Brian of London, back in Israel again. I’ve been travelling the last couple of weeks (as you’d know if you followed me on my tour of Canada and the USA via Twitter or Facebook). I thought this would be a few lines but it’s turned into a bit of a monster post.
I used to regularly host the Shire Network News podcast. That is on a break but I’m still a consumer of podcasts. There is one podcast that I listen to regularly that often does not reflect my views and which therefore challenges me to think differently. The show is twice weekly, recorded (and broadcast) live “in the morning” on Thursdays and Sundays. It’s called No Agenda and is hosted by John C. Dvorak and Adam Curry, as you’d expect from a consummate radio professional like Curry, the production is extremely good. Time zones mean I rarely listen to the live stream and usually listen to the show within a couple of days of it coming out.
Last Sunday’s show included a brief piece of Adam and John discussing Israel. Here is a short audio extract from the show: 336 NA-336-2011-09-04_israellycool_extract. Now Adam veers toward some of the more outlandish theories of what is going on in the world, some I can broadly get behind (evil elites are running the world) and some I reject completely (the evil elites invent Islamic terrorism to keep us enslaved). John C. Dvorak acts as a foil to these ideas and the combination is usually informative and amusing. The central idea of the show, however, is to look behind the news – to “deconstruct” stories – and find out what’s really going on. They don’t claim to be right all the time, but their willingness to look for the reasons behind a story is a very important lesson.
Nevertheless the subject of Israel does come up from time to time; how can it be avoided, it’s pushed so hard to the front of the news? And this is, of course, where the grinding power of the main stream media meets people who know they’re being lied to but aren’t able to work out precisely why.
But this time Adam asked a very good question: why is Israel in the news so much? I completely agree with the reason for asking the question. Israel is in the news too much and I’ll give Adam my short version of the answer using terms from the No Agenda show and then follow it with the shortest history lesson I can come up with for 4000 years.
The Short Answer
Israel is in the news so much because, to the Islamic world, Israel isn’t just distraction of the week, it’s distraction of the century or more. Arab despots (primarily) need to keep distracting their (mostly) Muslim people from the truly atrocious conditions they live under because if they don’t the despots will end up dead (or running through the desert). Hatred of the Jews is baked into Islam not least because of numerous stories from the life of Muhammad: inciting Muslims to hate Jews starts in the cradle.
Whatever else you think you know about Islam, you’ve probably grasped, by now, that it’s not completely a religion of peace™. Islam can’t accept that any territory once conquered in the name of Islam is no longer ruled over by Muslims. Remember of course, Islam was only founded 1400 years ago so everywhere that is now Muslim, was either Christian, Jewish or Other as recently as 1500 years ago.
And Now The History Lesson
Israel is just such a place. It was “other”, then it was conquered by Jews (we’d say it was given to us), then a mix of Greeks, Babylonians / Persians and most emphatically Romans took it. The Romans were so pissed off with the Jews they wiped the name Israel off the map, replacing it with a word derived from the collective name of the already long dead peoples who’d been there before the Jews: Philistines.
After the fall of the Roman and subsequent Eastern Christian (Byzantine) empires it was conquered by Islam, Christianity (the Crusades) and Islam again and then held in trust briefly by the British until 1948. Some Jews did live here continuously enduring bad times, even worse times and intermittent slaughter and death. My wife can trace ancestors living in Israel back beyond the 1830’s for example.
The Jewish people had been talking about and praying about Israel and Jerusalem non-stop since the Romans had expelled and scattered them 2000 years ago: there’s a nice picture of this on the Titus arch in Rome. Both Israel and Jerusalem are mentioned frequently in all our scriptures and most of our prayers: this is the in-built desire that we call zionism. We never gave up wanting our home back.
Modern Zionism really started properly back in the mid 1800’s. Zionism is nothing more than a fancy name for Jews wanting their own state and to rule over themselves, as Jews, instead of living as a minority among the other nations. Jewish self determination if you like. It’s just a point of linguistic history that a word like Zionism exists: perhaps the Kurds or Tibetans would be doing better in their (very creditable and well established) desires for their own homes if they had succinct words for the ideology of desiring Kurdistan or a Tibet not ruled by the Chinese! Perhaps the world would be caring more about the 100s of Kurds killed in the last couple of weeks by Turkish bombing in Iraq.
