Chit Chat

By Ted Belman

From now on comments on every post must relate to the content of the post.

Comments that don’t relate to the post must go here.

Any person who contravenes this demand will be put on moderation. Also their offending comment will be trashed.

The reason for this demand is so that people who want to read comments which pertain to the post, don’t have to wade through the chatter.

Everyone will be happier.

April 16, 2020 | 7,975 Comments »

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25 Comments / 7975 Comments

  3. @Reader

    So who is he trying to hurt?

    He is trying to bring down Bibi’s Right wing govt, something which he has been trying to do since shortly after the govt was formed. He wants to try and split the govt based around the Heredi draft bill, and thereby force Bibi to strike a bargain with Gantz, which would give Washington complete control over Bibi or at least lead to new elections.

    Congratulations on your success with the emoticons.

  7. @Sebastien Zorn

    Here is an interesting book by Clement Leibovitz ((it is very thoroughly documented)):

    The Chamberlain-Hitler Deal it’s a PDF downloadable for free from his website:

    http://cleibovitz.upwize.com/

    The Chamberlain-Hitler Deal is an earlier version of the actual paperback In Our Time: The Chamberlain-Hitler Collusion written with a co-author and looking a lot more “civilized” but the authors themselves recommend reading the PDF in addition to the print version.

  8. Thanks, Reader.

    While scholars have discovered references to Christians in Gaul in the late second century C.E., this scroll is the first reliable evidence of Christianity north of the Alpine region before the fourth century C.E. It predates all other proof by at least 50 to 100 years.

    when civil order was breaking down in the Roman Empire. Emperors were

    Maximinus I 9first commoner to become emperor)
    Gordian I (proclaimed emperor alongside his son, while serving as governor of Africa)
    Gordian II(the shortest-reigning emperor)
    Pupienus (tortured and murdered by the Praetorian Guard)
    Balbinus (tortured and murdered by the Praetorian Guard)
    Gordian III (died aged 19, possible murder plot)
    Philip “the Arab”) (killed in battle)
    Philip II (murdered by the Praetorian Guard)
    Decius (killed in battle against the Goths)
    Herennius Etruscus (killed in battle, alonside his father)
    Tregonianus Gallus (murdered by his own troops)
    Hostilian ((reigned 1 month)
    Volusianus (murdered by the soldiers, alongside his father)
    Aemillianus (murdered by his own troops)
    Sibannacus (obscure)
    Valerian (died in captivity)
    Gallienus (murdered by army officers)
    Saloninus (murdered by rival troops)
    Claudius II “Gothicus” (d. of plague)
    Quintillus (committed suicide or killed by rival
    Aurelian (murdered by the Praetorian Guard)

    The dating is to the “Crisis of the Third Century (235–285)”

  10. Archaeologists Find Oldest Evidence Of Christianity North Of The Alps Inside An 1,800-Year-Old Silver Amulet

    https://allthatsinteresting.com/frankfurt-silver-inscription

    The silver amulet, dated at 230-270 AD / CE, contained an unmistakenly Christian inscription:

    “(In the name?) of Saint Titus.
    Holy, holy, holy!
    In the name of Jesus Christ, Son of God!
    The Lord of the world
    resists with [strengths?]
    all attacks(?)/setbacks(?).
    The God(?) grants
    entry to well-being.
    May this means of salvation(?) protect
    the man who
    surrenders himself to the will
    of the Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God
    since before Jesus Christ
    every knee bows: those in Heaven, those on Earth
    and those
    under the Earth, and every tongue
    confesses (Jesus Christ).”

  11. TEST with the accursed terms messed up:

    U$$R

    S0c1al1sm

    S0vi&ts

    Nazism

    Fascism

    UPDATE
    the results still stand, and Nazism and Fascism are acceptable terms.

  13. @Sebastien Zorn

    Gratitude? ?

    Sebastien,
    How do you get emojis to display?

    I copied the above from your comment and got question marks instead.

    I am using a different comp now, so it is not my computer’s fault.

    ? This one I got online, and it doesn’t display also.

  14. Patrick Bet-David

    Tyson demolished his opponent the very first moment his opponent opened his mouth in this key debate.

