Tag Archives: Orthodox Judaism

PPLFF says no BDS of Israeli Apartheid

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Crap. The Anti-Apartheid BDS campaign targeted Cannes because of it, Hollywood luminaries boycotted the Toronto Film Festival over the same principles in 2009, you’d think the Springs gay community might have paid heed. Instead the 2010 Pikes Peak Lavender Film Festival opted to screen the Israeli melodrama Eyes Wide Open, Zionists’ illegal appropriation of Jerusalem be damned. When Canadian gays made international news for allowing Queers Against Israeli Apartheid to march in their pride parade, in spite of Jewish philanthropists pressuring the City of Toronto to withdraw funding, I hoped that COS pride festivities might opt to climb aboard. Instead this weekend Colorado Springs gets a full-on endorsement of Israel’s ongoing illegal invasion of Palestine.

It was a false hope. The Pikes Peak area gay community has found itself so embattled since Amendment Two’s 1992 measure to legalize discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, that common social causes are easily crowded out by Gay Marriage, DADT and brand recognition for LGBT. So much so that social justice activists can only participate in the pride parade on the condition that it be about solidarity, not antiwar. With gay issues being so politicized, should gays and lesbians get a pass on staying apolitical about war or racism? Whatever excuses we make, it’s a perfectly flamboyant example of silence equals consent. I count apolitical queens every bit as complicit with US military criminality as the above-it-all new-agers and NASCAR jackasses.

Set in an Orthodox neighborhood of Jerusalem, Eyes Wide Open doesn’t address the Israeli-Palestinian troubles, it ignores them, effectively normalizing an ethnically-cleansed Palestine. The film tells the story of an extramarital gay affair between Jewish scholars, blablabla, minus the evictions of Palestinians in the path of encroachment by Israeli settlers, and the hijacking of Muslim holy sites . “Beverly Hills 90210” was fine without scenes of the LAPD repression of Watts or East LA, but 90210 wasn’t pretending to be taped on non-Jewish land.

Eyes Wide Open was the title of the 2005 American Friends Service Committee antiwar boot-counting exercise to open American eyes to the enormity of casualties of the Iraq War — before the Eyes Wide Open slogan was adopted by a 2008 Israeli PR project to encourage American Jews to pay more attention to their birthright offer of Israeli citizenship. The death count of US soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan (now that the AFSC has been cleared to consider both wars illegal) has long since outgrown the AFSC budget for buying boots or lugging them around in rented trucks, and now EWO (Einaym Pkuhot) is a miserable tale about infidelity and sin.

Frankly, Trembling Before G-d was an incredible documentary about gay Orthodox men struggling with the DADT policy of Orthodox Judaism. I remember seeing it at the 2003 PPLFF, or so. I remember Rabbinical experts expounded on both sides of the argument with authority and humor. But that was before the BDS movement to curb Israel’s racist apartheid system. You either support the picket or you scab.

Objective reviews of EWO are scarce in the Zionist-dominated press, and increasing numbers are honoring the cultural and academic boycott of Israeli Apartheid. Refusing to see EWO is by no means concluding it is bad. For all I know the film may be using the ostracism of homosexuals within the Orthodox community to represent the growing alienation Israelis are feeling in the face of the open revulsion expressing itself by the rest of the world. Maybe it’s brilliant.

But I’m not deliberating about whether to see it. BDS means no to Israel, to its statesmen, artists, scholars and products. And the American companies which support Israel’s policy of Apartheid, several dozen, and now that includes our own PPLFF.

Bibi is NOT Israel, revisited.

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The Israeli Knesset is debating a bill proposed by David Rotem of the extreme right Yisrael Beiteinu party that would require all Israeli citizens to swear loyalty to Israel as a “Jewish and democratic state.” This bill is targeted at increasing pressure on the twenty percent of Israelis who are Palestinian citizens while forcing the ultra Orthodox Jewish minority who reject the legitimacy of any state not based on Jewish biblical law to accept Zionism. If passed in its proposed form, citizens unwilling to take the loyalty oath would be at risk of losing citizenship I wrote an article about a year ago, I think, titled “Bibi is NOT Israel!” but the title was in Hebrew.

The Modern State of Israel uses Judaism the way George Bush uses Christianity, a prop, only that and nothing more, quoth the Raving, nevermore.. and yeah, I deliberately mangled the line from Poe.

Zionism is at most a sect of Judaism, so in fact are any Christian sects. In fact, when Judah split off from Israel while Solomon lay dying, it was done on a sectarian level equal to England and the Vatican. Bibi courts some reactionary extremists who are pushing him as a Jewish Pope, who would imagine?
Other than the Zionist faction is more secular than sectarian… And the absence of a “Unified Judaism” doesn’t seem to have wiped out Judah in the past 3500 years, so why the new Anti-Semitic actions from people claiming to represent Israel, the people, in the form of Israel the state?

Bibi can no more claim to represent Judaism than the Pope could. Either the people or the faith.
When I looked up the Hebrew spelling of the last post, that Bibi is not Israel, I also tried and gave up after a few moments (I had a headache, the soup was boiling over, the dog ate my homework, whatever) but I stumbled across some sectarian Messianic as in “Jewish to Christian Convert” website claiming that Netanyahu is a Messianic name. Which could be and probably is exploited in Israeli politics when dealing with people who are sectarian.

This is like the term “under God” being placed into the Pledge of Allegiance to try to overcome LEGITIMATE sectarian concerns, by Christian Groups and JEWISH groups, over the Idolatrous worship of the State embodied in the rest of the pledge. These groups are, now, commonly dismissed as being “Not REAL Christians” by the same groups, like the TeaBags and RepubliKlan Party as being “Not REAL Americans”. Arbitrarily because we don’t share the Fascist Agenda so common in such groups. Or Plutocratic.

The way of saluting the flag during the Pledge was changed at the same time, due to political expediency, from the Roman Right-hand-extended forward salute, known as the Bellamy Salute, to the Roman hand-over-heart salute, equally a salute to the power of the state, worshiped as a god. The other two are a (now) Military Salute and one used when invoking the name of any god while taking an oath, all four of these salutes were Standard Roman ways of greeting…. ones social equals or superiors, the flags and other standards of Rome and pictures and statuary of the Roman Emperor.

Two of the images were from Far Right Extremist sites who insist that, in one case, the stripes on the American flag represent their TeaBag Fake Revolution Anti-American Extremist Views that anybody who doesn’t take THEIR version of the Pledge of Allegiance-Loyalty (to their idolatrous Money Cult, capitalism) is … wait for it…

Not a REAL American. The hand over heart one in fact. That’s now a standard salute for one not in uniform, but the original, was for soldiers who had their unit insignia, like a police badge today, over their left breast. Complete with a picture of the Emperor. The ones who said they were gods.

To close it out, for now, any DoucheBag Tea Party Extremists who want to object, tough cookies, bubba. (or bubbette) You ignorant racist fascist bastards will NEVER have the authority to declare anybody a “REAL” American or to take that distinction away from anybody.

The same way your Extremist Hero Benjamin Netanyahu will never have the authority to declare anybody a non-Jew. And that picture of uniformed American children giving the fascist stiff arm to the flag, while reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, absolutely not faked.