Our friend Joachim Martillo produces a lot of interesting material, often as not connected with Jews, Islam , Israel , Eastern Europe . Here is a small collection of his recent and learned writing (you can get on his list by dropping an email to ThorsProvoni@ aol.com
Judging Jewish Historical Claims
by Joachim Martillo
When I was taking
Jewish studies courses at Harvard, a group of us undergraduates realized that
there were four basic principles that we had to apply to evaluate the
truth of Jewish historiography about Jewish communities.
1.
Everything almost invariably takes place later than claimed. The best
example is the collapse of second Temple Judaism into many separate currents. From
these "Judaisms," Constantinian Christianity crystallizes first, then Islam, and
the last is Medieval Judaism, which crystallizes in the tenth century
CE and later develops into Modern Judaism. In other words modern Judaism is the
younger sister of Christianity and Islam.
2. From the sixteenth
century onward important historical events almost invariably take place first in
Poland at least from the standpoint
point of Judaism but often in general.
Commonwealth Poland became the first modern failed state in the seventeenth century.
A more recent example is the Auschwitz convent controversy, which proved to be the model for all later attempts of the organized American Jewish community to control discourse about the Holocaust and genocide in general with an attempt to prevent the construction of a convent at Auschwitz as part of the memorialization of martyred Poles. The resulting increase in Judeophobic feeling among ethnic Poles was predictable as was the transformation of Radio Maria into an important Jew-hostile phenomenon of Polish Catholicism.
Needless to say, the organized Jewish community has tried to use the Polish reaction to American Jewish arrogance, bigotry and prejudice as proof that anti-Semitism is an integral component of Polish identity and the gentile psyche in general. Similar subsequent behavior of the organized American Jewish community throughout Europe and the USA has almost invariably led to an increase in hostility to Jews wherever the organized Jewish community has cracked the whip on non-Jewish communities.
3. "Many the lie
that Jews live by." Now that we have more information from Eastern Europe and
Russia since the collapse of
the Soviet Union, and we better understand the role of ethnic Ashkenazim in
overthrowing Czarist Russia, consolidating the Soviet Union, Soviet ethnic
cleansing, Soviet mass murder and Soviet genocide, Jewish powerlessness must be
considered a myth in Central and Eastern
Europe . In point of fact, greater education and more liquid assets
made it possible for Eastern European ethnic Ashkenazim to do a lot of damage to
many countries.
4. Jewish perception
of the amount of historical Jewish suffering doubles roughly every century.
Careful analysis of the data indicates that approximately 10,000 Jews died as
collateral damage during the Chmielnicki rebellion. By the end of
the seventeenth century, the number was 20,000. By the end of the
eighteenth century, the number was 40,000. By the end of the nineteenth century
the number was 80,000. And by the end of the twentieth century, the number was
160,000. Nowadays Poles and Ukrainians are often described as combining
forces to attack Jews.
Generalizations like the above are always subject
to criticism and need to be applied judiciously unlike the common practice
ethnic Ashkenazi Americans to generalize shamelessly about goyim (non-Jews), about
Germans, about Russians, about Poles, about Arabs, and about
Muslims. At least, I generally try to consult primary Jewish and
non-Jewish sources, and when I extrapolate from sociological and
demographic studies, I try to apply sound mathematical and scientific
principles.
So far my research indicates that ethnic Ashkenazi
Americans are the major fabricators and purveyors of Islamophobic propaganda
(cast in the mold of classic anti-Semitism) . Jewish-owned major media
corporations and Zionist facilitators in their employ are working hard to
spread anti-Islamic incitement throughout the
world.
I discuss aspects of this issue in my article "The
significance of the AJC attack on 'progressive' Jews." This essay can be read
at: http://eaazi. blogspot. com/2007/ 07/updating- ajc-attacks. html.
Letter to the Editor
of the Detroit
News (letters@detnews. com)
by Joachim Martillo
(ThorsProvoni@ aol.com)
To the
Editor:
Laura Bermen writes in "Paul eyes the cranky Mich. vote," Detroit News, January 3, 2003.
Paul, an obstetrician- turned-lawmaker, hates taxes, sloppy immigration policies, abortion, and the loss of the gold currency standard. His campaign rhetoric goes heavy on "freedom." He exudes a twangy "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington " authenticity that college students, libertarians, Ayn Randians, and the usual suspect fringe of survivalists and neo-Nazis find appealing.
Before I learned about the media update sessions that the organized Jewish community provides to reporters to explain how they should cover the news, I used to think that Berman's sort of snide, insinuating and misleading comment was just ignorance.
