Category Archives: Ideology

Is Pope Francis Practicing Talmudism Covertly?

Posted on by

Why did Pope Francis mention Moses and not Jesus in his addresses to the White House and the UN?

Is it because he wanted to cite a figure that would not “offend”?

But Muslims venerate Jesus, even if they do not regard him as the Son of God. They would not be offended.

It follows that Francis avoided Jesus, to avoid giving offense to religious Jews.

Historically, many – but not all – Jews have regarded Jesus as a blasphemer and apostate.

But, if interfaith peace is the goal, why not mention Abraham, who is the fountain-head of all three faiths?

Why Moses?

The answer lies in looking at Jewish texts.

Moses is held up as the greatest of the prophets by Maimonides, one of the most authoritative of Jewish rabbis and the codifier of the Shloshah Asar Ikkarim (“Thirteen Fundamental Principles”), a distillation of the Taryag mitzvoth (613 regulations) binding on orthodox Jews.

From Chabad.org:

1. Belief in the existence of the Creator, who is perfect in every manner of existence and is the Primary Cause of all that exists.

2. The belief in G-d‘s absolute and unparalleled unity.

This would conflict with the doctrine of the Trinity in orthodox Christianity – that is why Francis praises Chagall’s White Crucifixion – because it effaces the divine Jesus and substitutes the human Jewish rabbi, thereby erasing the core of Christianity.]

3. The belief in G-d’s non-corporeality, nor that He will be affected by any physical occurrences, such as movement, or rest, or dwelling.

[Again, this conflicts with the doctrine of the Incarnation most fundamentally.]

4. The belief in G-d’s eternity.

5. The imperative to worship G-d exclusively and no foreign false gods.

[Maimonides and many great Rabbis saw Jesus as a heretic, sorcerer, and blasphemer.]

6. The belief that G-d communicates with man through prophecy.

The belief in the primacy of the prophecy of Moses our teacher

[This diminishes Jesus, who is superior to all the prophets, according to Christian teaching.]

8. The belief in the divine origin of the Torah.

9. The belief in the immutability of the Torah.

[Jesus taught that the Mosaic law was given because of the degradation of the people and that it did not fully reflect God’s law, as his perfection of it did.]

10. The belief in G-d’s omniscience and providence.

11. The belief in divine reward and retribution.

12. The belief in the arrival of the Messiah and the messianic era.

[Christians believe that the Messiah has already arrived. As for the Messianic era, some Christians regard this as heresy and others as true.]

13. The belief in the resurrection of the dead.

 

Is This Blog Anti-Semitic?

Posted on by

By the standards of the ADL (the Anti-Defamation League), yes, of course.

I think I subscribe to at least half of the beliefs they state qualify one as anti-Semitic:

I think that Jews are disproportionately represented in the media and government; that they wield too much unaccountable power for their numbers and that this fact is dangerous for the rest of society….

[…But I also believe that Jews are generally a productive and capable people.]

I believe – from the evidence – that Jews tend to be loyal before anything else to the Jewish ethno-state, even when they might not be pro-Israel.

[However, I also understand why that is so – trauma-conditioning orchestrated by the powers-that-be.]

As a Christian, I try not to hate any group of people.

But “loving your enemies” is not an instruction to acquire certain sentiments against your will.

It has nothing to do with superficial sentiment.

It is an instruction to treat others mercifully and not merely justly, as you would wish to be treated..

It is an instruction not to be vengeful and descend to the level of your enemies.

In that spirit, I do not denigrate nor regard as demonic or Satanic, Jewish religious faith, even if Jews do not return the favor.

[I do abhor certain practices and beliefs in Judaism, as I also do certain practices in other religions, including certain Christian heresies.]

However, I don’t see any instruction in the Gospel to laugh away behaviors that are detestable or to call one’s open enemies “one’s friends” or to claim that black is white and up is down.

If a Jew were accused unjustly, I would stand up for him, even though I knew the favor might not be returned.

If a Jew were being attacked physically, I would help him, even though I might not be able to count on the same help in return.

On this blog I have defended several neoconservative Jews like Donald Sterling, whose beliefs are anathema to me.

