Terra Incognita 54 Addiction, Nudity, the white man and Jewish charities

Terra Incognita
Issue 54
“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”

A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel

Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/

September 27th, 2008

1) Nudity and 'expression': Why is it the only way people in our secular culture can express themselves, especially women, is to do something in the nude? Whether it is Amanda Beard, the female Olympic swimming champion posing nude and declaring it to be the high point of her life or PETA’s endless nude female antics such as the ‘State of the Union undress’ or someone named ‘Earth Friend Gen’ who skates nude in Seattle, we suffer a daily barrage of nudity in the name of originality. Yet its not original. Everything in our society is vulgar, sexual and nude. It would be original if women could express themselves by keeping their clothes on in front of the camera, not removing them.

2) Addicted: Our media, and by extension our society, suffers from an addiction to Semites. Not just any old Semites, but those called ‘Israelis’ and ‘Palestinians’. The most minor, insignificant events in Israel and the Palestinian territories make it to the front or second pages of major newspapers and media outlets such as the New York Times, the Economist or the BBC. Whether is the dead baby girl, Rose, or the pipe bomb at Prof. Sternhell’s house or some Palestinian homosexuals or Fulbright scholars denied exit visas. The only way to cure an addiction is to quit it, cold turkey. We need a hiatus from coverage of the Israelis and Palestinians. The Middle East conflict is the greatest drug known to mankind.

3) Can Islam Save the White Man? Racist as it sounds, the decline of the ‘white man’ is one of the great themes of the 20th century. Through discussions of ‘white privilege’, affirmative action, the disappearance from education of the oft-called ‘dead white man’s history’ and the concentration on multi-culturalism and diversity, the white man has lost his power both in terms of the historical narrative and under the law. But with the rise of Islam and it becoming the ‘most favored minority’ the white man has a new chance to redeem himself and celebrate imperialism, slavery and god. All he has to do is convert to Islam and he can once again glory in his past and be loved at home. He can even dust off those old KKK robes because now blowing up gays, Jews and blacks isn’t racist, its just the act of a militant with a legitimate grievance such as ‘occupation’.




4) The Jewish Charity: Helping Arabs: The chancellor of the Conservative Jewish movement in the U.S recently declared that “The time has come for Israel to imagine a role in the Jewish state not only for Jews, but for non-Jews as well…Zionist theoreticians spoke mainly about Jews and I think that it is time to go beyond that in the name of a Jewish state, and create a role for minorities in the Jewish state.” This has become the mantra among almost all well known Jewish charities in the world, from the JDC to the New Israel Fund. For them the most important community in Israel is the Arabs. Leave it to Jews to create a country and then discover that the most important people in that country are a people that already have 22 other countries that they dominate. How did Jews manage to create a national movement and then decide that the most important part of that national movement is not helping the 13 million Jews in the world but making sure the 250 million Arabs and 1.3 billion Muslims feel good about themselves and have enough charity?

Nudity and 'expression'
Seth J. Frantzman
September 22nd, 2008

Why is it the only way people in our secular culture can express themselves, especially women, is to do something in the nude? Whether it is the photographer who has thousands of naked people on bicycles or operas and theatre with nudes or PETA's nude campaign against eating meat everything in our culture boils down to one thing: if you are naked you are 'expressing' yourself. This is one of the great lies of modernity. It conflates nudity in public, something that is not the norm, with the idea that the very existence of something that is not normal means it is therefore an act of intelligence that means something. Think of the State of the Union Undress that PETA carried out and broadcasted live for all to download. This was supposed to be ohhh-so-original. It, of course, featured a large breasted white college age woman, probably a 'feminist'. Who else would strip naked and call it 'expression'. But that is our culture. That is our society, that is the cesspool we are forced to live in. People conflate nudity with being 'counter culture' because they claim that 'conservative' Christians are against nudity and thus in order to fight 'fundamentalists' one must be nude. One saw the same thing in an often told story about the campaign of Pym Fortuyn in Holland before he was gunned down. He was the openly gay flamboyant man who ran for office opposing the creeping Islamization of his country. He was killed in 2002 by an animal rights activist-turned assassin. But before he was killed he was often out campaigning. At one point a woman supposedly addressed him from below his balcony pointing at her partially exposed chest saying "this is why I support you, for my right to dress like this." Here we see once again the confusion of two things. The main reason to fight against the Islamization in society is not to protect the ability of western women to go about nude in public. If that’s the only thing one finds troubling about Islam then we must seriously consider why we oppose Islamization of society. The opposite of the Burka is not the nude person.

