OK, Muffti has a very limited point to make here so don’t go all apeshit on him. But when Muffti was posting Hate Site of the Weak he noticed that most had links with titles like ‘the talmud exposed’ or ‘talmud truth’ where a bunch of quotes from the talmud are strung together to show how dangerous Judaism is at root. For example:
Jews May Rob and Kill Non-Jews, Sanhedrin 57a . When a Jew murders a Gentile (“Cuthean”), there will be no death penalty. What a Jew steals from a Gentile he may keep.
Minor Tractates. Soferim 15, Rule 10. This is the saying of Rabbi Simon ben Yohai: Tob shebe goyyim harog (“Even the best of the gentiles should all be killed”).
Yebhamot 11b: “Sexual intercourse with a little girl is permitted if she is three years of age.”
Aboda Sarah 37a: “A gentile girl who is three years old can be violated.”
Thankfully, people take the time to explain and contextualize these things, show them to be allegorical and how to be understood. Maybe this cannot be done for the bits and pieces of the Koran Wilders strings together but the lesson should be clear: a bunch of quotes out of context do not make for an indictment of anything.
Tom Morrissey
3/31/2008
So it now suits Muffti to embrace the It’s-All-A-Metaphor school of interpretation? We’ll file this away for the next time he derides it (maybe as soon as later this week, who knows).
grandmuffti
3/31/2008
Muffti doesn’t embrace any such school
1) looking at something in context is NOT the same thing as treating it as a metaphor. 2) Muffti would be happy to find out that the torah is one big metaphor. He jsut then wonders why everyone is so satisfied in thinking they know how to interpret it. 3) what muffti is really saying is that if the metaphor approach is good for the jew-goose, it may well be good for the mussulman-gander.
froylein
3/31/2008
What’s the plan for later this week?
BTW, the postcard’s on the way, parcel will follow.
Tom Morrissey
3/31/2008
Viewing the matter cynically (which is, I trust, right up Muffti’s alley), this is why metaphorism has great utility. Everyone in the God business, from the Lubavicher rebbe to L. Ron Hubbard, has embarassments like these, and needs some means to assign them less importance or ignore them altogether.
themiddle
3/31/2008
Well, Muffti, that’s an interesting take on those religiously driven attacks on the WTC and those trains in Europe. Isn’t that the point of the film? That there are those on the extreme side who consider the Word to be true and holy and who interpret it literally and then act on it? So that if the Word espouses violence against non-believers, then it is desirable to commit violence and if the Word has some anti-Semitic comments in it, then it is fine to uphold those sentiments as truthful?
If Israel was a theocracy and they waged a genocidal war against “Amalek” then you might have a point about Israel. Ignoring Israel and dealing with individuals, you could even make the claim that a percentage of Jews believe in the Torah or halacha to a degree where it drives their political actions. However, just from a numeric standpoint, not to mention actual experience of attacks by devout Jews upon non-Jews, it appears to me that you can’t compare to what is presented in this film.
In other words, theoretically your point makes sense but in the real world, it doesn’t square with what we’ve seen.
grandmuffti
3/31/2008
Muffti didn’t make any point about israel…and didn’t you read the ‘very limited point’ disclaimer at teh beginning?
Alex
3/31/2008
It seems like some liberal knee-jerk reaction to insults thrown at another group that Muffti would try to find some moral equivalence between us and them to make the world seem a more reasonable and fair place for all. Well, it isn’t and history and today’s realities won’t allow your analogy to pass the sniff test. On top of that, I find it highly distasteful that with terrorist apologizing and whitewashing groups aplenty such as CAIR, a Jew at a Jewish blog has to feel obligated to defend a religion with a majority of hostile practitioners who’d be more than happy to see him dead, despite his impassioned defense. Does Muffti or any other Jew really believe that if we are as outspoken in our pleas for fairness and ready to jump to the defense of our enemies to show the world or them that we have objectivity and compassion, that they will suddenly stop hating us and want peace? To them, you are still and will always be a Yehudi and a useful one at that.
Sorry, but I’m so tired of this “we’re all guilty, bad, or evil” approach. Judaism, for all it’s faults, comes nowhere near Islam in relation to its interpretation and compatibility with civilized, modern life. The context is all in the numbers and the sum of its parts. 1 Jewish terrorist or 3 ugly lines from the Torah do not equal thousands of Islamic terrorists nor hundreds of albeit misinterpreted, but hate inciting lines from the Koran.
