The Jewish Question

What's wrong with this image?

The problem with that image is that it suggests that a third of humanity is Jewish. Not even a third of 1% of humanity is Jewish!

Yes we really have to zoom in to see them at all!

Nobody in the history of humanity has been as overexposed and given undue attention for good or ill as the Jews. Not even the Kennedys.

The Final Solution to the Jewish Question

What is it about the Jews that has caused so many problems in the world?

If the Roman Empire had chosen a religion other than Christianity the story of the Jews would be very different. For a start it is very difficult to imagine that the depths of enmity between some Christians and the Jews would have been echoed between European followers of Mithras or Dionysus and the Jews. Jews will to some Christians always be simply the Christ-killers, the ultimate bad guys. You just don't see that aspect in the relationship between Jews and people whose religion owes nothing to Jewish scriptures or history such as Hindus, Jains, Zoroastrians and Sikhs. Those people don't agree with Jewish teaching or theology but they don't make that difference into something huge and insuperable and a justification for hatred, fear and persecution in quite the same way as Christians and Muslims do.

If the whole of European history had unfolded without the people of Europe thinking that the Jews were something special and had a special relationship with God I think it is likely that there would not have been the special ambivalence that we saw. Perhaps Europe would have excluded the strange foreign infidels (believers in the wrong god, or not enough gods) or perhaps the Jews would have found it easier to convert to a religion in which they had no special ambiguous place. I suggest that if Europe regarded Yahweh the same as it regarded Horus and Vishnu Jews would have felt a much stronger urge to fit in with the religion and society around them. It was the concept that they were worshipping the same god but in different ways which caused many of the problems.

There is something fundamentally arrogant about Judaism which cannot be airbrushed away. Read the Bible. It is full of nauseating detail about how special the descendants of Israel are and how other people are to be attacked, enslaved and dispossessed. Whichever way you look at it Judaism is an arrogant religion. It would be difficult to design a religion which was more arrogant and obnoxious to the rest of humanity if that was your aim. Of course to anybody with a religion this is fighting talk, it goes against the code of avoiding speaking ill of other people's religions, faiths and gods in the hope they won't laugh at or persecute yours. But I am an atheist, all the religious feel they have carte blanche to attack atheists whenever the mood takes them, we have nothing they want and they do not respect or seek peace with us. They feel fully justified in insulting us at every turn and disrespecting us individually and collectively.

Popes will happily greet rabbis, sheiks, imams, and lamas but he won't shake hands with Richard Dawkins. It seems to be respectable you have to have irrational beliefs, if you haven't got any the religious don't feel comfortable speaking to you at all.

Hitler and the Nazis persecuted Jews, communists, homosexuals and gypsies. They also persecuted Jehovah's Witnesses. There is some common thread in that pattern of persecution, it is arrogance, specialness, living apart, feeling superior to the common herd around them.

Gypsies as well as Jews kept themselves apart and looked suspiciously at outsiders, seeing them as potential sources of genetic, linguistic, moral and cultural infection. For all the Nazi's talk about wanting to keep the races separate the kernel of the problem lay in the exact opposite phenomenon. Jews and Gypsies were living separate parallel lives by their own choice and that was seen as offensive. Those people think they're too good to mix with us. Arrogant bastards.

Of course Hitler was an evil man and his attitude to people other than Germans was atrocious, but it wasn't that unusual either. There were plenty of people in Britain and America who were expressing sentiments about “lesser races” which were just as abhorrent as those of the Nazis, most of the intellectuals of the first half of the twentieth century expressed sentiments which would get them expelled from most modern universities today. We do all like to pretend that the Nazis were especially evil and did things which were somehow unique in human history but the chilling reality is that before the horrors of the gas chambers were uncovered racism was normal. Most people believed that races existed, were real, God given, immutable and fundamentally unequal. They also believed that such views were respectable, respected, backed by science, moral and self-evidently correct.