In a recent case a woman was skating nude in Portland, Oregon. The newspaper article relates that "The skater, Gennifer Moss, aka Earth Friend Gen, asked organizers for permission this summer to skate naked in the city of Ashland's Fourth of July parade." On September 18th the New York Times included the article 'Nudity and opera stars: how much is too much?' The article sums up the issue; " Nudity is coming to opera. In recent years, with all the talk from general managers, stage directors and go-for-broke singers about making opera as dramatically visceral an art form as theater, film and modern dance, traditional boundaries of decorum have been broken. Opera productions have increasingly showcased risk-taking and good-looking singers in bold, sexy and explicit productions." The article goes on to explain " And yes, during her uninhibited and kinetically choreographed performance of the "Dance of the Seven Veils," she shed item after item of a Marlene Dietrich-like white tuxedo costume until, in an exultant - and brief - final flourish, she twirled around half-crazed and totally naked." See, the nudity is really about pushing those 'traditional boundaries' and it is 'bold.'
But the author of this piece also admits the truth: " There is no question that in many plays explicit nude scenes have been used to compensate for shallow writing or simply to lure people into seats…. choreographers have to be careful not to use naked dancers to inject an easy jolt of eroticism into a mediocre piece… the director teases you with glimpses of flesh." In the end the truth is that the nudity is not pertinent or central to the show and yet it exists merely to 'push boundaries' and put the audience in their seats. But it's all under the guise of being original. Every film today includes nudity, mostly by women, and yet we are still expected to believe that all the sex and soft-core porn encountered in our daily lives in magazines, movies and TV is really so 'original'. It would be more original if the opera forced the audience to be naked while the performers were clothed. But true originality and boldness always escapes the vapid modern culture of our time that seeks base originality and fake 'boundary breaking' in order to make us believe that we are intellectuals. But you can't get away from the nudity. Every book of art and photography is full of it. Every art school has nude models, almost all women of course. And why are they all women? Would not sketching a nude man develop the artist as much as sketching some $10 an hour female college student who poses for this 'art'. We know, in our hearts, why it is only women. Because all the quest for the 'breaking of boundaries' and 'originality' and 'art' is a lie. It is a lie because it is primarily only about a society in which a woman's only way of 'expressing herself' is to be nude. And we create this make believe whereby this is some 'value' which we must fight for lest Islam deny our women this 'right'. The banal society of 'open minded' women 'expressing themselves' by being naked has infected everyone to such an extent that there are few women in any professions who don't feel that in the end their real value must be in posing for people to look at them nude. Whether it is the Australian women's national soccer team, which posed for a nude calendar, or Amanda Beard, the U.S Olympic swimmer who said, after winning her Olympic medal and deciding to pose nude, that the offer to pose nude was the 'high point' in her life. Or all the movies glorifying the 'independence' and 'originality' of some strip tease, whether it was the film 'Striptease', or 'Closer' or 'Showgirls' or 'Dancing at the Blue Iguana' or 'Mrs. Henderson presents'. Because in our society a woman who achieves a gold medal, well that’s not so important, but if she can be in Playboy, or perhaps be a model, that is the high point in her life. Of course it is. What else would one expect from a 'feminist' society? But how did Israel try to convince people that it was a 'cool' country a year or so ago? It took a bunch of its female IDF soldiers and let them volunteer to pose partially nude for Maxim magazine. Because that is the message that needs to be sent to female soldiers: being a soldier is not an important job, but if you can show off your body for men, now that’s an important job.

