“I once belonged to a wonderful religion. I belonged to a religion that allows those of us who believe in it to feel that we are the greatest people in the world—and feel sorry for ourselves at the same time,” says young Jesse. However, it seems that it didn’t take too long before Jesse found out for himself that what he was part of was neither flattering or glorious.

Jewish tribal cultural indoctrination is a full-on, comprehensive process. “Although I was fortunate enough to have parents who did not try to force me into any one set of beliefs, being Jewish was in no way possible to escape growing up”, says Jesse. “It was constantly reinforced at every holiday, every service, and every encounter with the rest of my relatives.”

Inherent to the culture and its maintenance is self-love. “I was forever reminded how intelligent my family was, how important it was to remember where we had come from, and to be proud of all the suffering our people had overcome in order to finally achieve their dream in the perfect society of Israel.”

Jewish ideological and cultural ‘programming’ is rather sophisticated. It is a unique dynamic pattern practiced in both a collective and an individual way. But those who carry the message aren’t themselves fully aware of their role within the tribal ideology they aim to maintain.

Of course Jews hold many different, and even contradictory, political beliefs. But however diverse their views may be somehow, those who are identified as Jews politically always unite against any attempt to criticise the cultural and ideological foundation of their tribal bond. Young Jesse is clearly aware of this. On the surface, it was the crimes against the Palestinians that provoked his ethical sense. “I grew more concerned. I routinely heard about unexplained mass killings, attacks on medical bases, and other alarmingly violent actions for which I could see no possible reason. ‘Genocide’ almost seemed the more appropriate term, yet no one I knew would have ever dreamed of portraying the war in that manner; they always described the situation in shockingly neutral terms.”

One of the most sophisticated tribal aspects of Jewish culture maintenance is the gradual manner in which criticism is silenced. “Whenever I brought up the subject, I was always given the answer that there were faults on both sides, that no one was really to blame, or simply that it was a “difficult situation.” This common Hasbara argument on the surface sounds reasonable but it ignores the fact that in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict there is a clear distinction between the aggressor and the victim. The Israelis are the ethnic cleansers and the occupiers. The Palestinians, on the other hand, are the expelled, the racially discriminated, the abused, deprived, locked behind walls and barbed wire in open air jails and, in some cases, even starved.

But Jesse seems to be made of the stuff of honesty. Unlike some of the Jewish leftists who presents a pseudo-moral argument only to gain credibility so that he/she can then vet the discourse, young Jesse presses on, stripping himself of any trace of choseness and exceptionalism. “It was not until eighth grade that I fully understood what I was on the side of. One afternoon, after a fresh round of killings was announced on our bus ride home, I asked two of my friends who actively supported Israel what they thought. “We need to defend our race,” they told me. “It’s our right.”

This “We need to defend our race,” is a common excuse Jewish activists use amongst themselves. Although Jews do not form a race, Jewish identity politics is still overtly racist. In fact, any form of Jewish secular identity politics is racially driven and fuelled with racial exclusivity. This applies not only to pro Israeli Jews but unfortunately also to Jews-only ‘anti’ Zionist groups.

I guess it is obvious where Jesse is heading. He clearly sees an ideological continuum between the civil right movement in America and the Palestinian liberation struggle. In both struggles, there is clearly a racially driven oppressor and a victim collective — and Jesse draws the necessary conclusion, “I felt horrified at the realization that I was by nature on the side of the oppressors. I was grouped with the racial supremacists. I was part of a group that killed while praising its own intelligence and reason. I was part of a delusion.”

Jesse has obviously identified the Jewish politics and culture of which he was a part, as a form of ‘racial supremacy.’ He never mentions Zionism, in fact, the word Zionism is not mentioned once in his sincere award-winning post. He simply speaks about his Jewish upbringing, the culture and the ideology.

Young Jesse has already grasped that an appeal to his Jewish friends is not going to lead anywhere. He writes, “I decided to make one last appeal to my religion… The next time I attended a service, there was an open question-and-answer session about any point of our religion… When I was finally given the chance to ask a question, I asked, ‘I want to support Israel. But how can I when it lets its army commit so many killings?’ I was met with a few angry glares from some of the older men, but the rabbi answered me. “It is a terrible thing, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘But there’s nothing we can do. It’s just a fact of life.’ I knew, of course, that the war was no simple matter and that we did not by any means commit murder for its own sake, but to portray our thousands of killings as a ‘fact of life’ was simply too much for me to accept.”

It seems that Jesse has the courage to redeem his soul. “I thanked him (the Rabbi) and walked out shortly afterward. I never went back…. If nothing else, I could at least try to free myself from the burden of being saddled with a belief I could not hold with a clear conscience.… I did not intend to go on being one of the Self-Chosen People, identifying myself as part of a group to which I did not belong.”

Surprisingly, Jesse wasn’t compelled to apologise for telling truth. He didn’t have to retract for telling things as they are. In fact he won the most prestigious humanist award for his essay. But I’m wondering how long will it take before ADL’s Abe Foxman and infamous Ethnic-cleansing advocate Alan Dershowitz launch a campaign to destroy the awarding college.

Being a person who oscillates continuously between being an ‘ex-Jew’ and a ‘proud self hating Jew’, I embrace young Jesse and hold him close to my heart. My dear young twin brother, journeying from choseness is a life-struggle. From time to time you may feel lonely but you are never alone. Humanity and humanism are there at your side – for all time.

One Law for Lion and Ox is Oppression.

— William Blake

Where is the place of understanding?  Where is wisdom to be found?

— The  Book of Job

Info coming at us at the speed of light—gigabytes per nano-sec—and our horse-and-buggy bio-chem brains struggle with ancient grammars, syntaxes and texts!  Even our metaphors are now wretchedly overwrought: Not, “how to connect the dots,” but how to perceive, measure, record and duck the shot-gunned info-pellets rushing at our faces!  No wonder the world has gone gaga—not Lady!—for predictions!  “The world is too much with us,” so maybe those Mayan calendrical types knew a thing or two.  Maybe Nostradamus.  Maybe Cayce.  Somebody must know something!

Last decade, in September, ‘07, I posted a piece called “Can the Left and Right Unite?”  That was long before President “Hopey-Changey” had risen on his rhetorical pinions just long enough to foist on the gullible–one of the best bait-and-switch” acts in U.S. political history.  It was a year before the Lehman Brothers “Great Recession” began; before TARP; before Europe’s implosion; before Tahrir Square; before the B.P. and Fukushima disasters; before the Tea Party and Occupy Movements; before Bin Laden’s and Saddam’s and Kim’s and Gaddafi’s demise, and Representative Giffords’ near-demise; before the Supreme Court sanctified corporate, financial, electoral control; before the National Defense Authorization Act, etc.!

Four years ago, the chief divisions in the country had to do with prosecuting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—and most Americans were united in thinking “terrorists” the enemy, but not sure how to get them.  Nobody had declared the American homeland a “battlefield” in the War on Terror—with all the ominous implications of such a designation.

Now, the war in Afghanistan slogs on, and the shadow of our wars in Mesopotamia will haunt us through the ages.  The possibility of war with Iran is a warmonger’s wet-dream now—and the sheets are gross and soggy.  Now, perhaps, it can begin to be said and heard: It was Bushwhackian, Rumsfeldian, Cheney-Reese and Powellesque, Pearle and Wolfowitz idiocy to attack Iraq; and our heedless diversion and waste of resources has helped to bankrupt us financially and morally.  We’ve continued to hammer, frack and bomb our egg of a planet and now we’re dancing on a thin eggshell—and we’re mostly tap-dancing alone, not waltzing with a willing partner.

Not impressed by Obama’s card-shark, Mac-the-Knife routine, I sat out the last presidential election and urged others to purposively—not apathetically–do so, too.  But that was then.

As of now, there is only one candicate for whom I’d seriously consider voting.

The main reasons are: (1) He’s the only one who talks about our over-extended “Empire.”  He actually uses that word!  (2) He’s the most anti-war.  He talks about employing diplomacy a lot more and military force a lot less.  Give brains a chance!  (3) He is the only candidate who wants to abolish the Fed—and offers sound reasons for doing so.  (4) He presents well-reasoned arguments, not “9-9-9” style gibberish.  (5) He has argued his beliefts carefully and consistently for decades.  (6) His personal life has been a model of good citizenship and family values.

I’m talking about Ron Paul, of course, and I can hear the clamor of my “progressive” (formerly, “liberal”) friends wondering if I, too, have lost my prayer beads.  So, here’s my take: If we lived in a truly “free” society, where the masses had access to the skinny about how the System works, the high and growing levels of corruption and decadence in every branch of our government—federal, state, local—and if we had an educated working class, making the best-informed tactical and strategic moves to advance common values, able to work their way through the morass of media-corporate-government hype and propaganda… I’d say, Hold off, final victory will be ours!

But nothing today smells remotely like that!  This is not Sweden, Iceland, Switzerland, nor is it Never-Neverland where people don’t grow old and sick and tired and die.  We are a globe-straddling Empire, imposing our lifestyle and disposing of our opponents with engineered coups and revolutions, and our modus operandi is more akin to Tony Soprano’s than to the amorphous “good guys” we esteem ourselves. Surveiling and managing the planet, in ways that are often nasty and devious, we are well along the usual trajectory of past “super-powers”: expansion, over-expansion, attacks abroad and crumbling infrastructure within, and, finally, kaput, nada, nada y nada! 

We’ve always been an Empire—check out latter correspondence between Jefferson and Adams. … Our nastiest business, our Civil War, had a lot more to do with managing the newly acquired Western territories—agrarian or industrial motif?—than with freeing slaves.  (Do we really think recently arrived Irish immigrants wanted nothing more than to get drafted into “Mr. Lincoln’s War”?  Check out the New York City draft riots for a quick refresher!)

We like to tell ourselves we’re the kind of people who only go to war for noble reasons, but the fact is… we’ve been the most successful conquerors in human history and we’ve stirred up hornet’s nests everywhere.  We have been the “Now” people, barely looking back, whose forward motion has been propelled by carrots dangled by illusionists.

When the present moment is as slippery as this one, people are apt to take solace in nostalgia for simpler times or in  fantasizing a better tomorrow.  (When miscreants like Newt Gingrich are taken seriously as “historians,” you know we’ve got serious problems about learning from our past!)  About “tomorrow”–we’re a species condemned to hope.  Hope and Imagination are always “leaps of faith,” but they work better when they are informed.

Eighteenth-century “Romantic” poet Blake was on the cusp of England’s Industrial Revolution—and he didn’t like the smell of things!  A visionary from childhood, seeing angels in trees, he thought anyone could be a prophet… so long as they carefully examined life whirling around them and life within.  “Truth can never be told so as to be understood, and not be believ’d,” he wrote.  Two hundred years later, our crystal balls are murky and all our messengers are suspect.

As we spin out of whirligig 2011 into the free-fall gravity of 2012, about information-overload, we may cry out with Job, “Where is the place of understanding?  Where is wisdom to be found?”

The U.S. has done some terrible things in this world and some would say we’ve been in a kind of karmic blow-back since 2001.  We collectively grieve, rightly so, at the horror of a woman losing her parents and three children in a Christmas-day blaze in Connecticut.  How senseless, tragic and bizarre!  Can a loving God permit such horrors on Christmas day?  To understand the kind of tragedy that has befallen Iraqis since our invasion and continuing occupation, one would have to multiply the Stamford horror about 1 million times over the past eight years!

Not because he has done evil, but simply to test and prove his faith and goodness, Job’s children and grandchildren are killed, his cattle killed, and he is cursed with boils.  And his wife asks, “Dost thou still retain thy integrity?  Curse God and die.”  She is empathetic; she sees her husband’s searing wounds and advises him to choose the oblivion of death instead.  Job tells her to stop talking foolishness; he will suffer much more, if need be.  And…, he does.  And before it all ends with a show of force and a little more info—straight from the Whirlwind’s mouth!—about how things really work, Job tells his three comforters (really, intellectual tormentors), “Till I die, I will not remove my integrity from me.”

“Integrity” is the key word in this extraordinary, pre-Grecian drama.  And if we are going to get through our next pivotal year intact — and, very likely, re-constituted — it is essential that we understand that concept the way it was meant back then.  It is similar to our word “integer” or single unit, and its meaning has a Taoistic, Asian flavoring rather than our looser, modern sense of “general honesty” or “decency”—difficult and noble as those virtues are.  Rather, the sense here is of “wholeness.”  Job can no sooner remove his identity than he can remove his skin.  His integrity is all-of-a-piece with whom he is—his identity, his being.

Now for Blake: the ox has his “integrity” being an ox, and the lion his just being him.  Both are powerful with legit claims on the world to sustain them as they are and wish to be.  You wouldn’t want to pull a wagon with two lions and you wouldn’t want to take down a wildebeast with a couple of oxen.  Each has its place, each does its thing; and if the lion can lie down with the lamb, he can also lie down with the ox.

Everywhere one looks in the world today one sees tension and divisions, strife, a lack of clarity, and a constant resort to the dialogue of guns, knives and bombs.  Did we fight the Cold War only to inherit a world gone mad, dividing along ancient fault-lines—Sunni/Shiite, Jewish/Muslim, Christian/Muslim–and along new ones of class?  Half of all Americans are at 200% or less of the poverty level for a family of four.  To put it another way, fifty percent of us are not “getting by” or just barely getting by, and most of those who are “better off” are scared as hell.  And people who are scared are easily manipulated—especially when doused with fear of foreign threats.  (Just ask Goebbels!)

Amidst the maya of illusions and delusions, we stumble along in our made-up world.  We can only see through a glass darkly, and the glass is a fifty-inch wide-screen HDTV with surround sound—and 3-D is coming!  Amidst the maya, we lose precision in our language, our discourse, our thinking, our literature, our relations with each other, with the powerful and with the downtrodden.  Professor Gingrich, commenting on Herman Caine’s alleged sexual abuses, remarks that he is “sorry for he and his famly.”  That’s it!  I’m outta hea’!   Here’s a guy who brags about being an “historian” and the two dozen books he’s written, and he doesn’t know the objective case of pronouns?

I don’t put much stock in American elections anymore.  (Maybe we need “international observers”… but who do we trust?)  The best one can hope for is what Ed Sullivan would call, “a really good shew.”  We put far too much faith in the figurehead of our president when our history since Kennedy should have shown us that even a top banana can be easily peeled—exploded in the public square, and then re-packaged as an aberrance, anomoly, a myth.  So now we’re stuck with this: Even an election victory that championed populist values of both the Left and the Right would be hemmed in by thousands of special interests and lobbysists, not to mention billions of contrapuntal bucks!

That’s what we’re up against… and any New Populist campaign must recognize those electronic realities.  Nevertheless, such a campaign would mean a voice raised and heeded.  It would mean a resurgence of resistance to the Neoliberal agenda of war and exploitation that both Left and Right can now oppose.

The best reason for the lion and the ox to collaborate is, ironically, to maintain their integrity!  Because the Corporate State is rapidly robbing all of us of cherished core values like “live and let live,” a “helping hand,” “all in the same boat” and the “individualism” essential to thinking and acting without duress.  The media mish-mash of sounds and images adds to the kaleidoscopic confusion, and no one seems to have remembered to unwind a string as we approach the Minotaur’s lair.

The real enemy of Occupiers and Tea-partiers is not the other guy, but the faraway robotic types guiding the predator drones above our global rafters.  How do you make sense of it all when you’re beaten down and scared of losing your home, your job, your health, your family?

For years I was for a woman’s right to choose… and I still am.  But, when I heard Paul speak of his experience as a young doctor, going into one hospital room where an aborted fetus had been unceremoniously discarded and walking down the hall into another where every effort was being made to save a mother and her life-endangered baby… I saw his opposition from another point of view, and felt the sincerity of that point of view.  Now, to counter-argue, one might say that to prevent the need for abortions better sex education should be available.  And that adoptions should be encouraged, etc.

Better sex education… and better every kind of education!  Had we not fallen so notoriously behind in our test scores, we might not be in the mess we’re in now.  Had we paid attention to the infrastructure of education, bridges, public utilities, transportation and communication, the Arts, we’d be able to get through this next hell of a year standing together, with a lot more equanimity.

“Opposition is true Friendship,” Blake wrote.

The “separation of Church and State” that Americans cherish was never meant to be a separation of morals and the State.  Yet, it is our moral core, our “integrity,” that has been lost amidst the funhouse mirrors of commercialism, consumerism, militarism, ethnocentrism, more and more and more.

In this winter of our discontent, the war clouds gather and austerity miseries grind the souls of those who have no homes, or broken homes.  We’re in a poisoned mine shaft and the canaries are singing. … Can we interpret their varied notes in time?

I don’t mind receiving Christmas cards or being wished a “Merry Christmas” from friends, clerks, or even in junk mail trying to sell me something no sane person should ever buy. My wife and I even send Christmas cards, with messages of peace and joy, to our friends who are Christians or who we don’t know their religion.

I like Christmas music and Christmas carolers, even if some have voices that crack now and then, perhaps from the cold.

At home, from as early as I could remember, my family bought and decorated a Christmas tree, and gave gifts to each other and our friends. Usually we put a Star of David on the tree, undoubtedly an act of heresy for many Jews and Christians. We learned about Christmas—and about Chanukah, the “feast of lights,” an eight day celebration of joy and remembrance of the rededication of the Temple of Jerusalem at a time when it seemed as if a miracle had saved the Jews from darkness during the Maccabean revolt in the second century BCE.

This year, my wife and I have a two-foot tall cypress tree, decorated with white felt angels, glittered silver tin snowflakes, and small white LED lights, a gift from a devout Christian. We weren’t offended by the gift; we accepted it and displayed it on a table in our dining room in the spirit of friendship. In Spring, we’ll plant the tree in our backyard and hope it grows strong and tall, giving us shade and oxygen, perhaps serving as a sanctuary for birds, squirrels, and other wildlife.

What I do mind is the pomposity of some of the religious right who deliberately accost me, often with an arrogant sneer on their lips, to order me to accept their “well wishes” of a “Merry Christmas.” Their implication is “Merry Christmas—or else!” It’s their way of saying their religion is the one correct religion, that all others are wrong.

Although I try to understand and tolerate other beliefs, the extreme right doesn’t tolerate difference or dissent.

Right wing commentators at Fox News are in their final week of what has become a holiday tradition of claiming there is a “War on Christmas.” The lies and distortions told by these Shepherds of Deceit, and parroted by their unchallenging flock of followers, proves that at least in this manufactured war, truth is the first victim.

The Far-Right-But-Usually-Wrong claim that godless liberals are out to destroy Christmas, and point to numerous examples, giving some facts but never the truth.

They are furious that many stores wish their customers a “Happy Holiday” and not a “Merry Christmas,” unable to understand that sensitivity to all persons’ religions isn’t some kind of heresy. The ultra-right American Family Association even posts lists of stores that are open on Christmas, have their clerks wish customers a “Happy Holiday,” and don’t celebrate Christmas the way they believe it should be celebrated. (Of course, the AFA doesn’t attack its close ally, the NRA, which on its website wishes everyone “Happy Holidays.”)

Because of their own ignorance, they have no concept of why public schools may teach about Christmas or even have students sing carols but can’t put manger scenes on the front lawn. Nevertheless, the Extremists of Ignorance and Intolerance parade the Constitution as their own personal shield, without having read the document and its analyses, commentaries, and judicial opinions that define it, and can’t understand there is a strict separation of church and state. The Founding Fathers, especially Franklin and Jefferson, were clear about that. They were also clear that this is a nation where a majority of its people profess to be Christians, but it is not a “Christian nation.” There is a distinct difference.

The ultra-right—some of whom stanchly believe Barack Obama is not only a Muslim but wasn’t even born in the U.S—follow the guiding star of Fox to wrongly claim that the President Obama hates Christianity so much that he won’t even put up a Christmas tree but calls it a “holiday tree.” Perhaps they were too busy imbibing the bigotry in their mugs to know that the President and his family helped light the National Christmas Tree near the White House, wished Americans a “Merry Christmas,” and even told a bit about what Christians believe is a divine birth.

When confronted by facts, these fundamentalists point out that the Puritans, the ones who fled England for religious freedom, demanded adherence to a strict code of Protestant principles—and if it was good enough for the first American “citizens,” it’s good enough for the rest of us. What they never learned, obviously, is that the Puritans banned Christmas celebrations, declaring them to be pagan festivals.

If the Fox pundits, leading their sheep into the abyss of ignorance in a counter-attack in a war that doesn’t exist, would take a few moments to think before blathering inanities, they might realize that the man they worship was called “the Prince of Peace” not “the General of War.”

Christmas Cancelled as a Security Measure

(Ellis Island)   The three wise men were arrested today attempting to enter the country.  The Iraqi nationals were carrying massive amounts of flammable substances known as “frankincense” and “myrrh.”  While not explosives themselves, experts revealed that these two substances could be used as a fuse to detonate a larger bomb. The three alleged terrorists were also carrying gold, presumably to finance the rest of their mission.

Also implicated in the plot were two Palestinians named Joseph and Mary.  An anonymous source close to the family overheard Mary bragging that her son would “bring down the mighty from their thrones and lift up the lowly.” In what appears to be a call to anarchy, the couple claims their son will someday “help prisoners escape captivity.”  “These people match our terrorist profile perfectly,” an official source reported.

