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Notes -
Menorahs on Public Lands
The Windows OS has a new feature that displays a small icon in the Desktop search bar. The icon rotates every few days based on the calendar, similar to Google's tradition of customizing their search page. I never paid attention to it until I noticed a Menorah displayed on my Desktop. Presumably subsequent icons would show presents or a Christmas Tree. Certainly, though, it will never display a Nativity or Christian Cross.
I learned recently that Allegheny v. ACLU ruled that a Nativity on public land, as a religious symbol, violates the Establishment Clause but a Menorah on public land does not. According to the logic of the ruling, the Menorah and Christmas Tree are secular symbols of the winter holidays and do not constitute the endorsement of a religion while the Nativity does so. The logic is on its face patently absurd as the Menorah is not a secular symbol in any sense. It is a sacred symbol honoring a miracle upon the successful Jewish revolt against the Hellenists. Reading various opinions from Jewish publications, it is clear that many Jews continue to interpret the public lighting of the Menorah from an adversarial perspective:
The Establishment of Religion Takes Many Forms
The concept of the Establishment of Religion is tenuous and arbitrary. What is religion except for a unique collection of symbols, rituals, and myths that have an, often consciously-designed, psychological effect on intended flocks? That psychological effect influences our behavior: it affects our loyalties and our behavior towards the ingroup/outgroup, our code of conduct in society, our mate selection and reproductive behaviors, our politics, our community rituals, and much more.
Myth, Religion, art, politics, and culture all belong under the same umbrella. Religion is everywhere and most people today do not consume their religious messaging through a church but through mass media. Many here have interpreted the BLM movement and protests as a Religious movement, often with the intent to dismiss it or ridicule it. This power of mass media was envisioned by Richard Wagner:
Wagner's conception of proto mass-media as Gesamtkunstwerk was preempted by Plato, who two thousand years earlier envisioned the psychological power of the cinematic projection of light. Today, our consumption of Myth: those projections which intelligently orient our view of the world in understanding right and wrong, heroes and villain, are increasingly delivered through mass media rather than traditional religious institutions.
Earlier this week at the lighting of the Menorah inside the White House, not to be confused with the giant Menorah on the White House Lawn, President Biden remarked "Together, we must stand up against the disturbing rise in antisemitism" while touting the December 12th formation of the Inter-Agency Group to Counter Antisemitism, which will be "led by Domestic Policy Council staff and National Security Council staff to increase and better coordinate U.S. Government efforts to counter antisemitism":
At the ceremony, also emphasized was "securing the largest-ever increase in federal funding for the physical security of nonprofits, including synagogues and Jewish Community Centers".
Likewise, in the recently passed 2023 budget, in addition to at least $4 billion for Israel, over $65 million in federal funds was allocated to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum which, combined with the abundant support from private funds, amounted to a whopping $245 million in support for that museum in 2022. That makes it apparently, and by far, the most well-funded museum in the Nation's capital with well over 3x the funding of the National WWII Museum.
In contrast, the National Museum of American History had a 2018 budget of $40 million despite the fact it received 3.8M visitors in 2016, in comparison to the Holocaust Museum's 1.6 million for that year.
Which of the above should be considered the establishment of religion? All of it.
Christmas is Never Secular
In the same vein, Christmas is fundamentally a Religious festival even in its most non-Christian expression. It's the time of year where the masses practice a form of religious observance that is more comparable to a pagan, pre-Christian form of worship.
We ritualistically build our household lararium next to the hearth. We set out milk and cookies as an offering to a benevolent god who lives in a mystical Hyperborean realm, judges our behavior, and leaves us gifts. We honor his image in our films, songs, and Myth, especially to the delight of women and children. We carry on quirky household traditions which are transmitted ancestrally. Our celebration of Christmas and observance of Santa Claus would be more similar to the way the Romans, for example, worshipped their ancestral or household gods.
In this sense a "secular Christmas symbol" is an oxymoron. There is no such thing, which is acknowledged by the Jewish perspective which remarked on the foreignness and inescapability of the gentile "Holiday Spirit". The reality is that both the Menorah and Christmas Tree are religious symbols, and the government is constructively establishing religion with its display of both.
The "War on Christmas"
The Christians, in a way, get the short end of the stick for not being allowed to display their sacred symbols on public land. But who do they have to blame for that? They have allowed, without much protest, the designation of their own religion as second-class to the financial and legal privileges granted to Judaism. Christians tilt at windmills while sacred symbols of Jewish Victory tower over them during the Christmas holiday at the White House and Central Park, while their own sacred symbols are outlawed on the same land.
