanitarian Cover.

 

Yet, just as the American Prospect argues, Power may not actually have been talking about the Israel Lobby.

The Israel Lobby as Walt & Mearsheimer framed it is a foreign policy issue.

Phil Weiss as often as not addresses the effects on American society of both the organized Jewish community and also the New Jewish Elite, which supplanted the old NY German Jewish Elite (sometimes called "Our Crowd").

The two starting points for analysis are intertwined, but they are distinct as I learned when I spent time in chatting with Jewish student activists at the Joint Massachusetts Legislative Hearing on Sudan Divestment. While I have found that the upper ranks of the JCPA (Jewish Council for Public Affairs) orchestrated the Save Darfur movement in conjunction with the Neocon leadership as a distraction from Israeli atrocities and the Neocon inspired disaster in Iraq, the Jewish students approached Darfur as a Jewish responsibility connected with remembering the Holocaust.

Holocaust promotion (or Holocaust Religion) represents a Jewish special activity separate from the Israel Lobby even though the Israel Lobby and Zionist apologists in general use the Holocaust to justify the theft of Palestine from the native population.

Holocaust Religion makes it possible for a wealthy powerful Jewish elite to shield itself from criticism under the cloak of victim status. Even if Israel did not exist, the organized Jewish community would still be devoted to a sort of secular Holocaust religion.

In addition, white conservatives can parade their support for Holocaust Museums and Holocaust shrines as proof of their opposition to racism and anti-Semitism even as they do away for the governmental programs that are trying to overcome the structural disadvantages from which African Americans suffer in the USA.

Herein lies one possible collision between special Jewish interests (and not special Israel Lobby interests) with Power's pet projects. The effort or act of Holocaust memorialization can distract from actually fighting ongoing genocides like the Holoexaleipsis (the Great Erasure of the native Palestinian population) that continues in Stolen and Occupied Palestine (pre-1967 Israel and the Occupied Territories).

Other non-Israel-related but important ongoing projects of the New Jewish Elite and the organized Jewish community include:

• Regendering American and global society according to feminist and gay liberation principles and
• Friedmanism (making the world safe for free markets and free trade, i.e., reinterpreting freedom as freedom of exploitation).

The first program could easily collide with Power's identification of genocides worthy of attention while the second makes no sense mathematically and can create or exacerbate conflicts that may become genocidal. 

The Israel Lobby often makes use of such projects, to wit, the argument that Americans should have no sympathy for Palestinians, Arabs or Muslims because they tend to be anti-feminist and anti-gay.

Likewise, the American Jewish Power elite occasionally uses Israel-related issues to achieve its goals. For example, an Israel-related crisis or catastrophe in the Arab or Muslim world creates the opportunity for Friedmanites to peddle their snake oil by means of tactics described in The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein.

The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy misses the big picture. Phil Weiss is closer to understanding, but his analytical framework needs refinement.

[BTW Power in her general hypocrisy denies that Zionists genocided and continue to genocide the native Palestinian population.]

 

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Anti-War: 1960s versus 2000s

A Gem from The Fall of Jerusalem by Abdullah Schleifer

by Joachim Martillo (ThorsProvoni@aol.com)

 

Many have wondered why the anti-Iraq war movement found so little traction with the American public and media in comparison with the anti-Vietnam war movement.

 

Some speculations have referred to a lack of a military draft.

 

The Fall of Jerusalem by Abdullah Schleifer contains the following text on p. 76.

In the winter of 1966 the Left-Baathists advanced a fascinating argument against Abdul Nasser's constant counsel for patience in the struggle with Israel and his claim that, with the gradual strengthening of their regular armies, time was on the side of the Arabs.

 

According to the Baasthist thesis, Israel was already at work developing an atomic bomb and within a few years would be capable of waging nuclear warfare. Within the same period the Aswan Dam would have been completed in Egypt. At such a time the Palestine cause would be lost, the Baathists argued, for none of the Arab armies -- however strong by then -- would even consider the idea of liberating Palestine at the risk of nuclear destruction of every capital in the Arab East and the flooding of the Nile Valley if the Aswan Dam were to be destroyed.

 

The Baathist thesis also took into account the depth of American commitment in Vietnam and the growing unpopularity within America for further armed interventions, holding that the U.S.A. would not be in position to extend any but token support to the Israelis, assuming an Arab advance.

LBJ was always disappointed that the organized Jewish community and Jewish media pundits (even the conservative ones) never reciprocated his support for Israel in 1967 with backing for his Vietnam policy.

 

Reports of Baathist thinking were certainly available to Israeli and AIPAC policy analysts at that time period, and the organized Jewish community along with the Israel Lobby seems to have made the logical response by encouraging their stable of Jewish media facilitators, gatekeepers and pundits to take a cold or even hostile attitude toward the Vietnam war.  

 

Diminishment or termination of US involvement in Vietnam guaranteed that US resources and assets would be immediately available if the State of Israel needed them as was the case during the October War.

 

In contrast, the Israel Lobby and the organized Jewish community strongly supports the expenditure of US assets in efforts directly benefiting the State of Israel strategically, and in response Zionist news facilitators, gatekeepers, and pundits have worked hard to stymie the anti-Iraq war movement and to spike coverage of it since before the invasion of Iraq.

 

Update

 

Norman Podhoretz' career as editor of the American Jewish Committee's Commentary Magazine* spans both anti-war movements. Not only has he been a leader within the organized Jewish community and the Israel Lobby, but he has also served as a media facilitator-gatekeeper and as a pundit during the whole time period. His behavior has been consistent with the theorized effort to direct coverage of the two anti-war movements in order to influence the level of traction that each could obtain from the American public.

 

The hypothesis of conscious media manipulation is hardly far-fetched. In Buried by the Times, the Holocaust and America's Most Important Newspaper, author Laura Leff argues cogently that NY Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger managed by example to influence the whole newspaper industry to keep Holocaust stories off the front and editorial pages and thereby prevented the development of general awareness of the ongoing extermination of European Jews even though practically all the information was available.

 

 

Note

 

* The American Jewish Committee spun Commentary off as an independent publication in January 2007. Podhoretz was editor-in-chief of Commentary from 1960 through 1995 when he retired and assumed the position of editor-at-large. Today his title is editor emeritus.

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Jewish Islamophobic Web-Incitement

Another Disproportionately Jewish Endeavor

by Joachim Martillo (ThorsProvoni@aol.com)

 

Below is some typical material disseminated by the Jewish World Review as part of the ongoing campaign of the unofficial Israel Lobby to demonize Muslims.

 

http://politicalmavens.com/index.php/2008/01/24/pigs-heads-at-australian-islamic-school/

Pigs' Heads at Australian Islamic School
By Julia Gorin (bio)

Two pigs' heads were recently found at the site of a proposed Islamic school on Sydney's outskirts Wednesday…An Australian flag was draped between the two heads, said Jeremy Bingham, spokesman for the Quranic Society.

