Thursday, January 02, 2025
Elder of Ziyon
But that's when Joseph Massad is speaking to a Western audience and he doesn't want to look like a Jew-hater in public. He always skated right up to the line where he could claim that he was only talking about Zionists or something.
But in an interview last March with a Pakistani podcaster, Massad drops any pretense.
He starts off by asserting lots of things that are simply not true, which is a pattern we've seen from him before.
Zionism of course begins perhaps in its earliest manifestations in the Crusades of the 11th century. After all it was the Crusades who began to also refer to Palestine as the holy land and the idea at the time was that uh you know and the major sort of papal announcement of the Crusades, the idea was that Palestine had to be cleansed of um its uh both Muslim and non-Catholic occupiers.
This is not only false but insane. Massad is defining Zionism as "ethnically cleansing Palestine" so therefore the Crusaders, who murdered tens of thousands of Jews, must have been Zionists.
Saying that the Crusaders coined the term "the Holy Land" is also wrong. The Vulgate Book of Wisdom (1st century BCE or CE) explicitly calls the Land of Israel "terra sanctae," the Holy Land. At the time it was not a typically Hebrew phrase which would call it "the Promised Land."
The holiness of the land was never in question for Jews, though - there are many laws from the Torah and elucidated in the Talmud that only apply within the borders of the Promised Land, the reason being precisely because of its sanctity.
Massad is an ignoramus whose view of history is colored exclusively by his hate for Jews.
He goes on:
Remember Judaism had been a missionary religion since its inception and continued to be so through another of the early part of the 11th 12th and 13th centuries and in that sense the idea that European Jews are somehow direct descendants of the ancient Hebrews is of course a bogus claim...
The Talmud quotes a Baraita (2nd-3rd centuries CE) that explicitly says to discourage converts to Judaism. The rabbis are instructed to tell the would-be convert, "What did you see that motivated you to come to convert? Don’t you know that the Jewish people at the present time are anguished, suppressed, despised, and harassed, and hardships are frequently visited upon them? "
Does this sound like missionary religion to you?
Again, in his zeal to demonize Jews, Massad makes up history.
What is special here about Zionism is not only the invention of Ancient Israel and the invention of Jews as descendants of the Ancient Hebrews – it is almost like a Hitlerian project to speak of Jews genetically in this fashion. It only becomes fashionable, of course, in the 19th century, with the rise of racial science and the biological sciences.
So tracing your origins is now "Hitlerian?"
How about the Muslims who use the title "Sayyed" to indicate that they are direct descendants of Mohammed - are they Hitlerian too? Or the many Palestinians who proudly trace their origins to the Arabian Peninsula, preferably Mecca and Medina, but many from Yemen, and who keep track of all their families and tribes - are they "Hitlerian"?
Or is that term only to be used for the people who were the victims of Hitler, not the people who want to continue Hitler's goal of exterminating the Jews?
Massad is no scholar. He is a professor who uses the trappings of scholarship to promote antisemitic propaganda.
(h/t MEMRI)
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"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022) |
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