It’s not often that the anthropopper gets so angered by something he hears on the news that he shouts at the radio and then stalks out of the room, saying: “I refuse to listen to any more of these obscene lies.” Yet this is what happened a few days earlier when I heard Nikki Haley, the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, praising the Israeli Defence Force for its “restraint” after they had killed 62 demonstrators and shot nearly 2,500 more in the face of protests in Gaza a day earlier.
Haley went on to tell the UN Security Council that “”No country in this chamber would act with more restraint than Israel has. In fact, the record of several countries here today suggest that they would be less restrained.” She then blamed Hamas, the Palestinian Sunni-Islamist fundamentalist organisation which runs Gaza, for backing the demonstrations and encouraging protesters over loudspeakers to rush the border fence with Israel throughout the Gaza strip. She said it was Hamas — not Israel — that was making the “lives of Palestinians miserable.” Her comments came at the same time as the U.S. blocked a Security Council resolution calling for a probe into the violence.
These demonstrators from Gaza were marking the 70thanniversary of what they call the Nakba Day (‘Day of Catastrophe’), on 15th May. For the Palestinians it is an annual day of commemoration of the displacement of Palestinian Arabs that preceded and followed the Israeli Declaration of Independence in 1948. Perhaps there are not many people today who are aware that the state of Israel was founded in 1948 on the forcible expulsion or displacement of over 700,000 Palestinians from their lands, to make way for 70,000 Jews. The Holocaust during World War II had given urgency to the question of a Jewish state, an idea first supported by the British government in the Balfour Declaration of 1917 – but in 1948 these Palestinians had next to no involvement with the persecution of the Jews and saw no reason why they should vacate their homes for the founders of the new state. They were driven from their homes during the Zionist ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948 for the simple reason that they were not Jewish.
As the Israeli historian Benny Morris has pointed out: “There could be no Jewish state with a large and hostile Arab minority in its midst. There would be no such state. It would not be able to exist. A Jewish state would not have come into being without the uprooting of 700,000 Palestinians . . . [therefore] it was necessary to uproot them”. They have been denied the right to return to their homes ever since for the same reason: they are not Jewish, and their presence would upset the carefully-engineered demographic tables maintained by the state to preserve its tenuous claim to an exclusively Jewish identity. The maintenance of that demographic balance and the suspension of the Palestinians’ political and human rights are inseparable from one another: the one enables, produces and requires the other.
So let us acknowledge it: the founding of Israel was the consequence of an historic injustice to the people already living there. Put yourself in the shoes of the Palestinians: would you have agreed to leave your home and go into exile to accommodate a group that came from outside the borders of your country, claiming a homeland lost two thousand years ago?
Now, you don’t need to tell me that Hamas is a terrorist organisation – I know. I think it likely that many of the 30,000 – 40,000 demonstrators attempting to break through the border fence were strongly encouraged to be there by Hamas. I’m also of the view that the Palestinian Arabs have been very badly served by their fractious and divided leaders (Hamas in Gaza and Fatah in the West Bank), who for decades have vowed to sweep Israel and the Jews back into the sea and whose only response to Israeli violence is more violence and virulent anti-Semitism. This Arab violence against Palestinian Jews long predated the birth of Israel, and prior to the 1948 war, it was usually one-sided. What’s more, I doubt that many of today’s Palestinian Arabs would be prepared to accept any size of Jewish state, however small, even if it was only based on Tel Aviv and the Jewish quarter of Jerusalem. It has been their violence, divided leadership and utter intransigence that has contributed so much to the present impasse. So please don’t tell me that there is long-standing hatred and terrorist activity on the Arab side – I’m fully aware of it.
My point is this: Israel was also born out of terrorism – witness the activities of the Stern Gang and Irgun, and their assassinations of Lord Moyne (the British Resident Minister in the Middle East) and Count Folke Bernadotte (the United Nations mediator), and many hundreds of others. Two of Israel’s most prominent statesmen, Yitzak Shamir and Menachem Begin, were terrorists. Later on, Jewish terrorists became legitimate leaders, presidents and prime ministers; and Begin and Shamir are among these.
According to Henry Siegman (president emeritus of the US/Middle East Project and a former senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations) writing in the London Review of Books, the leading political players in the U.S. “are probably unaware of, or simply refuse to know about, the extent to which terrorism and war crimes marked the creation of Israel. Those who are told about this history dismiss it as a fabrication. What they deny or ignore is that these charges have been fully documented not only by historians, including Israeli ones, but by Israel’s own military. The point of recognising this history is not to justify terrorism by either Israelis or Palestinians, but to acknowledge the outrageous double standard that has been applied to the two parties and has undermined the possibility of a peace accord. Without knowing that history, it is difficult, if not impossible, to understand the extent to which Israeli propaganda has succeeded in shaping a narrative about the creation of Israel that presents the Palestinians who were brutally expelled from their homes as the aggressors and the Jews as their victims. Without that history, it is impossible to understand the outrage Palestinians feel over having been portrayed as the bad guys for so long.”
Siegman goes on to say: “The point is not that Israelis have no right to defend themselves against Palestinian terrorism, but that the Israeli argument that there is no moral equivalence between Palestinian terrorism and Israeli preventive and retaliatory violence is deeply flawed. The relevant comparison is between the way the Jews acted during their struggle for statehood – not after they achieved it – and the way Palestinians, still very much in the midst of their hopeless struggle for statehood, are acting now. It is also flawed because you cannot condemn terrorism if you do not offer people under occupation a credible route towards achieving viable statehood through non-violent means. That is something Israel has never offered the Palestinians.”
Israel, through the support of the U.S., currently has the whip hand over the Palestinian Arabs and uses it ruthlessly. In Gaza, the Israeli army snipers were using high velocity bullets that left huge exit wounds, guaranteed to maim those who were not killed outright. Agreed, 30,000 to 40,000 demonstrators hurling rocks, Molotov cocktails, and attempting to lay explosive charges at the security fence and even to fly burning kites into Israel to set fields on fire, must have been a truly intimidating sight. But even so – why did the soldiers use live ammunition? Why did they not use tear gas, or rubber bullets? The Israeli death toll as a result of the storming of the Gaza fence was precisely nil.
Imagine yourself in the position of the ordinary people forced to live in Gaza. Gaza is 25 miles long, and between 3.7 to 7.5 miles wide, with a total area of 141 square miles. With a population of 1.85 million Palestinians, it ranks as the third most populated polity in the world. Since 2006 and the election of a Hamas government, it has been under an Israeli and U.S.-led international economic and political boycott. Due to the Israeli and Egyptian border closures and the Israeli sea and air blockade, the population is not free to leave or enter the Gaza Strip, nor allowed to freely import or export goods, or to fish freely in the sea. An extensive Israeli buffer zone and border fence within the Strip renders much land off-limits to Gaza’s Palestinians – it was this border fence that the Palestinian Arabs were attempting to breach. The population is expected to increase to 2.1 million in 2020. By that time, Gaza may be rendered unliveable, if present trends continue, with 95% of its water being unfit to drink, and electricity available for only a few hours each day, with access to food, medicines, and fuel also severely limited. Unemployment is 44%, rising to 60% for those between the ages of 15 and 29.
The UN’s leading human rights official, Mr Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, has said of the Gazans: “They are, in essence, caged in a toxic slum from birth to death; deprived of dignity; dehumanised by the Israeli authorities to such a point it appears officials do not even consider that these men and women have a right, as well as every reason, to protest.” Well, how would you feel in their situation? Would you not want to attack the border fence of your prison?
The demographer Arnon Soffer of Haifa University is the architect of the current isolation of Gaza. In 2004, he advised the government of Ariel Sharon to withdraw Israeli forces from within Gaza, seal the territory off from the outside world, and simply shoot anyone who tries to break out. “When 2.5 million people live in a closed-off Gaza, it’s going to be a human catastrophe,” Soffer told an interviewer in the Jerusalem Post (11 November 2004); “Those people will become even bigger animals than they are today, with the aid of an insane fundamentalist Islam. The pressure at the border will be awful. It’s going to be a terrible war. So, if we want to remain alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill. All day, every day.” He added that “the only thing that concerns me is how to ensure that the boys and men who are going to have to do the killing will be able to return home to their families and be normal human beings.” In response to the current killing and shooting, a senior member of the Israeli parliament, Avi Dichter, reassured his audience on live television that they need not be unduly concerned. Their army, he told them, “has enough bullets for everyone.”
Israel’s minister of defence, Avigdor Lieberman, has said that there are “no innocent people” in Hamas-run Gaza. Lieberman’s opinion of the value of the lives of Palestinians mirrors the view expressed by Ayelet Shaked, Israel’s minister of justice. A year before her appointment in 2015, Shaked posted on her Facebook page an article by Uri Elitzur, a settler leader, in which he said that Israel should target not only militants but the “mothers of the martyrs, who send them to hell with flowers and kisses. They should follow their sons, nothing would be more just. They should go, as should the physical homes in which the snakes were raised. Otherwise more little snakes will be raised there.”
And yet Jews are the genetic brothers and sisters of Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese, and they all share a common genetic lineage that stretches back thousands of years. That is why this massacre and maiming of Palestinians in May 2018 by the Israeli Defence Force reminds me ineluctably of King Claudius in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Claudius, you may remember, murdered his brother the King of Denmark (father of Prince Hamlet), seized his throne, and to add insult to injury, then seduced and married Hamlet’s mother, his late brother’s Queen. Claudius tries to pray to ease his conscience, but finds that he cannot:
O, my offence is rank, it smells to heaven;
It hath the primal eldest curse upon’t,
A brother’s murder. Pray can I not,
Though inclination be as sharp as will:
My stronger guilt defeats my strong intent;
And, like a man to double business bound,
I stand in pause where I shall first begin,
And both neglect. What if this cursed hand
Were thicker than itself with brother’s blood,
Is there not rain enough in the sweet heavens
To wash it white as snow? Whereto serves mercy
But to confront the visage of offence?
And what’s in prayer but this two-fold force,
To be forestalled ere we come to fall,
Or pardon’d being down? Then I’ll look up;
My fault is past. But, O, what form of prayer
Can serve my turn? ‘Forgive me my foul murder’?
That cannot be; since I am still possess’d
Of those effects for which I did the murder, My crown, mine own ambition and my queen.(Hamlet, Act 3 sc. 3, lines 36 to 55)
At the same time as young Israeli soldiers were slaughtering Gazans at the border, just fifty miles away a glittering champagne reception was taking place in Jerusalem to celebrate the opening of Donald Trump’s new embassy there. Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, and her husband Jared Kushner, welcomed the Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu and two Christian Zionist pastors, John Hagee and Robert Jeffress, to the embassy to lead the guests in prayer. Commenting on this, the former presidential candidate Mitt Romney quoted Jeffress as saying “you can’t be saved by being a Jew,” “Mormonism is a heresy from the pit of hell” and Islam no better. Such a bigot, continued Romney (who is himself a Mormon) “should not be giving the prayer that opens the United States Embassy in Jerusalem”.
And yet he was. And Netanyahu was bowing his head and mouthing his prayers alongside him, obviously less troubled by conscience than was King Claudius. It seems strange to me that the Israelis are willing to take any amount of anti-Semitism from preachers who believe paradise will not come until the Jews accept the punishment of a jealous God and convert to Christianity. Presumably they are prepared to live with the insulting beliefs of the Christian Zionists, just as long as the result is that the Americans do nothing to prevent Israeli settlers from taking over more and more land in the West Bank.
For let us be clear: it is American domestic politics that is sustaining and prolonging the present situation in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank. Why did Trump take the controversial decision to move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, an action which has received worldwide condemnation? He did of course give his repeated backing to Israel during the presidential campaign in 2016 and needed to fulfil the expectations of his voters. In turn, this leads to a further question: why would Trump voters be especially supportive of the Jerusalem policy? The answer to this almost certainly lies with a type of evangelical Christianity, ie Christian Zionism, and one of its most fervent supporters, Trump’s vice-president Mike Pence.
As Professor Paul Rogers of Bradford University has written:
“To talk about the power of the “Jewish lobby” in the United States is actually misleading, when the more correctly described “Israel lobby” wields far more electoral power thanks to its reinforcement by Christian Zionists. They number tens of millions of voters compared with the far smaller American Jewish population who, in any case, will tend more often to vote for the Democratic Party. Nearly a third of Americans, around 100 million people, lean towards evangelical Christianity and of these perhaps a third embrace the Christian Zionist perspective. This is passionate in its support for Israel.”
To quote the evangelical preacher Jerry Falwell: “The Bible Belt is Israel’s safety net in the United States.” The consequence is that no Israeli government, as long as it has U.S. support, will uproot the illegal Jewish settlements on Palestinian land, which already make a contiguous, autonomous and independent Palestinian state impossible. It is obvious that the “two state solution” is finished – American political calculations and Israeli settlement building in the West Bank have ensured its death. This whole issue also comes at a time when what is becoming known as the “Israel Victory” political caucus is gathering influence in Congress. This caucus, which has plenty of support in Netanyahu’s government, takes a simple, binary view: Israel has won, the Palestinians have lost – and everyone had better get used to living in a Jewish state. Such hubris may cause anger and dismay among many Jews in the United States and Western Europe, but it is a driving force within the Trump administration. Perhaps most significant of all, it fits almost perfectly into the Christian Zionist vision. Almost one in three Americans believes Israel was given to the Jews by God as a prelude to the Battle of Armageddon and Jesus’ Second Coming.
This belief that Jesus Christ will come for a second time in a physical body has been said by Rudolf Steiner to be a complete misunderstanding, and that Christ will not return in physical incarnation. This was done once and for all time, and will not be repeated. But according to Steiner, Christ is here already, in the etheric body of the Earth. From the 1930s onwards, Rudolf Steiner said, the Christ would be visible in etheric form to those who have been able to develop their powers of spiritual perception. At first the Christ will be seen by only a few, but during the next three thousand years more and more people will be able to have this experience.
In a series of lectures given in 1917 (the same year as the Balfour Declaration), Rudolf Steiner also said the following:
“I have described the task for mankind in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch (i.e. our present age) as that of coming to terms with evil as an impulse in world-evolution. We have spoken of what this means from various points of view. The indispensable need is that the forces which manifest as evil when they appear in the wrong place shall be overcome by human endeavour during this epoch, so that men can begin to make out of these forces something favourable for the whole future of cosmic evolution. Hence the task of this fifth post-Atlantean epoch is quite specially arduous, and many temptations lie ahead. And as the powers of evil make their appearance in gradual stages, men are naturally much more inclined to give way to them in all realms instead of battling to place what appears as evil in the service of the rightful course of world-development. This, nevertheless, is what has to come about — up to a certain point evil must be turned to good ends.”
The fundamental objection to everything that is happening to the Palestinian Arabs is that it goes against the second part of the Balfour Declaration, 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.” So how, to use Steiner’s expression, can the evil in Israel and Palestine be turned to good ends?
The two-state solution died because Netanyahu and previous Israeli governments were determined to kill it, Palestinian terrorism and violence encouraged the Israelis in that determination and American and other Western politicians who could have prevented its demise lacked the resolve and moral courage to do so. Therefore the only solution to this conflict that still remains is a pluralist, non-theocratic and secular state of Israel-Palestine, with a limited “right of return” and a settlement that gives Palestinian Arabs and Jewish Israelis the same, equal civil rights in ONE state.
Unless the almost inconceivable happens and the U.S. turns off the money and weapons taps, movement from Israel towards a one-state solution will never begin – one cannot really blame them when they have experienced so many Palestinian bombings and atrocities. So any progress now will be entirely dependent upon the Palestinians being able to find a leader cut from the same cloth as a Mahatma Gandhi or a Martin Luther King, a truly inspirational visionary who will lead them away from violent hatred and towards a campaign of non-violent civil disobedience.
Such a campaign is likely to cost Palestinian lives, but rather like Gandhi’s Salt March, it could be much more effective than violence in changing world public opinion. American journalist Webb Miller was on the scene of the Salt March and he later described what followed. “Suddenly,” he wrote, “at a word of command, scores of native police rushed upon the advancing marchers and rained blows on their heads…Not one of the marchers even raised an arm to fend off the blows. They went down like ten-pins.” Miller’s harrowing account of the beatings circulated widely in the international media, and was even read aloud in the U.S. Congress. Winston Churchill—no great fan of Gandhi—would later admit that the protests and their aftermath had “inflicted such humiliation and defiance as has not been known since the British first trod the soil of India.”
If the Palestinians were to adopt similarly peaceful means of protest, it would alert the whole world to what Israel has become under the influence of an ethno-nationalist, right-wing version of Zionism, transformed by successive Israeli governments into something that its nineteenth and twentieth century founders never intended. Public revulsion in the United States at scenes of Israeli brutalisation of Arabs could lead to the decline in America of the influence of Christian Zionism – and then there would ultimately be an opportunity for a one-state solution to emerge. The Israelis should remember that hubris is always followed by nemesis.
Let King Claudius have the last word, in his realisation that, however we may twist things to avoid justice while here in physical incarnation, ultimately we cannot escape our karma. God is not mocked.
“In the corrupted currents of this world
Offence’s gilded hand may shove by justice,
And oft ‘tis seen the wicked prize itself
Buys out the law. But ‘tis not so above,
There is no shuffling, there the action lies
In his true nature, and we ourselves compelled
Even to the teeth and forehead of our faults
To give in evidence.”
(Hamlet, Act 3, sc. 3, lines 57 to 64)
anthropopper 
Thank you friend for this thoughtful & well researched document, May this & all evil be redeemed & turned to the good of all. Peace ~hag
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Due to the worldwide rise of right-wing nationalism, not only in Israel but also in Russia, Europe and Amerika, the Arab-Israeli conflict has changed. Ethno-nationalism has brought Israel closer to conservative Amerika, to orthodox Saudi Arabia and to mafia state Russia. But despite the Israeli cruelties in Hamas-occupied Gaza, Israel is still a functioning democratic state and a liberal civil society with a free press.
You don’t mention the forcible expulsion or exodus of 600.000 Jews from Arab countries (‘the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country’ according to Balfour in your quote). In 1948 what is called the ‘Palestinian’ state used to be Arab (Egyptian, Jordan and Iraq), not Palestinian land.
Geopolitical Putinism has become more influential in the Middle East, even Trump seems to be dependent on him (Harding). An authoritarian Putin, in his new presidential term, could force a two state solution, wherein an autocratic Palestinian Authority (Abbas), not Muslim Brotherhood Hamas (Haniya), controls both Gaza and the West Bank connected by a corridor.
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Ton, you are right that Israel is a functioning democratic state and I should have made that clear. If you click on the hyperlinks in the post, you will find that many of them come from Israeli and Jewish sources, which shows that the Israelis have full access to information, including difficult issues about their history. Perhaps I should also have mentioned exodus and expulsion of Jews from Arab countries, but much of this is accounted for by “Aliyah” or the “act of going upwards” towards Jerusalem, in which Jews emigrate to the Land of Israel, one of the basic tenets of Zionism. I’m not sure that I share your estimate of Putin’s power to force a two-state solution, though I’m sure that he would like to exert influence more widely than just in Syria. And just for the record, there is no land corridor at present between Gaza and the West Bank, nor do I think that that the US or Israel have any intention of ever allowing such a development.
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On the corridor: Peace road links West Bank with Gaza Strip
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/peace-road-links-west-bank-with-gaza-strip-740139.html
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Ton, as I understand it, since Hamas’ takeover of the Gaza strip in 2007, Israel has imposed a complete blockade of the Gaza strip, whose inhabitants are not free to travel the 28 miles to the West Bank. There are in total around 700 miles of roads that the Gazans are prevented from using.
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Jeremy, it seems that “lest ye become as little children, ye cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven” must be a million miles and years away after reading this!
Yet, as an American, I can say first-hand that the travesty of the Donald Trump presidency is seen by many as a new standard of intentionally evil politics. So, could this actually be the incarnation of Ahriman that Rudolf Steiner predicted would occur early in the third millennium, or was it the first third of the fifth cultural epoch, c. 1413? Either way, 2018 is about the right time-frame.
I maintain that Europe needs to show the force of moral outrage, or outrageous conviction against the Trump tyranny. Last year, Trump went to Europe and showed his keen ineptitude amongst the various leaders, and especially the “three M’s”, – May, Macron, and Merkel. So, they know what they are dealing with *with* this buffoon, and yet need to speak out more forcefully for the rights of the Palestinians. Public opinion in my country means nothing; Trump believes that his fan-base is only growing. That is how deluded he is. It is your leader, Theresa May, and the other leaders of Europe that need to speak a kind of singular voice against what is clearly an Ahrimanic display of power and arrogance that thinks it can do whatever it wants in the world, and, for example, thinks that transferring the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem shows a really profound intellect, albeit cold, calculating, and utterly ahirmanic in nature.
As well, Jeremy, let us not forget that the British Empire was still a going concern in the first half of the 20th century, and ruled India and occupied Israel both until 1947/1948. Thus, European Jews were suppressed from returning to the homeland by the British occupation of Israel, and the liberation of India entailed the partition involving Pakistan for the Muslims, which was a British idea and concession. This is why Gandhi was made the victim, and assassinated. He was completely against partition.
In today’s world, nothing will change without an evolution of consciousness. I won’t say revolution because that simply means “what goes around comes around”, and old problems simply get a new veneer. Steiner’s anthroposophy seems pretty close to being obsolete in terms of helping with today’s rather terminal issues.
At least, reading this rather disturbing essay, which makes one very uncomfortable in terms of the hopelessness, the powerlessness and helplessness in the face of evil really comes through. Steiner said somewhere that this would need to be experienced before a new beginning could start. If so, then you have hit the nail on the head!
And, I truly hope so. Kind regards,
Steve
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Steve, there is a concept developed by the great Swiss psychologist, C G Jung, which he called “enantiodromia”, or the karmic tendency of human emotions to metamorphose into their opposite. It seems to me that the trends you and Ton have mentioned – Trump, right-wing nationalism, environmental degradation, lying and false news, governmental drift, xenophobia, etc, etc, may just be the high-water mark of our present degraded and evil systems, and that the sheer reality of what we have become will bring us to the verge of a major shift in worldview towards a more sustainable and humane future. Trump, in particular, is surely one of the great comic figures of our age: a more self-aware person, knowing himself to be a corrupt businessman, liar, adulterer, sexual predator, bully and braggart, etc, would surely never have run for President, realising that his past would then be subjected to such a degree of public, legal and media scrutiny that all his villainy would be exposed. But Trump is not self-aware, and so we are going to have a steady drip-feed of stories about him for the rest of his presidency. Eventually, even his core voting base will realise that, far from draining the swamp, Trump has been busy stocking it with alligators and corruptly enriching himself and his multi-millionaire chums. It will be interesting to see whether he runs for a second term. As for your remarks about Steiner and anthroposophy, I don’t agree that they seem pretty close to being obsolete. On the contrary, I experience them as islands of culture and sanity among the surrounding madness, which will be there as positive examples of possible ways forward when enantiodromia leads us inevitably in the direction of a society that is characterised by tolerance, social inclusion, regeneration and environmental sustainability.
