Hyperzionism. The Expansionist Party received the following odd email today, under the subject line "Contacts from Israel".

Hi!
We are - israeli right-wing movement "Bead Artseinu" - seek contacts.
The international Hyperzionist Movement "Bead Artseinu" ("For Motherland!" ["For Our Homeland", on their website]) was founded in 2001 by a group of young Israeli politicians, intellectuals and journalists.

The Movement includes several hundred activists (primarily Russian-speaking repatriants, although there are representatives of different Jewish diasporas, as well as different nationalities).

The number of those who support Bead Artseinu is numbering in the thousands.

Today "Bead Artseinu" is the only movement on the Israeli social-political scene, which has a clearly defined strategic goal as well as a unique ideology.

The official ideology of the movement is Hyperzionism. Hyperzionism is a thoroughly developed ideology, in development of which took part the best politologists of Israel and Russia. Hyperzionism is an ideology of the 3rd millenium, that has come to replace the obsolete ideology of political zionism, which is intended to give a new impulse to the growth and development of Israel, and which fully corresponds to the realities of the coming post-industrial era. This is why the importance of Hyperzionism transcends the boundaries of Israel and is capable of resolving the most urgent questions faced by mankind as a whole. The intent of Hyperzionism is to support the development of a powerful and independent Israel as a country which would have leading roles in the global economy, science and culture, the creation of "the Israeli Empire" in minimal borders from the Nile to Euphrates [their website shows a map of Israel taking everything from the Euphrates to the Suez Canal], the rebuilding of the Jerusalem Temple, and returning of the glorious heroic image to the Jewish people, as described in Tanakh.

The movement is active internationally. One of the main goals of the Movement's existance is to counteract Muslim fundamentalism, which presents a fundamental threat not only to Israel, but to the entire modern civilization. To ehnance awareness of this threat and to unite the forces, capable of standing against it, "Bead Artseinu" employs its versatile international connections, first and foremost in Western Europe, Russia and CIS ["Commonwealth of Independent States", former Soviet republics], in various Christian and Muslim circles.

The movement has conducted a number of political actions, directed to defend the Jews of diaspora, the Holy Land as well as in support of our political allies.

Two films were made about "Bead Artseinu", which were screened on Israeli TV channels "Israel-Plus" (a film by Petr Majstrovoy "For God, King and Fatherland") and "NTV-World" (a film by Alexander Stupnikov "The New Jewish Revolutionaries"), also there was multiple news coverage on the TV networks of Israel, Russia and other countries. Also, a chapter is dedicated to the movement in a book "Against the Modern World" by professor Michael Sedgwick, published by the Oxford University (the book deals with modern Traditionalist political parties and movements). Altogether, the activities of "Bead Artseinu" receive regular coverage in Israeli and foreign press. Many members of the movement have gained recognition in various areas * * *.

The official mass medium of "Bead Artseinu" is website www.zarodinu.org, where materials are hosted in 5 different languages (Hebrew, Russian, English, German, French). Chapters of the movement exist in Russia, the United States, Great Britain, the West Indies and Germany with a planned chapter in Italy.

Alexandr Rybalka, Secretary of Movement
secretariat@zarodinu.org

I replied:

BOY, have you reached a wrong number! We are wholly opposed to Zionism, and especially hyperzionism. We are hostile to any form of imperialism, and especially to one based on race or religion, or some crazed notion that God has 'chosen' just a few people out of the whole of humanity as his favorites.
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I'm glad you are at least forthright about your imperialist and ethnocentric designs. As for rebuilding the temple [see brief discussion toward the end of my blog entry of November 25, 2004], it does puzzle outsiders why, once Israel gained control of the whole of Jerusalem, it did not start on plans to rebuild the temple.
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A worldwide population of 18 million Jews should not have such insanely grandiose plans for the planet. Germany had 3 or 4 times as many people at a time when the world had only a couple of billion people, but its neighbors didn't like its designs, and Israel risks the same kind of wide, military alliance, including the United States, to stop designs such as yours. Cheers.