To reverse course, Christians would need to adopt the adversarial perspective that motivates Jews to light the Menorahs in these spaces. But given Christian doctrine it is not clear that the religion is capable of asserting itself in that way.
The Christmas Tree is not a Christian symbol. Every atheist I know has a Christmas Tree in his house. I live in a heavily Hindu area, and they are participating in Christmas lights and decorations with about as high participation as my white neighbors. The Nativity, though is a Christian symbol.
Jews are allowed to have their sacred religious symbol, which does have a deeply religious and symbolically important purpose. Whereas Christians are denied a Nativity in these same, symbolically-important public spaces.
This is very meaningful, as meaningful as Jews would interpret it if the Menorah in front of the White House were removed and replaced with a giant Nativity Scene. They would, rightfully, attribute important meaning to that act. All I am doing is calling attention to the fact that the status quo is also deeply meaningful and indicative of cultural power and influence.
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No, only two justices voted that the nativity scene violated the Establishment Clause while the menorah did not. Three judges voted that both violated the Establishment Clause and four voted that neither did.
The argument was not so much that a menorah per se is a secular symbol, but rather only that that particular menorah was, in large part because it was part of a larger display which included a Christmas tree and a celebration of liberty, all of whuch they deemed secular.
The Court actually remanded the case to determine whether the menorah violated the Establishment Clause for reasons not addressed in the appeal.
The Court okayed the display of a creche in 1984 in Lynch v. Donnelly, 465 U.S. 668. The difference in Allegheny, in the view of the five justices who voted that the creche was NG, was that "Here, unlike in Lynch, nothing in the context of the display detracts from the creche's religious message. The Lynch display composed a series of figures and objects, each group of which had its own focal point. Santa's house and his reindeer were objects of attention separate from the creche, and had their specific visual story to tell. Similarly, whatever a "talking" wishing well may be, it obviously was a center of attention separate from the creche. Here, in contrast, the creche stands alone: it is the single element of the display on the Grand Staircase." Note that this analysis is the same as that applied to the menorah.
The creche also included the phrase, "Glory to God in the Highest!"
And here is how Justice Gorsuch summarized the case law, just last May: "May a State or local government display a Christmas nativity scene? Some courts said yes, others no. How about a menorah? Again, the answers ran both ways."
So, your example doesn’t work.
Why are you saying "No" when you are just restating the verdict as I've described?
Obviously that is how judicial precedent works. But that particular menorah was not a secular symbol, that is an absurd claim. It was a sacred Jewish symbol, including that particular menorah.
Where exactly are the elements distracting the menorah outside the White House or the world's largest menorah in Central Park? Menorah lighting is clearly privileged well beyond the display of the Nativity scene, both in case law and in just using your eyes to see which of the two towers over the White House and Central Park. Gorsuch may be hinting that this will be revisited, which would be a good win for Christians and interesting Culture War moment. But the status quo obviously privileges the menorah above the Nativity.
I know I'm wasting my time, but:
Please read more carefully.
What I said has nothing to do with "how judicial precedent works"
A creche is far more of a sacred religious symbol than is a menorah, given how what a trivial part of Judaism Hannukah is, and how central Xmas is to Christianity. Yet, as Justice Gorsuch notes, sometimes creches are OK, and sometimes not. It depends on the particular creche, same as re menorahs.
Both appear to be privately funded. When government has a policy of opening public spaces to privately funded displays, it cannot exclude religious displays
Part of your confusion is that you seem to be under the misapprehension that simply displaying a religious symbol is an Establishment Clause violation, but the Courts has never so held. Rather, under the Lemon test, used in the cases you complain about, the display is OK if 1) it has a secular purpose; 2) it has a principal or primary effect that does not advance or inhibit religion; and 3) it does not foster an excessive government entanglement with religion. Re #1, that doesn't mean that the law's purpose must be unrelated to religion. Corporation of Presiding Bishop v. Amos, 483 U.S. 327 (1987). Most importantly, it is the purpose of the particular decision to exhibit the creche, not the nature of creches in general, which is the ultimate question.
Note that the Lemon test has been criticized for years, and most commentators (and Justice Kagan) considers it to have been effectively overruled this year in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District. But that widely misunderstood case is a topic for another day.