That’s our liberal society. It’s the society we are all so proud of. But what is there to be proud of? A fake society of people who convince themselves that nudity in opera is 'breaking boundaries' and that skating nude is some form of 'expression' and the being a stripper is a form of 'independence' and that posing nude for Playboy is a higher calling than the Olympics or being on the national soccer team. And its all in the form of smarmy people calling it 'original' and 'brave' and 'bold' and 'sensational'. But its not sensational. Its not sensational at all. Every halfway decent looking woman in America has been photographed nude somewhere, most likely on spring break, dancing in a wet t-shirt contest for a free T-shirt. There is nothing original in any of it. It would be original if a woman could go through her life without being an exhibitionist and without convincing herself that she is 'breaking' some 'boundary' by being nude and stripping on a bar for a bunch of drunk men. After all, the only real test of all of it is to ask, 'do men do it?' If the answer is no then there is nothing original in a woman doing it. And don't say its because the males lack good bodies, because there is no doubt that Michael Phelps has as sculpted a body as Ms. Beard, the only difference is that he doesn't see his highest point in life as posing nude for a bunch of salivating men and women. Imagine what we would say, and how we would laugh, if Mr. Phelps was asked to pose nude for a gay men's magazine and he described this as being his proudest moment in his life. And then imagine why we didn't have the same disbelief at Ms. Beard's statement and all the baggage and idiocy it carries with it for women in the West.




Addicted
Seth J. Frantzman
September 8th, 2008

The world suffers from an addiction. It is an addiction to Semites. Not all Semites. Just those Semites called ‘Israelis and Palestinians’. The Economist and the BBC are two good bellweathers of this addiction. They are both read throughout the world and both present international coverage. For the September 6th edition of the Economist if one examines the coverage of the Middle East and Africa (an area with some 60 countries) one finds that two of the stories, out of five, are about Israel and the West Bank. One is about how Israel is trying to court tourists through presenting itself “hip, cool, cultured, fun and creative.’ Then it is time for ‘The Villagers hemmed in: The Israelis secruity barrier continues to threaten Palestinian livelihoods.’ But, lest one were to think that Israel only shows up under reporting about the region it exists in, we find that in the book review section there is also a review of a book about Israel and Iran. Week in and week out it is the same story. Book reviews are more often then not about Israel and the Palestinians, whether it is another Palestinian memoir, or a book about the ‘ruined’ landscape of Palestine or ‘Israeli fiction’, Israel and the Palestinians are always there. A whole world of books must be pushed aside so that the addiction can be met, just as someone will sell their house and throw away their fammily for their addiction to heroin or cocaine. In the ‘Middle East and Africa’ section genocides and famines are ignored so that people can learn about the plight of one homosexual Palestinian who can’t come to Israel or a few Gaza students who can’t leave to study in the U.S. On August 9th it was ‘Israel: Gang warfare, in the courts’ and a story on which American president would be best for the ‘Arab’ which is to say ‘Palestinians.’ On August 30th it was “The Gaza Strip: Ceasefire plus blockade.’

The addiction manifests itself in the same manner on the BBC. The BBC not only reports the most minor incidents that take place in Israel and the Palestinian areas but manages to report the most insugnificant things about Palestinians elsewhere. For instance, while millions of Iraqis struggle for daily subsistence, we must learn that Iceland is taking in a few Palestinian refugee families from Iraq (“Iraq Palestinians head to Iceland: 30 Palestinians living in…”. That’s surely more important than all of Iraq. And on September 7th there were two photo essays on Palestinians. One on Palestinian schools in East Jerusalem (“when it comes to education, East Jerusalem remains a class apart.”) and another on one Palestinian’s journey from his home in Ramallah to the Temple Mount to pray for Ramadan. Surely his journey is more interesting than some Muslim African who has come all the way from Zanzibar. And surely those four schools in East Jerusalem are more important than the million other schools scattered throughout the Middle East. But the next day, September 8th, the photo essay was on, what a surprise, ‘Soldiering on: Mahmud Abbas on the frustrations of seeking Peace.’ And on September 10th what is the story on the side of the BBC webpage, the feature? ‘US Artiste says he was made to dance at Israeli airport.’ But that is what addiction does. The drug becomes everything and the world around the drug addict slowly fades away. Everything becomes about the next high and how one will get there.