Why did
Berman not mention as a way of defining a baseline of comparison that we do not
have to look at the "fringe" supporters of Giuliani to find
reasons for concern about the Giuliani campaign. Giuliani's
chief advisors are far scarier than anyone supporting Ron Paul. For
example, Podhoretz uses the Goebbelsian big lie technique to promote an
attack on Iran that will
plunge the USA in at least 100 more years of
pointless war for the sake of the State of Israel. (See The Case for Bombing Iran in the June 2007 issue of Commentary.)
Why did Berman not
tell Detroit News readers what Nazism is before accusing some subgroup of Paul
supporters of being Nazis?
Nazism is a form
of politicized ethnic fundamentalism that combines racism, extremist organic
nationalism, biological determinism, eugenics, theories of national decline
through race-mixing, concepts of national revival through racial purity, social
Darwinism, essentialism, and primordialism. It was particularly prevalent in
Central and Eastern Europe during the
WW1-WW2 Interbellum period until the end of WW2. Nazism made
a brief come-back in a revival of Greater Serbianism in post-Soviet
Yugoslavia .
Nazi and fascist
ideologies differ. Fascism is an extremist organic nationalist revision of
Marxist socialism. According to fascist theory, national revival provides the
means to transcend the class conflict. Nazism and fascism can coexist. The
Strasser faction of German Nazism was inclined to fascism while some forms of
fascism that incorporate racist ideas often developed Nazi
tendencies.
Today, Nazi
ideology remains a vital, dominant and dangerous ideology only in the State
of Israel. In stolen Palestine (pre-1967 Israel) and occupied Palestine,
the Zionist invader population has for the last 60 years pursued a program of
genociding the native population right before the eyes of the world with 80%
support levels (according to American Jewish Committee statistics) among
ethnic Ashkenazi Americans.
Berman fails
to report such essential information while she uses guilt by
alleged and tenuous association to delegitimize the candidacy
of Ron Paul, who questions any US obligation to pay trillions of
dollars as foreign aid to maintain the State of Israel. Because Berman is
propagandizing instead of reporting, the Detroit News should fire Berman
summarily and replace her with someone, who does not consciously or reflexively
twist news reports for the sake of an ethnic political
agenda.
Sincerely
yours,
Joachim Martillo
ThorsProvoni@ aol.com
CC: Laura Berman (1-248- 647-7221 or lberman@detnews. com)
http://www.detnews. com/apps/ pbcs.dll/ article?AID= 2008801030346
The Geography and Taxonomy of Political
Manipulation
by Joachim Martillo (ThorsProvoni@ aol.com)
On January 4th, Philip Weiss posted Chris Matthews's Coyness About Jewish Money in Politics Is Downright Irresponsible and Irritating to his blog Mondoweiss.
Phil states the following.
I'm a devoted Chris Matthews watcher because he's so street-smart and so knowledgeable about political history (and also a former Peace Corps volunteer). Last night he was the one guy on his show to understand the ravishing power of Obama's victory speech. He compared Obama to Roosevelt in '32. He also said that Obama's victory could send a chill thru Hillary's "donor-base, " which Matthews said is in Manhattan and the west side of Los Angeles . These people want to back a winner; they may feel misled by the Clinton team. He went on to talk about Hillary's support from New Yorkers who have moved to Florida .
Florida, Hollywood , Manhattan . This is coy and irresponsible. Matthews never talks about Jews in politics directly. He talks about blacks, about Irish-Americans, not Jews. He obviously believes Jews are important in our politics--I' d note his endless and great riffs on neocons and their supporters-- but as a guy who anatomizes the id of American political life, he owes it to his viewers to take on the Israel lobby headon. As it is, he confines himself to hinting, as he did last night. Or as he did five years ago when he asked one of his guests, with a big-eyed and virginal air: Why are political attitudes toward Israel in Europe so different from American attitudes? This is a political question, he knows the answer.
Matthews's coyness is evidence of the great problem here. A fearless guy is afraid to even discuss the lobby. Why doesn't he have Walt and Mearsheimer on air to talk about their ideas? I believe that Matthews knows he would pay a significant price for doing so, let alone talking about Jewish money in the Democratic party.
John
Mearsheimer tells me that Matthews is hardly the only informed person who
privately expresses support for his ideas while refusing to do so publicly. He
says, "Many people -- both inside and outside the Beltway -- have told me and
Steve [Walt] privately that they agree with our views on the lobby and its
harmful influence on US foreign policy, but that they are afraid to say so
publicly because they fear that the lobby will come after them and damage their
careers."
Pathetic.
(P.S. A couple readers have wondered whether Mearsheimer was speaking directly of Matthews. No. He was speaking of the general class of Matthews-like sheeple, I mean people)
The covert manipulation of political process by wealthy Jews is not new.
There are still many questions about the relationship between Lloyd George and the Cousinhood (of the UK 's wealthiest Jews) and whether Jewish money paid for the Balfour Declaration.
