Notes of a Fool

Research

I spent the last two days researching something i saw in an article.  Schools in the U.S. and Britain are considering removing the Holocaust from their education programs for younger students, i.e. Middle School/Jr. High.  The move is, they say, an attempt to prevent offensive material from causing problems among Muslim and/or Jewish students.

At first, I was completely baffled.  What does the Holocaust have to do with Muslims, and why the heck wouldn't Jewish students already know about the holocaust?

Ah, but there is a wealth of history that I was not aware of, in regards to Anti-Semitism in Europe over the last few hundred and The Crusades.

Let me digress first:  I was raised non-religious.  This is not to be confused with Agnostic or Atheist.  My parents simply did not involve me in religion.  I've learned what I do know about religion from the people that I know.  I continue to this day to be unaffiliated with any faith.

Now, I know a lot about the Catholic and Christian faiths, because I was raised the U.S. and had the opportunity to learn about those.  I have never gotten to sit down and talk to a Jewish or Muslim person, So most of this is relatively new territory.

This all has to do with only a few terms: Zionism, Anti-semitism, The Three Strong Oaths, and World War II.

So it all starts out with the fact that Anti-Semitism, the discrimination of Jews, had taken place for centuries prior to WWII.  In most countries, Jews could only hold a few types of jobs, notably that of tax collector or moneylender.  This reinforces the stereotype: 'Jews are good with money'.  For whatever selfish reason, people have always disliked Jews.

Prior to WWII the Palestinians, righfully, had control of what is now 'Israel'.  Israel is a term that means 'The Holy Land', but it is not meant to describe a real place (right now) because G-d has not returned it to them, according to their religion.

The zionists are a secular faction of the Jewish faith whose primary goal was (and still is) to return the holy land to the Jews, by any means possible.  Strong evidence suggests that the zionists were powerful in europe, and that they were in a large part responsible for the holocaust.  Their primary goal was to use the Jews in europe to help acquire the holy land.

There were many attempts to get rid of the Jews:  Hitler offered to allow them to leave, i.e. go to the US or Britian, on the terms that they left all their belongings and paid a ransom.  Unfortunately, The organizations that represented the Jews insisted that they would not take the deal.  They insisted that the Jews would only allow themselves to escape to 'Israel'.  At the time, this was not an option: the Palestinians had control of the area.

It all gets really screwy after this point, because according to the Jewish faith, they are NOT allowed to take their homeland back by force.  The Talmud explains That "we have been foresworn, by three strong oaths, not to ascend to the Holy Land as a group using force, not to rebel against the governments of countries in which we live, and not by our sins, to prolong the coming of moshiach."

Of course, we know how it ends, lots of Jews die, and they get the State of Israel.  As far as I'm concerned, this is some pretty messed up stuff.  If it's true that Jews are responsible for the slaughter of Jews...

And then I learned that there are Jews world-wide calling for the disbanding of the State of Isreal, and that most practicing Jews consider the state a tyrannical ghetto in which they would choose not to live.

With all of this, the Holocaust becomes much more complicated, and I can understand a little more why schools would be apprehensive about discussing it early in school education.

The hardest thing to understand for me, is why the U.S. and Britian are so hell-bent to support Israel.  The way I see it, Israel is a corrupt organization of Jews willing to slaughter another 7 million people to protect the homeland they're not allowed to have yet.

What political stand do I take?  I think Israel should be given back to the Palestinians, and the Jews returned to exile.