"Someone has put a couple of stakes in the ground with a pig's head on the top of each stake and an Australian flag inside," Bingham told AFP.
…
"Obviously you have got a sick individual (behind the act)," he said.
…
The state government's Community Relations Commission condemned the latest protest as "a mindless act".

"This insult and display of hatred is not something any fair-minded Australian would approve of," said commission head Stepan Kerkyasharian in a statement.

Muslim leaders condemned the incident, not the first in Sydney.

"It's just quite sad really, we don't need this rubbish in Australia," Australian Federation of Islamic Councils spokesman Haset Sali said.

So there you have it. Pigs' heads on stakes: Offensive.

Severed infidel heads on stakes: Not offensive.

Since Gorin is a typical super-Jew defender of any atrocity that the State of Israel commits, the comparison of Jewish and Muslim attitudes toward human life is worthwhile.

According to the Babylonian Talmud Tractate Sanhedrin 37a,

"Whosoever preserves a single soul of Israel, Scripture ascribes to him as if he had preserved a complete world"

In contrast,

. . . That if any one slew a person - unless it be for murder or for spreading mischief in the land - it would be as if he slew the whole people: and if any one saved a life, it would be as if he saved the life of the whole people. . . .[Qur'an[Qur'an 5:32] --Translated by Yusuf Ali]

I can look through Jewish or Muslim religious literature and cherry-pick passages that make unpleasant distinctions between believers and non-believers, but there is one major difference between the current of Second Temple Judaism which became Islam and that which became Rabbinic Judaism.

 

For Muslims (as for Christians) all humans are potentially members of the community while in Rabbinic Judaism there is a qualitative difference between Jewish and non-Jewish life.

 

Statistic analysis have shown over and over again that the vast majority of Muslims reject and condemn terrorist attacks on innocents.

 

In contrast, Zionism is an inherently terrorist ideology, whose core principle can be defined as follows:

Jews may plunder and kill non-Jews with impunity.

Because the State of Israel is consolidated on the above principle, it is a terrorist state in essence and engages in state terrorism on a daily basis. Yet, according to American Jewish Committee statistics approximately 80% of American Jews identify with and support Israel.

 

Is it not disturbing to non-Jewish Americans and non-Jews in general that an ethnic group, among whom such fundamentally sociopathic attitudes are far too common, now counts as the most important American political, cultural, and economic elite?

 

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Bringing Holocaust Religion to Arabs

Jewish Genocidaires Against the Truth

by Joachim Martillo (ThorsProvoni@aol.com)

 

On Friday, January 25, 2008, The Boston Globe ran an article entitled Israel's Holocaust memorial launches Arabic website, which provides a perfect example of Zionist Holocaust indoctrination by a Jewish media facilitator and gate-keeper, who in this case is Aron Heller of the Associated Press.

 

Here is the story.

Israel's Holocaust memorial launches website in Arabic

By Aron Heller, Associated Press  |  January 25, 2008

JERUSALEM - Israel's Holocaust memorial launched an Arabic version of its website yesterday, including vivid photos of Nazi atrocities and video of survivors' testimony, to combat Holocaust denial in the Arab and Muslim world.

Among those featured on the Yad Vashem site is Dina Beitler, 73, a survivor of the Nazi genocide that killed 6 million Jews in World War II. Beitler, who was shot and left for dead in a pit of bodies in 1941, recalls her story on the site, with Arabic subtitles.

Last year, Yad Vashem presented a similar version of its website in Farsi, aimed at Iran, whose president, Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, has called the Holocaust a "myth" and said Israel should be "wiped off the map." He has also hosted a conference that questioned whether the Holocaust took place.

A range of sentiments toward the Holocaust exists across the Arab world, from simple ignorance about its details to outright denial, to a more complicated belief - often expressed by many Arabs - that the Holocaust did happen but does not justify what is viewed as Israeli persecution of Palestinians.

Nazi literature is accessible in many Arab cities and some of the media engage in anti-Semitic incitement. 

© Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Only the first two paragraphs actually constitute the facts-based report expected in a standard news story.

 

The rest of the article is fluff, propaganda, defamation, and unsubstantiated allegations.

 

Ahmedinejad did not call the Holocaust a "myth." He argued for more research, which is in fact taking place.*

For the fact of the matter is, as Holocaust scholar Christopher Browning notes:

There are no written records of what took place among Hitler, Himmler, and Heydrich concerning the Final Solution, and none of them survived to testify after the war. Therefore, the decision-making process at the center must be reconstructed by the historian, who extrapolates from events, documents, and testimony originating outside the inner circle. Like the man in Plato's cave, he sees only the reflection and shadows, but not the reality. [Fateful Months, pp. 13-14.]

People in the fields of Holocaust studies, genocide studies, Central and Eastern European history, and Jewish studies do often distinguish between the Holocaust of Zionist myth and the Holocaust that actually occurred, but the Israel Lobby and the organized Jewish community are desperate for Americans to remain ignorant of the real academic discussion. Otherwise, Americans might then realize that the Holocaust was at least in part a response to the leadership and involvement of Soviet ethnic Ashkenazim in mass murder, genocide and ethnic cleansing on behalf of Bolshevism from the Russian Revolution through the beginning of WW2.

 

Goldhagen and too many Jewish propagandists argue that the Germans are a Tätervolk (perpetrator people) because of the genocidal acts of relatively few Germans. By such logic, Jews (especially ethnic Ashkenazim) are even more a Tätervolk. Worse, Jews are unlike Germans without remorse and convinced of their self-righteousness even as Zionist Jews in Stolen and Occupied Palestine (pre-1967 Israel and the Occupied Territories) cover up and continue to commit atrocities very similar to those of Soviet Jewish genocidaires.

 

Worse still, the Israel Lobby and the organized Jewish community have manipulated the USA into supporting the State of Israel in its ongoing crimes against humanity and have spent decades to indoctrinate the American public in a perverted Holocaust religion complete with temples and shrines throughout the country. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Boston Holocaust Memorial are typical sites where periodically American religious and political leaders engage in pseudo-religious rituals to validate Jewish victimology in a way that drowns out the voices of Palestinians suffering in the final stage of the Holoexaleipsis or Great Erasure of the native Palestinian population from Palestine.

 

The Holocaust constituted in many regards an unjustifiable albeit understandable collective revenge and preventive strike against a Jewish population that Central and Eastern Europeans had reason in the form of the Soviet Union to hate and fear.