When I was a dumb college kid, I used to consider myself objective in terms of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but then I saw how us Jews have more people sewing for peace for both parties while our enemies have just a handful and the rest are one sided in their support of their people. Well, for balance, I no longer consider myself objective. I’m not at all. All I care for is justice and peace for Jews and Israelis. Let our enemies and tons of humble objective Jews worry about the Palestinians. They have enough support. We don’t. I know where my loyalties lay and have no doubts about them. This post is exactly the type of thought process I voluntarily and gladly left behind. Like our elders always told us: “Don’t forget you are a Jew, because ‘they’ certainly won’t”.
grandmuffti
3/31/2008
Whoa, Alex, it seems that you didn’t read the disclaimer either. Muffti wasn’t trying to see moral equivalence…or claim that we are guilty, bad or evil…he just thought that there is something odious about taking quotes form a religious book, stringing them together and thinking that you have made a respectable job of making a point about religion. Most religions, including ours, can suffer something similar – the talmud has lines that when taken out of context make us look pretty crappy and have been used routinely to lend support to anti-semitism, to lend support to jewish conspiracy theories.
With all due respect, it would seem like some right wing knee jerk reaction to read what Muffti wrote as moral equivalence, a condemnation of anything or a defense of anything. Just a critique of an argument style really taht Muffti finds shallow and propagandizing.
Alex
3/31/2008
I understand what you were trying to say Muffti, I just think sometimes some things are left better unsaid, especially when it’s our dirty laundry. Sure, I can point to all sorts of crazy biblical passages and say, “see, our sh!t sticks too!”. I agree with you that sometimes it does, and that’s why I’m an Atheist/(Agnostic when my wife’s around anyway). Then again, Jews have always been good about “taking out own trash” so please proceed.
The bottom line is that religions and their practitioners should be judged on their actions rather than their words and holy books. Geert tried drawing a correlation between the two which I don’t agree with. I think Islamic terrorism is far more culturally/primitively driven rather than religiously. It’s one thing to have faith and believe some of the bulls!t in any holy book while it’s quite a far jump to take it seriously enough that you would saw through someone’s neck because you believed it to be right and ordained.
Jews and our customs over time have evolved on a higher moral/civilized plane than the Muslim world. We have always valued logic, reason, education, study, etc., far more than brawn and physical power. And I think Israel floating in a sea of ass-backwardness is a perfect example of that. Far more has been accomplished (for the world) in that tiny space in 60 years than anywhere around it in thousands of years. Am I ethnocentric? You’re damned right I am, and rightly so. So who cares if we have some dirt too. Yes, our sh!t stinks, but only if you are near it. Theirs stinks so much, you can’t get away from it.
grandmuffti
3/31/2008
Well, then, Muffti is glad we agree. At least on atheism (your wife doesn’t make Muffti hide his views
) Muffti just didn’t like the Geert correlation either – it may be there for all he knows but juxtaposition just prove one knows how to splice footage.
Alex
3/31/2008
Yes. Good point. Other crockumentaries come to mind that illustrate the point that good editing and false correlations can make true believers out of the uninformed:
- An Inconvenient Truth
- Every Michael Moore movie
grandmuffti
3/31/2008
For clarity’s sake, however, muffti should say that he massively adn totally disagree with ethnocentrism and the claims about teh muslim’s not respecting logic, education adn reason. Their achievements in math, literature and the like for a long time were the gold standard in each field.
Tom Morrissey
3/31/2008
….you mean, teh gold standard.
Jewish Mother
3/31/2008
“Maybe this cannot be done for the bits and pieces of the Koran Wilders strings together, but the lesson should be clear: a bunch of quotes out of context do not make for an indictment of anything” says Mufti.
What does Mufti mean by “maybe this cannot be done”?
Mufti is covering himself, and not being rigorous. He does not KNOW if this can, or canot be done; he has just admitted that. So how can he go any further, and be so all-fired “clear”? He says a lesson “should be clear”. How indeed does he even know the quotes were taken out of context? Has he read the context?
First Mufti says, “I don’t know,” then in the exact same sentence Mufti says, “I know”. Huh?
What Mufti seems to mean is, “this makes me feel uncomfortable because it is strongly against something”. No, I haven’t seen the film. I am just reacting to Mufti’s imprecision. He says himself “Mufti just didn’t like”. Well, a degreed Philo professor is supposed to use logic, and Mufti usually does, so this post is odd.
