In my reductionist world racism like falsity and ugliness is a manifestation of dissonance. It is a physiological reaction to an ambient stimulus that does not resonate with one’s current neural structure, i.e. state of mind at the moment. Persons of different religion, physiognomy and/or culture may promote such an adverse reaction manifest as discomfiture and antipathy. Unsophisticated, ignorant persons of limited vision are especially prone to such biased reactions.
Seeking resonance*, the comfortable feeling of being at one with the world, is the principle driving force of intelligent living. It is an innate urge of all cerebral animals and leads to the formation of social groups: a pride of lions, a tribe of baboons, and “birds of a feather that flock together!” One feels more comfortable, resonates, among ones’ “own people”. Hateful racism, xenophobia, on the other hand is extreme interorganismic friction.
*“Resonance” is further elaborated on in the Introduction
above and in Cascading Universe by Charles C. Worthington 2004,
Dorrance Publishing Co. 701 Smithfield St. Pittsburgh PA 15222-1786.
Racism is a world-wide problem for which there is no simple remedy except education which has proven to be of limited value. There is more involved in altering a mind-set than hypocritical “political correctness”. Saying something is beautiful when it is not perceived as beautiful is nonsense and cause for further dissonance.
In the United States black – white racial relations have greatly improved in the past fifty years. As a boy in Plant City Florida, in 1930, I remember chain gangs cleaning the street and the sorry black ghetto, “niggertown”. About once a year, at dusk, the Knights of the Klu Klux Klan, a goodly number of masked men and women, wearing hooded white gowns marched silently through town. They carried a large U.S. flag and a purple Klan flag of about the same size.
Anti-Semitism is a growing problem afflicting the whole civilized world. It is for the most part not racism per se but a reflection of intense anti-Zionism or anti-Israelism which the Israelis and their backers are bringing upon themselves.
The dissonance caused by the appearance of injustice or dishonesty can manifest itself as unmitigated hate. Herein lies the cause of the deep anti-Israeli feeling throughout most of the civilized world.
The idea that God bequeathed Palestine to the Israelis is patently absurd except to Orthodox and Conservative Jews and Christian Fundamentalists. In fact, Israel has no more right to steal Palestinian land and homes than Saddam Hussein had to take over Kuwait. One is also reminded of the Nazi demographic moves wherein about 1.5 million Poles and Jews were expelled from their homes which Germans settled into; and the current horrifying events in Sudan where hundreds of thousands of refugees are being slaughtered.
When conscientious people watch the televised thrust of Israeli tanks into Palestine destroying whole towns and erecting a thirty-foot high wall across farmland they are naturally filled with hate and loathing.
In the Guardian Weekly (June 11-17,2004) there is described the terrible havoc left when Israeli army’s bulldozers pulled out of Rafah refugee camp. Over 1600 people had seen their homes turned to rubble.
A report in New Scientist (29 May 2004) states that “Israel lays claim to Palestine’s water”. It is a secret project which they want US to fund. The disgraceful, unquestioning backing of Israel throughout the whole sorry Israel-Palestine contretemps by the most preeminent nation in the world is most discouraging. Penetration of the powerful Israel lobby into the United States government is deep and extensive. The Unity Coalition for Israel (UCI) the purpose of which is to direct Congress to act on behalf of the State of Israel. It calls for a militant, no compromise solution for the Israeli problem and is supported by many “Christians” hoping that prophesy of the Bible about the “end-time” is underway.
The UCI’s attitude toward the Palestinians and Arabs, in general, proposes genocide. They feel that the only way to end resistance in Palestine is by the military. Furthermore there are millions Christians that endorse the idea.
Bush’s war cabinet is another predominantly Jewish group that is responsible for our dilemma in Iraq as well as the desperate straits Israel is in today.
As Andrew Hurley points out in One Nation Under Israel, 1999 (The Truth Press, 4839 East Greenway, Scottsdale, AZ 85254): The Jews wield political power in America far beyond their numbers. Jewish political activism is found at all levels.
