"Jews Care About Their Own!" Is Not An Indictment

Edward Gilbert, the leader of the Catholic Church in Port of Spain...

EXERCISING THE EMPATHY MUSCLE (h/t Daled Amos) by Rabbi Avi Shafran

Politicians are often subject to derision, often for good reason. Recently, though, a Catholic cleric hurled an unusual and creative insult at local politicos: They are like Jews.
Edward Gilbert, the leader of the Catholic Church in Port of Spain, the capital of the southern Caribbean nation of Trinidad and Tobago, made the comparison between elected officials and “the original Jewish people,” explaining that Jews, at least in ancient times, cared only about their own.
“The Jews were compassionate and caring to the people of their nation, to the people of their race…,” Archbishop Gilbert reportedly said during an October 24 religious ceremony commemorating the 225th anniversary of the Roman Catholic presence on Trinidad. Christianity, he proudly asserted, “universalized the concept of love.”
Predictably, the Anti-Defamation League protested the sermon, calling Mr. Gilbert’s statements “a disturbing repackaging of ancient anti-Jewish canards and supersessionist beliefs.” The American Jewish Committee chimed in with chiding of its own, contending that “such prejudicial comments not only reflect personal ignorance, but also ignorance of the teaching of the Catholic Church since Nostra Aetate.” That was a reference to the Vatican II declaration repudiating the centuries-old “deicide” charge against all Jews, stressing the religious bond shared by Jews and Catholics, and reaffirming the eternal covenant between G-d and the People of Israel (though it does not, of course, renounce the essential beliefs of Christianity).
Personally, I wasn’t insulted by the Archbishop’s characterization, even if he meant to include contemporary Jews.

Because caring for one’s own is eminently defensible. In fact, it’s the only way to truly care for anyone.
Not much effort is needed to profess true love for all the world; but to actually feel such love just isn’t possible. Gushing good will at everyone is offering it to no one.
That is because, by definition, care grows within boundaries; our empathy for those closest to us, to be real, must be of a different nature than our concern for others with whom we don’t share our personal lives. Boundaries are what make those beloved to us… beloved to us.
Every person lives at the center of a series of concentric circles, the smallest one (in a healthy dynamic) encompassing parents, spouses, and children; the next circle out, other family members and friends; the one beyond that, members of their ethnic or religious groups. At a distance removed from that is a larger circle of human beings with similar values. And further out still, the circle containing the rest of humanity.
It is perfectly proper that we feel, and demonstrate, our deepest concern for the circle closest to us. More: it is the only way to achieve genuine care, providing us the ability to bestow it, if in a less intense form, upon those in the next circle out, and, in turn, on those beyond it.
Nothing demonstrates the danger of “universalizing the concept of love” better than the religion Mr. Gilbert represents. For all Christianity’s claim to have expanded its affection to all of humanity, early Church history was characterized by the vicious intolerance demonstrated by early “fathers” and emperors; the Middle Ages’ Crusades left swollen rivers of blood; and, a few centuries later, Reformation battles between Catholics and Protestants added millions of corpses to the body count.
Perceptive Jews and non-Jews alike understand how essential it is that ethnic or religious groups show special concern for other members of their “tribes.” They sense what to some may seem counterintuitive: it is precisely the intense empathy we feel and express for our “inner circles” alone that enables us to feel genuine, if somewhat less acute, concern for those in more distant ones. People who focus their deepest feelings on those close to them are those most likely to truly care about their fellow citizens or wider circles still. Exercising the “empathy muscle,” so to speak, provides the ability to feel—less intensely but more genuinely—concern for people who are not close to us.
So while the Trinidadian cleric may have been attempting an insult, he inadvertently provided his listeners—and all who were reached by media reports of his words—something else: a valuable opportunity to ponder how caring works.

this post gets to the heart of why liberal universalism (also meaning Catholicism) is the heart of what is wrong with the world today and how true love does not come from abstract ideas like "the world", but rather true love comes from loving within boundaries. That means NATIONALISM, and your FAMILY. The real haters think they are in love with Gaia or some material everything. The real lovers have walls. The real haters want to tear down borders. The real haters want to push standards that are not compatible with FAMILY. The real haters want to create universal equivalencies. They want to take away difference. The real haters don't want to recognize gender. The real haters don't want to recognize borders. The real haters are what today we consider social liberals... and they have so much in common with the liberals of yesteryear... yes the liberals called Christians.