In Wilhelmian Germany, the 1873 financial collapse provided a peak at the relationship between the Jewish moneyed elite and the political elite when Bismarck with the aid of his Jewish banker Bleichröder prevented the bankruptcy of Prinz Wilhelm zu Putbus and many others of Bismarck 's aristocratic political partners. In return for his efforts the Kaiser ennobled Bleichröder. (This particular type of exchange continues today as the Lord Levy Tony Blair cash-for-honors controversy demonstrated. )
This 1873 example had little connection to domestic or foreign policy, but German Jewish political money over the next five decades seems to have kept German securities and business practices law in a relatively immature state that permitted many shady practices that the progressive British and American political movements either had already eliminated or were in the process of eliminating.
There is a real need for some historical research in the role of Jewish (and in particular German Jewish and ethnic Ashkenazi) money in manipulating politics in the USA , the UK and in the German Empire.
Haim Saban's investment in German television is effectively a reassertion of the historical role of Jewish money in German politics.
There is also evidence of coordination between the "Newton Jews" of Massachusetts and the Central Council of Jews in Germany in attacking Cardinal Meisner and in working with the Axis of Good (Die Achse des Guten), in which Henryk Broder of Der Spiegel plays more or less the same role as Bill Kristol will play at the NY Times.
This new Axis based in Germany seems to work from translations of David Project or Daniel Pipes's press releases in its efforts to incite Islamophobia. (In the new discourse of German racial incitement, Matthias Küntzel plays the role of a sort of Daniel Pipes Robert Spencer hybrid.)
See the following articles:
- Nazism, Zionism, and Nutty Hypersensitivity
- Followup: Nazism, Zionism, and Nutty Hypersensitivity
- From Anti-Semitism to Islamophobia
Newton Jews are probably more important than New York ( Manhattan ), LA, and Miami ( Hollywood ) Jews in manipulating US politics because Jewish political power results from a collaboration of money Jews and brain Jews like Abigail Thernstrom.
Civil Rights for Some Americans provides an example of the Newton Brain Jewish role. (I admit that Thernstrom lives in Lexington , but in mentality she is all Newton .) Abigail Thernstrom can expend oceans of ink in criticizing African American victimology but has no problem at all with Jewish victimologies or with Charles Jacobs and the David Project. Brain Jews like Abigail Thernstrom validate the prejudices of money Jews while providing acceptable scholarly packaging for such ideas in order to indoctrinate non-Jews.
The elite Newton Jew combination of brains and money is strongly reminiscent of the pre-modern Eastern European ethnic Ashkenazi communal structure in which the mercantile class co-opted the rabbinical scholarly Jews by funding or by marriage in order to run the community with the qualification that now the main goals amount
- to maintaining Jewish elite status within the larger American society and
- to controlling the American social political system or at least those parts needed to guarantee that the USA continues to maintain the existence of the State of Israel.
The taxonomy of elite Jews (sheyne yidn) in Eastern Europe identified four or five important groups.In the USA today, there are three important groupings:
- Money Jews (geltyidn) -- Bronfman, Adelson, Wexner, Spielberg et al., who are analogous to the balebotim (proprietors) and mercantile class Jews of traditional Jewish society
- Brain Jews (kolelyidn metaphorically) -- Dershowitz, Wisse, Abigail Thernstrom, Pipes, Kristol, Spielberg, Sarna, et al., who are analogous to the members of the rabbinical scholarly class of traditional Jewish society
- Professional or communal Jews (kahalyidn) -- Abraham Foxman, David Harris, Israel Singer, Nancy Kaufman, Joe Lieberman, et al., who are analogous to the members communal bureaucracy and functionaries of traditional Jewish society,
There is some overlap among the three classes of modern sheyne yidn, but all together they are extremely effective in controlling the organized Jewish community and in manipulating American society and politics.
Within this classification scheme ordinary Jews are proste yidn, and for the most part modern American proste yidn empower and hardly ever challenge the sheyne yidn in any significant way. (See How Anti-Iraq-War Jews Licensed Neoconservatism by Philip Weiss.)
Should proste yidn ever seriously challenge the sheyne yidn, the history of Hassidism indicates any such rebellion will not last long.
Hassidism was initially a reaction of proste yidn to the corrupt combination of economic and rabbinic (intellectual or scholarly) power, but the Hassidic dynasties were co-opted fairly quickly into the elite system by the mercantile class which eventually came to span the Hassidish Misnagdish (anti-Hassidic) divide.
Traditionally, people like Philip Weiss, Norman Finkelstein or Noam Chomsky are the mosrim or traitors, and they receive precisely the same treatment from the organized Jewish community that mosrim used to receive from the Kehillah (Jewish community) in the past.
