From: Jkr438@aol.com
Date: Fri 13 Jun 2003 - 17:59:36 GMT
[Jake] Could Godwin's rule be invoked here? Or even if not, is this really a
good use of the memetics list? Surely some forums revel in this kind of
theorizing, so I can't imagine that the memetics list has anything to add to this.
-Jake
(only c&p's follow)
> From: joedees@bellsouth.net
> Subject: Re: Morphogenetic fields
>
> Dace Opined:
>
> > What you're missing is the human dimension. For example, plenty of
> > people have recognized that the state policies of Israel toward its
> > Palestinian minority are criminal. To be anti-Israel, in this limited
> > sense, results from subjecting beliefs to our innate capacity for
> > reason. But some people criticize Israel, not out of reason, but out
> > of a racist hatred of Jews. These are people who equate all Jews with
> > Israel, though many Jews, even Israeli citizens, are appalled at the
> > brutality of their government and their fellow citizens. The
> > principled anti-Isreali stance is a result of human intelligence, not
> > memetic struggle. The unprincipled anti-Israeli stance results from
> > the success of the anti-Jew meme. Another unprincipled stance, which
> > is pro-Isreali, depends on the success of the meme that equates all
> > criticism of Israel with "anti-Semitism" (the irony being that Arabs
> > are themselves Semitic).
>
> The bias is not on the basis of race so much as religion; all members of
> non-Islamic religions are to be converted, enslaved (dhimmitude) or
> killed. This is the stance that medieval Christians also took, but the
> Enlightenment, which the Islamists have either rejected or never
> experienced, grew them out of it.
Unlike Christians, Muslims always accepted and revered Jews and lived at
peace with them.
> As to who is and is not a criminal in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I
> wish to quote James Lileks for you:
>
> I havenTt written much about the oRoadmap to PeaceĀ for the same
> reason I wouldnTt write much about attempts to crossbreed a llama
> with a vacuum cleaner: I donTt think itTs going to work. I never thought
> it would work. The only question is how many dead Israelis it will take
> before the point is made, for the 3,234th time.
> The top-of-the-hour radio news played today's news just as youTd
> expect - everything shoved through the tit-for-tat template. Israel
> attempts to take out a terror leader; Hamas orespondsĀ with a
> bombing. As if theyTre equal. As if targeting the car that ferries around
> some murderous SOB is the same as sending a blissed-out teenager to
> blow nails and screws through the flesh of afternoon commuters so he
> can bury himself in the heaving bosom of the heavenly whorehouse.
> Cycle of violence, don't you know.
>
> They donTt have helicopters, we're told, so they use suicide bombers.
> If they had helicopters, they would have strafed the bus and everyone
> waiting at the corner. Give them a nation where Hamas runs
> unchecked, and theyTll have helicopters. They won't be Apaches. The
> bill of sale will be calculated in Euros and the manual written in
> French. By then the excuse for the terror won't be oppression; it'll be
> "the legacy of oppression." Sometimes I swear the mainstream media
> won't take a look at the Palestinian's horrid death-cult subculture until
> we learn that a suicide bomber played "Doom" at an Internet cafe for
> five minutes. And then they'll blame Intel.
This guy is letting his memes do his thinking for him. Both sides in this
conflict are committing terrible acts of violence against each other. At
first glance, it would seem that both sides are equally guilty. But when
you cancel out the violence of each side, what's left is asymmetrical
oppression. Israel is oppressing Palestine, while Palestine is not
oppressing Israel. Israel has all the power, while Palestine has none.
Israel illegally occupies Palestinian land, while Palestine occupies no
Israeli land. Israel restricts water to Palestinians, preventing economic
development, restricts Palestinian movement with numerous check points
(which has effectively shut down all higher education), prevents
Palestinians from using highways that criss-cross their territory, bulldozes
their houses, pulls up their crops and fruit trees, and exploits them for
low-end labor. The relationship is much like that of rapist to raped. To
claim that Israel is somehow the victim in all this is much like claiming
the rapist is the victim simply because, in the course of the attack, the
victim managed to bite his ear. Clearly, we're dealing with a highly
successful, pathological meme.
We may trace the genealogy of this meme to Adolf Hitler and Naziism. The
insane persecution of the Jews left them with an enduring sense of
victimization. Even now, as they victimize Palestinians, they
narcissistically view themselves as morally pure, while their enemies are
pure evil. The narcissism generated through oppression has remained in
place, even as they've become cruel oppressor. The Zion meme is a reverse
image of the Nazi meme. It's the same except that Jew is victimizer instead
of victim. One might say the Zion meme to the Nazi meme is what the
vertebrate body-plan is to the insect body-plan-- a simple inversion. They
may look strikingly different, but below the surface Nazi and Zionist bear
the same colors, which they elaborate on according to their cultural norms.
Just as Nazis projected their own criminality onto Jews, so Zionists project
their criminality onto their victims. The face of Palestine presented in
the US media is really just a mirror image of the true face of Israel. The
Jews made an epochal mistake when they abandoned their Semitic brothers and
trusted the very ones who had persecuted them. While Jews lived in peace
with Arabs for centuries from Iraq to Iberia, Europeans bullied them and
ultimately traumatized them. Yet the Jews left their ancient homes in the
Arab world to live in a nation established for them by these same European
powers. What would Saadiah Gaon, tenth century Exilarch (secular head of
Mesopotamian Jewry), have made of Israel's support for the bombing of
Baghdad, Gaon's beloved home of many years? He would have figured the Jews
had lost their minds, and he would have been absolutely right. Zionist Jews
have lost their power of reason to an insidious, malignant meme.
Ted
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