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THE HOFFMAN WIRE
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Michael A. Hoffman II, Editor
February 5, 2004
Pursuing the Millennium
Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel
"...the most totalitarian system ever invented..."
by David Hirst
The Nation | February 2, 2004
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040216&s=hirst
EXCERPT:
"As for non-Jews, the Halacha would be an edifice of systematic
discrimination against them, in which every possible crime or sin
committed by a Gentile against a Jew, from murder or adultery to robbery
or fraud, would be far more heavily punished than the same crime or sin
committed by a Jew against a Gentile--if, indeed, the latter were
considered to be a felony at all, which it often would not be. All forms
of 'idolatry or idol-worship,' but especially Christian ones (for
traditionally Muslims, who are not considered to be idolaters, are held
in less contempt than Christians), would be 'obliterated,' in the words
of Shas party leader Rabbi Ovadia Yossef.
"According to conditions laid down by Maimonides, whose Halacha rulings
are holy writ to the fundamentalists, those Gentiles, or so-called 'Sons
of Noah,' permitted to remain in the Kingdom could only do so as
'resident aliens,' obliged under law to accept the 'inferiority' in
perpetuity which that status entails, to 'suffer the humiliation of
servitude,' and to be 'kept down and not raise their heads to the Jews.'
At weekday prayers, the faithful would intone the special curse: 'And
may the apostates have no hope, and all the Christians perish
instantly.' One wonders what the Jerry Falwells and Pat Robertsons think
of all this; for it is strange, this new adoration by America's
evangelicals of an Israel whose Jewish fundamentalists continue to
harbor a doctrinal contempt for Christianity..."
In the minds of many Westerners, Muslim fundamentalism has replaced
communism as perhaps the greatest single "threat" to the existing world
order. From this perspective the Palestinian intifada becomes just
another episode in a "clash of civilizations." For them, there is an
intrinsic link between Palestinian "terrorism" and, say, the al-Qaeda
bombing of an American warship off Yemen. Almost totally absent from
such arguments is any inclination to examine Jewish fundamentalism, or
so much as to ask whether it, too, might be a factor in the conflict
over Palestine, one of the reasons why it seems so insoluble.
There is, in fact, a great ignorance of, or indifference to, this whole
subject in the outside world, and not least in the United States. This
is due at least in part to that general reluctance of the mainstream
American media to subject Israel to the same searching scrutiny to which
it would other states and societies, and especially when the issue in
question is as sensitive, as emotionally charged, as this one is. But,
in the view of the late Israel Shahak, it reflects particularly badly on
an American Jewry which, with its ingrained, institutionalized aversion
to finding fault with Israel, turns a blind eye to what Israelis like
himself viewed with disgust and alarm, and unceasingly said so.
American Jews, especially Orthodox ones, are generous financiers of the
shock troops of fundamentalism, the religious settlers; indeed a good 10
percent of these, and among the most extreme, violent and sometimes
patently deranged, are actually immigrants from America. They are, says
Shahak, one of the "absolutely worst phenomena" in Israeli society, and
"it is not by chance that they have their roots in the American-Jewish
community." It was from his headquarters in New York that the
Lubavitcher Rebbe, the late Menachem Schneerson, seer of possibly the
most rabid of Hasidic sects, the Chabad, gave guidance to his many
followers in both Israel and the United States.
The ignorance or indifference is all the more remiss in that Jewish
fundamentalism is not, and cannot be, just a domestic Israeli question.
Israel was always a highly ideological society; it is also a vastly
outsized military power, both nuclear and conventional. That is a
combination which, when the ideology in question is Zionism in its most
extreme, theocratic form, is fraught with possible consequences for the
region and the world, and, of course, for the world's only,
Israeli-supporting superpower.
Like its Islamic counterpart, Jewish fundamentalism in Israel has grown
enormously in political importance over the past quarter-century. Its
committed, hard-core adherents, as distinct from a larger body of the
more traditionally religious, are thought to account for some 20 to 25
percent of the population. They, and more particularly the settlers
among them, have acquired an influence, disproportionate to their
numbers, over the whole Israeli political process, and especially in
relation to the ultra-nationalist right, which, beneath its secular
exterior, actually shares much of their febrile, exalted outlook on the
world. It is fundamentalism of a very special, ethnocentric and fiercely
xenophobic kind, with beliefs and practices that are "even more
extremist," says Shahak, "than those attributed to the extremes of
Islamic fundamentalism," if not "the most totalitarian system ever
invented."
