Clueless. Just...Clueless
A supporter of the Canada Gaza boat natters on, and on, and on:
The immediate and primary goal of the campaign is to challenge and break Israel’s blockade on Gaza. The Canadian Boat, named Tahrir (“Liberation” in Arabic) departs eminently from various points in the Mediterrean. The 45 passengers from across Canada will sail the sea and, if all goes well, enter Gaza, bringing medical supplies and, hopefully, leave with new passengers.
The secondary goal is to challenge Canada’s complicity and political and economic alignment with Israel. Wendy elucidates.
“Last month, John Baird, [Canada’s] Foreign Affairs Minister, called the boat ‘provocative’ and warned that he supported Israel’s so-called ‘right to defend themselves’ against the flotilla, and that Canada wouldn’t be coming to the help of the Canadians if there was an attack [by Israel on the CBG]. This is unacceptable. The government should be ensuring safe passage and putting pressure on Israel that they won’t harm the boat.”
The Canadian Boat to Gaza is firmly rooted in an international movement for the freedom of the people Gaza, and for a free Palestine. When chatting about public reactions to the boat, Wendy points out a common misunderstanding, which is to look at the issue through a charity, rather than solidarity, lens.
Whichever "lens" you're looking through, sweetie, it's seriously distorting the scenery.
Yeah, the conversion of sound religious doctrines into socialist/progressive tropes has been one of the hallmarks of liberal religious "moral theology" in the last century or so, and not just in Judaism (which, of course, Ms. Goldberg touches upon with her reference to the Protestant "Social Gospelists" ). But that kind of semantic distortion of an originally well-grounded doctrine is not just a Jewish or Protestant problem.
ReplyDelete_Tikkun Olam_, in the progressive usage of the term, sounds remarkably like the tergiversations of the "Liberation Theology" movement within the Catholic Church, which had its heyday in the mid-1960s to mid-1980s, but, alas, has not disappeared altogether.
In all of these cases, the progressives have cynically tried to wrap the comforting mantle of religious feeling around decidedly unreligious or even anti-religious ideologies. I guess it does make for better PR than a call for the confiscation of all private property, the revocation of all personal freedoms, and the reduction of religion to quaint, entertaining ritual bereft of moral authority.