 

In contrast, the Holoexaleipsis is the archetypal genocide of the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first century. Central and Eastern European racists developed a clear, unambiguous and copiously documented plan to murder Arab Palestine in the 1880s,** spent sixty years preparing for the ultimate strike, carried it out in an orgy of rape, plunder, murder and ethnic cleansing in 1947-8 (the Nakba) and are finishing off the remnant of Palestinians at this very minute.

 

In a just world some decent person would drive a truck through that vile Holocaust Memorial in downtown Boston, and the US government would rededicate the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum as the United States Holoexaleipsis Museum, which would be launching a website to teach Jews about Zionist genocide and crimes against humanity.

 

Notes

 

* "The Politics of Genocide Scholoarship," by Stannard, David E. in Is the Holocaust Unique?, Perspectives on Comparative Genocide, [Second Edition], edited by Rosenbaum, Alan S., p. 268. The quotation is followed by several pages of discussion and interpretation of the evidence that is available.

 

** Below is quotation from Overcoming Zionism by Joel Kovel. It describes an early statement of violent Zionist intent.

Thus Vladimir Dubnow, in 1882: "The ultimate goal is, in time, to take over the Land of Israel and to restore to the Jews the political independence they have been deprived of for these two thousand years ... The Jews will yet arise and, arms in hand (if need be), declare that they are the masters of their ancient homeland." [p. 45.]

 

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Followup: Natalie Portman's Genocidal Racism ...

Zionist Web: Academia, Entertainment, Government

by Joachim Martillo (ThorsProvoni@aol.com)

 

On October 24, 2007, I posted Natalie Portman's Genocidal Racism and Utter Hypocrisy .

 

Recently, I received the following advertisement from Aish.com.

 

 

A-list actresses are extremely protective of their identity-brand. I cannot believe that Aish.com runs these adds without Portman's approval, but I will check.

 

Aish.com is the web presence of Aish HaTorah, which is a hybrid Jewish returnee (i.e., "born-again Jewish") extremist Israel advocacy organization. It is the Jewish face of the Zionist media intimidation organization known as HonestReporting.

Aish HaTorah is part of the network of Jewish organizations ideologically committed to the occult mystical Zionism of Rav Abraham Isaac Kook* and his son Tzvi Yehudah Kook. The media critic Michael Medved and the corrupt lobbyist Jack Abramoff** follow this sort of Zionism.

 

The Aish HaTorah advertisement connects to two Portman google-videos.

 

watch video

Video Description: Natalie Portman Talking About Her Love For Israel

 

watch video

Video Description: Natalie doing a surprise visit to Columbia University to talk about terrorism as part of V for Vendetta promotion.

In the first video, Portman tells us that Israel is her home without any acknowledgement that members of her E. European ethnic group simply stole the country from the native population and are continuing commit genocide right before our eyes according to a program that was formulated in cold-blood during the second half of the nineteenth century.

 

Portman later adds (in really atrocious Hebrew) that her feeling of roots there [in Israel] are hard to explain. She said something very similar to me once at Adams House at Harvard. I told her I was not surprised. When she was born, her family was probably living in a stolen house most probably on stolen land in a stolen country. Delusions about roots serve as one of the mechanisms used by far too many Jews and Christians to excuse the crimes that Zionists have been committing against the native Palestinian population for over a century.

 

At Adams House in the context of a Jewish-Arab dialogue, she had the nerve to tell me that Dershowitz did not plagiarize From Time Immemorial in his book The Case for Israel. She said she knew because she worked as one of Dershowitz' researchers. And I asked how many researchers there were. Apparently around twenty. And was Portman there from start to finish? No, she was not. Had she read From Time Immemorial? No, she had not. I offered to lend her my copy. She had no interest.

 

In the second video Portman acts as a typical Zionist apologist by cautioning against any acceptance of blame for any else's decision to commit evil.***

 

Portman avoided the two real questions.

1. Why do so many Jews believe that Jews should live in security and with impunity in Israel as a sort of reward for crimes committed by Zionists since the nineteenth century and ongoing even to this very day?
2. Why do so many Jews and so many very un-Christian evangelical fundamentalists believe that the USA should continue to spend US tax dollars to support the Israeli state, which routinely commits atrocities that invariably inspire terrorist acts as a response?

The cable broadcast of Portman's terrorism-shpil shows an interesting web of connections between Fox, Warner Bros., MTV, Portman, and Stuart Gottlieb at School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. 

Stuart Gottlieb (212-854-9282, smg16@columbia.edu) is Lecturer in Discipline of International and Public Affairs.

 

According to his Columbia profile,

[prior] to joining SIPA in 2003, Gottlieb worked for nearly five years in the United States Senate, first as senior foreign policy advisor to Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, and subsequently as policy advisor and chief speech writer for Senator Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut. He has also worked on several political campaigns, including New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani's reelection campaign in 1997.

The web pages, http://www.legistorm.com/trip/approver/Sen_Charles_Schumer/86/personal.html, http://www.legistorm.com/trip/traveler/Stuart_Gottlieb/4030.html, and http://www.legistorm.com/trip/sponsor/Jewish_Community_Relations_Council/7080.html, provide all sorts of interesting information about JCRC (Jewish Community Relations Council) largess to congressmen and their aides. Some of the aides like Stuart Gottlieb are themselves heavily involved in the Israel Lobby and apparently accompany the congressmen in a sort of minder capacity.

 

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Notes

 

* During the 1930s and 1940s Rav Kook's nephew Hillel Kook (a.k.a. Peter Bergson) helped establish the American Jabotinskian Zionist movement that eventually developed into Neoconservatism. Despite this early connection between the Jabotinskian-Neoconservative and Kookian Zionist movements, the two Jewish political groups are not normally close collaborators.

 

** John McCain, who shills for Neoconservatives and who comes from a dynasty of American political Shabbes Goyim (Money Jews, Brain Jews, Politics), chaired the Senate Indian Affairs Committee and released Abramoff emails that implicated Abramoff in possible tax and wire fraud that included materially and financially supporting Israeli sniper and settler organizations that would be considered terrorist if US prosecutors applied the same standards to Jews as are applied to Muslims and Arabs. Since 2005 nothing has come out of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, which is now chaired by Senator Byron Dorgan, whose campaign received Abramoff contributions, which were returned when they came to light. The sudden dearth of information about Abramoff and Israel-related fraud at the time when McCain began to build up his campaign chest for the 2007 primary season has the smell of a hush-up or payoff. 

 

*** The pure un-Jewish antinomianism of the Zionist mentality is breath-taking. Traditional Rabbinic thought has always considered "lifnei `iver" one of the most heinous sins.  Literally it means "[putting a stumbling block] before the blind" and describes the offence of putting another person in a situation that would probably lead him into committing a transgression.