Jewish Mother
3/31/2008
non sequitur, Mufti
DK
3/31/2008
Not all problems are eliminated when “contextualized.” And correctly noting that Judaism is still more progressive than fundamentalist Islam is damning Judaism with faint praise.
All ancient religions have had things said in their name that we could and should find problematic. The problem is that our community — like other communities — have reactionary segments that take these things more seriously than is appropriate. I don’t want to point fingers, but there may be overlap with those who also reject scientific method in favor or literalism and the nonsense that all generations were on a “higher level” in every significant way.
grandmuffti
3/31/2008
Middle, when Muffti say s ‘cannot be done’ he meant that for all he knows, the koran is to read exactly as Wilders suggests and it is a book that incites horrible violence. what he was reacting to was random verses being yanked out of a book with a finger point saying ‘see, it’s a religion of crazy barbarians!’
You shouldn’t like it either. After all, selective quoting from the talmud can do that to us to.
So where is the failure of logic, oh middleman?
grandmuffti
3/31/2008
And morrissey, when did you turn into such a sniper? Maybe even teh sniper!
grandmuffti
3/31/2008
oops! sorry, he meant ‘jewish mother’, not middleman. The poitn JM is that what wasn’t clear was whether or not the koran verses could be contextualized, allegorized or whatever else we do with the verses of the talmud we don’t like. What is clear is that a bunch of verses and some pictures don’t show much on their own. NO lack of precision of sequitority, so far as muffti can tell.
Jewish Mother
3/31/2008
The lack of sequitority was the assumption that folks who produce excellent math, astronomy and architecture somehow can’t ever do anything bad, because rich technical and esthetic culture just HAS to lead to peaceful behavior. It just HAS to. Insert petulant foot-stamp here. Well, it doesn’t. Sadly. That does not follow, which is what ‘non sequitur’ means. That it should follow is an Athenian Greek idea, a Western idea, and also a Jewish idea. A Western, liberal idea. A great ideal, and sometimes true. But, it doesn’t describe the whole of humanity, or human culture, necessarily, at all. No, I haven’t seen the film.
Maybe DK, in his irritation about certain levels of passionate Jewish religious belief, will make a comparable film about the Jews, with Talmudic quotes, and pictures of Jews doing bad things as directed to, by the Talmud. Yeah, sure. What would he put in? The horror of having to purchase, house, and wash six sets of dishes? For a large family and lots of guests? The mind reels.
HalfSours
3/31/2008
Muffti,
You are totally right when you point out that incendiary text should be contextualized. If I am not mistaken, that is the point that you were making in your post, and nothing more. I would like to use this as a forum to point out that we see the violent actualization of horrifically incendiary text coming much, much, MUCH, more often from adherents of Islam than pretty much anyone else today. I think that was the main point of the film.
ugh
3/31/2008
What an ignorant exercise.
Islam has a growing movement applying itself to enforcing offensive versus….they’re even waging war to promote them….
Jews on the other hand have modernized, and done whatever it takes to intellectualize our scriptures so that we can evolve with an ethical society in 2008.
To even suggest there is a comparable discounts reality for the sake of some psycho babble moral equivalency attempt at discourse.
ck
3/31/2008
When I posted about Fitna, I wasn’t trying to lend support to its producer, a well known racist. I was just amazed at how quickly he was censored both by the Dutch government and by none other than Network Solutions and how quickly LiveLeak pulled the video from their servers. For now Google is at least being consistent and has not pulled the video from Google Videos or YouTube. However, this does demonstrate that anti-Islamic messages are subject to a different standard than anti-anything else.
Just sayin’ is all.
Ben-David
4/1/2008
Middle got it right:
Fitna DOES contextualize these verses – the “context” being the widespread, world-wide action being taken based on these verses.
There is no similar widespread rape of non-Jewish 3-year-old girls in Israel. QED.
It’s somewhat pathetic to see someone as clever as Muffti stuck like this in PC patterns of thought.
Grand Muffti
4/1/2008
Oy, for Muffti this post has become a social psychology exercise in how people manage to not really read what you say in the interest of insulting you by projecting everything they dont like upon you.
Instance 1. JM said:
Please tell Muffti where he said anything like what you just said he said. He agrees that that is a non-sequitor but to get that out of the above requires what one might call a radical interpretation of the text.
Instance 2. Ugh said:
Ugh, first of all, please go look up the words ‘pscyho’, ‘babble’, and ‘attempt’. Then note that there is no moral equivalency in the above – Muffti’s made no attempt at all to say anything about morals. ALL he said was that it’s nothing short of cheap propoganda to string a bunch of quotes together from a book.