All of the suspects claimed they heard angels singing of a new era of hope for the afflicted and poor.  As one Wall Street official put it, “These one world wackos are talking about overturning the entire economic and political hierarchy that holds the civilized world together.  I don’t care what some angel sang; God wants the status quo -by definition.”

A somber White House press secretary announced that it might be prudent to cancel Christmas until others in the plot are rounded up. “I assure you that this measure is temporary.  The President loves Christmas as much as anyone.  People can still shop and give expensive gifts, but we’re asking them not to think about world peace until after we have rid the world of evil people.  For Americans to sing, ‘peace on earth, good will to all’, is just the wrong message to send to our enemies at this time.”

The strongest opponents of the Christmas ban were the representatives of retail stores, movie chains and makers of porcelain Christmas figurines.  “This is a tempest in a teapot,” fumed one unnamed business owner.  “No one thinks of the political meaning of Christmas any more. Christmas isn’t about a savior who will bring hope to the outcasts of the world; it’s about nativity scenes and beautiful lights. History has shown that mature people are perfectly capable of singing hymns about world peace while still supporting whatever war our leaders deem necessary.  People long ago stopped tying religion to the real events in the world.”

There has been no word on where the suspects are being kept, or when their trial might be held. Authorities are asking citizens who see other foreigners resembling nativity scene figures to contact the Office of Homeland Security.

A few days after submitting that piece, I received a nervous call from an editor.  “We love your story.  It’s very funny.”

“Thank you,” I said waiting for the other shoe to fall.

“The thing is, we want to take out the part about Iraq and Palestine.”

After a horrified pause, I explained that had been the whole point of writing the story — to humanize the people who were about to be killed.  When I refused to gut the story, he told me they would have to drop it all together.

I shouldn’t have been surprised.  Clergy who want to talk about real events in the world are seen as too political for the religious section, and too religious for the political section.  Of course, if a minister gets in the pulpit and waves the flag and prays for the troops, that’s not called “political”, but if a minister questions any war, then it is considered mixing religion and politics.  The resulting pablum in most clergy columns validates their strategic placement somewhere between the obituaries and the comics.

What have we learned as a result of the war? That was answered by Obama’s words to the returning troops:

Because of you — because you sacrificed so much for a people that you had never met — Iraqis have a chance to forge their own destiny.  That’s part of what makes us special as Americans.  Unlike the old empires, we don’t make these sacrifices for territory or for resources.  We do it because it’s right.  There can be no fuller expression of America’s support for self-determination than our leaving Iraq to its people.  That says something about who we are.

Looking back at my earlier Christmas article, I feel pain not pride at what the President said.  His speech to returning troops could have been taken from any leader, of any nation, from any period of history, simply by changing the names and places.  It is the kind of speech every leader has given since the emperors: brave and noble words, written in someone else’s blood.  This President who ran, in part, against this war, has come to repeat the party line.  This President, who once spoke of respect for all people of the world, has now deported more immigrants than Bush.

Hearing another speech expressing our nation’s narcissistic delusion made me physically ill. I could not help but think of the bloody wake such rhetoric leaves behind when put into action.  The fact that we are leaving Iraq at this point says nothing about the purity of our initial motives.  Even bank robbers don’t stay around after the crime has been committed.   I appreciate trying to make our young soldiers not feel like they were pawns in someone else’s parlor game, but for the sake of future generations we must painfully remember and affirm, that is exactly what happened.

We, from the United States, are not like the people in our nativity scenes.  We are like the Romans looming ominously in the background of the story.   Christmas is about the little people of the world who find joy and meaning while living under someone else’s boot.  We from the United States can only celebrate Christmas by ending our cultural narcissism, renouncing empire, and making room for the poor and the weak of the world like Joseph and Mary.

Christmas is not a fact of history, but Christianity’s particular symbol of every human being’s hope for world peace and universal happiness.  When the angels sang, “peace on earth good will to all,” they were expressing the song written in every heart.  But, that song calls us out of empire and into our entire human family.  Maybe stopping the frenzy of Christmas long enough to really hear the song the angels sang to the wretched of the earth, would give us the humanity to stop hanging our Christmas lights until we no longer kill our brothers and sisters for the fuel to illumine them.

O ye beneath life’s crushing load, whose forms are bending low,
Who toil along the climbing way with painful steps and slow
Look now, for glad and golden hours come swiftly on the wing;
Oh rest beside the weary road and hear the angels sing.

After Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Istanbul mayor from 1994 to 1998, established the Justice and Development Party (AKP) in the year 2001 and subsequently won a victory in the 2002 election, a new Turkey successfully emerged from a severe economic crisis and its runaway inflation. Since becoming Prime Minister in 2003, Erdogan has diverged from the post-Ottoman laicism (secular), authoritative, and nationalist philosophy of the Turkish Republic’s founder, Kemal Ataturk, and steered Turkey in a direction more consistent with western democratic philosophy.

What enables this nation to operate independently and grow in a dependent and declining western world? Can it sustain its growth? Can it reject Kemalism without military interference? These are only three of many questions concerning Turkey’s foreign, economic and social policies, all of which contain contradictions, doubts, and problems. Problems? Turkey excels in problems. There is the Kurdish problem, Cyprus problem, Islamic influence problem, writing a new Constitution problem, relations with adjacent nations problem, entry to the European Union problem and of course, problems with Israel and the United States

A trip through Turkey, sponsored by the Washington based Rumi Forum, an interfaith and peace organization, featured meetings with parliamentarians, journalists, academics and businessmen, and provided insight into Turkey’s (1) ability to confront its problems, (2) strength to continue an independent path, and (3) role as a model for the Arab nations that are struggling from a revolutionary spring into a bright and peaceful future. Istanbul revealed the ‘think tanks that define the present.” Ankara provided the parliamentarians that shape the future. In Sanliurfa and Gaziantep, one learns of an ancient past and gains insight into Turkey’s nationwide progress and the role of its Kurdish community.

A discussion of Turkey starts with its youth.

A modern country

New airports, new super highways, massive construction of modern buildings in expanding cities that now contain 75% of the population with a median age of 28.5 years, highlight the growing Turkey.

A western oriented nation reflects a Mediterranean appearance. Buildings, offices, restaurants, hotels and institutions use warm colors; brown, beige, orange, together with neutral white, black and lilac; colors associated with steadfastness, simplicity, friendliness, and dependability. The warm colors made large rooms look cozier, while the orange proved mentally stimulating as well as sociable.

A subjective appraisal notes a nation of hard working purposeful and dedicated people, well organized and progressive. Turkey reflects vision and mission. Youthful representatives satisfied the vision.

Faik Tunay, at 30 years, is the youngest parliamentarian for the The Republican People’s Party (CHP). The CHP is the oldest political party of Turkey and is currently the main opposition in the Grand National Assembly. Best described as a modern social-democratic party, it is faithful to the principles of Kemal Ataturk, the Party’s founder.

The deputy for Istanbul, member of the Foreign Affairs committee, speaks five languages, and has been invited by the Eisenhower Institute to visit America, In addition to being an elected member of the Grand National Assembly, he is involved in several family businesses and some of his own – construction, agriculture, advertising. His ambition – although born as a White Turk, a member of a privileged class, he wants to leave as a Black Turk, as a member of the masses.

The youngest member of the Turkish Grand National Assembly is only 27 years old, one of three members under 32 years of age. Bilal Macit represents an Istanbul district for the AKP, but insists he represents the state and not the civil authority, does not represent youth nor will limit his activities to youth policies. He has traveled widely, matured in a global world and learned to think independently. Cognizant that his Party’s leader changed politics, Parliamentarian Macit won’t allow his independent attitude to harm the Party. Surprisingly, he offered the opinion that youth does not represent the Arab revolutionary movements, suggesting the movements are more complex and widely distributed. The youthful parliamentarian attributes some of his success to his previous association with the Young Civilians, a movement he helped to found.

Young Civilians

Fatih Demirci, who graduated with a manufacturing system engineering degree and is now an Istanbul entrepreneur, is another 27 year-old founder of the Young Civilians and still an active member. At a dinner meeting, he explained the operations of the organization whose name indicates its thrust — contrasts to Kemal Ataturk’s Young Turks who led the 1908 revolution and the Young Officers who won Turkey’s independence.

Organization? The Young Civilians have no formal organization. Corresponding by Facebook, Twitter and other social networks, they gather compatriots at demonstrations. Their symbol is the sneaker, a sharp difference from the military boot that shaped the nation. Similar to America’s flower children of the 1960′s with a dash of France’s 1968 rebel Cohen-Bendit’s “Ask for the impossible,” the Young Civilians “demand the possible but perfect.”

They grimace at any military or nationalist demonstrations, such as the May 19 Youth and Sports Day national holiday. On that day, in 2003, the group organized its first gathering at Parliament to protest the style of the festivities and become known. They became well known, even internationally, with coverage by the New York Times. Reducing military appearance in social and political life, gaining equal rights for all forty-two ethnicities, and no-holds barred allowance for religious and national expressions dominate their thinking. Removing visa requirements and opening the border between Armenia and Turkey would please them.

Will the Young Civilians (who are growing older) be only a humorous irritant to Turkey’s elite or will it become a serious movement that contributes to all Turks embracing one another with equal expression, regardless of religion or ethnicity? Does the answer lie with the flowering of the flower children of the American 60′s, who became more conservative as they moved on in years?

The Young Civilians might already be superfluous. The Kemalism they want defeated and the military coup they fear are quickly being subdued with no appearance of immediate revival.

Kemalism

After Kemal Ataturk died in 1938, almost any government that threatened the principal tenets, the six arrows of Kemalism, triggered a military coup.

Republicanism–a broadly based republican system.
Nationalism–a distinctly Turkish identity
Populism–a more classless society
Revolutionism–wholesale, rather than gradual, change
Laicism-cancellation of the power of religion in the state, and
Statism–state-led development of the economy and society

were inviolate until the AKP gained power.

Prime Minister Erdogan’s instant and bold challenge in 2003 to the tenets of Kemalism did not provoke a military coup. Nevertheless, the military and allied Kemalists have been accused of preparing a conspiratorial response in 2007 that was uncovered in 2009.

Why did Erdogan proceed so boldly and why was it difficult for the military to instantly respond to the AKP’s removal of several of the six arrows of Kemalism from its quiver? AKP parliamentarian Bilal Macit explained; “Before 2002, the military exercised control of most facets of society except for the economic system. Their political and social control promoted economic stagnation and decline.” Erdogan’s deft handling of the economy apparently impressed much of the military to favor his administration.

Markar Esayan, editor of the independent Taraf newspaper, suggested that the Prime Minister correctly gauged a change in society and recognized he had wide support. The year 2002 is now a milestone in Turkish history – the year the military was no longer the principal authority.

Mesut Ulker, a former army colonel, presently a strategist for a think tank and a well-known television personality, added a simple comment: ‘The army has rapidly changed.”

Professor Dr. Yasin Aktay, Director of the Institute of Strategic Thinking, summarized the situation in a strategic context: “The shift of the population to urban areas created an expanding middle class with new social demands. The population requested an allocation of resources, a new identity and a new constitution. The ideological state (Kemalism) with its stress on Turkic identity and secularism created problems.”

Yusuf Acar, Zaman newspaper journalist and world news editor for magazine Aksiyon, echoed the decline of Kemalism and military domination. “Power has shifted to president office #1, Parliament as #2, and then the military. Nevertheless, the state still comes before the citizen.”

A journalist for Zaman, which has become one of Turkey’s principal newspapers, with a circulation of about one million, might be prejudiced in its observations. Yusuf Acar admits Zaman is often accused of being a government supporter and receiving assistance. However, except for sharing a state run television station and agency with the government, he denies the state has any involvement with the newspaper.

Ozcan Yeniceri, previously a university professor, and presently a parliamentarian for MHP (The Nationalist Movement Party) speaks passionately and in great length on all topics. By gaining 53 seats in the 2011 general elections, his Party remained the third largest parliamentary group. Previously characterized as an ultra-nationalist party, which has recommended martial law in Kurdish territory, the MHP has tempered its extremist views.

In Ozcan Yeniceri’s opinion, nationalism has ontological meaning, a striving for security, and struggle for independence. It unites the country against invading forces. He considers his Party is less nationalistic than that of President Obama and would not resort to the killing of leaders that Obama has done. (Evidently referring to the assassination of Osama bin Laden and NATO attempts on Moammar Gadaffi’s life.) “Liberal criticisms about the establishment of the Republic are wrong in the claim that Ataturk did not introduce democracy. Ataturk was a pragmatic and not actually a Kemalist. He understood the times and adapted. Turkey’s divisions have been between left and right with left defined as communist and right defined as capitalist. Now there is a rapid change in democracy in all areas with an increase in human rights.”

Kemal Ataturk’s framed portraits still adorn the walls of public sector rooms and halls. Gigantic banners and posters of his image are noticeable. Prime Minister Erdogan has wisely retained the reverence to Turkey’s George Washington but abruptly replaced Ataturk’s nationalist and statist policies with an agenda more compatible with the global system and more in harmony with democratic dictates.

Nevertheless, the AKP, despite its widespread support, still has severe antagonists. The charge of an ongoing coup against the government has resulted in mass arrests of well known public figures, has divided the National Assembly and disturbed leaders from several sectors of society. In mid-November 2011, after several judicial reviews and hearings, a 264-page indictment accuses 143 suspects, 66 of them in pre-trial detention, with an attempt to overthrow the government.

The indictments have provoked a question: Is Erdogan using tactics similar to those of the military forces, exaggerating threats to squash opposition? Will the trial of civilians and officers associated with Operation Sledgehammer destabilize the stable nation?

Operation Sledgehammer

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan insists that nobody has been jailed in Turkey because of their profession as a journalist; only due to their membership in an illegal organization. Others are skeptical.

Markar Esayan and his independent Taraf newspaper received credit and fame for exposing the proposed 2007 coup, which had as objectives: undermine the stability of the AKP and create chaos. Esayan would not expose those who presented his newspaper with the documents, but insisted they were authentic and with signatures of known generals. He said plans had been made to bomb two major mosques in Istanbul, assault a military museum by people disguised as fundamentalists, and increase tension with Greece by instigating dogfights between the fighter planes of the two countries over the Aegean Sea. The allegations included shooting down a Turkish plane and blaming it on Greece. Subsequently, he said, prosecutors found supporting documents at military headquarters.

Faik Tunay senses that the revelations spurred citizens to support Erdogan and harmed opposition Parties. Although he believes the alleged coup plotters should be punished, he senses some plotters, especially journalists, have been accused only because of personal association with alleged plotters — guilt by association.

Zaman’s Yusuf Acar said that the “society did not accept reports of military intervention,” but after “armaments in a military home were found to match some terrorist activities, belief became widespread. Changes became apparent when the Prime Minister chaired the Military Council and the General Chief of Staff no longer stood at his side.”

Professor Dr. Yasin Altai claimed that the military often created problems to justify its existence. He has been spied upon and a file prepared on him. Now the civil can try the military.

All top generals, one of whom died, resigned. Some interpreted the resignations as an attempt to create anarchy, others as a protest to the arrests.

What seems to many as an obvious and serious plot against the government, which must be dealt with in a legal manner, is viewed by others as a bumbling proposal by a few who drew others in with arguments and not with definite alliances. All words and no action. So where is the plot?

The decline of Kemal Ataturk’s political course and weakening of the military dictates a new direction. Can that direction continue without a new constitution? What constitution? The subject is being vigorously debated.

The Constitution

A commission, composed of representatives from the three major Parties and a pro-Kurdish group, has been appointed to prepare a Draft Constitution. One limiting factor: each article must be approved unanimously, an impossible task. Without a new constitution, Kemalism cannot be entirely decomposed. Without a new Constitution, it is doubtful Turkey can gain admittance to the European Union.

The Young Civilians want a total change and absolutely new constitution. Bilal Macit noted that it is difficult to change the first three articles of the constitution; secular, socialist, modern. Article 4 of the present Constitution declares the immovability of the founding principles of the Republic defined in the first three Articles and bans any proposals for their modification. Regardless, Macit claims that no division exists between secularists and Islamists. Both want a pluralist society.

If the Constitution is modified, will it contain some references to Sharia Law? The Kemalists and western world have one question in common: To what extent is the AKP an Islamic Party?

The Islamic Party

A consensus rejects the AKP as an Islamist party. Nothing in its agendas, in its cabinet, and in its operations suggests a relation with an Islamic movement.

Nasuhi Güngör, columnist for the Star newspaper, said that the AKP “no longer represents Islamic identity,” and he should know. He admits that the Star, which has a moderate circulation of 130K daily, is owned by businessmen aligned with the government and, although critical at times, still close to the AKP. “Many AKP members practice Islam and believe that forward movement requires affiliation with Islam. However, they don’t go beyond believing that the Islamic religion can play a satisfactory role in society and wanting its adherents to be able to practice the religion in accord with their own rules.” One clue, Güngör noted, is that the AKP has not brought the wearing of the scarf issue to the table, perceiving it as human rights rather than religious issue. If the AKP raised the issue then it would be marked as an Islamic Party.

Although Turkey might not be considered an Islamic run nation, will its identification with the Islamic religion serve as a model for the newly liberated Arab nations?

Turkey as role model

The world expects the Turks to guide the Arab revolutions in the same direction as Erdagon’s movement. Consensus does not adhere to that theme and has Turkey envisioning itself only as another European a nation. Rather than being a role model, Turkey wants absolute friendship with Arab neighbors, a lack of which distracted the Ottoman Empire and impeded progress of the Kemalist programs.

Star Daily journalist Güngör, who is the newspaper’s expert on the Middle East, believes the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt has close similarities to the incipient AKP, but has never governed and is 30 years behind the AKP operations. He declared that if any of the Islamic parties gain control in the Arab nations, and they have already in Tunisia and Morocco (whose Islamic Party is also named Justice and Development), that country will make a big mistake.

His views on Hamas and Hezbollah are sanguine. Both, he claims, are maneuvered by Iran and are too militaristic. Nevertheless, he recommends that Turkey continue its relationship with Hamas.

Zero problems with neighbors

As others have said: “Turkey’s pursuit of zero problems with neighbors has morphed into zero neighbors without problems.”

All commentators agreed that Turkey has failed in this pursuit. Turkey has problems with neighbors and this is partly due to its own initiatives and independent policies. PM Erdogan’s commendable moral imperative, which identifies friendship with moral agendas rather than with what one nation can do for the other, creates misperceptions and misconceptions.

Misperception of the moral imperative solicits charges of arbitrary judgment of others and intention to establish a neo-Ottoman agenda. Erdogan has a misconception that these policies can succeed in a world of mistrust and self-interest.

Trespassing on Iraq sovereignty by engaging in military attacks on Kurds in Northern Iraq, requesting the resignation of Syria’s President Bashar Assad, demanding Israel apologize for the killing of Turkish citizens during an attempt to break Israel’s blockade of Gaza, installing NATO missile radar detection equipment to deter Iran, and refusing to pay compensation to Bulgaria for Ottoman eviction of Bulgarians in eastern Thrace, are only a few examples of Turkey’s conflicts with neighbors.

MHP Parliamentarian Özcan Yeniceri described the policy. “Turkey previously consulted the Pentagon for regulating its relations with Iran, Russia and others. After the fall of the Soviet Union, everything changed, and this allowed Turkey to reach potential. Still, its relations with the U.S. hindered relations with neighboring nations.”

And a host of other problems: resolution of the Kurdish question, entry into the European Union, and engagement with Israel and its principal supporter.

The Kurdish

Strategists outside of Turkey consider the Kurdish insurgency as Turkey’s number one problem. Despite continuous attacks by the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), punishing government counterattacks, and arrests of suspected PKK associates, correspondents considered the Kurdish question to be a declining problem. They noted that the Kurdish population is no longer demanding separation, feel more Turkic and sense the government is addressing their grievances. Turkey’s minority of 20 million does not maintain a unique Kurdish language and many dialects are prevalent. As for the Kurds being an organized ethnicity with direct relations in several nations, the Turkish Kurds don’t directly relate to the Kurdish populations in the other nations of Syria, Iraq and Iran. Kurdish irredentism is irrelevant to Turkey’s Kurds.

No longer considered to be a military problem, the Kurdish situation is defined as a civil and human rights problem. Former army colonel Mesut Ulker expressed the opinion succinctly: “It is a civic problem that will be resolved in 2-3 years.”

MHP Parliamentarian Ozcan Yeniceri presented a more rigorous analysis: “One third of the population has Kurdish relatives, intermarriage between ethnicities is high, and Kurds are well integrated. The Kurdish independence problem appeared after the fall of the Soviet Union, when new states formed. Nationalist Kurds asked: ‘Why not a Kurd state?’

“The PKK thought that after reforms, the government would become weak, eventually collapse and the country would divide into several divisions. Demands for democracy and freedom are not essential for the Kurds. They are only a Trojan horse. Nevertheless, the government should acknowledge rightful claims, and the conditions of the Kurds are showing improvement. Demand for a separate Kurdish language to be used in all facets of everyday public life comes from the PKK movement. In response the government has granted a Kurdish language television station, which broadcasts cultural programs.” Dunya TV has a satellite channel, and a footprint that reaches to Kurdish speaking peoples in all adjacent countries.

Ozcan Yemceri believes in equal rights for all ethnicities and private courses for Kurds, in their own language, which the government now allows. He closed with a wry remark: “America might face similar problems with its own minorities,” evidently referring to the multicultural and multilingual aspirations of Hispanic groups.

