Shalom, my friend!

Greetings.

I'm delighted to see you're beginning to attract some reasoned critiques from Jews. That means they (i.e., more Jews than just myself) are beginning to notice you.

I'm happy to respond to Jewish critics as I have time. But if it develops into an avalanche of attack, I can't spend my whole life in a kind of Talmudic debate with them all, arguing the semantics of obscure issues and minutia.

I'm interested to see how you'll hold up under more critical and intellectual dissection. You're obviously a smart guy, but there are a lot of contradictions you're going to have to justify or obscure.

My dear sir. Jewish identity itself is rife with contradictions, hypocrisies, and paradoxes. It's not my original idea. Jewish scholars have written about it. Of course. I have a sense, based on some of the things you say, that you too (to your credit) may have some open sense of that. For my part, I do not claim to be perfect. Far from it. I am not beyond mistakes, nor are you. But I think you'll be disappointed in discovering that I can defend my positions quite well. But I'm not interested in mere swordfight wordsmanship. I'm interested in content. Substance. So if these debates seem to be steered by my assaulters into quicksand games of one-upmanship, nitpicking, and insane sophistry, I'll turn to other tasks.

Here's one for starters in relation to the kafir/antisemite question: it's presumably well known to you that the meanings of words are fluid and defined by context, and that each of these terms (kafir and antisemite) has had its own career and has meant different things in different times and contexts and out of different mouths. Wilhelm Marr, the hater of Jewy and racial ideologue who coined the term "anti-Semite" in the late nineteenth century to refer to himself, obviously meant something entirely different by it than does Abraham Foxman when he uses it today.

True, words float in meaning, expanding or contracting over time and context. But would you really argue that the term "anti-Semite" meant something completely different in Marr's time for Jews than it does for Jews today? If anything, I think the term, for the Jewish community, has picked up steam, no? The "anti-Semite" has become codified into Jewish identity quite clearly, don't you think? As some Jewish scholars have noted, for many atheist Jews who have lost their religious and ethnic Jewish roots, if you take away their self-heralded victim status vis-a-vis the antisemitic bogeyman that has come to define so much their identity, what is there left for them in being a "Jew?" Talk about contradictions!

By the way, Wilhelm Marr (the German who coined the term "antisemitism"), your "hater of Jewry" and "racial ideologue," obviously couldn't have been as racially-minded as you'd like. As I recall, he had a series of 4 wives. One was a Jew, and two were "half-Jews." There's either a "contradiction" in his ideology as a "racial ideologue," or there's a contradiction (stereotype?) in your premise about him. As I recall, his original "antisemitic" book was based on a critique of the Jewish seizure of German culture, "The Victory of Jews Over Germany," or something like that. I don't think Marr advocated genocide. Read some German history and you'll find his basic complaint was legitimate. Even if you disagree that his complaint was well-founded, we live in an age where it's taboo to publicly discuss this.

And, yes, the term "antisemitism" surely meant something different to Marr than it does to Foxman. The main reason is that Marr wasn't Jewish, and Foxman IS a Jew whose JOB is to make sure Jews are always scared enough into coughing up more dough to fight "antisemitism": i.e., conjuring the eternal Hitler on the horizon. The Jewish community, rife with so many identity conflictions, needs the concept of the irrationally malevolent "antisemite" to hold them all together. Without the "anti-Semitic" Palestinians, and the generic "anti-Semitic" everywhere, modern Israel would implode in conflicts between the Sephardim and Ashenazim, etc. The legend of the eternal "anti-Semite" is the glue to modern Jewish identity. It is the source of their lofty moral claim, don't you think?

Similarly, when Rumi used the word "kafir" it no doubt meant something quite different from when the same word is used today by members of al-Muhajiroun or other such reactionary Muslim organizations. And yet while you examine only the most manipulative and ill-intentioned uses of the word "anti-Semite" you present a simplistic (dare I say PC?) apologia for the various ways in which the word "kafir" has been employed under different contexts by many different Muslims to dehumanize non-Muslims.

