Shame Day: Zionism

This hasn’t been a great week.

My pick for the Zimbabwe elections lost to a 90-year old autocrat, white nose syndrome is devastating the American bat population, and the recent attempt to defund the NSA’s domestic spying programs has failed in Congress.

And in spite of all that, I’m going to be discussing issue I’ve been wanting to take an axe to for quite some time now.

Yep- Zionism.

That receptacle of all human achievement, Wikipedia, defines Zionism as follows:

Zionismis a form of nationalism of Jews and Jewish culture that supports a Jewish nation state in the territory defined as the Land of Israel.

Now I’ve talked about nationalism and it’s evils before, but for the sake of pure simplicity, let’s just focus on all the twisted malice summed up in that little sentence above. Now people have a false image in their heads that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is somehow complicated. Plenty of people have fallen prey to the tacitly (or heck, overtly) racist idea that the Arabs are just an inherently volatile people and the Middle East always has and always will be a mire of conflict and bloodshed (I’ve Shame-Dayed this whole concept too).

I try to cut through all that nonsense by presenting the simplest explanation of the conflict that I can offer.

Readers, would you support a whites-only state?

Would you support a blacks-only state?

Would you support a Jews-only state?

Now you might be saying, “But Gordon, you fearless mariner of the seas of controversy, being Jewish isn’t a racial thing! It’s a religious one!”

Ok then, so you’d support what? A religious state? I’m sorry, I thought this was America.

Last time I checked, it was the duty of every sane, enlightened human being to support religious freedom. And by the way, exactly which branch of Judaism gets to dictate this “Jewish” state? The Hasidic? The Reformed? The Orthodox? The Ultra-Orthodox? The lesser known Ultra-Ultra-Orthodox?

Or maybe you’re saying, “But Gordon, you dauntless champion of book learn’n, being Jewish is more of a cultural thing!”

Basing a state off of that sounds almost worse than the religious or racial argument. The implication would be that there any divergence or change within that culture would effectively be sedition of the state. How can you have a subculture or counterculture or any basic difference in worldview if your entire country is based on a concrete, unchanging perspective?

I mean, the implications of that would be censorship of the media or torching the offices of a soccer club for recruiting a couple Muslim players or proposing that non-Jewish citizens be forced to swear “loyalty oaths” or…

Oh wait, that all happened…

Again, the concept is just so wholly psychotic. The idea that a single square of land inherently belongs to anybody is dumb, the idea that you can only be there if you have the right genetic code or acceptable views about life, the universe, and everything is simply an abomination. And that’s just in the idea of it- we’re not even talking about the application and implications.

What happens to a culture where it’s constantly drilled into your head that you are, for whatever reason- racial, religious, or cultural- so different from your neighbors as to not even be able to live within the same borders?

That kind of, well, narcissism might, oh I don’t know, produce such an enthocentric society as to make things like imposing imprisonment and indefinite detention on minors a norm…

Click on the image to open it up [and zoom in] in a new window.

…Or have your armed forces wear t-shirts showing a picture of cross hairs over a pregnant Arab women with the caption “One shot, two kills,” just to name the mildest…

Seriously, go read the article linked above

Or even segregate the *****ing bus lines, because **** civil rights or even pretending to be fair…

Heck, you might even go so far as to coerce Ethiopian immigrants into taking birth control so as to maintain an ethnic majority for ze glorious fatherland and advance the chosen race until-

Sorry- I got confused with some other, eerily similar bigots…

I could go on to list the plethora of war crimes or daily horrors visited on the Palestinians, Israeli-Arabs, Ethiopian, Mizrahi, and Sephardic Jews- heck, anyone who offers the slightest criticism of this fascist state. That would take all night- heck, all week- and I’d barely get past 1981. For now, let’s just all collectively shake our heads in disgust that this kind of inherently racist, intolerant state exists in this day and age (let alone enjoys a blank check from the US and Canadian governments) and toast to the day when Zionism will join apartheid and every other form of bigotry as a footnote in the history books of a better world.