Here's a link to maps and accompanying descriptions of Israel's sordid affair with Arabs over the past century:

http://www.masada2000.org/historical.html

W.C.

Excellent site! These are just the things I was asking my husband about a couple of weeks ago.

But now... I see that word "Rapture" again. I thought I had it pretty well settled in my mind that no such event would occur, and I think that is the official teaching of the Catholic church, too. Actually I have my own version of the "rapture". :-)

Thanks,
Katy

Anti-Semitism in the press and in Europe is rampant. Anytime anyone refers to "occupied territory" they are making an overt and biased political statement.

The idea that Israel is the real problem seems fixed in the minds of many. While we in the United States hear cries of "no blood for oil" (and not without some justification, for we are fighting for our security, and part of that is economic security) the reality is that Europe and others are more than okay with Jewish blood for oil. They (especially the French) will sell out the Jews in a millisecond to keep Middle East oil flowing and to keep a market open for their products, whether nuclear plants or weapons.

I've been called anti-Semitic for attempting to evangelize every Jewish freind and aquaintance I have had. I see no reason to change my behavior, but
am trying to do it more from a place of love rather than fear. I might try leaving them alone after a few presentations, and allow them their freedom to choose whatever path seems right. I still might attempt to convince them that the left does not have their best interest in mind. Why many have this blind spot continues to baffle me.

This baffles me as well, but let's look at the record:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Semitism

Have we had enough of this? Can we now condemn it loudly and often and in the strongest possible terms? If God sheds tears, then I feel this may be why!

soapbox.net

MM:

I think that article, where it attempts to describe the early church's relationship with Judaism, is a bit weak. Paul and Peter and James seemed to reach agreements that suggest the Jewish Church would remain intact and allowed its customs. Paul consented to this, and spent most of his time dealing with Gentile pagan influences; he was, of course, clear about the obsolesence of Temple customs, but this doesn't amount to the early church's persecution of Jews, or even anti-Semitism, IMO.

w.c.,

That's another task for Christian apologists, to show how the early Christians went through a process
of differentiation and distinctiveness from Judaism. Judaism was the first "heresy" addressed by the early Church. Hans Kung treats it in this manner
quite skilfully in his book "The Church."

I see all men without Christ as in much need of him, so by some definition that would make me competitive with all other belief systems, including that one.

I don't know if God has given all land from the Nile to the Euphrates to the Zionists. I'm not even sure that the Zionists do.

I'm hopeful that the new leader of the Palestinians shall be more honest than Arafat, but Islamic extremists seem to be gearing up for another episode of

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_Cleansing

and increasingly resemble these fellows:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo-Nazism

Anything can be taken to an extreme, including anti-defamation efforts and Catholic bashing, which requires constant vigilance by whomever edits the wikipedia. IOW, point well taken!

I do not believe that I suffer from this malady:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamophobia

I get along fine with Muslims, and tell them about
Jesus while I'm at it! Wikipedia has repaired that article, but still won't allow one on "Islamofascism." That may change after more bombs.
Denial is not just a river in Egypt.

caritas,

mm <*)))))><

No, it is NOT my job to clean up after MM wherever he goes. But the url for Islamophobia is this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamophobia

---

P.S.: Nevermind. Apparently MM has fixed the link. Move along. Nothing to see here.

MM wisely asked: Have we had enough of this? Can we now condemn it loudly and often and in the strongest possible terms?

Cure anti-Semitism through personal responsibility
by Rabbi Aaron Bergman

quote:

Anti-Semitism, the hatred of Jews as a people and Judaism, is resurging around the world. More synagogues are being burned and Jewish schools attacked than anytime since the Holocaust.

I do not think, though, that the vast majority of people in the world are anti-Semitic. I do not think that most anti-Semites even hate Jews. After all, there are only 13 million or 14 million Jews out of a world population of around six billion people. You have to really know someone to hate them.

