With Merkel's Foes in Disarray, Germany Defies the Trump Trend

[Dill]

(04-29-2017, 01:54 PM)Sociopathicsteelerfan Wrote: At the risk of appearing to let Sam Harris do all my thinking for me I'd refer you to this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HX-UPcrejHc
It pretty much sums up my feelings on Israel and judaism.  Also, while you are correct, and is pointed out in my link, that parts of the old testament are as vile as you will find in any book, maybe the worst example there is, you won't find many jews who subscribe to them, now or a thousand years ago.  If we operate on your assertion that the only real difference in the origins of judaism and islam is the idea of forced conversion we must ask a very important follow up question.  Why then do we get such disparate results from their faithful, again, not only now, but centuries ago?

1.  Regarding Harris, I’ll just say here that arrogance combined with lack of knowledge, plus the double standard, grated on me throughout, especially during the slide from Hamas to the Islamic State and subsequent characterizations of Israeli state terrorism as “restraint.” I recognize some of his examples of “hate” from the diplomacy videos on the website of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs. I don’t expect most Americans to know a lot about the modern history of the Middle East, let alone Medieval and Ancient. So I understand why this sort of thing appears persuasive and “rational.” For anyone interested in attaining more depth on the subject, I recommend books like Edward Said’s The Question of Palestine and Covering Islam. For people with less patience, but who would like an accurate baseline for beginning to understand the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (the real root the problems debated here) I recommend the Primer on the Middle East Research and Information Project.  http://www.merip.org/primer-palestine-israel-arab-israeli-conflict-new#The%20Negotiation%20Process

2. Regarding the objectionable laws set down in Leviticus you, SSF, say “you won’t find many Jews who subscribe to them now or a thousand years ago.” You want to know “why we get such disparate results from the faithful, again, not only now, but centuries ago.”  To answer these questions honestly and with minimal depth, we need to push the question back another millennium.

Two thousand+ years ago you would hardly find any Jews who didn’t subscribe to the aforementioned laws. The ethnic cleansing of Palestine recorded in Joshua and Judges is not real history, but a narrative affirmation of sacred rights. One of its darkest episodes would be the razing of Jericho in which (save for Rahab and her family) the entire population is put to the sword—men, women and children—plus all animals, including Oxen and donkeys. (But even then, Judaism was not one thing, and moving away from the earlier barbaric practices, developing laws and morality which would be the foundation of ours today, as well as that of Islam. I regard Leviticus not as some monstrous Jewish aberration but a stage in the development of my own modern worldview and a part of my heritage too, though I am an atheist.)

The Seleucid and Roman administrators of Palestine during the last two centuries BCE would give you an earful regarding Jewish unruliness and terrorism.  In the 1st century CE, they were eventually given an exemption from the symbolic requirement that all subject peoples acknowledge the divinity of Augustus. Their sensitivity to religious slight was legendary, ready to war over issues like circumcision, the presence of foreign "idols," and verbal slights to their God.

There were cosmopolitan Jews like Josephus, whose The Jewish War (75 CE) gives us a close up picture of the sicarii (knifemen who murdered Jews cooperating with Rome) and the zealots who attacked Greek and Roman civilians and brought Roman destruction upon Judea and Diaspora upon the upper classes. Their willingness to die and create situations in which everyone around them would have to die as well are amply illustrated in Josephus’ narrative of the siege of Jerusalem. At one point they even destroyed the food supplies in Jerusalem to force the inhabitants to fight the Romans rather than surrender. Still not as bad as the Sicarii though, who at one point, after they took over Masada, massacred hundreds of Jewish civilians in a nearby village (including children—their own people!). You have probably heard about Masada, where over 900 of them all committed suicide when the Romans finally breached the fortress.

3. So how do we get from there to those Jews who, a thousand years later I agree, are indeed law-abiding, orderly and generally tolerant citizens of both Christian and Muslim cities across Europe and the Middle East?

The Diaspora plays a large role here. There were Jewish communities all over the Mediterranean, but when the Romans finally closed down any resemblance of a Jewish state and re-located the rich, educated upper classes to various other parts of the empire, forbidding their return, they were suddenly permanent minorities who eventually came to espouse the value of tolerance. (As did Christian minority denominations, after the terrible destruction of the 80 years war, the 30 years war, and the English Civil War.)

Not right away, of course. One thinks here of Kito’s War in the 2nd century CE, in the 2nd century CE, which was fought not in Judea but in various Jewish communities in places like North Africa, Cyprus and Alexandria, which rose up and destroyed “heathen” Roman Temples (for much the same reason ISIS does today) and killed hundreds of thousands of peaceful Roman citizens. The accounts of Jewish behavior rival ISIS today. Greeks and Romans were supposedly disemboweled and their intestines were fashioned into belts. (The Jewish Encyclopedia thinks there may be some exaggeration http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/5212-dion-cassius.) The consequence was that the Jewish population of places like Cyprus was pretty much wiped out and the property of those in Alexandria was confiscated to pay for the ruined temples. The Roman’s called the extinction of this rebellion Trajan’s War. http://www.livius.org/articles/concept/roman-jewish-wars/roman-jewish-wars-7/? (Can you imagine Roman and Greek cities refusing to take in Jewish refugees for fear zealots might be among them? Jews were forbidden entry to Egypt for a century thereafter.) This was a hard lesson for diaspora Jews, but it stuck.

By the time we reach the year 1017, peaceful, law-abiding Jewish communities were second-class citizens in both Muslim and Christian lands, but for the next thousand years, one could argue they had much more to fear from Christians. The First Crusade began with the massacre of Jews in Germany and ended with the massacre of Jews and Muslims in Jerusalem. The greatest impetus to the formation of contemporary Israel would be first, Russian pogroms of the 19th and early 20th century, and then the Holocaust perpetrated by a “Christian” state. Sandwiched between these events were enough massacres and pogroms and confiscations and expulsions to keep Jews in constant fear for their existence, which could be extinguished by any crazy rumor and mass hysteria caused by wars and natural and economic calamities.

I could offer a similar history of how Christians—some of them—learned tolerance the hard way.  I have said nothing here about why Muslims who for centuries lived peacefully with Jews and Christians in Palestine and the Levant may now indeed want to murder them—perhaps they just started reading the Qu’ran?  That is an issue I could take up in another post. But I hope this brief synopsis indicates why I have little patience with Maher/Harris-style arguments which separate holy texts from any historical context and shout “Look at what this says!” and ask “Why don’t we see Mormon suicide bombers?” or claim “Muslim terrorism has nothing to do with war and dispossession.”