[Peace-discuss] Peretz Article

Thu Feb 14 22:38:27 CST 2008

Related to the Christian Zionist movement... 

  Check out Paper Clips from the CPL -- it's a documentary about a public school in TN collecting paper clips to represent the 6 million Jews killed during the holocaust. It starts out benignly enuff, and then about halfway thru you realize these folks are a bunch of white fundamentalist Christians with their own agenda... one of the teachers sez the purpose of this is to teach the kids about discrimination... (this is the SOUTH fer crissakes, and there are even a couple of black kids in the frame!!) It ends w/ the school taking a field trip to NYC to ground zero, and the teacher telling the kids that the people who did this were just like the Nazis... wich is why we have to support President Bush so this doesn't happen here in the US. 

  If you tho't Jesus Camp was scary, Paper Clips will give you nightmares.   
   --Jenifer

LAURIE SOLOMON <LAURIE at ADVANCENET.NET> wrote:
        v\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);}  o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);}  w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);}  .shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);}                David,

  Thank you for the information about the Christian Zionist movement; I did not know anything about their existence.  Obviously from my response, I did not take Peretz’s (or is it Putz’s) comments very seriously and find it difficult to regard him seriously.  That is not to say that I do not regard him and his comments as dangerous.

  But even with tongue in cheek and foot up one’s a**, I still am left to wonder why he would refer to a Christian Zionist movement as petitioners for a Jewish State as opposed to petitioning for a Christian State in the name of Jesus - sort of a Protestant Vatican – and why he would say: "That's from before there were any Jews in the U.S. There were maybe a dozen Jews in every city."  This is factually incorrect; he even admits and contradicts his first statement by noting that there were maybe a dozen in every city at the time he is referring to.  In fact there were probably even more Jews than that, although they may not have been Zionists since Jewish Zionists, according to you, came later.  Thus, his deliberate loose use of language obscures the fact that he is not referring to Jews per se but to Jewish Zionists in his statement (and not only Jewish Zionists as individuals but as an established formally organized movement.

  However, I guess that this is neither here nor there in terms of his argument.  But I would question his argument that > People like Walt and Mearsheimer are "facing a stone wall, which is the fact that the American people like Israel and identify with it" < ; this has not always been the case.  It is a contemporary love affair of convenience.  Christian America before and after WWII were as anti-Semitic as they were racist for the most part and really did not give a damn about Israel or a Jewish homeland until post 1948.  Ironically, it was the USSR that first recognized Israel as an independent sovereign country – partially for ideological reasons and partially for Cold War reasons – although they did not recognize it as a Jewish homeland per se.  This embarrassed the US government and forced it to recognize Israel; once it did, the US set forth to buy its loyalty and turn Israel against the USSR.  This support was given begrudgingly by the US government and even more
 so by its Christian citizens.  Citizen support would only come much later after much manipulation by the Israeli lobby and US govt. officials.  The fundamentalist Christians in the US who until recently hated Jews and were as prejudiced against them as they were toward blacks (just Jews were not as easy to identify as blacks) only recently found it expedient to love and support them, to attempt to convert rather than kill them, and to treat them as allies now that many of the Jews started t o identify with conservative values and goals versus the older liberal orientation.  I suspect that the pendulum will swing in the other direction in the future and these Christian supporters will again become anti-Semitic and non-sup[porters of Israel. 

        From: peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of David Green
Sent: Thursday, February 14, 2008 11:36 AM
To: Peace Discuss
Subject: RE: [Peace-discuss] Peretz Article

  Not to take this too seriously, but Peretz is referring to a Christian Zionist movement from earlier in the 19th century that predated both the Jewish Zionist movement (1895) and the mass immigration of Jews from Eastern Europe.

LAURIE SOLOMON <LAURIE at ADVANCENET.NET> wrote: 

    How is this possible?  How can you get petitions from Americans before there were any Jews in the U.S. unless we are talking about petitions from non-Jewish Americans, in which case why would they want a JEWISH homeland?  Since there have been Jews in the U.S. since the beginning of the U.S., they must be talking about the early settlers before the U.S. Revolution and even before the establishment of the early colonies.  Given that this makes little sense, I can only conclude that they are referring to the American aboriginals as having petitioned for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine

    I further have a hard time understanding why the American aboriginals would want a Jewish homeland in Palestine and why they would be petitioning the white man in the U.S. (or Europe for that matter) for it; or how the white men of that period would know how to read a written petition from an American aboriginal.  By the way, do we know which aboriginal group it was.

          From: peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of David Green
Sent: Thursday, February 14, 2008 8:34 AM
To: Peace Discuss
Subject: [Peace-discuss] Peretz Article

      So if this is true, why did they want a Jewish homeland in Palestine? Was it because they loved Jews so much, or just wanted them to go somewhere else? Or was it because they dealt with their discomfort with Jews by projecting a biblical fantasy on to them? In any event, the vast majority of Jews either in Europe or America did not want a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Does that make any difference to Peretz? And why do Americans identify with Israel (if they do)? Only because propaganda since 1967 has exploited the Holocaust vis a vis Arabs and Muslims, and Israel has been identified with militarism.

      DG

"C. G. Estabrook" <galliher at uiuc.edu> wrote

People like Walt and Mearsheimer are "facing a stone wall, which is the 
fact that the American people like Israel and identify with it," he 
says. That support has little to do with the Israel lobby. "We have 
petitions upon petitions from centuries ago by Americans who wanted a 
Jewish homeland in Palestine," he says. "That's from before there were 
any Jews in the U.S. There were maybe a dozen Jews in every city."

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