The fact that the international sections of most newspapers and news programs, especially when it comes to the Middle East, tell only the story of Israel and the Palestinians shows the degree to which the West is truly addicted to this story. It needs its daily dose of it. Even when there is no news the teams of reporters stationed in Jerusalem as sent to find or manufacture a story. They find a few Arabs living in a house somewhere and create some story about them. They tramp out to the West Bank and find some bedouins in a hovel and create a story. Everyday the addict must find his high, he needs his fix, and in today’s western world that fix is called ‘Israel and the Palestinians’.

But how does one stop an addiction? What is the cure? Lest man overdose from his obsession with these people in the Middle East, he should first try to quit. The way to quit an addiction is to go cold turkey, to stop entirely. One must wake up and read the Economist and the BBC and not find any stories about the ‘conflict’ or the ‘Palestinians’ or ‘Israel’. Surely it will be hard for a few days because the media doesn’t know how to report about other places. But the media might discover that there are hundreds of millions of people out there that have been ignored, because the addiction has made it so man cannot see them. Addicts who come out of their addiction speak of that first time walking down the street without being high and seeing the beauty of the world. That world, so often ignored, can be seen again by the media. Will the readers miss the stories about that single Palestinian homosexual or those three Gaza students or that one Jerusalemite Arab family being evicted. Yes, they too will miss the addiction, the need to find fault in a country so far away at the expense of the injustices taking place around them daily. It will be hardest in Europe where a generation has been raised on the addiction, sort of like children of women addicted to crack. This generation of Europeans knows only about the lives of those two Palestinian students or that one homosexual Palestinian in Ramallah, they will be fascinated the first time they realize that right in their own backyard, in London or Paris, that, loe and behold, there are poor people denied visas to study abroad and people being evicted and homosexual men being beaten up because they live in a poor Muslim neighbourhood.

The greatest thing to see, if the world can cure itself of its addiction, is to see how people will pick up a newspaper and read a story about the injustice in their own society and realize that they have been addicted, for so long, to hearing about how evil another society is, that they have ignored the things that have festered beneath their very eyes.

Can the world and the media cure itself of its addiction? Can it provide coverage of the world and not include those words “Israel” and “the conflict” and “the Palestinians”? Can the media truly cut itself off from showing more and more pictures of ‘Arab children’ and ‘Palestinian women’ and ‘Mahmud, an elderly Palestinian man’? Probably the addiction cannot be beaten. It is so integral to our lives, so many have grown up with it, that it will probably be impossible to live without. It is the greatest drug known to mankind: ‘The Arab-Israeli conflict’.



Can Islam save the white man?
Seth J. Frantzman
September 8th, 2008

In the aftermath of the 1960s the white man has become a less than popular species. Whether it is the rise of feminism and African-American studies or post-colonialism, moral relativism and post-modernism the role of the white man in the West has been in a steady decline. From affirmitive action to multi-culturalism and diversity he is no longer the top of the roost. Whether it is critiques of ‘white privildge’ or the condemnation of history as ‘dead white men’ the role of the white man and his history and the Christian religion has been increasingly marginalized.

But is there a way to redeem the white man? Could Islam grant him a path to renewed dominance and approval? In a controversial episode that gained some media attention in 2007 there was a story of a Muslim mosque in Texas and how the local bigoted intolerant Christian white townspeople decided to start holding pig races near it. The controversy was that Muslims find pigs offensive. The television crew went down to Texas to find the victimized Muslims who were being discriminated against by intolerant white trash. They found the Muslim leader of the mosque. He was a convert. He was originally an overweight white redneck. But now he was a Muslim. He spoke with the same Texas twang. But now he had a 20 year old Morrocan wife who was completely obedient and covered up. He still enjoyed shooting his rifle. He apparently obstained from drinking but everything else in his life remained the same. Here was the overweight white hick, usually portrayed as a racist chauvinist, but now he had become the victim and a member of America’s Most Favored Minority (MFM), Islam.