Connecting Islam and violence etc. can be done. Well. Pulling verses out of a book to make people look bad is easy: Muffti’s point is that you can do it jews just as easily and people DO do it to jews to encourage anti-semitism actively all the time.
B-D and Middle, this sort of contextualizing is done all the time in ways that you find much less respectable and you know it. When Michael Moore does it, interviewing sick people and taking them to cuba, it gets called propaganda. Muffti wasn’t criticizing a moral drawn from the film, he was criticizing a lazy style of argument that goes for shock rather than honest intellectual work.
Not surprisingly, people don’t mind this kind of thing when they think the moral being drawn is true and iimportant. That’s about the time the overlooking of flaws begins. Muffti isn’t sure what pattern of thought that represents but it’s a little pathetic…
Halfsours, yeshar koach for being this posts best reader of the post.
froylein
4/1/2008
It might not come as a surprise to Muffti that the US scored pretty low at the PISA initial survey on reading comprehension. (Particularly amusing is that the students partaking mostly were top-notch private schoolers, yet their average results were similar to those of low-key and special-ed students that mostly were tested in the German part of the survey.)
Tom Morrissey
4/1/2008
When we refer to Islam or Judaism or Christianity, we refer in part to how people behave. Islam is more than the Koran: it’s what Muslims do in the world, purportedly in the name of their faith as they understand it. Ditto Jews and Christians. That seems to be the moral here.
It’s not so much about contextualizing, because faiths like Judaism and Islam (unlike, e.g., Catholicism) lack a structure which issues authoritative interpretations of religious texts binding on all believers. As a result, what some Jews or Muslims will view as contextualizing, others will see as a blasphemous departure from literally-understood truths.
Alex
4/1/2008
This guy is way more on point:
youtube.com/wa...
themiddle
4/1/2008
Well hell’s bells, I didn’t know I had a reading comprehension problem.
You wanted to make the following points:
1. At hate sites, you found attacks on Jews with the premise being that taking quotes from the Talmud can tarnish us all with the brush of subscribing to an ugly and repulsive, not to mention barbaric and outmoded set of beliefs.
2. Placing these Talmudic quotes within a context helps to explain their allegorical nature.
3. Thus, we learn that picking and choosing quotes from religious texts doesn’t really have any meaning or “truth” to it.
4. Ergo, this film by Wilders does not make a point because we don’t know the context of the quotes from the Koran and applying them to Muslims in the way the Talmudic quotes are applied against Jews becomes a meaningless exercise.
Is that accurate or did I miss something?
Alex
4/1/2008
Who cares what it says in the Koran at all? The point is, as Larry David said in Curb Your Enthusiasm while talking to his Muslim PI, “Yes, but there’s a whole lot of Meshuganeh Muslims running around out there, are there not?”
Whether it says this or that in the Koran is useless to dwell on. It says all sorts of wacky sh!t in all religious texts and somehow, most religious people learn to live in a practical world, including “most” Muslims. What matters is the actions of those who constantly identify themselves as Muslims and then continue to commit atrocities in the name of their religion. And more importantly, the silence that comes out of the Muslim World after that act.
Wilders proved his point before anyone ever saw the film, that any criticism of Islam is unacceptable, that calling Islam violent will be met with violence, and that the West has double-standards on free speech when it comes to speech about Islam. “If you cal me violent, I’ll kill you” is the message of the day.
And honestly, the weak, prisy, Westerners who tried to suppress Wilders’ freedom of speech are far more evil than the brainwashed Muslims who were instructed to riot after the release of a movie that most probably didn’t see.
We’re not f#cked from Muslim expansionism, the collective intelligence and force that would be needed to achieve that is definitely lacking. What we’re f#cked from is Westerners, Christians, Jews, and Atheists, that are waiting to roll over and die, mostly from fear, and mostly from idiotic PCness they picked up while acting like little b*tches in college while learning “tolerance”. And tolerance to the left, means tolerating intolerance to the point that you can’t tolerate yourself. I’m with the guy I linked to.
Grand Muffti
4/1/2008
hey, not bad! Muffti gives you a solid B+!
themiddle
4/1/2008
Muffti, what did I miss that would get me an A?
Grand Muffti
4/1/2008
you have to come to office hours to find that out.