    And he thus threw down a deadly challenge to the ruling class shat heads who seem to dominate in the American Republic Party and also I argue the Democrats

    Also implicated the whole of israpundit which is a quite horrible thing to have to report on and to contemplate. I say the latter because I am a big admirer of the Jewish nation.

    In the video I present below the broadcaster whose first name is Patrick and who is very popular in wide circles in America states that the vaccines for the disease Covid19 were not tested before being used by the public.

    Neil de Grasse Tyson to give him his dues, and full credit forever, did not allow Patrick to go on his sneaky and lying way for a single second.

    He did it much better than Fauci ever succeeded in his necessary arguments against the sprouting Fascists of science denial, a sprouting which was given great impetus because of this disease.

    And what did Neil de Grasse Tyson do that is so praiseworthy?

    Simply he answered the lie being carried (even perpetuated) a full 5 years after this all originated by Patrick.

    How did Neil de Grasse Tyson do it?

    Answer…He told the truth.

    He didn’t accept the lies of the sprouting Fascists. Note…he didn’t have to be swayed by shat because he was equipped with knowledge.

    Note that Neil de Grasse Tyson himself makes clear he is a scientist but not a geneticist.

    And that is more than all right because in his learned answer to Patrick that answer is based on the centuries old equally learned procedures of science.

    See for yourself and stay awake…don’t miss the first explosive sentences

    https://youtu.be/CquiSjgJNc8?si=n2cSvFYa-emUBhMZ

  16. Jimmy Carter’s death: Assessing the 39th president’s record on Israel and the Jews
    Despite some questionable statements, Carter accomplished much for the Jewish people
    By Benjamin Ivry
    December 29, 2024

    Jimmy Carter, the nation’s longest-living former president, died at 100 on Dec. 29. We are resharing this article, first published in September.

    To equitably understand the diverse stances towards Jews of former President Jimmy Carter, whose centenary is celebrated on Oct. 1, a precedent far from the stamping grounds of the peanut farmer from Plains, Georgia may be cited. Gallic historians tell us that Napoleon Bonaparte sometimes badmouthed France’s Jews, while also helping them in concrete ways.

    In a surprisingly similar way, Jimmy Carter helped launch the Camp David Accords, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., and the annual National Menorah lighting ceremony in the nation’s capital. Another legacy of the one-term Carter administration is the Israel Anti-Arab Boycott Act of 1977, which prohibited American companies from cooperating with the Arab boycott by refusing to do business with Israel. And Carter allowed a special visa category to be created to permit tens of thousands of Iranian Jews fleeing the Iranian revolution to find refuge in America while boosting numbers of Soviet Jewish emigres as well.

    But Carter also wrote the one-sided polemic Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, which blamed all Middle East woes solely on Israel and fudged some basic facts. Worse, an ill-judged sentence in the book implied that terrorism should continue until Israel accepted the goals of the “road map” to peace with Palestinians. About this, Carter later admitted during a book tour to Brandeis University that his wording was “completely improper and stupid” and would be revised in future editions.

    On NPR shortly afterwards, Carter again apologized for a “terribly worded sentence which implied, obviously in a ridiculous way, that I approved terrorism and terrorist acts against Israeli citizens.”

    Yet Carter never asked his publishers to correct errors of fact in his book, which led 14 Jewish colleagues at the Carter Center to resign from their positions. These former allies criticized Carter for his writing that was “biased, inaccurate, misleading and missing key historical facts.”

    Among these was historian Kenneth W. Stein, who castigated Carter for producing a book “replete with factual errors, copied materials not cited, superficialities, glaring omissions, and simply invented segments.”

    In the Spring 2007 issue of Middle East Quarterly, Stein further alluded to a previous collaboration with Carter on a book about the Middle East, 1985’s The Blood of Abraham. When a dispute arose over one passage that Stein found inappropriate, Carter smiled at him, saying: “Ken, only one of us was president of the United States.”

    This brashness may have been partly to blame when, as was revealed later, Monroe Freedman, former executive director of the government’s Holocaust Memorial Council, compiled a list of potential members only to have Carter respond that there were “too many Jews” on it. Even an unnamed Presbyterian Holocaust scholar was excluded because his name “sounded too Jewish.”

