SULTANIC VERSES

In a comment underneath a guest-posting (here: http://dovbear.blogspot.com/2006/12/akiva-and-war-on-christmas.html) by Akiva of Mystical Paths (http://mysticalpaths.blogspot.com/) on Dovbear's blog (here: http://dovbear.blogspot.com/ ), Sultan Knish (http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/), whose recent posting about the Seattle Xmas tree controversy is referenced (http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/2006/12/dateline-seattle-war-on-christmas.html) writes about anti-Semitism on both the liberal and conservative sides of the fence.


Sultan Knish's statement about anti-Semitism was clear and refreshing.

Usually I do not agree with Sulty, nor see eye to eye with him on many things, finding him far too strident even for my own disagreeable self.

But this time his comment was spot-on.


So I'm stealing it, and pasting it below.
I didn't even bother to ask his permission, because what he says is aza clear and well-written that it absolutely deserves to be said and needs to be read.

[But I ask that you do pay his blog a visit: http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/]

ON ANTI-SEMITISM
By Sultan Knish
12/13/06

"Conservative Jews accuse the left of being Anti-semitic and Liberal Jews accuse the Religious Right of being Anti-semitic. They are both correct but in pointing the finger at the other side they ignore the simple fact that both the right and the left have little use for Jews as Jews.

Since the French Revolution, Jews have often been enlisted on the liberal side with the offer of equality in exchange for abandoning their 'backwards traditions' and jumping on the bandwagon of the new liberalized age. In turn when their religious values came under attack, the reactionary right would enlist the Jews in order to defend Christianity by proxy.

Most of the time liberalism continued to view the Jews as chauvinistic, backwards and untrustworthy; a view held by a vast array of liberal heroes from Thomas Jefferson to FDR and from Voltaire to Tolstoy to Sartre. Many of these figures would at times defend Jews, but only as a leverage for attacking the reactionary forces of the right, just as liberals today will defend Jews only when Jews are threatened by right wing Anti-semitism but not the far more numerous bigots of the left and its islamic allies.

The reactionary right saw the liberation of the Jews from the ghettos as a threat and a sign of the corruption of society. In Europe the right took the form of the Catholic Church which conducted an open war against the Jews with the Catholic press being the primary source of European Anti-semitism from the 19th century and up until and into the Holocaust. But at the same time Catholics would defend Judaism when it came under attack from liberal figures such as Voltaire as a proxy for attacking Christianity.

And that remains the simple reality of Jewish interaction with conservativism and liberalism. Both will defend Jews against their opponents as a proxy for attacking their opponents on the other side. Neither will defend or restrain the Anti-semitism rabidly prevalent in their own ranks. Both trade in bigoted stereotypes when needed and neither have any use for Jews as Jews.

The left wants Jews to assimilate and leave behind whatever parts of their Jewish identity are not compatible with liberal ideology. This of course includes being the chosen people, the land of Israel, any non-universal aspects of Judaism among much else that will leave Jewish identity a hollow shell until the Jews are finally eliminated through assimilation . This liberal Jews have done and yet still end up being resented for all the classic anti-semitic reasons.

The right wants Jews to be Christians who call themselves Jews. They do not want to see anything Jewish remain except for perhaps a shell of customs and rituals, much as Messianic Christian groups have done. A shell which itself will fall away as even those converted Jews assimilate into the broader Christian world. Any Jews who do not go along with their agenda are ultimately sneered at with the same rants about the insidious corruption of the Jews as was deployed by everyone from the Czars to the Church.

Once the left and the right wanted a clear eradication of the Jewish people through assimilation. A secular nationalistic assimilation for the left and an elimination of Judaism followed by the elimination of the Jews for the right. Today those goals have not changed, they now exist in gradations. The left and the right both want a dramatically weakened and gutted Jewish identity in which the Jews exist as subsets of them, e.g. Liberal Jews, Judeo-Christians; until the remains of these gutted identities blow away as these Jews come to identify more with liberalism and the religious right than they do with their fellow Jews.

When there is a position that is correct, we should hold to it. We should speak the truth and be involved in the political life of the nation but without subsuming our Jewish identity to any political party or ideology. Whether we vote Republican or Democrat, whether we support or oppose gun control or immigration and whatever we believe, should stem from being Jews true to the word of G-d, rather than subservience to any political party."

----sultan knish
----------------------------------------------------

Blogs referenced:
Akiva / Mystical Paths: http://mysticalpaths.blogspot.com/
Dovbear: http://dovbear.blogspot.com/
Sultan Knish: http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/

----------------------------------------------------

As Mordechai said, "I do not bow, because my ancestor did not bow".