This is just a totally absurd statement. They are both sacred religious symbols. A menorah is not a secular symbol. Saying "one is more sacred than the other" is just trying to rationalize privileging one religious symbol over the other. Today I saw this Fox News article by Dennis Prager: Hanukkah made western civilization possible:
I also stated, to the annoyance of some here, that the menorah is a symbol of Jewish victory. And Prager affirms that interpretation verbatim. It is obviously a sacred religious symbol. The Talmud says:
So the Talmud mandates the display of the menorah to "publicize the miracle." That is a sacred religious symbol.
The menorah lighting at the White House and Central Park does not have a secular purpose. It has a deeply religious and symbolically important purpose. Jews themselves understand this. I know you are going to say it has a secular purpose, because you want to privilege Jewish sacred symbols over Christian symbols. But it doesn't make that position any more rational than it is.
Yes, but this article is historically absurd, and Dennis Prager is a mind-killed political ideologue. Hannukah is, historically, an incredibly minor festival in judaism. It only took off in the 50's in the U.S., when nice assimilated secular jews wanted their kids to have something to celebrate and get presents for while all the other kids were doing Christmas. The prominence of Hannukah today is entirely a product of Jews not being separate or apart from, or antagonistic to Christianity, but of them trying to blend in and become more like the secularized-Christianity of the American consumer religion.
For that reason, I would suggest not taking what Mr. Prager has to say too seriously.
It absolutely does - it affirms that Jews are a welcome part of the community, in the same way that the St. Patrick's Day parade did for the Irish and Columbus Day celebrations used to for the Italians. It's just not only that secular purpose, because the menorah is also a religious symbol for many jews. However, there are many assimilated, reform, and secular jews for whom the menorah does not have a special theological meaning, and who, when pressed, would say that the "miracle" is absolute hogwash.
Source: am half jewish, was raised jewish, but am non-practicing.
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As is always the case when people criticize legal decisions, I would suggest that when smart people with access to all the facts who have thought at great length about the issues involved, and who have had their arguments and conclusions scrutinized by other smart people with access to all the facts who have thought at great length about the issues involved, reach a conclusion, you might be a tad less sure of yourself when you think they are obviously wrong.
I would also suggest that the fact that you use Prager's claim re the historical significance of the battle that Hannukah celebrates as evidence of the religious significance of the holiday, you aren't thinking very rigorous about the claim you are making. Ditto if you think that my observation that "a creche is far more of a sacred religious symbol than is a menorah" is a claim that a menorah is not a sacred religious symbol at all. Obviously, both a creche and a menorah have [edit: I meant "can have" -- see my initial post re the Court talking about the particular menorah in question, not menorahs in general] both secular and religious meaning, as courts have repeatedly recognized.
Finally, the claim that menorahs in public places have no secular purpose is inane; they have the obvious purpose of reinforcing the idea that people of all faiths are members of the polity, which is clear to anyone who is familiar with the history of such displays, religious and otherwise.
Anyhow, as I said, I know I'm wasting my time.
It's a rationalization, but probably not the one you think it is. The courts don't want to ban Christmas trees because it would make them very unpopular, so they came up with this rationalization that they've become secularized. Then to paper over this and look like they were favoring Christianity, they accepted the menorah too, on the dubious but not groundless idea that Haunakkah has become secularized as a Jewish substitute for secularized Christmas.
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What I said was this:
That's the standard. And please don't embarrass yourself by saying "how do we know that Hanukkah is trivial?" -- businesses don't close in Israel for Hanukkah, the National Library stays open, and it is not mentioned in the Bible.
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They also made the Roe vs. Wade debacle and upheld it for a number of decades, and how is it faring now huh?. Taking whatever the courts says as a description of reality is insane in my opinion, no less a dereliction of your duty as a thinking and reasoning individual as those that take activist words as gospel.
Bye the bye, you may want to cool it with the consensus building there, as it's not obvious that those symbols have secular meanings.
ah yes, all correct thinking people, of course. Because when you see a menorah, you inmediatelly think about your non-jewish family and friends united in a common goal.
I had a typo; I meant that both "can have" both meanings. See my original post, where I said, " The argument was not so much that a menorah per se is a secular symbol, but rather only that that particular menorah was." Similarly, Xmas symbols can be used as purely religious symbols, or as symbols of more secular values ("Peace on Earth and goodwill to Men"), or as both.
The point is not whether the decisions are correct. It is that they happened. OP claimed that the courts have treated creches and menorahs differently. That certainly appears to be incorrect, at least according to Justice Gorsuch's interpretation of the case law, cited above. When I said "as courts have repeatedly recognized" I did not mean that that made it true, but rather that, when applying the law to these issues, the courts have treated both symbols as sometimes having both meanings.
Please read more carefully.
