From the BBC:
Why are Jews attending a conference on the Holocaust in Tehran at which star guests include deniers of the genocide?
Wait, wait . . . I think I know! Because they’re morons?
Clue: they also want an end to the Israeli state.
Yay! I’m right!
A handful of Orthodox Jews have attended Iran’s controversial conference questioning the Nazi genocide of the Jews – not because they deny the Holocaust but because they object to using it as justification for the existence of Israel.
With their distinctive hats, beards and side locks, these men may, to the untrained eye, look like any other Orthodox believers in Jerusalem or New York. But the Jews who went to Tehran are different.
Some of them belong to Neturei Karta (Guardians of the City), a group of a few thousand people which views Zionism – the movement to establish a Jewish national home or state in what was Palestine – as a “poison” threatening “true Jews”.
Last time the Jews were without a state, I seem to recall, things went rather badly.
Those Westboro Jews really hack me off!!
Two of the left’s favorite groups of religious extremists: Islamists and Neturei Karta. I wonder if there was a clamor over David Duke affections.
Or, you know, Transjordan.
But now we’re just nitpicking.
Or, for that matter, Israel. I don’t remember seeing the nation of Palestine in the Bible.
I have an idea: Israel nukes Iran, kills about 6 million Iranians, then denies it ever happened!
Philistines ring a bell?
Plenty of non-wackjobs think this. Textually, it’s well-supported, and it was the majority opinion until…recently.
You can make a non-wackjob argument for that, too. I’m not religious, so really I don’t care, but history suggests that the tying of a religion to a state eventually makes it (merely) one, and that’s a loss. There shouldn’t be a political Israel, but pragmatically there has to beâ€â€and the “true” religion, the people as anything more than a political body, will be erased by it.
At least they won’t all have been killed. Probably. But the Holocaust probably will have destroyed Judaism, or at least so altered it that it’s not “true,” not a religion, anymoreâ€â€by accident. Which sucks.
That isn’t what the wackjobs mean. They’re wackjobs. Neturei Karta is more political than religious, and that’s why it’s broken and crazy and its members are despicable shit-talking fucks. An ironic object lesson.
I wasn’t able to find the definitive link but I remember a poll taken several years ago in Israel that said over 50% of the p[opulation did not consider themselves “devout” Jews. A Zogby poll taken recently stated that 28% of Iraelis polled said that they worshiped “rarely.” I think that to consider Israel a “religious” state is a mistake. Religion is the shared history and culture as well as a binding force, but Israel is primarily a secular vision of “homeland” steeped in biblical justifications.
And, like every religion, they have their share of nutjobs, a few of them violent. I wonder if Ayran Nation or Christian Brotherhood sent any of their rocket scientists to Ahmadnutjob’s keening festival?