It didn’t take him much. He said some simple declaration such as ‘La La Il Allah, Muhamed Resu Allah’ and he was suddenly a victim. Suddenly at airports if he was searched he was a victim. Suddenly if he wanted to marry a girl half his age it was part of his culture and if he wanted to marry a few women he was no longer a ‘Mormon polygamist’ but a wonderful exotic Muslim. Suddenly if he spoke like a chauvinist about women staying at home people listened and called it ‘culture’. Suddenly if he hated abortion he wasn’t a ‘right wing Republic fundamentalist’ but a man practicing his culture. Now if his wife averted her eyes and was never seen it was part of their culture and exotic tradition. Now this white man was a professional victim, an interesting wonderful minority whose values would be respected at his school if, for instance, he didn’t want the Holocaust or homosexuality taught to his children. Suddenly if he had faith and spoke about God people listened and wanted to learn more. Suddenly if he showed up at a dinner party hosted by wealthy liberals in the city he wasn’t an unwanted ‘racist’ but a wonderful exotic piece of diversity. But he hadn’t changed. He had just said a few words.

After the white man converts to Islam all those pieces of history that were formerly not interesting suddenly become interesting. While Jefferson’s slave owning might be reviled, if instead he wants to uphold the slave owning of his white ancestors in Arabia than it is exotic and wonderful. While if he wanted to relish in the story of slave traders bringing slaves from Ghana to the Americas in the 19th century he would be called ‘racist’, if he instead wanted to relish in the story of white Muslim slavers bringing Africans from Zanzibar to Yemen it would be called ‘fascinating’. Suddenly worshipping leaders who had multiple wives and were deeply religious was interesting. Suddenly telling heroic stories of battles wasn’t ‘militaristic’ but part of his culture and ‘tradition’. And if he was sort of racist, calling blacks ‘Kaffir’ or ‘Abd’ (slave) it wasn’t ‘racist’ but also part of his ‘culture’ because Kaffir means ‘infidel’ and everyone knows that there is no racism in Islam. If he supported the genocide in Darfur by the white Arabs suddenly it wasn’t racist because as every good liberal knows the conflict in Darfur isn’t about ‘race’, its about resources and its due to ‘global warming’. Suddenly if he supported the Aprtheid regimes in the Gulf Arab states where the countries are governed by a white Arab elite and immigrants make up the vast majority of the people and the labourers, it wasn’t considered Apartheid but a glittering wonder called ‘Dubai’, a respectable place to vacation. And if in his culture there was unequal distribution of wealth their was no critque by leftist socialists but it was held up instead as a success of ‘Arab socialism’. If women had no rights it was not a cause for feminism but a cause for celebration and feminists even donned headscarves out of respect for his ‘culture’. If he hated gays it wasn’t called ‘intolerance’ but instead it was called ‘cultural’. If he stoned women to death for adultery or cut off the heads of criminals it was also cultural. If he hated ‘witches’ and hit his children it was his ‘culture’. If he loved the death penalty it was applauded by leftists as part of his ‘culture’. Suddenly secular society wanted to help him celebrate his holidays which became the most interesting exotic things because they had names like Ramadan and Eid. Now instead of people scoffing at the miracles of Jesus they were interested in how the Jesus was a prophet. Suddenly his art, under the guise of Islamic art, and his civilization, under the guise of Islamic civilization were wonderful. Now imperialism was wonderful and when he regalled people with the tales of ‘Muslim Spain’ or the ‘Ottoman’ and ‘Mughal Empires,’ people were enthralled about the empire. Now when he called Jews ‘dogs’ it was part of his culture and people wanted to learn more.

The savior of the white race can be found in Islam. While the KKK is considered a terrorist organization so long as it calls itself Christian if it were to call itself ‘Al Jihad al Quds’ it could wear the same white hoods and have the same meetings and then its cross burning and bombings of black churches and lynchings would’nt be racist terrorism but rather a ‘militant’ Jihad and any attempt to suppress it would be said to lead to a ‘cycle of violence’ and be ‘playing into its hands’.