That is how I interpret “love your enemies.”

Would I go out of my way to befriend Jews personally?

Honestly, no.

I don’t know many Jews as friends and those I’ve known and liked were singularly unlike the majority of their co-ethnics, being artists or otherwise exceptional individuals.

Even so, there was a silent area of potential conflict that prevented me from getting too close.

That area was Christianity..or, rather, Jesus Christ.

The Psalms asks us not to sit in the seat of the scornful.

The Gospel repeats that message.

What about conservative Jews who are not disrespectful of Christianity?

Certainly, there are many of those. But they are respectful only of Zionist Christianity – that is, of Christianity that puts ethnic Jews and their tribalism at the center of the faith.

In the case of liberal Jews, their lack of  exceptional hostility to Christianity is only part of their general disbelief in all religion.

Of real Christianity, they are just as uncomprehending as the openly hostile Kabbalists, and, worse, by their incomprehension, they allow themselves to be used as tools by the powerful Kabbalists.

In fact, in my view, the hostile religious Jews, are to be preferred.

They have at least understood that man as he is, natural man, doesn’t cut it.

Blow hot or blow cold, says the Gospel.

There is no hope for the luke-warm.

My problem with Jews [as they are called today, a Euro-Turco-Mongolic people] is that they are not enough Jews [in the sense of Torah followers or Yahwists].

 

Some Thoughts On Anti-Christian Speech

Posted on by

Thinking about the power elite’s incessant anti-Christian imagery and rhetoric, both covert and explicit, I had some thoughts about how Christians should react to it.

And my thoughts were these:

Anti-Christian speech should make Christians realize how powerful and destructive words can be.

And it should make us recall the powerful and destructive ways in which Christianity itself was used to destroy other people’s beliefs and gods.

Sometimes, this was to the good – when the targets were temple prostitution and child-sacrifice, for instance.

But sometimes, the destructiveness was unwarranted- as when Muslim or Hindu or Jewish prayer is denounced by some Christians as inherently demonic.

So how should Christians react to anti-Christian speech?

Well, Jesus said that all manner of blasphemies by men against the Son of Man (Jesus) would be forgiven them.

But blasphemies against the Holy Spirit would not.

For many powerful Jews and Jewish sympathizers, it seems to be cathartic to denigrate Jesus.

So be it.

Jesus was not injured by such insults then..and he is not injured now. And Christians need not be more offended than Jesus.

But it is a different thing when what is good in the Church is inverted. 

Cursing Jesus Christ is one thing.

Calling what is good evil is quite another.

 

 

 

 

Pope Francis Praises Blasphemous Painting

Posted on by

Update:

Added: I want to correct the last paragraph of this post.

I now read that Chagall grew up in a religious Hasidic family, so he must have understood exactly what he was doing.

As for Francis, I should add that there is the possibility that he is being manipulated by more powerful people behind him….the crony-capitalist Jewish elites that use redistributionist rhetoric to con the gullible public. The support for the “climate-control” agenda suggests that Francis is not so much a leftist as an opportunistic “liberal” of the sort that has the backing of George Soros and the CIA.

That would account for the enormous media coverage that he gets.

ORIGINAL POST

“The essence of Christianity is but the negation of the right of Judaism to exist…. The figure of Jesus is the figure of the universal enemy of Judaism, the eliminator and destructor of Jewish law [torat yisrael]. Thus, this figure was abhorred and despised in the eyes of many Jews with Jewish consciousness throughout the generations, and I share this despise and abomination”

—  Yeshayahu Leibowitz

[Lila: Of course, I do not accept that Christianity is the negation of Judaism…by which I mean Biblical Yahwism.

The Gospel, said Jesus, was the fulfillment of the Law (of Yahweh).

Yahweh of the Old Testament is the same merciful but righteous God as the one in the New Testament, although the OT scriptures have many misinterpretations, additions, alterations and corruptions that obscure that fact.]

Pope Francis’s fondness for the paintings of Marc Chagall has caught the attention of the media.

