Fixated Persons

"A Fixated Persons Unit set up in the wake of Sydney's deadly Lindt Cafe siege has lead [sic] to charges against 17 people, some of whom 'were on the cusp of some pretty terrible things', NSW Police Commissioner Mick Fuller said yesterday." ('We won't wait', Fuller vows on terror tactics, Deborah Snow, Sydney Morning Herald, 29/3/18)

I think Police Commissioner Fuller is onto something here. After all, just look at what happened in the absence of such a unit in 19th century Palestine:

"My dictionary defines a 'fixed idea' as follows:  'A Fixed Idea is a preconceived belief or idea, a prepossession, hence psychologically, an idea, usually delusive, which dominates the whole mental life during a prolonged period, as in certain forms of insanity.' This definition has fitted political Zionism or 'Jewish' nationalism to perfection. Ever since that Sunday, August 29, 1897, when Dr. Theodor Herzl, at the First Zionist World Conference in Basel, Switzerland, sold his bill of fare, his Judenstaat [Jewish State], to the leaders of East European persecuted ghetto Jewry, right up to the post-June 1967, 'Jewish' military victory over their 'enemies,' the Arabs.

"I know whereof I am speaking. I was a first graduate (Class 1913) of the Gymnasia Herzlia of Jaffa-Tel Aviv - the Nursery where 'Jewish' political nationalism had its rebirth after the demise of its Founding Father, Dr. Herzl. I attended the Gymnasia Herzlia from 1909 through 1913. Day and night, inside the classes and outside, I was inoculated with the 'fixed idea' of 'Jewish' nationalism. In all of Arab Palestine, in those days, there were only about 50 000 Jews, practically all living on alms - charity collections made in the Diaspora. Very few Jews, in those days, were farmers of artisans. Very few looked healthy and strong. The manly men I knew during the five years I attended the Gymnasia Herzlia were the Arab seamen who unloaded and reloaded the many steamers that had to stop miles beyond the high cliffs. Every Jew who lived in Palestine was first brought to land when he arrived from Russia, Poland or Hungary by those brave oarsmen, who got them through the narrow passage through the cliffs. Every worker on my uncle's large vineyard in Rehovot, was an Arab. Work was done by Arabs only, with few exceptions.

"Yet, the spiritual education we constantly received consisted of amanooh, artzanooh, moladtanooh - our nation, our country, our fatherland. My benchmate during my five years at the Gymnasia was Moshe Shertok, who was later to become, what it was hoped that both of us would become, a leader in the coming Jewish State. Moshe Shertok was Foreign Minister, and, for a short while, Prime Minister, of the young State of Israel. Religion was nonexistent. 'Jewish' nationalism was our new religion. We were made to understand, and feel, that the Jews of the world are sui generis, a 'Chosen People,' who must eventually all emigrate to their 'Jewish Fatherland.' There were hardly any synagogues in Jaffa-Tel Aviv. I never heard of any of my Hebrew teachers going to pray in a synagogue.

"We lived in an enchanted world of myths, dreams, and aspirations. It was a hotbed of pumped and inflated excitement and synthetic idealism. To me, who was brought up in Jerusalem, before I came to the Gymnasia, in the home of my saintly and revered grandfather who believed in, and practiced, ethical and universal Judaism (Orthodox but sincere), believed and practiced social justice in all his contacts with Jews and gentiles (he was a rich retired merchant who came 'to die in the Holy Land,'). this preaching of hatred towards the Arabs conflicted with the Prophetic Judaism of my grandfather. On his death, I left Jerusalem to prepare myself to study at the Gymnasia, at the age of 15-16. But at the age of 20, unlike my fellow-graduates, I refused to accept the scholarships offered me by the Gymnasia to study in Europe under their supervision, and decided to go America and support myself and be independent." (The Culmination & Full Manifestation of the Chronic, Pathological, Seventy-Year-Old 'Fixed Idea' of Fanatical 'Jewish' Nationalism, Moshe Menuhin*, The Decadence of Judaism in Our Time**, 1969, pp 502-03)

[*Father of the famous violinist, Yehudi Menuhin; **An absolute classic, recently republished by Forbidden Bookshelf in the US as 'Not By Might, Nor By Power': The Zionist Betrayal of Judaism.]

Introducing Rabbi Joachim Prinz

An interesting comment on the relationship between Zionism and anti-Semitism by Stephen Shenfield from the comment thread following Roland Nikles' An apologia for Ken Livingstone (What would Buber say?) at mondoweiss.net:

"Zionism... was steeped in anti-Semitism from the start. Zionists agreed with anti-Semites that the Jews were a foreign and unassimilable element in their host societies and that it was therefore natural, inevitable, and humanly understandable that they should be rejected and persecuted. They shared the anti-Semites' negative perceptions of Jews as they actually existed. That also meant that they hated themselves. Where they differed from the more thoroughgoing anti-Semites was their believe that at least some Jews could be rehabilitated and normalized through Zionist efforts. Hitler in particular did not believe this was possible; for him the only final solution of the Jewish question was extermination.

