Global Events & Politics Überthread

You've specifically amplified individuals who are specifically anti-Semitic, and broadly supported movements (the FN in France, pour example) whose DNA is specifically anti-Semitic. I'm not generalizing. I've been quite specific. You post tweets from Holocaust deniers and then run this game. Maybe the enemy of your enemy is not really your friend?
 
Julio3000 said:
You've specifically amplified individuals who are specifically anti-Semitic, and broadly supported movements (the FN in France, pour example) whose DNA is specifically anti-Semitic. I'm not generalizing. I've been quite specific. You post tweets from Holocaust deniers and then run this game. Maybe the enemy of your enemy is not really your friend?
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Maybe I don't believe these people being brandished as antisemites are actual threats. I've deal with this my whole life. There is a difference between someone that doesn't like Jews vs someone that wants to kill Jews and believe me there are huge numbers of Muslims that would actively kills jews.
 
thethe said:
Maybe I don't believe these people being brandished as antisemites are actual threats. I've deal with this my whole life. There is a difference between someone that doesn't like Jews vs someone that wants to kill Jews and believe me there are huge numbers of Muslims that would actively kills jews.
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I have no pretense of changing your mind, so I’m really not looking to wade into a “debate” here; but ...

It seems pretty rich to claim that explicitly anti-semitic, reactionary, nationalist groups—who claim to be the inheritors of a legacy of an explicitly anti-semitic, reactionary, nationalist political institution that actually aggressively took over two-thirds of Europe and actually killed six-million-plus of her Jews (and displaced countless more)—are somehow not an actual threat to the bodily safety of Jews ... but the nebulously-defined party of “Muslims” is.

I’m not arguing that some adherents of some forms of Islam aren’t threats to the bodily safety of some Jews. I’m just arguing that your rationale here is entirely incoherent.
 
jpx7 said:
I have no pretense of changing your mind, so I’m really not looking to wade into a “debate” here; but ...

It seems pretty rich to claim that explicitly anti-semitic, reactionary, nationalist groups—who claim to be the inheritors of a legacy of an explicitly anti-semitic, reactionary, nationalist political institution that actually aggressively took over two-thirds of Europe and actually killed six-million-plus of her Jews (and displaced countless more)—are somehow not an actual threat to the bodily safety of Jews ... but the nebulously-defined party of “Muslims” is.

I’m not arguing that some adherents of some forms of Islam aren’t threats to the bodily safety of some Jews. I’m just arguing that your rationale here is entirely incoherent.
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The history of the Jewish plight is obvious and nobody is innocent when it comes to accounting for the amount of blood spilled. Call me crazy but in the current time that we are in I find the threat from any other group to pale in comparison to the threat that is the subset of the Muslim population that wants to eradicate the Jewish population.
 
jpx7 said:
Care to parse this a little more? It doesn’t really accord with my understanding of contemporary theses regarding those two “populations” (where “Jew” is a relatively recent Roman Imperial-period designation for, vaguely, Yahwist peoples; and “Arab” even more recently came to describe “users of the liturgical abjab”, versus “the semi-discontinuous mobile desert tribes of the peninsular Near East”).

Certainly there was plenty of conflict (and strategic alliance) between Yahwist and their neighbors in pre- and mid-Kingdoms periods, but the bulk of that concerned Egyptian (New Kingdom, Intermediate/Kush-ite, and even Ptolemaic), Akkadian, Assyrian—all Semitic peoples, but distinctly not “Arabic”—as well as Persian/Achaemenid (and thus Indo-European) incursions. Moreover, the Yahwist city-states didn’t really emerge as a distinctly other-than-Canaanite (from which milieu they emerged) nation until roughly 2700-2500 years ago.

Even “2000 years” for “Christian vs Jew” seems to stretch a bit. The early medieval period seems (just as with Christian vs Muslim) to be the more defensible locating of the “origins” of these conflicts, writ large or semi-global; while “Jew vs Muslim” is more complicated, but not really tenable past 1300 years ago (and I would argue this latter “versus” was reframed enough by colonial divestment and Zionism to be a totally different discourse now than 150 years ago).
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I was referring to the true beginning of these problems between Arab and Jew/Hebrew, which would go all the way back to Abraham and his 2 sons by 2 different women, Ishmael from his sexual union with the handmaid Hagar and Isaac from his marriage/sexual union with his wife Sarah. I'm sure you already knew this but this nearly 4000 year quarrel has its roots in what we today would probably refer to as "Daddy's issues".

