| 1 | "The word of the Lord that came to Jeremias the prophet against the people of Palestine, before Pharao took Gaza. |
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| 2 | "Before thy malice was laid open: as it is at this time, making thee a reproach of the daughters of Syria, and of all the daughters of Palestine round about thee, that encompass thee on all sides. |
Palestine: The World’s Oldest Antisemitic Word
On June 11, during an Irish Ryanair flight, Bologna-Tel-Aviv, a stewardess repeatedly referred over the PA system to their destination as “Palestine.”
Of course, some Israelis on board did not like that and confronted her. Harsh words were exchanged, and Ryanair’s official, disgustingly dishonest apology—”It was an innocent mistake”—was characteristic of a people with the most antisemitic national assembly in the West.
The first gentile ever to call this land “Palestine” was the Roman Emperor Hadrian, who invented the idea. There had never been such a country with that name until then. For two centuries, Rome’s imperialists governed Eretz Yisrael as a colony and called it Judea. The Jews twice rose in violent rebellion; they had been the most obstreperous of the empire’s conquered peoples.
Indeed, many of the obscure empires that Rome had overrun were happy to be absorbed into the greatest power of the day. But not the Jews. They respected the Romans for their culture’s prowess in the arts, literature, and engineering, especially engineering. Jews built Roman roads, amphitheaters, sports stadiums, and homes with indoor plumbing.
But when it came to Rome’s idea of entertainment—men fighting to the death, men being torn to pieces by animals—and their wanton sexuality, the Jews looked down on the Romans and their polytheistic, idolatrous pantheon of cruel, imaginary gods.
Sat 1 Oct 2016 / 1 Elul 5776 B”H Dr Maurice M. Mizrahi
Congregation Adat Reyim
Luncheon in honor of my completion of Talmudic tractate Avodah Zarah
The demise of idolatry in Judaism The issue
After the return from Babylon, the Jews lost all desire for idolatry, after 1,000 years of clinging to it tenaciously and enthusiastically. Why did idolatry disappear from Judaism so suddenly and so completely in the past 2,500 years?
The desire for idolatry
-With their first taste of freedom, Jews rushed to worship the Golden Calf. [Ex. 32:1–8]
-Over and over again the Israelites rebelled against God and worshiped idols for 1,000 years. The prophets’ main job was to bring them back to the fold.
-Not only idol worship, but also accompanying child sacrifice [2Kings
16:3; 21:6; 23:10; Jer. 7:31; 19:5; 32:35] and sacred prostitution [1Kings 14:24; 2Kings 23:7; Ezek. 16:17, 23:5ff; Hos. 4:14-15].
-Even wise King Solomon fell prey to it in his old age.
-Worst offender: King Menasheh of Judah, the longest-reigning Jewish monarch (55 years: 697-642 BCE). He practiced, sponsored and encouraged idolatry on a wide scale, built idolatrous shrines, turned the Temple into a pagan site [2Kings 21], killed priests and prophets (e.g., Isaiah), outlawed study of Torah [Ezekiel 8–11, 16:17, 20, 23]. He repented before dying, but severe damage was done.
-Talmud: King Menasheh appears to Rav Ashi in a dream, engages him in a halachic discussion, shows himself to be not only well-versed in Torah but also Rav Ashi’s superior.
Rav Ashi: If you are so wise, why did you worship idols?
King Menasheh: If you had been there and lived in my time, you would have done the same. You would have lifted the hems of your robes to run behind me to worship idols also. [Sanhedrin 102b]
Society at large has a big impact on our behavior. If even kings and sages can be enticed to worship idols, what about the rest of us?
It was a craving, an organic need, an addiction, an overwhelming desire. Compare with sex drive: If God were to tell us “No more sex”, people would be doing it anyway. The urge for idolatry was that strong, and could not be easily silenced.
Moreover he also removed his mother Maacha, from being the princess in the sacrifices of Priapus, and in the grove which she had consecrated to him: and he destroyed her den, and broke in pieces the filthy idol, and burnt it by the torrent Cedron: | |
2 | "Moreover Maacha the mother of king Asa he deposed from the royal authority, because she had made in a grove an idol of Priapus: and he entirely destroyed it, and breaking it into pieces, burnt it at the torrent Cedron. |
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Who is Priapus the Jews worshiped?
Priapus..a god..whose originally Asian cult started in the Hellespontine regions, centring especially on Lampsacus. He was represented in a caricature of the human form, grotesquely misshapen, with an enormous phallus
...
In the 1920s, Adolph Hitler launched his political career by accusing Germany’s Juden, 1% of the population, of stabbing Deutschland in the back, which is why they lost the Great War/WWI. This led to WWII and the death of fifty million people. As fertile Judaism produced not only thousands of years of fascinating and rich Jewish history, Christian civilization, and Muslim culture, with their combined two billion-plus adherents today, so its opposite (call it Anti-Judaism) is no less a force of immense but destructive power.
O, Ok. It was the Jews who built Christendom. Who knew?
Today, the “legitimate” way of hating the People of the Book and applauding their murderers is the lie that they stole Palestine from the “Palestinians” when, throughout history, there never was such a country or nation outside of Hadrian’s vicious imagination.
Moreover, the Jews stole nothing. All the evidence of the Holy Land’s condition before the Zionist renaissance in the late 19th century shows a treeless, desolate landscape. Herman Melville made the pilgrimage in 1857 and described the country as a “caked, depopulated Hell.” Mark Twain, the other great 19th-century American author, came a decade later and wrote that the Holy Land “sits in sackcloth and ashes.” Neither said anything about meeting any “Palestinians” during their travels.
So here we are again, two millennia later, following in the footsteps of Hadrian who insisted this country be called Palaestina—as our contemporary anti-Jew Hibernian flight attendant insisted that the airliner they were all flying in was about to land in Palestine.
Plus ca change, say the French, plus c’est la meme chose.
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