From: "wayne mcguire" <wayne.mcguire@channel1.com>
Newsgroups: talk.politics.mideast
Subject: jewish fundamentalism
Date: 25 Dec 92 11:06:48 EST
Reply-To: "wayne mcguire" <wayne.mcguire@channel1.com>
Distribution: talk
Organization: Channel 1 Communications

To: Mark Ira Kaufman

Congratulations on writing a civil message. I can appreciate the
self-discipline and self-control behind that effort, really.

 MIK> To say that the Islamic fundamentalist movement is a
 MIK> response to Kahane's racism just does not hold with the
 MIK> facts.  It was actaully the other way around.  Islamic
 MIK> fundamentalism was an ugly reality by the early 1970's.  The
 MIK> massacre at the Munich Olympic Games took place long before
 MIK> Kahane began spewing his hatred.  So you chronology is just a
 MIK> bit off.

Mark (Ira? Which do you prefer?),

As I recall, the criminal terrorists who were behind the Munich
massacre were secularists and Marxists. Correct me if I am wrong.
At the time, Islamic fundamentalism was not a significant issue
in the Arab world.

On the other hand, Kahane by the early seventies was already in
full stride with the espousal of his form of Jewish
fundamentalism. He had already formed the Jewish Defense League
and was writing regular hate columns in Brooklyn's Jewish Press,
one of the largest (as measured by circulation) English language
Jewish newspapers in the world.

Ditto for Gush Emunim. They were in full stride by the early or
mid-seventies. I remember a period around then when you couldn't
walk through the gates of Harvard Yard without being accosted by
Gush Emunim followers proselytizing their cause.

So Jewish fundamentalism in the style of Kahane, Gush Emunim and
other groups long predates Islamic fundamentalist expressions
like Hamas. Hamas began to emerge as a major force only in the
last few years, and with the cooperation and approval of the
Israeli government, which encouraged it in a Machiavellian
fashion to try to weaken the PLO.

It's important to note that significant segments of the Jewish
establishment in the U.S. and the Israeli establishment have
offered overt and under-the-table support for Jewish
fundamentalists. Former New York mayor Ed Koch thought nothing of
publishing a regular column in a paper dominated by Kahane (thus
lending his prestige to it), and the Israeli government supported
the settlement drive by Gush Emunim in the occupied territories.
All these facts are well-documented in a number of sources.

 MIK> This is again false.  There does not exist anything in
 MIK> Israel like the Islamic Resistance Movement.  There does
 MIK> not exist a "covenant" among even the most racist Israelis,
 MIK> in which they plegde to kill Arabs as an expression of
 MIK> religious duty.

The then Prime Minister of Israel, Yitzhak Shamir, stated
outright that Israel would smash against the stone walls and
boulders the heads of any Palestinians who got in the way of
Israel's mystical destiny to settle the West Bank. How do his
views differ from those of Islamic fundamentalists who want to
kill any Israelis who obstruct their mystical imperative to
control what they consider to be their land?

 MIK> Citing extremeists, and suggesting that these racists
 MIK> possess any significant following in the Jewish world is a
 MIK> falsehood. Such views hold virtually no influence in
 MIK> Israel.

The Israeli government has supported the Jewish fundamentalist
group Gush Emunim. Significant elements of the American Jewish
establishment have tolerated or supported Kahane (this is all
documented in Friedman's book False Prophet). Shamir's cabinet
included a member who advocated the wholesale transfer of Arabs
from Biblical Greater Israel. The extremism in Israel goes right
to the top of the society and the government. See Ehud Sprinzak's
The Ascendance of Israel's Radical Right (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1991) for all the gory details.

 MIK> The existence of Islamic racism towards Jews, as documented
 MIK> in the Covenant of the Islamic Resistance Movement, is not
 MIK> only widespread in the Arab world but surely triggered the
 MIK> racism of people like Kahane, and NOT the other way around,
 MIK> as falsely asserted.

Actually, according to Robert Friedman, what triggered Kahane's
racism was not Muslim fundamentalists but American blacks, and
particularly groups like the Black Panthers. The early JDL was
obsessed with blacks (or, if you will, African-Americans).

Most of Kahane's racism seems to be PRO-active, not reactive. If
you read his columns in the Jewish Press, you'll see that his
racism is all justified by his reading of the Torah. He regularly
quoted chapter and verse from the Torah to justify his fanatical
hatred of virtually every non-Jewish group on the face of the
earth.
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