To Take on ISIS Americans Should End Support for Jewish Nationalism

http://mondoweiss.net/2015/11/americans-support-nationalism

The role that US support for Jewish nationalism in Palestine is not fully appreciated as one of the main reasons behind 911 and the resulting Iraq War which most think led to ISIS and the terrorism it creates.

Excerpts from a good article that the religious/quasi-religious fundamentalism of some Jews, (including those professing atheism!) regarding Israel must be confronted if we are to confront fundamentalism in Islam.
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the biggest impediment to both the reform of Islam and peace in the Middle East that Americans have the (in)ability to remove our support for a militant Jewish ideology that few Arabs and Muslims have ever accepted

This understanding dinned in on Americans after the last big shocker, 9/11. At that time some observers pointed out a simple truth: that Osama bin Laden and his radical little army were motivated by the occupation of Palestine as well as the U.S. presence in Saudi Arabia. But that idea was suppressed -

The 9/11 Commission concluded that US policy in Palestine was part of the motivation for the attacks, but that analysis was whittled down to a few sentences– even as the head of the commission said that the Iraq war was launched to protect Israel. (And Condi Rice said the war would provide “strategic relief” to Israel and Colin Powell said it was dreamed up by the Zionist thinktank the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs).[/B]

And the creation of Israel always had a religious character for many Jews: a faith so core that it gave life meaning, a faith so strong that it overruled reality. The former SDS leader Todd Gitlin says that Jews are a chosen people: they have “an unshakable attachment to the wild idea of divine election, which, however dampened, however sublimated, continues to ripple beneath the surface of everyday events.”

Yesterday James North and I wrote here that we’re not monocausal; even if there was justice in Palestine it would not end Islamist violence. I stand by that point. But the ultimate question is the one Bernie Sanders raised last night, What can we do to end the religious element of the conflicts in the Middle East? And the answer is that Jews must end their support for Zionism, which has turned out to be religious, fascistic and militant, and is fueling rage across the Middle East and further

While Harry Truman’s predecessor Franklin Roosevelt surely saw Paris coming when he said of two leading rabbis who came into the White House to urge a Jewish state in 1944: To think of it, two men, two holy men, coming here to ask me to let millions of people be killed in a jihad.

It was an American problem then and it’s an American problem now. We have set aside our own secular values when it comes to the Middle East. We should stop lecturing Muslims about their backward ideas till we reckon with our own. -

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