 

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Islamic Marcionism in Malaysia

Is Allah Equivalent to God?

by Joachim Martillo (ThorsProvoni@aol.com)

The International Herald Tribune reported on December 21, 2007 that the Malaysian Catholic Herald would not be able to renew its license to publish unless its Malaysian language edition ceased to use the word Allah.

According to Che Din Yusoff, who is a senior official from the publications control unit of the Internal Security Ministry:

"Christians cannot use the word Allah. It is only applicable to Muslims. Allah is only for the Muslim god. This is a design to confuse the Muslim people,"

This dispute over "ownership" of Allah originates in internal Malaysian ethnic and religious tensions.

Unfortunately, because local politics in the age of globalization is global and vice versa, such an ill-considered Malaysian policy can have global repercussions, for it dovetails exactly with Islamophobic and militant Zionist attempts at demonizing Islam in order to create a false American consensus on US ME policy by scare-mongering.

The desire of many Muslims in Malaysia and elsewhere to create a sharp (yet inherently false) differentiation between the true God of Islam and the inferior God of Christianity or Judaism is a twenty-first century reprise of Marcionism, which was a second century CE heresy, which identified the vengeful Hebrew God, Yahweh (יהוה), as a separate lower divinity completely distinct from the all-forgiving New Testament God.

The new Islamic Marcionism is completely understandable. Too many American Jews and a significant proportion of Christians slice and dice Christian and Jewish scripture into God's title registry in order to rationalize or to justify Zionism.

Together militant Zionists and a subset of very un-Christian Evangelicals have recreated the white racist nineteenth century heresy that used the Bible to hierarchize the races in order to prove that Southern Slavery was consistent with Christian values as part of God's plan.

Yet, when Muslims disengage completely from dialogue with Christians and Jews, they both concede victory in struggle for control of discourse to racists that would plunge the world into centuries of warfare in order to make the Middle East safe for Israel and also in principle abandon the entire Islamic prophetic heritage from Moses through Jesus. It is hard to imagine behavior either more misguided or further from striving in the way of Allah (جهاد في سبيل الله).

Even though some Christians claim just like the Malaysian Internal Security Ministry that Allah is not the God of Christianity, Arab Christians throughout the Middle East and North Africa routinely use the following terminology:

الله الآب, Allah al-Ab, i.e., God the Father,

الله الابن, Allah al-Ibn, i.e., God the Son,

الله الروح القدس, Allah al-Ruh al-qudus, i.e., God the Holy Spirit.

Allah, which is a God-name like Yahweh, is not exactly equivalent to God, which is the English word for a god in the generic sense.

To be specific, the phrase "the God" is perfectly normal English but an Arabic phrase like al-Allah or a Hebrew phrase like ha-Yahweh is neither normal Arabic nor normal Hebrew. (Al- and ha- are definite prefixes in Arabic and Hebrew respectively.)

English and most other European languages do not have a native God-name equivalent to Allah or Yahweh.

The generic Arabic word for god is ilaah (إله or إلاه ), which is comparable to Hebrew אלוה (eloah) or to Aramaic elah (אֱלָה) or to Syriac alah (ܐܰܠܳܗ).

האלוה is the definite form in Hebrew.

אֱלָהָא is the definite form in Aramaic.

ܐܰܠܳܗܳܐ is the definite form in Syriac.

Targum Onkelos (Jewish Aramaic translation) for Psalms 18:32 contains the phrase:

Leyt elaha (אֱלָהָא) ela Yahweh, to wit, there is no god but Yahweh.

La ilaaha illa allahu (لا إله إلاَّ الله) is the Arabic equivalent.*

Thus, the first half of the Islamic Statement of Faith (the Shahada), "There is no god but God (Allah)," is, in fact, Biblical as long as Yahweh and Allah are the same.

Deuteronomy 4:35 tells us יְהוָה הוּא הָאֱלֹהִים -- Yahweh hu ha'elohim. Yahweh is the (true) God.

אֱלֹהִים ('elohim) is the plural of אלוה (eloah) and means gods, but Biblical Hebrew can form an abstract noun by treating the (usually definite) pluralized form of a noun as a singular. In Biblical Hebrew usage הָאֱלֹהִים (ha'elohim) means the Divinity or the (true) God.

The alif/aleph of אֱלֹהִים is weak. In Introduction to Biblical Hebrew, Thomas O. Lambdin points out on p. 53 that the initial aleph becomes completely silent when the Hebrew prefix prepositions b-, l- or k- join to the word אֱלֹהִים.

During the Greco-Roman period, the form ha'elohim probably changed in Southern Palestinian mixed Hebrew-Aramaic dialects (possibly under the influence of Arabic) into ha'lohim (vowel reduction) and then into ha'lahim because Aramaic influence tends to convert long Hebrew o-sounds in a-sounds.

Eventually the aleph assimilated to the following lam to create a double-l, and a fully closed first syllable resulted in a short l-colored vowel intermediate between a and o. Thus ha'lohim became hallahim. Because this initial he/ha (ה ,ه) is elidable just like the alif in the Arabic definite particle al-, the initial he/ha easily changes into an initial aleph/alif, and hallahim became allahim.

Because later Mishnaic Hebrew and Palestinian Aramaic have no abstract noun formation via pluralization, Palestinian monotheists probably forgot the original abstract significance and modified the word allahim to avoid apparent polytheism or shirk into either Allahum (normal i <-> u interchange to remake an apparently plural form as a clearly singular form) or into Allah (stripping off the apparent plural ending entirely).**

Somewhere along the migratory or caravansary path from Southern Palestine into Hijaz, a traveler almost certainly cut the phrase from Deuteronomy into stone either in Aramaic or in Syriac characters as: Yahweh huwa Allah.

As the Roman Empire adopted the Constantinian form of Christianity that defined Jesus as God and that had no tolerance for other beliefs, some Judeans that rejected the divinity of Jesus but followed him as Messiah according to the Jamesian Judean form of Christianity, almost certainly journeyed the route into Hijaz in order to escape Byzantine (Roman) oppression. Eventually at least some Hijazi Arabs joined these followers of Jesus in their faith.

St. James, brother of Jesus, first bishop of Jerusalem

The names of Muhammad (the favored one), Abdallah his father (the servant of God -- a title of James the Just, brother of Jesus), and Abd-ul-Mutallab his grandfather (servant of the chamber or book [of marvels]) look very much like titles that signified a transfer or blending of authority from immigrant Judeans to Hijazi Arabs.

When Jibril/Gabriel brought down the Quran to Muhammad, the prophetic line from Jesus reached its culmination in Arabia and was sealed in Islam.

While the Islamic tradition is complete, it is certainly not independent of Judaism and Christianity.

By cutting themselves off from Christianity and Judaism, Muslims would deprive themselves of a means to enhance their comprehension of scripture just as Jews and Christians impoverish their religious understanding through ignorance of Islam.