What is Israel’s justification for their endeavors to take over all of Palestine, Eretz Israel? From the beginning it has been the Zionist aim. This is a historical fact, well established. (The Introduction to the Second Edition of Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict by Norman G. Finkelstein, 2nd Ed. 2003, Verso, New York, gives a detailed summary of the rise of Zionism).
To view the displacement of the indigenous population of Palestine as an inexorable concomitant of civilization’s advance is ingenuous but wholly unsatisfactory in today’s world of the United Nations and belief in the equality of all men and nations.
Thus when the Zionists appropriate, or steal, the land and homes of the Palestinians, fair-minded people get upset. For the most powerful nation in the world to subsidize such theft is horrendous. After all, when Saddam Hussein took over Kuwait we went to war and drove the Iraqis out.
It is quite a different story with Jews. Anti-Semitism is becoming more virulent as a result of their shabby treatment of the Palestinians. TV news practically every evening show scenes of Israeli tanks (supplied by the US President and Congress under the leadership of the Neoconservatives and the Israeli lobby) destroying Palestinian homes and vineyards. Israel states that they are rooting out “terrorists”. The Palestinians, having no army, are endeavoring to discourage further expropriation of their land and homes by terrorist tactics; their only defense.
Andrew Hurley quotes from The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities by Israeli statesman, Simha Flapan, 1987, Pantheon Books, New York. “The collective revenge of an army is no more righteous or admirable than the individual revenge of a desperate youth for the murder of one of his people. It is only propaganda and distorted vision that labels one ‘terrorism’ and the other ‘national defense.’” Pg 243.
The following notes are from One Nation Under Israel by Andrew Hurley.
Modern Zionism was originally dreamed up by Theodore Herzl, born in 1860 in Budapest. A journalist, he was assigned to the
Dreyfus case which stimulated a virulent anti-Semitism throughout Europe and convinced Herzl that only a Jewish homeland would provide peace and security for Jews. He got support from some Jewish financiers but mostly from East European Jews with whom he organized a World Zionist Organization of which he was elected president.
There was much internal dissension but at the World Zionist Congress in Basel Switzerland in 1892 it was determined that Palestine should be the Jewish homeland.
In 1904 Palestine was part of the Ottoman Empire with a population of approximately 35,000 Jews mostly in Jerusalem and the coastal cities and 665,000 Arabs.
“Not withstanding the numerical odds presented by the large indigenous Arab population, the early Zionists intended to establish an undivided Jewish hegemony over the entire territory of Palestine. They recognized the Arab problem – but decided that it could be solved later, after they achieved their primary objective – a Jewish state.”
Later on a Jeev Jabotinsky founded a new movement known as Revisionist Zionism. They claimed all the ancient biblical lands including Judea and Samaria and were manifest by violent terrorism against the British.
Eventually Chaim Weizmann became the recognized Zionist leader. He did not believe that Jews and Arabs could live together because he felt their cultures differed too much.
The Zionist movement as a nationalistic movement was uncompromisingly committed to three fundamental goals:
1 Establishment of a Jewish state in Eretz Israel (“the
historical land”) as the territorial center of the Jewish nation in
direct opposition to the Arab claims to the land.
2 Creation of a Jewish majority in Palestine.
3 Separation from the Arabs. In calling for a Jewish statehood, and
the restoration of Jewish culture, the Zionists sought to establish a
clearcut position isolated from Arab and Muslim cultural values and
social structure. The conscious aim was to create an independent
and autonomous Jewish National Culture and social system in Eretz
Israel which would be fortified by erecting, political, economic,
social and cultural walls designed to separate Jews from the
Arab population which they would rule.
THE BALFOUR DECLARATION was a short memo to Lord Rothchild, a Zionist leader, from Anthony Balfour, British Foreign minister. It stated that His Majesty’s Government viewed with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and it will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object, “it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”
According to Hurley the Declaration was the beginning of the murderous hatred between Arab and Jew although the roots of the conflict antedated it.