    Was this an attempt to assemble a multi-faith collaboration or one weighted towards Carter’s own brand of born-again Christianity (he preferred the emotional term “Holy Land” to the more secular “Middle East”)? In any case, Freedman described himself as “outraged by this absurdity” and denied that it was “inappropriate to build a Holocaust council with a significant majority of the board being Jewish.”

    Related
    opinion
    I worked for Jimmy Carter at the White House. He should be remembered as a champion of the Jewish people
    Jimmy Carter built strong bridges to American Jews — and tested their patience
    In 2007, Neal Sher, a Justice Department lawyer who helped deport dozens of Nazis from the US, told Israel National Radio about a comparably odd episode two decades earlier. Former president Carter had intervened in the case of Martin Bartesch, an SS guard at Mauthausen concentration camp. There, in 1943, Bartesch murdered Gottfried Ochshorn, a Jewish prisoner who was trying to escape. By lying on his immigration papers about his SS past, Bartesch lived undisturbed as a janitor in postwar Chicago, until the U.S. Office of Special Investigations caught up with him in 1987. Then he was deported to Austria. Bartesch’s daughters, who remained in the USA, appealed to politicians to allow their father to return, and Jimmy Carter added a handwritten note requesting “special consideration” for the Nazi murderer, for “humanitarian reasons.”

    Continuing until recent years to insert himself into discussions on the Middle East with his usual verve, in 2015 Carter told HuffPost Live that French Jews should not consider moving to Israel for their own safety, despite the explosion of antisemitic violence in that country, because Jews “on the average” are “maybe safer in France than some places in Israel.” Carter quickly added the caveat: “but I’m not trying to make a judgment,” raising the question of why he bothered saying it, if not to express a judgment?

    Looking on the bright side, Carter went on to mention that the November 2015 Paris attacks offered an opportunity for the West to discover what makes Islam “great”: “I think this is going to give a lot of people incentive to look into Islamicism, what is it about this religion that makes it great, that makes it appeal to really billions of people,” he said.

    French Jews may be pardoned for not sharing this silver lining amidst the horrors of life in their homeland. Likewise, Carter’s absolute faith in unreliable negotiators like Hamas, which he deemed worthy to join peace talks, was somehow strengthened by his ironclad religious belief.

    As an example, on the fourth night of Hanukkah in 1979, with advisor Stuart Eizenstat, author of an account of his presidency, Carter expressed these convictions when he lit the shamash candle which is used to light the other candles of the Hanukkah menorah. Carter spoke to the assembled crowd, alluding to the story in the Second Book of Maccabees about how a small quantity of oil to light the ancient Temple’s menorah miraculously lasted eight days.

    Then Carter uttered with the certainty of his Baptist faith: “This miracle showed that God meets our needs. If we depend on Him, He will meet our needs.” The notion of an all-providing deity just 35 years after the Holocaust devastated European Jewry suggests an optimism bordering on irreality.

    Elsewhere, Carter’s reflections on Jews, especially when teaching Sunday school, could be equally dicey. Stuart Eizenstat observed that during his presidency, Carter continued to teach Bible classes, later released in audiobook form. During one, he stated that Jesus “directly challenged in a fatal way the existing church, and there was no possible way for the Jewish leaders to avoid the challenge. So they decided to kill Jesus.”

    Carter reiterated this calumny of Jews as Christ-killers, the basis for centuries of antisemitic persecution, in yet another Sunday school lesson about how Jesus was aware that he was risking death “as quickly as [it] could be arranged by the Jewish leaders, who were very powerful.”

    Even more than such missteps, his faith in the integrity and reliability of the terrorist group Hamas irked some observers, like the Atlanta Jewish Times, which in a 2015 editorial deemed Carter a “parasite.” In response, Carter refused to be interviewed by any journalist from that periodical.

    But such squabbles aside, during his time in office and after, Jimmy Carter accomplished a myriad of positive things for Jews and others in America and overseas, for which gratitude is the appropriate response on this centenary.

    https://forward.com/culture/656007/jimmy-carter-death-jews-israel-palestine/

    Gratitude? 😀

    1

  17. Carter: Not the New Anti-Semitism, It’s the Older Kind
    It’s not just over the Palestinians. It is deep-rooted hatred that Christians were supposed to have disavowed.
    Dr. Charles Jacobs
    Apr 10, 2013, 10:38 AM (GMT+3)

    This article was co-authored by Ilya Feoktistov

    The Yeshiva University’s Cardozo Law School is facing a fire storm of protest for honoring former President Jimmy Carter because of Carter’s animus towards Israel. But who they indeed may be about to honor is an old fashioned anti-Semite.