Forward.com:

In interviews with Francesca Ambrogetti and Sergio Rubin for the 2010 biography “ El Jesuita ,” Pope Francis identified “White Crucifixion,” which depicts a Jewish Jesus, wearing a tallit instead of a loincloth, as his favorite work of art. “He likes us, he really does,” Tweeted Miriam Shaviv , a columnist for Britain’s Jewish Chronicle, about the pope.

But there’s more to the painting than “owning” Jesus as a Jew.

[Lila: Jesus was an Israelite, but not a Jew in the modern sense, obviously.

In the classical sense, there is no “Jew,” as such. That is a propagandist coinage invented to conflate the post-Temple (Talmudic) beliefs of a contemporary mixed-race people of Middle-Eastern and European descent with the Torah faith (Yahwism) of a Semitic people of thousands of years ago.

In Biblical times, there was only the Judean (a resident of Judea) and the Judahite (descendant of Judah).

Now, Jesus was not a descendant of Judah on his mother’s side (despite the genealogies in Matthew and Luke) and since he was only grafted on to Joseph, he could not have descended genetically from him either.

Finally, he was a resident of Galilee, not Judea, although he did teach in Judea. He was an Israelite, a Galilean, and, most likely, a Levite, descended from Aaron.

Israelite is not the same thing as Israeli. The latter word is often inserted into modern Bibles to conflate the two in the minds of unsuspecting readers, in order to further Zionist goals.]

Surrounding Jesus, we see a synagogue, a Torah scroll and a shtetl burning, as armed men march carrying red flags. And in the bottom-right corner, the Wandering Jew, donning a blue cap and a green coat, lugs a sack as he trudges past the smoking Torah.

That the chief executive of the Catholic Church has an affinity for a painting that was created by a Russian Jewish artist and also includes the symbol of the eternal wanderer, who was punished for abusing Jesus and became the pretext for centuries of anti-Semitism, is drawing a range of reactions.”

Forward is a Jewish paper.
The creator of White Crucifixion is the famous Russian Jewish painter, Marc Chagall.
For insight into what is really going on in Francis’ public admiration of  White Crucifixion, take a closer look at the painting.
It is not problematic that Jesus’s suffering on the cross is identified with the suffering of Jews.
[Lila: I want to reiterate this. Innocent suffering can be rightfully identified with the suffering of Jesus.  There is nothing inherently blasphemous about that.]
It is problematic for Christians that Jesus’ atonement is displaced by collective Jewish suffering.
The displacement is pure Kabbalistic teaching:
Determined to obscure the aptness of the prophesies of the Messiah in the Old Testament to the life of Jesus, the medieval Rabbi Shlomo Yitzchaki (Rashi) came up with the notion that the “suffering servant” the Scriptures describe in Isaiah 53 was not a man at all.
The suffering servant was the Jewish people as a nation.
This Kabbalistic notion has become a mainstream Jewish notion.
Now look at the Chagall  painting close up:
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-3HyKqo3jDlE/U3Kd-hmHJcI/AAAAAAAABdQ/V2lovO5wD_w/s1600/2094732310089814684UlOOJR_fs.jpg
The inscription above Jesus is the word, Yeshu, a variant of  Jesus’ name, used in the Jewish scriptures, the Talmud.
In the Babylonian Talmud (the more authoritative Talmud), Yeshu is mentioned as the one who led Israel into apostasy and was rightfully hanged on the Passover.
He is said to have had five disciples and to have performed sorceries.
Contemporary scholars claim that this and other references to Yeshu are descriptions of someone else, but there is ample historical and other testimony that Yeshu is none other than Jesus.
The name expresses the hostility of post-Temple (post 70 AD) rabbinate to Jesus.
Yeshu is an acronym for Yima  (YE) + Shemo (SH) +  Wezikhro (W)  meaning, May his name and memory be stricken out.
How to reconcile this curse with the depiction of Jesus with tallit and with the turban, characteristic of ancient Jewish rabbis?
The Polish Hasidic tradition, for instance, embraced the notion of a tzaddik (compare with Sanskrit sadhaka) or holy man,  whose being in this world was so close to the divine as to resemble that of incarnate deity.
And it is this rabid anti-Christian, incarnational Hasidism that permeates the painting.
Whether Chagall fully knew what he was doing is debatable, but Francis surely does.