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Yes, I experience anthroposophy similarly as “islands of culture and sanity” amidst the madness and chaos, but anthroposophy is hardly the worldwide movement that Rudolf Steiner hoped for, and, as previous threads have indicated, there is much room for the possibility of sabotage in the aftermath of Steiner’s death in keeping anthroposophy very timid and conservative as a mere legacy system. No true successor has ever come forth and taken charge with the power to effect a dynamic continuation that is willing to speak up and face these serious issues today; issues that clearly demonstrate the working of the anti-Christ [Sorath] for the past 20 years, since the third evolutionary surge began in 1998. As long as true Christ-consciousness is lacking, then Sorath has an easily attainable playing field to work with in conflict-building, e.g., the Arab-Israeli wars. The declaration of the War on Terror by George Bush in 2003 only serves to expand the complexity of it all, and the seeming hopelessness for world peace in our time.
Thus, I maintain that we must all die and be reborn into a better state of affairs in the next life. That doesn’t mean we can’t try to see things as they are now, and this takes some unflinching courage in the Michael tradition. As such, Anthroposophy stands as the herald of the future, as it gifts us today with its wisdom. Ears to hear and an active intellect is all that is required.
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Excellent piece, Jeremy. Truly enlightening.
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I think that the “Jewish State of Israel“ can be described as a tragedy. It’s been a long while ago, but I used to go there on short business trips with a certain frequency. I came to greatly admire what the people had accomplished there in such a short time. I also learned that they greatly fear the enemies who surround them on all sides; and they have reason to fear them. There are many Israelis who lament the current government’s treatment of the Palestinians and struggle to change it – including the “two-state solution”. But none (that I know of) would agree to allowing the Palestinians to return, for, they argue, the Ps would soon outnumber the Jews and it would be the end of the Jewish state. I think they might be right. Whatever the justification of a Jewish state (the holocaust), the very concept of a political state based on a religion – despite the fact that most Israelis are not religious – means an attempt to return to a kind of democratic theocracy – a contradiction in terms and ideas which cannot succeed in the long run. That’s why it’s a tragedy: it’s doomed, unless it can change it’s face and fundamental objectives.
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It’s interesting to ask oneself why Israel and Israelis believe that the land is their’s, that they have a right to take it (by force), and that all non-Jewish neighbours – even the 20% of Israeli (sub-)citizens who are Arab or Druze – are enemies. Some of the orthodox rabbinate have even stated that it is okay if soldiers kill the children of Palestinians because they too will grow into enemies (1).
These beliefs seem so alien to us, especially when they spring from the mouths of highly intelligent, educated, cultured people. Yet they do spring, and often easily.
I believe we are not dealing with “ordinary” politics here. I do not believe the Israeli regime behaves the way it does because it can. There is something more profound underlying it. There is something totally “unchristian” in its fundament, as if the injunction of 2000 years ago to “love thy neighbour”, those 3 words that changed the whole substance of what it is to be human, had never happened.
Jeremy, you’re right about Prof Soffer, who also said “We are not wanted in the Middle East, which is why we will have to continue to fight.” (2) And since Israel will remain in the Middle East, the fight will be eternal, a state of intentional continuous war. Peace is neither intended nor sought.
As I said, these are not “normal” thoughts. You may invoke the Holocaust to try to explain them, but you’ll end up looking for something “spiritual” that eludes you. And anger, while understandable, merely clouds the opportunity for understanding.
It’s been said that when Ahriman – sometimes the Anti-Christ – incarnates (in the West) he will make his base in Jerusalem, eg build a supermarket on Golgotha. For that to be possible, the West must once again have possession of the Holy Land. The Jews were chosen as the bearers of the body of the Incarnation; once Abraham had accepted the compact with Jahveh, they had no real choice. Now they appear to be willing partners in aiding the future reign of Ahriman. Except this time they have the possibility to refuse.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yitzhak_Shapira
2. https://www.jpost.com/Features/I-didnt-suggest-we-kill-Palestinians
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This is obviously a topic that arouses powerful emotions – a dear friend, a left-leaning Jewish woman, wrote to me to say: “Please don’t ask me to get involved with you in a discussion about Israel. I am deeply conflicted on almost every aspect and know that if I am not to lose my few remaining friends, I must keep away from the subject.” So I wrote back to apologise for causing her discomfort, said that we would not speak of it again, and that I did not intend to lose her as a friend. But it showed me just what a time-bomb this issue is in the world. It’s basic Cain and Abel stuff and goes right to the core of how we humans relate to one another.
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Jeremy, there is a lot to be said for your ‘left-leaning’ ‘friend, who does not want to throw their antlers into the ring on this matter, and possibly lose friends, which would seem to indicate that they have friends of the ‘right-leaning’ persuasion, which could even be predominate. Thus, it would appear that the Israeli aggression against the Palestinians is likely supported by the Western European Jewish community, even with some moral angst as to why it has to be so. Some simply see it all as a lost cause with no resolution, and so why even try to see the plight of the Muslims, who certainly have an equal right to this particular plot of ground; the so-called, “Holy Land”.
Now, the matter of equal rights to occupy this land seems to be the real issue. Who can really contest whether the Jews or the Muslims has the upper-hand, or whether it should even be an issue. Yet, as we see, the British/American regime has made it the issue ever since the end of World War II. By denying European Jews the right to return to their rightful homeland, i.e, Israel, with the British occupation of Palestine throughout WWI and WWII, it only seems clear that a genocide of the Jewish population was in the offing, and intentionally meant to occur. This fact seems clear today, and yet, only after three more years after the end of WWII in 1945 was the creation of the Jewish State of Israel made a reality in 1948. Ever since, it has been a constant battle between the Arabs and the Israeli’s.
Now, for the sake of convenience, let’s jump forward to May 15, 2018, and what that means. What does it mean? It means the coincidence of three significant events:
1) The yearly Muslim celebration of 15 May 1948
2) The rather unique occurrence of Ramadan, which began at sundown that day, and involves the detection of the first sliver of the waxing crescent moon in the 9th month of the Muslim calendar.
3) The celebration of the transfer of the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, Israel.
So, was this all merely coincidental, or was it planned to take place with the appropriate demonstrators from the Muslim side? What was reported as the damage? 68 deaths and some 2500 bullet injuries inflicted by the Israeli police.
It seems extreme, but when the flag of the United States is involved in a ceremonial act, it could prove to be a meaningful gesture.
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Bres Bo, you ask what the reason is that the Jews regard the land as theirs. Numbers 34 in the bible tells them that it is theirs:
Boundaries of the Land
1 The LORD spoke to Moses, saying, 2“ Command the people of Israel, and say to them, When you enter the land of Canaan (this is the land that shall fall to you for an inheritance, the land of Canaan as defined by its borders), 3 your south side shall be from the wilderness of Zin alongside Edom, and your southern border shall run from the end of the Salt Sea on the east. 4 And your border shall turn south of the ascent of Akrabbim, and cross to Zin, and its limit shall be south of Kadesh-barnea. Then it shall go on to Hazar-addar, and pass along to Azmon. 5 And the border shall turn from Azmon to the Brook of Egypt, and its limit shall be at the sea.
6 “For the western border, you shall have the Great Sea and itsa coast. This shall be your western border.
7 “This shall be your northern border: from the Great Sea you shall draw a line to Mount Hor. 8From Mount Hor you shall draw a line to Lebo-hamath, and the limit of the border shall be at Zedad. 9Then the border shall extend to Ziphron, and its limit shall be at Hazar-enan. This shall be your northern border.
10 “You shall draw a line for your eastern border from Hazar-enan to Shepham. 11 And the border shall go down from Shepham to Riblah on the east side of Ain. And the border shall go down and reach to the shoulder of the Sea of Chinnereth on the east. 12 And the border shall go down to the Jordan, and its limit shall be at the Salt Sea. This shall be your land as defined by its borders all around.”
13 Moses commanded the people of Israel, saying, “This is the land that you shall inherit by lot, which the LORD has commanded to give to the nine tribes and to the half-tribe. 14 For the tribe of the people of Reuben by fathers’ houses and the tribe of the people of Gad by their fathers’ houses have received their inheritance, and also the half-tribe of Manasseh. 15 The two tribes and the half-tribe have received their inheritance beyond the Jordan east of Jericho, toward the sunrise.”
These borders extend beyond current Israel. I believe it’s called The Levant. This is the reason why so many Evangelical Christians don’t want the land divided, or shared, because the bible tells us that it belongs to the Jews.
p.s. I am interested to see how Rudolf Steiner’s teachings fit in with the bible in regard to the ‘end times’. I have read part of Steiner’s lecture on Revelation, so far, and would love an article on that to hear Anthropopper’s overview. But that’s up to you. I like the website and have recommended it on You-Tube. I can only hope more people read your articles as they promote good understandings on these matters.
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Dear Clarice:
I don’t often get updated comment from prior posts, but I appreciate these remarks very much. I also am doing a more in depth study of the Book of Revelation, and seeing where the Lamb of God seems to be the principle agent in this book. Also, I have been having revelations about the Fatima miracle of 1917, and seeing St. John of Patmos as being reincarnated in the little girl, Lucia, who tried to give a further revelation of the tragedy of the twentieth century. She died in 2005, at age 97; the same elderly age as Saint John.
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Bres Bro conflates the Israelis with the Jews “The Jews were chosen as the bearers of the body of the Incarnation; once Abraham had accepted the compact with Jahveh, they had no real choice. Now they appear to be willing partners in aiding the future reign of Ahriman.”
Some are, some aren’t. Same as everyone else. “Jews” ins’t the same as the political entity of “Israel,” although it isn’t in the interest either of the Israeli government or its supporters or of antisemites, for that matter, to acknowledge that. Jeremy is spot on in saying that this is an issue about how humans relate to each other. He is also spot on in saying that American Christians bear a heavy responsibility for the failure of Israel to come to terms with its neighbors. English Christian Zionism played a large role, I think, in the processes that led up to the Balfour Declaration.
And as for Zionism itself, were it not for the intractable nature of European antisemitism, Zionism would not have come into existence. Because of Zionism, a lot of Jews did not die at the hands of antisemites. That might be easier for Jews to remember than non-Jews. Pointing that out isn’t the same as saying that Zionism worked out well or that it didn’t start out as a flawed option at a time when pretty every option for central and Eastern European Jews was flawed. But keeping in mind that Zionism was a response to the failures of Christianity is one way to keep the impulse for finger pointing at a Jewish “them” under control.
Substitute the term “imperialists” for “Israelis” and the Israeli behavior does not seem so unusual, which is another way that the impulse for pointing a finger at a “them” rather than an “us” might be held in check. These imperialists don’t have the advantage of significantly outnumbering the people already there.
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Woofles. I rather hoped that I hadn’t conflated Israelis with Jews. It was certainly not my intention. I was trying to illustrate a possible parallel between the role of some Jewish people in two significant incarnations. Obviously not all Jewish people are involved in this second mission, nor all Israeli Jews. That doesn’t disprove the hypothesis, and I repeat it is only a hypothesis, that the unconscious motive for the colonial Zionist project might be related to Ahriman.
The “surface” reasons – 19th and 20th century European anti-semitism, the calamity of the Holocaust, residual 19th century nationalism (aka Zionism), Arab hostility going back via the 1948 Naqba to the late 19th century when the Rothschilds bought up Ottoman owned land in Palestine, etc – are all true, but remain the fable convenu that Steiner so often referred to.
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I take the position that I like both Bres Bo’s comments, as well as Wooffles, and I think they have the tendency to conflate each other. Bres Bo is certainly on the side of Jeremy’s essay, as with Wooffles “spot-on” analysis, and so this must simply be a matter of two voices experiencing a kind of ‘tower of babel’ situation, which was instituted in the far past, and still has a lingering effect.
Now, if we take Steiner’s efforts toward conveying a kind of symptomatology in relation to social, historical, and psychological conditions affecting human evolution over many millennia, we can ascertain a kind of seminal condition which appertained the time of Christ two thousand years ago, when He sought to appeal to those of the Hebrew culture who were expecting such a one as He to appear in their midst. As such, it all came down to the final denouement, which was the plot of Caiaphas, High Priest of the Sanhedrin, who had the idea that a certain man must die for the nation. Thus, it was Caiaphas himself who came to realize that Christ had incarnated on earth, and needed to be the martyr for the Jewish nation. Let’s look at these words from the Gospel of St. John, and how their effects have applied:
It can be shown quite conclusively that Caiaphas intended for the Messiah to die for the people of Israel. The Gospel of St. John, Ch. 11 indicates it so:
Conspiracy to Kill Jesus
47 Therefore the chief priests and the Pharisees convened a council, and were saying, “What are we doing? For this man is performing many signs.
48 If we let Him go on like this, all men will believe in Him, and the Romans will come and take away both our place and our nation.”
49 But one of them, Caiaphas, who was high priest that year, said to them, “You know nothing at all,
50 nor do you take into account that it is expedient for you that one man die for the people, and that the whole nation not perish.”
51 Now he did not say this on his own initiative, but being high priest that year, he prophesied that Jesus was going to die for the nation,
52 and not for the nation only, but in order that He might also gather together into one the children of God who are scattered abroad.
53 So from that day on they planned together to kill Him.
http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John+11&version=NASB
In other words, they knew that the Christ had incarnated on earth according to scriptural prophecy, but was intentionally made a ‘false god’ in order to preserve the nation of Israel and its Judaism in terms of Abraham, Issac, and Jacob alone. This remains their trinity.
What seems most relevant to me is how Caiaphas had this plot to destroy the Messiah, Who had evidently proven His existence by way of the various testimony obtained by the Pharisees, and duly written down by the scribes over the three years described in the four Gospel accounts. This writing must have amounted to a large degree of evidence that the person of Jesus of Nazareth was actually taken seriously as being the One that the various prophets had foretold would come to save the world, and not just a nation.
Yet, Judas knew who he was betraying, and went to Caiaphas for the money, and this is the same kind of betrayal that snuffed out the Mithras mystery that is now revered in the Jewish celebration of the Winter feast of the Dedication, i.e., Hanukka..
What matters is the question of, “where did the testimony of the existence of Christ on earth go”? We live today with a populace that still conjectures if a Christ-Jesus really existed, and that is because all of that testimony must have been buried or destroyed in order to achieve the aims of the plot of Caiaphas.
Scholars are proud and convinced to say that only a quarto-page exists that possibly conveys that a Jesus, or Christ actually might have existed on earth. Yet, according to the gospels themselves, in which scribes accompanied the Pharisees in order to write down the testimony of Christ, which must have been submitted to the Sanhedrin, there must have been at least hundreds of pages of this writing.
Yet, none of it exists today as an outer-external and objective record. I say it is because of the plot of Caiaphas, which was to crucify the duly recognized Messiah for the good of a particular nation, and not the world.
This is accounted for in the Gospel of St. John, and why no written record still exists from the standpoint of the Jews. Their goal was to crucify the One, Who was for all Mankind, for the sake of a mere nation, which still upholds its special pedigree to the world, i.e., being the first and only chosen one’s of God.
And so it goes. Judas helped that cause and then passed into the Roman Empire as a significant figure. He would go on to extort Christianity as a mere motive of power for his empire. This seems rather plain to me, and would evolve to see its consequences in the era of Anglo-Americanism. Steiner even forecasted it in the lecture from December 14, 1919, when he said that by 1950 it would be known who ruled the world. He also talks of those here in America who must fight it, and foster the new spirit of our age; a difficult task, indeed.
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Here is a further perspective to this hugely important subject. Adam Kahane, whose destiny led him to work with sectors, organisations and communities around the world as a facilitator trying to resolve differences and bring about reconciliation and social change gives a thoughtful perspective on Arab-Israeli issues in his book “Love and Power – a theory and practice of Social Change”. see chapter 5 – bridging divides in Israel.
In 2006 he was asked to help in a project designed to rethink where Israeli society was going. Rather than convene a strategic dialogue between Israelis and Palestinians, the project focussed on bringing together the disparate leaders of Jewish Israelis. The logic was that until Jewish Israelis could agree amongst themselves on where they were trying to go, no leader would ever have a stable base from which to negotiate a way forward with the Palestinians.
One of the fundamental difficulties observed by Kahane is the extent that Jewish Israeli society is deeply divided and stuck. There are angry and bitter conflicts between religious and secular, left and right, immigrant and native, West bank settlers and people who live within Israeli pre1967 armistice lines and across other cultural, religious and political fault lines.
These deep internal schisms and blockages mirror deep internal schisms with and among Palestinians and the larger Arab world.
Kahane notes that in such a fractured social system, people typically try to address their tough challenges by pushing for what they want regardless of what others want through some form of aggression.
Nevertheless despite many hurdles the project had some success in getting these disparate leaders to step back and start listening to each other and to reach some common ground. One of the lessons is that there is no magic formula for doing this, and one has to press on intuitively in spite of hurdles and failures.
So Jeremy is right. It boils down to how we humans relate to each other and perceive each other, and how truly aware we are of how and where our opinions and views originate in this life or maybe even in previous ones.
One encouraging sign is that there are more and more people who are making the courageous step to forgive those who have caused them harm and to seek reconciliation. This provides the Spiritual World with the possibility to move from the Mosaic “eye for an Eye” Moon karma to Sun karma (karmic relationships Vol 5) and gives people the chance to cooperate with Christ in his new role as Lord of Karma.
For an example of this, see this talk from Marian Partington, whose sister went missing for many years and was abducted and murdered .
If the circumstances are right, this can even happen at the national level as it did with the truth and reconciliation experience in South Africa.
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Are you familiar with the work of Moral Re-Armament, which was begun in the 1920’s by Frank Buchman as the Oxford group? This led to its further expansion in the 1930’s in relation to WW II, and how Peter Howard became involved as a newspaperman for Lord Beaverbrook’s ‘Daily Express’. He would go on to help write the book, “Guilty Men”, under the pseudonym ‘Cato’, which went a long way to replacing Chamberlain with Churchill as prime minister in 1940.
Anyway, MRA did a lot of good throughout the 1940’s and 1950’s, and then met with the 1960’s, in which Buchman would die early in 1961, and Howard would take over, and reveal the conspiracy of the deaths of Diem and Kennedy, and then be assassinated in Lima, Peru in February 1965. After about ten years, Michael Henderson attempted to renew the impetus of MRA for a few years, and then retired in 2000. Since then, it has become IOC, Initiatives of Change, which is dedicated to truth and reconciliation for all the conflicts that have ever existed in the world.
Your post here made me think that maybe you knew of this genesis for such a thing which makes truth and reconciliation a possibility.
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Thanks to Steve Hale for drawing attention to Frank Buchman. I read with interest the IOC website and his potted biography on Wikipedia. A remarkable life.
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I read this piece the day it hit the internet, and I refrained from replying, but then came the amens of most of the comments. It’s a dispiriting thing to see anthroposophists join in the parade of anti-Israeli harangues we see published every day. Jeremy says that it’s a rare thing that he gets so angered as to shout at the radio and “refuse to listen to these obscene lies.” With all the terrible things that have gone on around the world over the last few decades and with all the dictatorial and repressive governments (including nearly every Muslim country) that exist, why exactly did only Israel cause him to have a tantrum? It seems that anthroposophists have joined the bien pensant intelligentsia.
Jacques Ellul, the political philosopher and Christian anarchist, once wrote a book called Propaganda where he tells us that one requirement of effective propaganda is an educated population. After all, you need an education to read the propaganda. Nearly all of the liberal Western media sound the same notes over and over again regarding Israel and the Arabs, and that is indeed quite effective. Everyone reads and nods. When there is a dissenting voice, we shout at it and race out of the room.
It is notable that all the quotes used are from leftists, except for the one from a Muslim, the UN human rights official. That last one really was the cause of bitter laughter. He heads the UN human rights council that includes members like Burundi, Cuba, Egypt, Rwanda, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. Every dictator led country in the world has been on the laughable UN human rights council, so to quote the Muslim head of this regarding Israel is especially egregious.
Benny Morris, a leftist Israeli, is quoted, but nothing is said about how he has changed his views. He now admits to having been mistaken in many of his earlier views. Perhaps the most important conclusion he came to was that if the entire Arab population had remained, Israel would have been strangled in its cradle. This no doubt would have pleased many Europeans. Morris now admits that the Arab desire has always been what we would call genocide. They wanted no Jews there, hence the common chant about pushing those Jews into the sea. Morris now says that what we call ethnic cleansing was in this case justified in order to save the lives of the Jewish population.
It is not enough to say that Hamas is a terrorist organization and then cry crocodile tears for the people that voted for them. You might have better served your readers by quoting from the Hamas charter which is not very different from the ideas that the Arab population in general has had since before the creation of Israel. It’s good to be specific so that readers can see who they are supporting and see what Israel has been up against. Here are some juicy tidbits:
……
The Islamic Resistance Movement is one of the links in the chain of the struggle against the Zionist invaders. It goes back to 1939, to the emergence of the martyr Izz al-Din al Kissam and his brethren the fighters, members of Moslem Brotherhood. It goes on to reach out and become one with another chain that includes the struggle of the Palestinians and Moslem Brotherhood in the 1948 war and the Jihad operations of the Moslem Brotherhood in 1968 and after.
Moreover, if the links have been distant from each other and if obstacles, placed by those who are the lackeys of Zionism in the way of the fighters obstructed the continuation of the struggle, the Islamic Resistance Movement aspires to the realisation of Allah’s promise, no matter how long that should take. The Prophet, Allah bless him and grant him salvation, has said:
“The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Gharkad tree, (evidently a certain kind of tree) would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews.” (related by al-Bukhari and Moslem).
Palestine is an Islamic Waqf land consecrated for Moslem generations until Judgement Day. This being so, who could claim to have the right to represent Moslem generations till Judgement Day?
This is the law governing the land of Palestine in the Islamic Sharia (law) and the same goes for any land the Moslems have conquered by force, because during the times of (Islamic) conquests, the Moslems consecrated these lands to Moslem generations till the Day of Judgement.
Initiatives, and so-called peaceful solutions and international conferences, are in contradiction to the principles of the Islamic Resistance Movement. Abusing any part of Palestine is abuse directed against part of religion. Nationalism of the Islamic Resistance Movement is part of its religion. Its members have been fed on that. For the sake of hoisting the banner of Allah over their homeland they fight.
