So the relevance of apocalyptic passages is close to zero.
Legolas Send a noteboard - 07/06/2010 11:55:05 PM
It's not like a holy writing becomes illegitimate just by being apocalyptic. It's either accepted or it's not. The deeper question is why such passages would be written in the first place. Of course, the promise to give Abrahams descendants Canaan is no more unique to Judaism than God telling Abraham to sacrifice his son to see if he trusts God to come through for him. There's a BIT more to the Palestinian/Israeli conflict than just kicking people off their dads land, though that certainly plays a role.
Not illegitimate, irrelevant. It's very hard to take Revelations seriously, and the parts about the "shoes made of hair" and "faces like shields" and all that makes the Muslim apocalyptic predictions almost as silly.
It's undeniable that large amounts of Muslims now are anti-semitic and claim religious reasons for that, including that verse, and they completely ignore the apocalyptic aspect of it, or the verse right next to it saying they'll wage war on the Turks. And obviously they're not going to change that just because I say so, or Tom says so. But at the very least we can keep pointing out that it's fake, it's propaganda.
Oh, I realize all of that, but the stories of conflict between Jew and Arab didn't happen in a vacuum. They may not have been universally accepted (and after the Exile that's more likely than not, since the Jews were scattered to the four winds on at least three separate occasions) but there's SOME basis there even if it was just some Jewish guy who really hated Arabs and wrote nasty things about them to disseminate to his fellow Jews.
The point is that at the time the Israeli-Palestinian conflict originated - to a certain extent in the first decades of the previous century, and full-blown in the twenties - there was no real reason why Jews and Arabs should hate each other. And if there wasn't then, there's no reason why there should be now, not anything other than the Israeli-Palestinian conflict itself. Both religions have enough ambiguous or interpretation-dependent material in their religious books that they could've produced propaganda of a similar nature against various other nations or ethnicities if the need arose.
Jacqueline Rose on the Dreyfus affair and related problems, in the LRB
06/06/2010 11:28:14 AM
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*remains amused at the suggestion of the Dreyfus Affairs "pertinence" to "current" events*
06/06/2010 05:14:23 PM
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I agree in part and (strongly) disagree in part.
06/06/2010 05:40:26 PM
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"If it's an eternal struggle, how could there ever be a solution or a peace?"
06/06/2010 06:20:39 PM
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Purim may or may not refer to a historic event. Even if it does, Haman was not likely an Arab.
07/06/2010 12:00:05 AM
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I second your main point.
07/06/2010 12:09:42 AM
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I don't discount that there is Arab blood in many or even most "Arabs".
07/06/2010 12:18:32 AM
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The holiday is centuries old and real, regardless.
07/06/2010 12:28:59 AM
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You're still missing the major point here.
07/06/2010 12:44:08 AM
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That seems a rather limited view of history.
07/06/2010 01:10:11 AM
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I (coincidentally) stumbled across those infamous hadith passages about Jews the other day.
07/06/2010 09:41:39 AM
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So?
07/06/2010 10:50:49 PM
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So the relevance of apocalyptic passages is close to zero.
07/06/2010 11:55:05 PM
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are you claiming that people would pull some things out of holy text and ignore the rest?
08/06/2010 12:16:41 PM
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well, for me this just proves why we are not supposed to live among non-Jews
06/06/2010 11:39:45 PM
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couldn't get past the part where anyone who opposes Obama is a racist *NM*
08/06/2010 01:40:07 AM
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You hallucinated? *NM*
08/06/2010 08:39:37 AM
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No, that would've been one of the places where she should've shut up. *NM*
08/06/2010 08:58:11 AM
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No
08/06/2010 09:08:04 AM
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I think he's not talking about that bit, but about the very first paragraph.
08/06/2010 09:30:21 AM
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If there was more I didn't get far enough to hear it
08/06/2010 12:09:47 PM
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That's the problem with the speech - the large majority of what she had to say was worthwhile.
08/06/2010 01:15:39 PM
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