Saturday, January 11, 2014

Ariel Sharon, Rabbi Kaduri, and the imminent arrival of the Messiah

There's an awful lot of internet traffic today devoted to imaginary prophecies concerning visions allegedly visited on Mizrahi rabbi Yitzhak Kaduri.

Kaduri was quite a character. Spent his whole life reading scripture and seeing visions. He kicked the bucket just weeks after Sharon went into what was to be his terminal coma. But he's having a bit of a resurrection today, thanks mostly to Christian Zionist propagandists in the US.

I'm personally a bit of a skeptic when it comes to visions. Oh, I've certainly had my share... that's why I'm profoundly skeptical. But Kaduri was mostly a big deal among the more orientalist folks in the Holy Land, and God knows those are the folks who will go in for visions and prophesies and quackery of all stripes.

It's a bit of Netanyahu-inspired folk-lore that Rabbi Kaduri once confided to him that Jehovah himself had revealed in a vision that anyone to the left of Likud was no longer an authentic Jew.

Netanyahu himself is of course the ultimate pragmatist and he knows quackery when he hears it, but he's certainly not adverse to harnessing it for his own ends.

Pretty much the only people anywhere even more susceptible to quackery are American Christian Zionists like Paul Begley.

What is really astonishing, and this is a profound indictment of the American education system, is that millions of people lap this stuff up.

2 comments:

  1. I've recently came accross Paul Begley, and at first was somewhat intrigued, but mostly entertained. As I listened I began to hear and see some things I did not agree with. Can you tell me why you believe Paul Begley is a Zionist? I would like to hear your synopsis on this.

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    1. google "Paul Begley Christian Zionists" and see what comes up. They are great supporters of Israel because of their peculiar interpretation of the most peculiar book in the Bible, Revelations. They're big in Republican politics and in the Harper government in Canada. Unfortunately their ideology ends rather badly for Jewish people, but the Likud faction sees them as useful allies in the short term.

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