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That is well said and in parts I agree. I'm still working through the list of sources but the ones I've seen don't blame the religion as A_Nony does.

That being said, the fighting still continues because the Palestinians also lay claim on Jerusalem (or at least a part of it). Is this also their private property?

jcgadfly wrote:

 

...

 

That is well said and in parts I agree. I'm still working through the list of sources but the ones I've seen don't blame the religion as A_Nony does.

That being said, the fighting still continues because the Palestinians also lay claim on Jerusalem (or at least a part of it). Is this also their private property?

I have not blamed the religion. I have made the occasional sarcastic remark but that is all. Blaming the religion I leave to Israel Shahak. I gave to excerpts and suggested it to tie it all together as background.

These days one cannot blame the religion for many reasons.

1) The majority of the world's Jews are what we call Orthodox. They do not recognize the Reform or Conservative as being followers of Judaism. I do not have a dog in that fight.

2) An indeterminate but substantial fraction of those who claim to be Jews are agnostic and often atheist. That is why I have been confident in saying you are not a Jew, because you are posting in the Freethinking Anonymous group and are therefore an atheist. The largest subgroup of those who have substantial numbers of atheists are the Russian immigrants.

3) The Russians bring up another problem. A significant fraction of those "jews" consider themselves to be Christians. Be they atheists or followers of Judaism or of Christianity they are big on pork which is now a significant import item for Israel.

4) If I were interested in blaming the religion I could simply post the news from Israel. Two weeks ago the rabbi and author of the King's Torah was finally arrested and charged with inciting hatred. Seems the book describes jewish thought on the permissability and at times duty to kill the woman and even the children of the enemy. Last week a different rabbi, the spiritual head of the Shas party which is a member of the current ruling coalition effectively put a curse on the Palestinians.

4a) Such things happen. The difference is in the West the condemnation would be loud and long and a public apology followed by leaving public life is the usual result. In Israel the absence of any condemnation by anyone in government or any other prominent political or social organization is deafening. A few whackos saying odd things can be ignored. The public silence cannot be ignored.

4b) Two in two weeks is a bit more frequent than normal but hardly a month goes by without such statements followed by silence. These are just the egregious enough to make the newspapers.

I do not blame the religion because as many as half the Jews in the world are fashionably agnostic or atheist so the religion is not an issue. Where religion is clearly involved quoting would make it too easy.

However, should you get around to Shahak you can see how the history which is inextricably entwined with the religion does play an important factor. It is the same factor that leads the French to take their "accepted" national character from Caesar's description of the Gauls as in wine, women and song.

 

jcgadfly wrote:

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So, is Jerusalem legal private property of the Palestinians or not?

Is New York private property?

Are you still avoiding learning the difference between sovereignty and ownership?

Is there some problem with your understanding of private property? The land is the lawful private property of its owners before they were expelled from Jerusalem by Jews. They or their descendants have a right to regain possession of that property in the same manner as Jews make that same claim to property in Germany and Poland. They have the same right to property in all of Israel as they do in Jerusalem.

There is a difference between ownership and sovereignty. You keep confusing yourself when you refuse to recognize the difference between the two. 

 

...

That is well said and in parts I agree. I'm still working through the list of sources but the ones I've seen don't blame the religion as A_Nony does.

That being said, the fighting still continues because the Palestinians also lay claim on Jerusalem (or at least a part of it). Is this also their private property?

The laws of education for violence

By Sefi Rachlevsky

An entire world lies behind the statement by Rabbi Ovadia Yosef that we should pray for the death of the "Ishmaelite-Palestinians" and, above all, for the death of Palestinian Authority President Abu Mazen (Mahmoud Abbas ). Over 52 percent of the excited children who marched off to first grade this week and are defined in Israel as Jews were sent to ultra-Orthodox and religious schools where boys and girls are separated. Even the minority among those defined as Jews who went to a non-religious first grade are subject to a system in which the religious chief scientist expresses reactionary opinions on matters of science and religion, and as in the affair of the Im Tirtzu movement, and the weak objections of Education Minister Gideon Sa'ar only exacerbate the situation. At the same time, the number-two person in the ministry, the head of the Pedagogic Secretariat, is busy censoring non-religious textbooks, replacing civics lessons with "Judaism" and chooses to send his children to religious schools.

What will we teach in this religious autonomy which, with government funding, is gradually swallowing up the majority of Israeli children and constructing their world view? The words of Rabbi Yosef senior, and even more the hypocritical investigation of the book "The King's Torah" (Torat Hamelekh) which deals with "Laws of life and death between Israel and the nations" provide an important part of the answer. Not only is the government reacting with silent assent to the rebellion of rabbis Dov Lior and Yaakov Yosef (the son of Rabbi Ovadia Yosef ), who refused to be questioned about their support for the book, in effect the education that most of the children defined as Jews will receive in first grade is close to the spirit of this book.

The authors of "The laws of killing Gentiles" did not invent a thing, and the government-financed education received by most first-graders continues a very specific halakhic (relating to Jewish law ) and kabbalist outlook. Unfortunately, according to the Orthodox interpretation of halakha, the commandment "Thou shalt not murder" does, in fact, apply to Jews only. Anyone who kills a non-Jew (the murder of a Gentile is not called "murder" ), according to halakha and Maimonides, is not supposed to be punished by human beings. The act is not permitted, but there is no punishment. For desecrating the Shabbat and "consensual sex with a married woman" the punishment is death. There is no real punishment for killing a non-Jew.

Rabbi Yehuda Halevi maintained that there are four levels in nature: inanimate, vegetable, animal, speaker. The speaker is the talking animal, the Gentile. Above them is the fifth and highest level, the Jew, the only one defined as a human being and human rights exist for him alone.