If you want to hate abortion and gays and have four wives and beat them and love slavery and imperialism there is nothing wrong with it so long as you call yourself Muslim. Its only a matter of time before affirmitive action is given to Muslims and unlike with making one’s skin black (a process that is near to impossible) the white man can easily take advantage of this affirmitive action. Whites found it hard to take advantage of becoming gay in order to gain victimhood and MFM status. Between 1990 and 2001 when the gay minority were supreme most whites felt that changing one’s sexual orientation was a hard bridge to cross just to become a victim in the eyes of the media. But the gays are old school now. They are has-beens. Who cares about the gays? Their ‘civil rights’ used to be very important and for a few years we all had to hear about their ‘struggle’ against oppression and learn the story of Matthew Shephard and ‘sexual orientation’ got written into those things one could not discriminate against and they were quite popular on campuses with ‘national coming out day’ and gay parades and ‘drag day’. But the era of the Gays is over. The era of the blacks is at an end as well. Since 2001 we have been living in the era of Islam. But this is all good news for the white man. He has weathered the storm. Forty years or so of learning about African-American rights, women’s rights and gay rights are at an end. Slavery, imperialism, child rape, wife-beating, chauvinism, the death penalty, religion. Its back! All you have to do is the following (from About.com):
Quietly, to yourself, make the intention to embrace Islam as your faith.
Say the following words with clarity of intention, firm faith and belief:
Say: "Ash-hadu an la ilaha Ill Allah." (I bear witness that there is no diety but Allah.)
Say: "Wa ash-hadu ana Muhammad ar-rasullallah." (And I bear witness that Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah.)
Take a shower, symbolically cleansing yourself of your past life.
Learn how to pray and practice Islam in your daily life.
Continue to learn, study, and grow in your new faith
So, white man, are you ready to become a minority again after all these years of being in the dog house? Are you ready for the wine drinking arrogant leftist to love you again? Are you ready for people to want to learn about your culture again? Are tired of being called a ‘hick, redneck, white, hillbilly racist?’ Do you want to hate black people and gays and abortion and have it be considered exotic and ‘cultural’? Do you want to blow up abortion clinics, gay bars and federal buildings and have people call you a ‘militant’? Do you want to hate the Jews and deny the Holocaust and have people love you for it?

Well pick up a gun, cover up your bible with the cover of a Koran and lets be Muslims! Now you can be a victim and your history can be revered and they won’t ever tell you about ‘white privildge’ again. Islam is the way for the white man, it is the path to his redemption.

The Jewish Charity: Helping Arabs
September 22nd, 2008
Seth J. Frantzman

Increasingly the Jewish charity has gone the way of all western charities: helping the other. It is no surprise that this has happaned, perhaps it is suprising it took so long. The primary concern of Jews, especially Jews living in the West, is to help the other. This idea of ‘Tikkun Olam’ has taken the form, especially since the Holocaust, of helping non-Jewish minorities throughout the world and making their causes a ‘Jewish cause’. The rational for this obsession with ‘the other’ is usually the idea that ‘since Jews suffered as a minority, we have a duty to help minorities.’ This mass psychosis primarily affects Jews (Greeks and Armenians living in their diasporas, by contrast, are not infected with this obsession to the same degree).