    As decades-old tapes from his Church Sunday school lessons reveal, former President Jimmy Carter’s bias against the Jewish state may come more from an old fashioned Christian animus toward Judaism than from concerns over the situation of Palestinians. Carter taught Christian students in Plains, Georgia that Judaism teaches Jews to feel superior to non-Jews, that Jewish religious practices are tricks to enhance wealth, and that current Israeli policy toward Palestinians is based on these “Jewish” values and practices.

    In a series of sermons Carter recorded between 1999 and 2003 that were published as a CD set by Simon and Schuster called “Sunday Mornings in Plains,” Carter attacks modern Israel by retreading ancient anti-Semitic tropes that go back to the early church fathers and the Judaism/Christianity schism that gave birth to a millennia of Christian persecution of Jews.

    (For a thorough discussion of the emergence and analysis of these tapes, see Phyllis Chessler.)

    Here are salient examples.

    1. Jews hate and feel superior to non-Jews: In the tapes, one hears — in Southern drawl — his ancient animus: Jews hate non-Jews:

    “…this morning I’m gonna be trying to relate the assigned Bible lesson to us in the Uniformed Series with how that affected Israel and how it affects us through Christ personally… It’s hard for us to even visualize the prejudice against gentiles when Christ came on earth. If a Jew married a gentile, that person was considered to be dead. … How would you characterize from a Jew’s point of view the uncircumcised? Non believer? And what? Unclean, what? They called them DOGS! That’s true. … What was Paul’s feeling toward gentiles in his early life as a Jewish leader? [Paul was not a Jewish leader. Ed.] Anybody? Absolute commitment to persecution! To the imprisonment and even the execution of non-Jews who now professed faith in Jesus Christ. … We know the differences in the Middle East. But the differences there are between Jews on the one hand who comprise the dominating force both militarily and also politically and the Palestinians who are both Muslim and Christians. …”

    2. Jewish ritual sacrifice is a dodge that relieves one from taking care of one’s parents, while preserving one’s wealth:

    “Corban was a uh prayer that could be performed by usually a man in an endorsed ceremony by the Pharisees that you could say in effect, ‘God, everything that I own all these sheep all these goats this nice house and the money that I have, I dedicate to you, to God.’ And from then on according to the Pharisees law those riches didn’t belong to that person anymore. They were whose? God’s! So as long as those riches were belonged to the person, that person was supposed to share them with needy parents right? But once it was God’s it wasn’t theirs and they didn’t have anything to share with their parents. So with impunity, and approved by the Pharisaic law, they could avoid taking care of their needy parents by a trick that had been evolved by the incorrect and improper interpretation of the law primarily designed by religious leaders to benefit whom? The rich folks! The powerful people! Because the poor man wouldn’t have all of this stuff to give to God. He would probably, in fact he might very well have his parents in the house with him or still be living with his own parents.”

    3. Carter ties this Jewish feelings of superiority and religious malevolence to current Israeli policy:

    “One reason is that the Israeli government headed now by Netanyahu has to depend on the ultra-right or fundamentalist Jews to give them a majority in the parliament which they call the Knesset, and the recent resignation of foreign minister Levy has left Netanyahu with only one vote margin in the parliament. So the ultra-conservative Jewish leaders demand always that they have total control over anything that relates to religion inside Israel, in particular in Jerusalem. Well, I’m not here to condemn anyone but to point out that even within ourselves, there is an inclination for, I’d say, a feeling of superiority. Wouldn’t you think so? Would you agree? I know I have it.”

    Carter’s beef with the Jews is not simply a disagreement over how Israel should treat the Palestinians. His is a deep theological hatred of the type that most Christians (including the Vatican in the 1960s Nostra Aetate) have long disavowed. This is not the“new anti-Semitism: it’s the old. All the more indefensible for an orthodox Jewish religious institution to give this man an award.