Senator McCain, who slavishly intends to remake the ME according to Zionist plans, and his father, who covered up Israeli crimes in attacking the USS Liberty, are the modern shabbesgoyim while any non-Jew that criticizes Israel or the organized Jewish community is an antisemit.
American Jews are trapped in false Manichaean world view that has become very dangerous to the world because of the power and influence that today's sheyne yidn wield in American politics.
Heinrich Heine and the Ethnic Ashkenazim Against Zionist Israel Blog
Princess Sabbath (Prinzessin Sabbath) vs. Schiller’s Ode to Joy (An der Freude)
[Both excerpts are found on the blog's left border]
Here is a quotation from a 2002 press release from the Vienna Jewish Museum (http://www.jmw. at/en/pr_ princess_ sabbath.html).
Heinrich Heine’s poem Prinzessin Sabbath is the most outstanding commemoration of the Shabbat in German literature.
Once upon a time Jews actually understood parody and irony – probably before they began starving peasants in the Ukraine , terrorizing Palestinians, and plotting the incineration of Arab and Muslim countries.
Harvard Professor Jack Stein once told me that Heine was the most German and the most Jewish of poets, but neither German Christians nor Ostjuden (Eastern European Jews) ever understood him.
Heine wrote in Nachtgedanken (Thoughts at Night):
I think of Germany at night
The thought keeps
me awake till light.
Denk ich an Deutschland in der Nacht,
Dann bin ich um
den Schlaf gebracht,
Ich kann nicht mehr die Augen schließen,
Und meine
heißen Tränen fließen.
He also described ancient Hebrews as “the Germans of the Orient.”
In the quest to connect themselves with ancient Hebrews (as the German Nazis tried to connect themselves with ancient Germans), Zionists have surpassed the German Nazis of the 1930s and are working on the 1940s.
I often wonder what Heine would be writing if he were alive today.
|
Heine's Original German from Prinzessin Sabbat |
Schiller's Original German from An der Freude
|
|
Schalet,
schöner Götterfunken, |
Freude,
schöner Götterfunken, Deine
Zauber binden wieder,
Seid
umschlungen, Millionen!
|
|
Cholent, ray of light immortal, Cholent, daughter of Elysium! So had Schiller’s song resounded, Had he ever tasted cholent.
For this cholent is the very Food of heaven, which on Sinai, God Himself instructed Moses In the secret of preparing,
At the time He also taught him And revealed in flames of lighting All the doctrines good and pious And holy Ten Commandments. |
Joy,
thou source of light immortal, Your
sweet magic, frees all others, |
Is Murdoch Big Brother?
by Joachim Martillo (ThorsProvoni@ aol.com)
Fox News/ New Hampshire Republican Party Forum has not invited Ron Paul to take part this Sunday.* Paul's electability or significance as a candidate is not the issue.
On page 3 the December 31, 2007 edition of the hardcopy Wall Street Journal identified Paul as top contender on the Republican side. The WSJ is one of Rupert Murdoch's media holdings and investments, which also include Fox News Channel, News Corporation (News Corp), Fox Network, MySpace.com, The Weekly Standard and numerous journals, broadcasters and cable companies throughout the world.
Ron Paul's Revolution Problem by George Ajjan indicates that the WSJ probably underestimated Paul's electability.
Fox News has yet to explain itself.
watch
video
Video
Description
Story by Fox affiliate station KPTM in Omaha , NE. covering exclusion of Ron Paul from the Fox and
New Hampshire GOP sponsored Republican
Candidates Forum to be held on Jan. 6th in New Hampshire , and the onslaught of Ron Paul
supporters expressing discontent for this blatant act of
censorship.
Not only has Rupert Murdoch often put his investments in the service of his political agenda, but there is already evidence of Murdoch's violation of the laws governing media ownership (see The "Sale" of the Boston Herald ). One may disagree with such laws, but until changed they should be enforced, and the conflict over the Roxbury Mosque demonstrated the value of laws that, if enforced, could make it difficult to misuse news reporting to persecute groups and individuals.
A core aspect of the conflict was the collusion between Fox Network and the Boston Herald in a probable criminal conspiracy to use fear-mongering defamation to deny the Boston Muslim community their federal First Amendment and state constitutional rights to unhindered religious worship and to free assembly. (See Singing HaTikvah while inciting a disastrous US invasion, The Boston Globe's Problem with Muslims, Open letter to the Boston Globe: A Lawsuit without Merit.)
Similar sorts of scare campaigns can be envisioned to deny American citizens their Second Amendment rights.
