SocraticGadfly: Roman Empire
Showing posts with label Roman Empire. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Roman Empire. Show all posts

January 29, 2009

Iranians used poison gas

Of course, they were normally known as Persians then.

Whey? More than 1,700 years ago, when the Sassanid Empire used suffocating gas to attack the Romans.

Just shows that, between the people who invented crucifixion and those who brought it to a new "art form," there's nothing new under the sun in the way of warfare, cruelty, etc.

Also, for the V.D. Hansens of the world determined to demonize Iran? Your Christianity's heaven, hell, apocalyptic dualism, bodily resurrection, last judgment and afterlife all came from those ancient Persians, as did Marco Polo's macaroni `,000 years after the battle in the link, so I'd just shut up if I were you.

May 11, 2008

Dallas Morning News gets Jewish-Roman history wrong

The Snooze lumps Rome’s two wars against Jewish rebels with Nazi persecution of Jews in what sets a new low standard for non-political stupidity on the editorial pages of the Snooze.
The murder of 6 million European Jews in the 1940s fiercely and urgently showed why Israel was, and is, necessary. It is no small mystery, though, that the failed attempt to exterminate the Jewish people would resurrect an ancient nation murdered by Roman legions.

As I e-mailed Snooze Editorial Page Editor Keven Willey, this is totally ahistorical. First, while Rome may have provoked Jews at times, nonetheless, the Jewish people had full religious freedom in the Roman Empire before the first Jewish Revolt. That’s TOTALLY different from the Nazis going out of their way to proscribe Judaism then kill the Jewish people just for being Jews.

And, it wasn’t until after the SECOND Jewish revolt that Rome put restrictions on Jewish practices and forbade them from living in Jerusalem.

As for modern Israel, the editorial also has its problems. It ignores that a fair amount of modern Israel’s economic stability is due to blank-check subsidies from the U.S., which have allows fungible money to then pay for building the West Bank border wall that exacerbates the “unresolved Palestinian issue” ths Snooze so decries. It also claims Israel is a raft of modernity, ignoring ultra-Orthodox parties that lust for (no other way to put it better), a Jewish equivalent of Islamic Sharia to govern Israel.