"The laws of killing Gentiles" is characterized by a practical discussion of the obligation of the individual in our time to carry out the edict that "the best among the Gentiles should be killed." But in principle the problem has existed in the Orthodox canon for many years. And this is what the children learn in the language of the Talmud: "You are called man and the nations of the world are not called man;" and in Maimonides: "Someone who sees a non-Jew drowning should not save him."

The historical background to these things is clear. The long, harsh persecutions experienced by the Jews provoked many reactions. Many of them transferred Jewish culture to symbolic and metaphorical worlds, others tried to create life at any price. But a central reaction was to take revenge in a written, downplayed and unrealistic way to the racist persecutions in the real world.

The downplayed texts could be called "the writings of a weak and battered child to his pillow." Like a child who suffers from his friends' abuse, who can "take revenge" only by whispering at night to his pillow that his "friends" are not human beings and about the horrible punishments awaiting them, in the same way many of Israel's great minds created writings of revenge - concealed and unrealistic in their time - in which non-Jews are described as inferior and Satanic "non-humans." Non-humans whom one is permitted to harm. But in a context in which no Jew was able to harm a non-Jew, the practical significance of the words was a dead letter.

When Judaism returned to the stage of concrete history and to political sovereignty, it was supposed to shelve the underground writings of the revenge literature and to concentrate on universal and humanist morality, both Jewish and non-Jewish. That was the main effort before the Holocaust and in the early days of Zionism, although even moderate Orthodoxy did not bring about a halakhic revolution, which became crucial with the dramatic change in the balance of power.

And so at present the absolute majority of the established Orthodox world is going in an opposite direction. Most Israeli rabbis, and the government in their wake, are following the path of Rabbi Lior and turning what was written as a cry of pain for the pillow into a violent call for action. A call with a gun attached.

The scorn for the law on the part of inciting rabbis must be stopped, and they must stand trial. But there is no real meaning to that without upheaval in the world of education that is financed and subsidized in Israel, and which by implication preaches precisely those things.

Even a peace process, which may attempt to achieve somewhat more than the creation of the necessary diplomatic conditions for an attack against Iran, will not save a nation most of whose first-graders are abandoned to such violent racism.

jcgadfly wrote:

So no one has control of Jerusalem but you support the Palestinian claim because they're the "real Israelis"?

I have no idea what you mean by "real Israelis" in this discussion. I do know the difference between Israelis and Israelites but I don't think you are talking about 1/3 the calories.

I am not supporting any side. I am reciting the facts in light of international law in the form of treaties to which Israel is a signatory. There is a difference between property ownership and sovereignty.

There is only one municipality called Jerusalem by Israel. East and West are mere convenience of reference. The world recognizes Israeli sovereignty over West Jerusalem and considers East Jerusalem territory under military occupation in fact ciminal occupation within the scope of the 4th Geneva Convention to which Israel is a signatory. The world has never recognized the loss of rights in ownership in either East or West Jerusalem. Nor has Israel recognized the loss of ownership rights of Jews who fled East Jerusalem in 1948 but refuses to recognize the reverse situation of non-Jews who were forced to flee. The world does not recognize the legitimacy of Israel's absentee owners laws.

Quote:

I'm not claiming I support this site's position but it seems like the polar opposite of yours. You both bandy about "facts" and you both claim to be telling the truth.

shred this for a bit - http://www.masada2000.org/historical.html

I'm going to bed.

You get the webmaster of that site here and I will discuss the matter with him. In the mean time you have an obligation to yourself to examine the facts not the opinion of the facts and decide for yourself. From you last post showing no knowledge of ownership in East Jerusalem it appears you have a long way to go.

You asked for sources that agreed with my facts. I gave you a list of them. You have not found fault with those sources thus far. You should look into the sources that organization references and see what they say.

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1. OK - you want Israel within their borders.Does the same go for the Palestinians? If so, that keeps them from having any land. Makes your sig kind of meaningless.

2. Working on their sources and yours.

3. Not sure why international law wants them dead either.

4. Evangelical Christians want to make the pile of bodies nice and high so Jesus can come down. They need both sides dead. They want the Jews to kill the Palestinians and other Muslims. Then the Christians can come and kill the Jews (likely with American firepower). Whatever reason you claim, you seem to be in agreement on those points.

Well, I was hoping for a more thorough response other than just stating things as facts with no supporting evidence.  Also I wish you would have given me some sense of what you consider a credible source for studying the history of the conflict.  And of course I didn't consider the bible a source at all, how absurd.

But really really disappointing.  I wanted to learn, all I read was opinion.

...

Or, realizing someone called you out, you can just lie.

"Jews stole the land, the owners want it back, that's all you need to know."  What a joke.  Prove it, be rational, back up your statements, or stop wasting our time.

jcgadfly wrote:

Great - you come back after a few months and still can't refute anything put against you.

It's still "Israel sucks and the Arab leadership who can't control anything in their territory should be in charge of the whole land".

Meanwhile the people get screwed again.

The present status doesn't solve the problem. Your solution doesn't either.

Got anything else or is it easier for you to be a part of the problem?

Perhaps you are using a different definition of the word refute than I am.

I was challenged to substantiate the "Jews stole the land" part and I cited Jewish law in Israel as evidence of the theft.

I am left with concluding you are not an atheist but rather a Jew by religious persuasion. That is not a problem for me. The deliberate deception is not a problem either rather I see no problem with my exposing your deception.

As you are not an atheist I refer you to the post which says you are not permitted to post here.

A rabbi once lamented young Jews defining themselves as non-Christians instead of Jews.

I suggest you are a cause of lamentation.