Unfortunately according to Wikipedia,
[in] August 1987, the FCC abolished the doctrine by a 4-0 vote, in the Syracuse Peace Council decision. The FCC stated, "the intrusion by government into the content of programming occasioned by the enforcement of [the Fairness Doctrine] restricts the journalistic freedom of broadcasters ... [and] actually inhibits the presentation of controversial issues of public importance to the detriment of the public and the degradation of the editorial prerogative of broadcast journalists, " and suggested that, due to the many media voices in the marketplace, the doctrine be deemed unconstitutional.
The FCC eliminated the "personal attack" and "political editorial" rules in 2000.
The benefits of incorporation are not a natural or constitutional right, and in cases where the advantages of corporate organization are almost certainly being used in criminal conspiracy against rights and possibly in seditious conspiracy, the government has an obligation to intervene for the sake of the preservation of the American constitutional system.
I have been concerned about the issue of public access to information since 1984 when I first realized how Internet technology could change the newspaper industry for the worse if large content providers could effectively seize control of Internet bandwidth.
I introduced VLAN Routing technology in 1991 that made Quality of Service (QOS) charging infeasible and that has now become pervasive. In the current QOS free-for-all, the smallest Internet context providers can compete effectively with the largest, but the battle for control continues.
Despite the spread of such Internet technology, corporate consolidation in other media industries has provided unscrupulous operators like Murdoch with unprecedented opportunity to drown out critical or dissident voices like Ron Paul. The need to bring back the Fairness Doctrine is becoming ever more urgent, and the mere threat of its return might compel Murdoch and his many corporate organizations to behave.
____________ _________ _
* See Concord Monitor - Some candidates won't make the cut and Winnowing the Debate Field - The Caucus - Politics - New York Times Blog.
Ashkenazi Ethnoreligious Correctness vs. Dialogue
by Joachim Martillo (ThorsProvoni@ aol.com)
Every year, a sizable number Jewish Americans spend a lot of time in convincing themselves and in informing the rest of the US population that they are alienated from non-Jewish Americans and American society at Christmas time. The repetition of this kvetch (see Introduction to "Kvetch", More Information on Kvetch) is so relentless that South Park has even parodied it in the immortal "Mr. Hankey the Christmas Poo" episode.
It's Hard to Be a Jew on Christmas
Mr. Hankey the Christmas Poo
Episode: 110
Air date: 12/01/1999
Views: 52241
The boys won't let Kyle join in on any of the holiday activities because he's Jewish. Kyle sings a song about how he feels lonely and left out on Christmas.
Recently, I pointed out on The New Jew: Blogging Jewish Philanthropy that this attitude represents a major psychological disconnect
- because Hanukkah and Christmas are essentially the same winter festival of lights and
- because to the first approximation the modern American celebration of Christmas was created by Jewish department store and studio owners out of a mishmash of Jewish perceptions of Eastern European Christmas practices and traditions.
Some of this discussion appears in The New Jew & Mundoweiss: Jewish Christmas Thoughts, and that article contains pointers to Maya Norton's original article and its responses as well as to a related thread that Philip Weiss started on his own blog Mondoweiss.
The last comment (from Shai) included in my blog entry is a classic because of its ethnocentricity, its defensiveness, its hypersensitivity, its intellectual dishonesty, and its attempt to baffle with b$llsh#t. It is everything I expect from Jewish apologetics since the publication of Mearsheimer and Walt's The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy. Here is Shai's comment in its entirety.
Joachim
Your ideas regarding "sacred king" myths is, I can fairly presume, from an Ashkenazi Jew by the name of Claude Levi Strauss (1955 - The Structural Study of Myth). Since you can't stand "secular ethnic Ashkenazi Jews" (of whom Strauss is one), and find them completely without credibility in any other aspect of their existence, perhaps the ethical thing to do would be to stop using their work or work based on their discoveries and ideas.
Regarding Sadya Gaon, he lived 1000 years after the events of Chanuka and 500 years after the redaction of the Gemara. The canon was fixed well before he was born. Therefore, it wouldn't have made a difference then what he thought about Migilat Antiocus (which by the way, he dated to prior to the destruction of the Temple - incorrectly) , the fact is as I stated, Chanuka is and always was a minor holiday - oddly enough, celibrated in great pomp today by many Jews who are the ideological descendants of the Hellenists, whose defeat by the ultra-Orthodox of the day forms the basis for a Chanuka celebration. Chanuka is not about freedom of belief, it's about freedom to believe the "correct" belief (orthodoxy), and that there IS a "correct" belief rather than one that adjusts for each era and civilization. Not quite as sexy that way as an American Jewish holiday, but that's what's been made of it. And you know what? It's OK by me. The idea of freedom of belief is, I think, a good one.
