States of Exile

Here at State of Exile, we acknowledge Naim Dangoor, British-Iraqi-Jewish real estate tycoon and self-declared Exilarch of the Babylonian Jews, to be Exilarch of all Jews. Here are some of his more noteworthy pronouncements, as made in his journal, The Scribe . On Adam: It is time to rehabilitate Adam and honour him not only as the father of our agricultural civilisation but also as the founder of Monotheism. On Buddhism: Buddhism is not a religion, but a philosophy. That and other cults, which have no contact with Jehovah, are man-made fairy tales. On the Creation: Modern science has confirmed the inspired knowledge of our ancestors regarding the origin of the Universe and its creation out of nothing which started with the Big Bang. Encouraged by this information, even serious Bible scholars are trying to find scientific proof in every word of the Bible which is overdoing it. On Cyrus: It is interesting to observe here that in 1971 Iran celebrated the 2500th anniversary, a Jubilee of ...

The War Nerd makes an underappreciated point in his article about the Israelis who fired on Palestinian marching into the Golan Heights: For every squeamish Euro descendant of socialist kibbutzim in those ranks, I’d bet there are ten Sephardim or Falasha with lots of juicy family stories about what it was like living in Muslim countries who’d be willing to empty their magazines into the crowd coming down the hill. To wit, the Sephardim are the more right-wing, conservative sub-race of Jews. In North America there are relatively few Sephardim, so Jews get fairly stereotyped as bourgeois liberals. But in Israel, Sephardim comprise at least half the Jewish population, so the country tilts to the right. Interestingly, Benjamin Netanyahu (though himself Ashkenazi) dismissed the Israeli "tent city" protestors as "Ashkenazi leftists eating sushi and smoking nargilas." Clearly then, Ashkenazi functions in Israel as Jewish does in certain North American circles: as a signif...