The day that enemies usurp part of Moslem land, Jihad becomes the individual duty of every Moslem. In face of the Jews’ usurpation of Palestine, it is compulsory that the banner of Jihad be raised. To do this requires the diffusion of Islamic consciousness among the masses, both on the regional, Arab and Islamic levels. It is necessary to instill the spirit of Jihad in the heart of the nation so that they would confront the enemies and join the ranks of the fighters.
It is necessary that scientists, educators and teachers, information and media people, as well as the educated masses, especially the youth and sheikhs of the Islamic movements, should take part in the operation of awakening (the masses).
For a long time, the enemies (the Jews) have been planning, skillfully and with precision, for the achievement of what they have attained. They took into consideration the causes affecting the current of events. They strived to amass great and substantive material wealth which they devoted to the realisation of their dream. With their money, they took control of the world media, news agencies, the press, publishing houses, broadcasting stations, and others. With their money they stirred revolutions in various parts of the world with the purpose of achieving their interests and reaping the fruit therein. They were behind the French Revolution, the Communist revolution and most of the revolutions we heard and hear about, here and there. With their money they formed secret societies, such as Freemasons, Rotary Clubs, the Lions and others in different parts of the world for the purpose of sabotaging societies and achieving Zionist interests. With their money they were able to control imperialistic countries and instigate them to colonize many countries in order to enable them to exploit their resources and spread corruption there.
You may speak as much as you want about regional and world wars. They were behind World War I, when they were able to destroy the Islamic Caliphate, making financial gains and controlling resources. They obtained the Balfour Declaration, formed the League of Nations through which they could rule the world. They were behind World War II, through which they made huge financial gains by trading in armaments, and paved the way for the establishment of their state. It was they who instigated the replacement of the League of Nations with the United Nations and the Security Council to enable them to rule the world through them. There is no war going on anywhere, without having their finger in it.
The Zionist invasion is a vicious invasion. It does not refrain from resorting to all methods, using all evil and contemptible ways to achieve its end. It relies greatly in its infiltration and espionage operations on the secret organizations it gave rise to, such as the Freemasons, The Rotary and Lions clubs, and other sabotage groups. All these organizations, whether secret or open, work in the interest of Zionism and according to its instructions. They aim at undermining societies, destroying values, corrupting consciences, deteriorating character and annihilating Islam. It is behind the drug trade and alcoholism in all its kinds so as to facilitate its control and expansion.
World Zionism, together with imperialistic powers, try through a studied plan and an intelligent strategy to remove one Arab state after another from the circle of struggle against Zionism, in order to have it finally face the Palestinian people only. Egypt was, to a great extent, removed from the circle of the struggle, through the treacherous Camp David Agreement. They are trying to draw other Arab countries into similar agreements and to bring them outside the circle of struggle.
The Islamic Resistance Movement calls on Arab and Islamic nations to take up the line of serious and persevering action to prevent the success of this horrendous plan, to warn the people of the danger eminating from leaving the circle of struggle against Zionism. Today it is Palestine, tomorrow it will be one country or another. The Zionist plan is limitless. After Palestine, the Zionists aspire to expand from the Nile to the Euphrates. When they will have digested the region they overtook, they will aspire to further expansion, and so on. Their plan is embodied in the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion”, and their present conduct is the best proof of what we are saying.
Leaving the circle of struggle with Zionism is high treason, and cursed be he who does that. “for whoso shall turn his back unto them on that day, unless he turneth aside to fight, or retreateth to another party of the faithful, shall draw on himself the indignation of Allah, and his abode shall be hell; an ill journey shall it be thither.” (The Spoils – verse 16). There is no way out except by concentrating all powers and energies to face this Nazi, vicious Tatar invasion.
….
There is so much wrong in the piece Jeremy has written and in the comments that one could write a book on it. There were tens of thousands of people ordered by Hamas to go and attack the border with Israel and they have gone on for a period of weeks, using bombs and incendiary devices to start fires in Israel. They flew kites with swastikas painted on them. According to Hamas, there were 62 killed. Jeremy calls that disproportionate and ruthless. He calls it a “slaughter.” Huh? Hamas itself has admitted that 50 of those killed were Hamas terrorists. Islamic Jihad has claimed a few more. What greater proof do you need that Nikki Haley spoke the truth. Israeli forces had to have been very careful indeed. They could have easily killed all of them in a few minutes, but over a few weeks they managed to get a mere 62, nearly all of them admitted terrorists. Jeremy is not happy because there weren’t 62 Israelis killed to make it nice and even.
A quick word on numbers. Many of those Arabs living in Palestine at the time of Israel’s creation left their homes at the behest of the invading Arab armies. They were told that they should leave for their own safety until they, the Arab armies, managed to kill all the Jews. It didn’t turn out the way they expected. It’s true that there were Arabs pushed out. No one knows how many left willingly and how many were pushed out. One commenter reminds us that Jews were expelled from Arab lands, too. He says 600,000, but most scholars put the number at 850,000. Some think the number is closer to a million. Every Arab country has been ethnically cleansed of its Jews and they have started on the Christians. Why don’t you shout at that?
One commenter told us that the Druze in Israel are regarded by the Israelis as enemies. Again we see here the astounding ignorance among too many anthoroposophists. The Druze overwhelmingly are patriotic Israelis who serve in the IDF and in all levels of government. They consider themselves Israelis and Jews consider them Israelis. It is the non-Druze Arabs who don’t like them.
One commenter thinks that Trump is Ahriman and another thinks that Ahriman will surely base himself in Jerusalem. This is just nutty. I find Vladimir Soloviev a more reliable guide if you really need a prophet. He predicted that Israel would be reborn in the 20th century and that Israel would be the place of Ahriman’s defeat but certainly not his base. Those who root for the Palestinians are rooting for the destruction of Israel, for the continuation of Hitler’s genocidal plan. There is no way around that. If you check out what is said on the Palestinian media when they speak in Arabic, it’s clear that that remains their goal. If Soloviev is right, then you are also on the side of Ahriman.
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Hello Herb,
Thank you for your comment and I’m grateful to hear the views of someone who takes a different stance on these very serious issues.
I had hoped that the post above had made clear my view that the Islamofascist attitudes you describe are one of the major hindrances to progress; this is why I said that a new kind of leadership is required from the Palestinian Arabs, who have been so badly served by past and existing leaders.
But none of this can disguise Israel’s own responsibility and the appalling irony that in Gaza the Israelis (with help from the Egyptians, in exchange for large injections of American cash) have deliberately created the largest concentration camp in the world.
I wonder if you have come across mention of Edwin Montagu. Montagu was the third Jew (after Sir Herbert Samuel and Sir Rufus Isaacs) to serve as a cabinet minister in the British government. He became Secretary of State for India between 1917 and 1922. What is particularly interesting about Montagu in this context is that he was a Jew who strongly opposed Zionism. He also opposed the Balfour Declaration of 1917 and wrote a memorandum to the British Cabinet (the inner circle of the government) setting out why he thought the Declaration was actually anti-Semitic. The whole memorandum is very well worth reading:
http://www.balfourproject.org/edwin-montagu-and-zionism-1917/
because it sets out clearly many of the problems that have since emerged, but I would like to highlight the following passages:
“Zionism has always seemed to me to be a mischievous political creed, untenable by any patriotic citizen of the United Kingdom. If a Jewish Englishman sets his eyes on the Mount of Olives and longs for the day when he will shake British soil from his shoes and go back to agricultural pursuits in Palestine, he has always seemed to me to have acknowledged aims inconsistent with British citizenship and to have admitted that he is unfit for a share in public life in Great Britain, or to be treated as an Englishman. I have always understood that those who indulged in this creed were largely animated by the restrictions upon and refusal of liberty to Jews in Russia. But at the very time when these Jews have been acknowledged as Jewish Russians and given all liberties, it seems to be inconceivable that Zionism should be officially recognised by the British Government, and that Mr. Balfour should be authorized to say that Palestine was to be reconstituted as the “national home of the Jewish people”. I do not know what this involves, but I assume that it means that Mahommedans and Christians are to make way for the Jews and that the Jews should be put in all positions of preference and should be peculiarly associated with Palestine in the same way that England is with the English or France with the French, that Turks and other Mahommedans in Palestine will be regarded as foreigners, just in the same way as Jews will hereafter be treated as foreigners in every country but Palestine. Perhaps also citizenship must be granted only as a result of a religious test.
(…)
I assert that there is not a Jewish nation. The members of my family, for instance, who have been in this country for generations, have no sort or kind of community of view or of desire with any Jewish family in any other country beyond the fact that they profess to a greater or less degree the same religion. It is no more true to say that a Jewish Englishman and a Jewish Moor are of the same nation than it is to say that a Christian Englishman and a Christian Frenchman are of the same nation: of the same race, perhaps, traced back through the centuries – through centuries of the history of a peculiarly adaptable race. The Prime Minister and M. Briand are, I suppose, related through the ages, one as a Welshman and the other as a Breton, but they certainly do not belong to the same nation.
When the Jews are told that Palestine is their national home, every country will immediately desire to get rid of its Jewish citizens, and you will find a population in Palestine driving out its present inhabitants, taking all the best in the country, drawn from all quarters of the globe, speaking every language on the face of the earth, and incapable of communicating with one another except by means of an interpreter. I have always understood that this was the consequence of the building of the Tower of Babel, if ever it was built, and I certainly do not dissent from the view, commonly held, as I have always understood, by the Jews before Zionism was invented, that to bring the Jews back to form a nation in the country from which they were dispersed would require Divine leadership. I have never heard it suggested, even by their most fervent admirers, that either Mr. Balfour or Lord Rothschild would prove to be the Messiah. I claim that the lives that British Jews have led, that the aims that they have had before them, that the part that they have played in our public life and our public institutions, have entitled them to be regarded, not as British Jews, but as Jewish Britons. I would willingly disfranchise every Zionist. I would be almost tempted to proscribe the Zionist organisation as illegal and against the national interest. But I would ask of a British Government sufficient tolerance to refuse a conclusion which makes aliens and foreigners by implication, if not at once by law, of all their Jewish fellow-citizens.
I deny that Palestine is to-day associated with the Jews or properly to be regarded as a fit place for them to live in. The Ten Commandments were delivered to the Jews on Sinai. It is quite true that Palestine plays a large part in Jewish history, but so it does in modern Mahommendan history, and, after the time of the Jews, surely it plays a larger part than any other country in Christian history. The Temple may have been in Palestine, but so was the Sermon on the Mount and the Crucifixion. I would not deny to Jews in Palestine equal rights to colonisation with those who profess other religions, but a religious test of citizenship seems to me to be the only admitted by those who take a bigoted and narrow view of one particular epoch of the history of Palestine, and claim for the Jews a position to which they are not entitled.If my memory serves me right, there are three times as many Jews in the world as could possible get into Palestine if you drove out all the population that remains there now. So that only one-third will get back at the most, and what will happen to the remainder?
(…)
I would say to Lord Rothschild that the Government will be prepared to do everything in their power to obtain for Jews in Palestine complete liberty of settlement and life on an equality with the inhabitants of that country who profess other religious beliefs. I would ask that the Government should go no further.
E.S.M.”
Was Edwin Montagu wrong about any of this? I don’t think so. If the world had known at the time what was going to happen, who then would have supported the creation of Israel?
But Israel is now a fait accompli, and has been so for 70 years. So what can be done to resolve all the conflicts and move things forward? You make no suggestions, Herb, but from the tone of your comment it seems that you support the logic of Arnon Soffer: that in the face of Islamofascist attitudes from the Palestinian Arabs, the only thing left to do is to kill and kill and kill, all day, every day. If that is not your position, I would be grateful to hear from you how progress can be made towards a solution for this intractable conflict between Israelis and Arabs.
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Thanks for the response, Jeremy. As to whether Montague was wrong about any of this, my answer is yes. And the answer to the related question if the world had known at the time what was going to happen, who would have supported the creation of Israel, I would hope that every decent person would have supported it.
Europe had been soaked in anti-Semitism for centuries with all the discrimination, pogroms and mass murders that went along with it, and the endgame wound up being the Holocaust. If you knew of this Holocaust in advance and were still against a home for the soon to be murdered six million…well, what can I say? I can’t understand how that would be a moral position. You would have to clarify why you would not have supported a place of refuge.
Back to Montague for a bit. The idea that the Jews would be able to settle in what is today Israel sounds very good, but there were already pogroms going on there. The Arabs were adamant that no Jews should be allowed to come to a Muslim land. That attitude is still seen in the Hamas charter, just as it was seen with the PLO. It is seen when Abbas said Jews shouldn’t defile Muslim property with their dirty feet. The leader of the Palestinians in the 1930s and 40s, Amin al-Husseini, formed an alliance with Hitler because he wholeheartedly approved of the plan of extermination. His hope was that Hitler would help free Palestine of any Jewish presence. The method: extermination.
It was Europe that murdered six million Jews. One would think that it would be unimaginable for Europeans to now support people who explicitly want to murder all those Jews who were not already murdered in Europe. As an aside, it is interesting to me that it is Eastern Europe that is far more sympathetic to Israel than Western Europe. Perhaps this is because they suffered so much under communism, and Western Europe didn’t give a damn.
As to your question about the solution, you put the question is a way that seems very strange to me in its bias. This “that in the face of Islamofascist attitudes from the Palestinian Arabs, the only thing left to do is to kill and kill and kill, all day, every day” has never been the Israeli position, as you seem to imply, and it certainly isn’t mine. It is a fact that Israel has been as restrained as has been humanly possible. Can’t you put yourself in their shoes? The last war with Hamas was a result of Hamas shooting thousand of rockets at their civilian population. They always aim for civilians. Only after suffering through all those rocket attacks did Israel finally respond. Naturally the EU response to that was how disproportionate Israel was. How about Scotland shooting a few thousand rockets at English towns and having Israel tell you to keep calm and just take it. Or France shooting rockets at Germany. Then you can give lectures about proportion. It’s all so bizarre.
An anecdote. I know an Israeli anthroposophist who grew up on a kibbutz. Naturally he was brought up to be a socialist, Peace Now, the whole deal. He moved to the US to become a Waldorf teacher. The kibbutz had an Arab village as a neighbor. My Israeli friend told me that his father and everyone on the kibbutz went out of their way year after year to be welcoming to their Arab neighbors. They invited them to all sorts of events, gave to Arab charities, did everything a good socialist neighbor could do. Then came the intifada, and my friends father said that they were being shot at by those same Arab neighbors. No, it was not reported in the Western papers, but Israelis knew. A little light even went off in the head of my friend’s father. He now knew something he refused to acknowledge before.
I can have no solution. There can be no solution as long as the Palestinians insist that the only good Jew is a dead Jew, that because the land was once under the control of Islam, it therefore must always be under the control of Islam. I hope you have noticed that most of the Arab world doesn’t care as much about the Palestinians as the enlightened oh-so-liberal Europeans. The Palestinians who went to live in Arab lands were more discriminated against than those who stayed to live in Israel. Many of them have been killed, though the Western media likes to ignore such things. Countries like Saudi Arabia and the UAE secretly prefer dealing with Israel because they trust Israel more than they do their brother Palestinians.
Forget about the BBC or the Guardian. Look for sites that will tell you what Arabs say to each other. Because Israel is a free democracy, all the reporters hang out in Israel. They distort everything. If they go to Gaza and report accurately on Hamas, they know they will have a very big problem. Reading the news, it’s as if nothing is going on anywhere else than in this little speck of land. If there weren’t Jews there, no one would be writing about it. Funny thing that.
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Jeremy: right on. This is a tragedy, for both Palestinians, who suffer the disgrace of injustice and want, and for Israel, built on a dream of a Holy Land and turned into a shame.
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“They flew kites with swastikas painted on them.”
And for this heinous crime “a mere 62” of them were blown away with expanding or explosive bullets, and thousands wounded. Such a light sentence, and from the most moral army in the world! The Palestinians should have thanked the IDF for letting them off so easily. No wonder they kept coming back each day for more.
Gosh Herb, I didn’t realize that even with all those F35s and a couple of hundred nuclear warheads, Israel really did feel so threatened … by kites.
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Bres Bro, are you dishonest, stupid, or anti-Semitic? Perhaps all three. As even the media pointed out and as I did as well, they were doing a lot more than telegraphing their Nazi sympathies and genocidal intent. Apparently you agree with them. To see this on an anthroposophical website is beyond appalling.
We have reached the point where European Jews are attacked on the streets. Synogogues need 24 hour guards. Many Jews are leaving, and we are within living memory of the Holocaust. Europeans should bow their heads in shame. Instead some inflame the oldest hatred. It looks like that includes some anthroposophists. That is painful to see.
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Herb, I’m letting this comment through but please look at this blog’s Comments & Moderation Policy, which asks you to respect other contributors and “to play the ball and not the person.”
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Someone recently wrote this. I shall pass it on because it is quite to the point:
I’d like to offer a challenge of my own to all those—in the media, in prominent progressive organizations, and elsewhere—who were so rattled by the riots in Gaza. Call it a reality-based thought experiment. Here goes: Imagine a government, run by a bloodthirsty dictator, who bombed a heavily populated urban area containing hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, reducing it to rubble. Furthermore, imagine that this benighted regime offered these poor Palestinians, the descendants of refugees living in squalor because of generations of systemic discrimination, two choices: Be ethnically cleansed from your makeshift neighborhoods, or continue to be bombed and gassed from the air until only a few thousand of you are left in the ruins. How would you react?
It ought to be a no-brainer: Covers in The New York Times condemning the massacre, impassioned pleas for justice from Senator Bernie Sanders, an emergency gathering of the UN Security Council, and prayer circles of progressive Jews all over the world, reciting the Kaddish for the murdered and chanting about Tikkun Olam. Right?
Wrong. In fact, none of these things would happen. Not one.
How can I be so sure? Easy: Because it’s happening right now, in the Yarmouk neighborhood of Damascus, where the genocidal dictator Bashar al-Assad has murdered an untold number of Palestinian residents and driven all but a few thousand fighters—who he identifies as members of ISIS— from the wasteland of a heavily populated urban area that he has bombed flat.
Here, take a look. Do a search and you will find other reports, but right thinking people object to Palestinian deaths only when they come at the hands of Israelis defending themselves from terrorists. https://www.macleans.ca/news/world/the-forgotten-palestinians-of-syria/
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/10/yarmouk-is-being-annihilated-palestinians-in-syria-are-left-to-their-fate
If you’re not outraged now, you don’t really believe, like me, that Palestinian lives matter. And if you were only outraged when Israel killed 50 Hamas terrorists trying to attack it, well, there’s an age-old term that accurately describes how you feel about Jews.
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And behind the cruel Palestinian wars in Yarmouk and Gaza, using hybrid propaganda techniques and civilians, are the authoritarian regimes of Russia and Iran, who support Assad and Haniya.
https://www.macleans.ca/opinion/russian-and-iran-have-won-syria-they-might-not-like-what-comes-next/
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Yup. But if Jews aren’t involved, there’s not much interest. Here are links to more examples of Palestinians being killed by either other Palestinians or other Arabs. So many examples, but Western tears don’t flow nor do they get angry and yell. The number far exceeds those killed by Israel in 70 years of fighting and being attacked, further proof of the restraint they have shown. Since 1948 an estimated 10 million Muslims have been killed by other Muslims. But those 60 terrorists killed by Israel are an outrage, a massacre, a slaughter.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Gaza_(2007)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_Camps
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_September
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Hello Herb,
A friend has brought to my attention the work of Uri Avnery, a remarkable Israeli in his 90s who has seen the whole of Israel’s history from the inside and now has his own perspective on the path the country is taking. He has paid his dues, over and over, and has no need to mince his words about what he considers to be the serious mistakes being made by the current government. Here is what he has to say about the Gaza massacre:
http://zope.gush-shalom.org/home/en/channels/avnery/1526725578/
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Hello Jeremy,
Thanks for the link to Uri Avnery. Avnery is indeed remarkable. This group that he started, Gush Shalom, is very small and in no way representative of the thinking of 99% of the Israeli public, even the left end of the spectrum. He started the group because the Labor party and Peace Now were not radically left wing enough. It isn’t that he is against Likud; he has been against the left wing parties, too. Translated, that means that he has wanted to give the Palestinians everything that they wanted except the existing state of Israel, apparently believing that that gift would bring peace. He would even give Palestinians the so-called right of return. Of course, very few Palestinians remain who left their homes. The overwhelming majority are children, grandchildren, great grandchildren. They are the only people in the entire world treated so specially. I would like to see all the millions of Europeans, their children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren who were pushed out of their homes during and after WWII allowed to take them back. Perhaps you can start a petition.
I won’t do a critique of all of Avnery’s views because I think you can imagine that I find them to live in LaLa Land, not the real world.
Might I remind you and your readers that the Arabs were offered a Palestinian State in 1947-48 and refused it because they refused to have Jews control even a tiny part of the mandate. Might I remind you that Jordan controlled East Jerusalem and the West Bank from 1948-1967 and, wonder of wonders, the so-called Palestinians never asked for a Palestinian State. But the Jordanians did manage to cleanse the area of Jews and destroy the existing synogogues. In 2000, Israel offered the Palestinians a state on all of Gaza and 97% of the West Bank, and they turned it down. Have you forgotten? They offered a similar deal in 2008 and it again was turned down. Benny Morris, whom you quoted earlier, said this referring to the Arab view of Israel “It was once in the hands of the Muslims, and it is inconceivable [to them] that infidels like us [the Israelis] would receive it.”
But this does make clear to me that your views correspond with those of the far left and to what has been called Palestinianism. I am truly sorry about that. We simply have very different views of this.
Soloviev predicted an awakened Islam that would attack the West. Any comment? Perhaps you would like to comment on Steiner’s view of Islam as Ahrimanic. These things are relevant to the case.
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“Herb” wrote:
“…the Arabs were offered a Palestinian State in 1947-48 and refused it because they refused to have Jews control even a tiny part of the mandate. Might I remind you that Jordan controlled East Jerusalem and the West Bank from 1948-1967 and, wonder of wonders, the so-called Palestinians never asked for a Palestinian State. But the Jordanians did manage to cleanse the area of Jews and destroy the existing synagogues. In 2000, Israel offered the Palestinians a state on all of Gaza and 97% of the West Bank, and they turned it down. Have you forgotten? They offered a similar deal in 2008 and it again was turned down.”
Well, why should the Palestinian state in Israel, numbering some 700,000, and having resided in Palestine for some two thousand years, have to concede anything to a so-called “official Jewish state”, now finally condoned by the western powers some thirty years after it was first proposed to take place in 1918 at the end of WWI; the “war to end all wars”? Why didn’t the Jewish state form then, and this could have prevented millions of deaths seen with the Stalin purges [20 million people]. and the Hitler genocide [six million people] in the 1940’s.
