Haim Saban, a billionaire donor to the US Democratic Party and active in pro-Israel political efforts in the United States, once asserted that, \u201cI\u2019m a one-issue guy, and my issue is Israel.\u201d Saban is a devout Zionist. I\u2019m a devout karateka. I\u2019m a one-issue guy, and my issue is anti-Zionism.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve watched livestreamed footage of verminous Israel\u2019s industrial-scale extermination of the beautiful Palestinians. As a human and a karateka, I know where I stand on it. The underlying philosophy of all Japanese martial arts is morality, enshrined in budo (way of the warrior), whose goal is training to avoid violence and to live in peace and harmony with others. Westerners typically latch onto fancy-sounding Japanese terms but don\u2019t properly understand their meaning. Bu, usually translated as \u201cwar,\u201d is written as crossed halberds separated by the symbol for \u201cstop\u201d\u2014bu means \u201cto stop conflict\u201d; \u201cdo\u201d signifies lifelong learning and self-mastery. To train properly is to establish hontai, which is morality. To establish morality is to increase your ethical conduct and benefit humanity.<\/p>\n
Zionism is incompatible with karatedo. Zionism is murderous, racist, Jewish condescension towards anyone not Jewish. Israel as a Zionist state deliberately immiserates and massacres the nearly 2.2 million Palestinians it has imprisoned in Gaza and the West Bank. Zionism is not Judaism, the lovely religion of the Jews, with its seven values that have nothing to do with Zionism. Educate yourself by looking them up. The first and second values\u2014in God\u2019s image and human dignity\u2014are the crux of my anti-Zionism: \u201cAnyone who takes a single life, it is as though he has destroyed the entire world. And anyone who saves a single life, it is as though he has saved the entire world\u201d; and \u201cthe Torah does not permit Jews to take an innocent life, even for the benefit of many.\u201d<\/p>\n
These lofty values are not evident in the context of how Israel treats the Palestinians, who are not strangers among the Jews because they were in Palestine long before the Jews arrived.<\/p>\n
So, if you practice karate but support<\/p>\n
\u2022\ta state so immoral that it uses the Holocaust to justify its intentional infliction of unimaginable death, destruction, and suffering on another people
\n\u2022\tuntrammelled theft of another people\u2019s land and resources
\n\u2022\tindiscriminate bombing of defenceless Palestinians who lack Apache helicopters, drones, jet fighters, and laser-guided artillery to retaliate
\n\u2022\tindiscriminate killing of children just so you can build waterfront properties on top of their remains
\n\u2022\tburning patients alive while still tethered to their IV drips in makeshift tents because Israel has destroyed all hospitals
\n\u2022\tsurgery without anaesthetic because Israel has banned medical aid
\n\u2022\tdeprivation of the basic conditions of life, destruction of entire neighbourhoods into fields of rubble, and obliteration of entire families
\n\u2022\tcoward snipers who kill unarmed journalists trying to report on Israel’s unfathomable cruelty
\n\u2022\tdisplacement of Palestinians that resembles the death marches of past genocides and the 1948 Nakba
\n\u2022\tstomping out speech critical of Israel and its genocidal savagery
\n\u2022\tuse of white phosphorous on civilians
\n\u2022\treferring to starving trapped Palestinians as \u201cputting them on a diet\u201d and to bombing them as \u201cmowing the lawn\u201d
\n\u2022\tbrutish Israeli soldiers who broadcast TikTok videos of their criminality<\/p>\n
you contaminate karatedo and do not belong in it. If I had the power, I would expel you from it. Instead, I actively avoid you for fear of that contamination.<\/p>\n
In my opinion, Israel is a foul brat with an unlimited murder budget from its American sugar daddy (\u201cDad, I need another $14 billion for my Jewish ethnostate\u201d . . . \u201cAll right, but be good, don\u2019t spend it all at once). Israel is a crime scene, a pandemic of inhumanity, a serial killer society high on hate and drowning in bad faith, where true human love is unknowable. It should have been under permanent sanctions seventy-five years ago for its subhuman treatment of another people. I dismiss the Zionist \u201cchosen people\u201d canard in the face of their rampant, rapacious, salivating greed and plunder; blatant rejection of law; absolute indifference to anyone else\u2019s life but their own; and their unrelenting, eight decade-long repression and killing of the Palestinians. Zionists like to describe the Palestinians as worthless animals. In my opinion, Zionists are the only animals in the room.<\/p>\n
To confront evil\u2014even if there is no chance of success\u2014keeps alive our humanity and dignity. Israel would like to erase from historical recognition the great Marek Edelman, the Jewish survivor of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. He reminded the world that, \u201cto be a Jew means always being with the oppressed, and never the oppressors.\u201d Just don\u2019t tell that to Zionists in all their feculent bestiality. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Haim Saban, a billionaire donor to the US Democratic Party and active in pro-Israel political efforts in the United States, once asserted that, \u201cI\u2019m a<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-369","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-opinion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/colinsmithkarate.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/369","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/colinsmithkarate.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/colinsmithkarate.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/colinsmithkarate.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/colinsmithkarate.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=369"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/colinsmithkarate.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/369\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":374,"href":"https:\/\/colinsmithkarate.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/369\/revisions\/374"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/colinsmithkarate.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=369"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/colinsmithkarate.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=369"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/colinsmithkarate.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=369"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}