Tag Archives: Jewish

Do we not bleed?

Posted on by

Some Jewish girls, plainly prevented by the nature of their social values from asserting their religious and cultural identities by just wearing a veil or a promise ring or whatever, have achieved this seemingly fashionable goal by boycotting Shakespeare in their GCSE exams.

Because of his anti-semitism, it appears…..

I assume they are thinking about the Merchant of Venice. Even if you choose to ignore the fact that Shakespeare actually gave Shylock some of the most stirring anti-bigotry speeches ever written, Shakespeare’s views on any topic (if you can deduce what they might have been) were the views of a sixteenth century playwright.

Should we only read or listen to or look at works of art if we agree 100% with the worldview of their creator? In that case, we had better get really brilliant at writing and painting and making music, because, for each of us, there is only one person that we will ever agree with completely. Even then, we must be careful not to change our minds as a result of experience, because we won’t be able to use even our own creations then.

Why stop at works of art? Can I live in a house built by people who are on the other side of the political spectrum? Wear clothes when the person who made them might not agree that we are heading straight towards ecological disaster? My Freya, I suspect that the person who made the cup I’m drinking from didn’t believe the Wire was the best TV series ever made.

Discussing the school students’ absurdity in the Guardian, Seth Freedman argued that this sort of religiously-inspired intervention in education is inherently dangerous.

Policy makers should be joining the dots and realising that they have a tough choice to make when it comes to appeasing religious minorities on the one hand, and making Britain a country that opposes fundamentalism and extremism on the other……
The reluctance of religious institutions to pay heed to secular teaching methods can be found right across the spectrum of faiths in the UK, as well as abroad. Devout Christians are just as unlikely to force their children to learn how man descended from monkeys as ultra-orthodox Jewish parents are, and so too is the case with strict adherents of Islam.

Anti-Israel does not equal anti-Jew

Posted on by

Atheist defends Dawkins. Shock, horror. (OK, not.) Still the Times has an unpleasant piece by Daniel Finkelstein in which he distorts something Dawkins said in the Guardian in order to misrepresent Dawkins as anti-semetic.

So Dawkins, a liberal hero, believes, er, that Jews control world power. And, judging from the Guardian, it is now a part of mainstream debate to say so. Perhaps you think I am over-reacting, but I am a little bit frightened.

Well no. What Dawkins actually said is that atheists need some organisation analogous to the Jewish lobby, which had proved its success by the fact that it had managed to

more or less monopolise American foreign policy as far as many people can see.

It seemed obvious to several commentators that
(a) US foreign policy seemed more than a little pro-Israel;
(b) this is not even explicable in terms of the US’s own national interests (oranges versus oil, as one commentator remarked);
(c) it reflects the influence of pro-Israeli American lobbyists and people in power.

This is a huge leap away from saying that Jews monopolise world power, as the blog headline and comments said. However, this misrepresentation of Dawkins was taken by some Times commentators as a given. And stuck together with a self-evidently ludicrous claim that Dawkins wanted to take children away from their parents if the parents taught them religion. To make a general attribution of Dawkins really being a Nazi.

I know. I know. This sort of thing doesn’t even bear recognising as a rational discourse. But still, I think it is worth repeating ad nauseam that opposing Israel does not make one a Nazi.

The Jews suffered terribly in Germany. Why didn’t they get given Germany? They didn’t suffer anything at the hands of the Palestinians. Why did they get Palestine? Well, partly because they carried out a prolonged terrorist campaign against the British government to get it.

Terrorist campaign, note. The British government gave in.

If the USA had not been committed over decades to supporting everything that Israel did, ignoring the complaints of the Palestinians as their land was taken and they were turned into refugees in their own country, there would be no insane jihadists now.

The only quarrel I would have with Dawkins in this is that atheists don’t have an agreed agenda beyond removing religious influence from the public sphere. What else would be the point of atheist lobbyists? Remember the herding cats thing? The capacity to think independently is the strength of rational people, not their weakness.

Papal bull

Posted on by

You might think the Catholic Church had enough to worry about with the laughably huge sums its having to drag from the contributions of the faithful to pay out to kids abused by its minions, but the Pope seems to be going for “the best defence is offence” strategy.

The Pope has been spraying papal bull^^^ in all directions, making some mockery of the concepts of ecumenical fellowship.

Protestants
In Sunday’s Observer, Will Hutton compared the Pope’s recent pronouncement on Protestants to the tribally offensive behaviour of drunken Orange marchers, pissing on the Wigan train while shouting anti-Catholic rants. He referred to the Pope’s Continue reading →

Signs of Madness

Posted on by

It seems that no matter how hard I try (or dont try as the case may actually be), I cant avoid the madness that permates the and specifically the . Just to get a bit of perspective, there are millions of websites, millions of blogs written by sane, “normal” people. They just aren’t as much fun…

The serendipitous wonder which has been following my bored searches on Technorati brought me to a blog by one “joannafrancis.” This really was a descent into the world of madness.

The internet has always been a hotbed for “conspiracy” lunatics of all branding, and among the big three Abrahamic religions, Jews often get a rough end of the conspriacy deal (people even try to claim General Relativity is a Jewish conspriacy), so lots of this blog is no real surprise. What is shocking, especially for a blog from what appears to be a devout Catholic(religion of compassion?) is the sheer vitriol and hatred which oozes from pretty much every word on every post.

Just to be open, the reason I think she is a Catholic is she makes the following statement: (read original)

And yet, what Catholics should realize, whether Novus Ordo, SSPX, or sedevacantist, is that these Jews from the SPLC are attacking not only our religion, but all of our ancestors as well.

As an atheist, I find it quite entertaining how much she rants about even the slightest hint of Jewishness in people (for instance, apparently Courtney Love is a Jew, based on an oblique entry in NNDB)

The post which really made me chuckle (on the assumption she reall is alone with these ideas) was made on 10 Nov 06, titled “Israeli Snipers Killing U.S. Troops?” in which she postulates the idea that Mossad or another Israeli organsiation is responsible for killing Americans in Iraq to drag the war out. It is a great post. It has every single one of the crackpot conspiracy nut hall marks in. It could be used as a teaching tool to help spot nutters.

She has some “proof” that the Israelis are involved, for example:

At the very beginning of this video clip, you see a rifle with a video camera attached to it. This weapon is made by the Rafael company, an Israeli arms manufacturer, that also makes IEDs.

So at the very least we know she has no idea at all what an IED actually is. If they were manufactured, they would not be “improvised” would they? Manufactured IEDs are called bombs and mines etc. After some nonsense about rifle mounted cameras being another sign of the Jews, she somes out with:

Mossad is a master at false flag operations, e.g., Oklahoma City, the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen, the bombing of the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires, the July 7, 2005 London bombings, the 9-11 attacks in New York, the assassination of the Prime Minister in Beirut, the stoking of Muslim riots in France last year, the bombing of the Hassan al-Askari Mosque in Samarra, Iraq, etc.

Wow. Mossad took out the World Trade Center and the London Underground. Amazing. I bet they even killed Jean Charles Menendes and just blamed it on the Metropolitan Police. I mean, he was a catholic as well wasn’t he?

The post carries on along these lines – even going as far as to say the Mossad Liaison was in charge of US troops at the time of a bombing in Fallujah. The rest of the posts on her site follow this thread. One of the other themes seems to be blaming Jews for American abortions – it all being part of a Jewish plot to kill more and more Americans.

Madness does not do her justice.