Today everybody has to pretend that virtually the same scant evidence points just as clearly, unambiguously and self evidently in exactly the opposite direction. Now anybody expressing the view that people may be different from one another in unseen ways as well as obvious ways is considered to be committing the ultimate heresy.

In the same period as the Nazis were operating in Germany, America and Australia had openly racist immigration policies. Australian aboriginal children were being kidnapped from their families and the medical profession was engaged in active cooperation with eugenics programs based on forced sterilizations in many American states. The British Empire was also openly racist in its policies and the army was organized on the principle of divide and rule, using regiments recruited from different parts of the empire for both internal and external purposes. There's nothing like a regiment of Hindus to quell a rebellion in a Muslim city.

Hitler learned a lot from the British Empire, one lesson he was seen to apply was the use of hostile neighbours for internal repression. Recruit a regiment of Muslims and use them to hunt for Jews and suppress Serbian Orthodox rebellions which seem to automatically align with the successors of the forces of the Russian Orthodox Czar.

In what way was Hitler's regime so very different from what had gone before? Occupied Europe didn't have democracy. So? There was no democracy in Germany either. Poles didn't get to vote, but then Germans didn't, neither did any of the hundreds of millions of people living in India (comprising all of India plus modern Pakistan and Bangladesh). Treating foreigners as second class citizens in their own home lands is hardly something that the allied powers could lecture about from a high moral position. Hitler had sought lebensraum for his people by looking to the East and taking what he fancied. How was that so very different from what had happened in North America as Uncle Sam looked West for space for its (white) people? Hitler did it faster, with less humbug and hypocrisy. It was still expropriation of land combined with ethnic cleansing. Was it worse because Hitler's victims were pale-skinned, literate and apparently civilized? Japan too applied the same lessons in her empire: what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. If Britain can take a big Asian land empire in India why could not Japan take one in China? If America could operate the Philippines as an imperial possession why could not Japan be the master instead? The American response to that is that it's not imperialist, evil or fascist when Americans do it because it's obvious to everybody (that counts) that they are the good guys. Yeah right.

Is perhaps the revulsion that the allied powers have towards Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan not similar to the revulsion many men feel about rape? That little nagging suspicion that they are not so far removed from being the monster themselves. Does humanity ever hate anybody as much as we hate our own dark side? You only need to think about all those homophobic Christian ranters who always seem to end up being caught with their own trousers down to know that those who make the biggest fuss about being horrified are often deeply guilty themselves and struggling with that guilt.

There is quite convincing speculation about the nature of Jewish attitudes to pork and blood which suggest that these religious obsessions come from the abhorrence and strange fascination that the Israelites had towards ritual sacrifice of children. See this fascinating YouTube video featuring the words of Christopher Hitchens. Please note that this is not an updating of the blood libel, it is seeking to understand the memeplex of Judaism, what it contains and why it has been so potent for well over three thousand years.

In 1945 civilized American officers who were members of country clubs which excluded Jews from membership (and continued to do so for another generation) entered Nazi Germany and were horrified by what they found. They found their European cousins doing things to Jews which were as bad as their grandfathers had done to the native Americans, and sometimes a little bit worse, but definitely very efficiently.

But why Jews? What had the Jews ever done to the rest of humanity? Well, apart from the obvious: declare themselves unequivocally and inherently superior to the rest of humanity, not much really. Any people who declare that they are superior to the rest of humanity and the rest of humanity is unclean and abominable are going to get people's backs up sooner or later. Hitler has a lot more in common with Charlie Chaplin than a moustache and being born less than a week apart. Chaplin played the honourable little man often put down by the bully who looked down on him. Surely we can all see something in the little man's righteous indignation at the actions of the snob who puts him down. That is a big part of the grudge felt by Hitler towards the Jews, a feeling that was widespread among the German people. Who were these people to look down on them for being unclean and inferior? How dare they regard Germans that way in Germany! Remember that understanding is not condoning, I am not excusing antisemitism I am seeking to explain it. If you can't understand something how can you ever predict it and stop it? A refusal to understand something does not make it go away. Never confuse an analysis and understanding of something with approving of it, I analyse and seek to understand lots of things I don't approve of and I suppose you do too. Ignorance and a lack of imagination is not a virtue.