Francis’ public embrace of  this anti- Christian art cannot be accidental.

He is too well-educated and, as we can see from his wildly popular sound-bytes, too well-versed in public relations.

 

Female Privilege: The Facts

Posted on by

From Debunker.com:

Yet the notion of the American woman as a powerless “victim” is one of the most absurd notions ever foisted upon anyone. American women live, on average, seven years longer than men. They control 86 % of all personal wealth [PARADE Magazine, May 27, 1990], and make up 55% of current college graduates. Women cast 54% of the votes in Presidential elections, so they can hardly claim to be left out of the political decision-making process! They win almost automatically in child custody disputes. Women suffer only 6% of the work-related fatalities (the other 94% are suffered by men). Women are the victim of only about 35% of violent crimes, and only about 25% of all murders, yet because of our society’s exaggerated concern and respect for them, special legislation has been passed to punish “violence against women” as if it were a more heinous crime than “violence against men”. (Feminists claim to want “equality”, and this is an example of what “equality” means to them, i.e., preferential treatment to address their concerns). Two out of every three dollars spent on health care is spent on women, and even if you don’t count pregnancy-related care, women still receive more medical care than men – yet feminists still holler that womens health is being “neglected”, and far too many of us credulously believe them. Of the 25 worst jobs, as ranked by the Jobs Related Almanac based on a combination of salary, stress, security, and physical demands, 24 of them are predominantly, if not almost entirely, male, which might explain why men commit over 80% of all suicides. (Most of these statistics come from The Myth of Male Power by Warren Farrell.)

Now, if it were really the case, as feminists claim, that men have selfishly arranged everything to be wonderful for themselves, absolutely ignoring womens’ legitimate concerns and needs, would the above be true? Of course not. It is much more realistic to suggest that women have cleverly seized the upper hand by pretending to be helplessly trapped below! Looking at the full picture, and not the tiny, distorted one that feminists and those they have duped present, we see a very different picture: The American woman emerges as perhaps the most privileged large group in history, enjoying a never-before- seen level of affluence, power, leisure, and health, supported by the work, discipline, and self-effacing, life-destroying exertions of a group they have bamboozled – their men – into believing their cries of “victimization”. The links below will help you to start finding your way out of the familiar maze of feminist lies.

Click here to read my article, Feminism, The Noble Lie

Take Back the Campus: refuting the Ten Most Common Feminist Myths (which are more accurately termed “lies,” because feminists just keep on promoting them with reckless disregard for truth, no matter how many times the falsehood of these claims is pointed out to them.).

Read my article Bill Clinton and the Gender Gap, in the August, 1996 issue of The Backlash Magazine.

Read Steven Goldberg’sarticle, Feminism Against Science

Howard Zinn: Card-Carrying Communist

Posted on by

The Other McCain:

One of the things you can learn from M. Stanton Evans’ recent book on Joe McCarthy’s investigations, Blacklisted by History, is how deeply the FBI had penetrated CPUSA. One reason that McCarthy’s was sometimes unable to publicly substantiate his accusations was that he relied on secret information passed along by the FBI. McCarthy couldn’t identity the source of his information without compromising the FBI’s investigations, so when his critics tried to make it appear that McCarthy’s suspicions were without merit, McCarthy couldn’t simply say, “Here is the FBI file.”

As we see from this file, the FBI had access to the CPUSA mailing list, which is not the same as a membership list, but is certainly strong evidence when combined — as in Zinn’s case — with admitted high-level involvement in a slew of front-group activities.

UPDATE III: Even if all the other FBI files proved nothing, this 1957 memorandum based on information from a former CPUSA member would seem rather conclusive:

So, according to the informant, Zinn appeared to have been a member of the Brooklyn section of CPUSA before the informant joined that section in 1949 — tending to corroborate information previously developed by the FBI.

Here is something very interesting: George Kirschner is named as co-author of Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States: The Wall Charts. Whether this is the same person as the George Kirshner who reportedly hosted CPUSA meetings in Brooklyn in 1952 might be a subject worth researching.

