The breadth and depth of the Islamic propaganda machine is nothing short of amazing. I have a friend (more of a friendly acquaintance -- he's my age, but the actual friend was his late mother) who is of mixed parentage -- his father was Unitarian and his mother was Jewish). I just received an e-mail from him. It wasn't sent to me -- it was an e-mail blast, sent to everyone on his author e-mail contact list.
He bemoans the "genocide" being carried out by the "evil" Israelis, but not a word about the brutal Hamas attack that started this latest dustup.
He's a nice guy, but I definitely can't talk politics with him. He and I are at opposite ends of the political spectrum.
This touches close enough to a question I've had for the last month or more. Is your friend Jewish? Or does he identify as whatever his father was (I assume some European lineage)? For that matter, what race is his mother?
What race is a "Jew?" I see on the Wikipedia page that they divide themselves into 3 racial tribes... one based out of the Spanish Iberian peninsula, one based out of Central Europe, and one based out of the Arabian Peninsula. The social structure of Judaism in the world is collectively referred to as a Diaspora. It's awful hard to maintain a "race" as a diaspora. You're going to intermarry with outsiders. You're going to lose adherents. You're going to gain converts.
Every Jewish person I've ever met, from Arizona to Minnesota to Washington, has been white. Some Polish, some German, some English, some Russian... they vary a lot. It seems that once you convert to Judaism you are officially a Jew according to Israel, and are eligible for citizenship. For a religious group claiming to be the direct descendants of the various Tribes that followed Moses out of Egypt, they sure have a lot of European names and German/Caucasian/Anglo blood.
You look at pictures of Israeli citizens and they look like Europeans. Some of the men wear severe black/white clothing and have funny hats and curly hair, but it's a European under all that. They don't look like a Lebanese or Egyptian or Haothi or Bedhuin.
Someone posted something elsewhere (FB) that kind of resonated with me. That the entire nation of Israel is like a giant LARP for religious nuts. It makes at least superficial sense: say a few words, learn some secret language and handshakes and become a member of the Sacred "In" Club. I don't say this with a derogatory intent towards Judaism as a faith, I say it to demand a comparison of what exactly is a "Jew" versus a Scottsman, Irishman, Spaniard, Italian, or Pole? Take any of those ethnicities and have the person convert to Judaism and he's now a "Jew." When a person converts to Unitarianism or Catholicism or Buddhism he's not race-swapped or race-associated.
I've got no interest one way or another in the Israel/Palestine issue other than I'm nominally on the side of Israel due to them having a more Western and rational dogma behind their social structure. Not enough to want Americans over there to fight for Israel. My general synopsis of the situation is the League of Nations made an empty promise regarding the nation of Israel; the UN carried that empty promise forward with a lot of assumed guilt after WWII, but ultimately that "Israel" is about as silly a nation as Iraq and Turkey and Jordan and the rest; lines drawn by Europeans who are thousands of miles away from the people actually living there and that the lines don't reflect the reality of the cultures present. It's a mistake made 4 generations past that everyone needs to let go of and move on; Israel exists now and the way to "get rid of it" if the Palestinians really want to is to buy it back out from under the Israelis. The amount of money spent on terrorism so far by Palestinians and their supporters could have bought a significant chunk of Israel instead. And also advanced Gaza's humanitarian condition.
