History is Bunk!

Quite a few CiF commentators appear to be graduates of the Henry Ford School of History, at least when it comes to one specific area of the world. Carlo Strenger’s April 15th article on CiF prompted some comments which are quite incredible, either for their ignorance, their revisionism or their plain idiocy. Take a look at some of these choice examples, and if you happen to be a history teacher, have the tissues to hand.

JRuskin

15 Apr 2010, 10:21AM

The Old City of Jerusalem is Palestinian; Christian and Muslim Palestinian. Walk through the streets and observe.
Apart from a few Zionist fortresses with armed guards, a small Jewish quarter (eighth, more like) and Orthodox worshippers hurrying through from the Western Wall to the Damascus Gate (unmolested, as it happens, unlike Muslim worshippers in Hebron)…..

Now tell me; what are Israel’s long-term plans for these people? They can’t even be expelled to Silwa n now.

JRuskin

15 Apr 2010, 10:29AM

Yanpol

I’m not sure why Israeli Jews would want to worship in the mosque….but it is Israel who bans them. Perhaps the extremists threaten the Israeli state as much as the lives of Palestinians?

The gates are controlled by armed Israelis; Israeli policeman stalk the compounds; the excavations (which are causing subsidence all the way down to Silwan- a school class room collapsed last year) continue apace.

And all they can find are Arabic relics.

But, anyway, to hell with the mythologies and the ancient history. Denial of justice and human rights have too long been in thrall to them.

LaRitournelle

15 Apr 2010, 10:45AM

BananaChips:

It’s not speculation but historical fact that Jews were prevented from attended their holy sites when it was controlled by Muslims

But it was speculation we are talking about future resolution, not past actions. Persistent negative speculation and partisan personal opinion are no ‘proof’ of any potential outcome.

it is also a fact that the Dome of the Rock was built on an early Jewish site

That may well be the case, but there seems to be a great deal of archaeological activity on the part of Israel alone to try to determine this conclusively.

IMHO current claims are 2,500 years past their sell-by date and the historical importance should not just be for Jews, Muslims and Christians – they should be protected at all costs for everyone.

EastofEton

15 Apr 2010, 1:25PM

Yanpol,

Just a little reminder that the first ‘suicide killer’ was ‘Samson’. But he is meant to be the ‘good guy’. Sort of depends on your perspective doesn’t it?

Just to throw a line to get you all going, Ashkenaz is son of Gomer, who is son of Japhet. Gomer is interpreted as being ‘Cimmerian’, a tribe from the eurasian steppes and black sea, perhaps “Scythians’.

So they are not descendants of Shem. i.e., not ‘semitic’, nor are they ‘seed of Abraham’. So please , what claim do the ashkenazi jewry have to an ancestral home in Jerusalem? It’s a bit like an Irish catholic claimiing the Vatican lands as their own, isn’t it?

IrishIain

15 Apr 2010, 3:01PM

[i]The only solution for the Holy Basin is … internationalising it[/i]

I’ve got another one. Obliterate it. 24h notice, if anyone really cares enough to stay there then so be it. Several tens of thousands of pounds of conventional ordonance later there’ll be nothing to fight over. Problem solved.

Thename

15 Apr 2010, 3:56PM

Israel is a terrorist country it claims that America wants to occupy their land. They raise hell over it and they are doing Palestinian. Israel is just a sewer where religious groups think something happened. Thats it take that away from these end time extremist and the world would have not taken up with their behavior.
The only reason they want . Palestinian land is because a few fairy tale books say that it belongs to the jews. Take that away and it would have already been leveled and made into a WalMart parking lot.

fair2

15 Apr 2010, 6:16PM

Sydk, made you nervous, didn’t I? If, when, Palestine declares nationhood Isreal will be in quite a pickle. Not only will the concurrent majority of UN members recognize Palestine as a viable, sovereign nation, it will open the door for all to see what ‘crimes against humanity’ the Isrealis have been committing for uncounted years. It will be difficult for them to cry “Holocaust” when they are proven to be responsible for the Palestinian “Holocaust”.

Sydk, made you nervous didn’t I?

This American is mostly concerned with American national security. Fortunately, for me and I hope, most, this means security, peace and prosperity for all nations. 9/11 is the direct consequence of Isreal’s occupation and brutal oppression of the Palestinians. So are the terrorist atticks in my sister country, England.

Sydk, for you, which country comes first?

And from a skewed view of American national security, to good old conspiracy theories about the Jewish influence in the US and ‘American imperialism’.

FalseConsciousness

15 Apr 2010, 9:26AM

As recent polls show, 70% of Israelis continue to favour the two-state solution, but the same proportion believe that this solution is not attainable in the foreseeable future.

The “two-state solution” will never be attainable, mostly because the Israelis will never be pressured to give up land to a much weaker people, even though the land isn’t theirs to give up in the first place.

The only principled solution is the one-state solution. The communal division of land won’t lead to peace in the Middle East. Dividing land based on race or religion is reactionary and will only leave to further bloodshed. This is what happened when India was divided through the creation of Pakistan and when Yugoslavia was broken apart. Even if a Palestinian state miraculously emerged, it would still be dominated by Israel and US imperialism.

OopsItsMe

15 Apr 2010, 10:30AM

bananachips

Stealthbong the “Zionist” control the USA myth is frankly BS , but if it makes you happy carry on.

Oh so that’s why every potential President of the USA must attend AIPAC events and talk about how America will defend Israel to the last day. Genius!

nofixedabode

15 Apr 2010, 3:26PM

Personally, I see no future for Israel and its people if they don’t come to an equitable deal with their naighbours soon.