First, I said that, historically, the PURPOSE of govt putting up the symbols or permitting the symbols to be displayed on public grounds was to communicate the idea that people of all faiths are members of the polity. I did NOT say that anyone should, or even does, interpret it that way, so your reference to "correct thinking people" and to how people respond when seeing such menorah is irrelevant.
Second, you seem to think that I meant that it symbolizes that everyone is part of the Jewish community, but I didn't: These are symbols placed in public space, and I said that placing such symbols in public places symbolizes that all groups are members of the polity -- I said that it is a message by the govt to non-Christians. It is not a message from Jewish people to non-Jewish people.
Finally, I don't know where you get "united in a common goal." In Dred Scott, the Court answered "no" to the question, "can a negro whose ancestors were imported into this country and sold as slaves become a member of the political community formed and brought into existence by the Constitution of the United States[?]" The Fourteenth Amendment's citizenship clause was intended to reject that conclusion, but it certainly says noting about "uniting in a common goal." They are too different things; obviously, members of a community often work on their own independent, frequently opposing goals, particularly in a liberal democracy, given that the right of each person to determine their own "conception of the good" is a foundation of liberalism.* Yet they are all members of the community nonetheless.
*I hope I don't have to explain which meaning of "liberalism" I refer to here
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The legal decision should be criticized for regarding a sacred Jewish symbol as secular when it is not secular. Jews themselves, the ones who sponsor the menorahs, do not regard them as secular. The decision relied on that logic which is clearly wrong.
What matters, at the end of the day, is that there are giant menorahs in front of the White House and many other public spaces where elected officials pay respect and promise support to Jews, and in those spaces there is no similar regard for Christianity. It's the largest menorah in the world at Central Park, not the largest Nativity scene in the world at Central Park. Allegheny helps explain the development status quo, but I am talking about the meaning of the status quo rather than simply criticizing the legal decision. So your hairsplitting really does not change the fact of the matter.
All religion has historical significance. The birth of Jesus, whether you regard it as history or myth, is itself a historically important story.
Prager regards the menorah as a symbol of Jewish victory, like many of the Jews I read who weighed in on their interpretation of why it's important to light the menorah in public spaces. "It's a symbol of Jewish victory, and it's historically important" does not make it secular any more than saying "The Cross is a symbol of Christianity, and it's a historically important symbol" makes it secular.
If the menorah were replaced with a Cross (relates to historically important developments, so it's secular!), and Joe Biden attended ceremonies for its dedication, and promised support to the Christian people and federal handouts to Churches and Christian community centers, and created a task force in the National Security apparatus to "counter anti-Christianity", would you regard that as the establishment of religion?
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Because what @Gdanning said is in no way what you described.
Here is the first sentence under "Opinion of the Court" in the article I linked:
The breakdown of the votes between the two sides of the majority is not at all relevant. I even linked the article where anyone could see the vote breakdown between the two sides. But the opinion was as I described.
The key point is that the articles are doing a lot of work here. Notice that it's "the" display and "the" menorah, not "a" display and "a" menorah. In other words, this wasn't a blanket decision saying that menorah's are okay but nativity scenes aren't; it's saying that given the specific context of each display one violated the Establishment Clause while one didn't, and provided some guidance for making such determinations in the future. Given the rhetoric of the actual decision, it's likely that if a menorah were displayed on the courthouse steps in the same manner as the nativity scene, it would likewise be a violation. It's also worth noting that there's nothing about the decision to suggest that it's any evidence of some kind of inappropriate Jewish influence. There weren't any Jews on the court at the time, and the organization that brought the suit, which was arguing that both displays were violations, was the ACLU, which, to put it mildly, doesn't exactly have a reputation for being devois of Jewish influence itself.
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Yes, certain parts of the legal establishment have a blatant double standard against Christianity. I’m not exactly philosemitic, but it certainly to me doesn’t seem to be an example of Jewish domination and victory over Christianity or whatever. No doubt a Diwali or Ramadan display would be allowed to, because the relevant variable is certain parts of the blue tribe having a distaste for public expressions of Christian faith, not Jewish privilege.
If the Christian cross were permitted to be displayed on public land but Jewish religious symbols were banned, would you interpret that as symbolically meaningful? If so, how?
There’s really three possible explanations for that scenario- the people making the decisions have an animus against jews or Judaism, the people making that decision want to promote Christianity over other religions, and some combination thereof(eg the people making that decision want to promote Christianity over Judaism because they have an animus against Judaism). And you’d need to think about which explanation is likely correct based on the available evidence.