Like fundamentalism everywhere, the Jewish variety seeks to restore an
ideal, imagined past. If it ever managed to do so, the Israel celebrated
by the American "friends of Israel" as a "bastion of democracy in the
Middle East" would, most assuredly, be no more.
For, in its full and perfect form, the Jewish Kingdom that arose in its
place would elevate a stern and wrathful God's sovereignty over any
new-fangled, heathen concepts such as the people's will, civil liberties
or human rights. It would be governed by the Halacha, or Jewish
religious law, of which the rabbis would be the sole interpreters, and
whose observance clerical commissars, installed in every public and
private institution, would rigorously enforce, with the help of citizens
legally obligated to report any offense to the authorities.
A monarch, chosen by the rabbis, would rule and the Knesset would be
replaced by a Sanhedrin, or supreme judicial, ecclesiastic and
administrative council. Men and women would be segregated in public, and
"modesty" in female dress and conduct would be enforced by law. Adultery
would be a capital offense, and anyone who drove on the Sabbath, or
desecrated it in other ways, would be liable to death by stoning.
As for non-Jews, the Halacha would be an edifice of systematic
discrimination against them, in which every possible crime or sin
committed by a Gentile against a Jew, from murder or adultery to robbery
or fraud, would be far more heavily punished than the same crime or sin
committed by a Jew against a Gentile--if, indeed, the latter were
considered to be a felony at all, which it often would not be.
All forms of "idolatry or idol-worship," but especially Christian ones
(for traditionally Muslims, who are not considered to be idolaters, are
held in less contempt than Christians), would be "obliterated," in the
words of Shas party leader Rabbi Ovadia Yossef. According to conditions
laid down by Maimonides, whose Halacha rulings are holy writ to the
fundamentalists, those Gentiles, or so-called "Sons of Noah," permitted
to remain in the Kingdom could only do so as "resident aliens," obliged
under law to accept the "inferiority" in perpetuity which that status
entails, to "suffer the humiliation of servitude," and to be "kept down
and not raise their heads to the Jews."
At weekday prayers, the faithful would intone the special curse: "And
may the apostates have no hope, and all the Christians perish
instantly." One wonders what the Jerry Falwells and Pat Robertsons think
of all this; for it is strange, this new adoration by America's
evangelicals of an Israel whose Jewish fundamentalists continue to
harbor a doctrinal contempt for Christianity only rivaled by the
contempt which the Christian fundamentalists reserve for the Jews
themselves.
Fundamentalists come in a multitude of sects, often fiercely
disputatious with one another on the finest and most esoteric points of
doctrine, but all are agreed on this basic eschatological truth: It is
upon the coming of the Messiah that the Jewish Kingdom will arise, and
the twice-destroyed Temple will be reconstructed on the site where the
Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa mosques now stand. One school of
fundamentalists, the Hanedim, believes that the Messiah will appear in
His own good time, that the millennium, the End of Days, will come by
the grace of God alone. The Shas party is their largest single political
component. Their position has in it something of the traditional
religious quietism, which, historically, opposed the whole idea of
Zionism, immigration to Palestine and the establishment of a Jewish
state.
The other school, less extreme in outward religious observances, is more
so, indeed breathtakingly revolutionary, on one crucial point of dogma:
the belief that the coming of the Messiah can be accomplished, or
hastened, by human agency. In fact, the "messianic era" has already
arrived. This messianic fundamentalism is represented by the National
Religious Party, and its progeny, the settlers of the Gush Emunim, or
Bloc of the Faithful, who eventually came to dominate it. Its adherents
are ready to involve themselves in the world, sinful though it is, and,
by so doing, they sanctify it. Except for the symbolic skullcap, they
have adopted conventional modern dress; they include secular subjects in
the curricula of their seminaries.