Peaceful and equal co-existence, this seems to be the sentiment of the Balfour Declaration of November 1917, and coming just one year before the armistice of November 1918, which ended World War I, it could have and should have taken place. Yet, by some means it was delayed for another thirty years, which would encompass the 2nd World War on a much larger scale, and see these intentional killings of mass populations who carry no rifle, and serve no war, but simply live civil lives on earth. In other words, 26 million people died between 1939 and 1945 in Russia, Germany, Poland, and other oppressed regions for what purpose? Was it ethnic cleansing in the larger European theater in order that 70,000 courageous Jewish patriots could finally find their safe passage to the Homeland of Israel?
Who creates these carefully crafted stratagems which causes wars and creates delays in effecting plans like the Balfour Declaration in order to render more madness on earth over the course of a Saturn revolution? It is not without interest that 1948 is the exact midpoint between 1898 and 1998, which constitutes the last one hundred years of Sorath’s second incarnation, i.e., 1332-1998. There have been twelve Presidents of the United States in the seventy years from 1948 to 2018, and they have all done their part in blessing the official establishment of the Jewish homeland in Israel, c. 1948, with the necessary technological weaponry over these years in order to maintain their authoritative control over the Palestinians of Israel. This only helps to make this latest bit of news, from 15 May, all the more eye-opening in terms of what these poor Palestinians must feel and think. They have no voice, no life, no real freedom, except to listen to the pimps called “Hamas”.
It is a pathetic situation, and it is good to talk about it again right here in 2018, which is 20 years into Sorath’s third evolutionary incarnation/surge. Now, as we know, something has been brought onto the scene here, wherein Islam has somehow gained the power to attack the West with some kind of technological weaponry in order to start the War on Terror, c. 9/11/2001. Well, this is how it has been presented, and yet, the Palestinians in Israel are so weak and pathetic, defenseless, and reduced to flying kites, throwing Molotov cocktails, and even presenting their own bodies at the border fence to experience the pain of high-velocity bullets coming from the IDF. 2500 bullet injuries vs. 62 deaths seems to be the larger intent because these are the civilians who have nothing else to live for except the possibility to express what freedom means to them. As Uri Avnery said recently, ‘he’d being doing it too’.
I don’t remember Soloviev ever saying that Islam would attack the West, but he did try to establish a kind of universal theocracy which involved seeking a meeting with the Pope and wherein Roman Catholicism would be the means for such a thing due to its influential power existing in the world. The Pope denied any such meeting with Soloviev, and not long afterward Czar Alexander III censored Soloviev from giving any public lectures, which was his main source of income. This was in 1883, and the reason is because Soloviev had written a letter appealing to the Tsar to forgive the assassins of his father, and not put them to death.
Relating Islam to Ahriman is like relating the world to Ahriman; we are all in the clutches of this so-called “ruler of the world”.
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“Relating Islam to Ahriman is like relating the world to Ahriman; we are all in the clutches of this so-called “ruler of the world”” Whaaaat? Steiner said a bunch of specific things about Islam and Ahriman– not at all just “like relating the world to Ahriman.”
why should the Palestinian state in Israel, numbering some 700,000, and having resided in Palestine for some two thousand years, have to concede anything to a so-called “official Jewish state”, — Why should Native Americans, numbering in the millions, having resided in the Americas for many thousands of years, have to concede anything to the United States? . .
Why should Aborigines, having resided in Australia, etc.?
I’m not making a defence of Israeli policy, only reacting to what sounds like you taking an almost inpenetrably complicated situation, in which each side can eloquently and accurately go on at great length about the flaws and failures of the other side, and reducing it to something one-sidedly clear-cut.
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Ah, I like seeing my name in scare quotes.
“why should the Palestinian State in Israel, numbering some 700,000, and having resided in Palestine for some 2000 years…”
You refute yourself with such bizarre anti-historical assertions. First of all, there has never been a Palestinian State in Israel or anywhere else. In fact, before the creation of Israel, the Arabs living in this area never thought of themselves as a people and never asked for a state. They were indistinguishable from the Arab population living in the surrounding area of what is now Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon, and they thought of themselves in that way.
Of course, the Palestinians, making history up as they go along, say that Jews never lived there but they themselves were once the Canaanites. If you believe such drivel, I would like to sell you my 1832 Mercedes. We didn’t even have Islam until the 7th century. When Mark Twain visited the area in the latter third of the 19th century, he saw few people, nearly all of them poor and miserable. It was largely desert, rubble, and some villages. Even Jerusalem had only 20,000 people in it, and Islam showed no interest at all in their supposedly third holiest city or indeed in any of that area. Then Jews from Europe began to emigrate to this deserted poor land. All of a sudden…well, you can take it from there.
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I think you utterly missed everything that I was attempting to say, which came out that I was condoning how ahriman rules the world and makes its slaves out of the amerio-indians, the aborigines of Australia, and the Palestinians of Israel.
No, I was rather offering the warning that this is true, and how Ahriman is a kind of ruling spirit in which the descent into materialism is what we find today. So, wherever resistance can be found against the prevailing materialism, such as in Gaza lately, it demonstrates a great deal in opposing Ahriman. Maybe you didn’t get that part, but it certainly shows the power to overrule and defeat.
Sadly, the native Americans is a good example of how European colonialists conquered this country, and made slaves of the indigenous people of this continent. This is how they gained the basis for the supremacy that rules the world today. It only shows how easy it was to make Europe its next pawn, and create the Jewish and Palestinian issue we see today.
When will it end? Well, I’m sure it has everything to do with its own infrastructure. And yet, who created that? Maybe Ahriman did, yes indeed. But, there will always be those of the intellectual mind who will try to ensure it and make it into a fact.
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I knew an old Zionist in the 1980s (“old” as in German training farms in the 1910s for these urbanites in preparation for life in Palestine), who talked about how they had learned Arabic and built clinics and schools and how they dreamed that Arabs and Jews would live peacefully together (her stream of Zionists, at least) and how, looking back, she realized that all that had been a European illusion about non-European populations like the Arabs and what they aspired to. She was in despair about how it was going to turn out, in part because the graft of Jews onto this Arab region was clearly not taking and in part because of what was happening to Israeli society in the effort to make the graft hold.
In other words, everything that Herb says in his comments might be pretty much true, if not the entire story, but how does jt lead anywhere except to ever-increasing cycles of violence?
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“Wooffles”, let me ask: What do you see that needs to take place in order to rectify these ‘ever-increasing cycles of violence’?
Could it possibly have to do with a western-dominated control force which seeks to keep the middle-east in a kind of subservient position?
Of course, we all know where the technocratic advantage exists, and it is right here in America, where Soradt crossed the pond back with the first venturings sponsored by the London Company in 1607. Yet, today, people don’t consider these larger global initiatives, which bear the ear-marks of a world-democracy.
No, I would more than suggest that they look at your own testimony about the German Zionist of the 80’s, who having cultivated their field of inspiration since the 1910’s, must mean a kind of hope wherein we can all live together and learn each other’s language. Was this something of your experience?
I only know from my experience that anyone who aspires to lead the spiritual life at ninety years of age deserves to live it. Thus, your account proves that there is no obstacle to achieving it, even if they remain outside the so-called, ‘Holy Land’.
‘Graft and greed to the Jews’; let that be the matter for “Herb” to contend with. You see, not everyone who writes to the Anthropopper blog is an anthroposophist. You can’t assume that by any measure with the preceding comments.
And yet, you can get a sense of what this blog is about when you look at the facts. This present post is a good example, and yet there are many more in preceding sequence. For example, the last-most; it was all about caring for the elderly and what it means to have to care for those that lose their minds. This becomes a challenge that people are already dealing with, and so it goes.
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Steve Hale. Graft and greed to the Jews? What are you talking about? I need to know what bizarre idea I am to contend with.
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Well, Herb, you have already answered in your inimitable style. As such, you left out anything to do with graft and greed, but this was the remark that I picked up on:
“She was in despair about how it was going to turn out, in part because the graft of Jews onto this Arab region was clearly not taking and in part because of what was happening to Israeli society in the effort to make the graft hold.”
You then responded with your comments, which I cannot predict, except to know that they were forthcoming very soon. Nothing bizarre about that, is there?
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“Graft” was meant in the sense of grafting plants or skin. No one gave up their established lives in Germany in the 1920s or 1930s to go to the pioneering conditions of Palestine out of greed.
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Woofles, you could be right about that, and that could easily lead to despair. But there is still some hope. Arab leaders have flooded their population with anti-Semitic materials in their newspapers, television and education, but they have done that to distract their population from their own troubles. In fact, the leaders of most Arab countries have never liked the Palestinians. That’s evident from how they have been treated in these countries. Some of these leaders want to be done with this, so even their open support of the Palestinians has been weakening. We now have a case where the main support of the Palestinians comes from the Mullahs of Iran and…Western Europe. In fact, the EU supports with European tax dollars nearly every anti-Israeli organization in the Middle East. If the Europeans stop this and Iran is pushed back, the Palestinians finally may have to give up their desire to “push the Jews into the sea.”
I will end by throwing out one other suggestion. The Palestinians are experts at manipulating Western media. For example, it was not a coincidence that Hamas saved its most violent demonstrations for the day the US moved its embassy to Jerusalem. They knew exactly how the useful idiots would report it. If the Western media would report on Israel in proportion to its size, my bet is that the Palestinians would give up their exterminationist hopes. Since those hopes for the end of Israel now depend so much on Iran with its eliminationist rhetoric, we have to also hope that the Iranian people can somehow overthrow the mullahs and the Revolutionary Guard.
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Herb, it might be useful if you could outline what form of existence Israel would grant the Palestinians if the latter stopped everything Israel doesn’t like.
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@ Ton „Due to the worldwide rise of right-wing nationalism, not only in Israel but also in Russia, Europe and Amerika“
Yes, there is this rise in nationalism, but not only in Europe, but also in India, China, Japan; it seems to be a world-wide phenomenon. This is quite surprising. What started this rise and why now? We know from Rudolf Steiner, that luciferic archangels are involved in this kind of nationalism, but as it is a world-wide phenomenon, all at the same time, even higher spirits must be involved.
However „right-wing“ is not true for all countries, in southern Europe it is more leftwing, Syriza (and Communists) in Greece (the right wing golden dawn is comparatively small), Podemos in Spain, Italy: the right-wing Lega more in the north, the left-wing 5 stars movement more in the south, in France you also have both Melonchon and Le Pen.
And then the nationalism is different in all countries and the special kind of nationalism says much about the „national character“: „America first“ is mainly motivated by $$ and migration, GB Brexit nationalism is „gimme my country back“, a legalistic side and migration, then look at Hungary, Poland, and so on, each is really a nationalism, typical for this country.
Ottmar
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On the state of Israel
There is this strange connection between the founding and existence of the state of Israel and Germany. I mean the 2 fundamental aspects: The Balfour declaration as the price which GB had to pay to the USA for entering into WWI, it was the agreement to form a zionist state in Palestine. And then the holocaust was the driving force to form a Jewish state, a save haven for the Jews after the horrors of Nazi Germany.
Then Rudolf Steiner confirmed what Goethe had written in the tales of the German emigrants, that the German people will suffer the same destiny that the Jews had suffered after 70AD. (The famous Fairytale of the green serpent is part of these tales, published in 1795.)
When I close my eyes and think of states like Portugal, Greece, Denmark and Israel I cannot but think: Portugal, Greece, Denmark and other states will, in one way or another still exist in 200 years from now, with its territory, language and so on, but when I think of Israel I m not so sure, well I can hardly imagine this. It is not what I wish or fear for, it just seems unlikely to me and I always compare it to the crusaders state there, some 800 years ago: A state cannot exist in the long run on military power alone.
Ottmar
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Take a look at a world map from 1900. Many states thought to be forever are now no longer, including quite a few in Europe. Others had their borders redrawn. What’s more, people seem to be under the impression that Israel is a new state in the Middle East, put there among all these Islamic states already existing for centuries. The fact is that most of the Arab states are, like Israel, 20th century creations. The main difference is that Israel was actually a state in the past while the others are new. Most borders were arbitrarily drawn by the imperial powers. Before WWI, most of the Middle East was controlled by the Ottoman Turks. Nationalism was imported from Europe in the 20th century, very recent history indeed, and that is why we have all these new Arab Muslim states.
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And Putin is behind the world-wide rise of nostalgic nationalism with autocratic leaders since 2012, including Christian values. He was baptised: “The New World Leader of Conservatism”.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/03/its-putins-world/513848/
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So, you are saying that the Balfour Declaration was made as the agreement for Wilson, after three years of maintaining a neutral posture, to enter the war on the side of the allied powers? Yet, we know that the U.S. had been funding the war from the beginning, and had been keeping a record of the war debt owed by the 10 countries fighting Germany and Austria. After the war, these countries were all given their bill.
This is interesting, and I asked this question recently about why the Balfour Declaration did not lead to the establishing of an official Jewish state back in 1918; why did it take another thirty years? A great deal of damage and loss of lives took place in that time span.
Yet, people really believed that the “war to end all wars” was just that, and peace would prevail for all time; so, let’s take our time and get all the hostilities out of our system. This logic would seen to see the importance of a Jewish resettlement of the Europeans taking place as a sign of peace, and yet, it didn’t take place until 1948. Why? Could it be that with the severe punishment of Germany for its supposed causing of the war, that German Jews would be refused to relocate to Israel, and this would be looked upon as being unfair and extremely prejudicial? With the end of WWI, the idea contained in the Balfour Declaration should have been expanded to enable all Jewish citizens throughout Europe to receive safe passage back to the homeland. Remember, this was what the Crusades was all about, and the forming of the Knights Templar to ensure safe escort in order to visit Jerusalem some one thousand years ago.
Steve
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Steve Hale wrote, ‘Graft and greed to the Jews’; let that be the matter for “Herb” to contend with.
I didn’t understand what he could be talking about (even the grammar is off) and he answered by quoting something that doesn’t mention greed at all and that uses “graft” not in the greedy sense of corruption, but in the sense of grafting a branch on to a tree. So I am still puzzled. The only thing I detect is an antipathy to Israel and perhaps to Jews.
Bres Bo asks me to outline what form of existence Israel would allow the Palestinians if they stopped doing everything Israel didn’t like. Let me first say that the question as stated is so dripping with venom that it cannot be answered. It isn’t a matter of everything Israel doesn’t like. If I might state the question differently: Is it possible for the Palestinians to give up their ambition to destroy Israel and conclude Hitler’s final solution? We see no sign of that as yet.
The Palestinians have a pretty normal existence if they live in only one country in the Middle East: Israel. Polls show that if a Palestinian State was formed in the West Bank (Judea and Samaria in the older language), most Palestinians would prefer to remain Israeli citizens. What do you say to that, Bres Bo? Israel is a country that has Arab members in its parliament that side with Hamas. I do know how much freer you can get than that.
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Well that’s that question neatly and mendaciously side-stepped. I might as well have saved my venom.
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As can be seen here, this type of discourse can go nowhere but down unless the realities conveyed by the science of the spirit; let’s call it the “anthroposophical perspective”, is taken into consideration. I feel Bres Bo’s frustration in wanting solutions to the world predicament, and yet hears that there is none at the present time. Well, who doesn’t know that already? So, what does it mean to mince all these words which appear quite analytical and topical to the situation of conflicting ideologies of culture-clash when it can have no bearing whatsoever on solving the ‘day of reckoning’ before it gets here as a fact?
Present-day thinking simply has got to become more fully-dimensional than what exists today. We’ve all heard the phrase, “thinking outside the box”. Well, what does that mean; what is the box that we need to think outside of? It is the world that is configured in terms of outer-external parameters, and spacial dimensions involving measure, weight, and number figures. Thus, believe it or not, it is a phenomenal world of appearances that is displayed before our eyes and ears and other senses that makes up what we perceive in the waking state. Along with this, these sense impressions, is a logical faculty of reason that has arisen which attempts to make it all coherent; this is the power of inductive reasoning, which represents the operative function of the Intellectual Soul.
And yet, as we have learned in the previous thread, concerning the travails of old age, this Intellectual Soul cannot see us through to a reality that exists outside the limits of the present box of a phenomenal world representation. Thus, human minds are losing their grip and falling into a kind of bankruptcy. The world itself is also showing these same symptoms, and the history of the 20th century is particularly indicative of it. Now, we are eighteen years into the 21st century, which is also a new millennium. Accompanying these years is the War on Terror, which only helps complicate all the previous issues involving the Arab- Israeli War since 1948.
Do you think, or should we not think, that certain powers are working quite intentionally against the true aims of earth evolution when these kinds of problems of cultural divisiveness seem to be only on the increase? Why would that be? People all over the world are quite aligned with living peaceably, and yet we have these specific and stratified areas of conflict, in which it seems that certain powerful tools of propaganda want to try to influence world opinion.
I think they do on a certain level, but this needs to be seen through and made transparent, which is certainly possible for those that think outside the box. Anthroposophy is a cultural imperative which has attempted to find solutions to problems and dilemmas which affect our lives today, and would have us all living from above, which is truly possible in our day and age. Ask people about it; it represents the psychological dimension of spiritual science.
You see, it is Michael that would have us living within the emancipated head which sits atop the rest of the body. This head has been prepared over many past ages and spheres, i.e., Saturn, Sun, and Moon, in order now to experience its own divine origins; in other words, the Life Divine. This is a real possibility here in the Consciousness Soul Age.
Yet, we are at a kind of crossroads in this endeavour. Conflicting viewpoints recently expressed would indicate that a merely intellectual analysis of the present situation of the Israeli-Palestinian crisis is all that is needed in order to see that the over-arching issue is one of Palestinian tyranny in the Holy Land, and Muslim conquest of the world in terms of the War on Terror, which became the official declaration by the U.S, government in March 2003, when the decision to wage war with Iraq began. Of course, this was all proven to be a sham. To hear that Colin Powell finally admitted his lies is a good thing.
So, might foresight be a good thing in looking forward to better times?
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Herb, is your reference to the Occupied Territory as “Judea and Samaria in the older language” related to your lack of any mention of the two state solution?
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@ Jeremy: I was quite surprised that you wrote on such a highly political and controversial topic. Dozens and hundreds are killed, daily, in Yemen, Africa and in many forgotten places.
Erdogan called the massacre 60 of Palestinians on the Israeli border a genocide, the 1,000,000 Armenians killed by Turks 100 years ago was not a genocide for Erdogan.
General Powells speech to the UN, presenting lies about the weapons of mass destruction in the hands of Saddam Hussein was -in my eyes- more malicious than the speech of Haley. Presenting lies as a pretext for war! Gen. Powell meanwhile regrets his lies, I ve read. Will Haley regret serving Trump one day?
@ Steve: Yes, the US gave financial support to the UK and other countries, but troops came in only after the Balfour declaration. And not only financial support before 1917, but also military support, using civilians as human shields, which was a state secret for 70 years >Lusitania. Human shields aren t an invention of Hamas then.
@Herb: You are right, the map of Europe in 2018 looks different from the map in 1900. In Austria-Hungary there were 13 nations, many of which now have „their own“ state. As Rudolf Steiner said, the further you come to the east in Europe, the less borders make sense. In 1900 there was hardly a homogenous population in eastern Europe, all peoples, languages, cultures were mixed, there were for example „German“ villages in Slovakia, Poland, Ukraine, on the Crimean peninsula, in Russia, in the Baltic states.
It was President Wilson who declared that every people should have the right for its own state and this spurred nationalism and ethnic cleansing. After WWII Poland and Germany were shifted to the west, it was one of the biggest ethnic cleansing operations in history, e.g. 12 million Germans had to leave their homes, 1 million died in the course of this process.
I said „When I close my eyes and think of Israel“ I tried to express some kind of feeling or vision about Israel s future, completely independent of right or wrong, sympathy or antipathy.
Mass migration and massive ethnic cleansing also has an occult dimension.
Ottmar
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Thanks, Ottmar, for the contribution. I agree with most of what you say, though I don’t think we should assume that Steiner was right about everything. On this business of mixed cultures, languages, religions, etc being a good thing while separating people gives us nationalism, ethnic cleansing and fighting, there is something to be said for it. But I have to add that it seems a lot more complicated than that. Look to the Arabs of the Middle East. Countries were created there during the 20th century where various tribes, religions, ethnicities, etc, were put together. We still got nationalism, and we still got conflict, and we still got ethnic cleansing. The Sunnis, Shi’a, Alawites, Kurds etc., didn’t exactly get along. They still don’t. Even the tribes within each group often didn’t get along. As you said, the Turks murdered the Armenians. And everyone wanted to murder the Jews. We have seen similar bloodshed in various parts of Africa where millions have been murdering each other for decades. Needless to say, the Western media and the intelligentsia paid less attention to those millions than they did to the 60 terrorists Israel killed in defending its border.
Human beings never seem to want to fit into anyone’s idea of what the world should be like.
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“Needless to say, the Western media and the intelligentsia paid less attention to those millions than they did to the 60 terrorists Israel killed in defending its border. Human beings never seem to want to fit into anyone’s idea of what the world should be like.”
Well, Herb, this could all be a moot point, considering that the ceasefire of 2014 has been lifted and all-out war between these two factions is again taking place. Maybe our modem heat has had an effect, and yet, if so, that might not be a bad thing. You see, what is really starting to emerge from the ether bands here is your really seriously deluded idea that the 60 Hamas agents killed was somehow more serious than the millions previously killed in the Holocaust. No, nobody takes this recent attack and death-toll as more serious, and yet you have never even acknowledged that since March 30th of this year, when these latest skirmishes began, that 2500 other serious injuries were also inflicted upon the Palestinian citizens who rightfully stood against the border fence. That is why Jeremy corresponded it to the march on the Salt Works during Gandhi’s campaign for non-violent protest in seeking India’s independence. Many suffered brutal head and bodily injuries during that engagement.
And yet, all you can do is uphold the martyred Jews of Israel, and their pathetic past at the hands of Hitler and Stalin. Yes, let us not forget Joseph Stalin, who was America’s ally in WWII. He was a brutal dictator, but his twenty million people exterminated is largely repressed in favor of Hitler’s six million people.
It’s all bullshit in 2018, as a kind of terminal legacy to the human condition wherein the guilt factor is applied by people like you, Herb. How does that sound? The slogan, “this must not happen again”, is ready to happen again. Don’t you get it? The Jewish Israeli’s are fighting people that own the very land that they were given an official Jewish state over. So what? That is why a declaration of independence meets a day of catastrophe on the same day, i.e, 15 May 1948. One up and one down.