Well, we know that large portions of the blue tribe seem incredibly uncomfortable with the religious aspects of Christianity, and don’t share that discomfort with other religions(eg, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism). So banning nativity sets in public fits with that pattern, and forcing blue tribe preferences on people who seem like they might be red tribe sympathetic, while ignoring similar behavior that doesn’t have the same connotations, is fairly common and normal.
The "red tribe" and "blue tribe" heuristic is way overused, there are other types of tribes. The "Blue Tribe" dislike of Christianity has little to do with the driving forces behind the emergence of Public Menorah lightings. Joe Biden has now done two separate Menorah lightings at the White House where he's promised the Jewish People major financial handouts to Israel, Jewish causes, synagogues and Jewish community centers, as well as only this month created a task force to use the National Security apparatus to organize a government response against anti-Semitism.
Does any of this strike you as symbolically demonstrating the political and cultural power of Judaism in the United States government? You think it really reduces to a "blue tribe" dislike of Christianity?
I think that Jews as a group have lots of power in the US and that they're generally not interested in using this power to promote the Jewish religion, for the simple reason that they mostly don't believe in it themselves.
I also think that 'dislike of the religious aspects of christianity' is a real thing that really explains a lot of blue tribe behavior and hypocritical-seeming behavior of institutions under substantial blue tribe sway, and that rounding it all off to Judaism or whatever is dumb because almost none of these people are themselves religious Jews, and that even if a disproportionate number of them are ethnically Jewish it's still a very large majority of them that are gentiles.
Their religion is themselves, and they are their religion. Their religion is a matrilieanly-inherited status to the Chosen people, and that membership is often extremely important even to "non-religious" Jews. Their influence to give themselves special financial and legal privileges as members of that group, handouts of federal funds to their synagogues and community centers, billions of dollars of taxpayer money to their ethnostate, and now a "task force" which will use the national security apparatus to "counter" people who dare to criticize them... That is all promoting their religion, even if "promoting their religion" does not involve great effort to convert gentiles.
You don't necessarily promote a religion by trying to convert others. You can promote it by giving it special status and privileges and protections, or by lighting giant menorahs in symbolically important spaces where Christians are denied a Nativity during the Christian's own very import holiday.
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I'm not @hydroacetylene, but stated bluntly, yes. I really do think it reduces down to that.
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In addition to this, it's focused around the specific parts of Christianity those complaining have unhappy memories of. There are Day of the Dead alters in public schools and libraries.
I'm less certain about Ramadan -- there would be endless complaints in Red areas, and it would probably be forbidden in places like schools and libraries, other than as a statement that it exists. I have not seen Passover celebrated in public institutions, despite most Christians feeling neutral to positive about it.
You may have a point about Ramadan, although it seems to me to also be relevant that Ramadan is usually not timed near a major Christian religious holiday, hence it doesn’t feature very often in diversity lessons.
And I have seen public institutions celebrate Passover, albeit less often than Hanukkah. I think this has to do with the time of year involved; Easter is just less of a big deal to nonreligious people than Christmas.
Ramadan is set based on a lunar calendar and moves about ten days earlier every year. This may be true the last few years, but it'll start before Easter within the next decade.
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None of it.
So this is a typical example of how you try to sneak a lot of assertions past hoping people won't examine them too closely.
First of all, support for Israel is certainly a topic of foreign policy worthy of discussion and debate, but it is not de facto "establishment of religion." Israel and Judaism may be closely coupled, but the U.S. has vested interests in Israel that go far beyond an affection for Jews. We aren't supporting Israel to support Judaism, any more than we are supporting Egypt to support Islam.
Moving on to another little factoid you tried to trot past us without scrutiny: yes, the Holocaust Memorial Museum has a larger total budget than the National Museum of American History. However, the National Museum of American History is one of sixteen Smithsonian museums. Comparing the budget of 1/16 of the Smithsonian with the budget of a single non-Smithsonian museum is disingenuous.
Given that you don't think the National Holocaust Museum should exist at all, I can see why it wouldn't be a compelling argument if you drilled down to the details and just complained about the National Holocaust Museum getting $65M in federal funds vs. $25M for the National Museum of American History, $20M for the American Museum of Natural History, $136M (!!) for the National Art Gallery, $54M for the National Portrait Gallery, $43M for the Air and Space Museum, etc. Likewise, arguing that the Holocaust Museum shouldn't exist because the Holocaust didn't happen obviously wouldn't get you much traction except among fellow true believers. But for the majority of people who believe that the Holocaust (a) happened and (b) was bad enough to warrant commemorating with a museum, calling it a "religious establishment" is a ridiculous argument. It's commemorated because people actually believe the Holocaust happened and should be remembered, not because Jews Jews Jews. You can of course try (as you do) to persuade people that the Holocaust was fake, but "recognizing the Holocaust violates the Establishment Clause" is sophistry. Even if the Holocaust were fake and we're all commemorating a hoax, the Holocaust Museum should be defunded on that basis, not on the basis that it's a Jewish religious institution, which it is not.