UNESCO converts Maimonides to Islam

The Rambam is likely rolling over in his grave upon hearing of his 'conversion' to Islam.

Moses Maimonides is known as the greatest Jewish philosopher and codifier of Jewish law in history. Born in Cordova, Spain, he was forced to flee from fanatical Moslems at the age of thirteen, where he traveled with his family to North Africa, and ten years later to Palestine. As a result of the devastation left by the Crusaders, Palestine was virtually uninhabitable, forcing the family to move to Fostat (current day Cairo).

Just when you thought they couldn't get any crazier, UNESCO has converted the Rambam (Maimonides) to Islam.

On a final note, a recent UNESCO report on science, Jewish physician and theologian Maimonides is classified as a Muslim named “Moussa ben Maimoun.” So the Rambam - for Rabbi Moshe Ben Maimon – has been forced to “convert” to Islam by the UN’s revisionist historians.
During the Middle Ages, the French Inquisition confiscated and burned Maimonides's books. From the elegant Parisian boulevards, UNESCO’s inquisitors are now following the same dreadful solution of rendering history and the Holy Land "Judenrein."

And this is just the latest chapter in UNESCO's war against the Jews, writes Giulio Meotti.

Chuck Laramie didn't do his homework

I'm not going to do a blog post or waste my time articulating things everytime I get a guy like this blabbering his brainwashed talking points I've heard before... but I saw this bouncing around the blogosphere and thought I should spend a few minutes dealing with this:

Muslim Rage Boy...
<Sarcasm> totally RANDOM image...
I swear </Sarcasm>

Chuck Laramie:

Perhaps if the following men, Chief Joseph, Sitting Bull, Tecumseh, Cochise, Red Cloud, were alive they might hold a series of hearings on Christian Radicalism and the danger it presented to their Indian Nation. But they can't and neither can their descendents due to their complete lack of a real voice in their native country.

European immigrants, Christians, came to this land and looked upon those here as heathens, barbarians, who needed to be exterminated. As one American Colonel said, “Nits make lice, kill them all.” Not very Christian, eh Mr. King.

America in the 1890's embraced Anglo-Saxionism. This was the idea that English-speaking nations had superior character, ideas, religion, and systems of government and were destined to dominate the planet. This led the United States to adopt a policy of imperialism that would lead to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Asian people in Hawaii, Philippines and China. Not very Christian, eh Mr. King.

I'm Jewish and I don't even get his point.  I don't remember Jesus saying thou shall kill the natives.  

I could take this theme back to the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition but I think Mr. King understands what I mean.

So Chuck remarks at the Spanish Inquisition... an example of where my own ancestors were burned at the stake, but what is left out of the textbooks today is how and why Christian Europe became so hostile.  Before there was a Christian Inquisition there was a Muslim one.  The so called Al Andalus was not the Islamic utopia our media is making it out to be.  Here is an excerpt underlying my point.

The idea that Muslims, Christians, and Jews "lived and shared together" in medieval Cordoba could perhaps be dismissed as a rhetorical flight of fancy, but the idea that Christianity and the Inquisition ended the brilliance of Cordoba is a deliberate lie.

According to The Cambridge Companion to Maimonides, "the fundamentalist Almohad movement," which "fought to restore the pristine faith of Islam, based on the Quran and the Sunna, and to enforce the precepts of the sacred law" (sound familiar?), conquered Cordoba in 1148 and drove out the ten-year-old Moses Maimonides and his family.  They hid from the Almohads in Andalusia for ten years, then emigrated to Morocco, where Maimonides wrote his Epistle on Forced Conversion to console his Jewish brethren forced to choose between conversion to Islam and death.  Later he moved to Cairo, where he achieved safety by acting as a physician to the Muslim rulers.  Obviously, the great works of Moses Maimonides were not written in Cordoba, and Christian exclusivism and the Inquisition had nothing to do with his departure.

There is the case of a Christian nation that only 69 years ago put its own citizens into concentration camps in California. There is the case of a Christian nation that had to fight a bitter Civil War because it allowed its Christian citizens to own other human beings. Not very Christian like.

well actually... those Christians bought those slaves from Muslims.  not justifying the practice, but slavery was not something that was prevalent to Europe before the greater contact of the two cultures.

as for the Japanese.  I admit America made some mistakes, but... wow,,, I wouldn't compare us to the cruel sword of Mohammad for it.

via blog.oregonlive.com image via thenoseonyourface.com

btw... not saying I spent much time on this, but I'm not sure it is worth it.