Arab people safeguard artifacts even though they were made by now defunct people. The Dead Sea Scrolls fall into this category. The Holy Land was a crossroads of several different cultures, mostly extinct. Civilizations came and went but the people, some of them, remained. The artifacts once associated with these people belong to all of us in one sense. The study of archaeology and ancient history sheds light on these ancient people and are a source enrichment for everyone. That the Dead Sea Scrolls can be attributed to an unorthodox Hebrew sect and possibly one that was shunned by rabbis in the Temple two millennia ago, does not give the Jews of modern Israel the right to steal all or any historical treasures from non-Jews on the grounds that they have an association with a defunct Jewish sect.
It is brazen effrontery for the modern state of Israel to claim that it speaks or acts for all Jews, including Jews who live in other countries and continents. It does not.
Ok. Wow.
#1. And I don't know how I could possibly make this more clear without yelling. Maybe I need to yell. THE JEWISH PEOPLE ARE NOT DEFUNCT NOR EXTINCT NOR AN ANCIENT AND IRRELEVANT PIECE OF HISTORY. THE JEWISH PEOPLE ARE A LIVING PEOPLE WITH A RICH, VIBRANT HISTORY AND A PROMISING FUTURE WITH A CLEAR CONTINUITY FROM THE MOST ANCIENT TIMES RIGHT UP TO THE PRESENT DAY. THESE DEAD SEA SCROLLS ARE THE VERY SAME DEFINING LITERATURE AND RELIGIOUS TEXTS WE USE TODAY. We clear, yet?
The sect which developed the Dead Sea Scrolls are understood by scholars to have become
extinct a couple of thousand years ago. Some of the texts I understand to be from the Jewish Bible and other holy books written mostly in Hebrew and Aramaic, the language spoken by Jesus as well as Greek. So, there are various influences.
#2. The Arab and Muslim people have a shitty, shitty, shitty record of safe-guarding and caretaking the historical and religious cultural heritage of other cultures. Come on! Temple Mount Sifting Project! The hell?! They are destroying irreplaceable archaeological finds in order to deny the existence of the Jewish people's history. And the Palestinians, through UNESCO, are ACTIVELY seeking to erase Jewish history and religious significance. They are re-writing the truth in order to eliminate the Jewish people's rights to our own cultural heritage. And you support this? Why? Why would you support this?
I am unfamiliar with excavations around the Al Aqsa mosque but the destruction of of all evidence of population of an ethnically cleansed people such as happened to the Jews under the Roman period is like a second cleansing and vile. I see this happening in Israel when Palestinian place names and their replacement with Hebrew and it is no less reprehensible.
#3. Israel absolutely has the right to act on behalf of the Jewish people everywhere when it comes to preserving and protecting our cultural heritage. That was the entire POINT of creating our own Nation! So that we could be protected. Wow. Are you that clueless? Is France no longer permitted to speak for the French? Is Japan no longer permitted to speak for the Japanese?
I see it quite differently; the British were offering European Jews a homeland as long as it was not in Europe. They settled on Palestine and the consequential death, bloodshed, and hateful propaganda has continued ever since. European Jews had nothing to do with the Dead Sea Scrolls. Many of the rich had already gone to America where they did rather well for themselves. Those in the east European shtetls suffered in the Final Solution. The British version of the final solution was to get the Jews out of Europe. Those Jews who went and took Arab land have no more right to speak for all Jews in the world no more than the Jews of Queens, New York can speak or all Jews.
But to ease your mind, let's ask. Let's ask some of our Jewish members here who they would prefer to have caretakership over our ancient Jewish texts? Hey,
Hollie ,
Roudy ,
rylah ,
irosie91 ,
SAYIT ,
MJB12741 ,
turzovka , (and please tag anyone I have forgotten): Who would you rather have as guardian of the oldest known extant texts of our Torah -- Israel or the Palestinian Authority? (I vote Israel, btw).
I heard that
argumentum ad populum is supposed to be a logical fallacy. Thanks for the list.