America is supporting Egypt to support Israel!
It's pretty clear. As soon as Egypt signed a peace treaty with Israel they got a flood of US aid. They got $5.9 billion in US aid in 1979, when the treaty was signed, up from about $1 billion in 1975 when they were signing disengagement treaties over the Sinai. Before, in 1974 they were getting $70 million. When Jordan signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1994, they got $700 million in debt relief from the US and about half a billion in annual aid since, 10x what it was before.
The fact of the matter is that there are enormously wealthy and powerful Jewish billionaires and lobby groups who generously donate to candidates and encourage them to be pro-Israeli. Adelson on the Republican side for example. He gave Trump at least a hundred million dollars, possibly more. Besides funding pro-Israel political candidates, he funds Jewish-Israeli institutes at universities to improve its image and discourse power there.
Besides Adelson (and many other billionaires funding other pro-Israeli candidates who I've left out for conciseness), there's AIPAC which is tremendously powerful.
And there are many other Jewish slavishly pro-Israel groups.
US support for Israel is primarily motivated by this wealthy and influential band of lobby groups and billionaires, who are predominantly made up of Jews supporting their coethnics/religious brethren. There are also Christian Zionists and more dovish Jewish groups but they are in the minority.
Israel gets away with so much - they bomb/invade their neighbors, sell US technology to China, spy flagrantly on the US, supply misleading intelligence about the Iraqi nuclear program, bomb a US ship. They never join in US wars and yet get the most aid, despite being a rich country. The US suffers hundreds of billions in economic damage due to the Arab oil embargo - because they resupply Israel during the Yom Kippur war. Israel delegitimizes the non-proliferation treaty, they motivate Iranian nuclearization. They're a massive strategic deadweight. Only the lobbying can explain such ongoing US support.
Even if that were true (which I don't really know to be true or false), that would still prove the very point @Amadan was making. Because if we were supporting Egypt to support Israel, then we aren't doing it to support Islam, much like Amadan said.
Well no the US isn't supporting Islam. But he was saying it's 'not supporting the establishment of religion' generally. I'm saying US support for Israel is motivated by the Israel lobby in the US, who is primarily motivated by religious feeling.
That isn't how I understood it. He was using the support of Egypt to establish a point: that support for a country is not because one supports its religion. Nothing to do with establishment of religion more generally, simply saying that if you support a country it can be for reasons other than because you support its religion. And in that light, even support for Egypt in order to support Israel would prove his point. Which having proven that point, goes to show that US support for Israel is not necessarily due to support for Judaism, but could be for other reasons as well.
He was arguing, in contrast to OP, that US support for Israel was for broader strategic reasons, not religious reasons.
I'm saying that US support for Egypt is to support Israel, which is motivated by religion. Thus US support for Egypt is due to religion, albeit not Egypt's religion.
The strategic reasons to support Israel don't merit the enormous amount of leeway and aid it recieves, compared to the amount of harm the alliance causes the US, as I said above.
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I don't know who this Adelson person is that you're talking about, but if you were even vaguely familiar the last 100 years or so of middle eastern history/politics you'd recognize how just how absurd that claim is. Egypt has been one of Israel's chief adversaries/rivals since it's founding. We support Egypt not because it helps Israel (just the opposite in fact) we support Egypt to keep a lid on North Africa and because over 10% of the world's shipping passes through the Suez Canal. Meanwhile we support the Israeli's because "democracy" and as a counterweight against the Iranians. We paid the Egyptians off because it's a bit awkward to have two ostensible US allies fighting each other.
Now if you had chosen the Saudis as your example you might have been able to make a case, but you didn't because you don't know middle eastern history/politics.
Did you miss the part where I described how US aid went up an order of magnitude as they signed treaties with Israel?
Why would the US not care about Egypt in 1974, like them 10x more in 1975 and then even more in 1979? If you were right about the shipping, you'd expect aid to be consistent through that whole Cold War period. Or at least it would rise when they open the Suez canal, which it did in 1975. Your theory explains only the 1975 surge but not 1979. And then there's Jordan too, a country not known for its shipping lanes.