Apparently, the Turks believe that as their democracy develops it will encompass all minorities and diminish ethnic demands for separation. Developments in the Balkans, Iraq and Spain have not substantiated that belief.

European Union

As a member of the European Customs Union, Turkey has common tariffs in trade with EU nations. Petitioning the European Union for complete admission has faltered. Now, observers note that due to the contrast between Turkey’s growth and strength and a weakening Europe, it might no longer be favorable to Turkey to become a EU member.

Parliamentarian Bilal Macit agreed: “It is not important.”

Dr. Burak Erdenir, Deputy Undersecretary at Ministry for EU affairs, disagreed.
Three reasons for his intransigence:

(1) As a member of the Customs Union, Turkey is part of the decision taking but not part of the decision making.
(2) The European Union has been incorrect in its behavior towards Turkey and that behavior must be corrected.
(3) The EU process is supported by all political Parties

Dr. Erdenir spoke frankly. “EU refusal to grant admission to Turkey is entirely due to prejudice. To achieve candidate status, 35 articles must be approved. Seventeen are constantly blocked. Although Bulgaria and Romania have been given admission, Turkey is refused. The EU believes Turkey is too big, too poor, and too Muslim. The Austrians in particular have a mindset that that equates today’s Turkey with that of the Ottoman Empire 18th century attack on Vienna.

“However, things have changed. Turkey has the sixth largest economy in Europe, 159 universities, and the most stable economy. The EU has lost credibility and behaves dishonestly.”

Israel and America

Commentators condemned Israel for its policies towards the Palestinians and criticized the United States for its support of Israel and for its other Middle East policies. From observations, Israel has little support in Turkey, regardless of Party affiliation.

CHP Parliamentarian Faik Tunay included discussions of U.S. foreign policy as one factor in his Party’s quarrelsome manner. Despite Erdogan’s angry attitude towards Israel, which he supports, he claims the U.S. supports the AKP. His validation – Due to the AKP government, demonstrations against U.S. involvement in Iraq were limited.

MHP Parliamentarian Özcan Yeniceri established Israel and its support by the United States as the prime foreign policy issues. “The American image is deteriorating internationally and includes instability within NATO, in which the US has played a key role. The direction of its fight with Radical Islam and Al Qaeda will soon include all Islam. The U.S. shouldn’t be a military empire, but should base policies on values. U.S. mentors have become the Evangelists and Samuel P. Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations.

The U.S. interfered in Iraq and now tries to restrict Iran in its developments. Unlike Iran, the U.S. has the nuclear weapon and has used it, signs of hypocrisy and loss of credibility. The same can apply to Israel. If the U.S. changed its policy in regard to Israel, the region will change drastically. The effort would be a game changer.”

Two industrialists, who manufacture food containers for export to European nations, posed a simple question: ‘Why can’t Israel be satisfied with its nation to the Green Line? Why is it constantly expanding?”

Economy

Officials from TUSKON, the Turkish Confederation of Businessmen and Industrialists Worldwide, which has offices in major cities worldwide, highlighted Turkey’s economic progress. Since the AKP achieved governance, GDP and exports have tripled, while the inflation rate has fallen from 30 percent to 7.5 percent. Unemployment, which had been 14 percent in 2010, has dropped to 9.5 percent. A GDP of 735 billion dollars places Turkey 17th in the world and 7th in Europe, excluding the Russian federation. An export driven economy has increased exports to 135 billion dollars.

All the statistics are moving in proper directions, and although the inflation rate, interest rate (6%) and unemployment are high by western standards, they are acceptable by Turkish standards. Actually, the real interest rate (interest rate minus inflation) is negative, a deflationary anomaly that was not explained, and could hinder investment. Another major concern is the monotonically increasing negative trade balance, which was 42 billion dollars (2010).

If a fall in the European economy intensifies the negative trade balance, negative real interest rate, and relatively high unemployment rate, Turkey’s growth could come to a screeching halt. The vigorous economy has fragile elements.

Conclusion

Few, if any world leaders, have received as much admiration from the domestic and international public as has Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. His open manner, sincerity and moral challenges contrast with the covert, duplicitous and self subscribing attitudes of most world leaders. If his policies are out of step with most nations, they might prove that in the present global environment an independent course is a route to success.

• Europe’s and America’s economies falter. Turkey continues with rapid growth.
• Nations split apart from nationalism. Turkey enhances national identities.
• Western nations sanction Iran. Turkey increases trade with the Islamic state.
• Military control increases in most nations. Military control is constrained in Turkey.
• China and other fast growing nations pursue statist polices. Turkey eschews statism.

As in most nations, continued governing by the AKP depends upon the continued success of its economic policies. With Europe being the primary source for Turkey’s exports, a forecasted faltering of the European Market could drastically affect Turkey. Or will it? Is it possible that Erdogan’s pragmatism will lead Turkey to realign allegiances and markets and shift them to Iran and Russia, trading finished products for energy supplies? Turkey seems to be in the driver’s seat.

But not entirely. The AKP needs prosperity to advance democracy, which will enhance civil and human rights and prevent the electorate from considering Kemalism as an antidote for Turkey’s problems.

Kemalism will soon be proved as either past history or a spoke in the cycles of history. As the wheel turns, will Kemal Ataturk’s visions and policies return and challenge another Turkish Republic? The verdict is still not rendered.

This was the Christmas truce of 1914; an event organically blossomed by men who had reason to hate. They were freezing during this unusually harsh winter on the horrific Western front. They spent their time in dugout trenches, often amongst their dead. It was the “war to end all wars”, but deep down the men experienced discord over this mandate. One would probably be hard pressed to find anyone at that time who could verbalize why this war was happening, other than spitting out government sanctioned hype that had been fed to them prior to being sent out to kill.

The propaganda didn’t take completely, though; a spontaneous plea for a cease fire issued from the men, often but yards away from their foe. Perhaps they realized that their deprivations were equal to what their enemy was experiencing and felt empathy. It’s difficult to know. But when holiday treats began arriving, for whatever reason, the German and British lines opted to share and fraternize during that holiday truce. They exchanged gifts, laughs, and allowed the other to bury their dead without fear of snipers. Of course, the British high command didn’t approve. But they were 27 miles behind the front in luxury accommodations; they weren’t on site to snuff it out immediately.

Inherent decency seems to always get hijacked, however, and the men were soon back to fighting with appropriate goading from the elite of the military as well as the politicians of the day. They knew that those fighting men had more in common with each other than they did with those in charge of their own nations. This could not stand. But some units dragged their feet and very little fighting occurred until the next year.

I give Thomas Paine his due credit when he so aptly stated “Belief in a cruel god makes a cruel man”. Did these men cast out the words whispered by the cruel and bloodthirsty gods –those of the supernatural, and those of the political realm?

Perhaps they heard this Christmas carol in their heart, if not their head. “Truly he taught us to love one another; his law is love and his gospel is peace. Chains shall he break for the slave is our brother; and in his name all oppression shall cease.” 

Who knew carols could be so radical!?

I don’t hold much hope in my heart for organized religion, but I find it astounding that such a blind eye is cast on this type of message by the “religious” of today. America is fat with religion, but it is a nightmare creation, thick with puritan self-denial and heapings of thoughtless greed, perhaps the most effective crazy-maker out there. I highly doubt that the lyrics above, from John Sullivan Dwight’s version of “O Holy Night” will be sung in their mini-mall churches this season. Existentialist commune dwellers from over 150 years ago tend to pen songs lyrics that don’t fit well with that worldview. How about reading from “The Secret” instead?

Those men in 1914 with all their pain and loss (and probably many barely 20 years old) could embrace something that would certainly be branded un-patriotic by a pepper spray vegetable proclaimer on Fox news. Do they know how garish they are, pitching hate in hiked up miniskirts? The plastic men guffawing in allegiance.

Truly they taught us to despise one another; their law is greed and the gospel is war. Chains shall we make, for the inmate is our profit; and in that name all compassion shall cease.

So much of what Americans feel defines their collective identity does not hold up to scrutiny. This may be obvious to many of us, but overall most Americans haven’t begun to sort through any of this. The ideals that were indoctrinated into the pure minds of children – that our nation is a fair one, that it provides for decent, humane treatment of others. Sadly, of course, it’s not the case, but it’s no accident that these were the themes pushed most readily. There is a basic desire for equity and fairness, and when you get down to core needs, humans would rather play than fight. It takes master manipulation to draw out the bloodshed and looting. A foundation of common ideals is proclaimed, only to be perverted beyond recognition. Walls of subterfuge completely block out what our hearts know to be right. It’s a maze to navigate…”but how can the deeds be so incongruous?” the newly aware ponder this.

I’m not saying that sociopaths don’t exist and make up an irredeemable portion of the populace, but we’ve elevated them to power and made their hateful talk accepted as they infect others. They get Frank Luntz to phrase it in a palatable manner.

But after a lifetime of these mixed messages, the majority doesn’t know what went wrong. For many what is there to do but self medicate with big Pharma items, or succumb to unbridled hate of others? Americans try to fill the emptiness with whatever is handy, be it throw away material goods or even substance abuse. The aching sadness from being a part of all this — it will be dealt with in some manner. But, really, all we want is love and fairness. Like that of a child. Like boys on that absurd battlefield. They still frolic and share with each other in my dreams. And they never fired another shot at each other again.

But now….in our unique moment of space and time…what manner of numbness causes an individual to not notice the panic and desperation of a single mom with two kids trying over and over to get food stamps? And the countless missed moments of empathy that are too painful to even contemplate? And we know what the nicks and cuts to our humanity leads to.

There are choices, though. These moments belong to us, not the powerful who have boys slaughter each other. They don’t want our humanity extended because it provides evidence of their hollow and bloodthirsty essence.

Many of us know about their game and how they play it. It is our duty to scream this out to those who still don’t understand. To yell out from the trenches. All that is left now is to tear down their false walls as we play together and share that chocolate cake as well as our love. Peace on Earth.

The war in Libya is just the start of a new cycle of external military adventurism inside Africa. The U.S. now wants more military bases inside Africa. France has also announced that it has the right to militarily intervene anywhere in Africa where there are French citizens and its interests are at risk. NATO is also fortifying its positions in the Red Sea and off the coast of Somalia.

As disarray and turmoil are once again uprooting Africa with external intervention, Israel sits silently in the background. Tel Aviv has actually been deeply involved in the new cycle of turmoil, which is tied to its Yinon Plan to reconfigure its strategic surrounding. This reconfiguration process is based on a well established technique of creating sectarian divisions which eventually will effectively neutralize target states or result in their dissolution.

Many of the problems afflicting the contemporary areas of Eastern Europe, Central Asia, Southwest Asia, South Asia, East Asia, Africa, and Latin America are actually the result of the deliberate triggering of regional tensions by external powers. Sectarian division, ethno-linguistic tension, religious differences, and internal violence have been traditionally exploited by the United States, Britain, and France in various parts of the globe. Iraq, Sudan, Rwanda, and Yugoslavia are merely a few recent examples of this strategy of “divide and conquer” being used to bring nations to their knees.

The Upheavals of Central-Eastern Europe and the Project for a “New Middle East”

The Middle East, in some regards, is a striking parallel to the Balkans and Central-Eastern Europe during the years leading up to the First World War. In the wake of the First World War, the borders of the multi-ethnic states in the Balkans and Central-Eastern Europe were redrawn and reconfigured by external powers, in alliance with local opposition forces. Since the First World War until the post-Cold War period the Balkans and Central-Eastern Europe have continued to experience a period of upheaval, violence and conflict that has continously divided the region.

For years, there have been advocates calling for a “New Middle East” with redrawn boundaries in this region of the world where Europe, Southwest Asia, and North Africa meet. These advocates mostly sit in the capitals of Washington, London, Paris, and Tel Aviv. They envisage a region shaped around homogenous ethno-religious states. The formation of these states would signify the destruction of the larger existing countries of the region. The transition would be towards the formation of smaller Kuwait-like or Bahrain-like states, which could easily be managed and manipulated by the U.S., Britain, France, Israel, and their allies.

The Manipulation of the First “Arab Spring” during World War I

The plans for reconfiguring the Middle East started several years before the First World War. It was during the First World War, however, that the manifestation of these colonial designs could visibly be seen with the “Great Arab Revolt” against the Ottoman Empire.

Despite the fact that the British, French, and Italians were colonial powers which had prevented the Arabs from enjoying any freedom in countries like Algeria, Libya, Egypt, and Sudan, these colonial powers managed to portray themselves as the friends and allies of Arab liberation.

During the “Great Arab Revolt” the British and the French actually used the Arabs as foot soldiers against the Ottomans to further their own geo-political schemes. The secret Sykes–Picot Agreement between London and Paris is a case in point. France and Britain merely managed to use and manipulate the Arabs by selling them the idea of Arab liberation from the so-called “repression” of the Ottomans.

In reality, the Ottoman Empire was a multi-ethnic empire. It gave local and cultural autonomy to all its peoples, but was manipulated into the direction of becoming a Turkish entity. Even the Armenian Genocide that would ensue in Ottoman Anatolia has to be analyzed in the same context as the contemporary targeting of Christians in Iraq as part of a sectarian scheme unleashed by external actors to divide the Ottoman Empire, Anatolia, and the citizens of the Ottoman Empire.

After the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, it was London and Paris which denied freedom to the Arabs, while sowing the seeds of discord amongst the Arab peoples. Local corrupt Arab leaders were also partners in the project and many of them were all too happy to become clients of Britain and France. In the same sense, the “Arab Spring” is being manipulated today. The U.S., Britain, France, and others are now working with the help of corrupt Arab leaders and figures to restructure the Arab World and Africa.

The Yinon Plan

The Yinon Plan, which is a continuation of British stratagem in the Middle East, is an Israeli strategic plan to ensure Israeli superiority. It insists and stipulates that Israel must reconfigure its geo-political environment through the balkanization of the Middle Eastern and Arab states into smaller and weaker states.

Israeli strategists viewed Iraq as their biggest strategic challenge from an Arab state. This is why Iraq was outlined as the centerpiece to the balkanization of the Middle East and the Arab World. In Iraq, on the basis of the concepts of the Yinon Plan, Israeli strategists have called for the division of Iraq into a Kurdish state and two Arab states, one for Shiite Muslims and the other for Sunni Muslims. The first step towards establishing this was a war between Iraq and Iran, which the Yinon Plan discusses.

The Atlantic, in 2008, and the U.S. military’s Armed Forces Journal, in 2006, both published widely circulated maps that closely followed the outline of the Yinon Plan. Aside from a divided Iraq, which the Biden Plan also calls for, the Yinon Plan calls for a divided Lebanon, Egypt, and Syria. The partitioning of Iran, Turkey, Somalia, and Pakistan also all fall into line with these views. The Yinon Plan also calls for dissolution in North Africa and forecasts as starting from Egypt and then spilling over into Sudan, Libya, and the rest of the region.

This map was prepared by Lieutenant-Colonel Ralph Peters and published in the Armed Forces Journal, June 2006. Map © Ralph Peters 2006. Click for larger image.

The Eradication of the Christian Communities of the Middle East

It is no coincidence that Egyptian Christians were attacked at the same time as the South Sudan Referendum and before the crisis in Libya. Nor is it a coincidence that Iraqi Christians, one of the world’s oldest Christian communities, have been forced into exile, leaving their ancestral homelands in Iraq. Coinciding with the exodus of Iraqi Christians, which occurred under the watchful eyes of U.S. and British military forces, the neighbourhoods in Baghdad became sectarian as Shiite Muslims and Sunni Muslims were forced by violence and death squads to form sectarian enclaves. This is all tied to the Yinon Plan and the reconfiguration of the region as part of a broader objective.

In Iran, the Israelis have been trying in vain to get the Iranian Jewish community to leave. Iran’s Jewish population is actually the second largest in the Middle East and arguably the oldest undisturbed Jewish community in the world. Iranian Jews view themselves as Iranians who are tied to Iran as their homeland, just like Muslim and Christian Iranians, and for them the concept that they need to relocate to Israel because they are Jewish is ridiculous.

In Lebanon, Israel has been working to exacerbate sectarian tensions between the various Christian and Muslim factions as well as the Druze. Lebanon is a springboard into Syria and the division of Lebanon into several states is also seen as a means to balkanizing Syria into several smaller sectarian Arab states. The objectives of the Yinon Plan are to divide Lebanon and Syria into several states on the basis of religious and sectarian identities for Sunni Muslims, Shiite Muslims, Christians, and the Druze. There could also be objectives for a Christian exodus in Syria too.

The new head of the Maronite Catholic Syriac Church of Antioch, the largest of the autonomous Eastern Catholic Churches, has expressed his fears about a purging of Arab Christians in the Levant and Middle East. Patriarch Mar Beshara Boutros Al-Rahi and many other Christian leaders in Lebanon and Syria are afraid of a Muslim Brotherhood takeover in Syria. Like Iraq, mysterious groups are now attacking the Christian communities in Syria. The leaders of the Christian Eastern Orthodox Church, including the Eastern Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem, have also all publicly expressed their grave concerns. Aside from the Christian Arabs, these fears are also shared by the Assyrian and Armenian communities, which are mostly Christian.

Sheikh Al-Rahi was recently in Paris where he met President Nicolas Sarkozy. It is reported that the Maronite Patriarch and Sarkozy had disagreements about Syria, which prompted Sarkozy to say that the Syrian regime will collapse. Patriarch Al-Rahi’s position was that Syria should be left alone and allowed to reform. The Maronite Patriarch also told Sarkozy that Israel needed to be dealt with as a threat if France legitimately wanted Hezbollah to disarm.

Because of his position in France, Al-Rahi was instantly thanked by the Christian and Muslim religious leaders of the Syrian Arab Republic who visited him in Lebanon. Hezbollah and its political allies in Lebanon, which includes most the Christian parliamentarians in the Lebanese Parliament, also lauded the Maronite Patriarch who later went on a tour to South Lebanon.

Sheikh Al-Rahi is now being politically attacked by the Hariri-led March 14 Alliance, because of his stance on Hezbollah and his refusal to support the toppling of the Syrian regime. A conference of Christian figures is actually being planned by Hariri to oppose Patriarch Al-Rahi and the stance of the Maronite Church. Since Al-Rahi announced his position, the Tahrir Party, which is active in both Lebanon and Syria, has also started targeting him with criticism. It has also been reported that high-ranking U.S. officials have also cancelled their meetings with the Maronite Patriarch as a sign of their displeasure about his positions on Hezbollah and Syria.

The Hariri-led March 14 Alliance in Lebanon, which has always been a popular minority (even when it was a parliamentary majority), has been working hand-in-hand with the U.S., Israel, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and the groups using violence and terrorism in Syria. The Muslim Brotherhood and other so-called Salafist groups from Syria have been coordinating and holding secret talks with Hariri and the Christian political parties in the March 14 Alliance. This is why Hariri and his allies have turned on Cardinal Al-Rahi. It was also Hariri and the March 14 Alliance that brought Fatah Al-Islam into Lebanon and have now helped some of its members escape to go and fight in Syria.

A Christian exodus is being planned for the Middle East by Washington, Tel Aviv, and Brussels. It is now being reported that Sheikh Al-Rahi was told in Paris by President Nicolas Sarkozy that the Christian communities of the Levant and Middle East can resettle in the European Union. This is no gracious offer. It is a slap in the face by the same powers that have deliberately created the conditions to eradicate the ancient Christian communities of the Middle East. The aim appears to be the resettling of the Christian communities outside of the region so as to delineate the Arab nations along the lines of being exclusively Muslim nations. This falls into accordance with the Yinon Plan.

Re-Dividing Africa: The Yinon Plan is very Much Alive and at Work…

In the same context as the sectarian divisions in the Middle East, the Israelis have outlined plans to reconfigure Africa. The Yinon Plan seeks to delineate Africa on the basis of three facets:

(1) ethno-linguistics;
(2) skin-colour;
(3) religion.

It seeks to draw dividing lines in Africa between a so-called “Black Africa” and a supposedly “non-Black” North Africa. This is part of a scheme to create a schism in Africa between what are assumed to be “Arabs” and so-called “Blacks.”

An attempt to separate the merging point of an Arab and African identity is underway.

This objective is why the ridiculous identity of an “African South Sudan” and an “Arab North Sudan” have been nurtured and promoted. This is also why black-skinned Libyans have been targeted in a campaign to “colour cleanse” Libya. The Arab identity in North Africa is being de-linked from its African identity. Simultaneously there is an attempt to eradicate the large populations of “black-skinned Arabs” so that there is a clear delineation between “Black Africa” and a new “non-Black” North Africa, which will be turned into a fighting ground between the remaining “non-Black” Berbers and Arabs.

In the same context, tensions are being fomented between Muslims and Christians in Africa, in such places as Sudan and Nigeria, to further create lines and fracture points. The fuelling of these divisions on the basis of skin-colour, religion, ethnicity, and language is intended to fuel disassociation and disunity in Africa. This is all part of a broader African strategy of cutting North Africa off from the rest of the African continent.

Israel and the African Continent

The Israelis have been quietly involved on the African continent for years. In Western Sahara, which is occupied by Morocco, the Israelis helped build a separation security wall like the one in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. In Sudan, Tel Aviv has armed separatist movements and insurgents. In South Africa, the Israelis supported the Apartheid regime and its occupation of Namibia. In 2009, the Israeli Foreign Ministry outlined that Africa would be the renewed focus of Tel Aviv.