Maybe the Palestinians needed a leader like Mohammed Ali Jinnah, who brokered a Muslim state in India, called Pakistan. Now, after all these years, we see how that worked in establishing peaceful coexistence between the Hindu’s and the Muslims of India.
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“Thanks, Ottmar, for the contribution. I agree with most of what you say, though I don’t think we should assume that Steiner was right about everything.”
Excuse me, Herb, but what makes you think that Steiner was right about anything? If so, what was he right about in your mind?
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Can this topic help us on our path of anthroposophic self education or schooling?
I think yes. We can ask ourselves and experience how much we are all (more or less) tightly in the hands of luciferic forces as we all tend to put the national interest, our own people, our own religion above the truth -my country, right or wrong-. It is a kind of instinctive reaction to defend „our“ group and there is also the instinctive hate of one group towards the other group. So we can have the experience how much we are bound by these luciferic beings, how they shape our thinking and our feelings.
Rudolf Steiner says that on New Year s eve we (all??) are lifted above our national limitations and we are a universal human being, at least for this night. Ottmar
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I have no such antipathy to Israel or the Jews. Possibly, I misunderstood the nature of ‘graft’, and I apologize for using the word, ‘greed’, which never was expressed at all. The nature of these discussions can cause ideas to come fast and furious, but for me, it is all about the inquiring mind and its search for answers and solutions; solutions that seem more often to be found in hindsight.
My support of a Jewish resettlement was given in this recent posting:
https://anthropopper.wordpress.com/2018/05/23/israel-king-claudius-and-the-massacre-in-gaza/#comment-4951
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Steve Hale, I have to admit that I don’t think it is worth the trouble to respond to you, but I will do it one last time.
Your comment about Jews and graft and greed shows clearly your dislike of Israel and Jews, no matter how much you deny it. It was taken out of thin air, and that is telling. You do that sort of thing a lot. For example, there is this from your last bit directed towards me:
“Maybe our modem heat has had an effect, and yet, if so, that might not be a bad thing. You see, what is really starting to emerge from the ether bands here is your really seriously deluded idea that the 60 Hamas agents killed was somehow more serious than the millions previously killed in the Holocaust.”
I never said anything even remotely like this, so you are doing what you did with greed and graft. You seem to have a reading comprehension problem. What I pointed to was the fact that many people are bewailing the deaths of 60 Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists while giving far less attention to the millions of deaths in other areas around the world over the past couple of decades. And that is not to mention all the countries where the freedom of entire populations is nonexistent. You never respond to my actual arguments and supporting facts.
Everything else you wrote is also not in line with the facts, but is instead a result of your antipathy and strange view of the world. You are the kind of anthroposophist who asks this from a commenter like me: “Excuse me, Herb, but what makes you think that Steiner was right about anything? If so, what was he right about in your mind?”
You want my anthroposophiclal bona fides, something I resist and dislike about some anthroposophists. It is the ideas that are important, and you don’t address them very well. It would take me a long time to go over your mistakes one by one. I don’t have the time or patience for it.
Last word: I was a Waldorf teacher for nearly three decades. Please don’t ask again. Thanks.
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I hope this blog doesn t become a blog about mid-east politics, accusing and defending the different opposing sides.
What about oral history? I had the privilege to meet a most interesting man with a most interesting biography. His parents were Jews and Communists or must I say communist Jews or Jewish communists in Konigsberg, Eastern Prussia. His father escaped imprisonment in 1933 (communists were the first to be imprisoned) because he had left the party a few months before January 1933 because of differences of opinion about „the right“ policy. So he was not on „the list“ and thus escaped. The son, the man I want to talk about, soon was „adopted“ by a „arian family“, he was given a new identity. As such he fought for the German army in WWII and he managed to survive. In 1946 he managed to go to Haifa. He was shocked about the 1948 „war“ and the injustice that was done to the Palestinians. In 1958 he came by boat back to Marseille, France. When he went to the German consulate there, asking for a German passport, they didn t believe his story. He finally settled in Frankfurt, became an anthroposophist and Christian. He got deep insight into the Kabbalah (I forgot his teacher s name in Israel) and he wrote remarkable cabbalistic-anthroposophical books on the Genesis.
So what can we „label“ him: Jew, anthroposophist, Christian, German, Kabbalist? (Not an unpolitical question because until recently there were only Jews in Germany and not German Jews.) I think he would certainly see himself as a Human striving for spiritual progress in the first place.
We often talked about politics, the state of Israel, Palestinians, Jerusalem etc. He was convinced that the status of Jerusalem was the point where „conservative“ Jews would never compromise or where a compromise would be the most difficult. He also told me about his hometown Konigsberg, now Kaliningrad, a Russian exclave between Poland and Lithuania. Konigsberg was the first German city that was conquered by the Red Army; before the assault the leading general gave out the slogan „Kill and rape, wherever/whenever you can!“
Ottmar
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Woofles asked: Herb, is your reference to the Occupied Territory as “Judea and Samaria in the older language” related to your lack of any mention of the two state solution?
No, it isn’t. It is related to the fact that what the media calls “occupied territory” was not called that when Jordan controlled it. This is a political designation that most of us are not aware of. There are other names for the area. Palestine is the Roman name for the larger area. Some call it the West Bank. The Biblical name used by Jews is Judea and Samaria. Without going into a lecture on this, I merely wanted to suggest that this is a contested area where even the names are evidence of that.
As for the two state solution, I think that if it is if not dead, then it is sleeping deeply. Things have gone so far that even most of the left in Israel think that the Palestinians do not want peace or two states (after all, whenever a state has been offered, they have rejected it and started an intifada, blowing up buses, restaurants, Passover seders, etc), but rather the obliteration of Israel. All the Palestinian leaders have said that, at least in Arabic, for decades. Israelis on the left used to not believe it, but now the majority do. Most Israelis do not want to commit suicide. The majority who wanted to give Palestinians the West Bank has shrunk and is now a minority. They have seen that Hamas spends its money not on building a civil society but rather on building an Islamic fascist state. They have seen that most of the billions in aid given to the PA over the years has gone to their leaders and those who work for them. Go to the West Bank cities and you will find mansions all over the place, built by EU, UN, and American aid.
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If Herb is right in his description of Palestinians, and most Israelis are as generous as Herb appears to be, I for one am rather glad they have each other as neighbours for the time being.
One of Steiner’s other interesting comments about Ahriman’s qualities when he finally incarnates, is the appearance of solving the world’s problems. I’m not holding my breath 🙂
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In responding to “Herb’s” remarks on this thread, I had a kind of queasy feeling about the name. Herb, Herb, where have I heard that before? So, my first intuition was to simply avoid discoursing because it seemed plainly evident that Herb was out to convict anthroposophists for being anti-semitic as a general tendency. This can be easily seen in the entirely unbalanced approach taken in terms of the present Jewish-Palestinian situation in Israel. Herb has no solutions other than the typical finger-pointing exercise, and this begins with the stereotyping of anthroposophists as non-sympathetic with the Jewish cause. Now, according to Herb, I am an anti-Semite for making a ‘Freudian slip’, and no matter what I say in my defense, it is still so. This is the same kind of mentality that occurred with McCarthy and the labeling of american communists in the 1950’s.
Well, so be it. Herb is also a thirty-year Waldorf teacher, which would seem to mean that the anthroposophical knowledge and appreciation is there. But, I can’t find one speck of it. So, I got curious enough to go see where I had heard from Herb before, and here it is. Back in August, in the “Don’t Be Evil” essay, Herb takes liberal umbrage with anthroposophists; this time for conspiracy-thinking, which is another one of those labels inflicted upon us simple seekers of truth and knowledge. Herb has all the answers there, too.
https://anthropopper.wordpress.com/2017/08/21/dont-be-evil/#comments
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Remember that I am always generalizing about the two sides in this conflict and when you meet an Israeli or a Palestinian, you always need to look at the individual.
It is like with Steve Hale. I look at him as an individual. I have known an awful lot of anthroposophists over the years and very few are in the least anti-Semitic or anti-Israel, the main reason seeing some things being said here caught my attention. I imagine that some of this has to do with taking what one reads in the media at face value. Steiner in his own time rightly pointed out that most things you read in the media were untrue. Nothing has changed over the last century.
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“Steiner in his own time rightly pointed out that most things you read in the media were untrue”
And I understand that what I’m reading here is the media. And this is what Uri Avnery said today in his media. I don’t like long posts, but I’m inserting the whole of his weekly essay here, so that you, dear Reader, can compare not only what Avnery says with what Herb says, but also the way that both of them say it:-
Strong as Death
OH, GAZA. Strong as death is love.
I loved Gaza. That is a play on words. The Biblical Song of Songs says that love is strong as death. Strong in Hebrew is Aza. Aza is also the Hebrew name of Gaza.
I have spent many happy hours in Gaza. I had many friends there. From the leftist Dr. Haidar Abd al-Shafi to the Islamist Mahmoud al-Zahar, who is now the foreign minister of Hamas.
I was there when Yasser Arafat, the son of a Gazan family, came home. They put me in the first row of the reception at the Rafah border, and that evening he received me at the hotel on the Gaza sea shore, seating me next to him on the stage during a press conference.
I met with a friendly attitude everywhere in the Gaza Strip, in the refugee
camps and in the streets of Gaza City. Everywhere we talked about peace and about the place of Gaza in the future State of Palestine.
GOOD, BUT what about Hamas, the terrible arch-terrorist organization?
In the early 1990s, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin exiled 415 prominent Islamists from Gaza to Lebanon. The Lebanese did not let them in, so the exiles vegetated for a year in the open air on the border.
We protested against the expulsion and put up a tent camp opposite the Prime Minister’s office in Jerusalem. We stayed there for 45 days and nights, including some days in snow. In the camp were Jews and Arabs, including Israeli Arab Islamists. We spent the long days and nights in political discussions. What about? About peace, of course.
The Islamists were nice people, and treated my wife, Rachel, with utmost civility.
When the exiles were finally allowed home, a reception was held for them in the largest hall in Gaza. I was invited, together with a group of companions. I was asked to speak (in Hebrew, of course) and after that I was invited to a banquet.
I am recounting all this in order to describe the atmosphere at that time. In everything I said, I stressed that I was an Israeli patriot. I advocated peace between two states. Before the first Intifada (which started on December 9, 1987) Gaza was not a place of dark hatred. Far from it.
Masses of laborers crossed the checkpoints every morning in order to work in Israel, and so did the merchants who sold their wares in Israel, or crossed Israel on the way to Jordan, or got their merchandise through Israeli harbors.
SO HOW did we succeed – we, the State of Israel – in turning Gaza into what it is today?
In the summer of 2005 the then Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, decided to cut all ties with the Gaza Strip. “Arik”, a soldier in his heart, decided that the costs of occupying the strip were higher than the benefits. He pulled the army and the settlers out and turned the strip over – to whom? To nobody.
Why to nobody? Why not to the PLO, which was already the recognized Palestinian authority? Why not within the framework of an agreement? Because Arik hated the Palestinians, the PLO and Arafat. He did not want to have anything to do with them. So he just left the strip.
But nature abhors a vacuum. A Palestinian authority came into being in Gaza. Democratic elections were held, and Hamas won in all of Palestine. Hamas is a religious-nationalist party which originally was furthered by the Israeli secret service (Shin Bet) in order to undermine the PLO. When the PLO did not accept the election results, Hamas in Gaza took power by force. Thus the present situation came into being.
DURING ALL this time we still had a positive option.
The Gaza Strip could have turned into a blooming island. Optimists spoke about a “Second Singapore”. They spoke about a Gaza harbor, with due inspection of incoming goods either in Gaza or in a neutral port abroad. A Gaza airport, with appropriate security inspection, was built and used and then destroyed by Israel.
And what did the Israeli government do? The very opposite, of course.
The government subjected the Gaza Strip to a stringent blockade. All connections between the strip and the outside world were cut. Provisions could come only through Israel. Israel increased or decreased the import of essential necessities at its whim. The affair of the Turkish ship Mavi Marmara, which was bloodily stormed near the Gaza shore, emphasized the total isolation.
The Gaza population has now reached about two million. Most of them are refugees from Israel, who were driven out during the 1948 war. I cannot say that I am innocent – my army unit fought in the south of Palestine. I saw what was happening. I wrote about it.
The blockade created a magic circle. Hamas and the smaller (and more extreme) organizations carried out acts of resistance (or “terror”). As a reaction, the Israeli government intensified the blockade. The Gazans answered with more violence. The blockade became worse. And so on, up to and including this week.
What about the southern border of the strip? Rather bizarrely, Egypt cooperates with the Israeli blockade. And not only because of the mutual sympathy between the Egyptian military dictator, Abd al-Fatah al-Sisi, and the Israeli rulers. There is also a political reason: The Sisi regime hates the Muslim Brothers, Its banned internal opposition, which is considered the parent organization of Hamas.
The PLO regime in the West Bank also cooperates with the Israeli blockade against Hamas, which is its main competitor within the Palestinian political framework.
Thus the Gaza Strip remains almost completely isolated, without friends. Except some idealists around the world, who are much too weak to make a difference. And, of course, Hezbollah and Iran.
NOW THERE prevails a kind of balance. The Gazan organizations carry out violent acts, which do no real damage to the State of Israel. The Israeli army does not have the appetite to occupy the strip again. And then the Palestinians discovered a new weapon: non-violent resistance.
Many years ago an Arab-American activist, a pupil of Martin Luther King, came to Palestine to preach this method. He found no takers and returned to the US. Then, at the beginning of the second Intifada, the Palestinians tried this method. The Israeli army reacted with live fire. The world saw a picture of a little boy shot while in the arms of his father. The army denied responsibility, as it always does. Non-violent resistance died with the boy. The Intifada demanded many victims.
Truth is that the Israeli army has no answer to non-violent resistance. In such a campaign, all the cards are in the hands of the Palestinians. World public opinion condemns Israel and praises the Palestinians. Therefore, the army’s reaction is to open fire, in order to induce the Palestinians to start violent actions. With these the army knows how to deal.
Non-violent resistance is a very difficult method. It demands enormous
willpower, strict self-control and moral superiority. Such qualities are to be
found in Indian culture, which gave birth to a Gandhi, and within the black
American community of Martin Luther King. There is no such tradition in the Muslim world.
Therefore it is doubly astonishing that the demonstrators on the Gaza border are now finding this power in their hearts. The events of Black Monday, May 14, surprised the world. Masses of unarmed human beings, men, women and children, braved the Israeli sharpshooters. They did not draw weapons. They did not “storm the fence”, a lie spread by the huge Israeli propaganda apparatus. They stood exposed to the sharpshooters and were killed.
The Israeli army is convinced that the inhabitants of Gaza will not stand the test, that they will return to useless violence. Last Tuesday it seemed as if this assessment was right. One of the Gaza organizations carried out a “revenge action”, launching more then a hundred mortar shells into Israel without causing any real damage. That was a useless gesture. Violent action has no chance whatsoever to hurt Israel. It only supplies ammunition to Israeli propaganda.
When one thinks about non-violent struggle, one should remember Amritsar. That is the name of an Indian town where in April 1919 soldiers under British command opened murderous fire for 10 consecutive minutes on Indian non-violent protesters, killing at least 379 and wounding about 1200. The name of the commander, Colonel Reginald Dyer, entered history, for eternal shame. British public opinion was shocked. Many historians believe that this was the beginning
of the end of British rule in India.
“Black Monday” on the Gaza border reminds one of this episode.
HOW WILL this end?
Hamas has offered a Hudna for 40 years. A Hudna is a sacred armistice, which no Muslim is allowed to break.
I have already mentioned the Crusaders, who stayed in Palestine for almost 200 years (more then us, at this moment). They agreed to or entered into several Hudnas with the hostile Muslim states around them. The Arabs kept them strictly.
The question is: Is the Israeli government able to accept a Hudna? After
inciting the masses of their followers and filling them with mortal hatred
against the people of Gaza in general and Hamas in particular, would it dare to agree?
When the inhabitants of the Gaza Strip are choked, lacking medicines, lacking enough food, lacking pure water, lacking electricity, will our government not fall into the trap of illusion and believe that now Hamas will collapse?
That will not happen, of course. As we sang in our youth: “No people withdraws from the trenches of their life!”
As the Jews themselves proved for centuries, there is no limit to what a people can endure when its very existence is at stake.
That’s what history tells us.
MY HEART is with the people of Gaza.
I desire to ask their forgiveness, in my name and in the name of Israel, my country.
I am longing for the day when everything will change, the day when a wiser government will agree to a Hudna, open the border and let the people of Gaza return to the world.
Now, too, I love Gaza, with the love that the Bible says is as strong as death.
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Herb, you might find it refreshing to review all of my comments here in which I have extolled the possibility for a European resettlement of the various Jewish populaces to Israel as seen even with the Balfour Declaration in November 1917. Yet, sadly the relocation never took place, although a kind of acknowledgement of a Zionist state was seen as occurring with this pledge to Lord Rothschild of Britain. Only some thirty years later did an actual Jewish state arise out of the persecution and death of European Jews at the hands of Stalin and Hitler during WWII. So, indeed, maybe the Balfour Declaration was merely a kind of ideological framework for what would actually take place in 1948, and yet, one has to wonder what it would have meant if a relocation had been made possible after the end of WWI. My feeling is that it would have started a trend, and whereby a resettlement of those Jewish Europeans seeking to return to the homeland would have begun to take place, and this would have had the effect of reducing the diaspora population some 30 years in advance of the genocidal interests of Hitler and Stalin.
So, you see, these are the things I contemplate within my own individuality, and have done so for many years. The label of the greedy and grafting Jew might have an actual place and time, which serves to gain the stereotypical denominator, and even given further evidence in cultural history right up to the present time, but that is only because it is seen as a cultural outcome. Personally, as an individual, I have never taken any issue with any other human being. My remark was a mistake concerning what I thought I heard from an old zionist of the 1980’s, who I thought was commiserating about all the graft and greed that they had seen as causing their plight in the world.
Well, why not see this as a possible situation in the plight of the Jews in the world today? Certainly, it could be seen that people live in the world with a much lesser standard than they deserve. As such, America could actually lift up every nation in the world in order to make it whole, and yet, doesn’t do it. Why not? It is possible for every nation in this world to reap its own harvest.
Powerful countries like the United States can remake the world almost overnight, but it takes goodwill intentions. Anybody can imagine a man like John F. Kennedy, who had this impulse, and then contrast him with Donald Trump, who easily bears the Ahrimanic incarnation in human form. It sounds nutty, I know; nutty, it sounds, and yet, who rules the world these days with might and mane? So, why not just place a kind of celebrity POTUS before the world scene; a kind of reality show which gets the various aspects of the main-stream media going with their propaganda news?
Well, this is it, and it is what it is. But why is Europe not seeing it more forcefully? Why does the U.S. control every opinion and decision in the U.N.? If they are actively supporting Israeli Jews against the Palestinians than this is a conflict of interest, and needs to be recognized. Then, they should abstain from any vote concerning their prejudicial position.
But, of course, let us remember that it was the United States that rejected the U.N. Security Council’s decision not to declare war against Iraq in 2003. So, what did they do, i.e., the United States?
Maybe present-day Europe takes a dim view of the United States, and its history of intervening in the affairs of other sovereign countries, but a point in time comes when it must be said, “enough is enough”. This doesn’t come from here, Herb, which you wouldn’t even expect, but from Europe, of course, which has the power with each nation to tell it like it is, and take action.
Trump has been shown to cower when faced with force coming from truth. It works.
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From fairy tales, we know that the devil can be defeated if only we can speak his true name. Israel is an Apartheid system that exists in order to serve Zionism, i.e. Jewish supremacy in Israel. That’s just a fact. It is currently supported and dependent on US Imperialism for economic, political and military aid. But even if it weren’t, there will be no solution until Israel ceases to identify itself as a Jewish state. In Steinerian (racist?) terms, Christ has to replace Jehova. What can we do about it? Oppose US Imperialism by saying it as it is.
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Any chance that the solution you insist upon might also add with equal vehemence that the countries around Israel not identify themselves as Muslim states and renounce the the antisemitism that they churn out in large quantities (and maybe not kill each other in such large numbers as they do)? I think that Israel is heading for disaster and that a fair amount of it seems self-inflicted, and the whole situation is extremely saddening, but this sort of comment leaves me scratching my head.
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I would also like to draw attention to the comment from DG, which has me equally scratching my head. Yet, I can see how it arises, as it comes from the side of a perceived support plan in which the imperialism of the United States conjoins with Steiner’s supposed conviction that Christ must replace Jehova.
Yet, of course, Steiner never considered there was anything other than a kind of mutual relationship between Jahve and Christ. The problem is that the entry of Christ into earth evolution was not perceived and accepted by the Jewish authorities in Palestine, and yet, according to the Gospels, ever-increasing multitudes of simple Jewish folk began to follow and believe in the work of what appeared outwardly as a simple man, named Jesus, from Nazareth.
Of course, it can be admitted that all four of the gospels contain scathing attacks against the Jewish hierarchy there in Judea at the time of Christ, and yet equally to be found contained therein is the testimony of simple Jewish people being healed and encouraged in such a way as to become the beginnings of a new Jewish nation. So, what went wrong?
In an earlier comment, it was shown that the High Priest, Caiaphas, had the rational belief that one man must die for the nation, and that it should be the Christ, which would surely seem to indicate that Caiaphas did acknowledge that the Messiah had actually incarnated on earth. But, in his idea, Christ must die for the nation of the chosen people of God, and also with the ability to bring the diaspora tribes, scattered throughout the other territories, back to the homeland of Palestine in order to rise up and defeat the Roman overlords who stood as watch-guards from Galilee to Judea.
https://anthropopper.wordpress.com/2018/05/23/israel-king-claudius-and-the-massacre-in-gaza/#comment-4909
That is why Barabbas was freed instead of Jesus. Pilate wanted to free a man that the Jews had condemned, and yet, he could find nothing of sufficient guilt as to condemn him to crucifixion. Yet, Barabbas was seen by the Jewish authorities, i.e, Caiaphas, as someone with the courage and zealotry against the Romans who could lead a revolutionary action that would defeat them. The paradox is that Barabbas himself was moved by the revolutionary activities of the Christ over the three years, and saw Him as the true leader of any revolt, which he would have supported completely. Yet, all depictions of Barabbas, having been released while Christ is crucified, accurately convey a man who has no power to accomplish anything because the true revolutionary leader has been executed in order to achieve Caiaphas’ ingenious plan for the sole salvation of the Jewish nation. Thus, Barabbas dies a guilt-ridden man.
