but while carrying on that line of reasoning, might one wonder aloud why it was that the "Wiemar Republic" who's principle flaw was in not having outlawed the establishment of religion gave rise to the likes of the Christian Coalitionists that formed the basis of support behind the Nazi Party?
When we look at secular governments of Liberty we see very little of this established hatred, religious persecution and intolerance, and people of all religions can live in near-perfect peace and harmony precisely because no single religion(even Marxism) can ever become established in the manner of a fascist totalitarian tyranny. This is the great blessing of "Liberal Democracy" or "Republican Liberty" as our forefathers called it. Funny thing is it is not quite as republican, nor as anarchically democratic as it sounds!
We have anointed a Paper Monarch called our Constitution which stipulates the terms of our human and social freedoms and outlaws the specific sorts of repressive fascist things that (supposedly) cannot be established, represented or legislated into law by mere populist democracy. Our courts and supposedly; in the case of GW Bush, our President are charged with the duty of speaking for and enforcing our Constitutions orders of Liberty.
Thus it is, that by defending Liberty above all else that we protect ourselves and all our neighbors and all of our respective non-established religions, and in no other way!Unfortunately for America. it was due to the criminal, hateful dogmatic biblical socialist doctrinal justifications for slavery that Nazi-Christianist "Whig" Neo-Conservative Fascism refused to die off properly as it should have, leaving only room for Liberal Socialists (federalists) and Liberal Privatists (parochialists) to properly occupy the newly redefined political main stages of constitutionally regulated Liberal Democracy that they had fought to establish!
“The greatest enemy of the truth is very often not the lie, deliberate, contrived and dishonest, but the myth, persistent, persuasive and unrealistic.” John F. Kennedy.
Yet Anglican Fascist Great Britain and Catholic Fascist Italy where two 'conservative' Christian societies (socialist nations), who together with the so-called "Christian" noble conservative-privatist support of notable Americans like William Randolph Hearst, the Carnegie Institution, the Rockefeller Foundation the Harriman's and even Henry Ford did everything they could to feed, promote and assist the Christianist eugenics movement and support the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute and Hitlers new hate-regime. Mussolini's dear summer holiday fellow-fascist Churchill even opined that Benito Mussolini was "the greatest lawgiver on earth"! (Read:
The Great Hatred )
In fact for most of the Christian Nazi's Hitler's "Final Solution" was seen to be merely a "Stop Gap Solution" as they believe fervently, and since the end of WW II the secret Gehlen-MI6-CIA military industrial Christian mafia dictatorship have been actively engineering a colossal global thermonuclear battle at Armageddon
(Megiddo) in the Sinai desert to complete the job Hitler couldn't.
To this end, in the 1960's Britain's Anglicanist MI6 crusader mafia supplied heavy water and weapons grade plutonium to ensure that the tiny impoverished struggling nation was well stocked with a strategic arsenal that would "have to be" targeted by other nuclear powers to protect the Arab oil fields, and with the looming demise of it's treasured and lucrative "Soviet Menace" in the late 1970's the Britain's Gehlen/Bush Christianist CIA Mafia nuclear-armed Pakistan and trained and nurtured the Mujihadeen and Osama bin Laden. (Read:
Is the US an ally of Israel?)
Indeed, as you say Jewishness is much more than a mere religion, for indeed it is a distinctive ethnicity with it's own language(s), culture and customs, but racially, a true Jew is as Semitic as his Arab neighbors. Yet indeed, you'd have to agree that most of the colonists in Israel are merely Europeans exploiting their religious baggage. As far as the Zionist movement is concerned the Harvard Israel Review has an excellent article on
Reviving Religious Zionism which pretty much sums up what most Jews see as the needs for Religious Statehood, which are either based upon Rabbi Kook's traditional messianic quest, which does not justify political religious socialism as Professor Leibowitz eloquently criticized it. Now Rabbi Hartmann takes Leibowitz's allowance that the "creation of Israel, could have religious impact by providing opportunities for furthering Jewish practice." and tries to run with the "Positive Zionism" angle but still that does not explain the need to impose totalitarian Judaism upon the residents, immigrants and citizenry.
Finally, Rabbi Joseph Dov Soloveitchik's Halakhic Option tries to justify fascism on the basis of "...the Bible commands Jews to defend one another. The lesson of the Holocaust, as Fackenheim notes, is that such defense is impossible without a nation-state and sovereignty." then turns around and ignores Liberty and breaks his own "famed six-hundred-and-fourteenth commandment, which emanated from the commanding Voice of Auschwitz, forbidding the post-Holocaust Jew to give Hitler posthumous victories" by basing the need for Zionist fascism on the faults of fascism in the first place!
Surely Israel has a right to protect it's majority cultural need for it's distinctive identity but that can be accomplished without any need to marginalize or segregate citizens of other faiths, and can be done in a secular Liberal Democratic fashion which does recognize institutionalized mores of a predominant Jewish culture and identity. Surely a reasonable quota system could also be adopted for immigration and resettlement of refugees too! It is the example that is being set for Palestinians that bothers me, they are being polarized away from the pacific unity of Liberty instead of falling in love with it.
Anyone who is willing to surrender Liberty for security deserves neither! And to paraphrase another great political statement (please don't take this personally), the one thing I have to say to these dumbfounded nation building Conservatistas is:
"It's about Liberty, stupid!"