If it's just Egypt and just 1975, maybe they're buying the shipping lanes. But Egypt and Jordan, just after they sign treaties with Israel? The common denominator is Israel.
Don't say I don't understand Middle Eastern history when you haven't even understood my post.
Did you not understand my post? What do you think the "Pay off" I was referring to was?
The Egyptian-Israeli talks at Camp David happen in the context of a long simmering border conflict between Egypt and Israel punctuated by three shooting wars in as many decades. Despite the pro-West Egyptian monarchy being overthrown in '52, the US had formally recognized the new government and supported them against against the French and British. The US thinking at the time being that a stable and "neutral" and Islamist government in Egypt would be vastly preferable to a Communist one aligned with the Soviet Union. The countries that are now Syria and Iraq had already started cozying up to the Soviets and there were concerns that the whole region might "go red". This put the US in the awkward position of supporting both Egypt and Israel even while Egypt and Israel were at war with each other. As such, any support for one naturally viewed as a betrayal by the other. I can't help but notice that as much as Reddit-Nazis and the BDS crowd both like to talk about the USS Liberty and similar incidents they never talk about why tensions between the US and Israel were so strained through the 60s and 70s. Anyway, in an effort to resolve this awkwardness the US put pressure on Israel to relinquish Gaza and the Sinai to Egypt while simultaneously offering the Egyptians a security pact and generous financial incentives to walk away from the conflict. The rest as they say is history. Israel relinquished the Sinai and Egypt got paid.
My point is that it's not just Egypt and it's not just '79, nor is it just Israel, it's a whole tangled mess going back to first world war.
If the US wanted to gain favor with the Arabs, they could simply not support Israel, their number one enemy.
Syria and Egypt started cozying up to the Soviets precisely because the US was extremely reluctant to provide them weapons that might be used against Israel. The region was going red because of US support for Israel.
Tensions between the US and Israel were hardly strained through the 60s and 70s. They were improving, despite Israel's best efforts. Israel nuclearized, making the NPT into an even bigger joke and successfully got massive US miiltary aid in the '67 and '73 wars, bringing down the Arab oil embargo that cost the US hundreds of billions.
The US might have wanted Egypt onside but clearly not at the cost of dumping Israel, otherwise they would have. There's nothing messy about it, the situation is quite clear. The US clearly weighs Israeli security very highly, they were and are willing to sacrifice relations with the Arabs, oil security (quite literally when it comes to the deal where Israel gets a guaranteed US-supplied oil reserve), nuclear-nonproliferation and considerable amounts of money for this goal.
If the US was so concerned with Egyptian security, why not provide them military aid? Why not fly in billions worth of armaments if they look like they're losing a war? Because the US did not want them to defeat Israel, Israel was valued higher.
And there's US aid for Jordan too, as I keep mentioning.
??? You are surely aware that Syria got its independence from France in 1946, that the shortlived United Arab Republic was between Syria and Egypt, not Syria and Iraq?
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It's makes way more sense to me to compare the budget of one museum to another museum. Not to compare one museum to a system of 16 other museums. The fact that the Holocaust Museum, which focuses almost exclusively on Jews, gets twice as much federal funding as the museum for all of the rest of American history combined looks unfair to me. It's not like we just really care about genocides in the abstract, there's no Armenian genocide museum or one for the Tutsi or the Kurds or any of the other thousands of ethnicities that have been mass murdered at some point in history.
The point is that if you look at one museum among seventeen and note that it receives more funding than some and less than others, it looks a lot less outrageous than SS's cherry-picked comparison of the USHH with one of those other seventeen museums. He chose the National Museum of American History specifically because he wanted to imply "We elevate Jews above American history." When you consider the National Museum of American History is just 1/16 of the Smithsonian, individual museum budgets look a lot less like the Elders of Zion deciding what gets priority and more like Congress parceling out money according to standard funding requests and budget wrangling.
You can of course make an argument that USHH should not exist, or should not receive federal funding, if you wish, but "the USHH receiving slightly more money than the National Museum of American History is evidence of Jewish cultural domination" is a dumb argument that makes no sense in context. The relative funding of all museums getting federal grants is not racked and stacked according to how "important" we think each museum is compared to one another.
As I've said, it received $244 million from public and private sources. That is not "more than some and less than others", that is vastly more than all others. I have also said that this fact indicates a prioritization of the subject matter we consider sacred.
