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    From Judaism to Fascism: How Zionists Turned Their Backs on Their Own Culture 📂 Archived Message

    Posted by sashimi on July 17, 2021, 7:47 am

    Eleanor Goldfield, July 15th 2021

    (quote)
    WASHINGTON - In late June of this year, New Scientist blandly reported that the
    Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) had "used a swarm of small drones to locate,
    identify and attack Hamas militants," the first documented case of a drone swarm
    being used in so-called combat.

    In his book, "Exterminate All The Brutes," Sven Lindqvist contextualizes Adolf
    Hitler's atrocities in the imperialist violence of the nineteenth century, and
    in one chapter outlines how European artillery advancements gave colonizers both
    emotional and physical distance from the indigenous Africans they
    slaughtered. Europeans were an "invisible and unreachable opponent," capable of
    being "victorious without even being present." This can't really be called
    combat, and indeed even Winston Churchill referred to it as "only a sporting
    element in a splendid game." Combat was something gentlemen did and in the
    imperialist mindset, of course, the Africans were savages, barely even human.

    There's a thread that links this kind of "sport" from the atrocities in Africa
    to the Holocaust and now, so ironically, to the state of Israel.

    Your Lebensraum, my Lebensraum
    In the 1890s, a German zoologist named Friedrich Ratzel coined the term
    "Lebensraum," which literally translates to living space. Those who have studied
    the Holocaust might be familiar with it as the Third Reich's reasoning for
    invading Central and Eastern Europe. Well, this is where they got the
    idea. Besides the European Scramble for Africa, Ratzel had been inspired by his
    travels to North America, where he saw how white colonizers were taking land by
    force. Seeing this as a positive and indeed necessary transgression, Ratzel
    fashioned a brutal Darwinian ideology: in order to acquire sufficient
    Lebensraum, inferior races have to be displaced, which incidentally often means
    they will die and leave the space entirely. Sounds familiar, doesn't it?

    The whole concept of Zionism is that Jews need specific and exclusive
    Lebensraum. Therefore, others must be displaced. This displacement, far from
    being a negative or even cruel endeavor, merely proves the supremacy of the
    displacer, thereby proving the necessity of exterminating the displaced. As
    Lindqvist writes "during Hitler's childhood, a major element in the European
    view of mankind was the conviction that 'inferior races' were by nature
    condemned to extinction; the true compassion of the superior races consisted in
    helping them on the way."

    During the Holocaust, Jews were an 'inferior race.' Today in Israel,
    Palestinians are an 'inferior race.' As reporter and The Electronic Intifada
    Associate Editor Nora Barrows-Friedman told me when I asked her how Zionists
    respond to Jewish teachings of solidarity with the oppressed: "When you talk to
    Zionists about Jewish teachings and how that relates to the Palestinians, they
    say 'well we're not oppressing them, they're not even people,'" a line that
    could have easily been taken from Hitler himself. And when Adolf was still just
    a young lad in Austria, that same sub-human paradigm fueled the celebratory
    reports of European barbarity in Africa, as well as the U.S. and Canadian
    genocide of indigenous peoples in North America.

    It's important to place Israel's atrocities in historical context, for we can
    only know where we are by understanding where we've been. Hitler did not exist
    in an ideological vacuum. He simply looked around at the world he was born into
    and pulled from already existing ideologies, tried and true tactics. He was
    inspired by people like imperialist sycophant Ratzel, who was inspired by the
    U.S. Hitler too was a big fan of U.S. domestic policy, not least of all the Jim
    Crow laws that he simply repackaged into yellow fabric Stars of David. Even the
    concentration camp predates Hitler's rise to power. The concept was originally
    used by Spaniards in Cuba then moved north to the U.S., then across the pond to
    England during the Boer War, and finally a hop and a skip down to Germany. And
    today, the U.S. carries on that tradition via the PR-polished "detention
    centers" for migrants.

    Zionists were likewise inspired by their socio-political surroundings and, as
    Barrows-Friedman notes, "were explicit about their colonialist aims. In the
    original documents that Zionists drew up, they specifically say 'this is a
    colonial project,'" she explains. "Everyone was doing the colonialism thing, and
    they [Zionists] wanted in on it." This wasn't about 'going home.' Yes, some Jews
    have always lived in the area now known as Israel, and there were plenty living
    there quite peacefully as Palestinians up until 1948. Jews have also lived
    almost everywhere else. We are not a people without a home; we are a people with
    many homes.

    Zionism and supremacy: paying oppression forward
    Indeed, this concept of borderless solidarity is something that has inspired
    many Jews to be active in liberation and justice movements. And while Zionism is
    packaged as the need for a safe space for Jews, it's clear that this wasn't
    about safety. There is no safety in terrorism. Rather, it was about
    supremacy. Having been shunned from so many communities for so long warped the
    perspectives of some Jews into believing that what they really needed wasn't
    basic human rights but the right to thwart others' basic human rights. The drive
    to climb the blood-soaked ladder of imperialism, to no longer be on the bottom
    rungs, shrouded not only their humanity but their own cultural teachings.

    For those who haven't had the pleasure of attending a Seder (you're always
    welcome to my house for our anti-capitalist, anti-Zionist extravaganza!), the
    primary theme of the evening is "don't be an oppressive asshole, for you know
    what it is to have assholes oppress you." I'm paraphrasing, but that's the basic
    gist. And Passover is just one example. Throughout Jewish traditions and
    teachings, the voices and experiences of the oppressed are uplifted in order to
    highlight the need for Jews to not just stand up for our own human rights, but
    for the human rights of all. We were exiled, we were driven out, we were
    genocided, we were persecuted just for being ourselves. Our place is therefore
    in the struggle for a world beyond those atrocities. None are free till all are
    free. To be Jewish is to be a fighter for liberation, for justice. As
    Barrows-Friedman explains, "the term 'Never Again' is not selective. It has to
    be universal."

    How Zionism is profoundly anti-Semitic
    Zionism is therefore anti-Semitic - in both theory and practice. First and as
    noted above, it flies in the face of Jewish teachings and traditions. Second, it
    suggests that we only belong in one place - that we are not welcome in places
    that we have learned to call home, from New York to Shanghai. It pigeon-holes us
    into a homogeneous monolith, a singular stereotype. These points were the main
    drivers of the loud Jewish tradition of anti-Zionism. Again, inspired by
    teachings and experience, many Jews in early twentieth-century Europe were loud
    and proud leftists.

    As John Merriman writes in his book "Ballad of the Anarchist Bandits," a popular
    term for Jews in turn-of-the-20th-century Europe was "Cosmopolitan Anarchists."
    Which I actually really love. These Jews were vehemently opposed to the ideas of
    imperialism, nationalism and colonialism - aspects they saw as intricately
    linked with any sort of Zionist endeavor. Furthermore, they didn't like the idea
    of appeasing anti-Semites in Europe by just disappearing. As one early
    twentieth-century poster shared in a recent interview with scholar Benjamin
    Balthaser asserts, "Where we live, there is our country!" Yet, appeasing
    anti-Semites was a cornerstone of Zionism from the beginning. Theodore Herzl,
    known as the 'father of modern political Zionism,' wrote in his diaries that
    "[t]he anti-Semites will become our most dependable friends, the anti-Semitic
    countries our allies." To quote my Jewish grandmother, "What a schmuck."
    (/quote)
    -- Cont'd at https://www.mintpressnews.com/from-judaism-to-zionism-turned-their-backs-on-their-own-culture/277960/

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