Regarding what you claim as an "attempt to conceal the role of Jews" in making Christmas what it was, your claim is tendentious, as I said previously. You make no such similar claim about the likes of Walt Disney, Charlie Chaplin, or other non-Jews who were just as involved in advancing the melting-pot assimilationist approach that caused Hanuka and Christmas to merge into an "American" seasonal holiday period, where the message of both holidays has been lost. Why focus only on Jews?
I said before in a previous comment that you would do well to analyze the surrounding cultural milieu within which this assimilation occurred - it was not sinister, and certainly did not have Jews playing an overarching role that, without their participation, would have changed anything. The melting pot idea was an attempt to make one country of a myriad of immigrant groups of which Jews were only one part. The idea had its origin well before the immigration of Jews to America (late 1700's). It wasn't a bad idea (well I don't think so anyway). Heck, it even gave your own family a safe haven, if your last name is to be a measure. I bet there weren't any Martillo's on the Mayflower, Joachim.
Look - fair people can argue about whether the melting pot idea is the best one. But it was a good idea for its time, and aside from helping American citizens of different backgrounds to join hands and bring America to victory in WWII, it literally saved the lives of millions of Jews escaping for their lives from Europe . Same is true for Irish, Italian, German and Mexican Americans. Jews feel "hakarat hatov" (recognition of the good) for America and for the chance it gave them to live free, safe lives - they want to be part of it in every respect, as Americans, to feel fully a part of it without having their loyalty questioned any more than a person of Italian or Mexican or Irish descent when they are involved. I think that should be respected.
The comment above typifies everything that makes it impossible to have a rational discussion with ethnoreligiously correct Jewish narcissists.
(1) Jews are not the source of every important idea or observation. While several ancient scholars noticed the connection of Biblical narrative to Greco-Roman mythology and while medieval monks often studied Virgil's Aenead along with and as an introduction to the Bible, modern scholarly investigation of Near Eastern (including Judean), Greek, and Roman heritage as a coherent whole begins with the Huguenot scholar Joseph Scaliger in the 16th century. Without coherent understanding of this intellectual inheritance, in which the calendar plays an important role (as I carefully pointed out in my discussion of Hanukkah, Christmas, and `Idu-l-Adha and in my blog entry Boston Globe Islam-Bashing: Complain!), comprehending modern Christianity and Judaism is simply impossible.
Anthony Grafton describes Scaliger's own calendrical investigation in Defenders of the Text, The Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science, 1450 - 1800.
Scaliger's treatment of the Jewish calendar as a whole marks a great improvement on [Sebastian] Münster. Where Münster, like Maimonides, went deeply into the functioning of the calendar, Scaliger reconstructed its history. He argued apparently for the first time, that the calendar of the Jewish computus was not that of the Pentateuch, and that it must rest in large part on the arithmetic and astronomy of Babylon . [p. 128]
Grafton's article "In Bernays, Scaliger, and Others," which is found in The Jewish Past Revisited, Reflections on Modern Jewish Historians, discusses the German Jewish classicist Jacob Bernays, who was a very important 19th century scholar in Scaliger's tradition. Grafton includes a significant reservation about Bernays' work that applies to modern Jewish ethnoreligiously correct scholarship of academics like Alan Segal of Columbia, Aren Maeir of Bar Ilan, Jacob Lassner of Northwestern University, and Alexander Joffe formerly of Purchase College (see Jacob Lassner and Nadia Abu el Haj, Nadia Abu el Haj and the Truth about the Wizard of Oz, and Long Version of Tenure Wars).
Most important of all, Bernays could not deal honestly with some of Scaliger's most radical and challenging theories about history and exegesis. Bernays insisted that he himself had no faith in biblical criticism. Historical readings of the Old Testament he dismissed as pseudo-scholarly profanations of a sacred text, based only on wild hypotheses. Scaliger had other views. He not only found but published (and refused to abridge the Egyptian dynasty lists that plunged the world of European historical learning into a century and more of crisis. Worse still, he speculated in radical ways about the gaps and defects of the Masoretic text of the Hebrew Bible. Scaliger noted that the Masoretic text was relatively late: he dated it to around the time of Gamaliel, whose remark that masoret seyag la-torah (tradition is a fence to the law) he took as a reference to the Masoretic apparatus. And he insisted that even this well-preserved official text represented only a version of a lost original. Its language, Hebrew, was not -- so Scaliger claimed -- a special, holy language, with which God had created the world and in which Adam had named the animals, but the ordinary tongue of ancient Assyria. Neither was its script original or sacred, since the Jews originally had used a different one, much like that of the Samaritans. Only after their return from the Babylonian exile did they transliterate the text into the square [Aramaic] characters used in extant manuscripts and the printed Hebrew Bible. The Old Testament, like the new, suggested Scaliger, incorporated many errors and showed some worrying gaps. The Masoretes, narrowly Jewish in culture and tradition, had known little or nothing about non-Jewish history. Their vocalizations of non-Hebrew names, for example, were often faulty; much less accurate, Scaliger thought, than those of the more cosmopolitan Alexandrian Jews who had translated the Septuaging. Finally, all texts of the Old Testament referred to stories and texts now lost, such as the story of the young man killed by Lamech, referred to -- but not recounted in Genesis.
