Asked by an audience member how Diaspora Jews can trust what they read in the news about Israel, Schneeweiss said: “I suggest supplementing news sources. If you just read Canadian news, supplement it with Israeli news, but also, don’t just read Ha’aretz. Read different points of view.”
Benmergui interjected: “Read the Arab and Palestinian press… part of our Jewish experience is to love the other, the stranger.”To be clear, reading the Arab and Palestinian press today is akin to reading Der Stürmer.
See, you can "love" 'em all you want, Ralph. That doesn't mean they won't want to wipe you off the face of the Earth just for being Jewish.
5 comments:
The real irony of the thing is that the mainstream of Jewish thought used to be more self-protective. That's why the followers of the "turn the other cheek" guy split off under the persecution of the Romans et al. Now the Jews (like this guy) who are in the midst of losing their Jewish identity try to pretend that they are more Christian than Christians.
It's that "tikkun olam"/"social justice" stuff. It has turned them into Jewish Quakers.
That's a lot of it, but then Tikkun Olam means perfecting the world and I suppose its an attitudinal thing on my part but I tend to feel that a greater part of perfecting the world is ridding it of those who want to do damage to innocent people...
It's a worldview thing, I think. The great Thomas Sowell has unpacked it in several books. It's about those who have a "tragic vision" (i.e. conservatives) and those who have a "vision of the anointed" (i.e. those "go-getters" on the left, who think there is no problem that they, in their infinite wisdom, can't fix, and no misunderstanding that can't be resolved when they haul out their "big guns"--empathy and love).
Yes! The absurd arrogance of the progressive! So full of tears and and the milk of human kindness they slosh when they walk. They forget (or were never taught) that they are only three or four generations away from the Jews that were rousted from their homes all over Europe in the wee hours of the morning during the holocaust. Of course, the "civilized" German Jews of the '30s were very full of themselves like these. Many of them were utterly shocked that their cultured German neighbors could treat them that way. They had faith in assimilation and loving the stranger and they saw the Sturmer in a language they were native to and it still made no impression on their "vision of the anointed". The shtetel Jews to the east had no such illusions. They were reminded of The tragic vision every day of their lives. Some of them mounted resistance but were overtaken by numbers and armaments.
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