Hi Charley-
Thanks for linking Cockburn's obit for Shahak. I found a similarly affectionate one by Christopher Hitchens in the Nation's archives. I have a hard time squaring away those obits with the writings of Shahak that I've read on the Radio Islam pages. Some misinformation is being passed along here, which isn't too surprising when you consider the sources, unfortunately. Alexander Cockburn, Noam Chomsky, and Christopher Hitchens are admitted Communists.
I don't know whether Shahak was, but I assume that he was at least leftist. Birds of a feather, and all that.
He was famed as having been the head of the Israeli League for Human and Civil Rights - I did an extensive google search, couldn't find anyone else connected with that organization except two Arabs, one who was a photographer for one of his books, one who was an editor. It may have been an organization of one.
Shahak's presentation of the Jewish as anti-Christian was spurious. The lies he told could only have been motivated by ill-will. No person of good will would write things like this:
>>Dishonouring Christian religious symbols is an old religious duty in Judaism. Spitting on the cross, an especially on the Crucifix, and spitting when a Jew passes a church, have been obligatory from around AD 200 for pious Jews. In the past, when the danger of anti-Semitic hostility was a real one, the pious Jews were commanded by their rabbis either to spit so that the reason for doing so would be unknown, or to spit onto their chests, not actually on the cross or openly before the church. The increasing strength of the Jewish state has caused these customs to become more open again but there should be no mistake: The spitting on the cross for converts from Christianity to Judaism, organized in Kibbutz Sa'ad and financed by the Israeli government is a an act of traditional Jewish piety. It does not seize to be barbaric, horrifying and wicked because of this! On the contrary, it is worse because it is so traditional, and much more dangerous as well, just as the renewed anti-Semitism of the Nazis was dangerous, because in part, it played on the traditional anti-Semitic past. <<
abbc.com
Further, no person of good will would read that and take it at face value. It's propaganda of the vilest sort.
Shahak played into these people's hands because he was opposed to a religious state being founded in Israel. I am also personally opposed to religious states, because they don't value freedom of thought, freedom of religion and freedom of speech - although I think the Islamic religious states are more dangerous to personal freedom than Israel has been. But Shahak undoubtedly did more harm than good.
Lying to further one's political ends has a long tradition, especially among the Communists, but this is worse than mere lying - pandering to race hatred is evil.
I spent several hours reading about this on Saturday, and learned that, indeed, there are some 4 or 5 passages in the Talmud which some commentators believe are slurs on Jesus - which other commentators believe were not about Jesus at all. Christians seem to want to believe they were about Jesus because that is more evidence that there was an historical Jesus. But people of good will do not claim that these isolated passages represent the whole of the attitude of Jews towards Christians. And most of the rest of the alleged passages from the Talmud and other Jewish sources were forgeries, much like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion were forged.
Here are some more links that tell the real truth about the Talmud:
www2.bc.edu
www2.bc.edu
www2.bc.edu
bc.edu
religion.rutgers.edu
ccat.sas.upenn.edu
angelfire.com
All of this is, unfortunately, on topic, because propaganda is part of war. |
