Prime Minister Mahathir Muhammad
Malaysia
Dear Mr. Prime Minister,
Your statement about Jews running the world was foolish and self-defeating, not because it isn't nice, or because it's anti-semitic, but because it confuses things in just the way Ariel Sharon and his companions wish. You may be sure that they found great profit and comfort in it.
Jews do not run the world. The American empire and its Israeli client do, and the power causing the United States to serve the interests of Israel even contrary to its own is clearly not Judaism. Relations between Israel and the United States were not even really friendly until the 1967 war. You will remember that the United States actually forced Israel out of the Sinai in 1956, together with Britain and France, its allies at the time. Today the United States cannot bring itself to force Israel out of a single colonial settlement in the West Bank or even Gaza, even when Israel has no allies at all, unlike the case in 1956.
What has changed? Jews have no more influence in the United States now than in 1956. They have lost a number of allies, notably blacks; Muslims are becoming a significant force; and Jews themselves in the United States identify with Israel less than ever since 1948.
The difference is clearly this. America fell in love with Israel after the 1967 war because Israel proved to be a winner, and because America suddenly looked at Israel and saw itself in the mirror. Americans identify with Israel's conquest and colonization of Palestine because this recapitulates America's genocidal conquest and colonization of North America. America loves Israel for being an outpost of the West, the light of European and American civilization among the barbarous backward heathen. This is no more about Judaism than apartheid South Africa was about Christianity, although the apartheid regime brayed loud and long about being the bastion of Christianity in the heart of darkness, and thereby also got steady American support for many years. Remember that Israel and South Africa themselves recognized their kinship - they were close friends as long as the apartheid regime endured.
It was clearly necessary in bringing down apartheid South Africa to strip away its Christian pretensions. Once its ideology stood exposed as nothing but greed and domination, with Christianity and anti-Communism revealed as mere ideological pretexts, the regime crumbled.
In the same way, Israel must be exposed as anything but a Jewish state. It is a Western colonial crusader state using Judaism as ideological cover, but it is in fact an unrelenting enemy of Judaism.
Judaism says, "Hear, O Israel - the Lord your God is One . . . and you shall love the Lord your God." Israel refuses to hear Moses and the prophets about anything, and loves domination, plunder, and humiliating the weak.
Judaism calls Jews to be a light to the nations. Israel teaches the nations to believe in darkness - in violence, in force of arms, in deception, in torture and other horrors done in secret because they will not bear the light of day. Israel does all it can every day to demonstrate that darkness and not light is the way to find success.
Judaism says, "What does the Lord your God require of you but to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God." Israel delights in every kind of injustice, loves cruelty and abhors mercy, and walks in the most insufferable conceit with its military hardware and its equally arrogant American friends.
Judaism forbids Israel to wage war against fruit trees. Israel delights to wage war against fruit trees, even olive trees that have stood for hundreds of years until these young gods of war come against them with bulldozers - and they have already destroyed hundreds of thousands.
Judaism, in the person of Moses, confesses in Psalm 90 that God has been the dwelling place of Jews in all generations. Repudiating this foundational understanding of Judaism prescribed by Moses, Zionism claims that not God but a modern European-style nation state is the dwelling place of the Jewish people, and on a certain piece of land. This is the foundational idolatry of Zionism, what in Islam is called shirk.
The Israeli regime is simply not a Jewish state. It is a cancer on the Jewish people, a deadly poison to the Jewish soul. It is unjust to deal with a cancer by attacking the patient.
Christian Zionists in America are Israel's greatest supporters, and without them, nothing that any Jew could do would make America act as it does. Christian Zionists do not love Jews or Judaism, but they love Israel, because Israel embodies their own quite anti-Jewish religion, which also flings to the ground all the teachings of Jesus, even as they say to him, "Lord, Lord." In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus warned us against exactly this religion..
The United States, like Israel, was founded by invaders who came to North America to set up a religious paradise, a city on a hill. They did so by mass murder, theft, deceit, slavery, and ethnic cleansing on a massive scale. The only way they could look in the mirror was to prove to themselves that in all these abominations they were God's instrument. American religion numbs the American conscience, enabling Americans to feel good about themselves and what they do without having to face who they really are and what they really do. Thus, the more abominably America acts in the world, the more religious pieties we hear from American rulers. As Jesus said of their fathers the Pharisees, "They rob widows' houses, and for a pretense make long prayers." George Bush is unmatched in cruelty and rapacity among American Presidents since Woodrow Wilson, who like Bush also accompanied his oppressions and cruelties with brazen religious fervor.
In all this, America is just like the Zionist enterprise. Americanism, for all its Christian patter, is a brutal secular ideology. It uses Christianity as a virus uses and destroys the cells of our bodies, but it is the bitter enemy of everything Jesus of Nazareth and his apostles ever taught. Zionism and Americanism are alike, and that's why they love one another. They are in no way Jewish or Christian. They are modern Western secular religions which use Judaism and Christianity to deceive, but which destroy them as they use them. These ideologies, like South African apartheid, lose power when their claim to be Jewish or Christian is exposed as a lie, but when Muslims and others confuse Zionism with Judaism and Americanism with Christianity, you strengthen these ideologies and oppose yourselves. Even now, are you not feeling upon your skins the consequences of this failed strategy?
Peter Attwood
15047 Coralwood Drive
Chino Hills, CA 91709
USA
attwoods@earthlink.net