Marcion's Christian heresy would have drained Christianity of all meaning. Islamic Marcionism in the Age of Globalization threatens Muslims with irrelevancy and leaves billions of good people at the mercy of racist heretical Christian extremists, militant Zionists, and genocidal Neoconservatives, who would manipulate the United States into incinerating Muslim and Arab countries one after another. Abandoning the jihad of dialogue places all Muslims and probably the entire human race in peril.

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Future Directions

I have put two examples of my attempt to create a framework for universal scriptural hermeneutics online at:

1. Linguistics, Islam and the Beatitudes and
2. Connecting Hanukkah, Christmas and `Idu-l-Adha .

In the near future, I will add articles on

1. the Jamu`a (جمعة), the Jewish Sabbath (שבת) and the Christian Lord's Day (κυριακή ἡμέρα) and
2. Virgin Birth in Islam, Christianity and Judaism.

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Notes

* Leyt (Aramaic for existential negation) requires a nominative with the definite article suffix where la (Arabic for not) requires a definite accusative without the definite article prefix.

**More than a thousand years later Judeo-Spanish speakers converted dios, which is the Spanish word for God, into il-dyo for exactly the same reason.

Sphere: Related Content

Connecting Hanukkah, Christmas and `Idu-l-Adha

A Homily for the Season

by Joachim Martillo (ThorsProvoni@aol.com)

Because Hanukkah, Christmas, and 'Idu-l-Adha occur so close together this year, the 2007 winter holiday season provides a wonderful opportunity to explore the connections between these holidays in order to increase mutual understanding among Jewish, Christian, and Muslim faith communities as well as between believers and non-believers.^$

Hanukkah is the appropriate starting point for analysis because the Maccabean revolt set in motion a process of change that challenged the fundamental religious assumptions of the people of Hellenistic Judea and of anyone that worshiped God according to the rituals of the Jerusalem Temple Religion that is also called Second Temple Judaism.

The Talmud, the Megillat Antiochos (Scroll of Antiochus), and the Greek deuterocanonical books of Maccabees contain somewhat different versions of the history of the struggle between the Maccabean fighters and the Hellenistic Syrians ruled by Antiochos IV Epiphanos. Even though the miracle of the oil becomes central to the modern Jewish celebration of Hanukkah, the books of the Maccabees do not even mention it.

The Greek texts are neither centrally focused on demonstrating God's ultimate power over nature nor overtly concern with the most minute aspect of ritual purity down to the last drop of fuel for the candelabrum of the Jerusalem Temple but rather aim at legitimization of the Hasmonean dynasty that the Maccabees established.

The Jerusalem Temple Religion of the Hasmonean period was radically different from the Rabbinic Judaism that crystallizes into its final form approximately 1000 years after the Maccabean revolt. Rabbinic Judaism is based on the deterritorialized Talmudic framework that was developed after the 2nd century CE Bar Kochba rebellion and that focuses on spiritual rather than political power issues.

On the basis of unavoidably questionable Rabbinic Jewish understanding of the historical events of the Maccabean rebellion, Christopher Hitchens describes the current celebration of Hanukkah in a recent Slate article:^*

"And so we have a semiofficial celebration of Hanukkah, complete with menorah, to celebrate not the ignition of a light but the imposition of theocratic darkness.."

Hitchens has inadvertently but possibly also somewhat maliciously trivialized the complex national and international politics of Hellenistic Judea of the 2nd century BCE.

Second Maccabees Chapter 1 describes the miracle that concerned the author of the Greek text and thereby hints at the actual conflict that underlay the rebellion.

18	Therefore whereas we purpose to keep the purification of the temple on the five and twentieth day of the month of Casleu, we thought it necessary to signify it to you: that you also may keep the day of Scenopegia [Feast of Tabernacles], and the day of the fire, that was given when Nehemias offered sacrifice, after the temple and the altar was built.
19	For when our fathers were led in Persia, the priests that then were worshipers of God took privately the fire from the altar, and hid it in a valley where there was a deep pit without water, and there they kept it safe,
20	But when many years had passed, and it pleased God that Nehemias should be sent by the king of Persia, he sent some of the posterity of those priests that had hid it, to seek for the fire: and as they told us, they found no fire, but thick water.
21	Then he bade them draw it up, and bring it to him: and the priest Nehemias commanded the sacrifices that were laid on, to be sprinkled with the same water, both the wood, and the things that were laid upon it.
22	And when this was done, and the time came that the sun shone out, which before was in a cloud, there was a great fire kindled, so that all wondered.

The miracle of Second Maccabees is not the miracle of the oil but is that of the rekindling of the sacred fire during Nehemiah's governorship of the Yehud administrative district of the Persian Empire. The territory of this district corresponded only to a portion of the area of the pre-exilic Kingdom of Judah.

The rekindling miracle took place approximately four centuries earlier than the 25th of Kislev (Casleu), which the Hasmoneans designated the first day of Hanukkah in order to commemorate the Maccabean rebellion. The Hasmoneans connected themselves with this miracle in order to claim legitimacy to rule Hellenistic Judea even though they came from Modiin outside of Persian Yehud and were not descendants of the elite transplanted from Mesopotamia to Jerusalem at the time of Ezra and Nehemiah.

The issue of the lineage of the Hasmoneans has been obscured in the canonical and deuterocanonical books of the Bible because the Book of Ezra probably purposefully conflates the people of the land (of Yehud) and Samaritans (or Samarians) as groups with whom the new Jerusalem elite of Yehud were not supposed to intermarry.

The description of the social political situation makes no sense because Samaritans had their own Temple and their own elite certified by the Persian Emperor, and in the 6th century they almost certainly had no particular interest in aiding or hindering the construction of the Jerusalem Second Temple.

The text of Ezra mixes the politics of two different periods. In the 6th and 5th centuries BCE, the central Persian government had a practice of installing elites with no connection to local populations to act as agents of the central government. Such elites might be associated with a dubious local pedigree, but first and foremost they represented Persian interests. Thus even though the territory of Palestine is naturally within the Egyptian sphere of influence, in the Torah text of the "returnees" Egypt plays the role of villain and unappeasable enemy of the Children of Israel. Because intermarriage with the people of the land (the am haaretz of the Book of Ezra) might weaken commitment to Persia, the new Persian-backed elite maintained their privileges as long as they kept separate and established no family allegiances with the locals.

Persian Yehud Modi'in was located about 35 mi. SE of Joppa just outside the borders

By the time of the establishment of Hellenistic dynasties that replaced the Persian Empire, the people of the land have fully assimilated to the religious practices of the Persian-created elites in both Judea and Samaria, and the main tensions no longer manifest themselves between Mesopotamian "returnees" and the people of the land but between Samarians and Judeans. Depending on when the texts of Ezra and Nehemiah were composed, they either reflected these tensions or were modified for consistency with the later historical situation.