"However, Hitler cannot be equated with Nazism as such. In the 1930s there were Nazis, including SS officers, who thought Zionism could solve the Jewish question. A key figure in the attempt at a Zionist-Nazi rapprochement was Rabbi Joachim Prinz. I got hold of his book Wir Juden (We Jews), published in Berlin in 1934, i.e. under Nazi rule. The author himself apparently blocked publication of an English translation after his emigration to the US in 1937 - and no wonder. The book is a skillful synthesis of Nazi and Zionist ideas, with the 'German Revolution' presented as a model for Jews to emulate. It shows that the German Zionists did not collaborate with the Nazis for purely practical purposes - they also saw the two movements as ideologically complementary. Of all the tendencies of Jewish thought Zionism is and always was the closest to anti-Semitism. The hypocrisy of Zionists accusing other people of anti-Semitism on the flimsiest grounds is astounding."

Here's more on Rabbi Prinz by Israel Shahak:

"Dr Joachim Prinz, a Zionist rabbi who subsequently emigrated to the USA, where he rose to be vice-chairman of the World Jewish Congress and a leading light in the World Zionist Organization (as well as a great friend of Golda Meir), published in 1934 a special book, Wir Juden (We Jews), to celebrate Hitler's so-called German Revolution and the defeat of liberalism: 'The meaning of the German Revolution for the German nation will eventually be clear to those who have created it and formed its image. Its meaning for us must be set forth here: the fortunes of liberalism are lost. The only form of political life which has helped Jewish assimilation is sunk.'

"The victory of Nazism rules out assimilation and mixed marriages as an option for Jews. 'We are not unhappy about this,' said Dr Prinz. In the fact that Jews are being forced to identify themselves as Jews, he sees 'the fulfilment of our desires'. And further: 'We want assimilation to be replaced by a new law: the declaration of belonging to the Jewish nation and Jewish race. A state built upon the principle of the purity of nation and race can only be honoured and respected by a Jew who declares his belonging to his own kind. Having so declared himself, he will never be capable of faulty loyalty towards a state. The state cannot want other Jews but such as declare themselves as belonging to their nation. It will not want Jewish flatterers and crawlers. It must demand of us faith and loyalty to our own interest. For only he who honours his own breed and his own blood can have an attitude of honour towards the national will of other nations.'

"The whole book is full of similar crude flatteries of Nazi ideology, glee at the defeat of liberalism and particularly of the ideas of the French Revolution, and great expectations that, in the congenial myth of the Aryan race, Zionism and the myth of the Jewish race will also thrive." (Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years, 1994, pp 71-72)

Compare the above with the following account of Prinz from the promotional website of the 2013 documentary, Joachim Prinz: I Shall Not Be Silent:

"In Berlin in the 1930s, the civil rights of Jews were systematically stripped away. A young rabbi refused to be silent. His name was Joachim Prinz and he set out to restore the self-esteem of the German Jews. Knowing the Nazis were monitoring his every word, and despite repeated arrests, Prinz continued to preach about the value of Judaism. He saved many lives by encouraging Jews to emigrate from Germany. Expelled from Germany in 1937, Prinz arrived in the United States, the land where democracy had supposedly triumphed over bigotry and hatred. Here, he witnessed racism against African Americans and realized the American ideal was not a reality. As rabbi of Temple B'nai Abraham in Newark, NJ and later as President of the American Jewish Congress, Prinz became a leader of the civil rights movement. Prinz worked to organize the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, declaring, 'bigotry and hatred are not the most urgent problem. The most urgent, the most disgraceful, the most shameful and the most tragic problem is silence.' Moments later, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his 'I Have a Dream' speech. Throughout his career, Prinz spoke out for justice, unconcerned with the popularity of his positions. He identified with the prophets, writing in a 1975 letter, 'Remember the Biblical adage, 'For the sake of Zion, I shall not be silent'." (Prinz's Story, prinzdocumentary.org)

Returning to earth:

"Said Rabbi Joachim Prinz, President of the American Jewish Congress in a resolution he introduced at the closing session of the group's biennial national convention in Miami Beach on May 18, 1958: 'We call upon the United States to take the lead in solving the Arab Refugee problem by pressing for the resettlement of the bulk of the refugees in the sparsely populated land of their Arab kinsmen'." (The Decadence of Judaism in Our Time, Moshe Menuhin, 1969, p 142)

The Jewish People?

There's really no pleasing some people: "The NSW Jewish Board of Deputies (JBOD) has asked for the immediate withdrawal of a book that schools use as an HSC text, which it says contains anti-Semitic slurs." (School textbook 'fuels anti-Semitism', Anna Patty, Sydney Morning Herald, 28/10/09)

The book, Cambridge Studies of Religion Stage 6, apparently contains the following 'offending' sentence: "Much modern conflict in the world is related to the reactions of other groups to the Jewish people." According to the JBOD, "this statement has the potential to incite racial hatred because it 'directly blames Jews for the existence of much of the conflict in the world'."

