thinking and taking the book out of the box

Mitt Romney and Israel still making waves or hay as he tries to throw Obama into the barn. Its all B.S. but gives the pundits what to wax on, or better yet to chew and spit out. Frankly, Sheldon Adelson seems the most interesting part of the entire story; after all this election looks like its going to be a crap shoot and for Sheldon and the Vegas bookies, it looks like a “pick-em” scenario. You can get some traction out of yids but, with regard to Romney, he’d have to to an “Undercover Boss” story, sport the locks and black garb and head into the religious urban jungle, or head out into the  heat of the Judean hills to get a sense that the wild and stiff-necked culture is more than the ivy-league educated smoothies who are nominally jewish, perhaps more as a perceived and unfortunate birth defect…

From Tablet Magazine (see link at end) …Just how racist against Palestinians is Mitt Romney? According to Current TV host Cenk Uygur, “deeply racist.” Salon-partner site Mondoweiss similarly accused the presumptive Republican presidential nominee of espousing “painfully oblivious racism.” Saeb Erekat, senior aide to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, deemed Romney simply a “racist.”

What grave offense did Romney commit to merit such opprobrium? Speaking to donors in Jerusalem, he ascribed the success of the Israeli economy to the country’s strong entrepreneurial culture—implicitly deriding Palestinian culture as inadequate by comparison. “Culture makes all the difference,” Romney said. “As you come here and you see the GDP per capita, for instance, in Israel, which is about $21,000, and you compare that with the GDP per capita just across the areas managed by the Palestinian Authority, which is more like $10,000 per capita, you notice a dramatic, stark difference in economic vitality.”

…It is true that Romney made no mention of Israeli occupation as a cause of Palestinian stagnation—a crucial and highly problematic omission. But is his claim, however inadequate, prima facie racist? Before answering, we might want to consider a person who made exactly the same argument almost a century ago: Albert Einstein…..

This was written by explorer Richard Burton in the 1870′s ; Burton a notorious sort of conservative libertine exemplified British colonialism and cultural hegemony while simultaneously fighting the establishment for his own piece of the pie. An atheist of the first degree that makes Hitchens look like bowed supplication, he admonished all religions and his writings on Jews were wild and loaded with fantasy.Ultimately, Burton lacked the intellectual capacity to fathom it so did a pseudo-intellectual hatchet job on it. Although a superb linguist, he never grasped Hebrew. fairly anti-semitic, apparently the jewish women were not forthcoming in extending their charms to him. And the men as well:

As regards the restoration of Israel to the Holy Land, that favourite theme of prophecy and poetry, that day-dream of the Jew, at least until he found a country and a home in the far happier regions beyond his ancient seats, no supernatural gift is required to point out the natural course of events. Though the recovery of Jerusalem is the subject of eternal supplication throughout the Jewish world, wealthy and prosperous Jews openly declare that they take no personal interest in the matter. The prayer, in fact, has become a mere formula. Still, with six millions of souls, which will presently become nine, there can be no difficulty in finding volunteers like those who now garrison the four Holy Cities—Jerusalem and Hebron, Tiberias and Safed. A single million of souls would give the Israelite complete command over the Land of Promise in the widest…Read More:http://www.vho.org/aaargh/fran/livres7/BURTONTheJew.pdf

….Einstein disdained all forms of racial discrimination, having experienced its effects firsthand many times in the form of anti-Semitism. Perhaps most infamously, the physicist’s groundbreaking scientific theories were derided by German Nobel laureates Philipp Lenard and Johannes Stark as “Jüdische Physik” in contradistinction to the superior “Deutsche Physik.” Spurred by such ordeals, Einstein would fight against anti-Semitism for much of his later life, most notably through his Zionist advocacy. But his battle against racism extended beyond Einstein’s own community.

Already in 1931, while still living in Berlin, he penned a letter of support to African-American civil rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois. It was printed in the NAACP’s magazine, The Crisis, with an introduction that recapped Einstein’s achievements and noted that “he hates race prejudice because as a Jew he knows what it is.”

Einstein brought his passion f

acial equality to America, where he befriended the residents of the largely segregated African-American community of Princeton and allied himself with the African-American actor and activist Paul Robeson. He inveighed harshly against “the treatment of the Negro,” which he called “the worst disease under which the society of our nation suffers,”…

…Yet in a largely overlooked September 1930 conversation with a Russian rabbi and personal friend named Chaim Tchernowitz, Einstein expressed sentiments highly similar to the ones Mitt Romney articulated last week in Jerusalem. Tchernowitz recorded the exchange–which took place at Einstein’s summer home in Caputh, Berlin—in his Hebrew memoir, Masekhet Zikhronot. There, he recounts how the discussion turned to the question of the Jews in Palestine and their surrounding Arab neighbors. The rabbi transcribed Einstein’s thoughts as follows:

Einstein explained to me that he is universalist in his outlook in that he does not believe in differences between the races. Rather, he believes in the acculturation of individuals and nations to their surroundings and the spiritual inheritance that is acquired through education. He believes that the individual is born as a blank slate and only education can make him into anything. … For this reason, he is able to believe in the unique genius of the Jewish nation. … He believes in its future because it is an ancient nation that has absorbed the great spiritual treasure of many generations….

