Zionism and the Chosen People Complex

By Salaam Abdul Khaliq, IFN Staff Columnist
Tuesday, 13 April 2010
http://www.infocusnews.net/content/view/44321/1369/

The recent political row with the Obama administration over illegal settlement building in East Jerusalem has put Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin “Bibi” Netanyahu on the offensive. Last month, he told an audience at the annual conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), “The Jewish people were building Jerusalem 3,000 year ago and the Jewish people are building Jerusalem today. Jerusalem is not a settlement. It is our capital.”

The reason for Bibi’s visit was to shore up support for his settlement building, and rally the troops – AIPAC and Congress – against the White House. Only this time, it didn’t work. Obama wasn’t going to be cowed by political blackmail. He knows Israel is America’s welfare state that gets no less than $6 Billion in financial and military aid annually. The Israeli leader also knows that. But like the proverbial dog, he came to Washington to bite the hand that feeds him and his little apartheid state. In Yiddish, they call it Chutzpah. Netanyahu has it in spades. Apparently, Netanyahu, like all Israeli leaders and many of the Zionist persuasion, suffers from what is known as the Chosen People Complex, or CPC. People with CPC display certain unique patterns of behavior that include an innate sense of self righteousness, an arrogant domineering personality, absolute disdain for public opinion, total disrespect for international law, the use of lobbies to bully and coerce American lawmakers, incessant crying over a tragedy that took place over 65 years ago in Europe, and the ubiquitous use of the anti-Semitic label to intimidate and silence critics. CPC serves Zionists well. It has helped transform their movement from a strictly godless secular movement into a quasi-religious false Messiah that steals land in the name of God and kills in the name of self-preservation. CPC cannot be faked. It’s genetic. Bibi has the DNA to prove it.

Like most Zionists, Netanyahu claims both a historical and religious connection to Jerusalem. The Holy Land is supposedly the ancestral land of the Jewish people, and God allegedly promised it to them.
But is there any truth to these claims?

Long before there was any such thing as Jews, the Holy Land was known as the Land of Canaan. Besides the Canaanites, it was also peopled by the Jebusites, Amalekites and Philistines, possibly the ancestors of Palestinians. This is a historical fact even acknowledged in the Bible. Jerusalem was also conquered and ruled by many peoples throughout the ages including the Hittites, the Amorites, the Babylonians, the Persians, the Romans, and finally Arab Muslims and the Ottomans.

So why should the Holy Land be the exclusive ancestral homeland of just one people?

As the religious claim, if God supposedly promised it to the Jewish people, he made the exact same promise to Muslims, and possibly to Christians too. So one religion’s claim is not any more valid than another’s. God is not exclusive to one people. Zionists (and most Jews) also believe that Abraham was the first Jew, and his son, Isaac, was almost sacrificed on the rock where Dome of the Rock stands today. The Temple of Solomon was supposedly built there, and that is why rightwing Zionists want to knock the mosque down and rebuild the Temple.

These two claims, however, are both strictly erroneous. Abraham could not have been a Jew for three reasons: First, the Torah was revealed centuries after his death. Second, Abraham was the father of both Isaac and Ishmael. The latter is the forefather of a major Arab tribe from which Prophet Muhammad (S) is a descendant. For sure, a Jew cannot beget an Arab (simple ethnic genetics). Also, Judaism and Jews were named after Judah, son of Jacob and great grandson of Abraham (a great grandfather cannot be named after his great grandson). And third, the Sacrificial Son was not Isaac but Ishmael, and that is according to the Bible itself. In Genesis 22:2, God is supposed to have told Abraham, “Take your son, your only son, Isaac, whom you love...sacrifice him there.” Ishmael was at least 12 years old when Isaac was born. So Isaac could not at any time have been Abraham’s “only son” as the Bible indicates. Now some would argue that Ishmael was not really Abraham’s son because his mother Hagar was a slave (that’s how Jewish tradition established one’s “Jewishness” through the mother only). Hagar, slave or not, was Abraham’s second wife, and Ishmael was his legitimate progeny. Anyone who denies this fact either has a terrible case of CPC or is accusing Abraham of adultery. Ishmael was the sacrificial son for sure. It is obvious someone tempered with Gen 22:2 by adding Isaac’s name after “your only son.” And even if Abraham were a Jew as claimed he was not a native of the Holy Land but migrated to it from ancient Mesopotamia. So how does this make his “chosen” descendants heirs to the land?