Anti-Semitism is really about frustration and powerlessness. It is about looking to blame others for one�s own problems or for diverting blame for one�s actions. It has little to do with Jews, and everything to do with fear. Even without a single Jew on Earth, there would still be anti-Semitism, because people would always search for a scapegoat.

quote:

Jews are often targeted because there are people who are afraid to confront those who truly trouble them. Instead, they vent their fury on those more vulnerable.

quote:

If the Arab nations truly wanted to give the Palestinians a homeland, why did they not give it to them between 1948-1967, when the Arabs had total control of the West Bank and Gaza? Why did the calls for Palestinian nationhood by the other countries begin only after the 1967 war? I am not saying Israel has been perfect, but the Palestinians have no recourse but to vent their full wrath toward the Jewish state, because they dare not confront their brothers.

quote:

People who do not feel in control of their lives have a need to believe someone is in control of the world. This kind of anti-Semitism is a desperate attempt at saying that if the people responsible for all the world�s problems were eliminated, then they themselves would have no more problems. The cure for anti-Semitism is taking personal responsibility for one�s own problems, not the constant shifting of blame to others.

I thought the rapture was a song.

I thought the rapture was a song.

Maybe you�re right, brother Rico. But if so, which song?

This is also Rapture.

quote:

And you don't stop, sure shot.
Go out to the parking lot.
And you get in your car and drive real far.
And you drive all night and then you see a light.
And it comes right down and it lands on the ground.
And out comes the man from Mars.
And you try to run but he's got a gun.
And he shoots you dead and he eats your head.
And then you're in the man from Mars.
You go out at night eating cars.
You eat Cadillacs, Lincolns too.
Mercurys and Subaru.
And you don't stop.
You keep on eating cars.
Then when there's no more cars you go out at night
And eat up bars where the people meet.
Face to face.
Dance cheek to cheek.
One to one.
Man to man.
Dance toe to toe.
Don't move too slow 'cause the man from Mars is through with cars.
He's eating bars.
Yeah, wall to wall.
Door to door.
Hall to hall.
He's gonna eat 'em all.
Rapture.

Ooh rats I thought no one would notice.

I could not find a link to Blondie.

I thought Bananarama could deliver the rapture equally well.

I have asked the question many times about how the Palestinian Arabs have been made to live and suffer at the hands of their brother Arabs. But that is how politics operate offer with one hand which the other is taking away. There is probably a greek god that represents such actions.

I have asked the question many times about how the Palestinian Arabs have been made to live and suffer at the hands of their brother Arabs.

It�s no exaggeration to say that the Jews have been kinder to them than their supposed Arab brothers.

As Mulder said, the truth is out there. Sometimes it IS RIGHT SMACK IN FRONT OF YOUR FACE. But then, I think as Rabbi Bergman wisely pointed out, so much of this stuff has very little to do with the Jews. They are simply a convenient target.

I was thinking of spiral dynamics, and my loyalty to the blue and red memes. There is a sick part of me that wants to go out and join the Nazi Party. It's the same quality as a young Muslim boy might experience when he wants to join the Taliban, the same quality a young ghetto kid might have which leads him to join a gang, or the feeling a Marine has when in boot camp becoming a "killing machine."

I could share a story with you of an actual person that I know, who had Marine Corps bumper stickers
on the back of his truck, like "Recon, When it Absolutely Positively Has to Be Destroyed Overnight!" It's a clever spoof on Federal Express
and I had many inward chuckles about it.

One day he had removed all such stickers from the vehicle. When I asked why, he told me that he is no longer a combat Marine and no longer feels it necessary to define himself that way.

My inner Nazi will always be a part of me. The best I can do is attempt to view it from a higher level, a perspective closer to where God is.

caritas,

mm <*)))))><

I find one of the biggest ironies to be for Muslims to fullfil their obligation's to Islam they must at sometime in their life take a Pilgrimage to Mecca or the Hajj as it is described in Islam. Once there you must perform several tasks one of which is the tawaf. The tawaf is the act of walking in the footsteps of Abraham. So for a Muslim to fullfill their total obligation to Islam they must walk in the footsteps of Jew numero uno.

All Muslims all over the world must make the Hajj. I wonder how they would feel if they realized they were walking in the footsteps of a Jew to be a better muslim.