Btw, alex, who has tried to suppress Wilder’s freedom of speech? Freedom of speech is a right you have against hte government. has his government banned his movie?
froylein
4/1/2008
Middle, you’d need to have expression-danced it.
themiddle
4/1/2008
Grand Muffti has revealed that:
1. He was wrong when he claimed that some of us didn’t comprehend his post
2. He doesn’t like to be wrong
3. He doesn’t like giving A grades to students who get his point but disagree with it
4. The Middle’s comments stand as before because he clearly understood Muffti’s point but had a different take on things
5. The Muffti is a shit disturber
themiddle
4/1/2008
Froylein, thanks for reading my long post!!!
froylein
4/1/2008
Welcome, Middle, it wasn’t too long, so don’t let people bother you about that. English is a foreign language to me, and I still coped.
Could I possibly have seen you on Sunday?
Alex
4/1/2008
GM,
No. Worse. They’re trying to lock him up for free speech:
hotair.com/arc...
Besides, I didn’t say censor, I said suppress. If Geert paid the same company that hosts tons of terrorist sites across the world, Network Solutions, to host his site, and then they voluntarily took it down, that’s suppression, and hypocrisy by the way.
I’m surprised you were more upset by him and his movie than the ridiculous and disproportionate response to it by the Muslim World and weak-kneed Westerners who only believe in free speech as long as it targets only Jews, Christians, and anyone else besides Muslims.
grandmuffti
4/1/2008
A+ Middle! Muffti just wanted to challenge you to do better!
grandmuffti
4/1/2008
Whoa, Alex, thanks! Muffti didn’t know they were considering prosecuting him. That is ridiculous.
And some cred where cred is due – Jewlicious is hosting that movie. We’re all about freedom of expression.
Muffti believes in free speech as it targets anyone. Muffti isn’t very upset by Geert nor his movie. He was just making a point!
themiddle
4/1/2008
Poorly.
Grand Muffti
4/2/2008
Only because of all the bad reading
Ben-David
4/2/2008
quote:
Muffti just wanted to challenge you to do better!
- – - – - – - – - – -
Boy does THAT bring back bad memories… now where did I put that lecturer evaluation form?
allasgit
4/2/2008
I just want to point out that almost all the qoutes form the “talmud” are lies — they aren’t there. In fact, from the short list of “quotes” used in this post, only the second one actually exists (although not in the talmud and surely not in the source cited since no such source exists) and is taken out of context. All the others were never said anywhere. I think we can all appreciate what a world of difference there is between making stuff up and taking statements that were actually made out of context.
Jewish Mother
4/2/2008
I can’t believe it took 44 posts for that to get said. I am no scholar, but I knew it intuitively. GM, you are not looking good! Please have some very strong espresso, and get off campus for at least two weeks. Jerusalem air? Profright Israel? A trip to Germany? Skydiving? Outward Bound? Jew-ward Bound? Something? Chazak and all that.
froylein
4/2/2008
What would Muffti be doing in Germany?
Read the second paragraph: come-and-hear....
And even this: talmud.faithwe...
“Rav Yehudah said in the name of Rav: A male child who has relations with a female adult causes her to be like one who was injured with a stick… Rava said: This is what was meant – an adult male who has relations with a female child has not done anything because less than this [three years old] is like sticking a finger into an eyeball.”
Even though it’s not about condoning pedophilia, it’s about determining the dowry for a child that has lost its virginity due to sexual molestation – which doesn’t count as such if the child is young enough. Sorry, but by any means, that is weird.
Tom Morrissey
4/2/2008
No worries, froylein. Muffti will tell you that it’s all a metaphor or simile or figure of speech, or an allegory (commonplace in penal codes everywhere), or can be understood by virtue of a context of which he isn’t aware but which has been outlined on Wikipedia or someplace, and that words have no intrinsic significance anyway, or haven’t you read your Derrida?
froylein
4/2/2008
Tom, I’m more concerned about the kitschy glorification, so to speak, that seems to have replaced serious Jewish histography and theology even among allegedly academic scholars. A neo-Enlightment might be well-needed.
Jewish Mother
4/2/2008
Somebody ought to acknowledge the delicacy of Tom Morrissey’s remark of a few days ago, something about ‘we have problems too, oh boy’. Nobody has. Also, it’s more constructive to go out and discover something, whether physical or metaphysical, than to just say the other guy’s science project won’t hold water, or something.
Tom Morrissey
4/2/2008
I’m always happy to share my problems, Jewish Mother, especially if it’s not costing me a buck-fifty an hour.