Do we not see the continuation of this mentality today, and yes, even with the huge support of the government of the United States? My daughter was telling me all about Christian Zionism last weekend when we were walking around the lake. It was very insightful. She seems to know what is being intended with this move of the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. I was very impressed. Yet, if the Jews of the world could actually see their way to an actual study of Christianity, and likely only the esoteric Christianity, as conveyed by Rudolf Steiner, could possibly convince them of its efficacy, then a whole new worldview could open up.
Of course, the same could be said of all the fundamentalist Christians and their several church denominations, and let’s not forget the atheists and agnostics of the world. In a time of transition, the future is proposed very clearly, and some get it. They take the responsible lead position, which is from above. It represents an outstanding vantage point, and far superior to where the rather terminal problems reside today. These come from the several sub-earthly powers that percolate to the surface like oil, which has been known to even gush.
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Putin has agreed with Israel to restrain Iranian influence in Gaza (Hamas), Lebanon (Hezbollah) and Syria (Assad). That’s Russia’s new geopolitics in a multipolar world, where apparently Trump is dependent on Putin.
Traditionally, Russian imperialism required free access to the Mediterranean Sea (Syria) and the Persian Gulf (Iran): “Open for yourselves a route towards the Persian Gulf. Re-establish, as much as possible, by means of Syria, the ancient commerce of the Levant, and thus advance towards India.” (The Will of Peter the Great, point 9).
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Islamic states, such as Saudi Arabia, are equally atavistic, but the Middle East is predominantly and historically a Muslim region. Syria, for example, is a secular democracy with a Jewish population. Lebanon is a secular democracy and had a Jewish population until recently. Israel is a modern (Western) Jewish state that occupies Palestinian territory as a racist coloniser. The surrounding Arab countries do not, for example, host the world’s largest open-air prison that is Gaza. Israel caused the problem originally, Israel is aggressively perpetuating the problem and, thus, ultimately needs to solve it. If the US were to withdraw its support, Israel might be forced to compromise with its neighbours and the Palestinians.
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“Israel caused the problem originally, Israel is aggressively perpetuating the problem and, thus, ultimately needs to solve it. If the US were to withdraw its support, Israel might be forced to compromise with its neighbours and the Palestinians.”
I agree that it could possibly make an enormous difference (or possibly not) if the United States tried to act as an honest broker instead of putting its thumb on heavily on the scale towards Israel. The rest of this comment comes across as staggeringly oversimplified. I think back to Jeremy’s remark in the post that the problem is “us,” not “them.”
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My interest in reading this blog and the comments is learning something new, something that goes deeper than the daily news in the papers or on TV, or if not deeper then at least a forgotten, overlooked fact or facet on the topic.
Well, for once, let me make some remarks on „the press“: I dont agree with the motion of the fake news, there might be some very few, but most of the time fake news is just unpleasant news (for Trump, for Putin or whoever) or one-sided news, but true nevertheless. So the term fake news is fake news itself. See where reporters are followed or hampered, where they are labeled anti-semitic, fascist, racist, zionist, communist, terrorist or whatever, just to silence them. I think for one item of truely fake news there are a hunderd cases of intimidation on journalists.
Ottmar
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What about some „deeper“ aspects on Israel and the matters involved. Some aspects surely are very occult, like: which hierarchies and which specific angles, archangles etc. are involved, what are the spiritual, esoteric consequences of the holocaust and many other questions. I dont claim to have a first hand insight there.
On a „lower“ level there are questions, which can more easily be addressed, where we must „only“ look at the indicative phenomenons. The beginning, the start or founding of a state, an organization or institution is always of importance, significance.
Rudolf Steiner talked about Henry VIII and the beginning of the Anglican church. Henry VIII had his personal reasons, but of course it was more than that. The UK like the USA cannot accept other states as equals, with equal rights and responsabilities. (It was completely overlooked that on the days after 9/11 the USA refused to sign the UN treaty on children s rights, the US does not accept the international court of justice in The Hague and and and, likewise the UK had more „extra rights“ in the EU than any other country and Thatcher got a huge financial rebate but still there s the Brexit). So sometimes there is a small personal interest at the start but behind it there is a much broader „historic motive“. So one might say there is something in the „genes“ of the Anglican Church.
In my eyes there is something in „the genes“ of the Anthroposophical Society which is a kind of burden or problem. Rudolf Steiner said in 1909, when the first tensions came up between Rudolf Steiner s theosophical work and the work of Annie Besant, that it is important that the 2 streams can work together as long as possible. Well, it wasnt possible, but it wasnt a glorious moment but a moment of tragedy but today most often it isnt seen as a tragedy. Spiritual world history made it necessary, but it still is a tragedy. Anthroposophy lost the world-wide, cosmopolitan, super-religious outlook of the Theosohical Society (I say outlook, in the heart it isnt, of course) and so anthroposophy was and by some people still is regarded as something German or European, … So it took more than half a century that the Waldorf Schools were regarded as something universal, applicable in all cultures.
I spoke of the „genes“ or shortcomings of the Church of England and the Anthroposophical Society. I hope this was enough of a foreword for the question: What is in the „genes“ of the state of Israel, what are the shortcomings of the Jewish state. (I hope nobody shouts you re antisemitic. There are shortcomings, problematic „genes“ in every state, institution.) Some try to find these „genes“ in an astrological chart; I m not into astrology at all; I think it leaves too much room for interpretation. I think it is clear to all that in the „genes“ of the Jewish state of Israel (it got a strictly Jewish Constitution in the days of the massacre, Jeremy spoke about, but this was widely overlooked in the international press) there are some big and heavy problems and burdens. At the moment I cant see a solution to the problems concerning the state of Israel; I fear much more bloodshed is nearly inevitable. (France and Germany were arch-enemies for centuries -in German we used the term Erbfeind, inherited enemy- and it took millions of lives to appease it.)
Ottmar
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I stated earlier that I have known a lot of anthroposophists and have seen little anti-Semitism and anti-Israeli feeling, but this blog’s original piece and the favorable comments seem intent on proving me wrong. Now some of its readers have chosen out of all the Jews in the world Uri Avnery as its Jewish guru. Unbelievable. This is a man with Nazi connections who has loved every Palestinian terrorist he has ever met, a man denounced and disinherited by his own mother. He is a part of the Islamofascist far left and has been allied with Holocaust deniers, Stalinists, and Nazis. In the beginning of the article propagated here, he directly admits his love for Islamists, Hamas, and Arafat. I am appalled that anthroposophists are attracted to him and are spreading his writings. Here are some details about him.
………..
Uri Avnery is quite literally the godfather of Israeli anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. Long before “Post-Zionism” became the pagan theology of Israel’s radical Left, Avnery was calling for an end to Zionism and to Israel in his book “Israel without Zionists,” crayoned and published by him in the late 1960s. At the time, Avnery was the publisher of the semi-pornographic scandal sheet “Haolam Hazeh,” Israel’s answer to National Enquirer in the US. Avnery ran for Knesset and got voted in briefly on a protest vote by the same sorts of people who might vote for Alfred E. Neuman or for Homer Simpson in other places. He was dishonorably involved in the complex matters surrounding the Kastner court case and controversy in Israel.
(Go to fullsize image Avnery throwing rocks at the Jews)
And since the early 1970s he has been working full time for Israel’s annihilation. He is a frequent writer for numerous anti-Semitic and pro-jihad pro-terror web sites, most frequently for “Counterpunch,” the neo-Stalinist web site run by arch anti-Semite Alexander Cockburn, the guy who claims the Jews were behind the 911 attacks on the US and also behind the anthrax attacks in the US.
Avnery is the poster boy for the Israeli far Left. He epitomizes everything that is pathological about it. He is incredibly self-hating. Unlike the other lefties, he admits he seeks for Israel to end all connections with Judaism and for Israelis to stop being Jews. He serves as Israel’s Lord Haw-Haw (Haw-Haw was the British propagandist who spent World War II broadcasting pro-Nazi propaganda over the radio in English from Berlin). Naturally he is beloved by anti-Semites all over the globe and frequently honored.
Avnery runs a splinter extremist anti-Israel “protest group” called Gush Shalom, funded by the usual haters of Israel from Europe and elsewhere. He often tours outside Israel as the speaker sponsored by Islamofascist organizations.
Uri Avnery was disowned by his own mother, who regarded him as a traitor. He repeatedly served as human shield for Yassir Arafat and other terrorists. At least one Israeli senior military officer called for Avnery to be shot as a traitor, as have some rightist hotheads like Baruch Marzel. He was beaten up and had both arms broken due to his treasonous writings as early as 1953. He claims that in 1975 someone tried to assassinate him, but I suspect this is nothing more than grandstanding and posturing to get himself publicity.
We earlier had occasion to comment on Avnery’s Nazi ties and affections from when he was a youth in Germany. What we now know is that his ties with Nazis and even with Holocaust Deniers are not forgotten indiscretions of youth but are evident for us all now, even this week!
The Rense.com web site is a Holocaust Denial and Neo-Nazi web site run by a radio shlock broadcaster named Jeff Rense. Unlike Michael Savage, he is not banned from Britain for being a racist. Rense’s web site is overflowing with articles about how the Holocaust is a hoax invented by the Zionists, and that no Jews were murdered at Auschwitz. If you think I am exaggerating, go into Rense.com and do a search on their search engine for the words “Holocaust” or “Auschwitz.
Rense is so openly Nazi and so whacky (it also promotes “theories” about UFOs) that even the most openly anti-Semitic Jews usually stand clear of it. Even people like Neve Gordon, whose articles appear on other Holocaust Denial and Neo-Nazi web sites, has never gone near Rense. The only exception to this is Barry Chamish, who is a regular columnist for Rense.com, but he is so utterly deranged that his appearance on the site probably just helps to discredit it.
There are some anti-Semites and Holocaust Deniers who DO write for Rense and who also appear on leftist anti-Semitic web sites like Counterpunch. Alexander Cockburn does not seem to mind sharing some of his stable of writers with Rense (including Holocaust deniers like John Chuckman, Henry Makow, and Paul Craig Roberts, and leftist Neo-Nazis like Stephen Lendman).
Well, to get to the point, this week Uri Avnery is publishing one of his countless bash-Israel screeds on Rense.com. It can be read here. You better open it, or else I fear you will think I am spoofing you again.
Moreover, this is not Avnery’s first appearance there. If you go to Rense.com and write Avnery’s name in the search engine, you will see dozens of other pieces by Avnery published on this Holocaust Denial web site. Obviously Avnery is not bothered by this. If the publications were without his approval he could sue Rense and its sponsors to force them to be removed, or just publicly repudiate Rense. While you are in the search engine, look up Holocaust or Auschwitz. My favorite Rense item on the Holocaust is this. You will find Chamish listed among the official site columnists on the front page of Rense.com .
To remind you of Avnery’s personal history and connections with German Nazism:
The leading survivor of the early “Canaanite” (Israeli anti-Jewish) movement today is Uri Avnery, a fanatic anti-Zionist and anti-Semite, whose Bash-Israel pro-Hamas articles appear everywhere one can find anti-Semitism, on the Right and the Left. What is not well known is that Uri Avnery’s original name was Helmut Osterman, born in Germany, and among the two leading figures in the “Canaanites”; and Avnery/Osterman was an admirer of Nazism.
In 1941, Avnery wrote a pro-Nazi article in the Paris journal “Shem”, whose contents were later revealed by the Hebrew University Orientalist Prof. Yehoshua Porat in his book “Shelach V’At B’yado”, page 182. Herr Avnery was also fond of using the concept of “Hebrew Blood” in a racial sense, in the same way as Hitler spoke of German Aryan Blood. In those days he was anti-Marxist, although today has no problem with associating himself with Stalinists. Back then he repeatedly expressed admiration for the great job Hitler was doing in remolding and renewing the German nation. Avnery was an open admirer of Nazi propagandist Alfred Rosenberg, adopted the latter’s rhetoric, and repeatedly declared that he saw himself as the Hebrew Alfred Rosenberg (which, in a sense, he is). Avnery ran a tiny “journal” called The Struggle, an obvious imitation of the name “Mein Kampf”. He ran his own one-man party, whose official salute was a Nazi raised hand.
Avnery in those days advocated creation of a Semitic “race” that would lead the Middle East to greatness when combined with a new Hebraic non-Jewish culture. As such, he advocated the end of the Jewish people as a national entity and expansion of the new race into its “Semitic Lebensraum” (yes, he used that Nazi concept!). He later wrote of his dream for a new and better Hitler emerging, an anti-Nazi Hitler who will lead the struggle for peace and will promote the Palestinian cause (well, at least he got THAT part right!).
Avnery then left for Israel/Palestine. In the 60s he ran a semi-pornographic magazine called “Haolam Hazeh,” as the Israeli Larry Flynt. The magazine also did some scandal mongering. Avnery later ran for parliament and got elected by a sort of protest vote. [In the 1960s Avnery wrote “Israel without Zionists”, the Bible of Israeli self-hating leftism. Ever since, he has been the Reverend Moon of Israel’s far-leftist “Post-Zionists” and he runs the small and violently anti-Israel “Gush Shalom” organization.
_————————
Here is another piece about him for those who want to pursue the matter:
http://www.jewishideasdaily.com/815/features/who-is-uri-avnery-and-why-does-he-matter/
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Hi Herb. Would you like to provide your full name, so I can pass your character assassination of Uri Avnery onto him thus giving him a right to reply.
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Herb, here is where you get yourself into trouble, and demonstrate an agenda which wants to label anthroposophists on this blog as carrying anti-Semitic sentiments. You wrote:
“I stated earlier that I have known a lot of anthroposophists and have seen little anti-Semitism and anti-Israeli feeling, but this blog’s original piece and the favorable comments seem intent on proving me wrong. Now some of its readers have chosen out of all the Jews in the world Uri Avnery as its Jewish guru. Unbelievable. This is a man with Nazi connections who has loved every Palestinian terrorist he has ever met, a man denounced and disinherited by his own mother. He is a part of the Islamofascist far left and has been allied with Holocaust deniers, Stalinists, and Nazis. In the beginning of the article propagated here, he directly admits his love for Islamists, Hamas, and Arafat. I am appalled that anthroposophists are attracted to him and are spreading his writings.”
Where is there any indication that anthroposophists are attracted to Avnery and spreading his writings? Sure, Jeremy mentioned him, and yet, maybe your analysis deserves a further look. Personally, I have never heard of the guy, and it would be interesting to hear what Jeremy thinks of your account. For me, it all becomes the matter of ‘burden of proof’, and wherein you, Herb, wage your own personal agenda against what you see as “leftist leanings”, as opposed to what? Well, the right-wing agenda is well known as the cause of the United States. As such, it supports the Jewish state of Israel, and funds its army with its own leading-edge technologies in the field of war-craft. Yet, what is the larger issue, and the one addressed from the nearly beginning of this Jeremy essay, in which it was shown how a peaceful coexistence could have been brokered in the aftermath of WWI with the Balfour Declaration?
Herb, you would rather point fingers, and especially at certain anthroposophists who take issue with Nikki Haley and President Trump. Well, where does the ax of political decision fall these days other than the United States? It’s a stacked deck with all the cards in place, and in order.
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In 1994, with the mediation of his activist twin brother Braam Viljoen, Afrikaner general Constand Viljoen crossed the border towards Nelson Mandela:
“Speaking in Viljoen’s language, Afrikaans, Mandela persuaded him that a guerrilla war would lead nowhere. Instead, he urged him to stand for parliament in the multiracial elections. Viljoen left the house purged of warlike thoughts.”
https://www.ft.com/content/a342e372-5c64-11e3-931e-00144feabdc0
https://www.csmonitor.com/1993/1028/28131.html
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With regard to the comparisons drawn above concerning Amritsar, etc – very similar to Bloody Sunday in Ireland, where the British intention had the (intended ?) effect of transforming the civil rights movement in Ulster into something with which it was more difficult to sympatise (the IRA went from an almost defunct organisation of a few ageing men into a large and active terrorist organisation). Add to that the collusion between both governments and terrorists from the (ostensibly) ‘other side’, undercover operatives who planted bombs for the organisations they had infiltrated and even possibly encouraged factions to extremes of violence, and you get an idea of how twisted this sort of thing can become. When some of the chief players (Paisley, McGuinness) in the debacle realise (or did they always know?) that their respective post-masonic organisations were affiliates all along, an interesting dimension is opened.
The anthroposophic view, though, throws open other possibilities (as does any viewpoint that allows for realites behind the physically manifest) – apart from deliberate incitement to manipulate your enemy, the ultimate covert collusion is where you have instilled in him or opened him to the control of the same diabolic tendency with which you yourself are animated.
But getting angry towards Israelis or any other can also lead to the exact same thing – a force of hate is fanned up which is the same as that which motivates that which we denounce. And surely this works both ways for both the Israelis and Palestinians – the situation has become so difficult that both sides are being sucked into something that I refuse to believe is the natural inclination of either.
I think Rudolf Steiner once said concerning evil that it is something that would be otherwise good but is in the wrong time, place or quantity. Maybe, but I would qualify that by adding that there is a greater evil that is conscious of what it does and does so knowing that it is evil, something like our idea of a devil whether you concede it to be a conscious entity or merely a kind of force or other abstraction. Some people are more or less innocent and become agents of it’s activities through being caught up in it’s effects. Others, to the extent that they are conscious that what they choose is wrong, become like to it. A small few, I’m inclined to think, are very conscious.
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What Steiner said is that what was good in a former epoch becomes its opposite in a later time if it is retained and made a fixture. For example, up until the midpoint of the 19th century, human evolution was forward and progressing, and then the point occurred when theoretical materialism came on the scene and was accepted as the new venture for further excursions into its practical, and as we see today, its technological achievements in arch materialism. Consequently, thinking became retrogressive and began to become embedded in its own materialistic worldview. This worldview is hopeless, as we see today with all the seemingly unsolvable conflicts, and human minds themselves are losing their grasp of reality.
Ultimately, good must win out over evil in order to achieve the true and complete experience of freedom. So, an anti-Christ was put into the mix in order to opposed the One who died a human death on Golgotha. All we have to see is that the Good came from the Sun, while Evil comes from its polar direction, which is the lowest level of the sub-earthly, where the Asuras dwells. Nobody is going to deny that evil is an earthly matter. That is why Michael has taken his position from above, and yet, lives in human hearts who take up the sword of meteoric iron for truth and knowledge. Spiritual Science becomes an avocation in this respect, as seen here with the Jeremy blog.
Make no mistake, these discussions are important to have, and your own take on these matters makes me think about Lord Mountbatten, who having brokered the deal for the independence of India in 1947, which would also serve to bring an independent state to the Muslims, called Pakistan, would eventually lead to his own brutal assassination by the IRA in 1979, when his yacht was blown up. Of course, the Irish Republican Army took immediate and glorious responsibility for its action. Why? Simply because Mountbatten was a living legend of British democracy and its standards.
Now, in today’s world, what exists is the effort to erode the moral world order, which is from God, and from above, and why we can possibly be free human beings while living under the strict determinism of the laws of nature, which are from below, and make us all uniquely of the Human Kingdom, which rules over the animals, plants, and minerals. The word is that they seek redemption, too.
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In ancient times, Israel is like a moral ‘oasis’ (Steiner) in a pagan world:
“Within this Pagan culture, [like an oasis,] the utterly different Hebraic-Jewish culture took root, having Christianity as its offspring. … It was actually through Hebraic culture that the moral element was first inculcated into humanity. In Paganism the moral element did not occupy a place separate and apart; this Pagan culture was such that man felt himself a member of the whole cosmos.”
GA0193/19191104 [wie eine Oase, in German]
On the map, St. Petersburg (home of the Putin regime) is vertically opposite to Israel/Palestine (Jerusalem)…
Steiner: The apocalyptic two-horned Beast from the earth (also called Sorat, Sun demon or Earth demon) appears ‘before the end of the [20th] century’. Ahriman (Satan, i.e, the Adversary) appears in the flesh `before even a part of the third millennium of the Christian era has run its course’ (i.e. 1999).
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Steiner described Balfour with sympathy in The Riddles of Philosophy (1914), The World as Illusion:
“A characteristic phenomenon of his time is the personality of the English statesman, James Balfour (1840 – 1930). In 1879, in his book, A Defense of Philosophical Doubt, Being an Essay on the Foundations of Belief, he expressed a credo that is doubtless similar to that held by many other thinkers. With respect to everything that man is capable of explaining he stands completely on the ground of the thought of natural science.” Etc.
GA018_p02c03
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On Herb and Avnery: I believe that Jeremy was completely wrong to have permitted publication of the badly repetitive cut-and-paste job that Herb did from mendacious Judeo-fascist websites.
I know it’s wrong to attack the author rather than his/her thoughts, but in the case of Herb, I’d like to make an exception. Just compare the way Avnery writes with that of Herb, and you’ll know the difference between a man and a swine.
Herb should not be allowed to propagate his lies on these pages.
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Both you and Herb use pretty belicose and tendentious language, and its unfortunate to cut and paste things without checking them out first, as Herb did, but I’m not aware that he has lied, as you have repeatedly charged him with doing. Avnery was an Irgun member until 1942 and that alleged 1941 Shem article is something that an Irgun member could have written, as filtered through a hostile and incautious reporter, which Yehoshua Porat undoubtedly is. It would be helpful to see the original article, if it exists. You can look up Haolam Hazeh,” on Wikipedia. Again, the description of it in Herb’s article is hostile, but I’m not sure that there is anything actually false about it. Avnery’s mother did disown him. Avnery was at least sympathetic to the Canaanite movement, although I think he has said that he was never a member, which is not what the article says. I’m not sure that you wouldn’t be sympathetic to the Canaanite movement either.
Of all the terms of abuse you might choose, it’s kind of weird to call a Jew “swine.”
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‘Of all the terms of abuse you might choose, it’s kind of weird to call a Jew “swine.”’
My Jewish mum used the term quite a lot of persons she deemed beneath contempt. One dictionary definition is: “a contemptible person”.(1)
I consider the malicious and dishonest attack on Avnery – a peace-seeking and honourable old man incapable of defending his honour here – to be contemptible, whether perpetrated by Jew or anyone else.
As I have said before to you, dear Reader, just sample Avnery’s writing and compare his sentiment to some of the stuff (yes, even my own) here. He is brutally honest, yet loving at the same time. His enemies remain enemies even though he has compassion for them. This is truly Christian.
I have no idea how to respond honestly to people who twist language so that Counterpunch (www.counterpunch.org) becomes “neo-Stalinist” or “neo-Nazi”, and Alexander Cockburn becomes an “arch anti-Semite”. When almost the whole of the attack on Avnery was cut and paste (2,3) without any supporting evidence from websites that are just soaked in hatred, there is no other description for those who speak of others in this way. They are contemptible. I pity their hatred, but I will not avoid calling them out when they hurt others, even if I have to hurt them (and myself) in so doing.
