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Here are some interesting tidbits. And there's an interesting irony here.
Here's an especially interesting finding: The current war is not only bringing out the Jew-haters in America but also in Europe. Yesterday, one of Norway's leading writers, Jostein Gaarder, author of best-seller "Sophie's World," with 26 million copies in print, wrote an astonishing op-ed in Aftenposten, Norway's leading paper. It's called "God's Chosen People."
One synoptic illustration of this is described below.
The celebrated Norwegian writer, Jostein Gaarder, regarded as a friend of the Jewish people, marks The Second Lebanon War as a turning point. Gaarder (2006) was in fact so shocked he wrote: "It is time to learn a new lesson: We do no longer recognize the state of Israel. We could not recognize the South African apartheid regime, nor did we recognize the Afghan Taliban regime. Then there were many who did not recognize Saddam Hussein's Iraq or the Serbs' ethnic cleansing. We must now get used to the idea: The state of Israel in its current form is history."
In this book, The Tyranny of Guilt, Pascal Bruckner (2012) disapprovingly quotes that the Jews, who were victims of a ruthless order, impose their ruthless order on the Palestinians. Even more pertinently, he then quotes, disapprovingly again, from a piece by the Norwegian philosopher Jostein Gaarder who wrote: "Behaving like a people chosen by God is not only stupid and arrogant, but a crime against humanity. We call that racism."
Of course, the irony is not lost on us. But let's put these assertions to the test. Most especially, the assertion that the biggest antisemites are the Jews themselves.
Trust me the irony of that statement is not lost on me. It is not lost on others either.Asked in an interview with an Italian news channel about Russian claims that it invaded Ukraine to “denazify” the country, Lavrov said Ukraine could still have Nazi elements even though its president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, is Jewish. “In my opinion, Hitler also had Jewish origins, so it doesn’t mean absolutely anything. For some time we have heard from the Jewish people that the biggest antisemites were Jewish,” he said, speaking to the station in Russian, and dubbed over by an Italian translation.
https://archive.ph/WkZhb
As is correctly pointed out here, throughout Jewish tradition, the origin of hatred of Jewish arch-enemies is the most primitive sort: animosities are rooted in clan-based feuds. The despised are actually blood-related with common, not so terribly distant, ancestors. As noted, the Israelite patriarch Abraham had two sons: Isaac and Ishmael. Isaac is considered by modern day Jews to represent the Jewish lineage; Ishmael, even according to Islamic tradition, fathered the Arab line. In the Jewish family tree, Isaac's sons were Jacob and Esau: Esau is a kind of symbolic patriarch of all Gentiles. Only the children of Jacob are considered to continue the Jewish line. Esau fathered Eliphaz, who in turn fathered Amalek, the most-hated enemy in Jewish tradition. For purposes here, suffice it to note -- as startling as it may sound -- that the Old Testament commands Jews to "blot out the memory" of him by exterminating all his descendants. Amalek is, hence, actually not that terribly remote from the Jewish bloodline: he was the great-great grandson of Abraham.
Even more troubling, the Old Testament asserts that "the Lord will be at war with Amalek throughout the ages." "Amalekites," notes the Oxford Dictionary of the Jewish Religion, "were regarded as Israel's inveterate foes, whose annihilation became a sacred obligation ... Only after the final destruction of the Amalekites will God and his throne be complete." A disturbing modern perspective on the Amalekites is their reinvention in some Orthodox and Zionist Jewish minds as Arabs and any other non-Jews, or even Jews, that are understood to want to "destroy" Israel. Michael Asheri's Amalek, for instance, is generic Germans. "Amalek is also an ideology that denies Israel's unique mission in perfecting the world," wrote Shlomo Riskin in 1996. "The spiritual heirs of Amalek include the Nazis, the Soviet Communists and Moslem fundamentalists."
To read more about Amalek, click here.
Oh the irony of ironies.
You can't get more iconic than that.
As if that wasn't ironic enough, both (of the two distinct Hebrew societies) were originally Canaanite, and that's the irony of ironies here, Finkelstein and Silberman rightly observe.
Biblical diatribes against the Canaanites suggest this common origin; after all, the Israelites protested too much.
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