This should settle the argument over the historical and religious right of the Jewish people and their claims to Jerusalem, the Holy Land and the Temple. But unfortunately it would take more than reason and historical facts to debunk myths that have been thousands of years in the making.

When Muslims conquered Jerusalem in 638 AD, Omar Ibn Al-Khattab, Islam’s second Caliph, refused to pray inside the Church of Holy Sepulcher for fear of tacitly inciting future generations to expropriate the Christian holy site. Under Islamic rule, Jerusalem remained a peaceful, tolerant city for Jews, Christians and Muslims for most of 1200 years. Today, 60 years under Zionist rule, Muslim holy sites are constantly under threat of destruction and there is little tolerance and no peace. Zionism has proven itself to be not just a threat to the peaceful co-existence of the three faiths, but also a threat to the legitimacy of the Jewish people and their very survival in the Holy Land.

Hollywood should give Nazis a break

By Salaam Abdul Khaliq, IFN Columnist
Thursday, 25 March 2010
http://www.infocusnews.net/content/view/44293/1366/

Nazis have been Hollywood’s favorite bad guys since WWII started. No filmmaker could possibly go wrong depicting the Third Reich, Hitler and his Guestapo henchmen as the exemplars of evil. Quentin Tarantino’s latest Academy Award Best Picture Nominee “Inglorious Basterds” is a case in point. Basterds is an anti-Nazi film with a special flavor. It takes what amounts to perverse license to distort history and depict Nazis as subhuman vermin. Tarantino wrote a fictional story about a band of Jewish American soldiers who hunt and kill Nazis. Most critics did not take Basterds seriously but their opinion did not matter because Hollywood’s movers and shakers reward anti-Nazi celluloid gusto with lavish publicity and Academy Award bonanza.


But why does Hollywood keep constantly picking on Nazis 65 years after WWII ended? If Nazism were a horse it would’ve been beaten to death a million times over already. Some critics argue that by constantly portraying German-speaking folks as the ultimate bad guys one wonders whether today’s Germans are ever going to shed the mantle of guilt-by-association they have been forced to wear for decades. On the other hand, German taxpayers are still paying up billions of dollars in reparation annually to the apartheid state of Israel for the sins of their ancestors, and for crimes they did not commit. This money is ironically earmarked for land theft, settlement building, apartheid walls, and maybe an occasional genocide or two against women and children in Gaza and Lebanon. And thus it seems, Nazism feels like a viral contagion passed down from one people to another.

Apparently this subtle historical irony wasn’t on Tarantino’s mind when he set out to make Basterds. His mind was most likely set on box office tallies and Oscar night kudos. He knew that a mentally conditioned audience would dance to the Pavlovian tune of anti-Nazi propaganda and tired cinematic clichés. It is also a de facto doctrine among Academy members that Nazi-bashing tell-tales are guaranteed golden statue nods. In that respect, Tarantino’s effort amounts to nothing more than a pseudo artistic shoe-shine job at the expense of the ubiquitously maligned Nazis (for the record, Inglorious Basterds is a heavy-handed, contrived work of pure fiction, a film that cannot possibly be taken seriously as art or entertainment. It’s pure Tarantino hogwash with possibly the worst Hitler depiction since Mel Brooks’ The Producers).