For more than a century after Alexander's conquest of the Middle East, the "returnee" elite in Jerusalem manages to cling to authority in Judea, but the Maccabees seize an opportunity to displace this elite shortly after the Romans humiliate Antiochos in Egypt. There may have been some minor skirmishes with a Syro-Greek garrison that supported the old Persian elite, but in the end Antiochos probably did not care whether the old or a new elite held power in Judea, and from his standpoint an independent buffer state between Hellenistic Syria and Roman-dominated Egypt provided many benefits.

Supporters of the Hasmoneans wrote the history of the Maccabean triumph to minimize the intra-Judean conflict by emphasizing or fabricating a conflict between Hellenism and Second Temple Judaism. Yet the Hasmoneans themselves became thorough-going Hellenizers while they simultaneously legitimized their dynasty by injecting their victory into the core of the Jerusalem Temple Religion by adding Hanukkah into the sacred calendar in a way that radically reshaped Second Temple religious concepts.

The operation of calendar, the dates of Holy Days, and the associated meanings were key issues of spirituality and religious debate in Second Temple Judaism. Open questions still remained until the end of the Geonic Period, and Saadyah Gaon took part in calendar debates as late as the tenth century CE.

The Second Temple sacred calendar begins with the Passover liberation at approximately the equinox of spring. Next follows the law giving and rebellion at the Festival of Weeks at approximately the summer solstice. The warmth of summer corresponds in a way to the glory of the unified monarchy. Then comes repentance during the month of Elul as the summer draws to a close in the royal New Year. Ten days later comes the Day of Atonement, and the last holiday of the Temple's sacred calendar is the harvest Festival of Tabernacles or Booths with the associated Celebration of the Law and Assembly of the Eighth. The flimsy dwelling structures of the composite celebration presages weakness, dependency, and coming exile (Golah). .

Instead of returning to the start of the cycle in the spring, from the Hasmonean standpoint Hanukkah was supposed to legitimize the rule of the new royal dynasty by resolving the calendrical cycle with a celebration of the miraculous birth of a strong central expansive Judean state led by a warrior king, who defeated the forces of Golah near the winter solstice exactly when Nehemiah's earlier miraculous rekindling took place in a blaze of light and warmth that defeated the darkness and cold of winter.

The Hasmoneans drew an analogy explicitly between themselves and Ezra as well as implicitly between themselves and the House of David (to invoke the concept of the Messiah, the son of David) by rededicating the Temple just as Solomon built it. They connected themselves with messianic yearnings that were often expressed in combination with the star prophecy that later became associated with the Star of Bethlehem:

I shall see him, but not now: I shall behold him, but not nigh: there shall come a Star out of Jacob, and a Sceptre shall rise out of Israel, and shall smite the corners of Moab, and destroy all the children of Sheth. [Numbers 24:17]

Almost subconsciously by putting a new Festival of Light at the 25th of Kislev so close to the winter solstice and the ancient winter festival of light, the Hasmonean legitimization narrative also connected with the ancient sacred calendar and Sacrificial King of the older mythic traditions, which still lived in the mostly pagan Idumaean, Galilean, and Peraean districts that the Hasmoneans eventually added to their kingdom and Judaized.

Hasmonean Judea

According to the core of this myth, the Sacrificial King, who is also known as the Ever-Dying God, mates with the Great or White Goddess to impregnate her, and he is sacrificed to fertilize the land in a sort of apotheosis that transforms him into the powerful Summer God, who gradually withers as the seasons progress. Nine months later at the winter solstice, which is celebrated in a festival of lights, the goddess gives birth to her former lover as a miraculous child, who rapidly matures into the sacrificial king to mate with her once again in the spring to restart the cycle.^#

In later forms of the Sacrificial King myth, the Sacrificial or Sacred King avoids death through the substitution of a tanist, who is a sort of understudy or designated substitute and is often the brother or son of the Sacred King. In such versions the Sacred King is revitalized as the life-force of the tanist drains away. In the latest versions, the sacrifice is eliminated altogether as the High God informs the participants that he despises and has forbidden human sacrifice. In Greek mythology the High God's agent is usually a divine or semi-divine being like Herakles.

The Great Goddess often expresses herself in these myths and others as a trinity consisting of the virgin, the matron, and the crone, who in later patriarchal mythologies are reduced to the Fates (Moriae in Latin) or to the Furies (euphemistically called the Eumenides). James Frazer and Robert Graves discuss the Sacrificial King and the Great Goddess in detail in The Golden Bough and The White Goddess respectively.

The Hebrew Bible and the Christian Old Testament incorporate or retain a vestige of the Sacrificial King myth in the accounts of the Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar. Studying these Biblical stories in parallel with the Greek myth of Athamas, Nephele and Ino helps to elucidate the underlying mythological substratum of the Jewish and Christian Bibles and its application to questions of the covenantal and royal legacy that the Maccabees seized by force.

From the standpoint of mythological analysis, Abraham of the Bible and Athamas of the Greek myths are married to the triple goddess in disguise. The Biblical triple goddess consists of Sarah, Hagar, and Keturah. Traditional Jewish midrash (exegesis) tries to explain Keturah away as Hagar under another name. The Greek triple goddess consists of Ino and Nephele, who are the wives of Athamas, and Helle, who is the daughter of Athamas and Nephele. The Greek Athamas is an obvious variant of Adam, but Adam in the ancient Canaanite myths is also the Red Man (Edom) of Hebron, who is replaced in the Bible by Abraham. Abraham is originally the high father Av Ram but is also Av Raham or Av Rahab (by a pun or labial consonant transformation as sometimes occurs in Semitic languages).

Av Rahab is the father of the Sea Monster or Poseidon. Worship of Poseidon at inland Hebron seems unlikely, but the ancient glass industry at Hebron was explained by Phoenician settlers or immigrants. If Biblical Abraham or mythic Athamas is associated with Poseidon, at least one of his wives should be a sea goddess or nymph, and indeed Ino is transformed into the sea goddess, Leukothea (White Goddess). In Greek mythology, sea goddesses and nymphs are associated with laughter or mirth probably because sailors often perceive dolphins as laughing. Sarah is Abraham's wife, who laughs when the birth of Isaac is promised. Nephele (cloud), who bears an heir, and Helle (spark?), who is driven to flight, act in some ways like Hagar while the name Nephele is associated with the meaning of Keturah (incense).

Nephele is the mother of Phrixos (thrilling, causing shivers) just as Hagar is the mother of Ismael, a wild-onager of a man.⁺

In order to guarantee that her sons Leachos and Melicertes will inherit their father's kingdom, Ino bribes an oracle to tell Athamas that Phrixos and Helle must be sacrificed to save the Athamas' kingdom from famine.