According to the teachings of their spiritual mentor, Rabbi Tzvi Yehuda
Kook, the Gush, or at least the rabbis who lead it, are themselves the
collective incarnation of the Messiah. Since, in biblical prophecy, the
Messiah was to appear riding on an ass, he identified the ass as those
errant, secular Jews who remain in stubborn ignorance of the exalted
purpose of its divinely guided rider. In the shape of those early
Zionists they had, it is true, performed the necessary task of carrying
the Jews back to the Holy Land, settling it and founding a state there.
But now they had served their historic purpose; now they had become
obsolete in their failure to renounce their beastly, ass-like ways--and
to perceive that Zionism has a divine, not merely a national, purpose.
The mainstream secular Zionist leadership had wanted the Jewish people
to achieve "normality," to be as other peoples with a nation-state of
their own. The messianics--and indeed, though for emotional more than
doctrinal reasons, much of the nationalist right--hold that that is
impossible; the Jews' "eternal uniqueness" stems from the covenant God
made with them on Mount Sinai. So, as Rabbi Shlomo Aviner, a Gush leader
and head of a yeshiva that studies the ancient priestly rites that would
be revived if and when the Temple were rebuilt, put it, "while God
requires other, normal nations to abide by abstract codes of 'justice
and righteousness,' such laws do not apply to Jews."
Since Zionism began, but especially since the 1967 war and Israel's
conquest of the remainder of historic Palestine, the Jews have been
living in a "transcendental political reality," or a state of
"metaphysical transformation," one in which, through war and conquest,
Israel liberates itself not only from its physical enemies, but from the
"satanic" power which these enemies incarnate.
The command to conquer the Land, says Aviner, is "above the moral, human
considerations about the national rights of the Gentiles in our
country." What he calls "messianic realism" dictates that Israel has
been instructed to "be holy, not moral, and the general principles of
morality, customary for all mankind, do not bind the people of Israel,
because it has been chosen to be above them."
It is not simply because the Arabs deem the land to be theirs that they
resist this process--though, in truth, it is not theirs and they are
simply "thieves" who took what always belonged to the Jews--it is
because, as Gentiles, they are inherently bound to do so. "Arab
hostility," says another Gush luminary, Rabbi Eliezer Waldman, director
of the Kiryat Arba settlement's main yeshiva, "springs, like all
anti-Semitism, from the world's recalcitrance" in the face of an Israel
pursuing "its divine mission to serve as the heart of the world."
So force is the only way to deal with the Palestinians. So long as they
stay in the Land of Israel, they can only do so as "resident aliens"
without "equality of human and civil rights," those being "a foreign
democratic principle" that does not apply to them. But, in the end, they
must leave. There are two ways in which that can happen. One is
"enforced emigration." The other way is based on the biblical injunction
to "annihilate the memory of Amalek."
In an article on "The Command of Genocide in the Bible," Rabbi Israel
Hess opined--without incurring any criticism from a state Rabbinate
whose official duty it is to correct error wherever it finds it--that
"the day will come when we shall all be called upon to wage this war for
the annihilation of Amalek." He advanced two reasons for this. One was
the need to ensure "racial purity." The other lay in "the antagonism
between Israel and Amalek as an expression of the antagonism between
light and darkness, the pure and the unclean."
For the Gush, there is a dimension to the settlements beyond the merely
strategic --the defending of the state--or the territorial--the
expansion of the "Land of Israel" till it reaches its full, biblically
foretold borders. Settlements are the citadels of their messianic
ideology, the nucleus and inspiration of their theocratic
state-in-the-making, the power base from which to conduct an internal
struggle that is inseparable from the external one--the intra-Jewish
struggle against that other Israel, the secular-modernist one of
original, mainstream Zionism, which stands in their path.
The Gush must make good what Rabbi Kook taught: that the existing State
of Israel carries within itself "the Kingdom of Israel, the Kingdom of
Heaven on Earth; consequently, total Holiness embraces every Jewish
person, every deed, every phenomenon, including Jewish secularism, which
will be one day swallowed by Holiness, by Redemption."
It goes without saying that the Gush consider any American-sponsored
Arab-Israeli peaceful settlement to be a virtual impossibility; but
furthermore, any attempt to achieve that impossibility should be
actively sabotaged. For them, the Oslo Accords, and the prospect of the
"re-division" of the "Land of Israel," was a profound, existential
shock. It was, said Rabbi Yair Dreyfus, an "apostasy" which, the day it
came into effect, would mark "the end of the Jewish-Zionist era [from
1948 to 1993] in the sacred history of the Land of Israel." The Gush and
their allies declared a "Jewish intifada" against it.
