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Entry tags:
Fever, Zionism, Secularism
Spent two days off sick from work this week. On Sunday afternoon fellow gamers noted that I looked decidedly off-colour, but I managed to participate in good humour just the same - having decided that the language of Middle-Earth's Dalish needs to be expressed in the accent of the Swedish chef from the Muppets (if Rohirric is similar to old Anglo-Saxon, then Dalish is Swedish). OK, maybe that was the first signs of impending delirium, because all through Sunday night and throughout Monday and Tuesday I was hot, felt cold and clammy, constantly dehydrated.
I have finally finished an essay on Apartheid and Zionism, which nobody of a partisan persuasion will agree with, and follows on somewhat from a previous essay The Country of Palestine : A Zero State Solution. Appropriately today I went to a small lunch in honor of Nigel Sinnott's 70th birthday at Halina Strnad's home; there's a four hour interview with Halina available on Youtube including her experiences in Auschwitz and Stutthof.
Nigel been a secular activist for his entire life, and is a former editor of The Freethinker. A truly intelligent atheist and committed liberal in the British Oxfordshire tradition, his opinions are deeply considered and balanced. Other attendees included a number of people involved in the Humanist Society. Halina too is a member and delighted attendees with a story of a local Jewish function where a younger member at her table (who obviously didn't know) called her self-description as a secular Jew as an oxymoron. "What right do you have to call yourself a Jew?", he asked the holocaust survivor. It's where gallows humour meets irony.
I have finally finished an essay on Apartheid and Zionism, which nobody of a partisan persuasion will agree with, and follows on somewhat from a previous essay The Country of Palestine : A Zero State Solution. Appropriately today I went to a small lunch in honor of Nigel Sinnott's 70th birthday at Halina Strnad's home; there's a four hour interview with Halina available on Youtube including her experiences in Auschwitz and Stutthof.
Nigel been a secular activist for his entire life, and is a former editor of The Freethinker. A truly intelligent atheist and committed liberal in the British Oxfordshire tradition, his opinions are deeply considered and balanced. Other attendees included a number of people involved in the Humanist Society. Halina too is a member and delighted attendees with a story of a local Jewish function where a younger member at her table (who obviously didn't know) called her self-description as a secular Jew as an oxymoron. "What right do you have to call yourself a Jew?", he asked the holocaust survivor. It's where gallows humour meets irony.
no subject
http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/view.jsp?artid=1603&letter=A#4621
It is all madness of course, and I constantly find myself returning to the point of how human beings desire to be part of a collectivity for the mental security, yet then use that membership to differentiate and persecute members of other constructed collectives - overlooking the visceral reality of their membership to the same species.