Thursday, July 14, 2005

Zions and Tigers and Bears......

A fellow named Scooter recently blogged this onward-christian-soliders and it reminded me of my long standing confusion over the terms 'Zion', 'Zionist', et. al. So I looked them up. According to Dictionary.com, Zion means simply :

"a. The historic land of Israel as a symbol of the Jewish people.
b. The Jewish people; Israel."

Ok, I can grasp that. Furthermore Zionist means :

"A Jewish movement that arose in the late 19th century in response to growing anti-Semitism and sought to reestablish a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Modern Zionism is concerned with the support and development of the state of Israel."

That too, seems straightforward. Here is the part that confuses me. The only time I hear these words used is in the entertainment media, and it always has a negative connotation. But its a negative connotation spouted by an unsavory character. Usually, some greasy, hunched over, churl is cursing, through his bespittled maw, the "Zionist dogs" and their evil ways. My confusion is compounded by the plotline having nothing whatever to do with the establishment/support of the state of Israel. Was our greasy churl attempting to undermine the state of Israel and I missed it? Is it just an epithet hurled out of failure and anti-Semitism? Do Zionists call themselves Zionists?

Maybe I would be less confused if I knew more Jews. I think I only know one. I might know more, but I never think to ask. The one I know, I don't know very well. I am loathe to ask him to clarify, lest I offend.

1 comment:

Scooter said...

If you drop "International Zionist Conspiracy" into Google - you'll get back quite a few hits, including "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" - a concocted document purporting to detail how Jews want to take over the world. If you drop in ZOG (Zionist Occupation Government), you'll probably get a lot more - that's the theory that the U.S. (and perhaps the world) is already controlled by Jews. People who believe in ZOG tend to believe things like Global Warming being a conspiracy to convince nations to work together as a lubricant toward tricking them into adopting one-world rule under the U.N. as controlled by...ZOG. Zionism is used in your sense by people who don't see an international conspiracy and in the global conspiracy sense by those who need to watch few reruns of the X-Files.

If you think Zion is a confusing term, try "Israel" - it's a country, it's the Jewish people, it's white people according to Identity Christians, and there are about a dozen other meanings as well.

Anyway - whenever a term confuses me a bit, I try Wikipedia first, they often have a whole article about a concept, including tags as to whether it has a slant in one ideological direction, whether there's contention about the content, etc. For Zionism, they have an extensive article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zionism