On another forum Bad Eagle I pondered the question about ethnicity in America. The Churchill saga leads to a series of questions about our society. Churchill was not a philoNative American he spoke in their name to further an extreeme political agenda. He exploited the tragedy in American History to tear down our society in his warped quest for Utopia. Where was the genuine expression of love for his adopted community ?
Dr David Yeagley a Native American talks about several comunities in a genuine loving admiration. Yeagley has intellectualy broadned his horizons as an intellectual.This is a healthy and admirable thing to do expand ones horizons and frame of refference. My identity as a Jew is not dimminished by my love for Assyrian Christians or Guyanese. In fact in many respects it leads me to understand the subtle ties of my culture better.
Jews suffer from a duality syndrome that I do not understand . On the one hand are people like Yeagley who have a strong affinity for my people. On the other side of the spectrum are the radical leftist and rightist who are united in an anti Israel mania. The right has created the fictional Jewish Superman capable of subverting the entire planet. The left has a similar contempt but they couch it in a way where Jews are never right . The left often tries to couch behind the zionism label but the littany of Jews in every crank conspiracy theory points to something more ominous. I often wonder what life would be like as a Norwegian. Nobody seems to get too worked up about Norwegians.
NYC is a wonderful place where one can literaly meet a person from every culture if one puts in the effort. I could fill this blogs about the wonders of the cultures I encountered. There are few places on earth where it is this easy to be cosmopolitan. NYC is not heaven and there are downsides to living here . Perhaps I will explore them in future blogs at greater length.
The joy about being American is all of the Culture belong to me as an American . My cultural heritage inculdes people from every corner of the globe. Malcolm X and Chief Joseph are part of my cultural heritage and they are symbols of my history. In America we have the culture that we were born into and some of us have so many it becomes a cafeteria selection. What does my lovely niece call herself with Irish, Scottish , Cheokee , Polish and Jewish heritage call herself. For me the issue was far simpler I am an Ashkenazi.
The truth is we should use one word to describe ourselves American.
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"In America we have the culture that we were born into and some of us have so many it becomes a cafeteria selection. "
That's me!
Pass the salt and pepper.
Please spare us the bellyaching self-pity.
Life is delightfully pleasant as a Norwegian. You have to go back over a thousand years before you can find a time when they last had any form of imperialistic tendencies .. and even then they were ruled by others, so they can blame them.
Now I have a question for you: Have you ever imagined what it would be like to be a Jew without a sneering chip on his shoulder?
Have you wondered what it would be like to view anti-Israeli, or anti-Zionist, sentiments as something other than anti-Jewish (I wont say anti-Semitic, because Jews don’t own the Semitic tag, which applies equally to the Palestinian people) .. but perhaps to view these positions as being against oppression and a brutal racist regime, which seems not to respect any decent humanitarian values?
It really is quite pathetic for you to sit there wallowing in some silly creation of your own mind, where anyone who dares to speak out about Israel is automatically prejudiced against the Jews of the world.
Why is it that American Jews are generally so paranoid that they are wholly incapable of divorcing condemnation of Israel from condemnation of their race? .. in contrast to the European Jews, who can generally stand back objectively, criticise, debate and accept the validity of so much of the criticism of Israel, without the NEED to see it as a racist insult.
Generalised statements like “The left has a similar contempt but they couch it in a way where Jews are never right . The left often tries to couch behind the zionism label but the littany of Jews in every crank conspiracy theory points to something more ominous” are nothing more than pitiful paranoid nonsense, and are so far detached from the real world as to totally defy any form of rational thinking. They are akin to me, as a gay man, presuming that anything in life that doesn’t go my way, or which happens to criticise me, must be motivated by homophobia. It is a TRULY pathetic outlook to adopt.
I love it thanks for making my point clear. Your hostility towards Jews proves exactly what is wrong with the Euroleft. You want to indict America for its history without a look at your own.Kindly pick up the Black Book of Communism to read your legacy.
Nothing personal but thanks and do drop by again.
I don't have any hostility towards Jews in general .. nor have I even said anything that would indicate tha I have.
The fact that you have such a desperate NEED to think that I do have anything about Jews in general is so very telling of your own paranoid motivation .. and your trolling.
And given your own well expressed rabid prejudices, I think it is more than a little rich for you to point the finger at anyone.
And you still insist on pointing me to my own (British) history ... which really bafles me given the fact that I have repeatedly told you that I am not even Britsih :)
And why would I want to pick up a book of comunion? My legacy is nowhere to be found in such a text.
Thanks for stoping by and proving my point. I do not have a problem with Jews. Your posts speak louder than I ever could.
As far as your view on history or polotics I am laughing. Keep telling yourself you are informed.
Did you go to freedom house yet ? Have you looked into the history of the ME. Come back with better amo.
Remember this is nothing personal and you are entertaining. You are illustrating my points to my fellow conservatives.
For the record I am a Rudy Republican.
recidivist,
You really are making his point.
"but perhaps to view these positions as being against oppression and a brutal racist regime, which seems not to respect any decent humanitarian values?"
1. The term, anti-Semitism , since its first use in the 1800's, has always been understood to mean anti-Jewish, not Arab et al.
2. In view of the degeneracy, totalitarianism and total lack of any hint of democracy in the Middle East, except Israel; your finger pointing and rather over the top description of Israel as "a brutal racist regime, which seems not to respect any decent humanitarian values", not only flies in the face of reality, it marks you as an anti-Semite. You brand yourself.