The Declaration disregarded the Wilsonian principles of majority rule and self-determination.
The Arabs’ response to Zionism was a purely human reaction toward a movement whose unconcealed purpose was to take over and rule the country in which their ancestors had lived for centuries.
It became apparent to the British that the Zionists were using the Declaration to enhance their Palestine ambitions. In 1939 they issued a “White Paper” in which they indicated that they had at no time contemplated the subordination of the Arab population and limited Jewish immigration to Palestine for 5 years.
In the second World War, many Jews fought along with the British who helped train the Haganah, the military arm of the Socialist Zionists. In 1940 Abraham Stern, Israel’s most militant terrorist began building up commando organizations, arms caches and recruiting Jews from Europe.
When Stern was killed by the British, Yitzhak Shamir took over the Stern gang. He was followed in 1942 by Menachem Begin whose objective was to use terrorism as a means of making the British presence in Palestine intolerable to Britain.
Begin officially launched his war against Britain on February 1 1944; an unrestricted campaign of terror.
As the situation stands now Israel is faced with a limited number of choices:
(253) It can continue its military occupation of the territories under martial law and harass, brutalize and kill Palestinians in the hope that they will find life so miserable that they will be forced to abandon their homes and leave Palestine.
(254) According to Hurley, There is no question that the
Israeli Lobby and their collaborators in the U.S.Congress and the executive branch of the U.S. government are responsible for the desperate dilemma facing Israel today. If it withdraws from the West Bank and Gaza and permits a Palestinian state to come into existence, its boundaries, in spite of the wall will be vulnerable and always vulnerable to attack from neighboring Arab nations.
THE FOLLOWING IS FROM “WHAT WENT WRONG” by Bernard Lewis:
The failure of 5 Arab states in 1948, in preventing the Jews from establishing a state in Palestine was devastating and a picture of a Jew as a scheming evil monster supplied the answer.
However, it was Nazi Germany which disseminated anti-Semitism in the Arab world.
Jewishness is a religion, a system of belief and worship, a morality and way of life.
For the last 14 centuries, the overwhelming majorities of Jews lived in a Christian or Islamic world.
Why did the great scientific break-through occur in Europe rather than the more enlightened realm of Islam? It might be the ubiquity and inflexibility of the Islam clergy, the fanaticism of the religious authorities.
Western progress is attributed to separation of church and state and to Islams relegation of women to an inferior status thus depleting the energies and ideas of one half of the people.
What went wrong? To the Western observer it is lack of freedom of the mind from constraint and indoctrination.
Following notes from “THE NEW ANTI-SEMITISM” by Phyllis Chesler 2003.
She writes of a new plague of anti-Semitism connected to the events of 9/11 that she claims is being touted as “politically correct anti-Semitism”. Anti Zionism, or anti Israel are really anti-Semitism.
She claims that Israel was created to solve the problem anti-Semitism. Actually, the allied powers, following World War 2 foisted on the Palestinians an influx of Jews from Eastern Europe and wherever they had dispersed to over the centuries since the fall of Jerusalem in 65AD. She blames anti-globalization activists as well as Jews on the left for condemning Israel for defending itself against suicide bombers and Palestinian terrorists.
Page 225: “For nearly three thousand years Jews have been persecuted and murdered by pagans, Christians and Muslims.”
“Old-fashioned anti-Semitism was expressed in the name of ethnicity, Aryanism, white purity, superiority and nationalism. Nazi Germany believed Jews to be racially and biologically inferior.” (227)
(231) “At no point in the entire time since the Romans left was the area that the British called Palestine ever an Arab Palestinian state or a sovereign Arab Palestinian entity.
In essence the book is a catalog of anti-Semitism as it pertains to Israel. It disregards the fact that the Palestinians were ousted from their lands and homes with the backing of US military strength.