Causes to which Jews have attached themselves, such as the Civil Rights Movement in the U.S or the Sudanese genocide, have had nothing to do with Jews. But it was perhaps inevitable that Jewish charities would finally realize that the Jewish state, Israel, has minorities that need Jewish emotional attention. It has been argued elsewhere that this new ‘discovery’ of the Arab minority in Israel constitutes the discovery of New Jews, the creation of a Palestinian-Arab-Jew narrative. The basis of most Jewish causes has historically been about creating the idea in people’s minds that some minority group is ‘like the Jews.’ During the Rwandan genocide the Tutsis became the ‘Jews’. The Black minority in the U.S were the ‘Jews’ of the U.S and their discrimination was ‘the same’ as that suffered by Jews in Europe (even down to the claim that ‘since the blacks were slaves’ they are ‘like’ the Jewish slaves of Egypt.) The Sudanese genocide activists suddenly discover that there are ‘new Jews’ in the Sudan. The narrative that creates ‘Jews’ throughout the world is perhaps inevitable since there are no longer any Jewish minorities to defend. The Jews of Europe have become wealthy, assimilated and European. They are now considered ‘white’. When, from time to time, they suffer hate crimes they get some attention, but primarily they have become indistinguishable, so far as Jewish causes are concerned, from the rest of the Europeans. Jews used to be interested in the plight of Jews from Arab countries but these Jews no longer exist and the only thing that can be done is to read more books such as ‘Last Days of Babylon’ and ‘The Man in the white searskin suit’ and romantisize their lives.

So without Jewish minorities to defend in the world and with less and less people in the world who are candidates for being ‘the New Jews’ it is inevitable that the Arabs of Israel would become the ‘New Jews’. It is alarming the degree to which this thinking has penetrated every large Jewish charity. At the JDC headquarters in Jerusalem every other wall is festooned either with pictures of historic JDC operations, pictures of the most blond haired Ashkenazi Jews with some random Ethiopian Jew (the classic ‘coexistence photo), or Arabs. The only photos that depict modern ‘problems’ are the ones dealing with Arabs because besides the ‘coexistence’ photos the others are merely historic. The message is clear. The new Operation Magic Carpet, the New Russian Jews, the new Concentration Camp survivors that must be saved are the Arabs of Israel. There are the typical photos of the Arab women in their headscarves, since one might mistake photos of Arab men for Moroccan Jews, only photos of Arab women with headscarves convey that ‘I am a poor Arab victim, help me’ sensation. But the photos in the JDC HQ aren’t for outsiders to see, it is for local JDC workers to see and absorb. “The New Jews are the Palestinian Arab minority of Israel, they must be saved and it is our job, as Jews, who suffered as minorities in foreign lands, to save them.”

New Jewish charities devoted solely to Arabs pop up everyday. This isn’t about ‘Jews Against Israeli Apartheid’ charities or ‘Not in Our Name’ charities that aid Palestinian nationalism in the West Bank, this is about bonifide charities run by Jews for Arabs in Israel. The New Israel Fund and the Children of Abraham Foundation are the best examples. But what is even more surprising is the degree to which main stream Jewish organizations, councils, agencies, synagouges and think-tanks have decided that the “most important” issue facing the Jewish people and Israel is how to help the Israeli Arabs. It began a year ago with a trip by Jewish leaders to Israel to visit only Arab localities such as Umm El Fahm and to address only Arab issues. While one might have expected such bias from Europeans it was shocking to see it from Jews. That was followed by studies and speeches at places such as the Hartmann institute in Jerusalem claiming that Israel must find a ‘place’ for Arabs in its ‘culture’. This is part of the new rhetoric whereby cultural space is not developed by the culture itself but where the ‘majority’ culture must create the culture of the minority. It is part of the new dialectic of ‘dominant’ and ‘minority’ groups where the minority is seen as so pathetic and dependent that his culture must be created by the majority, it must be studied by the majority and in the end its entire ethos and history must be created by the majority. This was already the case in Israel where 90% of the scholarship devoted to Arabs was written by Jews and much of Palestinian history, especially the most extreme-Arab nationalist part of it, was already written by Jews. Now the message was that the Arab needed his special ‘space’ in society. Who must create the Arab space? Not the Arab, that would be too much to expect, after all he has already created a space for himself in 22 countries, so he does not have the strength to create space for himself in one more.