You lefties don't define the terms here, we do.
If you admire those peace loving, democratic, humanitarian Palestinians, go live among them and we will see how you fair as a gay man.
Do come back again.
And for the record, I am a social conservative with Libertarian leanings. Keep in mind that in the US conservative has nothing to do with your European ,so-called, conservative political factions.
LOL .. two troll sin a pod.
The term, anti-Semitism, since its first use in the 1800's, has always been understood to mean anti-Jewish, not Arab et alOnly in your wildest dreams.
not only flies in the face of reality, it marks you as an anti-SemiteIt marks me as no such thing, and you can't point to a single thing that I have said against all Jews - either as a race or a religion.
The fact that you claim it does, shows the total bankruptcy of your own argument.
Do come back again.I will gladly come back for so long as your red-necked racist chum Beakerskin to stop trolling other peoples blogs with his ridiculous unsubstantiated hypocritical racist bile.
So until that truly wondrous deliverance arrives, when he stops doing that, I will be sure to continue to point out the ridiculous paranoid nature of his belief that anything said against Israel is racist and anti-Jewish .. or that all those of a left wing persuasion are anti-Jewish.
And for the record, I am a social conservative with Libertarian leanings. Keep in mind that in the US conservative has nothing to do with your European ,so-called, conservative political factions..
I am at something of a loss as to understand why you are so desperate to convince me what the nature of your place on the political compass is, but European Conservatism is one of the most libertarian and decentralised ideologies there are, so I strongly suspect that your idea of what makes a libertarian would differ very strongly from that of most of the rest of the civilised world.
And why would they be my European anything? I'm not even European :)
The term anti-Semitism has always referred to prejudice towards Jews alone, and this has been the only use of this word for more than a century. It does not refer to prejudice to other people who speak semitic languages (e.g. Arabs or Assyrians). As Bernard Lewis notes "Anti-Semitism has never anywhere been concerned with anyone but Jews." (http://middleeastinfo.org/library/lewis_antisemitism.html) In recent decades some people have argued that the term should be extended to include prejudice against Arabs, since Arabic is a semitic language. However, this usage has not been widely adopted. In that there are few instances of prejudice against both Arabs and Jews to the exclusion of other races or nationalities, and in fact many more instances of antagonism between Jews and Arabs than of a specific bias against both groups together, there would seem to be little need for a word to describe such a prejudice, and thus to redefine anti-Semitism this way would result in robbing the word of any usefulness. Lewis writes "the term Semite has no meaning as applied to groups as heterogeneous as the Arabs or Jews." And, as has been pointed out by Neil J. Kressel, "In any event, nothing is gained from applying the anti-Semitism label to anti-Arab discrimination, abhorrent in its own right, except to confuse matters and take attention away from anti-Jewish hostility".
You have shown yourself to be anti-Semitic by your singling out "American Jews" plus the state of Israel, encompassing the majority of Jews in the world.
You have exempted "European Jews" probably meaning those who are not religious Jews and largely defining themselves only as "ethnic Jews", thereby divorcing themselves from those that practice their religion.
Therefore, you do not have a problem with those nice European Jews that know their place but those pesky nasty American and Israelis Jews, (that make up the majority of Jews in the world), better learn to toe the line.
Do you care to address my second point in my preceding post?
BTW, You better look up the definition of troll while you're at it. Yours is defiantly a case of the pointing hand having four fingers pointing back at self.
The poster known as the recidivist demonstrates some absurdities on the left. His posts ooze with ivecitives against Jews Israel and the Bush Administration. My points are illustrated in his attacks.
Should people claiming to be Jews be able to identify basic prayer objects ? Yes if one is going to claim to speak for Jews one should know what Judaism is. The only time these self appointed spokesmen claimed to be Jews is when they are promoting material out of the Noam Chomsky cult of idiocy.
Perhaps the reason his Jewish European friends will not tell you how they feel is because of your strident self righteous views. Israel and America alone are held to high standards while muslim and communist countries perpetrate crimes on a far greater magnitude. You still have not gone to Freedom house and looked at the data. Political and religious freedom in Israel are better than Turkey. In fact one sees a direct corelaion between Islam and Communism and repression.
As far as the Palestinian people there are no Palestinian people. What is the cultural,linguistic or religious differences between Palestinian,Jordanians, Most Syrians ,Saudis and the residents of the Sunni Triangle ? The reason there is none is that they are garden variety Sunni Arabs and are not indigenous.
The context of the first set of wars was Pan Arabism "drive the Jews into the sea". Most of the Sunnis thought of themselves as Syrians. After Pan Arabism gained no traction a bogus ethnicithy was created. We can compare Palestinians, Assyrians, Coptics ,Comanche and Brooklyn and the Palestinian case for nation status is inferior to Brooklyn.
As an openly Gay man you are sympathising with a culture that Jails and executes gays. Homosexual Palestinians flee to Israel for safety. Israeli Arabs also do not run to live in the PA .The peaceful Bha'i only find safety in Israel .
Please feel free to call me a troll,redneck and bigot. Your posts are being laughed at in chatrooms across America. Bring some friends and visit again.
I am preparing a blog on Gay rights around the world. I would like to hear your response.
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