Coincidentally, my brother arrived in Israel this morning, after stopping briefly, on layover, in Newark. We played some pool (I wanted his help in understanding "leaves", english (spin), etc.), so we played on the table I recently had installed in my basement), and then went to Kentucky Fried Chicken in East Orange for lunch. (Alan loves KFC. Happenstantially, I used to work for Colonel Sanders' lead trial lawyer in his controversies with the corporation that bought his U.S. operations, so I met the Colonel a couple of times.)
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While talking over lunch, he mentioned that there is a lot of tension between Israel and the United States now, in large part because Israel recognizes that without the U.S., Israel would not exist, and that kind of dependency makes Israelis very testy toward us. I mentioned that the law firm I work for has some Arab accounts, managed by some of our Jewish partners, and one of our Jewish associates was talking this week about visa requirements for travel to Saudi Arabia. I remarked that it used to be that Jews could travel anywhere, but now their movements are restricted because of Israel.
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This is one of the points made by the anti-Zionist Jewish website, jewsnotzionists.org — that Zionism has made Jews not more secure in their physical safety or freedom to practice their religion unencumbered, but less secure and more the target of intolerance.
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Zionism has even endangered non-Jews, as attacks on Americans in many countries around the world prove. U.S. support for Zionism has led to the bizarre accusation that we are "crusaders". The people of the Middle East should wish we were crusaders, because if we conquered the Christian "Holy Land" we would establish a secular government over it that would respect the right of every community to practice its own religion fully and openly, and give everyone equal treatment under law, guaranteed by the military might of the U.S. Government. People of all religious communions should think about what a (U.S.) State of Palestine would be like, and consider aloud ending the current miserable state of affairs to pursue admission of all of the Holy Land as a State of the United States.
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The current situation, tho generally grim, does lead to a few humorous incidents. My brother Alan had a story about the need for international businessmen to have multiple passports. He was working in Algeria, and at the airport a colleague presented his passport without thinking, only to realize that he had presented the one with stamps from Israel. So he pulled that one back and presented another, only to realize that that one had stamps from South Africa (which at the time was on a no-travel list in Algeria), so pulled THAT one back to present one with no objectionable travel stamps! The people traveling with him were sure he was going to be arrested, but apparently the customs officials were sufficiently familiar with the multiple-passport practice as not to bat an eye.
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My family is always a little worried when Alan travels to Israel to see his children and grandchildren. During college he met a woman who had been interned in Auschwitz as a child, and her parents thought they would be disgraced in the Jewish community of Lakewood (NJ) if their daughter married a "goy" (gentile), so my brother, not attached to his Catholic and Protestant upbringing, converted to Judaism. He and Phyllis (whom I always liked) eventually divorced, and Alan reverted, informally, to Christianity. But according to Jewish tradition and practice, the children were raised as Jews — Orthodox, no less — and Phyllis moved the family to Israel.
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My nephew David is now a rabbi who lives outside Jerusalem and teaches in a well-regarded yeshiva. His younger sister Debbie also lives in Israel, but the oldest child, Erica, moved back to the U.S. with her British-born Orthodox Jewish husband ("my [brother's] son-in-law the docta"), and has no plans to return to Israel. Phyllis's parents, Abe and Celia (who have terrific accents and were always fun to be around), moved to Israel for a while but were unhappy there so moved back to the U.S. and retired from New Jersey to Florida.
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In a normal world, none of this would matter. But in a world where Zionism has poisoned attitudes toward the Jews and provoked endless war in the Middle East and elsewhere (al-Qaeda trained Philippine guerrillas, who may have been involved in a bombing that killed 15 Christians today in Mindanao), it makes a huge difference. My brother takes his life in his hands when he simply goes to his oldest grandson's bar mitzvah. American Jews are made to feel guilty if they live here rather than in a horrible little country they can't stand, and don't even speak the ugly, useless language Hebrew. The Jews of the Diaspora, 2/3 of all Jews worldwide, have restrictions placed upon their travel and risks of anti-Jewish violence are a constant in their lives all because of an insane, pie-in-the-sky pipedream of Central European Jews a century ago. How much worse would things be for everyone if Hyperzionism came to have as powerful a hold on the consciousness — and restraint on the moral conscience — of Jews worldwide as Zionism now has?
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Hyperzionism, like Zionism, should be renounced by Jews themselves refusing entreaties to ethnic and religious imperialism lest the world, weary of endless war and crazy plans of self-centered Jews, have to end this nitemare by force. The next travel ban may be a U.S. ban on travel to Israel, preparatory to a full-scale "shock and awe" attack to end, once and for all, the nitemare that Zionism has given us. It can't come soon enuf for me.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 3:04 PM