Shortly after WWII ended, Zionists ethnically cleansed Palestine of its indigenous population to make room for Jewish immigrants. If it took Nazis over five years to commit their atrocities, Israel’s crimes have been over sixty years in the making. Why hasn’t Hollywood made a single movie about the Palestinian Holocaust? Why doesn’t Tarantino lens a movie about the four hundred and fifteen children that were massacred by U.S. made weapons in Gaza only a year ago? At a time when genocide could be broadcast on television and on the Internet, it’s become visually easy for viewers to draw parallels between Zionism and Nazism. No Hollywood anti-Nazi hokum can top the images of Palestinian babies laying dead with gaping gunshot wounds. The war crimes being committed against the Palestinians in Gaza and the occupied territories make the discourse about Nazi crimes rather anathema and irrelevant. For Hollywood to keep denouncing an evil that has been interred for over six decades while turning a blind eye on an evil that is still playing before our eyes smacks of hypocrisy and overt bias.

This argument should not undermine or belittle Jewish suffering or defend Nazi crimes against Jews but rather remind survivors and those who stand for justice that Zionist Jews cannot build their future on the blood of the Palestinian people. Anyone who claims to immortalize the memory of those who perished in the death camps of Auschwitz by building an edifice literally over the bones of dead Muslims (as is the case with the Simon Wiesenthal Center that is currently trying to build a Museum of so-called Tolerance on the site of an ancient Muslim cemetery in Jerusalem) cannot expect to sell sympathy by demonizing Nazis. Israel vehemently rejects comparisons with Nazi Germany but its actions and policies speak louder. By blockading Gaza from land, sea and air and starving its people then going in with the most technologically advanced weaponry and massacring men, women and children, it cannot claim a higher moral ground than Nazi Germany. The lives and blood of one people cannot matter more than the lives and blood of another people.

Hollywood should seriously give up its ridiculous infatuation with anti-Nazism propaganda films and start embracing the reality of current events. The evil of Nazism still lives. With impunity it rears its ugly head all around us, particularly in the Middle East where it claims might makes right. All that is left for Hollywood filmmakers to do is turn their cameras on it and yell “Action!”

Turkish filmmaker takes aim at U.S. and Israel

By Reuters

Israel may not like it, but a popular Turkish TV and film franchise which once depicted a Jewish doctor stealing organs from Muslim prisoners in Iraq now has plans to release a film set in Palestine.

"Valley of the Wolves: Palestine" is projected to cost over e10 million, making it one of the most expensive Turkish films.

Scheduled for a November release, the new project follows the 2006 feature "Valley of the Wolves: Iraq."

That film, which showed American soldiers running amok in northern Iraq, racked up 4.2 million ticket sales in Turkey and accusations of rampant anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1154420.html

How will the next Palestinian uprising look?

By Amira Hass
Judging from articles written by both Israelis and Palestinians, the next intifada is already in the air. They are predicting it is on the way and the most punctilious know it will be "popular." Bil'in and Na'alin are perceived as its models.

Some Palestinians are guessing it will first erupt in Jerusalem. There, the constant clash between a dispossessing first world and a misery-stricken world is palpable, and the presence of the discriminatory regime is particularly violent because of the daily mingling of the two worlds. In Jerusalem, as opposed to the Ramallah enclave, it is impossible to fake normalcy.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1153557.html

Hamas: Jordan or Egypt likely behind Dubai hit

By Reuters

Hamas suspects the security forces of an Arab state were behind the assassination of a senior group operative in Dubai earlier this year, the Al-Quds Al-Araby daily reported on Tuesday.

Mahmoud Nasser, a member of Hamas' political bureau, told the newspaper that slain commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh was likely being tracked by agents from Jordan and Egypt prior to the January 19 killing.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1153316.html

Israel's aid to Haiti won't save Gaza

By Akiva Eldar

Who said we are shut up inside our Tel Aviv bubble? How many small nations surrounded by enemies set up field hospitals on the other side of the world? Give us an earthquake in Haiti, a tsunami in Thailand or a terror attack in Kenya, and the IDF Spokesman's Office will triumph. A cargo plane can always be found to fly in military journalists to report on our fine young men from the Home Front Command.

Everyone is truly doing a wonderful job: the rescuers, searching for survivors; the physicians, saving lives; and the reporters, too, who are rightfully patting them all on the back. After Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon became the face we show the world, the entire international community can now see Israel's good side.