I would have thought that the JBOD Zionists would at least derive some satisfaction from the fact that the author has referred not to Jews, but to the Jewish people, a key tenet of political Zionism if ever there was one. Prior to the existence of political Zionism, things were relatively simple: a Jew was just that, a follower of Judaism, one of the three Abrahamic faiths. Zionism, however, has muddied the waters by inventing an ethnographic entity it calls the Jewish people.

My guess is that the textbook's author really means political Zionism, as in 'Much conflict in the world is related to the reactions of other groups to Zionism'. Even better (because more precise) would be: 'Much conflict in the Middle East today stems from the dispossession of the Palestinian people by a colonial-settler movement known as Zionism, which established a Jewish state in the land of Palestine predicated on their expulsion and occupation'. But then, given Zionism's habit of conflating Judaism, the faith, and Zionism, the political ideology (and therefore Jews and Zionists), one can perhaps understand the author's confusion. The point should also be made that by conflating Judaism and Zionism, Zionists expose Jews qua Jews, wherever they happen to be living and whatever their position on Israel, to unwarranted suspicion (and even possible attack) arising out of Israeli behaviour. [See my 17/5/09 post Sheridan in Love 4]

Given the constant reiteration by Zionists of the term the Jewish people (not to mention the Jewish state), and their constant blurring, in the minds of the general public, of the simple distinction between Jews and Judaism on the one hand and Zionists and Israel on the other, it often falls to those Jews who refuse to allow the state of Israel to speak and act in their name to assert this crucial distinction. One such was the great anti-Zionist Moshe Menuhin who unequivocally condemned the corrupting effect of political Zionism (or 'Jewish' nationalism as he calls it) on Judaism. The following passage is taken from the introduction to his 1965 classic, The Decadence of Judaism in Our Time:

"For two generations now, the din emitted by oppressed, frustrated and despondent Jewish leadership, which first emanated from the tortured ghettos of Czarist Russia, Poland and Hapsburg Vienna, has gathered momentum and spread epidemically throughout the pathetic, amorphous and unsophisticated Jewish world. It has declared that the Jews of the world, wherever they may be and no matter what their legal citizenship and nationality, form one transnational ethnic and political entity. With the advent of the state of Israel, this 'entity' has graduated into an 'internationally recognized Jewish nation', whose sovereign state and homeland is Israel. All this in spite of a two-thousand-year-old history of Judaism testifying to its overwhelming evolutionary development along spiritual, universal and nonpolitical lines; in spite of the radical and vital changes in the soul of civilised man everywhere after two world wars; in spite of the new advanced conception of free individual citizenship, of equal privilieges and obligations in a new fully integrated and harmonious civilised human community. To stultify, brainwash and inoculate the amorphous body of world Jewry with the virus of secular, rampant 'Jewish' political nationalism, Jewish education for Aliyah ('ingathering of the exiles' through immigration into Israel) under the pretense of spiritual and religious immunity or liberty has been instituted everywhere. This, in turn, has been undoing the normal and natural processes of the integration and evolution of the Jew into the new order of universalism and brotherhood. Cultural isolation, hiding behind the much abused expression 'cultural pluralism', has been self-segregating the Jew from the Gentile in America, England, France and elsewhere in the free world, to prepare him for Aliyah. 'Let the Book give place to the Sword, and the Prophet to the fair beast!" is how the great Hebrew writer and philosopher Ahad Ha-'Am... characterised 'Jewish' political nationalism (political Zionism) from the very beginning, when he attacked Dr. Theodor Herzl, the father and founder of political Zionism. Today, in our new one-world, pretexts for action based on Blood, Soil, Manifest Destiny, Redemption, Gloire and Grandeur, the Chosen People and the White Man's Burden are well recognized and fully rejected, with a sense of shame and compunction, by intelligent and awakened Europeans. Nevertheless, persistent, stagnant, decadent and anachronistic 'Jewish' nationalism still preaches, now more than ever, these time-worn and degenerate ideas of 'collective Sacro Egoismo', as Professor Martin Buber calls them. In its own way, it has already brought much misery to a million uprooted innocent Palestinian Arabs who were exiled from their homes and homeland, and to hundreds of thousands of uprooted Jews, particularly in the Arab lands. Advancing, evolving, universal and spiritual Judaism, which was the core of the Judeo-Christian code of ethics, is now becoming the tool, the handmaiden, of 'Jewish' nationalism, so that the ethical injunctions Thou shalt not kill, Thou shalt not steal, Thou shalt not covet have been transformed into the unethical, primitive and tribalistic 'Covenant of the Chosen People' and 'Israel First'. So much so, that Israelis regard themselves today as Israelis only, an elite, and not, God forbid, as Jews, who in their eyes are a lower breed of humans, traitors to the sacred cause of 'Jewish' nationalism unless they emigrate to the 'sacred-secular Jewish Homeland'." (pp xii-xiii)

Now wouldn't that give the JBOD something to chew on?