At any rate, the fact that “Informant T-1” was “brought up on charges of ‘white chauvinism’ by the CP” is also very interesting. This was the kind of “thought-crime” inquisition to which CPUSA members were sometimes subjected. Certainly an avid Communist like the informant, who had been a Party member since 1948, could not have been an outright racist, so we don’t know why he would have faced such an accusation. But it should be kept in mind that Stalin purged and executed many of the original Bolsheviks on fabricated pretexts of “deviationism,” and a similar Stalinist impulse might have made “T-1” a scapegoat.


This would seem to be the clincher: “T-1” is reported to have taken a photo of Zinn teaching a class on Communist doctrine in 1951, and to have provided the photo to the FBI in 1956. Zinn reportedly “took the position [in the 1951 class] that the basic teachings of Marx and Lenin were sound and should be adhered to.”

In May 1955, the FBI had de-activated its “Security Index” card on Zinn, who at that time was working on his Ph.D. at Columbia University and teaching at Upsala College in East Orange, N.J. Zinn’s file was re-opened by the FBI’s Atlanta office in 1957, after Zinn joined the faculty of Spellman College in Atlanta. A few years later, during the Kennedy administration, Zinn wrote an article in the Sunday edition of the Daily Worker disparaging Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and the FBI for their supposed failure to protect civil rights  — without ever acknowledging that Zinn himself had been interviewed a decade earlier by the FBI for his own Communist activities.

UPDATE IV: A little more Googling turns up George Kirschner’s December 2008 obituary in the New York Times, with commenters memorializing his association with Zinn:

KIRSCHNER–George. Beloved grandfather and greatgrandfather, father, husband, teacher and friend will be remembered for his contagious smile and energy, unwavering principles, profound sense of justice, unequivocal commitment to activism, and open and welcoming heart. Born in New York City, George served in the US Coast Guard during WWII. He began as a brewer, later went to college, and found his professional love as a teacher of history at the Walden School in New York City.

His age and biography as a longtime New Yorker would lend credence to the suspicion Kirschner was the same as the “Kirshner” listed in the FBI files as hosting Brooklyn CPUSA section meetings. So we may therefore presume that Kirschner is, like Zinn, now the only kind of good Communist.

UPDATE V: FBI files from the 1960s connect Zinn to a Who’s Who of the New Left anti-war radicalism:

In 1966, the main publication of the Socialist Workers Party, the Militant, reported Zinn joining with then-SDS president Carl Oglesby on a committee to defend a South African activist. After the SDS split in 1969 that led to the formation of the Weather Underground, Oglesby subsequently became a JFK assassination conspiracy theorist.

Zinn participated in a 1967 anti-war “teach-in” at Harvard, sponsored by SDS in cooperation with the American Institute for Marxist Studies, an organization founded by historian Herb Aptheker, chief theoretician of CPUSA.

At an MIT teach-in, Zinn was joined by Noam Chomsky.

In one of Zinn’s most infamous exploits, he traveled to Hanoi in 1968 with the radical priest Daniel Berrigan, an event hailed at press conference involving Tom Hayden (SDS co-founder and principal author of the “Port Huron Statement”) and socialist/pacifist Dave Dellinger, subsequently of “Chicago 7” notoriety.

What we see in all this, then, is how Zinn’s career forms a major thread in a rope that connects ’60s radicalism back to the Stalinism of the 1940s and ’50s. Zinn was a consistent advocate of Marxist-Leninist doctrine throughout his career, and it is amazing that his teachings — his anti-American history — are so popular nearly two decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

America won the Cold War, but the Communists won the campuses.”

Did America win the Cold War? Or was that victory simply a propaganda coup?

 

Brazil Denounces Christophobic Cultural Subversion

Posted on by

Brazilians have reacted strongly against extreme anti-Christian bigotry on display in Gay Pride Parades in the country:

– In the wake of numerous homosexual “pride” parades laced with anti-Christian profanities that have sparked outrage in Brazil, legislators are advancing a new law that will make “Christophobia” a felony.

Photos of the desecration of Christian images at the parades – an activity which is common in homosexual “pride” events throughout the world – have circulated widely in the Brazilian media and social networking sites this year. The offensive image that is receiving the most attention is that of the male to female transsexual Viviany Beleboni in this year’s Sao Paulo parade, who was portrayed as crucified on a cross seminude with a sign reading “Enough of Homophobia.”

