[ShepherdsDog]

hey be nice....they prefer the term gaming enthusiasts. I'm just like Molly Ringworm....Pretty in Pink.

[Psudo]

ShepherdsDog wrote:

Judaism is an ethnicity? Again, learn to swim before you jump into the pool. And that search engine you have on your magic box that brings you porn...it's for mre than finding the newest lady boy pictures. Try entering terms like 'nationality' and 'citizenship' and you might be surprised...confused, baffled and befuddled surely, but surprised too. Go beyond your Joo$ are evil preconceptions.

I don't agree with andyt on Israel (or much of anything) but this is a terrible response. There are more insults than anything else, and the only semi-point is "Go research." That's still not a rational argument.

There is an ethnic aspect to Judaism, and a religious aspect, and a ethos/cultural aspect. But the ethnic aspect has legal relevance both to Israeli national law and to religious law. They keep track of it and it matters to them. Were you really doubting that?

[ShepherdsDog]

I'm sorry, you seem to have confused m with someone who cares.

[andyt]

Psudo wrote:

I don't agree with andyt on Israel (or much of anything) but this is a terrible response. There are more insults than anything else, and the only semi-point is "Go research." That's still not a rational argument.

There is an ethnic aspect to Judaism, and a religious aspect, and a ethos/cultural aspect. But the ethnic aspect has legal relevance both to Israeli national law and to religious law. They keep track of it and it matters to them. Were you really doubting that?

What is it you disagree with? Before Shep got involved, I was trying to make the point that Israel is caught in a dilemma between being a full democracy and being a Jewish state, which I see as incompatible in the long term. Is that what you disagree with?

[andyt]

Quote:

It is not only Palestinians who have problems with the "Jewish state" formulation. Secular Israelis believe that the Orthodox rabbinate controls way too much of their lives. In Jerusalem the ultra-Orthodox are actually demanding (and may get) segregated public buses, i.e., separate buses for men and women. A desperately needed new parking lot recently opened only to have the religious authorities succeed in getting it closed on Saturday. The food police can shut down restaurants or shops that don't observe religious dietary laws (woe to the shopkeeper who has bread on his shelves during Passover). Not to mention the stranglehold the Orthodox rabbinate has over marriage, divorce, and citizenship.

Americans would never tolerate this. In fact, because we have a constitution and a First Amendment, even the most fervent Christian fundamentalist would not dream of demanding the kind of restrictions routinely imposed on all Israelis.

It is easy to imagine how formal recognition of Israel as a "Jewish state" rather than as the "State of Israel" could be used to make life even more difficult for the secular majority of Israelis.

http://www.israelpolicyforum.org/commen ... wish-state

Quote:

Leading Israeli intellectuals have, in the last fifteen years, been increasingly insistent that Herzl’s small book Der Judenstaat (1896)—traditionally known in English by the title The Jewish State—was not intended to inspire the establishment of anything like a “Jewish state.” Instead, it is claimed, Herzl has been misunderstood. What he really meant was to give his book the name The State of the Jews—a term intended to suggest a state with a Jewish majority, but which would otherwise not have any particularly “Jewish” characteristics...


Former Education Minister and constitutional scholar Amnon Rubinstein, now Chairman of the Knesset Law and Constitution Committee:
Thus the Jews’ own state would... be, as Herzl entitled his famous booklet Der Judenstaat, a state of the Jews, hardly a Jewish state.2
Former Education Minister and civil rights leader Shulamit Aloni:
I do not accept the idea of a “Jewish state.” It is a “state of the Jews,” to be exact. Herzl wrote a book called The State of the Jews.3
Hebrew University historian and chairman of a key Education Ministry committee on history textbooks, Moshe Zimmermann:
In Israel... the Herzlian concept of a “state of the Jews” is developing in the direction of a blatantly ethnocentric “Jewish state”....4
The novelist Amos Oz:
Herzl’s book was called The State of the Jews and not The Jewish State: A state cannot be Jewish, any more than a chair or a bus can be Jewish....5


