Susan reminded me of something Dara Horn said in a talk we attended last Thursday. She said that what has gotten Jews in trouble throughout history* is Judaism’s stubborn refusal to worship political gods.

Telling people that the bullshit they worship is not, in fact, God is an eternally unpopular act. It’ll get you ostracized in a hurry. And if you keep going, it will get you killed.

And Jews didn’t just point their critiques outward. Jews pointed their critiques inward, too, at their own rulers, priests and population. Jewish prophets were possible because of Judaism’s uncompromising monotheism. They knew the difference between the one and only God, and the myriad human imposters who attempt to usurp God’s place, and replace the transcendent God with some all-too-immanent monarch, aristocratic gang, make-believe divine character or ideology. This rebuking of anyone — including oneself, one’s own rulers and one’s own people is intrinsic to the Jewish tradition, and Jesus was very much a part of it.

Today, too many Jews worship political gods. They see themselves, no doubt, as prophets who critique the false nationalist god, Israel. But what they really do is criticize a nation for defending itself against an international theocratic totalitarian movement who will stop at nothing to annihilate it. And they refuse to acknowledge this basic fact because they are Progressivist ideoidolators, who worship a set of incredibly spurious beliefs as a god, and have lost the capacity for normal moral discernment and reasoning. To quote one exceptional Jew, “they strain gnats and swallow camels.” As I mentioned in my last post, they are driven not by principles but projections of their own petty emotions. Republicans, whose beliefs are stuck in the 2010s, remind them of their mean daddy, where Islamist dictators, whose beliefs are stuck in the 1200s, are exotic orientals who remind them of dangerous revolutionary possibilities.

Note: Jews were persecuted even before the wholesale theft of its scripture, divine status, tradition and land by the world’s two largest religions, who repaid the Jewish people with incessant persecution for the dire offense of continuing to exist past their expiration date.