Other images reportedly taken from the parades and displayed on the Facebook page of one Brazilian congressman show additional cases of desecration of Christian symbols. One photo shows two naked lesbians on a cross kissing on the lips. Another shows two people who appear to be a man and a woman sitting naked on top of piles of crucifixes, with sacred images covering their genitals.

Other images show nude men smashing sacred images on the ground, and a transsexual stripping naked in a lewd dance in front of a church.

Rogério Rosso, representing the nation’s federal district in the House of Deputies, has responded by proposing a new law prohibiting such displays and imposing a fine, and up to eight years in prison, for perpetrators. Such legislation would reverse the penalties sought by homosexuals against Christians who express their rejection of sodomy, applying them to homosexuals and others who desecrate the sacred images of a religion.

“The intention of the bill is to protect the beliefs and objects used in religious rituals by Brazilian citizens, because what has been happening in recent years during demonstrations, particularly those of LGBTs, is what we can call ‘Christophobia,’ with the practice of obscene and degrading acts which show prejudice against Catholics and Evangelicals,” Rosso states in the text of the bill.

Senator Magno Malta denounced the government-funded parades for going “outside the boundaries” of proper discourse, sowing “intolerance and disrespect for religious liberty.” He has asked federal prosecutors to begin a criminal investigation of the behavior.

“This country is Christian, and now, here, I speak in the name of millions of Brazilian Christians, Catholic Christians, spiritualists, Evangelicals from throughout the country, taking a position in their name. There is a general revulsion with this nefarious, unscrupulous and abominable attitude. You have passed the limit,” Malta said on the Senate floor following the June 7 marches.”

Tell me again why Hispanics/Latins entering the US is a bad thing from the perspective of the culture wars?

 

 

The Racist Vision Behind Pan-Europa

Posted on by

The current “migrant crisis” has been planned to hasten the demise of any vestige of Christian culture in Europe and impose on it a totalitarian anti-Christian system.

That much a careful parsing of the actors and ideologies involved tells us.

Israel’s Messiah must come…. and Edom/Esau must submit before he comes, according to the vision of eminent Rabbis.

But there is another element in this story.

The Pan-Europa vision is not simply of Fortress Europe commanded from a distance by Talmudic sages.

It is a vision of a racially mixed multitude that will be under an aristocracy of Jews and European nobility.

The promulgator of this vision  was Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi, an aristocrat of ancient lineage and great wealth. He was of mixed Flemish, Greek, and Japanese descent, with an admixture of several other European ethnicities.

In his book Praktischer Idealismus (Practical Idealism), 1925, he wrote:

The man of the future will be of mixed race. Today’s races and classes will gradually disappear owing to the vanishing of space, time, and prejudice. The Eurasian–Negroid race of the future, similar in its appearance to the Ancient Egyptians, will replace the diversity of peoples with a diversity of individuals.

Instead of destroying European Jewry, Europe, against its own will, refined and educated this people into a future leader-nation through this artificial selection process. No wonder that this people, that escaped Ghetto-Prison, developed into a spiritual nobility of Europe. Therefore a gracious Providence provided Europe with a new race of nobility by the Grace of Spirit. This happened at the moment when Europe’s feudal aristocracy became dilapidated, and thanks to Jewish emancipation.”

 

Tom Sowell: We Need Thought-Control

Posted on by

Thomas Sowell is often a smart guy. But not always.

You shouldn’t discuss inequality, he says.

[Added: I know that title might not have been written by him and I know that he doesn’t tell you in so many words not to discuss inequality in outcomes, but that is the tendency of this piece and several others on the subject he’s written. All inequalities of outcome are not the result of inequalities of opportunity, he says. Fine. Then he cites basketball-playing and university entrance tests. Well, those are specific areas where native abilities can be shown to play a dominating role. However, what Sowell – and many libertarians – then do is to broaden this argument to a generalization that all unequal outcomes must then be the result of differing capacities, and not of other, sometimes malign, factors.
If you read LRC consistently and see when they trot out Tom Sowell , it’s invariably on race-related issues, when the fact that he is a black man gives the argument more weight.

