Yakov Rabkin, Montreal Professor of history at the University of Montreal, had a letter of his published in the Int'l Herald Tribune the other day.
In it, he deals with Iran and Israel and writes:-
...While Iran has signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty and publicly refused to develop nuclear weapons, Israel possesses such weapons and has not signed the treaty.
True but does he mean that Israel is the real threat to world peace and that the Iranian's leader's spouting off on theology, the destruction of Israel and how much nuclear potential his country possesses is not indicative of any danger?
[Iran's president said Saturday his country now possesses 6,000 centrifuges, a significant increase in its nuclear program]
and
[Note this: "Of course he says they aren't producing a bomb, but they are producing the wherewithal to make a bomb once they have the enrichment capability...they haven't agreed to a slowdown in progress, not withstanding all the hints they would be doing so," Mark Fitzpatrick, a senior fellow for non- proliferation at the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies policy group, said]
Rabkin continues:
Moreover, Iran has not attacked another country for centuries.
What about this? But more to the point, when in the past few centuries have they had a leader like this one: crazy, meglomaniac and with the capability?
...While overtly anti-Zionist, he [Ahmadinejad] is not anti-Jewish. Indeed, had he been anti-Semitic, he would harass Iran's Jews rather than challenge a nuclear-armed regional power...Like many non-Zionist Jews, he wants Israel to evolve from a state for the Jews - a major source of the Israel/Palestine conflict - to an inclusive state of all its citizens...
Well, if you must know, Rabkin is a semi-Neturei Karta.
I found here and here that he espouses a antizionist position based on religion. Try this, too.
There's a lot behind just one letter-to-the-editor.
Posts
10 comments:
Don't forget that the IHT is fully owned by the New York Times Company. So, it's in their interest, as it meets their (low) journalistic standards, to present Mr. Rabkin as a kippa-wearing Jew (as if...) to somehow prove to the readers (originally European, of course) that "religious Jews" don't support the existence of Israel.
Dear Mr Medad,
Thank you for drawing my attention to this blog. I tried to post a reply but
am not sure to have succeeded. Please re-post it of needed: the text is
below.
Best,
Yakov Rabkin
Reply:
Thank you for the interest in my work. The letter in the IHT is based on an
article published in the Revue internationale et stratégique (June 2008). My
earlier response to Benny Morris on Iran had appeared in the Jerusalem Post.
This and some other writings on related subjects can be found on
http://www.cerium.ca/_Rabkin-Yakov_
If some people find my work "rubbish" and engage in ad hominem comments
this only sheds light on their own character. This is not my style in
debate. As religious Jews say three times a day in the conclusion of the
Amida: "ulemekalelai nafshi tidom".
Actually, ad hominem means attacking the person. I did not write that you were rubbish but that your writing and argumentation is rubbish.
Rabkin further writes:
Thanks. It would be good to debate all this, and I would be happy to visit Israel to do so. I seem to raise issues that interest many people in Israel. Ad hominem refers to the other comment posted on your blog. The word “rubbish”, however, seems yours.
Yakov Rabkin used to be a Zionist.Somewhere along the line he fell thru the cracks.
Speculation is that he was turned down for a professorial position in Israel. His entire Judaism was learnt from a Roman Catholic priest in Montreal as he had no knowledge of Yiddishkeit coming from the Soviet Union to Canada in the 1970s.
Today, the entire Montreal Jewish community, including the ultra-Orthodox, shun him and deny him entry into their synagogues.As you noted, the only ones who have greeted him wholeheartedly are the pseudo-religious Jewish sect called Neturei Karta who are in league with the Black Muslim fascist in America called Louis Farrakhan.
As for Rabkin's writings, they are worse than rubbish. Page after page has been documented to contain falsities and distortions of classic rabbinic teachings. Wholesale plagiarism characterizes his Israelophobe book derived from obscurantist pamphlets circulated by the Neturei Karta in London in the 1960s.
Having overtly allied himself as well with the haters of Judaism on the Marxist front, Rabkin now preaches their abominable ideology of dismantling the state of Israel and dispersing the Jewish population into the Diaspora. This, of course, was always the position of the Jewish Stalinists convened in the notorious Yevsektsia who so persecuted the defenseless Jews of Russia and the Ukraine.
But there is an even greater diabolic aspect to Rabkin's thought. His alliance with the cruel Marxists is but a fig leaf for his work on behalf of the all-powerful Palestine Lobby, financed by the Islamic capitalists in Riyadh and Teheran. What is the basis for this? Simply this: all of Rabkin's secular thinking about Israel is taken directly out of the volumes of anti-Israel propaganda issued by the Arab League in 1950 and recycled by the Arab war criminals in Ramallah and Gaza.
The Christian Zionist movement in America and Canada has for years closely followed this contortionist professor's evolution from a Zionist to an anti-Zionist. Their reports on him, shared with the leaders of the Jewish community, show beyond a doubt that his religious commitment to Judaism is merely a selling point for promoting his un-Jewish beliefs among the naive.
Even the Satar Hassidim, arguably the largest Hassidic movement in the world, has issued a herem (ban) against him for consorting with the Hitlerists in Iran.
What can one say except that this man's twisted path in life be made straight again and that he be healed from the malaise that plagues him and his family.
Miriam, thanks. And go here for my follow-up and demolishment.
Yisrael Medad, I think your vitriolic comments of Yakov Rabkin and his writings are actually a reflection of your fear of the truth! I hope the Lord guides your soul!
I think he does
Well I was bored, but not bored enough to work on my next big post, so I thought I'd do a small post, hence the title, to keep people entertained until my writer's block subsides.
Hi, listen, I'm pretty new on this blogosphere and Internet thing, so I don't know if there's a sort of "subscription" method that I can use in order to receive notifications of your new entries...? Thing is I enjoy reading your blog a lot and I'd like to be up to date with your posts!
Post a Comment