Or were you talking about something else?
 
Oklahomahawk said:
I was referring to the true beginning of these problems between Arab and Jew/Hebrew, which would go all the way back to Abraham and his 2 sons by 2 different women, Ishmael from his sexual union with the handmaid Hagar and Isaac from his marriage/sexual union with his wife Sarah. I'm sure you already knew this but this nearly 4000 year quarrel has its roots in what we today would probably refer to as "Daddy's issues".

Or were you talking about something else?
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Sort of, since I'm discounting the story of Abraham as "true beginning" or "history" (and counting it as, more likely, the folk back-formation of a cultural genesis story to account for the Yahwist divergence from Canaanite and other Semitic groups of the Levant), and instead looking at the archeo-textual strata in which a "Jewish" (and "Christian" and "Muslim") identity developed. In that light, there isn't a lot of evidence for a firmly separate Yahwist identity until ~700 BC (at the earliest), and not a strong case for a specific "Jewishness" until at least the Roman Imperial period—again, from what I've read.

But even within Biblical tradition, from my recollection, the association of Ishmael with pan-Arabic progenation (as opposed to his just going to dwell "from Havilah unto Shur" [not purely from my recollection: I had to look that line up to remember it] and producing twelve tribally-associated sons) is the stuff of more recent (ie anno domini) commentary.
 
jpx7 said:
Sort of, since I'm discounting the story of Abraham as "true beginning" or "history" (and counting it as, more likely, the folk back-formation of a cultural genesis story to account for the Yahwist divergence from Canaanite and other Semitic groups of the Levant), and instead looking at the archeo-textual strata in which a "Jewish" (and "Christian" and "Muslim") identity developed. In that light, there isn't a lot of evidence for a firmly separate Yahwist identity until ~700 BC (at the earliest), and not a strong case for a specific "Jewishness" until at least the Roman Imperial period—again, from what I've read.

But even within Biblical tradition, from my recollection, the association of Ishmael with pan-Arabic progenation (as opposed to his just going to dwell "from Havilah unto Shur" [not purely from my recollection: I had to look that line up to remember it] and producing twelve tribally-associated sons) is the stuff of more recent (ie anno domini) commentary.
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So are you suggesting that the normal "historical agreement" that Abram/Abraham left southern Sumeria, Ur-ish neck of the woods somewhere around 1900 BC m/l isn't accurate or are you going into a different direction?
 
Pretty historic moment with Kim meeting in Beijing. Trump administration also sent a message through China.

This along with the additional pressure we have been putting on China has to make one believe that an assertive approach was the best one.
 
Oklahomahawk said:
So are you suggesting that the normal "historical agreement" that Abram/Abraham left southern Sumeria, Ur-ish neck of the woods somewhere around 1900 BC m/l isn't accurate or are you going into a different direction?
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I’m suggesting that such a genesis is not (or at least no longer is) the “normal ‘historical agreement’” regarding the origins of the Yahwist Kingdoms (and thus eventually the “Jewish identity”).

Everything I’ve read—and it’s admittedly not that much, and mostly overview—suggests that the Israelites and Judeans were originally polytheistic Canaanites whose worship focused on El (basically the Zeus of the Canaanite pantheon; hence Isra-el), and whose specific focus on El (as their patron god) transposed onto YHWH when that god–word–idea traveled to them from Egypt along the Canaanite trade routes. This eventually morphed from polytheistic patronage to Yahwist monolatry to Yahwist monotheism between 1300 and 700-500 BC (with the historical Babylonian exile playing a large part in consolidating the Yahwist self-identification). In this view—which, again, I believe is the currently-accepted view (or normalized historical agreement)—the figure of Abram/Abraham is at best a semi-historical founder-myth entity, not unlike the Greek founder-heros (such as Theseus for Athens or Perseus for Mycenae).
 
jpx7 said:
I’m suggesting that such a genesis is not (or at least no longer is) the “normal ‘historical agreement’” regarding the origins of the Yahwist Kingdoms (and thus eventually the “Jewish identity”).

