A Response to a Post Blaming Israel for the Iraq Debacle

Background: The original post was by a person arguing that Bus was motivated by oil, esp, by the big companies. Then, there was a counter post claiming that Bush was motivated by suport for Israel. The second poster went on to accuse Israel of being corrupt, illegal, and so on.

I agree that Bush, while naive, illiterate, ill informed, and ill advised id not simply a tool of the big oil companies. I suspect, moreover, that those companies would have been all to happy with a rapprochement with Saddam rather than his deposition.

BUT, you go to an equally absurd extreme by blaming this disaster on us ... the Jews or Zionists .. whatever term you want to use.

First, calling Israel names is bigoted. Israel is a small country, in a tough place, trying hard to survive. Of course it deserves criticism, but calling it criminal, corrupt, etc is just nuts .. espe. when you look at the countries it stands against. If you can find a country more criminal, more corrupt, then Syria I will give you three points but it would take a lot to find good things to say about Saudi Arabia. So, you are correct, the interests of big oil and the interests of Israel do NOT overlap .. other perhaps than in the befuddled mind of our dear leader.

As a Jew, I am frightened of people like you. Israel is a refuge for us, one possible answer to the two millenia of of oppression by Christian and Islamic societies. If it fails, I suspect we will die as a people, Hitler, Torquemad, Pious IX, the KKK, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, the Iranian President, all these bigots will win and 3000 years of a very special history will have been destroyed.

I say this while also feeling that we have real responsibility for Bush's screw up. The Neocons may have a majority of Jews and certainly we are prominent in the top ranks of those who made this horrid decision.

The challenge to Jewish survival is not just from Islam but from our choices of allies. Israel, for example, made the horrid choice of siding with the apartheid regime of S. Africa. Only a nation faced with obliteration would ever make such a choice and it has yet to be learned whether the reward for that alliance,some say this was the source of Israel's atomic bomb, was worth it. Now e .. or our leaders .. chose to ally themselves with the Bushies .. a group of naive believers in the Chrsitian good of the world. They, the Bushies, believe that their fight is so good, so inevitable that all advice form "experts," military or political could be ignored. They even sent in missionaries with the invading force! We chose to support Bush and that may be a fatal error.

All this said, the challenge is not just to OUR survival. Much of what is said about the danger os Islamo-fascism is quite real. Saudi Arabia is like an overgrown tomato, already rotting. The potential evil of a Wahaabi regime that is more extreme than Iran's Shia regime is very real. Atomic bombs, Shariay, and oil .. are a dangerous mix for the whole world.

IMO, there is only one viable answer. The West/democratic part of the world needs to replace the US as a cop with some new, bigger alliance. Europe, the US, India, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Australia and part sof South America have a great deal of self interest in working with China and even the former Soviet Union in creating a ... new world order. Bush could have led such a movement post 9/11. He could have taken time, pursued confinement vs. invasion as alternatives and built the allinace needed to achieve pacification if invasion were the outcome. he did not do that. he wasted his presidency, huge amount of American wealth, and the possible piece of the world in pursuit of a naive, amateurish view of the world.

Finally, and this is the hardest part, I am NOT convinced Israel can now survive. Our alliance with the Christian right may have doomed Israel. There is, IMO, one barely possible alternative. We .. the Jews ... have a natural affinity for the Muslims. In a choose up between Islam and Christianity, the ease of the true strict monotheisms being allies is clear and historic. We also have another allie. Our times of great success in the world, post exile, have included two enlightenments .. Andalusia and later Europe. While Christianity treated us horrible, the enlightenment .. a child of Christinaity .. has been the time of great growth in our culture.
Islam may be, I emphasize maybe, finally in a time where it can enter the enlightenment. A Muslim enlightenment would be different than Europe's but it might be something we and our semitic brothers could join in together.

Call it a dream.
--
Stephen M Schwartz
SeattleJew.blogspot.com

Election 2006

Nuff said.

Of Burkhas and Pastors

I ran into trouble this morning after I tried to read more about the outing of Ted Haggard, a Bush confidant and evangelical gay bating pastor. Haggard scares me because he is part of a community of right wing evangelicals that envelope the US Air Force Academy at Colorado Springs. The same Air Force Academy that last year admitted to its officers' efforts to indoctrinate Jews into Jesus worship.