…Einstein’s formulation is valuable because it spells out exactly how cultural explanations are distinct from racial ones. Racists argue that human behavior is determined by factors that are intrinsic and immutable. Cultural explanations of difference, on the other hand, point to things that are contingent and changeable….

It would seem that Einstein hoes a rational/Aristotlean line that Maimonides delineated.

…Einstein explicitly proffered his cultural analysis of Jewish success not to affirm the racial thinking of his time, but to combat it. For him, the reason one nation may appear more advanced than another is not inherent racial superiority, but extrinsic advantages like education or intellectual inheritance that can be tapped into by anyone.

Richard Burton: ( who unlike Einstein, had no qualms about extending cultural criticism into the realm of racism):

A Jew abandoning the faith of Israel must die the death; also he should be surely slain for all such breaches of the Law as committing adultery. All who admit the doctrine of the Trinity, whether they be Jewish perverts, Christians, Muslims, or Pagans; all Hebrews who have violated
the secrets of the Synagogue; and all those especially who speak against or who injure a co-religionist, have forfeited their lives. In these days minor offenders are usually excommunicated; but those who have been informers or who proved themselves hostile to Israel must be killed at all risks, either by the Jews themselves, or, better still, through the local authorities. This is an invariable rule….

( tablet): An intelligent cultural critique, far from being bigoted, can point the way toward constructive improvement. Kemal Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey, famously applied social, political, and economic lessons from the West to revive his crumbling country…. President Obama, in his Cairo address to the Muslim world in 2008, offered many pointed criticisms of Arab culture, censuring its disempowerment of women, suppression of personal freedom, and the corruption endemic in many Arab governments. These examples are not racist: They are honest attempts at constructive discourse based on the assumption that culture is mutable….

Whether Romney’s statement reaches this standard is up for debate. His analysis may have been right or wrong. It may prove reductive and oversimplified, or an expression of a hard truth about Palestinian culture. On this, very smart people can disagree. But for honest observers, it should not be debatable that whatever the merits of Romney’s cultural contrast between Israelis and Palestinians, it does not rise to the level of racism.

You don’t need to be an Einstein to figure this out. Just ask Salam Fayyad, the Palestinian Prime Minister, who keeps a copy of Start-Up Nation—the book by Romney adviser Dan Senor, which the candidate cited as his source for attributing Israel’s economic success to its entrepreneurialism—on his desk. Apparently, the Palestinian prime minister thinks his people have something to learn from Israeli culture as well.Read More:http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/108428/romney-and-einstein-racists

Burton: The amount of intrigue and plotting is excessive even in a Syrian settlement, the charges bandied about by men against one another are atrocious—this doctor is a murderer, that scribe is an adulterer, and the third is a swindler and a thief. If the visitor were to believe half what he hears, he would find himself in a den of brigands. That not a few of these charges are founded on fact may be gathered from what travellers have printed concerning certain sons of this Holy City, some of which are too revolting for publication. The rich divines are accused of shamelessly embezzling the Halúkah, large sums sent from Europe for the maintenance of the community; and the poor are ready with complaints upon the most trivial occasions—the breaking of a hen’s leg sends them on a hurried official visit to their Vice-Consuls. It is not too much to say that if Safed again produced a theological school, it would rival in its narrow bigotry and peculiar ferocity that which disgraced the sixteenth century.Read More:http://www.vho.org/aaargh/fran/livres7/BURTONTheJew.pdf

ADDENDUM:

(see link at end)…Throughout this continent the career of the Jew is at once thriving and promising. The removal of Jewish disabilities in England and the almost universal spread of constitutionalism throughout Europe have told mightily in favour of the Jews. An essential condition of all reform is that the reformer never can say, “Thus far will I go, and no farther.” In sporting parlance, he took off the weight from a dark horse, and the latter is everywhere winning in a canter. The father kept a little shop in the Ghetto; the son has palaces and villas, buys titles, crosses, and other graven images utterly unknown to the Mosaic Law, and intermarries with the historic Christian families of the land. The great, if not the only, danger is that in the outlying parts of Europe, where men are not thoroughly tamed, and where the sword is still familiar to the hand, the Jew advances far too fast; nor is it easy to see how his career can be arrested before it hurries him over the precipice. At this moment Hungary is a case in point. The Magnate, profuse in hospitality, delighting in display, careless of expenditure, and contemptuous of economy, sees all his rich estates, with their flocks and herds, their crops and mines, passing out of his own hands, and contributing to swell the bottomless pocket of the Jewish usurer. But the Magyar is a fiery race; and if this system of legal robbery be allowed to pass a certain point, which, by-the-bye, is not far distant, the Jews… Read More:http://www.vho.org/aaargh/fran/livres7/BURTONTheJew.pdf