Analysis of the mythic structure of the Bible with emphasis on cultural or social anthropology is an approach often identified with James Frazer's works during the 1920s. Frazer followed lines of inquiry developed by E. B. Tylor and William Robertson Smith in the 19th century. The work of Claude Lévi-Strauss has superseded Frazer's ideas of totemism while Frazer's hypothesis of the evolution of religion has not proven valid, but neither of these two aspects of Frazer's thought pertained to my analysis of the winter holidays. Even if they did, the suggestion that it is improper to apply ideas originating with Jews in a Jewishly incorrect fashion is simply offensive albeit very common among Jewish ethnoreligious chauvinists like Alan Dershowitz (see Mundoweiss: Dershowitz and Jewish Influence).
The assertion that I cannot stand secular ethnic Ashkenazi Jews is just the usual accusation of anti-Semitism or self-hatred that Jewish chauvinists and Zionists fling at anyone whose opinions or conclusions they dislike.
(2) I pointed out that
Saadyah Gaon considered Hanukkah an immensely important holiday because his
opinion cannot be summarily dismissed, for without Saadyah's supremely
important tenth century CE efforts medieval and hence also modern
Judaism would have become almost entirely Karaite.
Not only is it
false to claim that Hanukkah is a minor Holiday comparable to St. Patrick's Day, but it
is essentially a defensive intellectually dishonest attempt
to put a fence around the Torah against the facts and serves as
obvious disinformatsia designed to discourage interfaith holiday
celebrations.
If Hanukkah had really been a minor celebration in Palestine, the Talmudic sages could simply have written it out of the sacred calendar as they did many minor festivals that modern Palestinians continued to celebrate before the Holoexaleipsis (Nakba -- see ADL, Ron Paul, Stormfront, More Jewish Genocide Denial).
Palestinians including the tiny pre-Zionist non-immigrant native Arabophone Jewish Palestinian population are unlike any other modern Jewish population actual descendants of people that practiced Second Temple Judaism in Hasmonean Judea. The lost minor Judean celebrations include those of Nabi Huda (Yehudah), Nabi Samt (Shimshon, Samson), Nabi Yamin (Binyamin), Nabi Musa (Mosheh, Moses), and others that are occasionally mentioned by ancient pagan and early Christian observers, whose writings discussed aspects of Judean religion of Greco-Roman times.
In point of fact, Hanukkah was probably so important in Greco-Roman Palestine that the Talmudic sages could not eliminate it but instead rewrote it, the revolt against the Seleucids and even the Maccabees themselves to conform to the deterritorialized spiritual framework that eventually becomes the core of Geonic and then of Rabbinic Judaism.
Describing the
Maccabees as the Ultra-Orthodox of their time period is errant
nonsense. When a writer tries to claim, "Chanuka is not about
freedom of belief, it's about freedom to believe the 'correct' belief
(orthodoxy), and that there IS a 'correct' belief rather than one that adjusts
for each era and civilization, " he shows himself to be a credulous ignoramus
regurgitating simple-minded religious indoctrination.
The main currents
of Greco-Roman Judaism from the Hasmoneans until the Khazar conversion are much
closer to Greek Orthodox Christianity and Islam than they are to
Rabbinic Judaism, which crystallized into its final form after and in response
to Islam. (See Linguistics, Islam and the Beatitudes, The Origins of Modern Jewry, and Les origines des juifs actuels).
(3) I understand the Shai's touchiness in response to the observation that Jewish department store and studio owners created the modern American Christmas celebration. American Jews like those of Commonwealth Poland before it collapsed into a failed state in the seventeenth century play immensely important societal roles. Because American Jews now like Polish Jews then had on the whole more disposable income and more education than the rest of the population, they could consciously or inadvertently do a disproportionate amount of damage to the state.
To discourage scrutiny by the political leadership of Commonwealth Poland , Polish Jews went out of their way to act and to appear harmless just as modern American Jews claim to be. Although this strategy was quite effective in Poland for a very long time despite the reservations of the Catholic Church with regard to Jewish exploitation of Polish peasants, it is beginning to fail in the USA because of the inability of the organized Jewish community and Jewish facilitators or gatekeepers in American media to contain the discussion of the Israel Lobby.
If I had discussed the obvious influence of American Jews on American humor, I doubt that Shai would have become so defensive, but the capability to modify Christian religion in American shows the immense power of American Jewry over US society and culture.