Israel’s two main objectives in Africa are to impose the Yinon Plan, in league with its own interests, and to assist Washington in becoming the hegemon of Africa. In this regard, the Israelis also pushed for the creation of AFRICOM in this regard. The Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies (IASPS) is one example.

Washington has outsourced intelligence work in Africa to Tel Aviv. Tel Aviv is effectively involved as one of the parties in a broader war not just “inside” Africa, but “over” Africa. In this war, Tel Aviv is working alongside Washington and the E.U. against China and its allies, which includes Iran.

Tehran is working alongside Beijing in a similar manner as Tel Aviv is with Washington. Iran is helping the Chinese in Africa through Iranian connections and ties. These ties also include Tehran’s ties to private Lebanese and Syrian business interests in Africa. Thus, within the broader rivalry between Washington and Beijing, an Israeli-Iranian rivalry has also unfolded within Africa.¹ Sudan is Africa’s third largest weapons producer, as a result of Iranian support in weapons manufacturing. Meanwhile, while Iran provides military assistance to Khartoum, which includes several military cooperation agreements, Israel is involved in various actions directed against the Sudanese.¹

Israel and Libya

Libya had been considered as “a spoiler” which undermined the interests of the former colonial powers in Africa. In this regard, Libya had taken on some hefty pan-African development plans intended to industrialize Africa and transform Africa into an integrated and assertive political entity. These initiatives conflicted with the interests of the external powers competing with one another in Africa, but it was especially unacceptable to Washington and the major E.U. countries. In this regard, Libya had to be crippled and neutralized as an entity supportive of African progress and pan-African unity.

The role of Israel and the Israeli lobby was fundamental in opening the door to NATO’s military intervention in Libya. According to Israeli sources, it was U.N. Watch that actually orchestrated the events in Geneva to remove Libya from the U.N. Human Rights Council and to ask the U.N. Security Council to intervene.² U.N. Watch is formally affiliated with the American Jewish Committee (AJC), which has influence in the formulation of U.S. foreign policy and is part of the Israeli lobby in the United States. The International Federation of Human Rights (FIDH), which helped launch the unverified claims about 6,000 people being slaughtered by Gaddafi, is also tied to the Israeli lobby in France.

Tel Aviv had been in contact simultaneously with both the Transitional Council and the Libyan government in Tripoli. Mossad agents were also in Tripoli, one of which was a former station manager. At about the same time, French members of the Israeli lobby were visiting Benghazi. In a case of irony, the Transitional Council would claim that Colonel Qaddafi was working with Israel, while it made pledges to recognize Israel to president Sarkozy’s special envoy Bernard-Henri Lévy who would then convey the message to Israeli leaders.³ A similar pattern (to that of Israel’s links to the Transitional Council) had also developed at an earlier stage in South Sudan, which was armed by Israel.

Despite the Transitional Council’s position on Israel, its followers still tried to demonize Gaddafi by claiming he was secretly Jewish. Not only was this untrue, but it was also bigoted. These accusations were intended to be a form of character assassination that equated being a Jew as something negative.

In reality, Israel and NATO are in the same camp. Israel is a de facto member of NATO. Had Gaddafi been conniving with Israel while the Transitional Council was working with NATO, this would mean that both sides were actually being played as fools against one another.

Preparing the Chessboard for the “Clash of Civilizations”

It is at this point that all the pieces have to be put together and the dots have to be connected.

The chessboard is being staged for a “Clash of Civilizations” and all the chess pieces are being put into place.

The Arab World is in the process of being cordoned off and sharp delineation lines are being created. These lines of delineation are replacing the seamless lines of transition between different ethno-linguistic, skin-colour, and religious groups.

Under this scheme, there can no longer be a melding transition between societies and countries. This is why the Christians in the Middle East and North Africa, such as the Copts, are being targeted. This also why black-skinned Arabs and black-skinned Berbers, as well as other North African population groups which are black-skinned, are facing genocide in North Africa.

What is being staged is the creation of an exclusively “Muslim Middle East” area (excluding Israel) that will be in turmoil over Shiite-Sunni fighting. A similar scenario is being staged for a “non-Black North Africa” area which will be characterized by a confrontation between Arabs and Berber. At the same time, under the “Clash of Civilizations” model, the Middle East and North Africa are slated to simultaneously be in conflict with the so-called “West” and “Black Africa.”

This is why both Nicolas Sarzoky, in France, and David Cameron, in Britain, made back-to-back declarations during the start of the conflict in Libya that multiculturalism is dead in their respective Western European societies.⁴

Real multiculturalism threatens the legitimacy of the NATO war agenda. It also constitutes an obstacle to the implementation of the “Clash of Civilizations” which constitutes the cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy. In this regard, Zbigniew Brzezinski, former U.S. National Security Advisor, explains why multiculturalism is a threat to Washington and its allies: “[A]s America becomes an increasingly multicultural society, it may find it more difficult to fashion a consensus on foreign policy issues [e.g., war with the Arab World, China, Iran, or Russia and the former Soviet Union], except in the circumstances of a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat. Such a consensus generally existed throughout World War II and even during the Cold War [and exists now because of the 'Global War on Terror'].”⁵

Brzezinski’s next sentence is the qualifier of why populations would oppose or support wars: “[The consensus] was rooted, however, not only in deeply shared democratic values, which the public sensed were being threatened, but also in a cultural and ethnic affinity for the predominantly European victims of hostile totalitarianisms.”⁵

Risking being redundant, it has to be mentioned again that it is precisely with the intention of breaking these cultural affinities between the Middle East-North Africa (MENA) region and the so-called “Western World” and sub-Saharan Africa that Christians and black-skinned peoples are being targeted.

Ethnocentrism and Ideology: Justifying Today’s “Just Wars”

In the past, the colonial powers of Western Europe would indoctrinate their people. Their objective was to acquire popular support for colonial conquest. This took the form of spreading Christianity and promoting Christian values with the support of armed merchants and colonial armies.

At the same time, racist ideologies were put forth. The people whose lands were colonized were portrayed as “sub-human,” inferior, or soulless. Finally, the “White Man’s burden” of taking on a mission of civilizing the so-called “uncivilized peoples of the world” was used. This cohesive ideological framework was used to portray colonialism as a “just cause.” The latter in turn was used to provide legitimacy to the waging of “just wars” as a means to conquering and “civilizing” foreign lands.

Today, the imperialist design of the United States, Britain, France, and Germany have not changed. What has changed is the pretext and justification for waging their neo-colonial wars of conquest. During the colonial period, the narratives and justifications for waging war were accepted by public opinion in the colonizing countries, such as Britain and France. Today’s “just wars” and “just causes” are now being conducted under the banners of women’s rights, human rights, humanitarianism, and democracy.

1. The Economist, “Israel and Iran in Africa: A search for allies in a hostile world,” February 4, 2011.
2. Tova Lazaroff, “70 rights groups call on UN to condemn Tripoli,” Jerusalem Post, February 22, 2011.
3. Radio France Internationale, “Libyan rebels will recognise Israel, Bernard-Henri Lévy tells Netanyahu,” June 2, 2011.
4. Robert Marquand, “Why Europe is turning away from multiculturalism,” Christian Science Monitor, March 4, 2011.
5. Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives (New York: Basic Books October 1997), p. 211.

There is no need for additional forensic evidence of what exactly transpired at Maspero, the site of a massacre that can only be called a crime against humanity. What started out as a peaceful march against religious persecution by Salafi vandals with a nasty habit of destroying Coptic churches turned into a blood bath. Two dozen demonstrators were murdered, the youngest of them 12 years old.

The only real question remaining is whether the slaughter was premeditated. From where I sit in Cairo, it sure looks that way. How else can one explain the outright lies and deceptions propagated by state owned media operatives?

The provocative coverage by State TV made it sound like Coptic gangs armed with machine guns had assaulted unarmed military police. And the public ate it up because they ‘saw’ it on their Telly. A call went out for ‘honorable’ citizens to go out and defend the army.

Of course, that story turned out to be a load of state manufactured manure. The online English language Al-Ahram website, also a government media outlet, gave a very different account.

A march of 10,000 Copts began today from Shubra to the State TV building in Maspero turned violent when protesters were attacked by stone throwing mobs from on top of the surrounding walls while they were trying to cross the Shubra tunnel. A 15-minute battle ensued as the Coptic protesters fought back and hurled stones at their assailants. Gun shots were fired in the sky, leaving terrified demonstrators wondering aloud if they were going to be shot.

During the attack, panic ensued as women protesters were told to stand under the bridge for safety as Coptic youth tried to contain the march. After the battle stopped the march, once again regained its peaceful nature and continued towards Maspero.

On their way to Maspero they stopped in the neighboring Galaa Street and were attacked once again. A car sped through the crowd and randomely shot at protesters. The march continued once again to Maspero where the protesters were attacked again with increased vigour and violence.

An Ahram Online correspondent at Maspero reports seeing glass being thrown down at protesters from inside the State Broadcasting building in Maspero while armoured personnel carriers were driven by the army through the crowds, hitting and running protesters over. Eyewitness accounts posted on Twitter detail people being shot by the armed forces and attacked by plain-clothed thugs, with fire consuming vehicles by the Nile.

So far confirmed as being among those killed are Mina Daniel, an activist and blogger; Wael Yunna, a journalist for Coptic TV; and Michael Mosaad, an activist and member of the Maspero Youth Coalition.

The protest was organised by the Maspero Youth Union, a group of young Coptic activists to protest against the recent violations against Copts. The protesters chanted, ‘raise your head high you are a Copt,’ and ‘no to burning of churches.’

The protesters also chanted against the army, shouting “the people want the fall of the Field Marshall Tantawi,” and chanted: “Tantawi, where is your army, our homes and churches are being attacked.”

The very next morning, the Arabic print version of Al-Ahram spared all of 150 words to report the story. The brief account didn’t even mention a clash or report on the casualties. This sanitary version of the events had Muslims and Christians marching peacefully chanting “Muslims and Copts are One Hand.” My best guess is that they didn’t want to squander all their recently acquired post-revolutionary virginity on a single story.

By Tuesday morning, Al-Ahram was back to usual form and reporting an eyewitness account from a wounded soldier who claimed he saw 14 of his comrades burned alive in an armored personnel carrier. The journalist who wrote that story is well-advised to invest a little money in a calculator. The official death toll is 25 killed. Of those, 21 have already been identified as Copts, two bodies are unidentified and it’s not exactly certain who the other two are. They could have been soldiers but then again they could have been Muslim activists who were marching in solidarity with their Coptic brothers. The army initially claimed that three of its soldiers had died and now refuses to confirm the exact count.

Usually, in similar circumstances, the soldiers who die in the line of duty are identified and their families are awarded compensation and press coverage to honor their sacrifice. So it could be that the military suffered no fatalities.

The bottom line is that the state owned press accounts were all over the place even though the reported events happened right under their noses. The site of the massacre was across the street from the State Television building at Maspero. State media, any state media, is always a suspect source of information. But when you get this level of confusion in Egyptian state media outlets, it is a sure sign of a cover-up.

The behavior of these ‘journalists’ – and I use that word very loosely – is very similar to what happened on February 2, 2011. That is exactly the same scenario that transpired during the infamous “Battle of the Camels” when armed thugs on horses and camels attacked demonstrators in Tahrir Square.

At the time, the army had already committed itself to protecting the demonstrators and volunteered to be a “custodian of the revolution.” But a curious thing happened – the army didn’t intervene and never bothered to explain how the hired goons had penetrated their lines or how they had manage to pass unnoticed through dozens of army checkpoints that were set up to enforce a curfew. That remains a taboo subject.

But there are some things we now know about the Battle of the Camel. It was a carefully orchestrated attempt by the Mubarak regime to abort the revolution and the plan included a very well-defined role for state media operatives. Their instructions were to ignore it and concentrate on reporting on ‘spontaneous’ outbreaks of support for the now deposed president. It’s fair to speculate that similar instructions were handed down to state media operatives on Bloody Sunday. For the record, these government salaried scribes are pretty much the same crowd that faithfully supported Mubarak for thirty years.

The massacre at Maspero came straight out Mubarak’s play book. Manufacture chaos, pose as a savior of the nation and extend the emergency laws or maybe go a bit further and declare martial law. Field Marshal Tantawi is already signaling the need to impose harsher measures against unidentified domestic and foreign provocateurs.

The Coptic demonstrators were not hooligans armed with machine guns; their ranks included women, children and sympathetic Muslim activists. And autopsies confirm that many of them were shot, stabbed, crushed by armored personnel carriers or beaten to death.

There is absolutely no need for a massive inquiry here. Just ask the soldiers and officers what their instructions were and who gave the orders. Pull in a few of the journalists on the state payroll and ask them the same thing. Round up a few of the thugs who attacked the demonstrators to determine if they acted ‘spontaneously’ or if they also had instructions. I’ll bet my last dollar that this was a False Flag operation to manufacture chaos and create enough sectarian tension to justify continued military rule.

Which gets me back to my initial thesis which is that there never was an Egyptian revolution. What happened in Egypt was a coup d’état that rode the back of a popular uprising, tamed it and now plans to re-establish six decades of military dictatorship. The generals were more than happy to get rid of Mubarak and his heir, a son who was not only a corrupt investment banker but also a draft dodger who never served a day in the military and was rumored to have a British passport.

The Copts who perished on Bloody Monday will go down as the last martyrs of the first Egyptian uprising or the first martyrs of the second Egyptian uprising. Either way, their blood will remain an indelible stain on Egyptian history. May God have mercy on their souls.

An overnight curfew was lifted on Monday but scores of people have been arrested, and a heavy security presence remained on the streets near Tahrir Square (the iconic landmark that witnessed the glorious days of the Egyptian revolution).

Sunday clashes followed Egypt Christians (Copts) protests over the recent destruction of a church near the southern town of Aswan, but actually there was more to these protests than just another case of demolishing or setting a church on fire (this was the third incidence in a row, of demolishing Coptic churches, in less than 8 months after Mubarak was toppled).

Barely a few weeks to the first post-Mubarak parliamentary elections and after months of political debate and turmoil, it has become obvious that the Muslim Brotherhood and the ultra-conservative Islamists (Salafists) are bound to gain the lead in the upcoming vote, thus devouring the biggest chunk of the next parliament seats and tightening their grip over the legislative house.

And since the Islamists front, which obviously struck some sort of a deal with the military, has made no secret of their intention to apply the Islamic Sharia law that could undermine the citizenry of the Copts and reduce them to second class citizens, the Coptic community grew not only insecure but also frightened of the perilous prospects of a gloomy future.

So the thousands of Copts in Sunday’s rally were not expressing their anger over the demolition of yet another church; rather, they were expressing their fears over threatened belonging and identity and over the failure of the interim government to protect them and their places of worship.

Never throughout the 1400 years of co-habitation with Muslims in Egypt had any church or monastery been attacked before.  That’s why this whole new cycle of persecution and discrimination against the Christian minority has been a very alarming precedent for all the Coptic community in Egypt.

What went wrong?

Copts of Egypt are enduring through threatened identity crisis for years now.

Many no doubt wondered what on earth had happened to the celebrated Tahrir revolution of civility, nonviolence and solidarity as they watched the violent late collisions between Egypt Copts and the soldiers of the Supreme Council of Armed Forces (SCAF).

Disturbing scenes certainly, but they were neither unexpected nor totally spontaneous as some like to portray them. In the historical course of most revolutions, moments of exceptional unity and sacrifice do not last long. Once the common enemy is gone, unity gives way to the reassertion of differences and sectarian interests; old coalitions collapse, new solidarities and ideological differences emerge and even plots and schemes by another enemy begin to play out.

At such times of political instability, the challenge, of course, is how to handle the old demarcations and emerging differences. In post-Mubarak Egypt, the rise of radical Islamists, a security vacuum and sectarian violence have always been the most feared obstacles to a smooth transition to a democratically elected government, whatever that means.

But with SCAF siding with the Islamist front while dragging its feet on getting the police forces back on the Egyptian street and properly functioning again, the Christian minority (10% of the Egyptian population) remains in limbo.

Copts in history

Egyptian Christianity, of course, predates Islam – which was brought by the Arab conquest of Egypt in 639 AD, and became the majority religion. Some Egyptians embraced Islam voluntarily for its promise of justice, many did so to avoid jizya (taxes) while still others to acquire equal social and political status with Muslims.

By the 10th century, Muslims outnumbered the Christian population, and Arabic replaced the Coptic language as the official governmental language. In the 12th century, the church adopted Arabic as the official clergical language.

“Like or not, we are the true landowners,” yelled the protesting copts.

Hardline Copts, in exile and at home, consider themselves a distinct ethnicity – with a unique ancestry, religion and way of life – that are now being treated as a second class population and suggest, moreover, that they are, in fact, the “true, original Egyptians.”

With that hardline concept and reasoning in mind that the Copts never dared or allowed, if you will, to take it outside the church premises, the Coptic protesters in their Sunday march defiantly roared, “Like or not, we are the true land owners.”

This was the first time for Egypt Copts to let go of their prudence and discretion and maybe also their long buried hostility.  Frustrated by SCAF lax handling of the violence and frequent targeting of the Coptic churches, and since no one was prosecuted or held accountable for the previous two attacks, the Copts set off this huge rally with a bit of a grudge against SCAF.

Left out

In Egypt today, the key responsibility to ensure sectarian peace lies with the country’s elite (the military council, the intelligentsia, the remnants of Mubarak’s regime, Islamists, and Coptic leaders) … and, of course, regional and international players, namely Saudi Arabia, the United States and Israel.

As for the intelligentsia and the liberals who have being outweighed by the rise of the well organized and obscenely financed Islamists, thanks to the Wahabbist Saudis, and are so busy and exhausted trying to secure, by any stretch, the minimum number of parliament seats even if that meant some secret deal with the Muslim brotherhood, they actually have no time for the Copts’ dossier.

The Coptic leaders, feeling insecure after Mubarak’s stepping down and also feeling left out while the Islamists and the remnants of the old regime split the booty of the transitional period, had no choice but to consider asking, or, rather, begging for international protection, an option long advocated by hardline Copts in exile especially in the United States and aided by Zionist organizations … and that required nothing more than some bloody confrontation with the Egyptian security forces during which Coptic victims would fall down in front of the whole world.

Judging from the latest statements of SCAF in which they explicitly announced that the council will not approve of a civilian president to be the future supreme commander of the military forces and with Field Marshal Tantawy insinuating that he might consider running for the presidency, we can understand SCAF’s need for more escalation of riots and unrest as a pretext to sort of prolonging the interim period for may be another two years during which they could cling to power and shift the country into military rule.

For the time being, both the United States and Israel prefer the military council being in command rather than to hand over the rule of Egypt to the Muslim Brotherhood with their known pro-Palestine agenda and their unpredictable stance on the Camp David peace accords, even if that means turning a blind eye to SCAF security forces getting so out of control as to run over peaceful protesters with their armored vehicles exactly as Mubarak’s security apparatus used to do.

False flag

When it comes to Egypt, the Israeli role doesn’t stop at the wishful thinking of an observer but extends into deep and covert involvement. I mean, we all remember the state of bewilderment and confusion that followed the Alexandria church bombing last Christmas night that left around 20 dead and 90 wounded, but the classified documents found in the headquarters of the raided state security apparatus proved that the whole thing was a false flag operation pulled to implicate some Gaza-based militants and help Israel tighten its siege on Gaza and incriminate Hamas as a terrorist organization.

What is similarly puzzling about the peaceful Coptic march that suddenly turned violent is the testimony of various eyewitnesses that confirmed that plain-clothed unknown assailants managed to infiltrate the rally and on reaching the final destination of the march they were the ones who started throwing stones, Molotov cocktail bottles and even shooting live ammunition at the military security forces taking down two soldiers — and from then on the scene turned into the chaos and violence we have all witnessed.

Obviously those were trained agent provocateurs that easily infiltrated the peaceful Coptic march and orchestrated this whole mess. What consolidates this thesis is the swift and widespread rumor that followed on the internet social media and on the Egyptian street stating that Hillary Clinton, the American foreign secretary, has declared that the United States is willing to help the Egyptian military council to protect the Christian minority in Egypt.

Of course, the next day this breaking news was refuted as false statement, but still this whole thing, regardless of the hidden motives of both the Copts and the Egyptian military, smells so much like a false flag.

In our previous article, “The Real Delusion Part I,”¹ we argued that, despite their emphases on religious skepticism and open scientific inquiry, the New Atheists² * have betrayed the spirit of the Enlightenment and have instead veered toward an obdurate and uninspiring offensive against superstition that blames most of the world’s current ills on irrational religious belief. Enlightenment thinkers assailed religious superstition because it was part and parcel of a powerful institutional framework that most found abhorrent; furthermore, most Enlightenment thinkers believed that religious toleration was a noble desideratum.³ The New Atheists, on the other hand, believe that religious toleration is potentially destructive.⁴,⁵ More importantly and dangerously, they have promulgated the idea that religious belief imperils Western society, convincing myriad people that such concerns are dire and distracting attention from other, more urgent political issues.

