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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Larry Loeb who wrote (120524)	11/26/2003 4:26:12 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 281500

Judaism, however, is a religion. You cannot convert into an ethnicity. Anyone can convert to Judaism It's not quite that simple. Judaism is not a proselytizing religion, and you need approval to convert - approval that is not automatically given. You need to convince a Rabbi to accept your application, and even then, the sense that somebody wasn't born into Israel follows converts around, particularly in religious communities. There is, however, no tension between Judaism and democracy. Not at all. But to keep Israel a Jewish State and a democracy, you need a large Jewish majority - and that may be tricky to keep when the Palestinian Arabs have one of the highest birthrates on the planet.

To: Larry Loeb who wrote (120524)	11/26/2003 5:11:23 PM
From: Noel de Leon	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

" You cannot convert into an ethnicity." Can you renounce having an ethnicity? This is a part of the problem. Hitler and others answered "No"(that is all Jews are an ethnic group - no matter which religion they practice). One could call this the Hitler postulate. Nadine insists on a difference between Judaism and Christianity(and other religions, I suppose)) which is ethnic in character. But this is the same as saying that: 1) A Moslem who grew up in a Moslem environment is different from a Jew who grew up in a Jewish environment in that the Moslem's Moslemness(ethnicity) is different from the Jew's Jewishness(ethnicity). 2) A Jew who grew up in a non-Jewish environment would still be an "ethnic" Jew while a Moslem who grew up in a non-Moslem environment would not be an "ethnic" Moslem. Both concepts are patently nonsense(as is the Hitler postulate). Put in another way, an American who "converts" to being a Dane is an American-Dane not a Danish-Dane. His children may well be Danish-Danes and then if a nutcase came along and said that all Danes with an American parent or grandparent are to be expelled then the question of ethnicity would come up again. Here in Denmark there are those who dispute that a second generation immigrant can call himself a Danish-Dane. But the argument usually applies to those second generation Danes with dark skin. All of which relates to the second and third laws of scoundrels: Religion is the first refuge of a scoundrel.(M.Winn, 2003) Race is the second refuge of a scoundrel.(N. de Leon,2003) The Nth law of scoundrels is S. Johnson's.(1775)