You are always relentlessly pointing out when Jews are being harmed, murdered or denigrated by others. Perhaps you view that as a reason for their being self-protective and needing a land that they can just about exclusively call their own — Israel.
One of the differences, I perhaps wrongly assume, that exists between you and me is that despite that I have Jewish relatives and half Jewish ones (including my own daughter), as well as have had many very close Jewish friends and co-workers or classmates throughout my life, I am concerned about all bigotry equally. This means that I absolutely do not tolerate any disavowal when directed toward Muslims, Africans, Christians, Asians or others while you, instead, seem to primarily focus on hatred and “othering” of the Jews.
Moreover and since you identify with them ideologically and primarily, you don’t even bring up much at all the other individuals and groups that, also, get harmed … such as the Indian Sikh wearing a turban in California on the day after 9/11 who was beaten and kicked to death in a public location as he was perceived as being a a Muslim, the Muslim and aboriginally native children who are raped and murdered … or just plain slowly killed by multiple plunged knives by male adults of another religion and by other means in India, the Quakerly Palestinian college students who were shot in VT while on Thanksgiving college break of which two attend American Quakerly colleges and all three had attended a Friends school (as had my siblings and me) since aged six, and others — people of color like John Lewis— got their sculls cracked apart like an egg shells, etc., etc.
(He was fortunate relatively speaking since unlike M. L. King, Jr. and ever so many others throughout history who tried to change the system from within, he wasn’t murdered or tortured for his “sin” of being different skin color-wise, religiously, ethnically, culturally or otherwise labeled as a pariah — a despised and loathed, strongly hated vermin, who desperately needs a beating or, worse, total eradication.
I, myself, simply don’t favor any group such as Jews over others, although I particularly do especially admire my friends who have chosen to lay their lives literally on the line to support outsiders like my American Catholic Worker friend, Scott, who protected Muslim Bosnians from being murdered by Christian Serbs holding machine guns pointed toward his chest as he shielded the would-be victims and other friends of mine such as Andy Goodman who, unlike fortunate Scott, was tortured to death for his choice to try to serve the maligned and downtrodden African-American “othered”. (Andy and his companions were murdered as discussed here: Riding For Freedom| Countercurrents.)
In the end, I still consider you a friend of mine even though your sense of overall protectiveness toward life seems greatly curtailed to me since you seem primarily concerned with supporting Israel and the wrongfully castigated Jews rather than being more inclusive to embrace others like a little Muslim child such as six year old Hind and the dedicated EMT’s who laid their own lives on the line to try to save her after she’d witnessed her uncle and cousins get slaughtered. ( She, herself, eventually got killed by a U.S. made bomb as the evidence definitively showed.)
In the end, I bear no animosity or disgust for people who only support a limited group such as just Jews OR only Palestinians, who they see as being like themselves and with whom they identify. I guess, then, that the main difference between them and me is probably that I feel oneness with a broader range of people and life in general.
It would seem that I’m accepting of them all and more of the ones deemed as “others”, such as a person on death row who I supported in a Friends committee [About The Religious Society of Friends (Quakers)] when as the Peace and Social Concerns Clerk for a spell at a Quaker Meeting. After all, isn’t the main goal to basically try to uplift and support life overall rather than to denounce, denigrate and destroy? Is it not to foster something more inclusive beyond discord, discrimination and factionalism? I would assuredly hope so!
After all, this is the lesson that a large portion of humanity is taught. It is the same message across the whole world and has been taught for countless centuries according to any religion’s main covenants and atheistic humanists.
Brahmanism: This is the sum of duty: Do naught unto others which would cause you pain if done to you.: Mahabharata 5:1517
Christianity: All things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them.: Matthew 7:12
Islam: No one of you is a believer until he desires for his brother what which he desires for himself. Sunnah
Buddhism: Hurt not others in ways that you yourself would find hurtful.: Udana Varga 5:18
Judaism: What is hateful to you, do not to your fellowmen. That is the entire Law; all the rest is commentary.: Talmud, Shabbat 31:a
Confucianism: Surely it is the maxim of loving-kindness: Do not unto others that you would not have them do unto you.: Analects 15:23
Taoism: Regard your neighbor’s gain as your own gain, and your neighbor’s loss as your own loss.: T’ai Shag Kan Ying P’ien
Zoroastrianism: That nature alone is good which refrains from doing unto another whatsoever is not good: for itself. : Dadistan-i-dinik 94:5
Sally Dugman writes from MA, USA.
