informant38
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...But of these sophisms and elenchs of merchandise I skill not...
Milton, Areopagitica

Except he had found the
standing sea-rock that even this last
Temptation breaks on; quieter than death but lovelier; peace
that quiets the desire even of praising it.

Jeffers, Meditation On Saviors


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20.10.03

Ω{The phrase is "champing at the bit" blurred and obscured because it does involve the horse's mouth, and because our memories are indistinct now, most of us don't ride, only a dwindling minority of retentives holding each one their own bindle of phrase and locution, caught apt work of folk poetry and mother tongue.
I'm trying to gather the bits of irritation and terror into some cohesive page of at least temporary sense, and today there's this.
To speak of the 'War in Iraq' as primarily a 'Jewish' enterprise is, in America anway, to call down the leukocytes of anti-bigotry, you'll get dismissed out of hand. And yet it occurs to me the 'other side' sees exactly that. The stature of Mahathir Mohammad in his world gives a lot of weight to his position, whatever it is.
It is taboo, in the west, to speak of these things publicly. And I think one of the main reasons is semantic. 'The Jews' is a meaningless term in this context. There are Jews who are risking their lives opposing the racist policies and actions of Ariel Sharon's government; where are 'The Jews' in that?
But Sharon is a Jew and he gets his identity wholly and completely from that, without it he's nothing.
It's that inability, or refusal to further distinguish that gives these cowards a place to hide, and arms them.
Thuggish racism justified by the suffering and death of other, more innocent people, who share a name, a genetic history. It is vital to these men that no one be able to describe them as anything other than 'Jews', because they'll lose their excuses by that more accurate description.
Two things have gone unmentioned during these politically bizarre maneuvers in Iraq.
One is that the diaspora of the Jews, their 'homelessness', was directly caused by the sacking of Jerusalem in 586 b.c., by the Babylonians (Iraqis).
Clearly this could explain the destruction of antiquities, the looting of the museums that so horrified many sensitive souls in the west, and it could explain the strange 'look the other way' attitude of the occupying forces as it occurred. Seeing the 'War in Iraq' as a revenge fantasy of 'World Jewry' may be preposterous and mentally unsound, but preposterous things are easily dealt with by reason and logic.
The second is that most of the occupying authorities in Iraq have been Jews with 'non-Jewish' names. Bremer, Garner, Franks, Greenstock. That seems odd to me.
The problem is that even addressing this, whether or not it's true, whether or not it's significant, is automatically anti-semitic. So that at times it's as though 'we' are at war with the Arab world simply because they're 'anti-semitic'.
How about 'Jews' as a whole people aren't doing anything as a whole people, that there's so much fear, so much irrational reaction, that the root causes of it have disappeared, and now for a Jew to stand against the seeming 'will of God', as many have, is almost suicidally brave.
As in America, a loud, bigoted, and vicious minority speak for the divided whole as though they were its voice.
There's also a sense that these things are too trivial and bizarre to be dignified by response, but that's the point of this essay. It's what the 'other side' thinks; that isn't trivial, that's the mind of the 'enemy'.
Answer them. Show them how wrong they are. If they are.}

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