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.