1. https://www.thefreedictionary.com/swine
2. http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Blogs/Message.aspx/3544
3. http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Blogs/Message.aspx/2029
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Hahaha. My mum made me do it. That’s good.
As for Counterpunch, anyone can look it up. It is very far left and has loads of anti-Semites writing for it. Of course, some people think there is no such thing as an anti-Semite. Very convenient.
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But allow the ‘swine’ remark ?
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(that wasn’t meant as a criticism of your [Jeremy] letting that remark through – it just seems that the tenor here in some respects has shrivelled down into a kind of microcosm of the situation in the region under discussion, from whichever ‘side’ or vantage point we incline; which kind of proves part of the point I tried to make.)
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agreed, and thanks for your longer comment.
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Jeremy, I request that my “lies” be excised from the site. It is better that you are rid of a swine like me. Please do that for me. Please take my posts off. Thanks.
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Herb, I’ve noted your request to delete your posts to this blog, but I’m not going to do so. This is because my assumption is that your comments were made in good faith, and that the responses to it were also made in good faith. If I deleted your comments, those comments received in response to yours would make no sense at all, and therefore they would also have to be deleted; which would be unfair to all concerned.
A flood at home has kept me away from taking an active part in commenting in recent days, but I have nevertheless been reading and moderating everything that has come in as usual, in between mopping floors and taking soaking items to the dump. Writing a post on Israel and Palestine was of course not something I would have done if I had wanted a quiet life; but the generally good-natured and mutually respectful tone of comments received on other posts on this blog (and that make it something of an exemplar to observers, as I’ve been told by the digital editor of a prominent magazine) has been at times lacking with comments on the current post.
Why have I let some of these comments through? After all, the Comments & Moderation Policy spells out that contributors should play the ball and not the person; and that libel and hate speech will not be allowed. So why did I not refuse to approve those comments?
My instinct here has been that the kind of exchanges seen above are a kind of epitome of the situation between the Israelis and the Palestinian Arabs, and thus they tell us something about the larger problem, which as mentioned in the original post, is a kind of fratricidal warfare. The Jews, Palestinians, Lebanese and Jordanians are all genetically linked. “Jews and Arabs are all really children of Abraham,” says Harry Ostrer, M.D., Director of the Human Genetics Program at New York University School of Medicine, an author of a new study on these issues by an international team of researchers in the United States, Europe, and Israel. “And all have preserved their Middle Eastern genetic roots over 4,000 years,” he says.
So as I’ve also noted, what is going on between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs is basic Cain and Abel rivalry, and we’ve seen this reflected in some of the comments received here.
I’ve just been reading a most remarkable book called “Return from Tomorrow” by the late George G. Ritchie. At the end of the Second World War, Ritchie was an American soldier whose company had to get medical help to the newly liberated prisoners in a concentration camp near Wuppertal. He describes the sheer horror of what he saw that often threatened to overwhelm him. But he also met a very special person, a Polish prisoner whom he called Wild Bill Cody. Wild Bill was fluent in several languages as well as Polish, and worked fifteen to sixteen hours a day to help relocate people whose families, even whole towns, might have disappeared. His compassion glowed on his face and it was that glow that helped Ritchie when his own spirits were low.
Every group in the camp looked on Wild Bill as a friend, and he was the one to whom quarrels were brought for arbitration. Ritchie reports that the different nationalities in the camp hated each other almost as much as they hated the Germans, but Wild Bill always counselled forgiveness to the different groups.
One day Wild Bill told Ritchie something of his own story: “We lived in the Jewish section of Warsaw”, he said, “my wife, our two daughters and our three little boys. When the Germans reached our street they lined everyone against a wall and opened up with machine guns. I begged to be allowed to die with my family, but because I spoke German they put me in a work group. I had to decide right then whether to let myself hate the soldiers who had done this. It was an easy decision, really. (…) Hate had just killed the six people who mattered most to me in the world. I decided then that I would spend the rest of my life – whether it was a few days or many years – loving every person I came in contact with.”
Ritchie reflected that it was loving every person that had given Wild Bill the power to stay well in the face of every privation.
One could say that Uri Avnery seems to be displaying a determination to love the Palestinian Arabs that the Likud government doesn’t understand and wants to stamp out as subversive and un-Israeli. Whatever the attempts to blacken his character, this old man in his 90s is clinging to love rather than hate, and one can only hope that one day, many other people on both sides will be able to rise above their petty hatreds and start to embrace their brothers and sisters, in recognition of the Christ that is within them. That is surely the only direction in which a positive future for Israel and Palestine can lie.
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I am sorry to hear that you won’t delete my posts. Obviously the views of many anthroposophists are the opposite of my own, and I was shocked by the vehemence. That is why I want to be taken out of this conversation.
I am equally shocked by people who think that Avnery is a bringer of love. Oh, he says he loves Hamas, he loves Arafat, etc, but you shouldn’t have to read too deeply to see that he is full of hatred and that he has shown no love towards Jews. His love of these Islamists and terrorists looks to me like the kind of love that says, “I love these people because they hate the people I hate.” Most of what he writes about the conflict is pro Palestinian and pro Islamic and anti-Israel or anti-Jewish. It’s fascinating to me that he has mostly been popular in post Holocaust Europe, especially Germany. I will leave that analysis to others.
You also make a mistake when you say that it’s Likud that doesn’t understand Avnery’s so-called love. They are not alone. It’s true that a good portion of the elite left at one time aligned itself with Avnery. Those were the days when Avnery’s goals lined up very well with the European left and the Soviet communists. For a very long time he usually followed the party line of the Soviets, something that surely was no coincidence. This holy man rarely objected to Stalin’s policies, including the numerous anti-Semitic ones. Why not? How is it that some anthroposophists have no problem with this? After all, Steiner viewed communism as the greatest disaster in history. Avnery was certainly sympathetic to this scourge. The Soviets supported Nasser and Avnery supported Nasser, but later they both switched their allegiance to Arafat. Nevertheless, a case can be made that he was influential enough in the left wing circles of the time to get Labor to bring back Arafat and begin the Oslo peace process, something any objective observer should consider a disaster. The mainstream left in Israel at the present time, however, does not differ much from Likud in this respect. Most of the Israeli left no longer believe that the Palestinians really want peace.
I simply do not understand how anyone could see Avnery as a model Christian. I can only hope I won’t be called a dirty Jew or a vermin for offending the great man.
If you change your mind and delete my posts, I would be grateful.
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Avnery (2014) certainly is understanding of the thugocracy within today’s Russia:
“But Putin has some logic on his side. Sevastopol – the scene of heroic sieges both in the Crimean War and in World War II, is essential for his naval forces. The association with Ukraine is an important part of Russian world power aspirations. A cold-blooded, calculating operator, of a kind now rare in the world … Russia has a leading role in Syria and Iran. The US suddenly looks like a bystander.”
http://zope.gush-shalom.org/home/en/channels/avnery/1394214313/
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Herb, I wanted to quickly write to say that this defamatory remark made against you is very disappointing to hear. Wooffles even opined, “it’s kind of weird to call a Jew “swine.” Why do people resort to such measures when a very ample discussion was taking place, and the fundamental parameters were being addressed, although not even remotely answered.
Unless I am badly mistaken in my research, two ethnically related cultural entities existed at the time that Christ incarnated on earth, and they had existed there in the geographic region known as Palestine, or comprising the districts of Judea, Samaria, and Galilee, according to the Hebrews, for nearly two thousand years before Christ first appeared. Yes, Abraham had two sons, and this is the paradox that stands at the root of the present Israeli-Palestinian dispute. The first was born of the flesh, and the second, by the Holy Spirit.
In 1948, three years after the end of World War II, which saw the genocide of the Jewish peoples of Central and Eastern Europe under the regimes of Hitler and Stalin, two European leaders, it was determined then to create a Jewish State in Israel, but this action came from the western powers, Britain and the United States. Why did it not see an equal accord for the Palestinians who had lived in that region for thousands of years? Was it enacted based on the principle of martyrdom of the European Jews, which had taken some 26 million lives during WWII?
Maybe so, and what a price to pay for an official Jewish homeland. And yet, if we look at the demographics involved, we have 70,000 Jewish relocated to a place that already had 700,000 Palestinian’s living there. At least, it would seem, a similar Palestinian State should have been created at the same time.
Just one year earlier, with the independence of India, also brokered by the western powers, the state of Pakistan was created for the Muslims living in that region. So, why didn’t the same logic prevail a year later? You see, these are the issues that I am concerned to discuss, and never hurting someone personally; oh no, never. If I take affront, it is due to certain perceived labels inflicted on anthroposophists, such as anti-Semitism, which is a ploy used by the more vicious enemies of Rudolf Steiner, Anthroposophy, and yes, even Waldorf Education.
So, it is sad to see this discussion taking its course in another failed attempt to achieve any understanding.
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I was being restrained with “weird.” I’m assuming that Bres Bo doesn’t know the Middle East that well, but for the resonance that his insult would have for anyone from Israel, google “jews apes pigs”
.
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There is a fascinating article on the London Review of Books blog, posted yesterday: https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2018/06/04/sara-roy/there-is-a-life-behind-every-statistic/?utm_source=LRB+blog+email&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=20180605+blog&utm_content=ukrw_subs_blog
Sara Roy makes many of the points that I have made in the post above, but updates the death toll figures and tells some of the human stories behind the victims of the shootings. In the comments below the post, there is even someone, called Fred Skolnik, who holds remarkably similar views to Herb.
It is all very well worth a look.
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Ah, and I see that this Skolnik is not very well liked at the LRB. Since you have decided not to delete me, I guess that I must answer. I hope that I don’t offend.
Forgive a little biography that will seem like it has nothing to do with the subject at hand, and I expect it may jump around a bit. After all, I am not writing an essay for publication.
Way back when I was training to be a Waldorf teacher, I met some old anthroposophists. Very old. One of them was a eurythmist when Steiner was still alive. Another was a painter. I had already been reading Steiner for a while, but I was somewhat surprised at their politics. They were decidedly to the right while most younger anthros were left of center. I myself was that way, though some ambivalence had appeared, in part because of Steiner. His over the top criticism of communism struck home with me. I had regularly read nearly every elite left wing journal, magazine, newspaper, etc, and knew that thinking very well because I lived it. And I continued to live it but in a milder way. A point came, however, where I decided that the intelligentsia was not so smart after all and that I needed to read the other side. Finally I began to understand both sides quite well.
One thing that struck me about Steiner was his circle of friends before he joined the Theosophists. He had a number of friends who were then described as individualist anarchists. Today I think we might better call them libertarians. He even admired Max Stirner! These friends of his were extremely opposed to the left, and Steiner was in full agreement. I don’t think he ever changed that view.
I have the feeling that many here are convinced that the people with the reputation for being smart, the ruling class, the intellectuals, the left, the leaders of the culture, are to be read with respect and acknowledgement that they know more than anyone in the opposition could possibly know. I always admired Steiner for going to lecture to the workers. He knew that they could easily be influenced by the thinking that had become so strong in the culture at that time, and he wanted to counter it. We might call it left wing materialism. Steiner knew that all the flowery words of the left were abstractions; any attempt to put them into effect would be catastrophic. He was right.
Woodrow Wilson, for example, was very prominent in this progressive intelligentsia, and he was greatly admired by all right thinking people. If Steiner had not cautioned against him, it is likely that most anthroposophists would have become equally enamored of Wilson.
So I would urge caution when reading the LRB (and Counterpunch!) and all the other bright heads that you are supposed to read if you are to be thought bright yourself. Read the “bad” people with an open mind.
People on the left are almost entirely materialists. That doesn’t mean that they are necessarily wrong about everything, but why the attraction from anthroposophists? They have an ideology and everything must be made to fit into that ideology. They have a story to tell, and everything must fit that story. And their story and their ideology hasn’t changed all that much since Steiner’s time. It is this ideology that frames for them the question of Israel and its enemies. It is for this reason that we can see an alliance between the progressive left and Islam, an Islam that stands for ideas the left is supposed to oppose. I would suggest that a great deal of what we read is filtered through this left wing lens. Look through the other lens, too, if you don’t want to be cyclops.
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Thanks for putting in your two cents and for your comment on the defamation. I appreciate it. The situation is so unpleasant that I wanted to withdraw, but apparently I can’t, so I must continue to address what people are saying. That means I will add my own two cents. There should be no reason why we can’t write frankly and even assertively about this.
I am sure your intentions are good, but I remain convinced that a lot of people both within and outside of anthroposophy are misinformed, or they misunderstand what is going on. Of course, some will say that I am the misinformed one…or worse.
First, one must realize that in 1947 there was a partition plan to do exactly what you are talking about, divide the land in two, one for a Jewish state and one for yet another Arab Muslim state. There are now, I believe, 23 of them. The Jews accepted the plan and the Arabs refused it. Nothing has changed since then! The Arabs have consistently refused an offer of a state, something no one on this blog seems capable of acknowledging. Or perhaps they don’t know this. They openly stated then and they openly state it now that what they want is the destruction of Israel, something that can only be accomplished through genocide. This is why Hamas has allied itself with Iran.
The assertion that what we have here is a Cain and Abel thing, a fraternal fight, is also I think wrong. Yes, there is something in common, but the differences cannot be ignored. We mustn’t forget that Islam didn’t exist in ancient times, so we are not talking about the same people. What’s more, the population itself has changed over time with people moving in an out of there from other places. We have no way of knowing precise numbers regarding what happened after the Arab conquest. Presumably the population was forced to convert and others moved there. Then a Christian conquest, another Muslim conquest, and so on. When we get to the 20th century, as soon as Jews started to move back to the area, Arabs from the surrounding area also moved there because the economic conditions improved so much. As I mentioned before, Mark Twain traveled there extensively and reported that the population was small and terribly poor and backwards. This was also documented by others. I shouldn’t have to go into details about the history, for this can easily be looked up.
I don’t know what your 70,000 figure refers to. At the time of the creation of Israel, the Jewish population there would need another zero to make it close to 700,000. This number increased greatly after the creation of the state because Jews fled from Arab countries where the persecution was stepped up in light of the anti-Semitic sentiment towards Israel.
Steiner pointed out that Islam was a manifestation of Ahriman, so the culture is Ahrimanic but the attitude is Lucifer. He also characterized Arabs as being fanatical. I don’t see any evidence to disprove him. I agree with you that Steiner was not anti-Semitic, though he said things that can easily be interpreted that way. It didn’t help that there were some despicable anthroposophists who joined the Nazi party. But Steiner is not responsible for that, and I digress. Churchill wrote something similar to Steiner’s view of Islam that qualifies as very politically incorrect:
Indeed it is evident that Christianity, however degraded and distorted by cruelty and intolerance, must always exert a modifying influence on men’s passions, and protect them from the more violent forms of fanatical fever, as we are protected from smallpox by vaccination. But the Mahommedan religion increases, instead of lessening, the fury of intolerance. It was originally propagated by the sword, and ever since its votaries have been subject, above the people of all other creeds, to this form of madness. In a moment the fruits of patient toil, the prospects of material prosperity, the fear of death itself, are flung aside. The more emotional Pathans are powerless to resist. All rational considerations are forgotten. Seizing their weapons, they become Ghazis—as dangerous and as sensible as mad dogs: fit only to be treated as such. While the more generous spirits among the tribesmen become convulsed in an ecstasy of religious bloodthirstiness, poorer and more material souls derive additional impulses from the influence of others, the hopes of plunder and the joy of fighting. Thus whole nations are roused to arms. Thus the Turks repel their enemies, the Arabs of the Soudan break the British squares, and the rising on the Indian frontier spreads far and wide. In each case civilisation is confronted with militant Mahommedanism. The forces of progress clash with those of reaction. The religion of blood and war is face to face with that of peace. Luckily the religion of peace is usually the better armed.
—The Story of the Malakand Field Force (1898)
Add to this Soloviev’s warning that the 20th century would see a reawakened Islam attack the West. Of course, Muslims consider Israel to be a Western incursion. Combine this and a picture is created that seems reasonable to me.
Perhaps then one can see that the situation with India and Pakistan ended somewhat differently because the Indian people have a different attitude from the Arabs. Nevertheless, there remains great enmity between those two countries and we see that India has been growing closer to Israel now that it has jettisoned its third worldism.
Considering all this and more, I therefore fail to understand why so many anthroposophists here come down on the side of Islam.
In any case, I do appreciate reading what you wrote. It clarified a few things for me.
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Herb, I can only admit that I never came down on the side of Islam in this present situation. Yet, it can also be shown that Rudolf Steiner did not actually say too many bad things about the progressive function of Arabism in the early development of the physical sciences. As well, Mohammed, who received the Koran by way of a kind of inspiration in the early 7th century, is acknowledged as enabling, through the Islamic faith that his work created for the Muslim people, a means to thwart the aims of the Academy of Gondhi-Shapur. This Karma lecture from 1924, along with those contained in the earlier volume GA184, gives a fair assessment of Mohammed’s achievement, which as Steiner indicates was to “skim the cream off the top of the Academy of Gondhi-Shapur”.
https://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA235/English/RSP1972/19240316p01.html
The story of Cain and Abel comes much earlier than its later parallel with Abraham, the progenitor of both the Arabic, and Hebrew cultural streams. As such, Cain can be likened to Ishmael, and Abel to Isaac. Both are brothers; one of the flesh and the other of the spirit. Together, they represent the necessary integration of spirit and matter which constitutes our earth evolution.
It can be shown that the Arabic cultural stream bypassed the Christ Event for some six hundred years, until Mohammed, and the Hebrew cultural stream met it head-on, and rejected it. Thus, both cultures remain deficient in Christ consciousness to this very day. This is all described in the very important lecture from GA124, 13 March 1911.
Thus, if we jump forward to today, and even go back some seventy years, to 1948, it stands as a pivotal moment in human history. Uri Avnery would have been about 20 years old in 1948, and likely ecstatic about the forming of an official Jewish homeland in Israel. Interestingly, the movie “Exodus” has been on television this week, and based on the Leon Uris novel, and it deal with this Jewish independence and resettlement. My understanding is that some 70 thousand European Jews returned to Israel, but as you say, many more would have migrated from other arabic regions, and possibly making the two populations, Jewish and Palestinians, more equivalent.
To think that the Palestinians were offered a state of their own and refused it, and have refused it some, what, 23 times (?) is extraordinary. And I thank you for answering that burning question of mine. Yet, what were the parameters of the original negotiations in 1947? Were the Palestinians guaranteed equal land, or even more in order to accommodate their larger population? We are looking at a significantly disproportional ratio of 70,000 European Jews coming over to a country already populated by 700,000 Palestinians. So, the demarcation of the territorial boundaries is certainly important. Maybe it was a “take it or leave it” offer, and the Palestinians refused to concede one inch of their rightful holdings as original settlers.
Now, today, look at what we have. The 700,000 has grown to over two million people cramped together in the ghetto known as the West Bank and the Gaza strip. Herb, if you lived there, would you be satisfied? This is the message that we get from Uri Avnery, who is 90 years old now, and is clearly not satisfied.
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Well-known is the exodus of 70,000 Iranian Jews and the relocation of 70,000 Moroccan Jews.
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Herb,
It seems me that for you the justice of your side is so blindingly self-obvious that it makes it hard for you to understand that it simply isn’t to others. I haven’t read anything on this thread that suggests that anyone is on the side of Islam. The larger issue there is that I get the impression from you, as well as other Israelis, that the Israelis are falling more and more into an us vs them mentality, with the circle of people in the “them” category getting bigger and bigger, including a lot of diaspora Jews, and now, thanks to Netanyahu, everyone in America who isn’t a Republican, and that isn’t good for anyone. Or maybe it’s a preliminary part of the coming catastrophe. And I hope it’s clear by now that I’m not saying any of this this out of any innate hostility to Israel or desire to see it fail.
One example that particularly struck me from your “Cain and Abel” reply
“The Arabs have consistently refused an offer of a state . . “
There could be debate about which side’s internal politics and failures of leadership were more responsible for the Oslo accords failing, but I can’t imagine any outside observer saying that either the responsibility for failure or the desire for peace lay entirely on one side, as you appear to do. Ariel Sharon had peace in his heart when he visited the Temple Mount?
You also have a long passage from The Story of the Malakand Field Force about Islam, culminating with “The religion of blood and war is face to face with that of peace.”
You are aware that this is Winston Churchill writing this, right? And that you couldn’t possibly pick a worse person to say something like that? If you don’t much about Churchill beyond what the movies show, you can familiarize yourself here (and this isn’t exactly a lefty source): https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/not-his-finest-hour-the-dark-side-of-winston-churchill-2118317.html
As far as Gaza goes, I haven’t read anything by anyone who isn’t completely partisan who thinks that the Israeli government is doing all that it can do to relieve the suffering of the Gaza people. And it’s easy enough to get the impression from the current Israeli government that this suffering isn’t all that much of a concern for them. That’s quite apart from what is going on at the border right now, but it certainly doesn’t help Israel’s case in that situation.
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Fair enough. This is something that we will simply disagree about.
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‘As such, Cain can be likened to Ishmael, and Abel to Isaac.’
Steiner (1909) has even depicted Ishmael (ancient Egyptian wisdom) more like the priestly Abel of the Temple Legend, and Isaac more like Cain:
“In regard to this there is an ancient Hebrew legend that in Ishmael a shoot of Abraham was cast out into Arabia, that is, into the desert. What sprang from this stock is contained in the teaching of Moses. On Sinai, the ancient Hebrew people received back again, in the Mosaic Law, what had been cast out from their blood: they received it back from without.” GA0117/19091123
“Thus we find two kinds of human being characterised in Cain and Abel. The one consists of those who accept what God has prepared for them. The others — the free humanity — are those who till the soil and labour to win living products out of what is lifeless. Etc.” GA0093/19041202
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Gentlemen: Are we seeing the Shadow playing out among us? Are the leaders and the events we are analyzing and the burning thoughts we are expressing all aspects of our collective Shadow (“Double”)? I see Trump as the Shadow of the United States: minimally, a greedy, narcissistic, arrogant bully. The great thing is, the Shadow deconstructs when it comes out into the light of day. Jeremy identified the concept of “enantiodromia” -how emotions tend to morph into their opposite. This is because, on a Shadow level, they ARE their opposite – we just don’t see it consciously. Trump is compelled to come out into the light of day and we are witnessing a process of deconstruction – a necessary process for the advancement into the next stage/eon/era. Also, I remember the “Sleeping Prophet”, Edgar Casey, regarded what is unfolding the the Middle East as the war between mankind’s will vs feeling. This is all about us,collectively, not just some “them”. I think this aligns with Steiner’s vision.