Just at the moment that Athamas is about to sacrifice Phrixos, a magical golden ram appears to rescue him. Phrixos and Helle climb onto the back of the ram, who flies them toward the east. Helle falls off and drowns while flying over the straights now called Hellespont after her. The ram lands with Phrixos in Aea where Phrixos sacrifices the ram to thank Zeus for his rescue. Phrixos gives the golden fleece to Aeetes the King of Aea. The ram undergoes an apotheosis to become the constellation Aries.

In some sense the Greek version is closer to the common Islamic interpretation that Abraham nearly sacrifices Ismael (the Adha) and not Isaac (the Akeidah) as the Bible describes, but the identity of the near victim is not so important as the idea of associating the transfer of the Abrahamic covenant with the near sacrifice that sanctifies the near victim and his descendants. The issue of the transfer of the covenant became important in Judea as the decadent and brutal Hasmonean heirs were supplanted by the even more brutal and corrupt Herodian dynasty.

The Hasmoneans were basically usurpers, but they could claim a Judean and priestly heritage. The Herodians were usurpers of usurpers and traced their origins to the pagan priests of Idumea. As the Judean kingdom collapses in tyranny, its peoples reinterpret the idea of the Covenant of Israel and begin to look for a more personal salvation in lieu of the failed experiment in national political salvation.

The Biblical concept of the suffering servant was an important source of comfort during the crises and oppression of Herodian Judea. The suffering servant lives according to the Law and loves God even as he suffers under unbearable and unjust burdens, Yet the suffering people of Israel could hope that they would receive God's ultimate mercy in the same way that God annointed the Persian Cyrus Messiah to restore the exiled remnant of Israel to the Land of Israel or in the same way that God favored Joseph, who was sold into slavery, then rose to the pinnacle of power in Egypt, and in the end saved Israel and the Children of Israel.

For much of the population of Greco-Roman Palestine, the apocalypse and destruction of the 1st and 2nd centuries CE represented a recapitulation of the conquest and apocalypse of the Southern Kingdom and the destruction of the First Temple as described in scripture. In the aftermath of the devastation and as real memory of the Persian imperial period faded, many among the population of Palestine began to analogize themselves with the scriptural depiction of the post-apocalyptic Judahite "surviving remnant" that returned to the Land of Israel from the Babylonian Captivity not as haughty rulers but as humble aspirants to holiness and began to develop a new "surviving remnant" theology that quickly split into three separate currents defined by three very different understandings of Jesus.

The most conservative reaction to Jesus rejects granting him any status as prophet or messiah. This stream of thought develops into Talmudic Judaism and opposing proto-Karaite religious factions, which eventually crystallize as Rabbinic and Karaite Judaism around the 10th century CE. Even though this spiritual current characterizes Jesus as a bastard, a charlatan and a magician, and even though it takes pride in the belief that the Sanhedrin ordered the execution of Jesus, it accepts much of the teachings of Jesus and his followers but tends to ascribe them to sages that lived before Jesus was born.

Another conservative reaction, which eventually becomes Constantinian Christianity, reintegrates and evolves many of the religious, political and spiritual ideas current in Greco-Roman Palestine at the time of the Hasmoneans and the Herodians. This stream of thought combines together

• the suffering servant concept, which has some affinities to the much later Rabbinic Jewish concept of torah lishmah (studying and observing the Torah for its own sake without thought of a [covenantal] reward),
• the idea of God's mercy personified by Joseph (a suffering servant) in combination with a Messiah like Cyrus reworked as the son of Joseph by interpreting the Book of Esther in conjunction with Genesis 48:1-6 (Joseph's double portion) and Hosea 7:8 (the mixing of Ephraim with the gentiles),
• the Hasmonean messianic narrative that connects with the idea of the Messiah, the son of David, and
• the mythology of the sacred or sacrificial king

in order to understand the mission of Jesus the Savior, who is according to Christian scripture both the son of Joseph and descended from the lineage of David. The complexity of this interpretation of Jesus is disconnected from the simplicity and directness of his message of piety and righteousness.

The New Testament epistles develop the idea that the perfect sacrifice of Jesus transcends the incomplete sacrifice of Isaac and that the Abrahamic Covenant is renewed and reformulated for Jesus' followers, who now constitute the true Israel.

In the Christian nativity story, the birth of Jesus at approximately the winter solstice in a festival of lights in a fulfillment of the star prophecy provides a new resolution for the calendrical cycle of the Jerusalem Temple Religion. Developing a new understanding of the sacred calendar became critical with the destruction of the Temple and the concomitant collapse of the associated religious system.

In Christian interpretation of the sacred calendar, the second Jerusalem Temple becomes irrelevant except as a symbol of corruption that must be overcome, and Jesus is the miraculous child born at the time of the festival of lights in the cold of winter, which represents death as well as Golah. The child grows into the sacred king, who triumphs over mortality and brings everlasting life to his followers when he undergoes apotheosis as the true sacrificial king in the spring of liberation. Passover no longer simply frees the Israelites from the yoke of servitude and the burdens of exile but becomes the Easter celebration of the liberation of mortal men and women from the curse of death as long as they live justly and emulate Jesus, the suffering servant of God. Robert Graves's novel King Jesus can serve as an introduction to the thought processes underlying Jesus' mythographic transmogrification as long as one keeps in mind that it is a learned and very poetic form of prose fiction and neither history nor classical scholarship.

The most radical reaction, whose ideas Islam expresses, rejects the mishmash of apocalyptic, covenantal, and mythological ideas that transformed Jesus from a prophet and completely human messiah to the humble people of the land into an invincible divinity, who harrows Hell.

The Prolegomena to the Qur'an by al-Sayyid Abu al-Qasim al-Musawi al-Khu'i (as translated by Abdulaziz A. Sachedina) describes on p. 48 the revolutionary nature of the third stream of thought as it is embodied in the Qur'an:

...we find that the Qur'an is different from the two Testaments in all respects, and that it purifies the two Testaments from the delusive imagination and myths that filled the Testaments and the other sources of education at that time.

God speaking through the Qur'an simply discards the mythological core incorporated into the Hebrew and Christian Bibles by forbidding the intercalation of the lunisolar sacred calendar.

9:36	The number of months in the sight of Allah is twelve (in a year)- so ordained by Him the day He created the heavens and the earth; of them four are sacred: that is the straight usage. So wrong not yourselves therein, and fight the Pagans all together as they fight you all together. But know that Allah is with those who restrain themselves.
9:37	Verily the transposing (of a prohibited month) is an addition to Unbelief: the Unbelievers are led to wrong thereby: for they make it lawful one year, and forbidden another year, in order to adjust the number of months forbidden by Allah and make such forbidden ones lawful. The evil of their course seems pleasing to them. But Allah guideth not those who reject Faith.

