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Divide & conquer: The problem is not religion, but atheistic politics who abuses, manipulates & undermines religion to benefit from it

The following excerpt is just one of many examples how atheistic political cults like Zionism, becoming dangerous "religious" parasites, falsely posing as Judaism, in order to undermine, manipulate and destroy its hosts credibility and to create havoc and chaos towards other religions.

The cult of atheist Zionism posing as Judaism

By Rich Siegel

This essay was first published in Beyond Tribal Loyalties: Personal Stories of Jewish Peace Activists. (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012)

January 1, 2012

I consider myself a cult survivor. I was raised in the cult of Atheist-Zionism-Posing-as-Judaism. I stated this to a few select friends several years ago, and they thought it was funny. The statement brought with it a pregnant pause, as though a punch line was going to follow, as though I were telling a joke. No punch line. I'm serious. More recently, subsequent to Israel's 2006 Lebanon war and the massacre in Gaza of 2008-2009, I find that I can say this and it is taken seriously. People know that something is very seriously wrong with Israel, and with the culture that supports Israel. They may not understand it, but they're more open than they were.

My family's involvement with Zionism goes back to its beginnings. It includes a grandfather who fought with the Jewish Legion to "liberate" Palestine from the Turks in WWI, great-great-grandparents who went to Jerusalem for their retirement in the 1920's, the best buddy of an uncle who smuggled arms from Czechoslovakia to Jewish terrorist groups in Palestine in the lead-up to the 1948 war, grandparents who were officers in their local B'nai Brith1 chapter, and a cousin who was involved in "Operation Mural"2. He currently represents Jewish/Zionist NGOs at the United Nations office in Geneva. His wife writes Muslim-bashing books under a pseudonym.

During my childhood, Zionism and Israel were held up on a pedestal. They were central to our existence, our identity, our raison d'être. They were our sub-cultural equivalent of "Mom and apple pie". I grew up convinced that they were perfect and beyond reproach. There was simply nothing in my environment to indicate otherwise. Finding out that I had been lied to all my life, and that I had been supporting something that I would never have supported had I been told anything resembling the truth, has been absolutely shattering.

My Atheist-Jewish parents got together with a group of their Jewish friends in 1963 to start up a new Reform synagogue in the suburb of Pearl River, New York, which previously had not had a synagogue. Some in this group were atheists, some had religious beliefs. I grew up in Beth Am Temple, where the belief system echoed that of my parents: "We're proud to be Jews, members of this ancient group that everybody hates for no reason. We love Israel, our Jewish country that we need as our refuge in case another Hitler comes to power. Everybody hates Israel for no reason, just like everybody hates Jews for no reason."

We knew about relatives who had perished in the holocaust. Although they were distant cousins, the holocaust loomed large for us. Our awareness of the massive loss of Jewish life during that dark time formed a significant part of our sense of who we were. This combined with the liberal political agenda of the 1960s and 1970s. We opposed the war in Vietnam. We supported African Americans in their struggle for equal rights. We opposed American overseas military activity while supporting Israeli military activity, and saw no contradiction in this. Israel was different. There were antisemitic Arab hordes trying to drive the Jews into the sea. It was about survival.

I took Hebrew School and Judaism seriously. When I was old enough, I began fasting on Yom Kippur3 even though my parents did not fast. Lessons on the holocaust were presented to me both in Hebrew School and in my parents' discussions of their personal philosophy. One aspect of the history made a big impression on me: There were Germans and other Europeans who protected Jews from the Nazis, often at great personal risk. I thought about what I might do if I were in their situation. What would it be like to know that your people were committing monstrous crimes against humanity, and to have to make a choice between loyalty to them and doing the right thing? Opposing America's crimes in Vietnam was a clear choice, but considering the possibility of having to oppose my people, the Jews, seemed impossible. I was glad that there was no reason to do this.

There was a paradoxical element to our worldview. We considered that it was through our "Jewish values", our superior Jewish intellect and morality, that we were able to embrace progressive agendas. As contradictory as this was—I consider chauvinism antithetical to anything progressive—there was evidence to support it in my environment. Jews tended to be liberal Democrats, anti-war and pro-civil rights. The majority of the population in my town, Irish and Italian Catholics, tended to be conservative Republicans, pro-war, and racist. This was back when there were real differences between Democrats and Republicans.

My sub-culture didn't mix well with the local majority culture. In the second grade a girl told me that her father said I killed Jesus. I told her I'd never killed anybody. I was a skinny smart kid who wore glasses, got very good grades, and sucked at sports. In my family, sport was not stressed and academic achievement was. I was a target for the tough non-Jewish kids I grew up with. And I was bullied quite a lot. Taunts of "Jew-boy" and "fairly amorous gentleman" were frequent—lack of prowess in sport being ample evidence of homosexuality in the tribe of the playground, and there was occasional violence. I was also a bully, although it took me many years to see this. I took my humiliation out on kids who were more vulnerable than me: the fat kid at school, and my younger brother at home.

I found refuge in music, discovering early on that music was power. It earned the respect of my peers. I didn't get bullied on school concert days. Music also provided something else, which I did not have language to describe at the time. It filled a void produced by the spiritual desert I was raised in. The rejection of God, the belief in the privilege of belonging to a universally despised and superior people, and the pressure to achieve academically to prove that we were indeed superior, were not working for me, although consciously I accepted all of it. Music was spirituality—a term I would have rejected at the time. It provided a sense of wholeness, which my anti-religious religion was not providing.

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