I was with you in your OT citations. It was your conclusion that gave you
away. Note the following citation from your first link, a diascussion of an
article in Z magazine, and note how differently you have used this language
in your own statement:

"In your July/August issue, Edward Herman asserts that the 'exterminaiton
of peoples
standing in the way of God's chosen' has been a 'tradition in treating
enemies, starting with Moses' that the Jews have kept 'well preserved' to
the recent day (as exemplified by, among others, the heads of Israel's two
main political parties). This is naked anti-semitism.""

Your second link is a discussion of traditional Jewish law as applied to
the differential treatment of Jews and non-Jews. Both sides site
theological opinions from a millenium ago. While certainly some Jews still
hold these views, we're talking about a small minority. Your citation, in
asserting the continuity of these views, alleges that a majority of
traditional Jews in the US holds them. But even if this were true
traditional Jews themselves are a small minority. Sophistry, in other words.

The first Talmudic text I read was about the damages to be paid a man whose
ox had been stolen or killed. The issue was, suppose I don't have an ox to
offer in restitution? What would be a reasonable equivalent--how many sheep
or lambs, etc. We still read this, but nobody accepts the 1500 year old
exchange rate. As an 11 year old in Brooklyn it seemed on the face of it
incredibly irrelevant. Even the ultra orthodox would probably write a
check. But the lesson is the principle that equivalent restitution needs to
be made.

In an example from your link 2, if a Jew rob a non-Jew he must make full
restitution, which seems fair enough. If he robs a Jew he must pay double
the value of the theft. The point is that if theft is unconscionable
robbing from one's own is still moreso. This does not mean that offenses
against non-Jews were to be taken lightly, but that there's an added
offense involved in robbing those who would be most vulnerable to our
dishonesty.

But that's all beside the point. In this forum we communicate in our own
words, and what we choose to draw from other links defines how we are read,
for the obvious reason that one can't expect very many of us to read all
the links that we all provide each other--in this case we're talking about
what, 20 pages? And also because what we say in the body of our posts
indicates how we understand those links and why we are using them.

What you communicated was that there is some kind of behavioral continuity
between the Biblical account of events predating the beginning of the first
millenium BC and events of the 1940s to the present. As if the period in
between were filled, as it is not, with similar behaviors. How else could
one read this?

I stand by my statement. I'm stupid that way.

Mark

At 01:29 AM 9/28/2001 +0000, you wrote:
>>From: Mark Weiss <[log in to unmask]>
>>Reply-To: Poetryetc provides a venue for a dialogue relating to poetry and
>> poetics <[log in to unmask]>
>>To: [log in to unmask]
>>Subject: Re: Letter to a leftist friend/the real mystics/innocents
>>Date: Thu, 27 Sep 2001 17:58:40 -0700
>>
>>Probably pointless, altho I'm always wary of anything that could be read as
>>"blame the jews." See the very slightly veiled antisemitism of Sevanthi
>>Ragunathan's post proposing a causal connection between the Bronze and Iron
>>Age accounts of warfare in the Old Testament and the savagery of the modern
>>Israeli state: "This tradition in treating enemies, starting with Moses, is
>>well preserved in the Gush Emunim, Shamir, Netanyahu, and Rabin (who
>>several years ago as Defense Minister authorized the Isaeli forces to
>>enter Palestinian homes and 'break bones.')"
>
>
><yawn> Pointless indeed, but why should that stop you? While I'm
>oh-so-sure that you are wary of anything that could read as "blame the
>Jews", the "lightly veiled anti-semeticism" of the proposal was not mine, to
>say the least.
>
>You know, if you'd simply clicked the links, particularly the second, you
>could have saved me the trouble of remarking on your stupidity.
>
>
>
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