Zionists Out of the Peace Movement

Jewish Witnesses for Peace and Friends is once again calling for justice and peace advocates to protest the Jewish Federation of Washtenaw County's annual "Main Event" at the Ypsilanti Marriott at Eagle Crest (click here for map). The protest starts at 6 pm on Wednesday, December 6, 2006, on the corner of Huron St. and James L. Hart Parkway and is co-sponsored by the Huron Valley Greens.

The Federation comprises the local cadre of the Zionist state terrorist infrastructure and this is its single largest fundraising event of the year. In the 2004-2005 funding cycle, the Federation gave approximately $300,000 to an organ of the Israeli government--the Jewish Agency for Israel (JAFI). The main function of JAFI is to facilitate the settlement of Jews from all over the world on land that has been ethnically cleansed of its indigenous Arab inhabitants but the agency also funds international Zionist propaganda or hasbara campaigns, too. Tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of other Federation dollars make their way to the apartheid state through grants to the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, birthright israel, Israel Scholarships, etc. Money not sent to the genocidal "Jewish State" stays here and is spent, in part, on indoctrinating local Jews in Jewish chauvinism, which brings us to this year's keynote speaker: rabbi Joseph Telushkin.

Although the Ford Motor Co. is paying to bring Telushkin to Ypsilanti, he is representative of the Zionism and Jewish chauvinism promoted by the Jewish Federation of Washtenaw County. Telushkin co-authored The Nine Questions People Ask About Judaism with Dennis Prager. Prager is a Right wing talk show host, lecturer, etc. who still supports the 2003 US invasion of Iraq and he argued last summer that "Israel's fight for existence against the primitives, fanatics and sadists in Hezbollah and Hamas and elsewhere in the Arab/Muslim world who wish to destroy it" is "the most clarifying moral litmus test of our time" and "Anyone on the Left who cannot see this is either bad, a useful idiot for Islamic terrorists, anti-Semitic or all three." But, I digress.

In The Nine Questions, Telushkin (and his co-author) write (all quotes are from the 1986 edition):

First, violent crime is virtually unknown among observant Jews, and this is as true in societies where Jews constitute the majority of the population (as for example, in Israel) as where Jews constitute a minority. This abhorrence of bloodshed among Jews is historically attributable to Judaism and its laws. Kashrut, for example, has over the past three thousand years generated in Jews a reverence for all life. ... "Consider the one circumstance that no Jewish mother ever killed a chicken with her own hand and you will understand why homicide is rarer among Jews than among any other human groups." [p. 69]

This would be hilarious if it were not such an appalling lie. Jews have shown themselves to be at least as murderous as any other people. One is reminded of the Jewish prominence in Murder, Inc. and other gangs. Can you say Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel, Meyer Lansky, Louis "Lepke" Buchalter, and Dutch Schultz (born Arthur Flegenheimer) to name a few? Yigal Amir, the assassin of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, was a devout Orthodox Jew. Perhaps, the problem is these killers' mothers slaughtered their own chickens. Then, there are the tens of thousands of Germans murdered by Jews after WWII. Not to mention 30,000-90,000 Christians murdered by Jews in 614 A.D. after the Persian conquest of Jerusalem. This is, by no means, an exhaustive list.

And as most Palestinians--and many Israeli Jews--will tell you, the most observant Jewish settlers are typically the most violent. The notorious Baruch Goldstein, a Jewish Defense League alum, comes to mind. According to the Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem, the soldiers and citizens of the "Jewish state" have killed 3,997 Palestinians--including many children and other unarmed noncombatants--during the approximately six years of the second Intifada. Then there's the one thousand or more Lebanese killed by Israelis last summer, again mostly innocent civilians.

In fact, even leaving out the Palestinians killed by Israelis and vice-versa the homicide rate in the "Jewish state" isn't that great in international comparison. The Israeli rate of "Intentional homicide, completed" per 100,000 population was 3.01 and 2.62 in 2003 and 2004, respectively. For example, the corresponding figures from Germany were 0.99 and 0.98; Ireland, 1.12 and 0.91; Iran, 2.64. and 2.93; and from the United Arab Emirates, 1.12 and 0.63. During 1990-1995, Israel had the world's third highest firearm-related homicide rate among children less than 15 years of age.

Furthermore, one wonders if Rabbi Telushkin is either appallingly ignorant or a bald-faced liar when he claims "abhorrence of bloodshed among Jews is historically attributable to Judaism." Judaism and the Tanakh/Old Testament are rife with Jewish-perpetrated slaughter of other peoples--at God's command and otherwise--and/or the celebration of same. Even Isaiah prophesied against Judah: "Your hands are full of blood".

The Passover commemorates the night that "the Lord struck down all the first-born in the land of Egypt, from the first-born of Pharaoh ... to the first-born of the captive who was in the dungeon ... there was a loud cry in Egypt; for there was no house where there was not someone dead" (Exod. 12:29-30). But the Lord passed over the houses of the Israelites and none of them were killed.

According to Aaron J. Tapper ("Towards a Jewish Theology of Nonviolence," Tikkun, March-April 2005) "in traditional homes" Jews recite a prayer known as the Shfokh Chamatkha during the Passover seder:

Pour out Your fury against the nations who do not know You and upon the regions where they do not invoke Your name because they devoured Jacob and desolated his home. Pour out Your wrath on them and may Your blazing anger overtake them. Pursue them with anger and destroy them from under the heavens of Adonai.

