Multiculturalism is a filthy word in their lexicon. Feminism is just as bad. Gays merit both contempt and physical punishment. Violence toward minorities has always been their trademark, and for decades they’ve attacked liberals, secularists, and those who do not share their Middle Ages mentality.
No, I’m not talking about the Taliban. I’m not even talking about Anders Breivik and his Knights Templar revivalists (who pathetically are a hundred years behind the KKK), or the Tea Party racists who want to bring back Jim Crow, although the description is certainly apt for any of these groups.
I’m talking about their cousins, the religious Right in Israel, particularly the Kahanists, who for years have been running amok with few or no consequences and who are now the model for violent extremists like Breivik and multiculturalism-haters in the Tea Party or rabid Zionists in the U.S. like Joe Kaufman. As incomprehensible as it seems to me for Jews to be involved in violent, hate-soaked, religion-perverting nationalism, it is more shocking that these particular fellow Jews (if indeed we share any values) are the model to which the rest of the haters aspire.
Last year a guidebook called “Torat HaMalech” was published in Israel. The subtitle of this book could easily have been “Who Would Moses Slay?” because it was nothing more than a 230-page justification for murdering non-Jews. If there had not been such an uproar, a second printing could easily have been accompanied by a forward by one of the many Israeli Islamophobes who inspired Anders Breivik.
Why do Jewish brownshirts and thugs like Baruch Marzel, a “former” Kahanist who had a little love-fest last month with Glen Beck at the Knesset, operate so freely in Israel and in the Occupied Territories and in the Orthodox communities of the United States? Because, as the U.S. State Department is fond of saying of the American relationship with Israel, there is hardly any “daylight” between them and the government. Israel’s Likudnik policies are fully congruent with the extremist right. Israel is slowly being ethnically cleansed of Arabs, both in the West Bank and the Galilee, and even at the cost of importing hundreds of thousands of non-Jewish Russians. As the Mizrachim might agree grudgingly, It’s never been about religion. It’s always been about race and culture, particularly the domination of Ashkenizi culture. And as always, religion is just a tree the nativists hide behind. Even “liberal” and “secular” Jews who have moved into the West Bank because of economic inducements prefer not to think too much about how they got their cheap housing. For them it’s not about religion either. When it comes right down to it, there’s never been enough “daylight” between the Left and Right in Israel. And that’s the triumph and corrupting influence of nationalism.
Living in Israel today is like living in Anders Breivik’s Norwegian Utopia of 2083, where Muslims are being removed by state institutions and racial and cultural “purity” is well on track to being restored by a brutal form of nationalism. Israel’s twisted form of Revisionist Zionism has now become not merely the paradigm for European Christian nationalism but their How-To manual. But if by chance Breivik’s dreams come true, it won’t be a win for religion. And Europeans may not turn out to like all that concertina wire and concrete.
So when I hear Jews or Christians utter the phrase, “Judeo-Christian values,” I wince because a perverted and violent form of religious-themed nationalism is what it is has really come to mean.
Just another meaningless, cynical phrase falling from hate-filled, profanity-laced lips.
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