The Jews Who Love Ahmadinejad

It usually can't be stressed enough that Judaism and Zionism are separate belief systems. Judaism is both a belief system and an ethnic identity that is thousands of years old, that enjoins good action on its followers, flowing from the same fundamental proposition that form the basis of Islam - that there is only one Almighty (Al-Mighty?) and that service to that Almighty is the definition of good. Zionism is a political agenda that seeks to consolidate already inhabited land under the control of political movement conceived by and for European Jews.

There are those regressive individuals on either side of the Middle East conflict who out of ignorance or arrogance wish to blur this line. Of the former, we have the many millions of Muslims who look upon all Jews as Zionists, and consequently look upon them with suspicion. On the other side, we have those Zionist "professionals" - the PR people, the Likudniks, the American Evangelicals, the Western chauvanists, and the shrewd imperialists who lead all of the former. They wish to link the future of the Jewish people inextricably with that of the future of Zionism, such that a desire to vanquish this vile ideology of greed and racism can be easily portrayed as an attempt to destroy the Jewish people. Of the two, the ones who are more dangerous to Judaism are the later - the Zionists themselves, for their goal is to hold Judaism hostage to a self-interested political agenda, and use innocent Jews as the human shields of the movement.

What's missing from this analysis, however, is the perspective of religious Anti-Zionist Jews themselves, who go further than to simply say that Judaism and Zionism are separate entities; instead, they assert that Judaism and Zionism are mutually exclusive.



This is why when President Ahmadinejad comes to New York, they come out in his support - it's obvious that the push towards war in the Middle East doesn't come from Iran today anymore than it did in 1980, when all the great powers from the US to the USSR and the Arab despots supported Saddam Hussein's invasion.