The grisly climax came when, in the Ramadan of February 1994, a doctor,
Baruch Goldstein, Israeli but Brooklyn-born-and-bred, machine-gunned
Muslim worshippers in Hebron's Ibrahimi Mosque, killing 29 of them
before he was killed himself. This was no mere isolated act of a madman.
Goldstein was a follower of New York's Lubavitcher Rebbe. But what he
did reflected and exemplified the whole milieu from which he sprang, the
religious settlers, and the National Religious Party behind them.
There was no more eloquent demonstration of that than the immediate,
spontaneous responses to the mass murder; these yielded nothing, in
breadth or intensity, to the Palestinians' responses to their
fundamentalist suicide bombings, when these first got going in the wake
of it. Many were the rabbis who praised this "act," "event" or
"occurrence," as they delicately called it. Within two days the walls of
Jerusalem's religious neighborhoods were covered with posters extolling
Goldstein's virtues and lamenting that the toll of dead Palestinians had
not been higher. In fact, the satisfaction extended well beyond the
religious camp in general; polls said that 50 percent of the Israeli
people, and especially the young, more or less approved of it.
The "Jewish intifada" also turned on other Jews. Yigal Amir, who
assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in November 1995, was no less
a product than Goldstein of the milieu from which the latter sprang. As
in other religious traditions, the hatred Jewish fundamentalists
nurtured for Jewish "traitors" and "apostates" was perhaps even greater
than it was for non-Jews. Rabin, and the "left," were indeed traitors in
their eyes; they were "worshippers of the Golden Calf of a delusory
peace."
In a clear example of their deep emotional kinship with the
fundamentalists, Sharon and several other Likud and far-right secular
nationalist leaders joined the hue and cry against Rabin and his
government of "criminals," "Nazis" and "Quislings." Declaring that
"there are tyrants at the gate," Sharon likened Oslo to the
collaboration between France's Marshal Ptain and Hitler and said that
Rabin and his foreign minister, Shimon Peres, were both "crazed" in
their indifference to the slaughter of Jews.
The struggle between the religious--in its fundamentalist form--and the
secular, between ancient and modern, ethnocentric and universal, is a
struggle for Israel's very soul. The Gush settlements are at the heart
of it. The struggle is intensifying and is wholly unresolved. The
fundamentalists can never win it; they are simply too backward and
benighted for that.
But, appeased, surreptitiously connived with, or unashamedly supported
down the years by Labor as much as by Likud, they have now acquired such
an ascendancy over the whole political process, such a penetration of
the apparatus of the state, military and administrative, executive and
legislative branches, that no elected government can win it either.
Meanwhile, they grow increasingly defiant, lawless and hysterical in
pursuit of the millennium.
The Zionist-colonial enterprise has always had a built-in propensity to
gravitate towards its most extreme expression. And what, with the rise
of the Begins and Shamirs, the Sharons and now a new breed of
super-Sharons, has been true of the whole is bound to be even more true
of its fanatical, fundamentalist particular. Its latest manifestation is
the so-called "hilltop youth"; these sons and daughters of the original,
post-1967 settlers, born and reared in the closed, homogenous, hothouse
world of their West Bank and Gazan strongholds, surpass even their
elders in militancy.
In keeping with time-honored, Sharon-approved Zionist tradition, they
have taken to seizing and staking out hilltops as the sites of
settlements to come, and, in every neighborhood they claim as their own,
they forcibly prevent the Palestinians from harvesting the fruit of
their ancestral olive groves. There is surely worse--much worse--to
come.
<END QUOTE>
For further research:
Goldstein's Massacre at the Mosque (VHS Video):
http://www.revisionisthistory.org/cgi-bin/store/agora.cgi?p_id=63
Modern Amalek --David Irving, Revisionists and Palestinians (VHS Video):
http://www.revisionisthistory.org/cgi-bin/store/agora.cgi?p_id=109
Judaism is not the Religion of the Old Testament (audio CD):
http://www.revisionisthistory.org/cgi-bin/store/agora.cgi?p_id=127
>>>>>>>
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