Bartender Geek

So, Egypt has been trying to crack down on an Islamicist party -- having their police beat up pro-that-party demonstrators, putting up roadblocks in front of polling places in areas that support that party, and the like.

And that sort of thing. . . I just don't think it works very well in the long run. Which is one of the (many) reasons that I think that what we're doing in Iraq is moronic.

See. . . I'm Jewish. And because of that, I can name a half-dozen religious fundamentalist fighters and clerics that are revered in my religion for their opposition to invading forces. And some of them could be argued to be terrorists. Bar Kochba, Akiva, Mattathaias, Judah Maccabee and the rest of his brothers. . .

I mean -- think how it would have been reported:

"Radical cleric Mattathaias ben Yochan today killed [insert name here] and a Roman officer as they attempted to perform a ceremony to show their desire for peace with Rome. He and his followers then fled, and are believed to be hiding in the mountains outside the city."

That would be a fairly unbiased report, frankly.

These are people that we revere. People who went through the rural villages forcibly circumcising boys, against their parents' consent.

Look: as Jews, we can point to the Maccabees, the Zealots, the Hagganah and the Irgun as organizations, deemed as terrorist organizations by the rulers of Israel at the time -- that we have at least SOME reverence for (okay -- the Talmudic rabbis weren't wholly thrilled with either the Maccabees or the Zealots, nor are modern Jews totally thrilled with the history of the Hagganah or the Irgun in British-Mandate Palestine -- but they all have a certain amount of reverence and respect).

This is more-or-less the situation we find ourselves in Iraq. Fundamentalist clerics gaining more and more popular support -- that they would normally never get, because nobody LIKES fundamentalists except during times of perceived oppression -- against an invader of a different religion.

And it amazes me that Bush couldn't see this coming. I mean, I know he doesn't study history, but he's presumably a Christian -- at least, he always says he is -- so I wonder that he never read the Books of Maccabees. I mean, as a Jew, they're not actually part of my Bible, but they are part of his.

Okay. That has got to be the best subject header I've ever put on a LJ post. Pity the body isn't going to quite live up to it.
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In weirdjews, I came up with a quote which, the more I think about it, the more I think I'm right. I said:

There are three lasting solutions to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. One is the complete destruction of the Palestinians. Two is the complete destruction of the Israelis.

I'm in favor of the third solution.

I'll let you know if I ever figure out what it is.

Now, really, "complete destruction" doesn't necessarily mean violence or death. It means the destruction of the identity of "Palestinian" or "Israeli".

Option 2 is just plain not going to happen. The identity of "Israeli", or "Zionist" has been around since at least 1897, if not before. And if, somehow, G-d forbid, all the Jews were kicked out of Israel, and Israel ceased to exist as a modern country, there would still be Zionists. So, Option 2 isn't happening.

Option 1: as a Zionist myself, although one who frequently feels that the government of Israel is doing the wrong thing, I would love it if all the people who think of themselves as Palestinians decided that they wanted to be active participants in the modern state of Israel, and decided that, fundamentally, they are Israelis. And that would be the ideal way that we would see the destruction of "the Palestinians" as a group distinct from "the Israelis".

But that's not going to happen, either. Their entire self-definition is based on what they're NOT as much as what they ARE -- and what they're NOT is Israelis. You just can't put that down easily.

There are plenty of Arab Israelis. Arab Israelis aren't Palestinians.

I can understand this emotional reaction. As a Jew, a significant part of my self identity is "not Christian."

It sucks, because I have a lot of Christian friends, and I can respect what they do with their Christianity, and that Christianity is a positive influence in their lives. Yet, my emotional response to the word "Christian" is strongly negative. And half my own family's Christian. (Interestingly, I've got a slight positive response to "Catholic", no response whatsoever to "Protestant", and "Quaker" is strongly positive.)

For whatever definition of "soul" you use. solipsistnation just posted about how he's going to miss his old all-but-junker of a car. Which makes sense to me. Cars are one of the types of nonliving objects that have, or can develop, souls.

Other things in this category include weapons of all sorts, pool cues, musical instruments, stuffed animals, and virtually anything that someone uses ritually. Anything which you'd give a name to.

Anything else? What other sorts of things have souls?

So, we went from a Pope who, in WWII helped a Jewish refugee, to a Pope who, in WWII, was a Hitler youth.

Any bets how long until the majority of American Catholics form a schismatic church and just get away from Rome?

My money's on fifteen minutes.

See, given that I've been working a lot, and at rehearsal, I've not been near a computer recently. But I have been talking to Lis and she keeps saying, "I wish you would blog that." and she's now actually grumpy at me for not posting the stuff I've been telling her, so I'm going to try to catch up with a couple things that she's insisted I blog about in the past week or so.