Frankly, I'm not too interested in the term "kafir." You are trying to position me into a corner where I'm defending Islamic ethnocentrism. I'm not interested in Islamic ethnocentrism. If the Saudis ruled Hollywood, I would be. If Rupert Murdoch and Izzy Asper propagandized throughout their media empires as Muslim apologists, I would be. I've never seen anybody called a "kafir" in America, but I see people -- good, decent, moral people -- called "anti-Semite" all the time. I suspect the Amish have a pejorative term for the non-Amish. But who cares? So long as the Amish don't have a firm lock on the intellectual, educational, governmental, and cultural infrastructure, they can freely call me whatever they'd like as an outsider and I really don't care. Muslims are not complaining every minute over the Western airwaves about the terrible "kafirs" and how they must be censored, shut down and/or fined and jailed for, say, daring to criticize Muslims as a community. And, as you surely know, more and more agitation about "kafirs" in the Islamic world may well be understood as reactions to Israeli racism and Western imperialism. If someone invaded wherever you lived, and took it over, worked to erode your culture and belief system, and jailed and murdered people, you'd be whispering your own version of "kafir" too. You'd shout it when you could.

Your hypocrisy in this instance even goes so far that you employ the same trick as Jews who apologize for the very negative connotations of the word "goy" by simply citing the literal definition "(member of a foreign) nation":

This is what I want: your honest concession. You introduce the term "goy" here in this discussion. Wonderful. In Jewish tradition, the goy is the generic non-Jew. Most Jews don't like to talk about this. To your credit, you bring it up. As you know, in Jewish contextual tradition, the goy is scum. (Lest you jump on me for technicalities, "scum" is my descriptive word. I'm flowering things up a bit, you know?) Again, you may charge whatever you'd like against me. If my concession to your notion about "kafir" is necessary to pry a public concession from you about the pejorative term goy for ALL NON-JEWS, then, pal, it's worth it.

But I point out to you that the term "goy" in Jewish culture is much more parallel to "kafir" in Islamic society. In both cases they are of religious origin -- ethnocentric views of outsiders. The term "anti-Semite" is a term that has become largely a policing device, a tool. Sorry. "Anti-Semite" and "kafir" aren't parallel terms.

I repeat to you: in Western culture, Muslims are not freely smearing people on TV and the newspapers with the term "kafir." If they had the power to do it, this web site would be about them. In Western culture, the Jewish Lobby that is empowered so heavily everywhere has free reign not only to use the term "anti-Semite" as a policing tool in all directions, they have the power to use it to punish people they don't like.

you say that kafir means simply "someone who refuses to accept God," while ignoring that the word is related to the words for "liar" and "ingratitude," (for one online dictionary example, see link 1 below). You also omit the fact that in much of Islamic scripture including the Quran (see link 2, below) the kuffar (plural) are regarded as playing a preordained role as the enemy and hunter of Muslims; that a separate set of religious laws apply to Muslim actions toward kuffar which allows greater latitude for violence and theft (see quote from Abu Hamza in the last Shariah magazine below).

Of all the tens of thousands of things at the Jewish Tribal Review, why is it that you fixate on armwrestling with me over a Muslim term? I suspect it echos your very special interest and world Jewry's war with the Palestinians. AND Jewry's need to equate itself as victims with the REAL victims in the Middle East: Arabs and Muslims. The Jewish community doesn't like to see itself in the mirror as ruthless oppressor. So, yeah. Muslims got bad words too. You and I both know that anyone called "kafir" today is probably an object of bitterness: the Israelis and, increasingly, Americans bombing their lands in the Zionist shadow. Or, for that matter, any member of the noble "coalition" who comes to harnass today the people of Afghanistan and Iraq. Ain't nobody sitting on the heads of Jews and their nuclear bombs in the Middle East, sorry.

And herein lies the crucial difference between the Muslim term "kafir" and the Jewish term "anti-Semite." Muslims are trapped beneath Jewish and Western imperialism and are fighting a war of Islamic liberation and their invaders are understood as "kafirs." If the Israeli army comes to my home and shits and pees all over everything (as they've done during the Intifada), I'd call them "kafirs" (and a lot else) too. Jews are a central force in the apparatus of Islamic and Arab oppression, and anyone who dares to say this in our Judeocentric society is decreed to be an "anti-Semite." Again, "kafir" and "anti-Semite" are in no way equal terms. You yourself argued that context informs words. In the sense I describe to you, you are right.