(Intercalation is the mechanism that kept the seasons at relatively fixed periods within the calendar.)

While modern religious people tend to be unaware of the critical importance of the calendar to belief and spirituality in Greco-Roman times,⁺⁺ the calendar issue was still so important in the 7th century CE that Muhammad reiterated the prohibition of the lunisolar sacred calendar in his farewell sermon on Mount Arafat.⁺⁺⁺

The Qur'an eliminates the sacred king mythology so critical to Christian understanding of Jesus from the story of Abraham's sacrifice of his son. The story simply becomes a witness to faith in God on the part of both Abraham and his son.

Most Muslims reasonably assume that the son is Ismael because the festival of the sacrifice (`Idu-l-Adha) commemorates this test of faith (December 19th this year) in such close connection with the Hajj during which Muslims empathize with the anguish of Hagar as she seeks water for her son Ismael as he is dying of thirst.

The Qur'anic version of the expulsion of Hagar differs from the story told in the Bible. Jealously between co-wives does not play the pivotal role that it does in the Bible or in the myths of Athamas, Ino, and Nephele. Abraham simply obeys God's command to send Hagar and Ismael to Arabia. The commentators give propagation of monotheism as the purpose, but Ismael can only truly freely choose to follow God's command alongside Abraham in the ultimate test of faith (al-adha) if he and his mother are removed from the influence of Abraham and if Ismael is given reason to distance himself from his father.

All together, the Qur'anic story of Hagar and Ismael, `Id al-Adha, and the Hajj tells us to remember and to care for the child and mother that are left alone with no sustenance just as God hears their cries. It is a good message for a season that is perhaps overly focused on the commercialization of the birth of the miraculous child Jesus and of the miraculous "victory" of the Maccabees over Hellenistic Syrians.^**

It is hardly surprising that the chosen messenger to whom the Quran was conveyed was himself an orphan and that the city of his birth is founded on the site to which Hagar and Ismael journeyed and where Ismael was dying of thirst until God provided the Zamzam Well located today in the Masjid al-Haram in Makka. By the same "b" "m" interchange previously mentioned, Makka is identified with Bakka (equivalent to Hebrew bekheh), which describes the anguished weeping of Hagar.

Zamzam Well Slightly off center to at the bottom left

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NOTES

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$ In New Statesman - Lost in a muddle of greetings (13 December 2007), Andrew Stephens discusses the American approach to winter holidays and its spread to the UK. He decries the Americanization of the British holiday season even as he misdescribes the historical developments that led to the way Americans celebrate winter holidays today.

Stephens rather obnoxiously fails to point out in his article that the modern commercialization of Christmas is very much a creation specifically of Jewish-owned department stores while the issue of Jewish participation in Christmas celebrations in schools was sent to the courts under the cover of Atheist plaintiffs in more or less the same way that the David Project found non-Jewish James Policastro to shill for its extremist Jewish or Zionist racial and religious hatred against Arabs and Muslims during the Roxbury Mosque conflict.

* On December. 3, 2007 Hanukkah celebrates the triumph of tribal Jewish backwardness. - By Christopher Hitchens - Slate Magazine was published to the Web. While Hitchens' ignorant religion-bashing, which includes an attack on Christianity as well as Judaism, was probably fun to write, the article neither increases mutual understanding among believers and non-believers, nor does it explain the texts, nor does it elucidate in any reasonable way the history and major spiritual questions of the Greco-Roman period under question.

Because he would rather pander his own prejudices than find the truth, Hitchens accepts the traditional Rabbinic Jewish Hanukkah story at face value instead of applying the sort of skepticism to which he would subject an official report or press release from the Bush administration.

In misexplaining the history of Hanukkah, Hitchens acts on behalf of the left rather as Victor Davis Hanson misdepicts classical history in the service of the right-wing and especially on behalf Zionist Neocons.

# This story has many variants, and the major festivals are not always in the spring and the winter. In Lebanon among the Phoenicians, the Semitic version of the myth of Adonis and Venus was celebrated in the late summer. Adonis is the Greek version of the Hebrew God-name Adonai. Venus, who is the Greek Aphrodite and the Semitic Astarte, from whom the name of the Festival of Easter is derived, is the Great Goddess directly but ambivalently incorporated into the primary Olympian pantheon. Hesiod claims Aphrodite was born of sea foam while Homer identifies her parents as Zeus and the non-Olympian Titan goddess Dione. Homer emphasizes her foreign character by calling her the Cyprian, and in the Iliad the Trojans worship the Great Goddess as Aphrodite.

+ The wild-onager is the sacred beast of the Egyptian god Set, who is identified with Greek god Poseidan even though Set is more commonly a desert than a sea god. Set murders Osiris yearly.

++ The religious calendar issue today is rather like the debate over the choice of a gold or silver standard in late 19th century America. It was a burning conflict then with tremendous economic impact and effects on the lives of many Americans, but the public of 21st century America is for the most part completely unaware of this historically extremely important political debate.

+++ The rejection of the traditional ordering of the Semitic alphabet for the new Arabic alphabet created in the latter half of the 7th century CE probably reflects a similar effort to purge the Islamic religion of esoteric mythic mysteries that could otherwise have been associated with the letters of the text of the Qur'an. Vestiges of the mysteries of Semitic sacred alphabet survive in the retention of traditional numerical values for the letters of Arabic alphabet, and numerology of the Quran remains popular with some Muslims just as some Jews try to find esoteric meanings in the Hebrew Bible by numerological methods.

** In some sense, Christian observance has corrected the omission of abandoned women and children from the observance of Christmas. Before he was commercialized as Santa Claus, Bishop Nicholas of Myra, who is known today as Saint Nicholas even though he was never canonized, has become associated with the holiday in part because of his legendary gift-giving, which included providing the dowries for three motherless girls, who would otherwise have been sold into prostitution. Nicolas is the patron saint of Beit Jala, Palestine, where masses celebrate him according to the Gregorian calendar on December 19th, which is December 6th on the Julian Calendar.

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WORTH READING

Muhammad and the Golden Bough: Reconstructing Arabian Myth by Jaroslav Stetkevych is an interesting attempt to reconstruct pre-Islamic Arabian myth.

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 contains a lot of nonsense, but the author provides a lot of material from the primary sources.

Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World by Patricia Crone and Michael Cook 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 may have been written with 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. Christian Judaism was probably the predominant form of religion among the Palestinian peasantry from the late second through the fourth century CE. It combined the beliefs of Second Temple Judaism with the acceptance of Jesus as a prophet and as a completely human messiah.

The Beginnings of Jewishness by Shaye Cohen 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.

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