Everything I’ve read—and it’s admittedly not that much, and mostly overview—suggests that the Israelites and Judeans were originally polytheistic Canaanites whose worship focused on El (basically the Zeus of the Canaanite pantheon; hence Isra-el), and whose specific focus on El (as their patron god) transposed onto YHWH when that god–word–idea traveled to them from Egypt along the Canaanite trade routes. This eventually morphed from polytheistic patronage to Yahwist monolatry to Yahwist monotheism between 1300 and 700-500 BC (with the historical Babylonian exile playing a large part in consolidating the Yahwist self-identification). In this view—which, again, I believe is the currently-accepted view (or normalized historical agreement)—the figure of Abram/Abraham is at best a semi-historical founder-myth entity, not unlike the Greek founder-heros (such as Theseus for Athens or Perseus for Mycenae).
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So, what is your source for this different timeline? I think we are talking about two slightly different things here. I referred back to the origins of Judaism, ie Abram/Abraham who according to everything I've ever read or heard (and definitely not just Old Testament material) left the land of Sumeria, around the city/state of UR m/l around 1900 BC and traveled to the west, winding up in Canaan after a long trip and series of adventures. The 1300 BC you refer to would be somewhat in the same time period (give or take a few years) of the Exodus of the Hebrews from Egypt. The 700 BC would be right in the middle of the "getting taken over in chunks" by the Assyrians and then the Chaldeans and being taken back to Babylon. By 500 BC we should already be talking about their gradual return (again in chunks) to Judea/Canaan, after Cyrus the Great and the Medes/Persians take Babylon and end the rocky Chaldean or Neo-Babylonian Empire (Nebuchadnezzar II and the gang) and the beginning and quite frankly the hey day of the Persian Empire that Alexander the Great would conquer less than 2 centuries later.

I agree that there's more polytheism in their roots than some Bible scholars want to admit, Zoroaster and the rest.

I do like the El theory though. If nothing else it sounds Kryptonian. :)
 
A topic change but here's an interesting article claiming that the single biggest mistake of the 2nd Iraq War was disbanding the military. Paul Brennan, now a ski instructor in Vermont (really), was saddled with giving the orders, which went against the original plan, but he says they came from elsewhere. It's unclear where. This writer speculates it was Cheney, influenced by Chalabi, who turned out to be an Irani spy?


Another about Brennan the ski instructor This is the better and more complete article. Good stuff.
 
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Yeah, the pissed-off, armed, unemployed sectarian minority became first the soldiers in a civil war and later the core of ISIS.
 
Julio3000 said:
Yeah, the pissed-off, armed, unemployed sectarian minority became first the soldiers in a civil war and later the core of ISIS.
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A wise observation and one that sounds all too familiar in these times. (From the 2nd article)

"Nonetheless, Bremer is reluctant to assign blame. “One has to be fairly humble in trying to figure out why things happen at high levels of government,” he cautions. “It’s not totally explicable.” Then again, he admits, “It’s a fair criticism that there doesn’t seem to have been a tight NSC coordination of where Bush was headed regarding particular decisions. That led to a lot of ambiguity, into which people could drive their own agendas — and they subsequently did.” "
 
The crew that backed Chalabi, and their influence, was one of the great mysteries of that whole era. Like, it was clear that guy was a grifter, and people seemed to think we could just install him as president and call it a day.

There's some rumbling that Bolton wants to try the same trick with the MEK (!) in Iran.
 
Problem to me is even if you take an Arab kid at birth these days he can still get online and get connected to some radical ideas. Combine that with some angsty teen years and likelihood of facing some bullying for his race makes them ticking time bombs. I don't hate the people I hate the culture. It's barbaric and violent.
 
cajunrevenge said:
Problem to me is even if you take an Arab kid at birth these days he can still get online and get connected to some radical ideas. Combine that with some angsty teen years and likelihood of facing some bullying for his race makes them ticking time bombs. I don't hate the people I hate the culture. It's barbaric and violent.
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They follow a religion that espouses violence from their prophet. This will never end while Islam is still practiced and Islam is not going anywhere. This is going to be a war that rages on for hundreds of more years. The crusades never ended.
 
I agree it only ends in ww3. We will lose our Christian identity over time but not in their eyes. Quite frankly I hope I don't see it in my lifetime.
 
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