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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   15631 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 19, 2022

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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.

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.

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.

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.

one of the key goals of Adelson and other advocates of the Jewish center is to moderate the Arab presence at the university." The program's first director, Yossi Shain (who also heads the Hartog School of Government at Tel Aviv University), said it was important to set up such a program at Georgetown "because it's a Jesuit school, because it's in Washington, because it's in the foreign service school."

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.

Former Congressman Mervyn Dymally (D-CA) once called AIPAC "without question the most effective lobby in Congress," and the former chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Lee Hamilton, who served in Congress for thirty-four years, said in 1991, "There's no lobby group that matches it . . . They're in a class by themselves

And there are many other Jewish slavishly pro-Israel groups.

Albert Chernin, the executive director of the National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council (NJCRAC, later renamed the Jewish Council for Public Affairs), expressed this perspective in 1978 when he said that our "first priority is Israel, of course, reflecting the complete identity of views of the American Jewish leadership with the concerns of the rank and file." The historian Jack Wertheimer terms this comment a "stunning admission that political efforts to shore up Israel superseded all other concerns of Jewish community relations organizations in the United States."

as Hyman Bookbinder, a high-ranking official of the American Jewish Committee, once admitted, "Unless something is terribly pressing, really critical or fundamental, you parrot Israel's line in order to retain American support. As American Jews, we don't go around saying Israel is wrong about its policies.

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.

America is supporting Egypt to support Israel!

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.

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.

We aren't supporting Israel to support Judaism

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.

Comparing the budget of 1/16 of the Smithsonian with the budget of a single non-Smithsonian museum is disingenuous.

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.

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 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.

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

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?

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.

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.

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 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."

Given that you don't think the National Holocaust Museum should exist at all

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.

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.

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?

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."

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,

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.

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.

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?

Religion" is not just what you hear when you go to church. Its 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.

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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