If the museum to the Victims of Communism had a $244 million dollar budget in combined public and private support, and the USHMM had a $1 million budget in combined public and private support, I would not say, like you do, "Oh well, that's just due to the way the government processes budget requests." I would also attribute that to a meaningful difference in the cultural narratives we consider sacred compared to the present reality.
In this alternate universe where the Victims of Communism museum had $244 million in support and the USHMM had $1 million support, how could you see that happening without a major cultural change in this alternate world?
Even assuming this is true (I haven't actually looked at the balance sheet for every Smithsonian, let alone every museum in the country), you are intentionally conflating public and private funding.
If you want to make an argument that Jews and Israel (I assume those are the main sources of private contributions) contribute a lot of money to the Holocaust Museum, make that argument, but it's hardly surprising, and would not be surprising or nefarious but completely understandable if you allow, for the sake of argument, that the Holocaust actually happened. Therefore it is not good evidence that the Holocaust didn't happen and is only being propped up as a "sacred symbol" pushed upon us by Jews.
I see that little switcheroo you did again. If we talk about how the government processes budget requests, we are talking specifically about what we (the American taxpayers) are paying for.
If you want to compare every single private institution in the country and how much money they receive from various private sources, we can do that, but it doesn't quite fit the narrative you are trying to construct here, does it?
I would assume victims of communism would be more likely to contribute money to a museum to the Victims of Communism, and victims of the Holocaust would be more likely to contribute money to a museum to victims of the Holocaust. You have to make several leaps of logic that you are studiously trying to keep us from scrutinizing too closely to go from "The Holocaust Museum gets a lot of money" to "Jews control the narrative and our priorities."
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Woah there, that's an extremely uncharitable assertion. SS might be perfectly supportive of the museum existing, just with some of the numbers changed. Or the dates.
Given that SS's history has made his position on the Holocaust and Jews very clear, I don't think it's uncharitable to conclude that he does not think the National Holocaust Museum should exist. That seems to be the thrust, in fact, of the post I responded to. But if this is not true, I'll accept correction and would be fascinated to hear what form he believes the National Holocaust Museum should take.
The USHMM should exist if it presents an accurate historical account, to the best of its abilities, of what transpired, and it should not exist if it does not do so due to malice and gross negligence. It should exist if it is trying to preserve and present history, it should not exist for the primary purpose of psychologically influencing the American public for the benefit of international Jewry. Do you think that's a fair position?
But the purpose of my post was not to argue whether the museum should or should not exist. My point was that the massive level of funding available to that USHMM from both public and private sources, which stands head and shoulders above all other museums, indicates a level of prioritization in the subject matter we consider sacred. To call this "secular" is just absurd. Being a "Holocaust Denier" is an infinitely more grave charge than being called an infidel or atheist. That is a Religious phenomenon.
"Religion" is not just what you hear when you go to church. It's transmitted through the symbols we display on public land, the museums we build and provide the most funding for, and the esoteric messaging that is embedded in mass media. Symbols matter, this is deeply understood by Jews themselves who have worked very hard to achieve the prevailing status quo. Meanwhile, Christians are not even operating in the same arena and it's not clear if they are able to do so.
Sure. Of course that's kind of like saying "The Air and Space Museum should not exist if its purpose is to perpetuate the hoax of NASA's faked moon landings." And "the Museum of Natural History should not exist if its purpose is for atheists to psychologically influence the American public to turn them away from God and the reality of Biblical creation."
I gave a list of funding for other museums. The USHMM is arguably above average, but hardly "head and shoulders" above all other museums. Complain about them getting too much money if you wish, but they're still just one of many museums that receives federal funding and their level of funding is not so much greater as you claim.
You believing this does not make it true. There are also deniers of other atrocities, such as the Armenian genocides and the Rape of Nanking. Is it a "religious" phenomenon to believe those events happen, or only if you happen to disagree about whether they did?
Again, accepting your premises, yes, the Elders of Zion have created a religion and indoctrinated us all in its arcane symbols and articles of faith.
But that requires accepting your premises. If one doesn't accept your premises, your argument is nonsense.
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Yeah, labeling a menorah as secular is bizarre. Someone’s playing with a motte and bailey for the first amendment. Now why does it demand a wall of text again?
Oh. Right.
There’s an argument to be made the angels and star affiliated with Christmas trees make them just as referential as the menorah. Of course, plenty of Christmas trees lack those elements; I’m not clear on whether the case law allowing them specifies the decorations. On the balance, this looks like a weird exploit of the categorization, and menorahs should probably not be allowed anywhere that a cross wouldn’t.
Out of curiosity, what other icons show up in that position? On Easter, in particular.
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