We also noted that human political nature could be usefully understood with the aid of two important concepts: reverse hierarchy egalitarianism and coalitional competition. Using these concepts, we traced the rise of the modern state, noting that legitimation narratives are an important component of state formation and maintenance. Although the earliest legitimation narratives were religious, growing skepticism and secularism gradually eroded the efficacy of religious narratives in the West. This led to the development of secular narratives and eventually to the neoliberal nationalist narrative that is predominant today. Finally, we argued that Harris’ contentions about the nature of Islam and its effects on believers are often erroneous, unempirical, and dangerous because they could potentially contribute to Western Islamophobia.⁶ *

In this article, we will continue our analysis of the Enlightenment and its tradition, specifically focusing on Noam Chomsky. We will first situate Chomsky historically, noting that he is profitably viewed as perhaps the most representative intellectual of the Enlightenment heritage. His radical critique of power and ideology, exposure of moral hypocrisy, and praise for intellectual integrity, represent the true spirit of the Enlightenment and will inform our criticism of modern power and the narratives it uses to cloak its machinations. This will be accomplished by focusing on three domains: the mainstream media, domestic policy, and foreign policy. We will conclude by completing our critique of the New Atheists in light of the previous analyses.

Continuing the project of the Enlightenment

According to the Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant, enlightenment is humankind’s emergence from a self-created cocoon of immaturity and ignorance; and the Enlightenment, the age that finally began to offer the freedom needed to thus emerge.⁷ The most important obstacles to this desired freedom were powerful institutions and the narratives they propounded; the institutions because they coerced behavior and the narratives because they encumbered and enslaved reason. An important and instructive example of this spirit is found in the works of Thomas Paine, particularly in his two major treatises: The Rights of Man (1791), ⁸ and The Age of Reason (1794-1807).⁹ In The Rights of Man, Paine excoriated corrupt and tyrannical forms of government and the narratives used to justify them. Monarchy, he asserted, was an affront to reason and human dignity, and he endlessly attacked the pomp and pageantry used to mystify it. Paine believed that illegitimate forms of government were based on either superstition or power–the former government based on priestcraft and the latter on conquerors. The only legitmate government arose from the consent and reason of the governed. The age of Reason, like The Rights of Man, was a sustained attack on power and privilege, this time aimed at the “adulterous” nexus of church and state. Paine believed that the institutions of the church were iniquitous and that priests lusted power and wealth rather than human betterment. As Paine acerbically put it, “the Christian theory is little else than the idolatry of the ancient Mythologists, accommodated to the purposes of power and revenue.”¹⁰ Paine also panned the doctrines of Christianity, but it is important to remember that churches wielded a significant amount of political power at the time he was writing and that his chief concern was social justice.* This concern permeates his writings and is the fount of both his bitterness and his optimism.

The legacy of the Enlightenment, then, is a healthy skepticism of power and of the narratives propounded by the powerful. It is true that Enlightenment thinkers also sought to advance scientific thinking and to dispel various kinds of superstitions, but most were satisfied with a “non-overlapping magisteria”¹¹ arrangement: science tackled empirical problems, and religion tackled existential issues.¹² (It is useful to remember that some of the most brilliant embodiments of the Enlightenment were quite religious–Newton, for example.) Viewed from this perspective, no one better encompasses the spirit of the Enlightenment than Noam Chomsky, who has tirelessly attacked powerful and unjust institutions, intellectual hypocrisy, erroneous political narratives, and the moral laziness that leads to a passive acceptance of power no matter how grievous the consequences. Perhaps Chomsky’s most general statement of the appropriate task of intellectuals is found in his essay “The Responsibility of Intellectuals.”¹³ The first and most obvious responsibility, Chomsky argues, is “to speak the truth and to expose the lies” of powerful institutions like corporations and governments; this burden is placed on “intellectuals” because Western democracies “provide” them “with the leisure, the facilities, and the training” to pierce the patina of distortion that cloaks the operations of power. The intellectual does not mock doctrines that have little influence on social injustice, or those held by official enemies (say, in many cases, Islam), but rather confronts, first and foremost, the image in the mirror.¹⁴ For a citizen of the United States, that means focusing on the policies of our own government rather than self-righteously lampooning the ignorance or stupidity of the beliefs of “official enemies or those designated as unworthy in the prevailing political culture.”¹⁵ These are responsibilities that Chomsky has taken seriously for more than 40 years, working indefatigably to dismantle the narratives and ideologies of the powerful. His work offers the modern activist a fruitful heuristic for combating the myths, lies, and distortions that obscure the machinations of powerful coalitions and the institutions they control. This critique, not the New Atheists’ criticisms of religious faith, represents the true spirit of the Enlightenment.

Once again with human political nature and coalitional conflict

In our previous article, we argued that humans possess a suite of behavioral propensities that interact with the environment to give rise to political systems [see reference 1]. We focused on two of these tendencies: egalitarianism and coalition formation. The first manifests itself in a hatred of despotism and in the formation of reverse hierarchies in order to thwart despotic upstarts;¹⁶ the second, in the creation of unified coalitions of people who divide the world into “us” and “them,” granting moral status to ingroup members that is denied to outgroup members. For this article, we will also focus on a third fundamental component of human political nature: the motivation to control.¹⁷ * According to cognitive and educational psychologist, David Geary, the motivation to control is “an evolved disposition and is implicitly focused on attempts to control social relationships and the behavior of other people, and to control the biological and physical resources that have historically covaried with survival and reproductive prospects in the local ecology.” [page 24] Put more colloquially, the motivation to control is a biological tendency to desire control over people and resources. Politically, this essentially reduces to a desire for power, although it does not always need to manifest in a reprehensible form. For example, an activist concerned with inequality desires the ability to implement policies that will alleviate America’s inequitable economic distribution; the activist desires, in other words, the power to control economic policy.

The combination of these propensities leads to nearly incessant conflict between coalitions over finite resources. (The conflict need not be violent. Much of it is ideological, for example, and amounts to arguing with friends, groups, and large coalitions about how resources should be distributed.) In complicated, industrialized states, human egalitarian tendencies are often no match for the power of integrated coalitions; however, the combination of egalitarian proclivities and the motivation to control leads to anger and moral outrage from people and coalitions that do no reap the benefits of the institutional and coalitional arrangements (for example, women or minorities who were/are discriminated against in the labor market or victims of the financial machinations of Wall Street.).¹⁸ This necessitates some form of population control. In more democratic societies, the bludgeon is not an effective instrument and some attention must be paid to popular sentiment.¹⁹ The control of this popular sentiment through propaganda (political narratives) is therefore vital for the power elite. It is vital because it 1) limits the domain of thinkable thoughts and 2) limits the domain of acceptable debate. In the United States, the power elite (which consists of the corporate community, the upper class, and the policy planning network),²⁰ although only a tiny fraction of the entire population, controls a staggering proportion of the country’s available resources. This inequitable distribution of resources requires justification: it will not do for the power elite to simply assert, “we are better than the rest of you and therefore we own a significant proportion of the country’s wealth.” In the United States, as we argued in part I, the current political narrative is the neoliberal nationalist narrative. Because the mainstream media are an important conduit* of this narrative, it is important for a politically conscious person to analyze and criticize the media. Probably the most powerful framework for such a task comes from Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent.²¹

Power nexus 1: The mainstream media (obscuring institutional analysis)

In Manufacturing Consent, Herman and Chomsky offer a compelling institutional analysis of the media. Instead of tramping down the well worn and distracting trail of liberal versus conservative analysis,* Herman and Chomsky ask a simple question: what are the media? The straight forward but illuminating answer: “…the major media–particularly, the elite media that set the agenda that others generally follow–are corporations ‘selling’ privileged audiences to other businesses.”²² That is, the media are enormous, profit seeking corporations that raise revenue by selling space for advertisers. They can charge more for such space if their readership includes the proper demographics–so, in essence, they are “selling” their audience to other businesses (namely, advertisers). In a certain functional sense, the “news” is simply a lure to attract audiences, which are the primary product that the media offers on the market.

Before continuing, it seems profitable to make a few remarks on institutional analysis. Perhaps one of the more impressive accomplishments of modern propaganda is effectively to eliminate this kind of straight forward analysis from mainstream consideration. In a famous scene from the documentary Manufacturing Consent, for example, the author Tom Wolfe calls Herman and Chomsky’s observations about the operations of the media “patent nonsense,” and conflates them with a conspiratorial view of the media, complete with elites in a “beige room” deciding what can and cannot be distributed. This is stunning because Herman and Chomsky explicitly assert the opposite: there are no central control stations or informational bureaus; rather, there are institutions functioning exactly as one would expect them to function. Wolfe, like most of the population, is almost certainly unfamiliar with the style of analysis Herman and Chomsky use and probably honestly confuses it with the picture he presents in the documentary–a confusion that is common and prevents such analysis, although obvious and highly informative, from becoming common place. Since we are surrounded by powerful institutions, this dearth of institutional analysis is particularly pernicious. For those not properly acclimated to our intellectual environment, it might seem risible that a number of intellectuals (the New Atheists) assail the “irrationality” of religious belief and fulsomely praise the virtues of skeptical inquiry while utterly ignoring the functions of the institutions that dominate modern society (and therefore greatly shape the lives of people on the planet), but such protestations of open skepticism have often been coupled with unquestioning acceptance of contemporary institutional structures and in this the New Atheists have ample company. Nevertheless, if one wishes to be serious about skeptical inquiry, one should extend its reach beyond relatively obvious belief structures and into domains of real power.

Herman and Chomsky’s basic institutional framework led to their propaganda model of the media. The propaganda model is a theoretical description (Chomsky calls it “virtually just an observation”²³ ) of the forces that shape the content of the media; it also describes the type of content one would expect given the structure of those forces. According to the model, there are five basic filters that affect the content of the media: ownership, sources of funding, sourcing, flak, and fear mongering (anti-communist or anti-terrorist ideologies). Of these, the first three are the most important.

–Ownership. The media are large corporations; therefore the content is owned by large, profit seeking institutions.* Through interlocking directorates, the corporations which own the major media outlets are linked to the corporate community in general. This shapes the content of the media because it is in the interest of corporations to instill a consumerist mentality and subservience to power. And it is certainly against the interests of corporations to teach institutional skepticism.

–Sources of funding. The media “sell” audiences to other businesses. It follows that the elite media wishes to attract affluent readers and to convey a consumerist message so that businesses will desire advertising space. A newspaper, for example, that is highly critical of corporations and profit seeking in general cannot attract advertisers and is at a serious funding disadvantage. In a very real sense, the function of the “news” is not to provide trenchant analysis of the political world, but rather to attract affluent audiences or distract the less affluent*; the news, in other words, is not the primary product. (This does not mean that individual journalists are conscious of this; rather, it means that the news functions as a lure for audiences.)

–Sourcing. The media require sources of information and individual reporters desire access to “privileged” insider information. This makes the media highly dependent upon official sources, like the pentagon or the central government. If a reporter writes a story critical of some aspect of foreign policy, for example, she might lose her source. Since reporters compete for sources, such a loss can be devastating. In a larger sense, each media outlet is dependent upon information from official sources because an outlet cannot possibly put reporters all over the globe. Reporters are concentrated in informational areas: the pentagon or the White House, for example.

This institutional arrangement leads to the propagation of a corporate friendly narrative in the same way that the institutional arrangement of ESPN leads to the propagation of a sports friendly narrative. Doubtless, many journalists within the framework earnestly feel that they are “free” to publish and discuss what they desire, and visible evidence of censorship is kept to a minimum (although it is certainly not non-existent²⁴ ). Overt censorship is rare precisely because it is not necessary. Individual journalists and reporters who succeed within the establishment do so because they have either 1) internalized the neoliberal nationalist narrative or 2) have not desired to directly confront it in any meaningful way. Those who challenge the framework, like Norman Finkelstein, Noam Chomsky, Jack Rasmus, et cetera, are weeded out well before they reach elite centers of news distribution.

Perhaps one of the most pernicious effects of the mainstream media is the creation of an illusory boundary of reasonable debate. Subjugating thought to a manufactured framework with narrow limits, this boundary determines what can and cannot be discussed, even contemplated, in the United States. If one does transcend the boundary and attempt to criticize institutional structures, one is reduced to speaking an incomprehensible language. For example, asserting that the United States is the largest purveyor of terrorism in the world is not just considered erroneous, it is considered insane–it is virtually a meaningless sentence in the English language (at least in the U.S.). Most people would react to that and other similar statements in the same manner they would react to a person asserting that the home sports’ team should pull its best player so that it can lose as many games as possible–with bemused indignation. Let us consider a concrete example.

While “cool” and “rational” pundits like Jon Stewart* bemoan the increasing polarization of media outlets in America, the real polarization between the rich and the poor continues at an alarming rate.²⁵ This was shockingly evinced in the media’s coverage of the budget battles of 2011. Representative Paul Ryan, a self-styled votary of the mythological Reagan, unveiled his budget plan on April 5 to a prodigious amount of media hype. Many fulsomely praised the unflinching “seriousness” of Ryan’s plan, which managed to manhandle reality “with both hands” and forced “everybody else to do the same.”²⁶ Meanwhile, the progressive congressional caucus also forwarded a budget (April 13) that would balance the budget while leaving in place the legacy of the New Deal. While the “People’s Budget” received praise from some notable economists, including Nobel laureate Paul Krugman, who called the plan “genuinely courageous,”²⁷ it was not widely discussed in the mainstream media,²⁸* apparently lacking the “seriousness” of the Ryan plan, despite the fact that it managed to balance the federal budget within a decade (the People’s Budget projected a $30.7 billion dollar surplus in 2021²⁹ ) without eviscerating important social programs. What condemns the media more forcefully than this disparity in coverage, however, is their utter disregard for the opinions and desires of the majority of the United States’ population. While David Brooks and others continue to praise the boldness, seriousness, and courageousness of robbing the poor to fund the rich (for example, while the Ryan plan cuts $4.3 trillion dollars in spending, it offset this with $4.2 trillion in tax cuts, at least two thirds of which come from programs for those of moderate means. See analyses of the Ryan plan³⁰,³¹ ) the majority of the population believes that income should be more equally distributed (on the level of Sweden) and, in fact, believes that it is already much more evenly distributed than it is–a great success of the propaganda system no doubt.³²

It is important to note that the Ryan plan, the People’s Budget, and other proposed fiscal policies have enormous concrete effects on normal citizens. While the New Atheists deploy witty one liners about the follies of faith, write books about why god is not great, and lament the irrationality of religious belief, millions of people are unable to perceive the reality of important political policies that will, to a significant degree, determine the future state of our society. The first and most salient reason is the shameful content of the mainstream media, something that those who desire a more “rational” world should focus their energy on combating and correcting.

Power nexus 2: Domestic policy and power (in praise of mythical markets)

The media are, in a very real sense, an extension of the centers of domestic power; therefore, it is important to understand and criticize these domestic power centers. Significantly, domestic power and policy has shifted dramatically since the 1960’s, leading from the Keynesian era to the triumph of neoliberalism (or, what has been aptly dubbed ‘the Age of Greed’ by Jeff Madrick.³³ This shift has profoundly impacted society, drastically increasing inequality (see figure 1²⁵ ), while concomitantly decreasing investment in social programs and infrastructure. In other words, an increasingly small fraction of society (a small coalition) has appropriated more of the resources. Noam Chomsky has been a leading critic of this trend, consistently pointing out the astonishing disconnect between the narratives used to justify this pattern of appropriation (“free markets dispassionately distributing resources”) and the reality behind it. In a society where narratives often serve the function of the bludgeon, it is important to escape one’s voluntary servitude by increasing one’s knowledge of 1) economic and political reality and 2) the content of the narratives used to justify the underlying reality.

Domestically, neoliberalism can be conceptualized as a set of policies aimed at increasing profitability while stripping away the foundations of the New Deal settlement (e.g., constraining upper class incomes, pursuing full employment, increasing labor’s share of the national income, etc.³⁴ That is, these policies are designed to enrich the oligarchical power elite, who are, in Chomsky’s words, “vulgar Marxists, with values and commitments reversed.”³⁵,³⁶ These policies include liberalizing trade and finance while promoting macroeconmic stability, privatization, and deregulation.³⁷* The monetary outcome of these policies, as indicated by a plethora of data, is continually increasing inequality and economic insecurity;³⁸ psychologically, there are plausible but still controversial interpretations of data that claim these policies have led to increases in antisocial behavior, including narcissism, and in potentially serious mental illnesses like depression and anxiety.³⁹ If our general outline on human political nature is correct, the increasing prevalence of these conditions is entirely understandable. Humans desire control and some form of egalitarianism. Just as a dearth of food leads to predictable physiological responses and pain, so a dearth of control leads to predictable psychological ailments.⁴⁰,⁴¹ However, because of the power of the neoliberal nationalist narrative and the increasing popularity of libertarian philosophies, many people are ignorant of the causes of inequitable resource distribution and the many troubling symptoms it causes. It may turn out that many of us are suffering from a curable disease but are unable to discern its cause. Furthermore, there is good evidence that inequality promotes religiosity where as religiosity does not promote inequality–in other words, there is good evidence that inequality causes increases in religious belief (at least in the United States).⁴² Those who desire that religion disappear might want to pay some attention to such recalcitrant facts as they recommend a strategy much different from the currently fashionable activity of denigrating the beliefs of religious adherents.

Because the policies of neoliberalism would be repugnant to most citizens, they are justified with narratives about the efficiency and fairness of free markets.⁴³,⁴⁴ In fact, it would be difficult to find another mythical entity that provokes such effusive praise and elicits such unthinking devotion. As Chomsky points out, many miracles are imputed to the creative efficiency of free markets that were actually the result of careful social planning and federal investment: the internet, aeronautics, pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, the high tech industry in general,… the list is nearly inexhaustible. In fact, one of the vital roles of the pentagon in the United States’ economy is to fund high tech industry, a simple fact that should be known by every citizen but is safely hidden by the propaganda system. The basic argument that “free market fundamentalists” (a truly scary form of fundamentalism) make thus rests upon a false premise. Consider one representative example. In a 20/20 episode on free market health care,⁴⁵ John Stossel argues against Michael Moore’s concerns about the free market, noting that free markets have created all kinds of brilliant things like cell phones, computers, and helpful medicines. Unfortunately, Stossel does not bother to note the incredible amount of federal funding that went into creating these technologies, the patent monopolies that drug companies use to boost profits and thwart competition, or the direct investment line from the enormous corporations that produce these goods into politicians who doubtlessly return the favor with friendly policies. (Corporations aren’t investing in politicians so that they will increase competition and lower profits.)

Like most fundamentalists, free market votaries almost invariably misrepresent the ideas of their supposed ancestors. A particularly illustrative example is Adam Smith, the nearly flawless and peerless demigod who begat the notion of the ‘invisible hand,’ and supposedly showed how a laissez faire system could, as if through some form of economic alchemy, change the base metal of selfishishness into the gold of economic prosperity for all. As Chomsky has noted numerous times,⁴⁶ the phrase “invisible hand” appears exactly once in Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (it appears one other time in his other works⁴⁷), and Smith does not use it to describe how selfish humans behaving for profit unknowingly but ineluctably bring prosperity to others; rather, Smith uses it to assuage fears of capital flight, arguing that people will prefer to invest in domestic markets rather than foreign markets.⁴⁸ Smith’s arguments were subtle and sophisticated, but he generally favored market policies because he believed that they would produce economic equality. He had nothing but scorn for the “masters of the mankind,” who lived by the “vile maxim” of “all for ourselves, and nothing for other people.”⁴⁹ Like most enlightenment thinkers, he assailed the established powers of his time: the merchants and the policies that favored them. Had he lived to see the modern corporate revolution, he undoubtedly would have execrated the corporations that eventually supplanted the merchants that he so effectively attacked.

In a country with a reasonable educational system and tolerable media content, the above would be recognized for what it is: a series of facts and truisms. Since the myths that disguise these truisms actively promote the interests of the “masters of mankind,” however, they are eagerly promulgated and the truths that they hide are relegated to the margins of scholarship. Again, those who desire to liberate the mind from the shackles of irrational mythologies, especially when those mythologies have serious repercussions, should actively attack and encourage others to attack the neoliberal nationalist narrative and the myths it promotes. To consider just one example of the seriousness of the repercussions of neoliberal policies concretely, it is worth contemplating the following: the September 11 attacks (of which more below) tragically killed 3,000 individuals. However, an estimated 45,000 Americans die every year due to a lack of health insurance.⁵⁰ This is an astonishing number that is absolutely preventable, unlike the deaths that result from the actions of official enemies. It may comfort us to focus on those crimes while ignoring our own, but it does not improve our society. Although, as Noam Chomsky notes in a related context, it is not surprising that we often choose to ignore these inconvenient facts “given our principled exemption from moral truisms.”⁵¹

Power nexus 3: Foreign policy and power (noble intentions)

The neoliberal nationalist narrative promotes a consistent picture of American foreign policy: it stems from “benevolent” intentions and “clear moral purpose.”⁵² Sometimes, in fact, the intentions become so altruistic that it is appropriate to assert that “America is going through a noble phase” in foreign policy, one shrouded in a “saintly glow,” and committed to ideals that might actually be injurious to American interests because of their utter beneficence.⁵³ Although the language here might be a bit hyperbolic, it is not anomalous. In a 2002 article by Dinesh D’Souza, for example, we learn that America is “the most magnanimous imperial power ever,” an “abstaining superpower” that could “conquer” the world but has not interests in doing so.⁵⁴ In fact, the idea that the United States is the single greatest force “for peace and freedom, for democracy and security and prosperity” is a virtual truism.⁵⁵ Attempting to find assertions to the contrary in the mainstream commentary poses an enormous challenge. If one veers to the extreme left of mainstream debate, one might find arguments that American intervention across the globe is wrong, not because it is criminal, but because it is too costly or because America is not “winning.” More often the focus is turned toward our “kindergarten” allies and their inability to cooperate.⁵⁶ The function of the narrative is clear. It dissuades criticism, refuting counterarguments not with logic but with a simple tautology algorithm: if America intervened, it did so from noble intentions. Statements to the contrary are simply not allowed to register in the minds of most citizens; therefore, even on the rare occasions that such arguments are broadcast, they are nearly incomprehensible. A hypothetical Martian might be forgiven for wondering why a group of “free thinkers”* finds it so necessary to demolish the relics of irrational religions, while sedulously ignoring (or underplaying) the horrific brutality of American foreign policy and leaving the basic narratives that support it untouched. Again, to find a trenchant analysis of the exercise of institutional power (this time, in the realm of foreign policy) that preserves the spirit of the enlightenment, one should turn to Noam Chomsky.