First, here's one about abortion.

See, one thing I really try to do is to understand points of view with which I don't agree. Which is one of the reason why I make sure to read the LJs and blogs of people who I respect who have very different political, religious, and moral beliefs than I do.

One thing I can sometimes do is to take a postulate, put it in my head as if I believed it, and see what that would lead me to feel and to believe.

So I took the postulate "a person becomes a person at the moment of conception", and decided to see what that would lead me to believe.

I now understand the protests against fetal stem cell research. Because, you see, if you believe that postulate, then using fetal stem cell research to cure chronic degenerative diseases is precisely the same as bathing in the blood of slaughtered babies to restore one's youth. Not "analagous to" -- but precisely the same.

With that postulate, then legalized abortion is even more wrong than legalized slavery, and the comparison of Roe v. Wade to Dred Scott is mild, rather than over-the-top.

With that postulate, blockading abortion clinics becomes a moral imperative.

Hell, with that postulate, even the murder of doctors -- and even receptionists -- who work at clinics begins to look understandable, if not rational or forgivable. But it's no more crazy than John Brown's actions at Harper's Ferry.

And then I take that postulate back out, and look at it, and look at how ridiculous it is, and the whole edifice collapses into radical crazy psychosis. Because a human being ISN'T a human being at the moment of conception. I mean, heck. Exodus 21:22 is pretty damn clear about that fact. (I found pro-life sites that try to twist the Hebrew words in all sorts of bizzare ways to attempt to obscure this fact, but they're clearly not working from the actual text -- they're trying to pick and choose among ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS to attempt to obscure the fact that the loss of a fetus is seen as an injury to the mother and not a death of a human. They come up with this insanely stupid argument that this refers to a PREMATURE BIRTH and not a miscarriage, which I think would pretty much surprise everyone who's been USING this rulling for the past four millenia. The Hebrew is pretty damn clear.)

But I nonetheless understand more where people are coming from.

So, this is an analogy I've been thinking about for a while, and Lis has been pushing me to finally write about it in my LJ. As a matter of fact, she's bribed me with an offer of fudge, so here we go. I've been thinking about this since before Worldcon, and I remember talking about it with folks there, but haven't really posted about it.

There's something that has struck me as really, really odd about how a certain segment of the right-wing talks about homosexuality. There are a whole bunch of comments that I'd been hearing for months which all have an underlying assumption that "homosexuality is incredibly attractive." I'm not going to mention specific quotes, mainly because I found them somewhat disquieting and I don't want to think about them, but there were about half a dozen quotes from Republican congresscritters and pundits which made no sense to me until I applied that filter to them, and they then started to make sense. Things like, "If you COULD sleep with men, why would you ever sleep with women, since men would understand your body better?"

And this finally gave me a way to think about and understand their position.

Y'see, I belong to a religion which forbids me to sleep with men and to eat bacon. As it turns out, I have done both.

Bacon is better.

I know perfectly well that not everyone feels that way. There are plenty of people who just plain don't like pork products. Some people are grossed out by them. Some are grossed out by meat in general, some just find pigs disgusting. And I know for a fact that there are really quite a number of people out there who rather like the concept of having sex with men. I've dated some of them.

But for me, bacon is far more tempting than sex with guys is.

So, I started thinking. How would I look at the world if I really took my religion's prohibition against bacon very seriously, and as a universal law, rather than just as an odd little tribal taboo (which is how I do perceive it -- that doesn't mean I don't consider it important, but I consider it to be a rule that is just supposed to be applied to MY tribe, and not to everyone).
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Yeah. Sleepy. Yom Kippur is really, really spiritually uplifting and all that, and totally, completely exhausting. It takes a lot out of you. Really, I suppose, it takes EVERYTHING out of you -- that's the point.

And now I've got to do class prep for tomorrow morning. Sleepy. . .

Anyway, there was a bit of excitement this afternoon at services. We were having a discussion on what "forgiveness" was, and how it worked and all that, and all of a sudden there was a crash and a circular hole appeared in one of the windows.
( <mode:'AnthonyTrollope'>Now, dear readers, I do not wish you to worry about this rather dramatic development. As you will soon see, this event, which may seem so sinister at the outset, nonetheless, indeed, had an innocent and harmless cause.</mode> )

Lis says, “Oh, my. . . “

IM’s me a link -- I start snickering.

A plague of locusts may hit Iraq.

“What kind of clues do these people NEED?” I ask.

Then I finish reading, and I lose it completely.

[ . . . . ]
"If an upsurge is not controlled, a plague can occur in which swarms invade countries outside the traditional breeding areas," the agency said, according to JTA. "Crop damage by swarms can be devastating."


Related story:

Leprosy makes comeback

. . . that actually isn’t funny to normal people, right?