In the ninth chapter of book of Esther, which the festive holiday of Purim is based upon, we read:

15And the Jews that were in Shushan gathered themselves together on the fourteenth day also of the month Adar, and slew three hundred men in Shushan; but on the spoil they laid not their hand. 16And the other Jews that were in the king's provinces gathered themselves together, and stood for their lives, and had rest from their enemies, and slew of them that hated them seventy and five thousand--but on the spoil they laid not their hand-- 17on the thirteenth day of the month Adar, and on the fourteenth day of the same they rested, and made it a day of feasting and gladness. [Text is from the 1917 Jewish Publication Society translation]

As Tapper points out, "the text clearly refrains from stating that the tens of thousands of 'assailants' [those killed by Jews] were armed." To state otherwise, i. e. that "assailants" [sic] were armed, "is not the pshat/literal meaning of the passage." In other words, the text gives no indication that the Jews' victims were armed.

As a result of the legacy of violence in Judaism it is not uncommon to find pronouncements from the government-funded Israeli rabbinate sanctioning the killing of non-Jews by Jews. The late Israel Shahak documented several such instances. Thus, at the above mentioned Baruch Goldstein's funeral, Rabbi Yaacov Perrin declared that "1 million Arabs are not worth a Jewish fingernail."

Continuing from the passage cited above, Prager and Telushkin claim, "Second, ethically excellent behavior is expected from observant Jews." Perhaps, they are thinking of people like the Federation's keynote speaker last year: Alan Dershowitz, an acclaimed liar--oops, I mean lawyer--and torture advocate.

Elsewhere in The Nine Questions we learn why Jews shouldn't marry non-Jews. This chapter starts off from an epigraph from Herman Wouk:

These people [Jews who assimilate] ... are lost from Judaism, that is all; lost down a road which has swallowed many more Jews than the Hitler terror ever did. Of course they survive as persons. But from the viewpoint of an army, it makes little difference whether a division is exterminated or disperses into the hills and shuck off it uniforms. [p. 145; italics in original]

The issue we are told is "values, not ethnicity" (p. 146). You see, "Judaism is a superior system" (p. 143) and if your potential spouse shares your concerns and values then "marry that person. Judaism welcomes converts" (p. 146). Otherwise, you're messin' with "the centrality of the Jewish role in the world" (p. 146).

In accordance with Judaism's 3,200-year-old directive (Exodus 19:6) ["ye shall be unto Me a kingdom of priests, and a holy nation"], the Jews must form an army of tender, caring, strong, moral people to combat the hordes of bored, aimless people and the religious and secular totalitarian and nihilistic ideologies to which they are prey. ... It is time--if there is time--to proceed with the world-transforming event which began 3,200 years ago at a mountain in Sinai--the Jewish revolution. [p. 119]

If you marry that "shiksa bitch" then you're doing Hitler's work and messing with the army and the revolution. Oh, and, by the way, Israel is Judaism's "model state ... Now nationally, as well as individually, the Jewish people have the capacity to show the world the moral power of the Jewish ideal" (p. 119). Indeed, they have and Israel is truly a "light unto the nations"--a flashing red light.

Finally, on the marriage topic, there is this gem: "In our personal experiences, we (the authors) have been involved in relationships with Jewish women which were eventually ended because to these women Judaism was likely to remain a peripheral concern" (p. 147). I would love to hear what the women have to say about that; Prager has reportedly been divorced twice.

I'll close with one last nugget of Jewish wisdom from The Nine Questions. Question 6 is "Is There a Difference Between Anti-Zionism and Antisemitism?" In the epigraph to this chapter our demonic duo repeat a quote falsely attributed to the Rev. Martin Luther King: "When people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews" (p. 120; italics in original). Prager and Telushkin also assert: "Unless the Nazis are to be considered the only antisemites in history, anti-Zionists are as antisemitic as every other type of antisemite. Only their motivation may differ. Like all other antisemites, anti-Zionists are at war with nearly every Jews (nearly every Jew has some sense of Jewish national identity and supports Israel's right to exist)" (p. 122).

Here's what Norman Finkelstein says in Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History:

As already noted, Jewish elites in the United States have enjoyed enormous prosperity. From this combination of economic and political power has sprung, unsurprisingly, a mindset of Jewish superiority. Wrapping themselves in the mantle of The Holocaust ["an ideological representation of the (actual) Nazi holocaust"], these Jewish elites pretend—and, in their own solipsistic universe, perhaps imagine themselves—to be victims, dismissing any and all criticism as manifestations of "anti-Semitism." And, from this lethal brew of formidable power, chauvinistic arrogance, feigned (or imagined) victimhood, and Holocaust-immunity to criticism has sprung a terrifying recklessness and ruthlessness on the part of American Jewish elites. Alongside Israel, they are the main fomenters of anti-Semitism in the world today.

See you next Wednesday.

See also:

• Juan Cole on Prager: Muslims and the 5 Questions
• The Jewish Witnesses for Peace and Friends protest leaflet here.
• "We killed Jesus, we'll kill you too!"

Last revised: 08/25/2007

Labels: Jewish supremacism, Jewish violence, Judaism, Norman G. Finkelstein, Zionism