As Bar-On explains, the term “Jewish state” is being rejected by leading Israeli intellectuals and public figures due to a growing ideological discomfort with the normative implications of a state that is “Jewish” in its essential purpose. The term “state of the Jews,” on the other hand, is descriptive, relating almost exclusively to the fact that Israel is “a state in which Jews are a majority.”

http://www.azure.org.il/article.php?id=288

Quote:

The organizations on the left that petitioned the Supreme Court to overturn the law, based on liberal conceptions of free speech, did the right thing, and every democrat must hope that the justices will rescue us from the terrible law cooked up by a racist government. But we must not allow the important struggle for free speech to blind us to the fact that the struggle is actually a more fundamental one: between Jewish and democratic - the Jewish option, in its racist, colonial Zionist version, versus democracy and equality for all the country’s residents and refugees who choose to live here.

http://mondoweiss.net/about-mondoweiss

[Thanos]

ShepherdsDog wrote:

hey be nice....they prefer the term gaming enthusiasts. I'm just like Molly Ringworm....Pretty in Pink.

It was a good fight you guys had going. I didn't want to interupt it except with some taunting from the sidelines.

Greatest loop video ever. Someone should do a 10-hour version.

[Psudo]

andyt wrote:

What is it you disagree with? Before Shep got involved, I was trying to make the point that Israel is caught in a dilemma between being a full democracy and being a Jewish state, which I see as incompatible in the long term. Is that what you disagree with?

I don't think a Jewish state and a democracy (in the general sense) are essentially incompatible. It's a tightrope walk, but it's not a contradiction in terms.

Some things must remain true to keep the religious part from conflicting with the democratic part. A clear distinction needs to be made between secular law/courts/authorities and religious law/courts/authorities, secular law must maintain freedom of religion and equal rights of worship, and religions law must apply only to religious adherents. The religious adherent vote must be sufficiently divided and political parties sufficiently diverse and religiously pluralist that other religions and non-believers are not marginalized. There might be others.

I don't follow Israeli politics closely enough to know whether these principles are actually being upheld, but it's possible for them to be upheld.

[andyt]

It's a tightrope walk, as you say. I think they may be slipping. And as you can see from the quotes I gave, this is a long standing discussion among Jews themselves.

[Psudo]

Every country thinks of itself as slipping to some extent. Many Canadians think Harper is destroying the liberal consensus. Many Americans think Bush destroyed our freedom or Obama destroyed our economy. It's difficult to believe your nation stands for something and not worry that it's losing it's values. That's like knowing your mortal and not worrying about death.

I'm sure the Knesset is divided on how they're doing, but I'm not sure who's right. Right now, I'm reading about how the 1996 reforms intended to weaken the power of the smaller parties (specifically, electing the Knesset and the President separately) instead strengthened them.

[Thanos]

It's really just another example that religious fundamentalists of all creeds always play a zero-sum game. They win, in total. Their opposition loses, in total. Religion and democracy aren't incompatable, but totalitarian fundamentalism and democracy certainly are.

[ShepherdsDog]

What the obviously ignorant fail(ed) to realize is that Israel was founded by those who saw themselves as being Jewish, but extremely secular as well. They believed that they could be Jews without being overtly religious, and were so secular that the Soviets actually helped to arm them, believing that the socialists and social democrats who ran Israel would establish a socialist republic friendly to Russia in a region dominated by the West.

Many Jewish intellectuals were also staunch communists in other European nations which the Nazis pointed out whenever they had the chance. They saw no conflict between jewish values and secular values. Even from a religious perspective, Judaism dwells on the here and now, and how you live your life in relation to others, rather than dwelling on rewards and punishments in the afterlife. There are no definitive views on life asfter death in Judaism like there are in Islam and Christianity.

Religious fundamentalism in Judaism is in fact an abberation and deviation from the norm. But sofa philosophers wouldn't be aware of these aspects, as they've never experienced Israeli society first hand.

[BartSimpson]

sandorski wrote:

Religion is poison of the Mind.

And your religion is communism.

[sandorski]

BartSimpson wrote:

sandorski wrote:

Religion is poison of the Mind.

And your religion is communism.

Fail.