According to Chomsky, the basics of inter-state relations are simple and are captured to a first approximation by the maxim of Thucydides: “the strong do as they wish, and the weak suffer as they must.”⁵⁷ Because the United States has been the most powerful country on the planet since World War II, it has done what it wishes, and its victims have suffered as they must.* The important thing, then, is to understand what America wishes; or, in other words, to understand its goals and how they lead to the particular interventions it has engaged in. The most basic goal “is to ensure a favorable global environment for U.S. based industry, commerce, agribusiness and finance.”⁵⁸ Countries that do not cooperate with this motive are punished through the two basic weapons America has at its disposal: military might and economic leverage. The examples of Chili and Indonesia are highly informative in this respect.

In 1970, Chile (democratically) elected Salvador Allende, a nationalist and Marxist, president. American policy planners were horrified. According to a 1975 Church Commission Report,⁵⁹ Washington had spent millions of dollars campaigning against Allende in prior elections even carrying out “spoiling operations” to prevent an Allende victory.⁶⁰ In 1970, however, he won by a narrow margin and policy planners immediately scrambled to undermine his regime. Nixon feared that Allende might become another “Castro,” meaning someone who refused to take orders from Washington, an overwhelming fear of policy elites. Two basic plans were designed: a Track I strategy that relied on political sabotage and economic warfare (making the “economy scream” according to the notes of DCI Helms.⁶¹ Nixon believed this would have “one hell of an effect.”⁶² ); and a Track II strategy that involved the CIA initiating a coup to prevent Allende from taking office. Both strategies failed to prevent Allende from taking over, but the economic warfare did have a serious, deleterious effect on the country. Eventually, General Augusto Pinochet was able to organize a bloody coup and overthrew Allende on September 11th, 1973 (now sometimes called “the first 9-11.”⁶³ ). Although there is no evidence that the CIA was directly involved in this coup, they were quite aware of it, and the Nixon administration was privately delighted (this was somewhat disguised in public).The death toll of the coup was over 3,000, and the horrors of the tortures implemented during Pinochet’s regime are ghastly.⁶⁴,⁶⁵ Not unsurprisingly, little time was wasted by policy elites ruing these tragedies. Today, the Pinochet regime is often remembered for being “tough,”⁶⁶ but for creating an “economic miracle”–one orchestrated by the “Chicago Boys,” who were “inspired” votaries of Milton Friedman’s “free market” principles. As Chomsky notes, this “miracle” is more mirage than substance, as the economy under Pinochet actually floundered, and the state had to take over much of the banking system to save the falling fragments of a failing economy. This is sometimes sardonically called “the Chicago road to socialism”–an apt phrase, although one not ordinarily encountered in mainstream literature on the topic.

In Indonesia in the 50’s and 60’s, after briefly expressing tepid support for him, America worried that president Sukarno was a dangerous “neutralist” and decided to take covert action to oust him. This attempt failed, so America decided to build up the Indonesian military, hoping for a coup. In 1965, there was a bloody coup and a subsequent “purging” of “communists” in the Partai Komunis Indonesia (PKI).⁶⁷ Suharto ascended to power and an estimated half a million people were killed.⁶⁸ While America was not directly involved in the coup, policy elites supported it, desiring to extirpate the PKI.⁶⁹ This support went as far as providing lists of thousands of “communists” to the Indonesian military.⁷⁰ In 1975, Indonesia invaded East Timor and overthrew the Fretilin headed government. They continued to occupy the island until 1999, when Clinton finally noticed that some bad things had happened and “informed the Indonesian military that Washington would no longer directly support their crimes.”⁷¹ Although the exact number of dead in East Timor is unknown, it is estimated that at minimum 102,800 East Timorese perished; while a higher end “speculation” of the number dead due to “conflict related hunger and illness” reached 183,000 (the CAVR report, from which these numbers are taken, did not issue a maximum estimate).⁷² Staggering numbers made even more heinous because they could have been easily prevented: Without direct support from Washington, as is clear from later events, the massacres would not have happened.⁷³ * As noted by Chomsky, what is astonishing about all of this is that it has been converted into a proof that America had entered a “noble” phase of foreign policy.⁷⁴ Meanwhile, most citizens remain unaware of the horrific tragedy, another impressive achievement of the propaganda system.

What the examples in Chili and Indonesia (the cases could be multiplied ad nauseam) incontestably illustrate is that American foreign policy is not about high moral values, benevolence, altruism, or other idealistic phantasms; rather, it is about the exercise and continuation of power. In Latin America, the U.S wanted to guarantee itself access to important resources while concomitantly allowing for a continued corporate presence in the region. Allende threatened these goals; consequently, the people of Chile had to suffer while their economy “screamed.” In Southeast Asia, the goals were the same, and the people of Indonesia, regrettably, were just some of the hapless victims. The horrific invasion of South Vietnam, saving it from “internal aggression” (against U.S. military and an U.S. supported regime), and near destruction of North Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, follows the same pattern. Importantly, U.S. foreign policy is not the manifestation of a “national interest,” unless one conflates the small coterie of elites who control foreign policy with the American population. Indeed, foreign policy follows the same basic pattern as domestic policy: a group of elites controls and benefits from the policies, while the vast majority of the population either suffers or reaps marginal rewards (and massive consequences from “blowback.”⁷⁵ It should be sobering to recognize that these terrible crimes, with prodigious and horrendous body counts, occur with the implicit consent of American intellectuals who, although granted unknown luxury and freedom, seldom rise from the comfort of their positions in academic institutions or branches of the government to protest against them.

Terrorism: Theirs and ours (intentional ignorance)

The events of 9-11 were, in many ways, the catalyst for the development of the New Atheism. Prior to 9-11, America had enjoyed almost absolute immunity from the kind of horrifying crimes it regularly doles out around the world. On 9-11, that changed. Understandably, many people were confused and emotionally disturbed by the tragedy and looked for answers to George W. Bush’s poignant question “why do they hate us”⁷⁶ * (Although, as Chomsky notes, the question is improperly phrased. “They” do not hate “us.” They hate the crimes that are perpetrated by the government, which should not be confused with the population of America.⁷¹ ) As Chalmers Johnson notes, this is a part of the blowback phenomenon.⁷⁵ Civilians, unaware of their government’s machinations in the affairs of other countries, suffer the consequences without knowledge of the reasons. Into this vacuum, a number of intellectuals provided a simple answer: they hate us because they are “simply evil” adherents of a “kind of death cult” religion,⁷⁷ a religion of a failed civilization that despises Western freedoms and values. And the attacks, so Richard Dawkins informs us, were made possible by the alluring image of 72 virgins in a paradisaical afterworld.⁷⁸ This, Dawkins also notes, is the source of the “underlying divisiveness in the Middle East which motivated” the attacks in the first place. In light of the grisly consequences of the 9-11 attacks, these intellectuals asseverated that it was no longer morally proper or decent to remain taciturn in the face of irrational belief systems, supposedly sacred or not. A number of subsequent bestsellers were penned and published, including Harris’s The End of Faith, Dawkins’ The God Delusion, and Hitchens’ God is not Great, that assailed religion and the supposedly heinous crimes it can compel believers to commit.⁷⁹,⁸⁰,⁸¹ One of the consistent themes of these books is that religion, at least the Abrahamic religions, is a barbaric relic of the middle ages and should be eschewed by rational and enlightened adults in an enlightened society (“the delusions of our ignorant ancestors,” according to Harris⁸² ). It is also implied, both implicitly and explicitly, that without religion, the horrific 9-11 attacks would not have occurred. (This is spelled out quite clearly in the rather unfortunate posters that read “Imagine a world without religion” and show the twin towers standing in front of a glistening sun.)

The New Atheists, then, systematically ignore or downplay the importance of politics. Specifically, they ignore the legitimate rage that many around the world feel because of years of suffering from American atrocities and cast blame at a more palpable (because easily known) target: religion. Harris, for example, goes so far as to say that we are at war “with precisely the vision of life prescribed to all Muslims in the Koran.”⁸³ (It is hard to tell if Harris is aware of the last 60 plus years of Middle Eastern history.) This trajectory of thought is often presented (in tone and rhetoric) as a continuation of the Enlightenment, a desire to use reason to slay the bogeyman of superstition and promote the values of skepticism and science. We have no disagreement with the second part of this desire. However, the most noble traditions of the Enlightenment would recommend a rather different course of action: acutely analyze political reality–the nature of the institutions and power structures that dominate the world today, the effects of foreign policy interventions, past and present, and the struggles of those who have not benefited from the “values” and “freedoms” of the West–and contextualize the behaviors of others in light of this analysis. Moral decency also offers another simple recommendation: look in the mirror before excoriating official enemies. In the political arena, this is often called “liberal masochism,” but in everyday life it is recognized as a noble virtue.

There were edifying responses to the events of 9-11, responses that followed the better spirit of the Enlightenment. Of the responses, Chomsky’s stands out for its lucidity and moral integrity*. Instead of using the tragedy to foment hatred, attack religion, or clamor for revenge, Chomsky sought to contextualize the event, noting that “we have a choice: we may try to understand, or refuse to do so, contributing to the likelihood that much worse lies ahead.”⁸⁴ That is, we may imitate Nietzsche’s portrait of the powerful and ignorantly persevere, paying no attention to the myriad legitimate grievances of those we regularly victimize, or we may behave like enlightened citizens and attempt understand the causes of the almost global antipathy against the U.S., antipathy that does not justify senseless murder, but that remains, in itself, reasonable given the history of U.S. foreign policy. Germane to the topic of terrorism are many polls, pointed out by Chomsky in his initial responses, that demonstrated that the majority of Muslims were (and still are) angered by U.S. policies, especially toward Iraq and Israel/Palestine. Further concerns included the U.S. role in propping up oppressive regimes and appropriating the great wealth of the region.⁸⁵ This is a view shared by Supervisory Special Agent James Fitzgerald, who, in testimony before the 9-11 commission, asserted that “[Al Qaeda and other ‘terrorist’ groups] identify with the Palestinian problem, they identify with the people who oppose repressive regimes and I believe they tend to focus their anger on the United States.”⁸⁶ This is a conclusion that stems back to the Eisenhower presidency. Eisenhower was concerned about a “campaign of hatred” against the United States–a concern apparently elicited by NSC explanations that majority of Arabs believe that the U.S. is concerned with protecting its oil interests by supporting the status quo, a status quo that stultifies economic and social progress.⁸⁷ Recent psychological research supports this general outline, and indicates that coalitional commitment, not religious belief, is a strong predictor of support for suicide attacks.⁸⁸,⁸⁹, ⁹⁰ If one is committed to a coalition that is regularly victimized, it is not difficult to understand why one might desire some form of violent revenge. Suicide bombers, then, are not psychologically different from average humans nor are they “misguided missiles” who are mindlessly infected by extremist religious memes.* Rather, they are committed members of a coalition they feel is existentially threatened by the actions of the U.S.. Although their actions may be barbaric, their motivations, contra Hitchens, are not. It might not be palatable, but it is true that the same basic psychological forces that lead to suicide terrorism also lead to some of the most noble behaviors humans are capable of. The goal is to guide humans to the noble path and away from the destructive.

Conclusion

The general desideratum of the Enlightenment was, we believe, a noble one. Skeptical thinking and science are undeniable virtues. It is tragic, then, that the New Atheists actually betray these virtues by expending their cognitive resources in an obstinate battle against religion–without citing or apparently consulting important scientific research on the topic–while ignoring the more powerful institutional structures and narratives that shape and will continue to shape the social life of humans on this planet for years to come. We believe that the motivation to control provides the “best guess” at the puzzle of human (political) nature and that, combined with the other sources of human political nature we covered (reverse hierarchy formation, and ingroup/outgroup propensities), it should provide a starting point for a basic analysis of political phenomena. These (psychological propensities) interact in important ways with institutional structures and political narratives and give rise to the multifarious political behavior manifested in the world. In order to create a just, moral, and decent society, one should focus on the effects of these institutions and narratives on human well-being. There is good evidence that the current structure of society does not promote human flourishing; and there is incontrovertible evidence that the current structure leads to terrible consequences across the globe. The responsibility of intellectuals, to rephrase Chomsky, is to remain as impervious as possible to the propaganda of power and to criticize the shortcomings of institutional structures. This was a consistent theme of Enlightenment authors and we should honor their legacy by continuing that task. To this end, the New Atheists represent a betrayal of the Enlightenment and Chomsky, one of its most productive offspring. The planet will remain replete with apologists for power, no matter how grievous its crimes; we should honor the few who resist this all-too-human propensity and fight to promote the always precarious inheritance of skeptical inquiry.

* “New Atheists”: The term was first used in Wired magazine⁹¹ to refer to people who are not just atheists but who believe that irrational religious belief should not be tolerated and should be impugned by science and reason. Wired specifically cited Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Daniel Dennett as examples of New Atheists. More recent members of the informal group include Victor J. Stenger and Christopher Hitchens. Whether or not there is anything “new” about the New Atheism is debatable. Frederich Nietzsche, to name one example, had nearly endless scorn for religion (although for different reasons than the New Atheists adduce) and did not believe “tolerance” was an appropriate reaction. It is perhaps unfortunate to lump a number of intelligent people into one group; however, for the purposes of our articles, the lumping is not terribly unfair and makes exposition much easier. Where appropriate, we attempt to single out particular scholars. At times, we are also more interested in the cultural idea of “New Atheism” than the actual people referred to by the term.

* “Islamophobia”: Sam Harris has argued that “Islamophobia” is a concocted “psychological disorder” used by “apologists” of Islam to protect it from legitimate criticism.⁹² We do not believe–and in fact, few people who use the term do believe–that Islamophobia is a disorder. It is, rather, the result of an ugly but “natural” proclivity toward demonizing the beliefs of outgroup members. Harris also argues that it is not possible to be “Islamophobic” because Islam is a set of ideas and practices that one can attack like any other set of ideas. This ignores two important facts. First, religion is not just a set of beliefs or practices; it is, rather, a system of sacred values that is often essential to a person’s sense of identity. Attack the beliefs and practices too vitriolically and you inevitably attack “the person.” This is not always illegitimate–but it should be approached with caution and civility. (We can see a person legitimately attacking Nazism, for example, or the ideas of Jihadis–and many Muslims do.) And second, what is objectionable in Harris’ writings (what contributes to Islamophobia) is not his abstract criticism of Islam, but rather his insistence, often absent of evidence, on blaming Islam for everything from terrorism to genital mutilation. We note that the great theologian, Hans Kung, offers pointed criticisms of specific aspects of Islam while presenting a historically grounded and balanced appraisal and no reasonable scholar would accuse Kung of Islamophobia.⁹³ John Esposito has written an excellent article on Islamophobia and contends that it consists of these beliefs:

1. Islam, not just a small minority of extremists and terrorists, is the problem and threat to the West
2. The religion of Islam has no common values with the West
3. Islam and Muslims are inferior to Judaism and Christianity
4. Islam is an inherently violent religion and political ideology rather than a source of faith and spirituality
5. Muslims cannot integrate and become loyal citizens
6. Most mosques should be monitored for embedded cells
7. Islam encourages its followers to launch a global jihad against all non-Muslims but in particular against the West.⁹⁴

As with any term that can be misused (e.g., anti-Semite, racist, misogynist), one should be careful when using it.

* “…was social justice.”: We have not and do not wish to argue that it is inappropriate to pen a book about the silliness of certain religious doctrines. What we object to, instead, is the strident tone, the unempirical assertions, the intolerance, and the unfair and inflammatory attacks against a specific religion (Islam), found in the books of the New Atheists (particularly in Sam Harris’ books). The rest of our objections–the main substance of our argument–is found in part I and the end of this article.

* “motivation to control.”: This was assumed but never explicitly articulated in our previous article.

* “Because the mainstream media is an important conduit…”: We note that the mainstream media is only one part of a larger “opinion-shaping network” that includes public relations/affairs institutions, think tanks, academia, etc.

* “…liberal versus conservative analysis…”: Debates about political bias in the media are not only a complete distraction but are often astonishingly removed from empirical reality. For example, self proclaimed media watchdog and president of the Media Research Center, Brent Bozell, in a review of the media’s performance in assessing Barak Obama’s first 100 days, plaintively asserts the following: “None of the three broadcast networks aired a single story on whether the new president’s economic policies were driving America towards European-style socialism. Not a single network news reporter used the term “socialist” to describe how his policies are shifting economic authority to the federal government. On only four occasions was the word “socialist” used on-camera at all – all by outside sources.”⁹⁵ We have yet to confirm if Bozell’s spaceship is set to return from his long sojourn on Neptune.

* “…owned by large, profit seeking institutions.”: As of 2009 there were six major media corporations: General Electric, Walt Disney, News Corp., TimeWarner, Viacom, and CBS. These massive corporations own and control output in the television, publishing, film, and internet industries.⁹⁶

* “…but rather to attract affluent audiences or distract the less affluent”: Chomsky, for example, makes a distinction between the elite “agenda setting” media which attract the most privileged audiences (business managers, professors, political managers, etc.) and the “mass media” proper which attract the rest of the population. As Chomsky puts it: “The real mass media are basically trying to divert people. Let them do something else, but don’t bother us (us being the people who run the show). Let them get interested in professional sports, for example. Let everybody be crazed about professional sports or sex scandals or the personalities and their problems or something like that. Anything, as long as it isn’t serious. Of course, the serious stuff is for the big guys. ‘We’ take care of that.”⁹⁷ Since 1997, when these lines were written, the awesome ability of the mass media to distract the population has substantially increased.

* “…pundits like Jon Stewart”: Despite Stewart’s facility with humor, his analysis of the media is unenlightening. The “rally to restore sanity” and other subsequent interviews illustrate the virulence of the neoliberal nationalist virus.

* “…it was not widely discussed in the mainstream media”: A google search of the terms “the Ryan plan” and “The People’s Budget” brings up 224 million and 69 million hits respectively. Thus, the Ryan plan has received 3.24 times as many linked pages as the People’s Budget. This is obviously not a a scientific survey but it is telling.

* “…and deregulation.”: We note that the precise causes of these policies are hotly debated, complex, and would take a great deal of space to explicate. See the referenced sources for more thorough analyses.

* “…group of ‘free thinkers.’”: Christopher Hitchens certainly addresses foreign policy issues, but a conversation about his political beliefs would require another article. Harris and Dawkins generally stick to more parochial concerns about the deleterious effects of religion on foreign policy (theirs, not ours). Dennet, so far as we can tell, does not bother much with politics. Many campus groups, inspired by “free thought” movements, exist and few, to our knowledge, seriously challenge current political narratives save for when they are directly related to religious issues.

* “…and its victims have suffered as they must.”: For an extensive, though partial, list of the victims one can do no better than read William Blum’s Killing Hope.⁹⁸

* “…massacres would not have happened.”: Kissinger noted somewhat cryptically that these events had taken place not willingly but “illegaly and beautifully.”⁹⁹ It is unclear which “events” in particular Kissinger is referring to. However, the illegal component rings true enough.

* “…George W. Bush’s poignant question ‘why do they hate us.’”: These plaintive questions and the jejune answers, which almost invariably support elite interests, are reminiscent of debates about Spanish policy toward the native inhabitants of the New World. Bartolome de las Casas described the treatment of the indigenous peoples of Hispanolia in graphic detail:

“The Spaniards first assaulted the innocent Sheep, so qualified by the Almighty, as is premention’d, like most cruel Tygers, Wolves and Lions hunger-starv’d, studying nothing, for the space of Forty Years, after their first landing, but the Massacre of these Wretches, whom they have so inhumanely and barbarously butcher’d and harass’d with several kinds of Torments, never before known, or heard (of which you shall have some account in the following Discourse) that of Three Millions of Persons, which lived in Hispaniola itself, there is at present but the inconsiderable remnant of scarce Three Hundred.”¹⁰⁰

It is not difficult to understand why the indigenous people were angered by such brutal treatment–allowing for the fact that de las Casas utilized hyperbole for effect. However, rather than comprehend the obvious, apologists for the colonialists and landowning elite, such as Jaun Gines de Sepulveda, argued that the Spaniards were simply superior to the “Indians” and had no option but to declare war against them, enslave them, and, ultimately, Christianize them.¹⁰¹ If the native Hispanolians had succeeded in a stunning and brutal attack against innocent Spaniards, Sepulveda could certainly have been counted on to explain that the indigenous people practiced a barbarous type of paganism that instructed them to eat human flesh and that this superstition was both the necessary and sufficient cause of the attack. If de las Casas mentioned the brutality of the colonial project as a contributing factor, he could be dismissed as an “apologist for terror” and Sepulveda could wax about Spanish freedom and benevolence. He could even dub the attack “simply evil” and attempt an hermeneutic of the “Indian mind” to better explain their hatred of freedom. While we rightly scoff at the notion of books explicating the “Indian mind,” it is worth noting that there are many books about the “Arab mind.”¹⁰²,¹⁰³,¹⁰⁴

This is not to say that the events of 9-11 were not a terrible atrocity. They certainly were. It is only to underscore the point, using a detached, historical example, that it is important to understand the grievances that lead to terrorism rather than bloviate about how “good” we are and how “evil” they are.