Whilst life under Tsars, Caliphs and assorted other despotic rulers around the world had not always been completely unbearable, it was often punctuated by cruel oppression and murder for the Jews. Obviously this Jew hatred reached its apogee with the Nazis. Modern Zionism had tried to establish Israel as a home for the Jews on the land described in the bible prior to 1939 but hadn’t succeeded. After 1945 there was probably no force left on earth that would stop the Jews. Not even the British Empire (exhausted and depleted from fighting Nazis) or the United States could stop it and the Arab and Muslim world was divided and conquered having largely backed the Axis powers in the world. Remember too, this is before the gift of vast oil wealth (with a hefty top slice for the oil companies) was given to the Arabs to use however they saw fit.
Many such as the Mufti of Jerusalem had made a huge effort blackmailing the British and others with violence and threats of violence to keep the Jews from their home as long as possible. In the end the 100,000 survivors of the death camps (yes, that is how many Jews were left in the camps at liberation) combined with the already substantial numbers of Jews in Israel and were joined by more than 800,000 Jewish refugees from Arab and Muslim lands.
So we arrive at today, forget 1967, it’s a side show apart from being a massive military defeat of Arab Muslim armies. Forget “settlements” they’re irrelevant: if Israel gave them all back Jihad and Islam would take it without thanks and carry on with the main aim of avenging all the wrongs Jews did to Mohammad by rejecting him as a prophet, and carry on trying to conquer the whole world for Islam.
Israel isn’t really unique: they want the whole world. It’s just that Americans and other Infidels aren’t mentioned hundreds of times in the Koran and Hadith by name as the bad guys: Jews are. So linking America with the Jews is really very useful for channeling the indoctrinated masses in their hatred.
If you think there is a Jewish conspiracy to control the media, it’s nothing compared to the vast amount of influence that the years of oil wealth have given to the Arabs. This gives us the comparatively recent creation of the Palestinian people, their “narrative” and their invented history supposedly pre-dating Jews. Which joins a false idea that there are no facts, only differing narratives.
But in the end, Jews now live in large numbers in Israel and thankfully we don’t really have to rely on anyone else for our safety anymore. We buy guns from America, with money they give and lend to us (that we must spend back in America) but this more than anything just pisses off the Europeans, at a push we’d be OK without it. It would be nice if we didn’t have to spend so much money on our army, maybe our taxes and the price of cottage cheese would be lower. But until the other side truly believes that Jews can live and run their own lives in Israel, we’ll keep defending our land.
Footnote
You’ll have to listen to a few episodes of No Agenda before you understand this: “I’m hoping that 33 or even 333 new readers will see this in the morning: may you all be hit in the mouth!” Followers of the show know that 33 is a code: John and Adam don’t know what it means, but every time they see it in a news story, they’re suspicious. Well Hebrew has a finely developed study of the numerical significance of letters called “Gematria“. From Joe Settler’s blog comes this study relating to the Palestinian bid for statehood this September:
I pointed out an interesting Gematria to friend Robert this morning.
The Palestinians always like to use the phrase and false claim of “Justice”. And they are now clamoring to be the 194th member state of the UN. Interestingly enough, the word ??? or “Justice” has the Gematria value of 194.
This afternoon friend Robert sent back an interesting response.
????? ?? ??
??? ?????????? ????? ??? ??????????? ????????????? ??????? ?????????? ?????? ??? ??????? ????? ??????????.
Deuteronomy 32:21
They aroused my jealousy with a non-god and provoked me with their vanities; I will arouse their jealousy with a non-people and provoke them with a vile nation.
The Gematria of “?????? ???” a “non-people” or a “non-nation” is 143. (A well-known and accurate description of the “Palestinians”)
As it happens, if they get in, the Palestinians will, more accurately, be the 143 member to join the UN following the original 51 founding members who founded it.
If you’re into Gematriot, then you’ll appreciate it, and you can then assume they’re likely to get in.