Sowell would prefer people NOT to look at diversities of outcome but to focus on equality of opportunity. But, if malign social factors come into play, attention to opportunity equality is beside the point and Sowell’s argument becomes diversionary and tool used to keep people looking away from what is indeed often (not always) a very powerful indicator of something amiss.

Well, a philosophy of radical egalitarianism is one thing. Discussing inequalities is another.

Apparently Sowell cannot see the difference between natural distributions of wealth and power and unnatural distributions.

And he doesn’t want you to talk about either of them.

Now,there are people who grow taller than others, because of genes.

And then there are others who are wearing 10 inch high boots.

And still others are actually standing on the second floor of the house.

Sowell thinks that differentiating between these people is counter-productive to wealth creation.

Oh really?

How much wealth has Thomas Sowell created, as a think-tank book-writer?

 

 

Edom vs. Israel = Athens vs. Jerusalem

Posted on by

A scholar [I incorrectly assumed the writer was a Rabbi] lets the Kabbalistic cat out of the bag in the piece below.

Unfortunately, Patrick Buchanan and other “third-world armageddon” pontificators don’t seem to get the message.

Or maybe it’s just much easier to kick at another set of victims than to address themselves to the real Masters of the Universe…yes, the guys who pull Goldman’s strings.

“Chanukah is an eight-day annual Jewish holiday. But it also lays claim as the start of western civilization. Not Jewish civilization, which was already old at the time of the first Chanukah in the second century before the common era, and not Hellenic (ancient Greek) civilization, which was also ancient. But the encounter of the West with Judaism, of reason with revelation, of Athens with Jerusalem: that began on Chanukah.

“Man,” said an ancient Greek philosopher, “is the measure of all things.” The Bible disagrees: “the fear of the Lord,” it says, “is the beginning of wisdom.” Who is right? A great debate about G?d and man lies at the heart of the West. From Sinai to Babylon, from the lions to the Crusaders, from the Wars of Religion to the Age of Reason–and of Revolution, from Stalin to John Paul II, from eugenics to a belief that life is sacred, and from globalism to a respect for individual states – even Israel! — it remains the central question. Athens and Jerusalem still are what they always were, the struggling twins of the West.

[ Lila: That would be Esau/Edom versus Israel. Jesus/Christianity is Esau, Paganism is Edom.]

Chanukah commemorates a miraculous victory in a war in 167 B.C.E. A Greco-Macedonian kingdom, centered in what is today Syria, had tried to outlaw the Jewish religion in its homeland in Judea and to replace it with Hellenic culture. Many Jews, in fact, supported that goal. But that is no surprise, because Hellenism had enormous appeal.

Hellenism seemed to have everything going for it. It was up-to-date, sophisticated, and intellectually satisfying. It offered wealth, health, art, and glamour. It represented the entrance ticket to an imperial civilization. Hellenism offered the opportunity to think big.

Judaism sat at the opposite end of the scale. It was old, small, and poor. It had no empire. It had nothing to offer except faith, trust, love, and strength. But those things, it turns out, are items that the human heart cannot do without.

So the miraculous happened. A small band, burning with faith, went on to defeat an empire.

There is, of course, a rational explanation; there always is. “The Syrian-Greek state had passed its prime.” “The Jews had short lines of communication.” “They mastered guerrilla tactics.” “The Greeks overplayed their hand.” “Judea wasn’t worth the bones of a Macedonian grenadier anyhow.” If rational explanations are enough for you, then take your pick.

But if you think that “the heart has its reasons that reason knows not of,” if you think that there is more to life than shifting particles, if you respect science without worshipping it – in short, if you doubt that man is G?d, then wonder at the light of a miracle burning in the dark days of winter.”

Of course, this is an insightful and rich statement taken in simply literary terms. But it is, like Cahn’s Shemitah prophecy, both superficial and misleading.

And, taken literally, it is the very essence  of what it condemns: It is a masterpiece of hubris.

And that is a Greek pagan word that translates very roughly to “the beginning of wisdom is the fear of the gods.”