But the remarkable identification with the victims of the terrible tragedy in distant Haiti only underscores the indifference to the ongoing suffering of the people of Gaza. Only a little more than an hour's drive from the offices of Israel's major newspapers, 1.5 million people have been besieged on a desert island for two and a half years. Who cares that 80 percent of the men, women and children living in such proximity to us have fallen under the poverty line? How many Israelis know that half of all Gazans are dependent on charity, that Operation Cast Lead created hundreds of amputees, that raw sewage flows from the streets into the sea?

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1143313.html

How much is an Arab brain worth exactly?

By Salaam Abdul Khaliq, IFN Columnist
A popular Israeli joke goes like this: Shlomo heads to the marketplace to buy a brain and finds a vendor selling a Jewish brain and an Arab brain. But to his shock and dismay, the Arab brain is 50 times more expensive. “This is not right,” exclaims Shlomo indignantly. “Shouldn’t the Jewish brain be more expensive?” The vendor grins and matter-of-factly says, “No. The Arab brain is barely used.”

This joke was put to the test when Israeli president Shimon Perez visited Egypt in November and told Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak that Israel’s government and people were standing by Egypt’s side in its row with Algeria. And what exactly happened between Egypt and Algeria to warrant political support from the Zionist state and its Nobel Laureate/War Criminal president? If you haven’t heard about what happened between the two North African Arab/Muslim countries, you should kick yourself because you have not only been living under a rock, but also have missed out on the most exciting event in recent Arab and Islamic history. Two brotherly countries came within a hair of severing diplomatic relations over ... (you need to sit down for this) … a soccer game!!!

http://www.infocusnews.net/content/view/44261/1357/

Neturei-Karta: JUDAISM UNADULERATED

By Abdussalam Mohamed

Neturei-Karta is Aramaic for "Guardians of the City." It is also the name of an Orthodox movement that defines itself by opposing Zionism and the state of Israel. The group makes a point of publicly demonstrating their position, which they claim represents the position of the Torah and authentic unadulterated Judaism. Neturei-Karta was founded in Jerusalem in 1938 for the purpose of fighting Zionism. The group believes that the rest of Orthodox Jews sold out to the "Golden-Calf" of Zionism by embracing its ideology that is built on dispossessing the Palestinians and occupying their land. Many followers of the group are still being persecuted by the Israeli authorities for their political views. They firmly believe that Israel should be peacefully abolished and the land returned to the Palestinians. Neturei-Karta’s Rabbi Yisroel Dovid Weiss spoke to InFocus.


InFocus: Rabbi, can you please introduce yourself to our readers?

Rabbi Weiss: My name is Rabbi Yisroel Dovid Weiss, spokesperson for Jews United Against Zionism, also known as Neturei-Karta. This is a group that opposed Zionism when its followers started going en mass to the land of Palestine in the 1930s. Jews were opposed to the concept of a political Judaism; the whole concept of Zionism was new to the Jewish religion and the religious community opposed it because it tainted Judaism. Arabs and Jews co-existed in Palestine for hundreds of years, and the advent of Zionism was a threat to this peaceful co-existence and that is why religious Jews in Palestine stood up against it.

http://www.infocusnews.net/content/view/14071/82/

Gideon Levy: Only psychiatrists can explain Israel's behavior

Our wild world of crime has recently been sent for observation. From the bodyguard of the IDF Chief of Staff to the killers of their own children - all have been sent for observation. The time has come, as is the custom around here, to send the country for observation, too. Maybe with ongoing treatment from specialists, the diagnosis that will save us can be made.

They should explain how the state prosecutor can announce his intention to expropriate more privately-owned Palestinian land at the settlement of Ofra - the "largest illegal settlement in the territories" (in the words of the defense minister's adviser on settlement issues) - when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in his address at Bar-Ilan University last year, explicitly committed not to do so, and President Shimon Peres did more of the same in a meeting with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1141442.html