Jonas E. Alexis: Abu Ghraib and the Jewish Century!

The Modern Age is the Jewish Age, and the twentieth century, in particular, is the Jewish Century. Modenization, in other words, is about everyone becoming Jewish, words by Jewish historian Yuri Slezkine of the University of California. This is another major article from one of our new writers that I highly recommend. Our VT readers expect us to be helpful in connecting the dots, and providing framing for the geo political brawl we seem to find ourselves in wherever we look. How much of it is forced on us, and how much we bring to ourselves, are some of the themes addressed below. A well researched piece with 144 footnotes, it is worth a good read. Rabbi Eric H Yoffie of the Union for Reform Judaism, wrote an article in the Huffington Post last month, basically saying that there is no such thing as a secular Jew. Jewish intellectual Sam Harris indirectly proves the rabbi right, by standing with Israel's crimes. In his best selling book: "The Moral Landscape", Harris argues that in many places in the United States, corporal punishment is used in public schools, and in those public schools, a teacher is allowed to beat a child with a wooden board hard enough to raise large bruises, and even to break the skin. Hundreds of thousands of children are subjected to this violence each year. It looks as though Sam Harris is interested in alleviating suffering, and eliminating torture, but the simple fact is that it is very easy to posit huge claims, but it is not easy to marshal convincing evidence for the same claims. Harris gave us no evidence for this particular claim, but he let us grant him the premise here, that he is right. How is this consistent with torture, which Harris has advocated for years, both in writing and during public appearances? Harris is very much concerned about spanking a child with a wooden board, and yet the same Harris is not concerned about torturing, raping and sodomizing grown ups. What was more interesting was that many of those who were tortured, turned out to be innocent. The brutal acts that happened in Abu Ghraib included rape, sodomy, homicide, and even urinating on detainees, and having them masturbate. Using the evidence that had blown out in the open in 2010, the Washington Post told us that "hundreds of other cases in which prisoners were subjected to electric shock, sodomized, burned, whipped or beaten by Iraqi authorities."