WHILE I'M CERTAIN that there are things Rabbi Shapiro and I would disagree about, a few, and I'll note that again A FEW aspects of sexual morality, gender roles and, of course, that I'm a Christian and he's an Orthodox Jew, his honesty and clarity of thought as well as his clearly diligent scholarship and reasoning impresses me ever more every time I listen to one of his talks. Unfortunately his book, "The Empty Wagon: Zionism's Journey from Identity Crisis to Identity Theft" is outside of my budget and longer than I'd feel capable of taking on right now.
In looking more deeply into the lie that anti-zionism is antisemitism, the clearly dishonest though largely successful lie campaign to equate the two to the extent that, as Rabbi Shapiro points out, someone taken as being as credible as Deborah Lipstadt is taken to be, can call Jews "antisemites" because they oppose zionism and are critical of the state of Israel. Lipstadt tap danced around an answer to that direct question in a weasely way by claiming that "the jury was out" on that issue, so as to say that not only Jews but the most observant of Jews, the most dedicated to Judaism can be anti-Jewish which should impeach her as an honest voice in the discussion but, as he also shows, she's far from alone in being so dishonest.
If zionism were an honest ideology, its defense wouldn't force scholars who certainly know when they are lying to lie through their teeth, in public, on the record. If academic credentials carried an obligation to tell the truth there would be some mechanism for removing university credentials from those holding those credentials who use their alleged authority to lie so flagrantly and maliciously though, from the start, academia was never much a moral proposition outside of some seminaries attached to specific denominations - and a lot of them were no more honest about guaranteeing the validity of the credentials they issue. They didn't remove the academic credentials but they, sometimes, removed other credentials from them. I have to say that academic credentialing is something that has plummeted in my regard since the turn of the century and I went online to read more of the babble of such college grad.
I can't claim that Rabbi Shaprio's answers to the many aspects of the question brought to him by the interviewer are neat and succinct in the desired modern American mode - which is unfortunate because Americans aren't, by and large, deep thinkers with great powers of concentration or even a long attention span, and I am directly talking to a couple of the jerks who troll me when I say that.
But his answer is the best one I've yet heard so I'm posting it. The definition of "antisemitism" he comes up with as opposed to the phony, polemical one that the IHRA has pushed so as to protect the criminals of the Israeli government and military as they commit genocide and crimes against humanity is vastly superior to that one which has been made de facto law of the land and the lying corporate media. As he points out, it was the genuine definition of the word, one that not only appeared in dictionaries of the English language BUT WAS SET OUT IN AT LEAST ONE HANDBOOK OF CAMPUS PRO-ISRAELI PROPAGANDA BEFORE THE NEW ONE WAS ADOPTED. He also says something that I've pointed out here a number of times, states don't have rights, human beings have rights, no state has a "right to exist." I feel especially vindicated in what I said because he is such a deep and honest and rational thinker and I don't get much occasion for having my ideas vindicated so authoritatively.
I would recommend listening at least once, I intend to listen a number of times and may go to the effort of editing the entire machine made transcript for posting in the future.
No comments:
Post a Comment