Your continual failure to address the apartheid issue is duly noted.


freediver wrote on Jun 19^th, 2024 at 9:14pm:


Oh really? What was happening in Europe while 'very many great rabbis were denying the existence of the American continent and saying that it is "impossible" ' ?

And you conveniently left out this part:

"Before the advent of the modern state, Jewish communities were mostly ruled by rabbis who employed arbitrary and cruel methods as bad as those employed by totalitarian regimes."

Earlier in the same chapter:

"...the most important social fact of Jewish existence before the advent of the modern state (was) observance of the religious laws of Judaism, as well as their inculcation through education, (which) were enforced on Jews by physical coercion, from which one could only escape by conversion to the religion of the majority, amounting in the circumstances to a total social break and for that reason very impracticable, except during a religious crisis.

"However, once the modern state had come into existence, the Jewish community lost its powers to punish or intimidate the individual Jew. The bonds of one of the most closed of "closed societies," one of the most totalitarian societies in the whole history of mankind were snapped. This act of liberation came mostly from outside..."

And following:

"The first book on Jewish history proper (dealing with ancient times) was promptly banned and suppressed by the highest rabbinical authorities, and did not reappear before the 19th century. The rabbinical authorities of east Europe furthermore decreed that all non-Talmudic studies are to be forbidden, even when nothing specific could be found in them which merits anathema...

"Under external pressure, the rabbis deceptively eliminated or modified certain (Talmudic) passages — but not the actual practices which are prescribed in them. It is a fact which must be remembered, not least by Jews themselves, that for centuries our totalitarian society has employed barbaric and inhumane customs to poison the minds of its members, and it is still doing so. (These inhumane customs ... are gratuitous barbarities directed against each and every human being. A pious Jew arriving for the first time in Australia, say, and chancing to pass near an Aboriginal graveyard, must—as an act of worship of "God"—curse the mothers of the dead buried there.) Without facing this real social fact, we all become parties to the deception and accomplices to the process of poisoning the present and future generations, with all the consequences of this process."

freediver wrote on Jun 25^th, 2024 at 5:05pm:


I already have.

At least the Einsatzgruppen – the Nazi brigades who murdered nearly half a million Jews in a matter of months, forcing their victims to stand naked at the edge of mass graves before shooting them through the head – tried to hide their crimes, showing they had some inkling of breaching morality’s fundamental principles. Hamas’s killers did the opposite: they videoed their atrocities and posted them – to howls of joy that echoed from Gaza to Lakemba – on the internet.

Only one word can describe these people: evil. To use the term may seem as anachronistic as speaking of abomination, uncleanness or iniquity. Even the Oxford English Dictionary tells us “evil” has been “commonly superseded, in familiar speech, by “bad”. But exactly as we know good from bad, so we can differentiate evil from ordinary wickedness – and this was it.

“Radical evil”, thought Immanuel Kant, is ultimately incomprehensible: to explain human action, he argued, is to appeal to good reasons; and there can never be good reasons for murdering babies, mutilating toddlers and disfiguring the dead. However, even if we can’t make that evil intelligible, we can capture its essence: the denial of the victims’ humanity.