There are several distinct parts to antisemitism as I see it:

1] Hatred of foreigners. If you're not a Jew then Jews are foreigners and all foreigners are untrustworthy, shifty, too rich/poor smart/stupid dirty/obsessed with cleanliness etc.

2] Religious reasons. Christians accuse Jews of being Christ-killers and Muslims have to hate Jews because their religion steals the place of Jews with God.

3] Any group who think of themselves as special, chosen by God and superior is going to get people's backs up.

4] Jews label outsiders with pejorative names.

5] Jews regard mixing with non-Jews as a form of contagion and have rules which are clearly based on the concept that people who are not Jews will contaminate them and “bring them down to their level”.

Have you ever seen anybody wipe their hand after shaking it? It is a deeply offensive act. Humanity has a natural sense of what contagion is. We are instinctive bacteriologists. We grasp the idea that a small contact with something unclean can make a clean thing unclean. We feel it. This instinctive understanding of contagion has no doubt saved millions of lives. We don't want to eat the bread that was stored in the hut with the dead man. We won't drink the water from the well with the dead goat in it, taking the goat out or looking the other way isn't enough. We understand contagion, we feel it inside. We can also clearly understand when other people are treating us like shit.

Jewish notions of ritual cleanliness treat people who are not Jews as sources of contagion to them. How can this fail to be deeply offensive? It is deeply offensive and people are right to be offended by anybody who treats them as a source of contagion. I fully agree with women who are mortally offended by men who regard them as unclean and think they have the right to ask whether the woman is menstruating. I am also fully in support of black people who are offended when their presence empties a swimming pool. For millennia Jews have regarded people who are not Jews as beneath them and a threat to them. “But we're the chosen people, not you, no offence” doesn't cut it. There is no way that any people can be special, chosen by God, and this not have any impact on the way other people view them.

I can't see how the Jews can ever see peace in their world as long as they maintain this religious position that they are special and that their god has given them land that other people have called home for just as long as they have claimed it. Whichever way you look at it Zionism is aggressive, bellicose and racist. It cannot fail to be. It is not reasonable to expect other people to meekly accept that the traditional myths about God giving land to the Jews constitute an unquestionable authority backed by the ultimate trump card of religion. What possible way out is there? With every generation that passes the commitment to the faith grows and being reasonable becomes an even bigger betrayal of those who stayed unreasonable in the past.

The conversion of the Jews is a miracle prayed for by Christians. I am tempted to conclude that it is a miracle that the whole world should pray for. As long as the Jews have a religious belief in their own superiority and the rightness of their audacious and unjustified territorial claim there will be trouble. Of course that rules out any benefit from the Jews converting to any religion that venerates the same God of Abraham.

The Jewish people have never had full possession of the land they claim. They are a splinter group from the semi-nomadic tribes that have been in that area for millennia, a group defined only by religion, only later did their languages evolve in different directions. The use of a claim that the land is theirs by divine right makes any form of compromise impossible. Even if you take their own scriptures as reliable the land was not empty before they arrived (assuming they were ever anywhere else) Jerusalem itself was originally Jebus, the home of the Jebusites, one of six tribes that Yahweh commanded the Israelites to exterminate. If Hitler deserved to be executed for proposing the final solution to the Jewish Question, Endlösung der Judenfrage, what would be the appropriate penalty for the authority behind the plan to exterminate the Amorites, Perizzites, Canaanites, Hittites, Girgashites, Hivites, and Jebusites? Wasn't this tyrant responsible for more bloodshed than any other? The solution is clear. Yahweh and all other gods need to be executed for crimes against humanity, for enabling the dark side of humanity to come to the surface disguised as something good, moral, just and holy. That is the final solution. The end of religion. The freeing of mankind.

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