* “…lucidity and moral integrity.”: This is not to compare the value of the responses, but to note that Chomsky’s response was particularly compelling and worth contemplation.

* “…mindlessly infected by extremist religious memes.”: While studies on the motivations of suicide bombers can elucidate and potentially have salubrious purposes, there is something rather distasteful in the obsessive quest for fundamental motivations. As Chomsky notes, “[e]veryone’s worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there’s an easy way: Stop participating in it.”¹⁰⁵ That is, as American citizens, we have a responsibility to stop the terrorism perpetrated by our government. In other words, instead of attempting to penetrate the supposedly unfathomable depths of the “terrorist mind,” perhaps we should worry about our own global atrocities. We have yet to see a book on the “Depraved soul of the American: Explaining global terrorism that emanates from Washington.” To paraphrase G.W. Bush’s favorite philosopher, we should examine the log in our own eye before we criticize the sliver in another’s.

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The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretence was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp.

Winston Smith, Ministry of Truth, Oceania

And so it begins.

The compulsory veneration of the seminal event 10 years ago that gave us our national security state will dominate our media and be pounded into our consciousness. In newspapers, on TV and on radio we will be assaulted by endless replays of the World Trade Centre collapse, interviews with survivors or bereaved relatives, stories of pain and suffering, heroic portrayals of rescuers, and moralizing about the need to defend our freedoms.

We will have drummed into us, subtly and not so subtly, the official story of how the U.S. was attacked by Muslim terrorists, and why we citizens must, for our own safety, willingly accept sacrifices to our civil liberties, the evisceration of the rule of law, the deaths of our soldiers in needless aggressions, and the mutation of our civilian police from law enforcers to law breakers.

There will be no proper context, factual analysis or intelligent debate because the commemoration is designed to impose obedience to authority, not foster understanding. If this sounds too bizarre for words, it shouldn’t; history is full of events that become moralized and take on a life of their own. The WTC attack, like the Crucifixion and the Holocaust™, is just another moralized historical event around which an moral absolutism is built. That absolutism engenders its own political authority to propagate the core belief and coerce public obedience to it. Those who reject the manufactured reality to seek the truth, suffer ostracism, slander, torture or even death. Truth is the enemy of the state.

In each of these three examples, a prominent death has been exploited to coerce public obedience to a political authority. The Christian Church uses the icon of the crucified, and then risen, Jesus to compel Christians into self-identify with it accepting that Jesus died for them.

But why would Jesus go out of his way to be tortured and put to death in such a gruesome manner? That question cannot be discussed freely because it invites alternate theories about Jesus’s nature and motives, many of which are contained in the gnostic gospels.

Imposing belief in the literal truth of the Crucifixion and Resurrection had nothing to do with Jesus, but everything to do with the Church, whose political authority is based not on the history of Jesus but on the myth of Jesus. Since a myth cannot withstand scrutiny because it has no rational foundation, so the Church can only be defended its power by waging war on free belief and massacring its critics, even heterodox Christians.

The Zionism Church (a.k.a. Israel and The Lobby) exploits Hitler’s persecution of Jews to sermonize about Jewish victimhood. The emotional blackmail of Jewish suffering includes the mantra of 6 million dead, gas chambers, Western guilt for not saving Jews, and the belief that Jews need a “homeland” to be free from persecution.

But are not Jews today persecuting Palestinians, and do not Palestinians deserve a homeland for the same reason? Can’t ask that question! If you doubt or in anyway weaken the canonical verities of the 6 million dead, the gas chambers, and the need for Israel you’re not only a heretic but an “anti-Semite,” and deserving of whatever persecution or violence that is inflicted on you. Israel is based on myths, not fact, and the fear of having those myths uncovered lies behind the zionist persecution of free belief and Palestinian rights.

The Terrorism Church (a.k.a. Project for the New American Century) has exploited the WTC attack to instill in us the myth that Muslim terrorists flew hijacked aircraft into the WTC and Pentagon, killing thousands of innocent Americans. The need to defend the U.S. from subsequent attacks made necessary the USA PATRIOT Act, which superseded the Constitution, and gave us our security-obsessed state.

But if Muslims in aircraft did all that, what explains all those explosions in the buildings below the level of impact, and the inability of a steel-framed structure to withstand a simple fire the way WTC1 did on Feb. 14, 1975? For that matter why would Muslims commit an act of violence knowing full well what the retribution would be? Way out of bounds! Any question about what happened and who was responsible invites analyses of the official absurdity, which the public is supposed to accept as holy writ. We can’t have a police-state if we don’t fear Muslims, and if we don’t fear Muslims, we need to ask who else could have planned and carried out the attack. That leads us to Israeli involvement, which is verboten.

The ability to believe an absurdity is easy if you accept the given zero-sum frame of reference between good and evil. If the absurdity is presented as “good,” then criticisms can be neatly compartmentalized and dismissed as “evil.” When George W. Bush said the Muslims attacked because they hate American freedoms, he reduced these alleged hijackers to evil stereotypes.

When a person or cause is stigmatized as evil, defence becomes impossible. This is why otherwise intelligent people cry “conspiracy theory” when faced with facts about the absurdity of the WTC narrative. To listen to a dissenting opinion would amount to respecting the devil. To foster this image, these “churches” promote hatred of the “other”: Jews killed Jesus; Nazis killed Jews; and Muslims attacked the WTC attack. (Though Nazis did kill Jews, this good/evil dogma does not recognize the zionist Jews who helped run the concentration camps and prop up the Nazi regime.)

Without a convenient scapegoat for people to vent their hatred, and without the image of the state as society’s saviour, belief in the absurdity will collapse. It is here we see how official demonization of “terrorist” Muslims is similar to the daily “Two Minutes Hate” orgy in George Orwell’s 1984. The object of the hate is Emmanuel Goldstein, the number one “enemy of the people.” Goldstein was never proven to be a real person, but the daily hate hurled at his image reinforced public loyalty and dependence to the state security apparatus.

As you read this except from 1984, note how Orwell’s depiction of Goldstein as a contrived object of hatred closely resembles our depiction of Osama bin Laden:

Somewhere or other he was still alive and hatching his conspiracies: perhaps somewhere beyond the sea, under the protection of his foreign paymasters, perhaps even—so it was occasionally rumoured—in some hiding-place in Oceania itself…. What was strange was that although Goldstein was hated and despised by everybody, although every day and a thousand times a day, on platforms, on the telescreen, in newspapers, in books, his theories were refuted, smashed, ridiculed, held up to the general gaze for the pitiful rubbish that they were in spite of all this, his influence never seemed to grow less. Always there were fresh dupes waiting to be seduced by him. A day never passed when spies and saboteurs acting under his directions were not unmasked by the Thought Police. He was the commander of a vast shadowy army, an underground network of conspirators dedicated to the overthrow of the State.

As if on cue, Israel’s Canadian satrap Stephen Harper gave official sanction to hatred of Muslims in an interview with the CBC. After Sept. 11, 2001, he said the major threat to Canada was still “Islamicism”—a nonsense propaganda term meant to incite public hatred of Muslims and sympathy for the state. To emphasize the point, Harper claimed that Canada even had “homegrown” Islamic radicals, necessitating a return to arbitrary police-state powers to execute warrantless arrest and coerce testimony from witnesses. According to the CBC, neither the police or prosecutors had a reason to make use of these powers, but now we’re supposed to believe they do have a reason?

“WTC Victim–Hate Week” reaches its nauseating crescendo on Sunday, but unlike Oceania, Canada has no law to compel citizens to take part. It is therefore the duty of every rational human being not to participate in this orgy of fraud. Wherever you find yourself: Turn off. Tune out. Unplug. Disbelieve.

Yet the now rich and self-satisfied secular West, after centuries of conquest and imposition of its colonial and now neocolonial order, has found itself at a nightmarish deadend. Wars, riots, drug addiction, corruption, famine, ecological Armageddon … There is little to cheer for and no coherent explanation for the impasse and the way forward. So the demand that the Muslim world follow in Western footsteps rings hollow.

For non-believers, there are social laws that can help to understand Islam’s continued relevance. One is Mayer Rothschild’s dictum: “Give me control of a nation’s money and I care not who makes its laws.” The other is Carl Clausewitz’s “War is the continuation of politics by other means.” Together, they point to the underlying economic and political problems which have led to the current crisis. In a nutshell, the dominance of banks (as opposed to governments representing the popular will) in controlling economic affairs has created a world where politics serves their particular needs (interest and profit), and the politics which promotes the interests of banks is — just look around — war and speculation (read: pillage and theft).

This is the “logic” underlying modern Western society, especially in the past three decades, with the alternative to capitalism, the Soviet Union, now dismantled, discredited, and more or less absorbed into the Western economic order. This triumph over the “enemy” left the field open to the Rothschild-Clausewitz mechanism. Electoral democracy is vaunted, but is a threadbare facade, for while the popular will consistently rejects war and banker hegemony, no political party is able to get elected to represent this popular will.

Believers need no explanation for the why and how of Islam and the devilish deadend the West now faces. Islam advocates a social order where there are no one-sided usurers using their monopoly on money to control economics and politics, a social order where peace (Islam) is the highest attainment of society, the goal of all “policy”, to which all should submit. If presented with the choice between the current chaos and the true Islamic alternative, there is little doubt that the Islamic alternative would be the overwhelming choice of the common people, both in Europe and America, despite the fact that Muslims represent only 2-8 per cent of the population in the West.

Of course, this social order is the ideal. The history of Islam witnessed periods of benign and far-from-benign rule. It began with military victories and the spreading of the Caliphate from Atlantic to Pacific. The majority of conquered peoples decided to adopt this powerful religion, converting from polytheism, Buddhism, Christianity, and Judaism, though, contrary to Western prejudice, not “by the sword”. Throughout the various Islamic political orders, Christians, Jews and others continued to profess their faiths, enjoying a peaceful coexistence with Muslims. There was no period of imperial conquest and genocide equivalent to the Western imperial order from the fifteenth century to today.

The westward march of Islam was stopped in Spain and on the fringes of Byzantium by Emperor Charlemagne in the ninth century. The Iberian peninsula — Al-Andalus — was the pearl of Islamic civilisation from 711 to 1492, as a province of the Umayyad Caliphate, and later the Caliphate of Cordoba and the Emirate of Granada.

Islamophobes portray Europe today as in danger of a new Muslim conquest, politicians and mass media egging on the likes of Norway’s Anders Breivik, who calls for the ethnic cleansing of all Muslims from Europe, much like Christian conquerors expelled Muslims and Jews following the reconquest of Spain in the fifteenth century. But consider for a moment the legacy of Moorish Spain. This period saw Muslims, Jews, and Christians living in harmony, creating a prosperous, peaceful society, a highpoint in Spain’s history. Under the Caliphate of Cordoba, Al-Andalus became a beacon of learning, and the city of Cordoba became one of the leading cultural and economic centres in both the Mediterranean basin and the Islamic world.

As part of the Alliance of Civilisations, Spain is now rediscovering this Golden Age before the Christian re-conquest of Spain, which saw the torture, murder, forced conversion and expulsion of Muslims and Jews, and the genocide of New World Indigenous peoples following the “discovery” of the continent by Christopher Columbus. While Al-Andalus lasted eight centuries, the post-Islamic period of Spain has lasted only six centuries, and suffers poorly in comparison to the Islamic Golden Age that preceded it.

This was acknowledged by Spain’s current leader, Socialist Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, when he co-sponsored the Alliance of Civilisations along with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan in 2005, as a way to “bridge the divide” between the West and Islam, through projects in youth, education, media, and migration. Forums have been held in Madrid (2008), Istanbul (2009) and Rio de Janiero (2010).

Given the current tyranny of money that characterised Western civilisation, it is not surprising that the Zapatero/ Erdogan attempt at bringing peace and understanding among the founding faiths of Spain and the Middle East is greeted with sneers and resentment by Israel and its supporters in the West. Israel-firsters such as Soeren Kern twist the positive moves to bring East and West together as a cover for “Muslim countries in the Persian Gulf and North Africa funnelling large sums of money to radical Islamic groups in towns and cities across Spain”.

But there is a more enduring dialectic at work in Europe. Despite the Israel lobby’s energetic efforts to blacken Islam, the wave of revulsion against Israeli apartheid continues to grow throughout Europe, but especially in Spain. Ilan Pappe describes how all Israeli ambassadors to Europe are more than glad to end their terms, complaining about their inability to speak in campuses and whining about the overall hostile atmosphere in Europe these days. The Israeli ambassador to Spain, Raphael Schutz, just finished his term in Madrid, and in an op-ed in Haaretz’s Hebrew edition, he summarised what he termed as a very dismal stay, charging that he was the victim of local and ancient anti-Semitism, comparing the situation to the Inquisition of five centuries ago.

In “Why the Spanish hate us”, Schutz states that the people of Spain are anti-Israeli because subconsciously they are anti-Semitic and still approve of the Inquisition. He ignores the fact that the Muslims were the main victims of the Inquisition, that Jews fought and suffered side by side with their Muslim allies as the Christian invaders flooded into Spain. Claiming that Spaniards who criticise Israel are racist and motivated by 500-year-old Christian bigotry rather than by Israeli’s criminal policies is just a feeble attempt at hasbara (public diplomacy) by desperate Israeli diplomats who have long ago lost the moral battle in Europe.

The Kerns and Schutzes are supported by Spain’s real latterday Inquisition, the National Intelligence Center (CNI), which published a report in July, warning of tens of millions of dollars coming to Spain from Kuwait, Libya, Morocco, Oman, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia to support Muslims, and calling for close monitoring of these funds. The CNI’s report hinted that the money would be used to promote Islamic courts, remove girls from schools, and encourage forced marriages. The Spanish government’s knee-jerk response was to call for all donations from the Gulf Arab states to be channelled through a government-controlled “Islamic Commission of Spain”.

The CNI pointed to the Kuwaiti government’s funding of the construction of mosques in Catalonia, from which Islamic preachers are supposedly “spreading a religious interpretation that opposes the integration of Muslims into Spanish society and promotes the separation and hate towards non-Muslim groups.” Qatari donations are made through the Islamic League for Dialogue and Coexistence in Spain, a group the CNI says is “linked to the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria”.

While the CNI talks only of the need to monitor funds, such as Kern argue that this is all part of a conspiracy by Muslim countries to take back Spain. He points to “the UAE, together with Libya [sic] and Morocco”, which paid for the construction of the Great Mosque of Granada. Says Abdel Haqq Salaberria, a spokesman for the mosque: “It will act as a focal point for the Islamic revival in Europe. It is a symbol of a return to Islam among the Spanish people and among indigenous Europeans.” Worse yet for Islamophobes, Muslims in Cordoba are demanding that the Spanish government allow them to worship in the main cathedral, which was originally the Great Mosque of Al-Andalus and is now a World Heritage Site.

Pointing to Saudi financing of the construction of Islamic Cultural Centres and mosques in Madrid and elsewhere, Kern conjures up the Saudi Wahhabi bugaboo, arguing that most Muslim immigrants in Spain are poor, and their low standard of living and low level of education make them susceptible to Saudi propaganda, ignoring the fact that Saudi Arabia is a close ally of the US, that Wahhabism is the quietist brand of Islam, and the only real way to improve the security situation is to raise the standard of living and level of education of the poor.

Despite such cries of “Wolf!”, attempts to reintegrate Islam into the fabric of Spanish culture are proceeding. Morocco recently co-sponsored a seminar in Barcelona titled “Muslims and European Values”, explaining that the construction of big mosques would be “a useful formula” to fight Islamic fundamentalism in Spain. According to Noureddine Ziani, a Barcelona-based Moroccan imam: “It is easier to disseminate fundamentalist ideas in small mosques set up in garages, than in large mosques that are open to everyone.” Using this logic, Spain should welcome more Libyan funding of Great Mosques, rather than participate in NATO’s efforts to destroy the Libyan state and create real grounds for terrorism.

Ziani also said that Islamic values are compatible with European values and that the so-called Western “Judeo-Christian” civilisation is really an “Islamo-Christian” one. The cultural construct “Judeo-Christian heritage” entered the English language only in the 1940s as a reaction to Nazism, and is used by the imperial elite in its “clash of civilizations” targeting Islam. A concept useful to a largely Christian empire where Jewish elites play a powerful role, but one which is rejected by serious scholars, both Christian and Jewish. Talmudic scholar Jacob Neusner calls it a “secular myth favoured by people who are not really believers themselves”. Not only Ziani but American scholars such as Richard Bulliet argue for the use of “Islamo-Christian” to characterise Western civilisation.

Spain suffered several terrorist bombings in the wake of 9/11, notably the 2004 11-M bombings in Madrid, but no evidence was ever presented to suggest Al-Qaeda or Muslims were the perpetrators. Many observers point to Basque and other independence movements as the culprits, or even the Spanish police themselves as part of a false-flag operation. The reality of Spain today is not the existence of any external threat from Islam, but on the contrary, domestic unrest due to the economic crisis and political paralysis.

This gloomy situation prompted concerned young people to boycott Spain’s elections in May and — ironically — emulate their largely Muslim Arab Spring heroes by constructing tent cities in protest at the lack of meaningful democracy. Just as Egyptian revolutionaries borrowed techniques from their Western counterparts to throw off their taskmasters, so Spaniards are emulating them in turn — a true Alliance of Civilisations. European, US and Canadian youth are also impressed by the endurance, the resolution of Palestinians in the face of Israel and its supporters, a 21st-century Judeo-Christian Inquisition persecuting Muslims, not only in Palestine, but in so-called Eurabia and North America.

The Islamophobes turn the truth on its head, attacking the Alliance of Civilisations as a “one-way bridge” undermining European society. But the West’s relations with the Muslim world show just the opposite — the West has invaded and continues to try to shape the Muslim world to meet capitalism’s requirements. That Muslims stubbornly hold to their beliefs and traditions is an important contribution to the search for a way forward for a crisis-ridden world.

Britain’s riots prove that Muslims are a boon to European society, being inherently peaceful and law-abiding. Muslims from the East London Mosque and the Islamic Forum Europe played an important role in helping to fight the looting and preserve public safety. Three Muslims died in Birmingham defending shops from looters, though in the media they were merely called Asians. “When accused of terrorism we are Muslims, when killed by looters, we become Asian,” a Muslim student told Al-Jazeerah bitterly.

Rather than the “clash of civilisations” advocated by Islamophobes, those who seek social and economic justice can find inspiration in the eternal truths of Islam, looking to Europe’s own Islamo-Christian heritage — past and present — to discover an alliance of civilisations that rejects war, theft, moral degeneration and racism. This is the lesson that Ramadan offers to the West today.

Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, Islam and variants of these and others are all story based systems with one original bio-consciousness function and, after a time, a variety of political, social and economic functions attached as power migrated from community structure to political and economic institutions. They are all incredible violations of the Reality within which our species must live: they are not true in any way.

But it essential to understand that they are not supposed to be true, we are only supposed to believe that they are true. Psychologists call this crazy-making, and that is how religion functions: simple compelling, yet inherently untrue, stories that organize behaviors. The stories are not intended to be veridical reality; they have always only been intended (adaptively) to guide the massively powerful and largely directionless capacities of the genus Homo. The only way for the directing effect to work is for the people to think the stories supremely important. The Consciousness System of Order supplies the tools: imagination and belief guided by environmental necessity.

But we have outgrown this simple formulation; in fact, we have been outgrowing it for at least 10 thousand years. For most of our time on earth, nearly 200,000 years, our close environmental attachments gave our behavior and biophysical reality a veridical relationship, religion was like the string tied to a finger to remind us to do the right thing. The environment had the power, behavior had its function in the environment and religion organized and motivated the behaviors across communities and generations.

Today our behavior is the power and it is still guided by stories and beliefs, but now it has become deadly dangerous that our stories do not have a veridical relationship to the Realities that control the world. Once the form was: belief in the story led to behaviors that were adapted to a sustaining environmental relationship, and the details of the story really didn’t matter in reality so long as the action was functional (though believing in them is what made them work!). Today the form is: belief in the story is the measure of social acceptability; the actions generated are considered correct only so long as the story is supported and this is where it ends; there is no systemic feedback design with the biophysical Reality of the environment; in fact, it is often specifically rejected. The result is that the aforementioned institutional religions are madness; real insanity. Buddhism is the least mad of the list, but its many practitioners make it about as insane as the others.