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Hello Kathy,
As it happens, by sheer serendipity, I’ve just arranged for the noted American anthroposophist, Christopher Schaefer, to give a talk at Emerson College in East Sussex about “Trump and Transforming the American Shadow”. Here are the details:
“AN EVENING WITH CHRISTOPHER SCHAEFER: Trump and Transforming the American Shadow
Monday, July 2nd 8 pm. Emerson College, Forest Row, E. Sussex.
How can we understand the election of an unrepentant liar, braggart, corrupt businessman, and authoritarian personality to the Presidency of the United States and his domination of the global media since Nov. 2017? What are the possibilities of transforming American Politics and the American Shadow and creating a society and a politics worthy of the human being?”
Best wishes,
Jeremy
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How I wish I were there, Jeremy! Is there any way to tune in from Ohio? Do you know if he’s published anything on this? (I’ll check it out on line.) Can you critique the presentation for us?…Kathy
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I’ll ask Christopher if he’s got anything written down that I can send to you.
Best wishes,
Jeremy
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Woofles wrote: ‘I’m assuming that Bres Bo doesn’t know the Middle East that well, but for the resonance that his insult would have for anyone from Israel, google “jews apes pigs”’
I have already tried to explain the English use of the word ‘swine’ meaning ‘contemptible person’. I did not use the word ‘pig’ at all, and certainly not in connection with the word ‘Jew’ because it’s horrible to do so. Nor did I use the word ‘ape’ however much some contributors to this discussion ape each other in bending language to suit their prejudices, and are totally pig-headed when challenged.
But we’ve ended up as far from an Anthroposophical perspective as one could imagine, largely because of that wonderful Jewish skill of name-calling; remember Genesis 2:19 “and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof”.
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Herb wrote: “Considering all this and more, I therefore fail to understand why so many anthroposophists here come down on the side of Islam.”
I think that is a mistaken judgment. Well at least as an Anthroposophist here, I am not “on the side of Islam”; I don’t have any different feelings towards Islam, Judaism or any religion. However, I do have feelings towards people being oppressed, and the Gazans are oppressed, materially and psychologically by the Israeli state. Blaming Hamas is not a viable argument; it is Israel that blockades Gaza, not Hamas. It is Israel that destroys the water supplies, and so on.
Has anyone thought what might happen if the Israeli state let Gaza flourish materially – even as a prison – at least to the level of Israel itself?
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Well, I posted this, which has likely already gotten lost in the shuffle:
https://anthropopper.wordpress.com/2018/05/23/israel-king-claudius-and-the-massacre-in-gaza/#comment-5047
As such, it attempts to take in all accounts, even from the beginning, and then looks at what a ninety year old man must feel today in living in such an uncomfortable place; certainly uncomfortable by western “armchair” standards, which seem to know how to choose sides. I don’t think we have the right to do that at all. But, I do think that reasonable minds could see the futility of their own vested, egocentric, and self-serving ways, and attempt to come together in a peaceful settlement. Spiritual Science has a lot to say concerning what it would mean to broker the peace; and, especially in this day and age.
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Bres Bo,
Thanks for clarifying that if you had had the slightest inkling that it might have been heard that way in that context you would not have used.. I assumed it wasn’t intentional, but I appreciate knowing how utterly unintentional it was.
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I’ve been thinking a lot this week about Ottmar’s question about “problematic genes” in a country and how it might apply to Israel, and also to Herb’s repeated single-focused insistence on Muslim and Arab savagery, climaxed, with no sense of irony, with a passage from Winston Churchill.
I always knew that Irgun was a Jewish terrorist group, but I didn’t know until I started digging around now just how indiscriminate and large-scale their terrorism against Arabs was before WWII and after it was (they weren’t something that the older Israelis I knew—I haven’t been there for over 20 years—talked about much or with any friendliness). I also didn’t know that the Likud party, which didn’t work its way into power until the mid-70s, is their political descendant. And of course the Likud’s allies, the settlers, have engaged in terrorism, both large scale and small scale, on the West Bank. The last time I was in Israel was shortly after a settler killed 29 Arabs in the West Bank city of Hebron. He’s a hero to at least some settlers.
It makes the Gaza situation more intelligible. Which, again, isn’t an endorsement of one-directional finger pointing. I also didn’t know until now how much modern Arab anti-semitism stems from the Nazis. An awful lot going on under the surface there.
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I wrote a response to this which has not appeared. It was designed to acknowledge your concerns:
https://anthropopper.wordpress.com/2018/05/23/israel-king-claudius-and-the-massacre-in-gaza/#comment-5086
Now, with regard to Ottmar’s notion of “problematic genes”, which you seem to find so impressive, let us refer to this original post here:
https://anthropopper.wordpress.com/2018/05/23/israel-king-claudius-and-the-massacre-in-gaza/#comment-5004
So, what could be so impressive other than the utter materialism of it. Genes are just like atoms, they only serve a useful purpose in describing conflicts which don’t actually exists but people find useful for some reason. Maybe it constitutes history, and involves genes and atoms in a kind of summation.
Of course, there is always the human summation, which is a living entity, and wonders about such notion as “problematic genes”. Of course, it also wonders about the latest G-7 summit, and what that might mean.
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I can see where this latest discussion has reached a roadblock; the Israeli-Palestinian issue appears to have no future, other than the termination of lives in support of the want to have a mutual and peaceful settlement. Yet, this won’t happen soon. May I remind all that the Balfour Declaration of 1917 had the incentive that could have created the Jewish State at a time that would have allowed a peaceful coexistence between the Jews and the Palestinians. And yet, it was delayed for some thirty more years, and after the travesty of WWII.
Now, who’s to say that this wasn’t a kind of planned event out of the larger geopolitical aims of the twentieth century, and wherein the goals of a second world war entailed a kind of genocide of the Jewish population of Europe for the simple reason that they were there as the displaced (disapora) population that should have been in Palestine, but got lost somehow. We all know the story of the ten lost tribes of Israel, and how several deportations since the 28th generation of Abraham, c. 586 BC, Book of Daniel, indicated that the people of Israel were cast further into the European territories. And so it goes. This is the history.
Yet, here is what I want to say today, and this is important. Someone close to this blog wrote to me about the original Roman Empire, and how it might have reoccurred in the United States, and this can be certainly shown to be true.
For example, if we take the current G-7 summit, which is comparable to last year’s G-20 summit, when the Donald Trump bombast first began to be displayed to the European community, what can be shown?
“Trump is very outright in saying who rules the world, and why Europe is indebted to the United States. So, indeed, the double agenda, which has existed throughout the 20th century, is revealed in Trump. This pretty much confirms where the new roman empire resides. Yet, for those that oppose this regime, what will have to take place? I have also posed this question to Jeremy Smith on occasion. Do not the several European leaders need to make a statement concerning this current POTUS? I refer, of course, to the travesty of the G-7 summit just completed.
Now, what has just been witnessed by all? Here in the United States, and you might be surprised by this, the majority consider Trump to be mentally incompetent, and this is eroding by day. So, the leaders of Europe, that is, May, Macron, and Merkel, need to express in a kind of joint resolution that they feel that this current POTUS is incompetent to perform the duties of his office. This will serve to send the necessary message that the 25th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States be invoked.
But, I doubt these leaders will do anything other than commiserate over it, and scratch their collective heads, which they are doing right now!
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Jeremy, I think that your concerns here are worth recognizing when we consider that Israel has the full backing of the United States. And, of course, the Palestinian cause in maintaining their freedom in the so-called, “promised land”, has a long legacy in its own right. Yet, again we must go back to the Balfour Declaration of 1917, and why its principles were not effectuated after WWI.
Thus, instead of creating both a free state of the Jewish people, and also the Muslims in free coexistence, this never took place, and Britain continued to occupy the region until the end of WWII. As well, it was also governing India, as its colonial ruler, and making plans for its eventual independence.
Of course, you do see the problem here, don’t you? Nobody has the right to rule anybody, and yet they do. This is what causes problems when freedom is the uppermost objective and people see that for themselves.
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Trump acts like a government-critical prophet. Prophets are traditionally regarded as having a role in society that promotes change due to their messages and actions (wiki). Trump is in contact with Putin, worships his image and serves as his intermediary by delivering messages to other people (cf. Rev. 13 and 19).
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There is no evidence that Trump worships the image of Putin, or serves as his “intermediary by delivering messages”, although they are both ruling dictators, west and east. Rudolf Steiner once warned in his second private lecture to the Russian members, c. 5 June 1913, GA158, that a battle for supremacy would arise between Russia and America by the midpoint of the 20th century. And, this certainly did take place.
Real prophecy can be ascribed to someone like Isaiah, who came forth at the same time as the beginning of the Fourth Cultural Epoch, c 747 BC. He said something that is not only found to be the impetus for the entire Greek epoch, but can also be found in all four of the gospels. As such, he wrote in chapter 40 of the Book of Isaiah:
“I am a voice of one crying in the wilderness, ‘Make straight the way of the Lord,’ as Isaiah the prophet said.” John, 1:23
As it is written in Isaiah the prophet:
“Behold, I send My messenger ahead of You, Who will prepare Your way; The voice of one crying in the wilderness ‘Make ready the way of the Lord Make His paths straight.’” Mark, 1:2
As it is written in the book of the words of Isaiah the prophet, “The voice of one crying in the wilderness, ‘Make ready the way of the Lord, Make His paths straight. ‘Every ravine will be filled, And every mountain and hill will be brought low; The crooked will become straight, And the rough roads smooth; And all flesh will see the salvation of God.’” Luke, 3:4
For this is the one referred to by Isaiah the prophet when he said “The voice of one crying in the wilderness ‘Make ready the way of the Lord Make His paths straight!’” Matthew, 3:3
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„Genes“
I was talking in a metaphorical way about the „genes“ of the state of Israel before.
There are some aspects in the „genes“ Israel, that make it unique in the world.
The Jews see themselves as a genealogical group, as a family if you like. So Jews often say that even if a Jew takes up another religion, he or she remains a Jew.
There are 2 nationality acts, le droit du sol and the droit du sang (in French, I only know the German and French terms), in English about: the birthright of the territory where you are born and the birthright of the blood or parents. You are a French or US American citizen, when you were born on their territory or soil, however you are a German when one of your parents is German. You can get an Israeli passport when your mother is Jewish.
There wasnt a Jewish state for 19 hundred years, they were in the diaspora for such a long time and in spite of it they retained their identity, because it was impossible to mingle with the people they lived with. (It was forbidden from the Jewish side and most often not wanted from the people where they lived.)
Now as there is a Jewish state not only the rejection but also the criticism of the Jewish state is intrinsically regarded as anti-semitic; criticizing the state of Israel was called anti-semitism 2.0.
Ottmar
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I think the descriptive idea of “genes” goes far beyond any metaphorical meaning. Jeremy’s essay had said:
“And yet Jews are the genetic brothers and sisters of Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese, and they all share a common genetic lineage that stretches back thousands of years. That is why this massacre and maiming of Palestinians in May 2018 by the Israeli Defence Force reminds me ineluctably of King Claudius in Shakespeare’s Hamlet.”
In other words, genetic lineage goes back to the Atlantean epoch itself, and wherein a core sub-race, the fifth, developed in the area that now encompasses modern day Ireland. These were the Primal Semites, and they were very much despised by the rest of the Altantean’s, who held close to their clairvoyant faculty, whilst these seeming stragglers had come down, so to speak, in order to feel the need to think about a rational and sensible world.
This is gone over in the earlier blog post here of January 2018, and wherein a particularly significant lecture is cited from GA109. This is the lecture from 7 March 1909, and wherein it is described how despised these early “semites” were to the more evolved other sub-races, and yet, it was this sub-race, the fifth, that was initiated into central Asia for an important purpose.
And so, I suspect that when “genes” are invoked as an issue, either metaphorically, or real, it truly comes down to spiritual-scientific knowledge, and how we all can be seen as coming from a common source in this semitic origin.
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But: “The rounded shape of the front of the brow, the formation of the part of the brain on which thought depends, first appears with the population of the original Semites, who were in no way similar to the present Semitic population.” (GA0093a/19051105). Cf. GA0054/19051109
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Ton wrote:
But: “The rounded shape of the front of the brow, the formation of the part of the brain on which thought depends, first appears with the population of the original Semites, who were in no way similar to the present Semitic population.” (GA0093a/19051105). Cf. GA0054/19051109
Well, don’t you think that has to do with the original destiny of the Primal Semites as the first forerunners of the faculty of thinking? Then, many centuries later, Abram was initiated at age 75, in order to bring forth the Hebrew Cultural Stream, which was a similar act of initiating this faculty into the etheric body of Abram; ref. Genesis 14, GA123 [Gospel of Matthew].
So, indeed, it can be shown that the “rounded shape of the front of the brow”, has migrated to us European-Americans, who have received the so-called, “Gabriel Faculty”, which constitutes abstract thinking in the protruding frontal lobe since the 19th century. This is why all knowledge today is so superficial, and why materialism seemingly has no end.
The original destiny of the Hebrew Cultural Stream was to bring the faculty of thinking into a kind of complete denouement of measure, weight, and number, and all the gray that goes with that kind of completion. And yet, as fate would have it, they came as a cultural entity into the Egyptian region, which had as its own destiny the formation of the faculty of Imagination. This is how the Hebrews first came under the influence of the so-called, “graven image”, and how they became the captives for 400 hundred years to the Egyptians as slaves. Steiner speaks in great detail about this in GA117.
Thus, the original destiny of the Hebrews had to be transferred to the Fourth Cultural Epoch, and why the Trojan War is fought in order to decide who will lead the cause in bringing deductive reasoning into the world. This was won by the Greeks, and it is not without importance that it was won because of the clever stratagem of Odysseus, who had the idea of giving a so-called ‘gift horse’ to the Trojans. Then, of course, the Greek epoch passed into the Roman epoch, where inductive reasoning arose. Yet, it was progression.
So, I suspect that when Steiner spoke in 1905 about how the original semitic influence has nothing to do with today’s semitic population it has to do with what we are seeing today. And so, what would that mean?
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Similarities and Opposites
Regarded with a phenomenological eye it is interesting to see the similarities and opposites of the Jews and Germans.
Both have the birthright of blood. The Jews had (still have?) the aliyah (the returning home to the fatherland) and Hitler gave out the motto „Heim ins Reich“, all you German descendents in the Baltic states, in Russia, Romania and elswhere, come back to the German home state. So there is Hitler s infamous motto „Blut und Boden“, in English blood and soil/territory and the Jewish ideas of blood and soil. (In no way I want to say Hitler s crimes and cruelty is similar to what you find in Israel.) Today every Jew has a right to live in Israel, today everybody who had German ancestors can ask for German citizenship. (Many British nationals, living in Germany today, ask for a German passport, which gives the right to live in EU countries. There are always practical, personal sides in these abstract ideas.)
Both, the Jews and the Germans have given more to the world (in literature, music, art, philosophy, religion, science etc.) than one would normally expect from a people of that size.
And opposites between Germans and Jews? The Jews cling to their bloodline and their special identity like no other people in the world. The Germans lose their identity easier and faster than any other people. (This can be shown from many sides, but I dont think this will be questioned here.) The Jewish part/origin in world culture is well known, the German part/origin is more often forgotten or obscured.
I didnt want to talk about today s politics nor about the occult side of it all. Jesaiah Ben Aharon wrote about it from an esoteric and anthroposophic point of view; I think he hasnt been mentioned here yet.
Ottmar
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Jesaiah Ben Aharon was discussed back in August 2017 here:
https://anthropopper.wordpress.com/2017/08/
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Steve, it’s absurd to call Trump a dictator (of a free society), while Putin is the long-time leader of a ‘guided democracy’ (but in fact a kleptocracy). Trump admires Putin, pseudo-criticizes him, but always acts in favour of Putin’s multipolar policies.
The quote is from Deutero-Isaiah (possibly king Hezekiah after his illness):
“The Deutero-Isaian part of the book describes how God will make Jerusalem the centre of his worldwide rule through a royal saviour (a messiah) who will destroy her oppressor (Babylon); this messiah is the Persian king Cyrus the Great, who is merely the agent who brings about Yahweh’s kingship. Isaiah speaks out against corrupt leaders and for the disadvantaged, and roots righteousness in God’s holiness rather than in Israel’s covenant.” (wiki)
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Of course, how can a ‘guided democracy’ actually be based on theft? How can a ‘free society’ tolerate a dictator whose whole manner of style and ability is both obsolete and incompetent?
——
And He came to Nazareth, where He had been brought up; and as was His custom, He entered the synagogue on the Sabbath, and stood up to read. And the book of the prophet Isaiah was handed to Him. And He opened the book and found the place where it was written,
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me, Because He anointed Me to preach the gospel to the poor. He has sent Me to proclaim release to the captives, And recovery of sight to the blind, To set free those who are oppressed, To proclaim the favorable year of the Lord.” [Ref. Isaiah, chapter 61].
And He closed the book, gave it back to the attendant and sat down; and the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on Him. And He began to say to them, “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”
—Gospel of Luke, 4:16-21
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Trito-Isaiah was a real prophet; Trump rather a pseudoprophet, who is very competent in destroying western liberal values, which Putin’s regime is practising since the start of the new millennium.
Cf. https://carnegieeurope.eu/strategiceurope/76547
A guided democracy is a formally democratic government that functions as a de facto autocracy, like the RF. In a free society there is freedom of trade, freedom of speech, freedom of religion and a separation of powers, absent in the RF.
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Trump is no pseudo-prophet; much more likely, a corrupt businessman who somehow got elected POTUS in order to wreak havoc on the world. Now, Putin is a regime builder, and why not, after the efforts to dismantle the USSR, which was orchestrated by the USA back in Reagan’s second term, c. 1985-1988. This is when Mikhail Gorbachev became the traitor of Russia, and then defected to the west in 1992. That is why George Bush had to win the election of 1988 in order to complete the deal. Everyone here wanted the Democratic nominee, Michael Dukakis, to win because he was very much a kind of person struck in the mold of JFK. He was even the Governor of Massachusetts at the time. This is also when the issue of “vote-scam” began to come forth. Exit polls indicated that Dukakis had won the election, and yet George Bush was able to succeed Reagan in order to complete the deal with ‘Gorby’, who then defected to the U.S. As well, Bush took time to start the first Gulf War, c. 1991-1992.
So, I hope you do get the idea of how the Book of Isaiah covers much time from when its prophet first arose at the outset of the Greek epoch, c. 747 BC, and then proceeded in order to instigate the goals of “making straight the way of the Lord”. Aristotle is a good example of someone committed to the Book of Isaiah. Also, Jesus of Nazareth, who spoke from chapter 61 when he met his folk after Christ had entered into him, ref. Luke 4.
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Trump’s ‘America first’ divides the western world, like Putin’s autocratic Russia does. Pseudo-prophet is the Greek word for the destructive false prophet in Revelation 19: the second beast or Sorat, who performs on behalf of the first beast, which was wounded and healed.
Trump in his praise and actions seems to be dependent upon Putin (former head of the KGB), who perhaps ‘has something’ on him and somehow got him elected President.
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Trump, the pseudo-prophet, as “the second beast or Sorat, who performs on behalf of the first beast, which was wounded and healed” (Revelations) really does resonate with me, Ton. I really can’t agree with you more on that, or a secret diplomacy relationship with Putin even before the election of 2016!
One of the really important blog posts here was back in August 2017, on “Don’t be Evil”, https://anthropopper.wordpress.com/2017/08/
Twice, I felt the need to post a diagram of the east-to-west migration of Soradt, which would eventually migrate to the American continent with the colonization program of western Europe into the so-called “New World”. This had the effect of bringing about the mass genocide/extinction of the original population of America, who were the descendants of the third sub-race of Atlantis, i.e, the Toltecs. This can even be shown to be a proof that there was an Atlantis for those scholars who say it is merely a myth out of kooky anthro-science 😉
https://anthropopper.wordpress.com/2017/08/21/dont-be-evil/#comment-3656
https://anthropopper.wordpress.com/2017/08/21/dont-be-evil/#comment-3736
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Arabism constituted a ‘two-pronged fork around Europe’ (GA0235/19240316), ‘Arabism embraced Europe in its fold’ (GA0316/19240424). Via Palestine and Constantinople, the Turkish-Mongolian-Tatarian peoples also played their (purely spiritual) role in Eastern-Europe and Russia (GA0216/19221001), the other prong.
“The Turks brought from their original residences no sense of nature with them, but an immense sense of a spiritual God, a god one can only express in thoughts, that you can’t behold anywhere. And this particular way to look at their God now passed over to Islam, to Mohammedanism.”
(From Beetroot to Buddhism, p.95 f., google ce0GELWHI5sC)
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Nobody said anything about Arabism not continuing to be the menace to Europe. Just look at today. But, when we consider that what arose out of the Academy of Gondhi-shapur in 666 AD, and then migrated across to the point of North Africa, well…, it can be shown that Sorath had a second incarnation in France, c. 1332. Here is the diagram again:
Maybe you want to speculate where the third incarnation took place, but I would say it occurred where the ahrimanic influence is most pronounced, and where the Rocky Mountains reside. This fact does not cancel out any prevailing indication, in which arabism exists to permeate European society and culture. Of course, when it is recognized and duly opposed, then something can take place within the European theater, although likely with violence and bloodshed.
The world today is cast with a great shroud which it does not understand. Maybe that is why spiritual science exists as a cultural imperative in our time.
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These are most important quotes, Ton. I think Rudolf Steiner also used the term „the two tips of the moon crescent“ that point to Europe, one tip from the Balkans, the other from the Maghreb to the Iberian peninsula and that this later attack went much further than Tour and Poitiers and he prophesied that this will soon become visible.
For me it is also important to see the truth of these things in real life, in history.
The eastern part of the moon crescent: Constantinople, Belgrade and the sieges of Vienna in 1529, 1532, 1606 and 1683. (Note the connection between the defence of Vienna and the loss of the German Alsace to France, which is covered by a taboo.) And today Erdogan told „his“ Turks in Central Europe to have at least 3 children, better more so that in the future they can take over heartland Europe. (He really said so but another taboo forbids to keep this in the minds of the general public.)
The western crescent attack is seen mainly in France, where there is a large community from Maroc and Algeria and where French colonialism played a role. Spain had the reconquista and later a christianism hard as rock, but now more and more immigrants come from Maroc.
It might be interesting to differentiate between these 2 „attacks“. The Turks are more violent and aggressive physically. The religious clergy and many artists from Maroc are more „occult“ than the Turks.
And we can ask ourselves what the world, what Europe and the attack of the ‘two-pronged fork around Europe’ would look like today if Hitler and WWII had not happened. I my view Hitler, the unleashing of the beast and WWII have accelerated the course of history by many centuries.
Ottmar
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