The Jewish Ayatollahs

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Jonathan Haidt notes that secular liberals are an anomaly in the non-Western world. Increasingly, this is true of Israel, often touted as “the only democracy in the Middle East.” The reality is that Israel is gravitating to its Middle Eastern Jewish roots, and that means a turn toward religious fanatics gathered around their charismatic rabbis—the guru phenomenon of Jewish social life. A good primer on this is Christiane Amanpour’s God’s Jewish Warriors.

Uri Avnery is an honest Jewish secular liberal, a remnant of the Jews who were influenced by Western thinking and a dwindling minority of Israeli Jews. He is a trenchant observer of the rise of religious fundamentalism in Israeli politics. His latest column, “The Jewish Ayatollahs“) discusses the controversy over recent rabbinic rulings, beginning with pointed examples showing how such things go completely against the grain of contemporary Western culture: “The Archbishop of New York announces that any Catholic who rents out an apartment to a Jew commits a mortal sin and runs the risk of excommunication.” But in Israel, “The rabbi of Safed, a government employee, has decreed that it is strictly forbidden to let apartments to Arabs— including the Arab students at the local medical school. Twenty other town rabbis—whose salaries are paid by the taxpayers, mostly secular, including Arab citizens—have publicly supported this edict.” Read more

Roger Scruton on Beauty

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A reader, Alan, pointed out that I did not call attention to this passage from Scruton:

There is a liturgy of denunciation here that is repeated all across Europe by a ruling elite that trembles in the face of ordinary loyalties. But the fact is that national sentiment is, for most ordinary Europeans, the only motive that will justify sacrifice in the public cause. Insofar as people do not vote to line their own pockets, it is because they also vote to protect a shared identity from the predations of those who do not belong to it, and who are attempting to pillage an inheritance to which they are not entitled.

Motivation is indeed worth pondering. The EU has no motivational power for Europeans because its an artificial construct with no historic cultural, ethnic or linguistic ties. Read more

Quantum Dylan: A Double Act, Part 2

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It is doubtful whether Dylan has ever read Wagner’s Judaism in Music — in which it is argued that Jewish musicians are essentially bricoleurs, only capable of “nonsensical gurgling, yodeling and cackling.” Nevertheless, Dylan’s gloriously imperfect and constantly mobile singing voice, and his boundless ability to mix musical styles, eerily correspond to Wagner’s stereotype of ‘the Jew’ as aesthetically and culturally impure.”[1] Dylan’s music is, in Murphy’s words, “littered with tiny rippling echoes of this giant national storehouse of folk ballads, hymns, Civil War songs, country folk blues, urban electric blues, country and western, bluegrass, dust-bowl folk, tin-pan alley, Broadway, gospel, jazz-beat, crooning, Tex-Mex, big band, rhythm and blues, pop music, reggae, rap — and all the rest.”[2]

Dylan freely appropriates other people’s melodies, chord changes, rhythm patterns, and tonal and textual phrases.  These pepper his works. … [Dylan] adopts musical masks, styles, and personas.  He is a great mimic.  But he is also unmistakably Mr. Dylan whatever he does.[3]

The radical hybridity of Dylan’s music and lyrics has a family resemblance with his “comrade-in-arms” Jimi Hendrix who rationalized his ambivalence towards both Blackness and America through the nomadic ideology of the gypsy – a symbol of his mixed racial and ethnic heritage:

In Dylan, Hendrix recognized a kindred traveler, another musical itinerant who rationalized his own ambivalent identity through music. … Hendrix and Dylan — gypsy and hobo — navigated a musical passage of self-invention that led them into borderlands where musical styles, idioms, and traditions overlap.[4] Read more

Roger Scruton’s “The Rebirth of Nations”

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Roger Scruton is familiar to TOO readers for his starring role in Brenton Sanderson’s wonderful series, The War on the English (see here and here). Scruton’s comments on the destruction of the English quoted by Sanderson are well worth re-reading.

Scruton recently published an article in The American Spectator that summarizes some of the successes of nationalist parties in Europe and the deep disillusionment with immigration, multiculturalism and the European Union (“The Rebirth of Nations“). It is a very heartening article with some familiar themes, particularly the point that this has been a top-down, anti-democratic revolution. The elites have systematically stifled nationalist sentiments, but these sentiments are once again “prominent in the cultural landscape of Europe. And they are the more prominent for the attempt by the Eurocrats to forbid them.” Read more

Michele Bachmann Loves Israel

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I’m sure there are some good things to be said about Michele Bachmann of the “at least she is better than X” variety. However, it’s very worrying that she seems determined to break all the records for fealty to the Israel Lobby. In a talk before the Republican Jewish Coalition in Los Angeles she said:

I am convinced in my heart and in my mind that if the United States fails to stand with Israel, that is the end of the United States . . . [W]e have to show that we are inextricably entwined, that as a nation we have been blessed because of our relationship with Israel, and if we reject Israel, then there is a curse that comes into play. And my husband and I are both Christians, and we believe very strongly the verse from Genesis [Genesis 12:3], we believe very strongly that nations also receive blessings as they bless Israel. It is a strong and beautiful principle.

There is simply no other civilized country in the world where a member of the political elite would claim–proudly and in public–to base her policy on an ancient religious text. She continues:

Right now in my own private Bible time, I am working through Isaiah . . . and there is continually a coming back to what God gave to Israel initially, which was the Torah and the Ten Commandments

It’s probably always a bad idea to base your actions on other people’s holy books. Isaiah also has quotes like these: “And the peoples shall take them, and bring them to their place; and the house of Israel shall possess them in the land of the Lord for servants and for handmaids; and they shall take them captive, whose captives they were; and they shall rule over their oppressors” (Isa. 14:2).” “They shall go after thee, in chains they shall come over; And they shall fall down unto thee, They shall make supplication unto thee” (Isa. 45:14); “They shall bow down to thee with their face to the earth, And lick the dust of thy feet” (49:23).

Here’s a video where she develops her views on Christianity and its “deep roots” in Judaism. She claims that because of these connections she worked on a Kibbutz in Israel as a teenager.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7cMxE1oFf0&feature=player_embedded#at=285

Read more