In other words many of the same elements which you ascribe to the term "anti-Semite" in the Jewish worldview also apply in many Islamic contexts to the term kafir, and yet you accept the most benign possible use of the word "kafir" as its "definition" while registering only the most sinister possible uses of the word "antisemite."

No. I accept one of your original points here -- that context informs meaning. Ultimately, a word can be a product of its context. Today's context:
* International Jewry=affluence, power, tribal activism, brutal Israel.
* International Muslims=disorganization, impoverishment, no unity, brutal resistance to brutal oppression.

"Kafir"= aimed at the oppressor.
"Antisemite"=aimed at the oppressed.

Each meaning a product of the context of our times.

Um, and, please ... What is the benevolent use of the term "anti-Semite?"

You may say that you are here to analyze Jewish ethnocentrism and not Muslim cultural chauvinism, but the salient point here is that you use a very critical set of analytical tools on Jewish culture, but apparently another, far more generous set on non-Jewish cultures.

This isn't an information center about Muslims. If they ran Hollywood, the modern art world, American foreign policy, and all the rest, I assure you this web site would be about Muslims and who would care about Jews? Your "critical set of analytical tools" treat oppressed and oppressor alike, and this is a false proposition. My criteria for criticism is who deserves it. I could criticize the ethnocentrism of every culture in the world, BUT THESE CULTURES DON'T NEGATIVELY IMPACT ME (AND SO MANY OTHERS) IN THE MANNER OF TRIBAL JUDEOCENTRISM.

That's not intellectual honesty;

Oh, yes it is. Yours is false reasoning at the very least, and intentional fraud and dissimulation at the worst. But you are trying to be reasonable in your condemnation of my perspective, and that -- from the Jewish community -- is progress, I assure you.

rather it is, as Jody correctly points out, simply another means and form of racial discrimination.

You have the audacity to accuse me of "racial discrimination" when that is the foundation/origin of Jewish identity? Are you one of those guys who claims that the "Chosen People" and "seed of Abraham" concepts are really about passing out candies to the dirty, drunken goyim? Are you one of those guys who can pass this accusation so casually when Israel, the nation built in the name of Jews everywhere, is an apartheid state?

It's common enough, and certainly a tactic employed by a goodly number of Jews,

Concessions are helpful. But you spill them as asides and not center stage. But I give you points for conceding ANYTHING. Most Jews veil. You've got a couple windows open.

but that's not company I would expect you to be proud of. My crusading friend, my guess is that your biases and internal inconsistencies are, over time, going to be deconstructed and fleshed out by more and more readers as more attention is paid to you.

Hey, my pesky friend. I have no doubt there will be virtual Jewish tag-teams trying to tear this web site down, figuratively and literally. But, so long as they can only squeeze through the Internet one by one to argue, and not cloud up like mosquitos on me, they're only going to accentuate and underscore the fundamental truths at this web site. With all due respect, like you.

I'm interested to see whether you post this response;

Listen. I haven't got all the time in the world to respond at length to every bitcher and moaner (polite or not) who glides in out of cyberspace. But I'm interested in responding/debating/arguing, whatever, as time allows. Guaranteed, folks who come in with insults and a flaming chip on their shoulder, I'll ignore. If they frame themselves as somewhat reasonable (I give you credit here) I'm game for some play.

it'll be interesting to see whether you are going to engage these sorts of honest criticisms or whether you are going to shove your head in the sand in order to more confidently rally your admirers forward.

My dear sir. You don't need to bait me like this. I see through it. If there are Jews out there who want to question me in a civil manner, in a genuine quest for understanding and mutual clarity, I'll respond as time allows.

I'm really not sure. Regardless, good luck and enjoy yourself or, as we say, b'hatz'lkha

(Matan Ariel)

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kafir

2: http://www.almuhajiroun.com.pk/detail.asp?id=1653&id1=14

3: "If a kafir person (non-believer) goes in a Muslim country, he is like a cow," explains Hamza. "Anybody can take him. That is the Islamic law...I say the reality that's in the Muslim books anyway. Whether I say it or not, it's in the books." (MATAN ARIEL)

Follow-up, Round 2 with Matan Ariel.