The problem? Google gave me too many hits. I began coming upon other news stories about fundamentalists in trouble over sex. I began to wonder, are fundamentalist Christtians obsessed with sex? Then I ran into this post from the personal blog of Marc Driscoll, a fundamentalist Christian pastor in Seattle:

....I started the church ten years ago when I was twenty-five years of age. Thankfully, I was married to a beautiful woman. I met my lovely wife Grace when we were seventeen, married her at twenty-one, and by God’s grace have been faithful to her in every way since the day we met. I have, however, seen some very overt opportunities for sin. On one occasion I actually had a young woman put a note into my shirt pocket while I was serving communion with my wife, asking me to have dinner, a massage, and sex with her. On another occasion a young woman emailed me a photo of herself topless and wanted to know if I liked her body. Thankfully, that email was intercepted by an assistant and never got to me.

....I would like to share some practical suggestions for fellow Christian leaders, especially young men:

• Most pastors I know do not have satisfying, free, sexual conversations and liberties with their wives. .... It is not uncommon to meet pastors’ wives who really let themselves go; they sometimes feel that because their husband is a pastor, he is therefore trapped into fidelity, which gives them cause for laziness. A wife who lets herself go and is not sexually available to her husband in the ways that the Song of Songs is so frank about is not responsible for her husband’s sin, but she may not be helping him either.
  

• Every pastor needs a pastor. Too often the pastor is seen as a sort of little God and his wife as some glorified First Lady. Every pastor needs a pastor with whom he can regularly have accountability and the confession of sin. Every pastor’s wife also needs a godly woman chosen for her maturity and trustworthiness.
• ... There is no reason a pastor should be sitting alone at the church at odd hours (e.g., early morning and late evening) to study when anyone can drop in for any reason and have access to him. .......Some years ago I found that lonely people, some of them hurting single moms wanting a strong man to speak into their life, would show up to hang out and catch time with me. It was shortly thereafter that I brought my books home and purchased a laptop and cell phone so that I was not tied to the church office.
• (if) a flirtatious woman shows up to a Bible study at the pastor’s home, the pastor and his family have the right to request that they never return.
• ..... Too often the pastor’s assistant is a woman who, if not sexually involved, becomes too emotionally involved with the pastor as a sort of emotional and practical second wife. I have been blessed with a trustworthy heterosexual male assistant who can travel with me, meet with me, etc., without the fear of any temptations ........
• Pastors must speak freely and frankly with their wives about their temptations. Without this there really can be no walking in the light and sin always grows in darkness.
• Pastors must not travel alone; the anonymity and fatigue of the road is too great a temptation for many men.
  

In conclusion, I say none of this as moralism.

The reader can judge for themselves but for me, this sounds like the stuff of a very serious mental illness. Mr. Driscoll sounds really obsessed. Is he also frightened of men? I wonder if this sort of fear motivates men in Saudi Arabia to enforce the burkha? And how does such thinking effect sex itself? After a day in the company of males and burkha-ed females, does the Saudi Prince come home to perfumed flesh?

I am personally sexually conservative, I believe that heterosexual sex is normative and see no reason to have a public debate about other forms of play in bed. To me, most fo this is a private affair. But, how can the same people who consider homosexuality a sin worthy of electing G. Bush as President and NOT see the illness implicit in Marc Driscoll's writings?

Impersonating Harold Ford

Last night I watched Harold Ford on Bill Maher. Or ... I watched someone who at times looked like Harold Ford. The actor worked hard at his Tennessee accent and at expressing support for prayer n the schools and totin guns as a civil right. He explained how his business cards carry the 10 commnadments on their backsides, to remind Mr. Ford of such important moral issues as not having any God but your own God. Hmmm ... must be the commandments Moses receives on a trip to Tennessee.


I feel bad. I really admire Mr. Ford and hope he will be elected. But the act was dreadful. This can not be the same articulate, well thought out young congressman I have watched parry the cable heads for the last four years. True, stripped of the weird accent and the Suthern patois, the underlying ideas were solid .. all Tennesseeans believe Their kids have a right to go to school, healthcare should be guaranteed to the kids of the poor and the rich, and more. I have tasted this man's spirit in his speeches to the Demo. Convention and know .. as much as nay of us can in this era of media deception, that MY Ford is the real one.