Mythology is the derivative of history. It is the mirror in which we see our reflection and the lens through which others see us.-SW
This Saturday night starts the Tisha B'Av, the Jewish holy day commemorating the destruction of the First and Second Temples (in each case also the destruction of the Jewish nation at that time). Other calamities befalling the Jewish people through the centuries are also commemorated on this day.
For the last two weeks I have been writing about Political Correctness and the way in which PC thought creates a cultural defect in reality testing. Part of the damage of PC is caused by the active attack on history and mythology, by the PC intellectuals, by their leftist allies (there is an overlap), and the opportunistic anti-democratic forces that are the spiritual heirs of communism and fascism, the two great totalitarian movements of the last century.
The Nazis and the Communists both recognized early on that a powerful weapon of attack on people involved propaganda, a form of information warfare. Part of the job of the propagandist was to delegitimize the enemy at their core. For example, the Czar's secret police created the Protocols of the Elders of Zion which sought to replace the Jewish version of their own history, as "people of the book" and the "chosen people", with an alternate view of their history which sought to destroy any positive traits associated with Judaism and replace those mythological qualities with evil traits as a way to justify virulent anti-Semitism. It is no surprise that the Islamic world has picked up on the same techniques used by the Czar, adopted by Hitler, and later still relied upon by Stalin.
The mythology of the Jewish people is closely tied to the holy ground of Jerusalem. The site of the Western Wall, all that is left of the Second Temple, has traditionally been referred to as the "Wailing Wall", a measure of a people's sadness at the loss. When the Jewish state was established in 1948 by the UN, the Western Wall was part of the Palestinian state. Jews were not allowed to visit many of their holy sites. Many Jewish sites in Arab hands were desecrated.
Destroying and burying the past of one's enemies is an old tradition for Jihadist Islam. Many Mosques were once Catholic Churches (Hagia Sophia); the Giant Buddhas at Bamayin were destroyed by the fundamentalist Taliban.
In the present day, the efforts of Islam to deny the Jewish connection to Jerusalem , and indeed to the land of Israel, continues apace, with the connivance and collaboration of many in the West. Arab preachers give sermons demonizing the Jews and denying the past. Holocaust denial is a popular pastime in the Arab media. Much of the West collaborates with the Multicultural haters of the West by denying our own history, concentrating on the low points and minimizing the best that our past has to offer. Only by destroying the Jew's history can our enemies deligitimize our connection to the land.
The Temple Mount is being bull dozed and excavated under the direction of the Islamic authority (Waqf) that controls the space, a ill considered result of the decision by the Israelis after reunifying Jerusalem to show tolerance and respect for the Palestinians and Islam by allowing them to administer the area they call the Dome of the Rock, the third holiest site in Islam. The Committee for the Prevention of Destruction of Antiquities on the Temple Mount offers rich documentation of this atrocity, the attempt to erase the Jewish past.
Yet as Jonathan Tobin, writing in the Jewish World Review on line, so elegantly describes, Now the Stones Will Speak. In his article today, he describes the finding of evidence for the existence of King David's Palace.
Dr. Eilat Mazar, senior fellow of the Jerusalem-based Shalem Center's Institute for the Archaeology of the Jewish People, made public the results of the dig she had been conducting since February in an area south of the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem, where scholars believe the city of David existed. What she produced ought to help quiet those who think Jewish history is bunk.
Amid the soil and rocks of the place that is now the village of Silwan, Mazar uncovered the ruins of the building she's sure was the palace of David itself — the very same structure that was built, according to the Bible, by King Hiram of Tyre for Israel's greatest king, around 1,000 BCE.
Here is further evidence for the existence of the historical David.
[I must admit that I have a warm spot in my heart for this. When my youngest child was born, we were struggling to find a name for him. We had settled on David because of a tenuous link to his departed Grandmother's name. Our choice was confirmed the day of his birth, August 6, 1993, by a New York Times, front page article which described the first hard evidence to support the existence of a historical David to match the Biblical David.]
Psychoanalysis has among its aims to reintroduce a troubled person to his past, which he can then view through adult eyes, insulated by his more powerful and mature mental apparatus from the intensity of the original painful and traumatic events that have left their mark on his personality. We do not seek to destroy the patient's personal mythology but to bring it into a closer alignment with a more realistic history. We learn, painfully, that our parents were not the giants we see in my memory of childhood, but were people, fallible and imperfect, who, if we were lucky, did the best they could, a job that was "good enough" to sustain us until we could care for ourselves and, perhaps, eventually to make our own unique mistakes rearing the next generation. It is confusing and, yes, painful, to learn to see our parents as real people, to re-assess our own personal mythology, to accept our own limitations and our own essential humanity, but we do it because it is the best way we have to escape the strictures of the past and move on. Those would bury and forget the past, will be doomed forever to repeat it.
Jewish history is under attack. But do not think that the sacrifice of the Jews will appease the enemies of civilization. The enemies of reason and humanity, under the misleading guise of tolerance and multiculturalism, have tried (continue to try) to destroy the past of the American people. It is useful to recognize that America was founded by human beings, that not all were giants in the past, yet PC thought would have us now believe that there was nothing good that could come out of the Judeo-Christian traditions, or of its shining offspring, the American experience.
The Islamic fascists know that people who lose their past cannot hope to have a future. Too many have forgotten so much of what is valuable in our shared heritage that they would endanger all of us.
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