I am not coming from outer space on this issue. Irving Kristol addresses the success of Jewish anti-Christian efforts in his self-serving and somewhat misleading essay "On the Political Stupidity of American Jews."
The Jewish campaign against any suggestion that America was a Christian nation won one battle after another; eventually it made sufficient headway in the media and the legal profession-- most importantly on the Supreme Court--that today there is widespread popular acceptance of the belief that this kind of secularism, which is tolerant of religion only so long as it is practiced privately and very discreetly, was indigenously and authoritatively “American,” and had always been so.*
In White Christmas: The Song that Changed the
World, Jody Rosen discusses the effect that Jewish control of the
entertainment industry has had in de-Christing* * American celebration of
Christmas.
While secularizing trends in British and American societies predated Jewish efforts by approximately 30 years (e.g., Dickens' A Christmas Carol in Prose, Being a Ghost Story of Christmas), the unceasing merchandising of Christmas by Jewish retailers since the 1870s (see Our Crowd for a readable if rather superficial history of New York Jews in retailing and other trades) along with the continuous rewriting of Christmas by Hollywood Jews since the 1920s has created a winter holiday culture that is alarming the British as it spreads to their country. (See Andrew Stephen's article in New Statesman - Lost in a muddle of greetings from 13 December 2007 for a discussion.)
(4) I was focusing on
Jews because the original topic of the thread was the relationship of American
Jews to American Christian celebration. Since Shai cannot discuss Jewish
influence over American culture rationally, he brings in a discussion of the
nature of the melting pot,*** which certainly was not part of American cultural
consciousness in the late eighteenth century when the major cultural
concern was German immigration and fear of Germanization.
According to Wikipedia "[the] exact term
'melting pot' came into general usage in 1908, after the premiere of the play
The Melting
Pot by Israel
Zangwill." (See the NY Times article at the end of this
article for a description of the plot of intermarriage and becoming
American.) Need I mention that Zangwill was ethnic Ashkenazi.
The Melting Pot is a forerunner of Elaine May's 1972 movie The Heartbreak Kid, which has recently been terribly remade under direction of the Farrelly brothers and released this year in a Dreamworks (i.e., Spielberg) presentation. The new version was ruined at least in part because the producers were nervous about the Jewish subthemes. I have tried to update the story to the present time in my screenplay Devorah's Two Weddings, which deals with Jewish and Zionist issues forthrightly.
In contrast Shai's final comment is the epitome of misdirection.
Jews feel "hakarat hatov" (recognition of the good) for America and for the chance it gave them to live free, safe lives - they want to be part of it in every respect, as Americans, to feel fully a part of it without having their loyalty questioned any more than a person of Italian or Mexican or Irish descent when they are involved. I think that should be respected.
Italian, Mexican and Irish Americans do not place their ethnicity or tribalism before American interests. Because many -- maybe most -- non-Jewish Americans suspect that American Jews are willing to sacrifice American wealth, power and lives for the sake of Israel, there is naturally increasing concern among American non-Jews that American Jews are disloyal to the USA.
Unless American Jews
are willing to address non-Jewish misgivings about Jewish behavior civilly,
honestly, and on terms of mutual equality (even with Arab and Muslim Americans),
American Jews certainly do not deserve respect, and non-Jewish
Americans will eventually have to solve the problem of a fundamentally
disloyal minority that is using its economic and political clout to harm their
nation.
Because of the wealth
and influence of Jews within American society, there is no greater threat
today to the United
States and its Constitutional system than
Jewish racism, extremism, and fanaticism.* ***
Notes
* See Kristol's article on On the Political Stupidity of American Jews
in its entirety. Despite Kristol's pretense to disdain for American Jewish politics, Jewish anti-Christian activities have been part of a very successful effort on the part of the American organized Jewish community to manipulate non-Jewish Americans on the basis of guilt for too little action during the Holocaust, for not living up to Constitutional ideas and, of course, for Jewish Christmas alienation.
Irving
Kristol and his fellow Neoconservatives at the American Enterprise
Institute have had no reluctance to use Jewish victimology to their own
advantage and have benefited tremendously in their program to subvert
the Republican party by depicting themselves as good genuinely conservative
Jews unlike the arrogant liberal Jewish secularizers at the ACLU.
**
Philip Roth, who probably counts as the outstanding enfant terrible
among Jewish American writers, coined this word and has had no problem
in discussing Jewish influence over American Christianity in his
novels.
*** Late eighteenth and early nineteenth century American intellectuals and writers like Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper often focused on creating a sense of American consciousness. The "melting pot" does not make much sense per se until there is an American mentality to which immigrants may conform.
**** For
Tony Blair: The Real Extremism indicates the debasement of political
language in the USA .
On the Political Stupidity of American Jews
Irving Kristol
