Thread by @_journaling_

@savtah8 @_centrist_ @Israel "ISRAEL IS NOW PRODUCING WATER FROM AIR"

Extracting water from air? No matter how good one's engineering is, one can only extract as much as nature offers. Israel is the size of Delaware and arid. If we all move there, Israel will have more people than Illinois.

@savtah8 @_centrist_ @Israel That air is going to get awfully dry.

@savtah8 @_centrist_ @Israel "don’t give up on America yet,as soon as they realize that DEMOCRAT PARTY WAS HIGHJACED"

Can we really blame any political party for American bigotry?

@savtah8 @_centrist_ @Israel ",the Jews will wake up from their trance."

OK, let's say we wake up. The Nazis and their apologists will still be there, we'll still be outnumbered, and as much as we'd like to think that the Alt-Right is a new thing, it's not.

@savtah8 @_centrist_ @Israel Reality check: Congregation Beth Shalom, Bloomington, Indiana, 1980s - you know, back when most of our parents were college students?

Synagogue gets firebombed. Police response - "outside agitators." They refuse to investigate.

@savtah8 @_centrist_ @Israel No investigation of that incident has been seen to this day. That's the reality of "enlightened, tolerant America" that doesn't get talked about - get outside of a few metro areas like New York and Chicago, and you will instantly find yourself in the redneck belt.

@savtah8 @_centrist_ @Israel Been on social media, lately? When I hear some yahoo calling black people "apes" and defending the near annihilation of the native Americans on the basis of a "right of conquest," Obama and CAIR have nothing to do with that. The fool managed to be a fool, all on his own.

@savtah8 @_centrist_ @Israel The sad, sick truth - the Nazis (and their ilk) are rallied around by their countrymen, and if the Jews or people of color they attack should object, one will get to watch a lot of "nice" Americans act like the people objecting to the attacks are the problem, and not the bigots.

@savtah8 @_centrist_ @Israel "JEWS unite when attacked"

Do we? Take a look at this tweet

https://twitter.com/Abc11Ab/status/1083449619638566914

and read between the lines.

@savtah8 @_centrist_ @Israel While ab is (I think) a little optimistic about what a small desert country can do, even with high technology, let's pay close attention to his line of argument.

@savtah8 @_centrist_ @Israel At a time when Americans, as a group, seem to have no problem with the idea of a Jew being told that he's going to be shoved into an oven (a line a few of us have already heard, repeatedly) or with said Jew being silenced when he talks back, Ab wants us to stay out of Israel.

@savtah8 @_centrist_ @Israel At a time when more and more Westerners openly endorse the idea of re-opening the death camps, he wants us to stay in America (and Europe, too, apparently). As a flood of Hate rises, as far as he's concerned, Israel is not going to be our lifeboat.

@savtah8 @_centrist_ @Israel If the concern was that Israel was a tiny, arid land with a fragile ecology that could only support so many people, I'd probably understand, but that's not his argument.

In fact, he denies the validity of that argument, asserting that Israel has no concerns about water.

@savtah8 @_centrist_ @Israel No, his position is that we're supposed to stay home (and, I guess, be good sports about the whole thing and die with a minimum of fuss should the crazies take over) because if we all came over, it would be bad for the Israeli economy.

@savtah8 @_centrist_ @Israel Notice who the OP is? Do you see anybody distancing himself from that remarkably cold position?

So much for "never again," I guess.

@savtah8 @_centrist_ @Israel Unhappy news, but useful information that goes with other useful information. Outside of Hillel, did you ever notice what you never see on the High Holidays, and usually not even outside of the holidays when you're in Shul?

A poor Jew.

@savtah8 @_centrist_ @Israel Not that we don't exist. My yearly income is $5000 US. That would qualify as poverty even in Mexico. But if one can't afford the dues, one doesn't go to shul.

@savtah8 @_centrist_ @Israel Is one's poverty a consequence of one's Judaism, because one's former boss blacklisted one after getting angry about the fact that one was being observant? Rabbi does not care, and neither does the congregation. To them, you're just a schnorrer, and their backs are turned on you.

@savtah8 @_centrist_ @Israel Not very admirable, is it?

@savtah8 @_centrist_ @Israel I looked at that, and the willingness of Christianity and Islam to resort to persecution in order to build their own numbers and asked myself a forbidden quest: what sign of G-d is to be seen in any of this behavior?

@savtah8 @_centrist_ @Israel Is the conduct of the faithful of all varieties not more scandalous than that of the unbelievers, and if so, what is the lesson of that?

I think that the answer is simple: that the atheists are right.

@savtah8 @_centrist_ @Israel The simplest explanation to the question of why G-d has failed to inspire better than He has in those who supposedly serve Him is that He never existed in the first place. That He is a fictional character, invented as a sort of wish fulfillment as Man faced a threatening world.

@savtah8 @_centrist_ @Israel That being the case, why take all of the dreck that comes with being known as a Jew? The death threats, the job discrimination, the open Hate?

It's not like there's a community that will have one's back when hard times come, as some of us know, because they're already here.

@savtah8 @_centrist_ @Israel The good news for some of us in this discussion is that we're not Ashkenazic, and that the bigots don't know who the Sephardim are. They'll look at one of us and think that we're Italian or Greek or something.

@savtah8 @_centrist_ @Israel I guess we could just lie, say that we are, and escape the whole nightmare.

We won't have the support of the Jewish people any more, but we didn't have that anyway, so problem solved? Just turn our backs on those who've turned their backs on us.

@savtah8 @_centrist_ @Israel It's not a happy moment, but what else is there for a lot of us to do?

@savtah8 @_centrist_ @Israel Aside from making this into a moment

⚡️ “Why I gave up on Judaism, God and the West” by @_journaling_

twitter.com/i/moments/1083…

and then tolling this up, because I ran on, didn't I?

@savtah8 @_centrist_ @Israel Please unroll @threadreaderapp

@savtah8 @_centrist_ @Israel Ugh ... "rolling this up," not "tolling this up."