So on September 20th the Jewish Theological Seminary hosted a conference entitled "Why Israeli Arab issues are so important to Israel's future as a Jewish state." The conference was due to the decision by the Gilboa Regional Council of Israel to award the Gilboa Award for Tolerance and Co-Existence to the Inter-Agency Task Force, composed of 80 Diaspora organizations, including the JTS. A foolish gentile might not understand how this came to be. He might ask how it is possible that the most important issue for the one Jewish state was how to make it more Arab when there were already 22 Arab states. But gentiles don’t understand Jewish logic. So Arnold Eisen, the chancellor of JTS must explain it to them. He said on September 22nd, 2008: “The time has come for Israel to imagine a role in the Jewish state not only for Jews, but for non-Jews as well…I want a Zionism that does not depend on negation of the Diaspora, that is not messianic, that imagines a place for non-Jews in the Jewish state…Zionist theoreticians spoke mainly about Jews and I think that it is time to go beyond that in the name of a Jewish state, and create a role for minorities in the Jewish state…The more that Israeli Arabs see opportunities and see themselves integrated - not assimilated, not disappearing - in the workplace, in housing, in education, in services, the more they will be able to imagine a Jewish state that is more than just a Nakba [‘disaster’] for them….We would just like to help our Israeli brothers get out of the morass.”
See, the main message of Judaism is not about God or Jews or anything like that. Its ‘Tikkun Olam’ or ‘healing the world.’ The main message of Israel has nothing to do with Jews or Zionism, its about Arabs and Arab nationalism and making sure Arabs don’t assimilate. Its about making sure that the existence of a Jewish state isn’t a ‘disaster’ for them and in order to make them stop calling the existence of a Jewish state a ‘disaster’ that state must become Arab. Zionism shouldn’t be about creating a Jewish state (which is what the term actually means) but it should be about helping diaspora Jewry become stronger. Zionism shouldn’t speak about the Messiah because although this word is integral to Jewish tradition it should be thrown out because it implies that Jews might actually live in the land of Israel and that can’t make any sense once Zionism is about the Diaspora and Israel is an Arab state. Zionism, in fact, needs to be about making an Arab Nationalist state, or at least a state modeled on Lebanon, where all the communities are recognized, integrated and coexist.
One wonders what level of education a person must have in order to come up with such a complicated logic that reverses everything in it so that the opposite of what should be becomes the norm. We see this in other western narratives where ‘peace’ has become Nazism and ‘justice’ has become genocide but one might have expected at least a modicum of logic from the JTS. It is, after all, ‘conservative’ Judaism. But conservative can also mean liberal. Anything is possible (the more so now that the U.S Treasury Department in the U.S is on a drunken binge to buy every failing company in sight). So the main message of Zionism is Arabism. The most important issue for Israel is Arabs. The most important issue for Arabs is Arabs. Everything is in line. But perhaps Mr. Eisen is just confused. He said in the same speech, after describing his ‘Zionism’ as being a form of Arab Nationalism that: “I remember in the early days of the conflict my cousin in Afula had her car stoned on her way to work. And I was living in Palo Alto [in California] and no one was stoning my car. I was in a better position to imagine a scenario where Arabs and Jews can live peacefully together.” Perhaps he was driving in a different California, perhaps one in space, than everyone else. He couldn’t have avoided the fact that in 1992 there were the Los Angelos riots. And what year was there also the First Intifada? 1992. Hmmm. Perhaps Mr. Eisen neglected to notice that a few car windows were also smashed in those riots. So perhaps its time he take his head out of the sand and realize that in his own backyard is a big festering racial problem.
How come Jews are the only ones who see the main message of their national movement being to help the other, so that 13 million Jewish people must help 250 million, lest those 250 million and their 22 countries and their religion that has 1.3 billion adherents lose hope and suffer from an inferiority complex. How come the ‘most important issue facing Saudi Arabia’ isn’t its 2 million foreign workers and the ‘most important issue facing Egyptian Nationalism’ isn’t how to empower the Copts and the most important virtue of Islam isn’t ‘helping the world’? But there are Jews who don’t follow the line of reasoning of Eisen. They are called Orthodox which seems a better word for ‘conservative Judaism’ than conservative Judaism. Because Conservative Judaism today is really Arab Nationalism, sort of like European secularism is really Islam. What a wonderful world.