    Please take 2 minutes out of your busy schedules to express your concern to the Dean of Cardozo and President of Yeshiva University.

    Contact details:

    Professor Matthew Diller, Dean of Cardozo: Tel – 212-790-0310; Email – mdiller@yu.edu

    Professor Richard Joel, President of Yeshiva University: Tel – 212 960 5300;

    Email president@yu.edu

    Charles Jacobs is President of Americans for Peace and Tolerance (www.peaceandtolerance.org) Ilya Feoktistov

    https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/341702

  18. @peloni

    I have tried it and my comment did not disappear.

    Mine did, and it was very clear what the system disliked.

    I tested it.

    Maybe it was a glitch in the system on that particular day.

    When you find out how the system works, please, let us know.

  19. @Edgar
    @Reader

    My understanding of Israpundit is that free speech is dominant.

    Thank you for making this point, and you are quite correct.

    I am not sure what has caused the ghost in the machine to take a liking to playing havoc with Reader’s comments and I am still trying to flesh it out.

  20. @Sebastien

    I was a history major and one of my concentrations was historiography

    I was not aware of your focus on historiography – it is an invaluable element of appreciating or weighing any historical record. I studied the era both prior to and including the short reign of Alexander, and without applying the skills of historiography, I would have come to far different and essentially baseless conclusions instead of those to which I came to appreciate are the closest approximate of what we might know of that long ago era. I later tried to apply these techniques to the era surrounding the life of Buddha and Mahavira in India, but I failed to successfully overcome the language barrier before life took my interests in another direction.

    In any event, it is an eye opening event to grasp how such open bias among historians comes to penetrate the pages of what is accepted as the historical record, and peeling back these inherent biases is, while difficult at times, quite revealing of how little history is at times contained within the historical record.

    1

  22. @Edgar Fascinating.
    @Adam Yes. This is his last work, “The Rise and Fall of the Judean State” by Solomon Zeitlin. The forward is a glowing tribute to him by Sidney B. Hoeing, who the New York Times described as “an authority on the Dead Sea Scrolls” who was associated with Yeshiva University for more than 40 years.” Apparently, his views about the Dead Sea Scrolls, though controversial, were not considered to be the views of a crackpot by his peers. He had expressed the intention of devoting a volume to the Scrolls but this was his last work which he completed just before passing away at the age of 90. Hoeing says Zeitlin didn’t feel that the Scrolls were relevant to understanding the Second Temple Period since they were not composed at this time or even in the following century. He also suggests some of Zeitlin’s critics deliberately ignored or misrepresented his views. The National Library of Israel says:

    “Solomon Zeitlin was an American Jewish historian, Talmudic scholar and in his time the world’s leading authority on the Second Commonwealth, also known as the Second Temple period. His work The Rise and Fall of the Judean State is about the Second Temple period. Read more on Wikipedia”

    https://www.nli.org.il/en/a-topic/987007270219205171

    Not being an expert of any kind, myself, that’s all I can say. It is fascinating and I’ve learned a lot, though I am a critical thinker when I have the tools – I was a history major and one of my concentrations was historiography (the history of history writing and embedded conscious and unconscious biases of contemporary writers of different periods writing about the same pasts). All I can say is its worth reading and its a fun read once you get into it. But, nothing is carved in stone for me. I will say that for people like myself, who have had no education to speak of – actually no formal education at all – in the pre-modern world, and have been frankly disoriented when attempting to read anything from or about ancient times, it’s a great navigation tool and way of familiarizing myself with the landscape and language which has become important to me since it’s my people’s history.

  24. @Edgar

    I don’t understand why your posts are grabbed up

    I think I got the answer when I tested my comments with certain terms – the 1st short comment with the terms properly spelled (it disappeared), the 2nd comment with the terms messed up like they do with swear words – this one posted immediately.

    Why don’t you try it yourself – spell the word [fill in the blank] or something like that properly and see what happens?

  25. @Edgar

    I don’t understand why your posts are grabbed up

    I think I got the answer when I tested my comments with certain terms – the 1st short comment with the terms properly spelled (it disappeared), the 2nd comment with the terms messed up like they do with swear words – this one posted immediately.

    Why don’t you try it yourself – spell the word U$$R or something like that properly and see what happens?

    Update:
    This comment posted successfully.