When you look at the history of anti-semitisim and the related pogroms that have errupted throughout history, clearly they will happen again. Israel survives because of direct finanical and military support from the US, and that in turn relies on the jewish lobby in the US. If that lobby loses influence (and the relative voting strength drops every year due to immigration) and anti-semitism gains even a slight hold in the US, I shudder to think what the consequences will be for ordinary Israeli citizens.

Which is all the long way round of saying that the best chance for the survival of Israel as somewhere you might actually want to live, is for Obama to make Israelis understand the lessons of history, and untie the apron strings that hold the two contries together whilst they are still friends.

And how about this charmer:

OopsItsMe

15 Apr 2010, 10:20AM

As the writer has said, …the messianic orthodoxy will not accept it but, according to all polls, this is a small minority.

And this is telling because it isn’t to do with religion. It hasn’t anything to do with religion. It’s politics. Israel was ‘created’ (and given) not for Judaism but for Zionism. Zionism and Judaism are not the same. The Israelis want Jerusalem because it helps rally more Jews into the country to help push out the Palestinians in their own land. It’s nationalism and apartheied etc marketed as being Judaism.

No doubt some Israelis want security and peace for Israel, but don’t be naive to suggest or think that anyone other than the Israelis have a hand in their own security and peace making for the region. The ones in power are not interested in peace making. If they were, we’d be living in a very different world, and the Palestinians wouldn’t be suffering. If this was really to do with religion, there’d be concerted efforts from the Jewish, Muslim and Christian communities to work at it. Because believe it or not folks, religious people believe living in harmony with everyone, even those who are polar opposited to your own religion.

So yes, another very naive article on a very important subject matter. I’m almost tempted to think it’s designed to be a naive article.

OopsItsMe

15 Apr 2010, 11:30AM

PaulMetcalf01

Your arguements are pathetic. Don’t be expecting me to respond if you don’t have the decency to argue like for like. Typical Zionist.

This amazing ignorance of both ancient and modern Middle East history in the btl comments is sadly not very different from some of the attitudes in Strenger’s above the line article. His description of the Torah story of Abraham and Isaac is a mere pastiche.

“According to the Biblical text, God requested of Abraham to take his son, Isaac, and sacrifice him on Mount Moriah. Abraham did as told, but when he was about to slaughter his son, God intervened and told Abraham to sacrifice a ram instead. There is a Muslim tradition that claims Ishmael was really the son that Abraham almost sacrificed on the Temple Mount. Paradoxically, Judaism and Islam compete with each other over which of the two sons was subjected to this traumatic ordeal.”

Whilst by no stretch of the imagination a bible scholar, even I can see that this story is not about ‘filial sacrifice’, as Strenger claims, but about the concept of belief in the intangible. The Torah tells us little or nothing about the deity, but an awful lot about human nature; it’s a sort of prototype DSM as far as I’m concerned in which every aspect of the weaknesses and strengths of human psychology are documented and described. So in the story of Isaac and Abraham, we see Abraham’s belief and trust in something which, according to logic, he should be reacting to in exactly the opposite manner and the potential of his belief to empower him.

So much of our own lives too are based upon the power of belief. We fall in love because we believe in that intangible concept; we marry and bring children into this world on the basis of that un-provable belief. We board a plane believing that it will land safely at our destination because we trust the pilot to know things we don’t. We summon all our powers of belief to get us through personal crises such as severe illness and we put our trust in the surgeon even though he holds our very lives in his hands or in a drug which we believe will work, even though we have no idea how. No, belief is not something to be ridiculed as belonging to quaint archaic religions; it is a part of all of our lives, whether we are religious or not. As Israelis especially know, the power of belief is the very basis of our having a country at all because if Ben Gurion and his contemporaries had examined the chances of creating the State of Israel in a measured, logical manner, eliminating from the equation such unquantifiable emotional factors as hope, trust and belief, they would have been forced to abandon the project before they even began.

The extent of Strenger’s miscomprehension of the Torah story he cites is demonstrated when he writes:

“Filial sacrifice epitomises one of the most problematic aspects of the monotheistic traditions. There is supposed to be one theological truth, and it is a truth considered worth killing and dying for, to this very day. At its most extreme, the power of the myth of filial sacrifice is exemplified in the sanctification of shaheeds – those willing to sacrifice their lives to kill unbelievers – ranging from suicide bombers in the Middle East to the perpetrators of 9/11.”

The classification of suicide bombers as ‘monotheism extreme’ is severely problematic in many ways. Not only does it fail to recognize the distinctions between the monotheistic religions themselves and the different streams of each of those faiths, it also affords some sort of ‘explanation’ for criminal and murderous actions which anyone hoping to really comprehend the Middle East cannot afford to entertain whilst simultaneously turning a willingly blind eye to the real factors which have made terrorism such a big part of our lives in this modern era.

From trite simplification of religious beliefs, Strenger then progresses to a dumbed-down ‘solution’ for the future of the Holy Basin. “The only solution for the Holy Basin is, as Bill Clinton proposed in the 1990s, internationalising it, thus avoiding a “victory” of one religion over another.”

Of course the guardians of such an ‘Internationalised’ Jerusalem would have to be some universally recognized body such as the UN, and as we have been made only too painfully aware in recent years, such bodies are disturbingly often motivated by geographical, tribal and political considerations rather than any objective factors. Strenger’s proposition may seem like a ‘quick fix’ solution, but in fact it would be the first step to a serious deterioration of the situation as it is at present. Making history should not be an aim in itself for either the Obama administration or any other party interested in the Middle East; any history which is to be made must be better than that which has gone before, and for that to happen an understanding of the past is vital because Israel is a country without second chances or retakes.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roD7i5xYCx0&feature=related]

Happy Independence Day to all CiF Watch readers.