One thing we know for sure about Jesus is that he was a Jew.

Katy:

You're welcome. It helps me to have visuals along with the historical accounts, both as an anchor for the information, and to help see the connections between past and present developments.

MM:

The distinction I was making re: the early church's exceptions to Judaism bears upon the way Christians tolerated the existence of their forerunners, attempting to persuade them, but not using organized violence like Moslems have done from the inception of Islam. Jews and Christians have fallen into and out of violence throughout their histories, but are able to settle into non-violent periods with no need to radically alter the world around them in order to secure their sense of identity; this, of course, is sourced largely in their various mystical traditions, where individuation is fostered. Moslems suffer, comparitively, from a rather sparse mysticism, at least in Islam's mainstream, and are culturally-laden with rigid role-identity expectations that root that intolerance of the mystical rather firmly.

Good point, Rico.

My inner Nazi will always be a part of me.

We could have put a thousand monkeys at computer keyboards and in a million years I don't think they'd ever type those words. It's certainly not a combination of words that I ever expected to see.

The lie heard round the world
By Mona Charen

Thanks for that article Brad, which I've seen other versions of. It should come as no surprise that Palestinian Arabs would offer lies to the world in this way, as they so easily offer their children to homicide-suicide in keeping with the self-destructive nature of their shame-honor bound family systems.

w.c.

That's an interesting point. How come there are no accounts of the Great Christian-Jewish Slaughter and Wars of the first and second centuries?

It would seem that they were caught up in something
of more depth and weight than hating.

whattheworldneedsnow.com

MM:

What wars are you specifically referring to?

The ones some historical revisionist is likely making up as we speak. It's all going to be explained in the forthcoming sequal to the DaVinci Code II, the Secret Jewish-Christian Wars.

But seriously, I believe we may have had a failure to communicate, for which I apologize.

The Romans likely saw the Christians as a sect of the Hebrew religion, and persecuted both, as against the religion of the state. Whatever the Jews and Christians were arguing about was probably not very important to the Romans.

It is an interesting area of study. I have a book around here somewhere called, "The Christians as the Romans Saw Them." I'll dig around for it in
my slighlty disorganized bookcase. An interesting area of study and I'm glad you brought it up, my freind.

caritas,

mm <*)))))><

Hans Kung:

"The disciples of Jesus saw themselves as the TRUE Israel. But this was equally true of the Pharisees,
the Sadducees, the Zealots and the Essenes. Clearly it took time and various historical experiences before the disciples saw themselves clearly as not only the true, but the NEW Israel. The foundations for this view had aleady been laid: the faith, rooted in their personal encounter with the risen Christ, that with the death and resurrection of Jesus the crucial and decisive eschatological saving event had occurred.
In contrast to all other "parties" the fellowship of those who believed in Christ could look back to this decisive event; for them the Old Testament promises had been fulfilled, the eschatological spirit had been bestowed on them, they had been given hope, based on the fact that the Messiah had really come, of the coming consummation of the reign of God. They WERE already the new Israel, even if externally a little different from the old. In the light of this saving event which had already occurred they could remain members of the people of Israel, share in its cult, keep its laws, affirm its history and its expectation--and yet see all these things in a fundamentally new way because of Jesus Christ. They could retain Jewish forms and yet give them an entirely new content, because of Jesus Christ; and this new content was bound, sooner or later, to burst the bounds of the old forms.

Thus the new and true Israel was already realized within the old; externally little different, inwardly already very different, but still witing for the metanoia and the faith of the WHOLE people
of the promise. But precisely because this expectation of the whole people of Israel was not fulfilled, the new Israel was revealed more and more clearly in its difference from the old. The early Christian community, for all its links with the Jewish nation as a whole, already posessed certain peculiar forms which pointed to a distinct development."

I really like the way Kung says all this. The Church is different and distinct yet still related to the Jews, who are part and parcel of the whole people of God, yet reject Christ as Messiah. This is much as I see this myself. I see myself as a Jew, an inheritor of the Abrahamic covenant by grace, and inextricably to every Jew. Praise God!

caritas,

mm <*))))><