Jewish problems

It took me a while and I needed to move here to get a tiny feeling for the complexity of this issue. Before that, 'jewish' was a label that I had in the same mental box as 'christian', 'muslim', 'hindu' or whatever. Boy is that misleading.

So many things here in Israel are challenging my understanding, every day. It doesn't help that I'd describe myself as agnostic or atheist. I guess Jews are the only example (that I know of) of a group of people that claim to share religion, ancestors and culture. I wouldn't know how - for example - one could create a model of a secular state here. I wouldn't know where to separate culture from religion and I'm convinced that I'll never understand the idea of common ancestry / being descendants of the same tribes.

Maybe this intermingled religion/culture/ethnicity (if this is the right word?) is confusing more people, just like me. And maybe some people react with fear if they don't grasp a concept?

But then the problem is to parametrize these three vectors' positions. The first one can be define in spherical coords as (acos(phi)sin(psi), asin(phi)sin(psi), a*cos(psi)) but then I need to introduce a third parameter for vector b and write both b and c using this system...

I'll give it another try this afternoon using matrices.

EDIT: Alright, I guess you can write a, b and c as a rotational matrix using Euler angles ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euler_angles ). You can probably also cancel one of the angles (let's say theta) by rotating your xOy plane around which doesn't change the problem.

You then just have to calculate S using phi and psi.

S = ||a^b||+||b^c||+||c^a||

and solve

dS/d(psi) = 0 and dS/d(phi) = 0

However, that's way too much trig for me for today so I'll leave it to someone more courageous than me.

Probably you could.

From my observation of the Arab world (which includes travelling there for work fairly extensively in the last few years) has been that a) these crazy stories do exist and b) the majority don't believe them outright, but shrug their shoulders at the suggestion.

As you said the subject is complex; ask a "standard" person on the street about the stories and they would probably know what you were on about. Ask if they believe it could be true a decent portion might say "maybe, who knows!".

But you could be stood on a US street and talking about 9/11 conspiracy theory. Or a UK street and talking about whether the French smell perpetually of onions (deliberately picking two ends of the scale there).

The key problem is you get a set of stories from the absurd to the quite reasonable; and you mix it with an already existing resentment. That leaves you with people who don't simply laugh at the absurd, and instead just shrug.

As to whether you could sell these stories to people; of course you can. The media, and other aspects of society, sell absurd stories to ourselves every day. Facebook has been abuzz at least three (distinct) times, to my recollection, about the fact that FB were going to start charging for access. People genuinely outraged about this development were raging about it.

Chain letters.

I also travel a lot in the US and in certain areas you see equally absurd stories about all sorts of different classes of people. Go back over history and it is even worse; we still get absurd stories about homosexuals. A little further and black people got the same treatment. Perhaps the stories we see here are not so openly absurd to us as "Iran releases killer sharks" - but if you dig into the story you example it is built on a perfectly plausible basis.

There is even a wholly relevant very-recent example; Jews and Money. That is still sold to people with alarming regularity.

I know a perfectly lovely, middle class, suburban housewife[1] who, on finding out one of my friends was gay, asked me if it was because he had been abused as a child. She is quite convinced that homosexuality is commonly the result of childhood abuse (safe to say; that one floored me :S).

1. No, not like that!

In the Middle East today, the relative prosperity of Israel relative to its neighbors is a good example of that. Abandoning science and reason has a negative affect on a society, and blaming your neighbor for your misfortune is easier than dealing with that.