It is the insanity of these religions that their critics are responding to, and have conflated with religion as a process. It would be correct to say that we must rid ourselves of religion’s insane content, but we cannot rid ourselves of religion since it is the structuring of belief systems in the community and society. When the environment was the mediating source for the designs of belief, the details of our stories were of little significance, but when disconnected, details take on unwarranted importance; societal madness is the outcome.

Virgin births, returning from the dead, miracles of all sorts, 800 year old people, reincarnation, grandfatherly despots living as spirits, infallibility of the written (and multiply translated) word, absolute necessity of following a certain code, convoluted sophistries of trinities into unities and back again, devils and demons, reverence for a piece of cloth, and literally thousands of other details of belief and story that are measures of worthiness and action – all of these disconnected from the biological and ecological realities that sustain the living condition and the living space. There are actually people who would see the whole world burned to a crisp if they believed their God told them it was the right thing; it is difficult to imagine anything more insane than that.

And so, to the extent that it is the insanity of religions that we eliminate, I am on board. But we humans must continue to believe and act from summary generalizations based on very little direct and personal knowledge. Also contained in all of the insane religions are real accumulated human wisdoms, stories of how community order and stability are maintained; stories of how we are to treat other humans, other living things and the earth in general. And perhaps more importantly, there are the basic stories of why we should or must follow these prescriptions. If the insanity of religions is removed, the sanities of belief and organizing designs have to be replaced.

There are billions of people who are so thoroughly trained in the societal madness of insane religions that reaching some critical mass of human numbers with belief systems based on a veridical relationship with Reality seems unattainable. But we must try with the clear understanding that most of humanity will go to their graves or cremations with the beliefs that they hold at this moment, with the understanding that that is how religion was evolved and adapted to work.

Whatever we do, it must not be only attempts to create competing insanities. Religion began as the way to act, but not believe, with accuracy in the natural world; it has now become one of the most distorting influences. The deepest understandings of science are now the only source for how to act with accuracy in the world, but we must correctly understand the functioning of religion and not make the mistake of dismissing the process of religion, another of our realities, as we try to free ourselves from our accumulated insanities.

There are no Gods. The physical events of the universe occur as a consequence of the laws of the Physical System of Order; the living process functions through the machinations of the Living System of Order and the information nexus of DNA/protein; humans operate in those spaces and with the Consciousness System of Order, a new information system that creates new probabilities for what can manifest in physical objects, living things and behaviors. Somehow a critical mass of humanity must come to grips with these Realities. Adaptable belief systems must grow from them using the religious process so that much of the rest of humanity can effectively engage the real world that our species faces.

Religions seem to promise a meaning for life; it is often said that a sense of purpose can only derive from Christian (Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, etc,) faith. But any gathering of humans in activities of common purpose is purpose. Institutional religions allow, actively perpetuate, the illusion that the religion is supplying purpose and meaning when it is only the gathering of people devoted to an apparently common action.

A search for truth can look to the work of modern scientists and philosophers just as well as it can look to the writings of Bronze Age mystics – should be done in both. The unchallengeable belief can be in the primacy of scientific, historical and philosophical method rather than prescriptions of “fact” and the “mysterious ways” of an anthropomorphic creator.

Belief has always been an adaptive behavior. Religion’s requirement that belief be turned into absolute faith has been largely a political act to support political and economic power in the face of obvious evidence, evidence that without such “faith” would lead to adaptive change. The belief in hard and fast facts has always been dangerous in a changing world. Belief in a process that guides adaptive change in the most reality based directions possible seems a better choice.

We will always create religions from our belief systems. For most of our tenure on the earth the religious process functioned adaptively; it is only for the last brief few thousands of years that it has gone of track. We are now up against the terrible and dangerous consequences of our general failure to adapt successfully to our great powers, one of which is the power of religious process to guide behavior. It is going to take a general change of belief to avoid the most drastic forms of those consequences.

One need only imagine the response to this essay in the fundamentalist Baptist churches of my southern youth, much less in a Wahabi Mosque, to realize our chances. Finding just one receptive person might be less the issue than getting out in one piece.

First, I realize that the term “radical political theology” may be annoying. Some people will dislike “radical” and prefer a more pragmatic approach. Others will argue that theology shouldn’t be political. Still others will want nothing to do with theology of any kind. At various times in my life, I would have offered all of those objections. Today I think a politics without a theology is dangerous, a theology without a politics is irrelevant, and radical is realistic.

By politics I don’t mean we need to pretend to have worked out a traditional political program that will lead us to the land of milk and honey; instead, I’m merely suggesting that we always foreground the basic struggle for power in whatever work we do at whatever level. By theology, I don’t mean that we need to believe in supernatural forces that will lead us to a land of milk and honey; instead, I’m merely pointing out that we all construct a world view that is not reducible to evidence and logic. In politics and theology, it’s important to be clear about what we know, and even more important to recognize what we don’t know, what we can’t know, what is instinct and emotion.

And all this needs to be radical — not in the self-indulgent “more radical than thou” style that crops up now and then on the left — but rather in the sense of an unflinching honesty about that unjust and unsustainable nature of the systems in which we live. Whatever pragmatic steps we may decide to take in the world, they should be based on radical analysis if they are to be realistic.

Revolution

I’m not interested in speculating about future revolutions. I don’t take seriously anyone who predicts a coming revolution in the United States, and I doubt that the traditional concept of a revolution is even relevant today — the dramatic changes that lie ahead likely won’t arrive that way. Rather than dream of revolutions to come, it’s more productive to think about the revolutions that brought us to this moment.

Ask an audience to name the three most important revolutions in human history, and the most common answers are the American, French, and Russian. But to understand our current situation, the better answer is the agricultural, industrial, and delusional revolutions. While those national revolutions had dramatic effects, not only on those nations but on the course of the history of the past two centuries, these other revolutions not only reshaped the lives of every human but remade the world in ways that may spell the end of human history as we know it. The agricultural, industrial, and delusional revolutions were — to use a current political cliché — real game-changers.

The agricultural revolution started about 10,000 years ago when a gathering-hunting species discovered how to cultivate plants for food and domesticate animals. Two crucial things resulted, one political and one ecological. Politically, the ability to stockpile food made possible concentrations of power and resulting hierarchies that were foreign to band-level gathering-hunting societies, which were highly egalitarian and based on cooperation. This is not to say that humans were not capable of doing bad things to each other prior to agriculture, but only that large-scale institutionalized oppression has its roots in agriculture. We need not romanticize pre-agricultural life but simply recognize that it was organized in far more egalitarian fashion than what we call “civilization.”

Ecologically, the invention of agriculture kicked off an intensive human assault on natural systems. While gathering-hunting humans were capable of damaging a local ecosystem in limited ways, the large-scale destruction we cope with today has its origins in agriculture, in the way humans started exhausting the energy-rich carbon of the planet, first in soil. Human agricultural practices have varied over time and place but have never been sustainable over the long term. There are better and worse farming practices, but soil erosion has been a consistent feature of agriculture, which makes it the first step in the entrenchment of an unsustainable human economy based on extraction.

We are trained to think that advances in technology constitute progress, but the post-World War II “advances” in oil-based industrial agriculture have accelerated the ecological destruction. Soil from large monoculture fields drenched in petrochemicals not only continues to erode but also threatens groundwater supplies and contributes to dead zones in oceans. While it’s true that this industrial agriculture has produced tremendous yield increases during the last century, no one has come up with a sustainable system for perpetuating that kind of agricultural productivity. Those high yields mask what Wes Jackson has called “the failure of success”: Production remains high while the health of the soil continues to decline dramatically.¹ That kind of “success” guarantees the inevitable collapse of the system. We have less soil that is more degraded, with no technological substitute for healthy soil; we are exhausting and contaminating groundwater; and we are dependent on an agriculture tied to a fuel source that is running out.

That industrialization of agriculture was made possible, of course, by the larger industrial revolution that began in the last half of the 18th century in Great Britain, which intensified the magnitude of the human assault on ecosystems and humans assaults on each other. This revolution unleashed the concentrated energy of coal, oil, and natural gas to run the new steam engine and machines in textile manufacturing that dramatically increased productivity. That energy — harnessed by the predatory capitalist economic system that was beginning to dominate the planet — not only eventually transformed all manufacturing, transportation, and communication, but disrupted social relations. People were pushed off the land, out of communities, and into cities that grew rapidly, often without planning. Traditional ways of knowing and living were destroyed, by force or by the allure of affluence. World population soared from about 1 billion in 1800 to the current 7 billion, far beyond the long-term carrying capacity of the planet.

This move from a sun-powered and muscle-based world to a fossil fuel-powered and machine-based world has produced unparalleled material comfort for some. Whatever one thinks of the effect of such levels of comfort on human well-being — in my view, the effect has been mixed at best² — the processes that produce the comfort are destroying the capacity of the ecosystem to sustain human life as we know it into the future, and in the present those comforts are not distributed in a fashion that is consistent with any meaningful conception of justice. In short, our world is unsustainable and unjust — the way we live is in direct conflict with common sense and the ethical principles on which we claim to base our lives. How is that possible? Enter the third revolution.

The delusional revolution is my term for the development of sophisticated propaganda techniques in the 20th century (especially a highly emotive, image-based advertising/marketing system) that have produced in the bulk of the population (especially in First World societies) a distinctly delusional state of being. Although any person or group can employ these techniques, wealthy individuals and corporations — and their representatives in government — take advantage of their disproportionate share of resources to flood the culture with their stories that reinforce their dominance. Journalism and education, idealized as spaces for rationally based truth-telling, sometimes provide a counter to those propaganda systems, but just as often are co-opted by the powerful forces behind them.

Perhaps the most stunning example of this is that during the 2000s, as the evidence for human-caused climate disruption became more compelling, the percentage of the population that rejects that science increased. Why would people who, in most every other aspect of life accept without question the results of peer-reviewed science, reject the overwhelming consensus of climate scientists in this case? Some have theological reasons, and for others perhaps it is simply easier to disbelieve than to face the implications. But it’s clear that the well-funded media campaigns using these propaganda techniques to create doubt have been effective.³

Even those of us who try to resist it often can’t help but be drawn into parts of the delusion; it’s difficult to keep track of, let alone understand, all of the fronts on which we are facing serious challenges to a just and sustainable future. As a culture, these delusions leave us acting as if unsustainable systems can be sustained simply because we want them to be. Much of the culture’s story-telling — particularly that which comes through almost all of the mass media — remains committed to maintaining this delusional state. In such a culture, it becomes hard to extract oneself from that story. Singer/songwriter Greg Brown captures the trajectory of this delusional revolution when he speculates that one day, “There’ll be one corporation selling one little box/it’ll do what you want and tell you what you want and cost whatever you got.”⁴

In summary: The agricultural revolution set us on a road to destruction. The industrial revolution ramped up our speed. The delusional revolution has prevented us from coming to terms with the reality of where we are and where we are heading.

Resistance

Even if a revolutionary program is not viable at the moment, strategies and tactics for resistance are crucial. To acknowledge that the social, economic, and political systems that have produced this death spiral can’t be overthrown from the revolutionary playbooks of the past does not mean there are no ways to affirm life. We face planetary problems that seem to defy solutions, but the U.S. empire and predatory corporate capitalism remain immediate threats and should be resisted. An honest, radical assessment of our situation doesn’t mean giving up, but it requires us to be tough-minded. We need to understand which resistance strategies and tactics are likely to be most productive at this moment in history.

To advance that discussion, let’s think back to February 15, 2003. Many of us on that Saturday participated in actions in opposition to the planned U.S. invasion of Iraq. It was an exhilarating day, the largest coordinated political protest in the history of the world. At least 10 million people participated across the globe, with a clear message for U.S. policy makers: The invasion being planned is illegal and immoral, and we reject not only this war but your right to use violence to achieve your political and economic goals. I was the emcee of the event in Austin, and I remember being amazed at the thousands who gathered at the Texas Capitol, stretching back so far that our loudspeakers couldn’t reach the entire crowd.

We had a compelling message, rooted in international law, political principles, and moral values. We had huge numbers of people. We had an international presence. And none of it mattered; the war came. Why could U.S. policy makers ignore us without consequence? First, those elites knew that a large segment of the public either actively supported the war or would passively support almost any war that was out of sight/out of mind. Second, they knew that when that day of protest was over, most of the people in the streets would go home, satisfied with their public statement and unlikely to go beyond that polite expression of dissent. Political movements are most potent when people are willing to take risks; without a large number of such people, the powerful know they can wait out protests.

For most people, attending an anti-war rally posed no risk. Immigrants and people in targeted groups (Arabs, South Asians, Muslims) had reason to feel threatened, but people who look like me — with only rare exceptions — don’t face serious repression in the United States today for engaging in peaceful political activity, though that can change quickly. What were most of us willing to do beyond attending a rally in opposition to a war being planned? A month later, when the war came, we got a partial answer. The crowd for the standing call to come to the Capitol when the bombs fell was at best one-fourth of the pre-war rally. Most of the people who came on February 15 weren’t willing to come out in public once the nation was at war; even that trivial a risk was too much.

I could be cocky and say that in 2003 I was willing to risk my job, my physical safety, even my life to stop the war. It might be true; I certainly felt the urgency of the moment. But the question is moot, because at that time there was no strategy for taking such risks. These decisions about risk are made by individuals but in the context of options developed collectively, and the movement I was part of had not discussed such options.

So when certain resistance tactics don’t work as part of a strategy that’s not clearly articulated, it’s time to rethink. I have no grand strategy to offer, and I am skeptical about anyone who claims they have worked out such a strategy. But I am reasonably confident that this is not a mass-movement moment, not a time in which large numbers of Americans are likely to engage in political activity that challenges basic systems of power and wealth. I believe we are in a period in which the most important work is creating the organizations and networks that will be important in the future, when the political conditions change, for better or worse. Whatever is coming, we need sharper analysis, stronger vehicles for action, and more resilient connections among people. In short, this is a cadre-building moment.

Although for some people the phrase “cadre-building” may invoke the worst of the left’s revolutionary dogmatism, I have something different in mind. For me, “cadre” doesn’t mean “vanguard” or “self-appointed bearers of truth.” It signals commitment, but with an openness to rethinking theory and practice. I see this kind of organizing in some groups in Austin, TX, where I live. Not surprisingly, they are groups led by younger people who are drawing on longstanding radical ideas, updating as needed to fit a changing world. These organizers don’t have all the answers, and I don’t agree with some of the answers they do have, but I am drawn to them because they recognize the need to dig in.

Revelation

Most discussions of revelation and apocalypse in contemporary America focus on the Book of Revelation, also known as The Apocalypse of John, the final book of the Christian New Testament. The two terms are synonymous in their original meaning — “revelation” from Latin and “apocalypse” from Greek both mean a lifting of the veil, a disclosure of something hidden from most people, a coming to clarity. What is the nature of this unveiling today? What is being revealed to us?

A reactionary end-times theology turns that particular book of the Bible into the handbook for a death cult, fantasizing about an easy way out. That isn’t the direction I will be heading. Rather than thinking of revelation as divine delivery of a clear message about some fantastic future above, we can think of it as a process that requires tremendous effort on our part about our very real struggles on this planet. That notion of revelation doesn’t offer a one-way ticket to a better place, but reminds us that there are no tickets available to any other place; we humans live and die on this planet, and we have a lot of work to do if, as a species, we want to keep living.

That process begins with an honest analysis of where we stand. There is a growing realization that we have disrupted natural forces in ways we cannot control and do not fully understand. We need not adopt an end-times theology to recognize that on our current trajectory, there will come a point when the ecosphere cannot sustain human life as we know it. As Bill McKibben puts it, “The world hasn’t ended, but the world as we know it has — even if we don’t quite know it yet.”⁵

McKibben, the first popular writer to alert the world to the threat of climate change, argues that humans have so dramatically changed the planet’s ecosystems that we should rename the Earth, call it Eaarth:

The planet on which our civilization evolved no longer exists. The stability that produced that civilization has vanished; epic changes have begun. We may, with commitment and luck, yet be able to maintain a planet that will sustain some kind of civilization, but it won’t be the same planet, and hence it won’t be the same civilization. The earth that we knew — the only earth that we ever knew — is gone.⁶

If McKibben is accurate — and I think the evidence clearly supports his assessment — then we can’t pretend all that’s needed is tinkering with existing systems to fix a few environmental problems; massive changes in how we live are required, what McKibben characterizes as a new kind of civilization. No matter where any one of us sits in the social and economic hierarchies, there is no escape from the dislocations of such changes. Money and power might insulate some from the most wrenching consequences of these shifts, but there is no escape. We do not live in stable societies and no longer live on a stable planet. We may feel safe and secure in specific places at specific times, but it’s hard to believe in any safety and security in a collective sense.

This is a revelation not of a coming rapture but of a deepening rupture. The end times are not coming. They are unfolding now.

Redemption

Just as revelation can be about more than explosions during the end times, redemption can be understood as about more than a savior’s blood washing away our sin. In a world in which so many decent people have been psychologically and theologically abused by being called “sinner” by jealous and judgmental scolds, sin and redemption are tricky terms. But we shouldn’t give up on the concept of sin, for we are, in fact, all sinners — we all do things that fall short of the principles on which we claim to base our lives. Everyone I know has at some point lied to avoid accountability, failed to offer help to someone in need, taken more than their fair share. Given that we all sin, we all should seek redemption, understood as the struggle to come back into right relation with those we have injured. If we are to live up to our own moral standards, we must deepen our understanding of sin and its causes so that we can understand the path to redemption.

For Christians, sin traditionally has been marked as original and individual — we are born with it, and we can deal with it through an individual profession of faith. In some sense, of course, sin is obviously original. At some point in our lives we all do things that violate our own principles, which suggests the capacity to do nasty things is a part of normal human psychology. Equally obvious is that even though we live interdependently and our actions are conditioned by how we are socialized, we are distinct moral agents and we make choices. Responsibility for those choices must in part be ours as individuals.

But an individual focus isn’t going to solve our most pressing problems, which is why it is crucial to focus on the sins we commit that are created, not original, and solutions that are collective, not individual. These sins, which do much greater damage, are the result of — we might say, created by — political, economic, and social systems. Those systems create war and poverty, discrimination and oppression, not simply through the freely chosen actions of individuals but because of the nature of these systems of empire and capitalism, rooted in white supremacy and patriarchy. Humans’ ordinary capacity to sin is intensified, reaching a different order of magnitude, and responsibility for the resulting sins is shared.

There is a politics to sin, and therefore there has to be a politics to redemption. That desire to return to right relation with others in our personal lives is not enough; collectively we have to struggle for the same thing, which requires us to always be working to dismantle those hierarchical systems that define our lives. Within hierarchy, right relation is impossible; assertions of dominance and concentrations of power create domination and abuses of power. That includes the most abusive of all hierarchies: The human claim to a right to dominate everything else. Our most important struggle for redemption concerns our most profound sin: Our willingness to destroy the larger living world of which we are a part.

The first step in redemption is to not turn away from that lifting of the veil, to face honestly what we have done, to contest the culture’s delusions wherever possible. Then we can face what we must do to enhance justice and build sustainable living arrangements.

What does this kind of redemption look like in practice? I think we should proceed along two basic tracks. First, we should commit some of our energy to the familiar movements that focus on the question of justice in this world, such as anti-war struggles. We redeem ourselves — especially those of us with privilege that is rooted in that injustice — through that commitment to fighting empire, capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy.

But I also think there is important work to be done in experiments to prepare for what will come in this new future we can’t yet describe in detail. Whatever the limits of our predictive capacity, we can be pretty sure we will need ways of organizing ourselves to help us live in a world with less energy and fewer material goods. We have to all develop the skills needed for that world (such as gardening with fewer inputs, food preparation and storage, and basic tinkering), and we will need to recover a deep sense of community that has disappeared from many of our lives. McKibben puts this in terms of a new scale for our work:

The project we’re now undertaking — maintenance, graceful decline, hunkering down, holding on against the storm — requires a different scale. Instead of continents and vast nations, we need to think about states, about town, about neighborhoods, about blocks. … We need to scale back, to go to ground. We need to take what wealth we have left and figure out how we’re going to use it, not to spin the wheel one more time but to slow the wheel down. … We need, as it were, to trade in the big house for something that suits our circumstances on this new Eaarth. We need to feel our vulnerability.⁷

Nature Bats Last

The phrase “nature bats last” circulates these days among people who have their eye on the multiple, cascading ecological crises. The metaphor reminds us that nature is the home team and has the final word.  We humans may be particularly impressed with our own achievements — all of the spectacular home runs we have hit with science and technology — but when those achievements are at odds with how nature operates, then nature is going to bring in the ultimate designated hitter and knock the human race out of the ball park. OK, let’s not try to stretch this too far — no single metaphor can work at every level needed. The point is simple: We are not as powerful as the forces that govern that larger living world.

The metaphor offers one other crucial lesson, in this case because of its limitations. When we say “nature bats last,” it implies we are one team and nature is on another, as if it were possible for us to compete with nature. But we are, of course, simply part of nature, one species in an indescribably diverse living world. To imagine ourselves as competing with nature would be like our lungs competing with our heart — either those organs work together, or an individual human dies.

Unfortunately, the architects of modern science didn’t see the world that way. One of the most often-quoted, Francis Bacon, believed that modern science and technology “have the power to conquer and subdue [nature], to shake her to her foundations.” Rene Descartes, another of these founding fathers, believed humans could achieve the knowledge and develop the means to know:

the force and action of fire, water, air, the stars, the heavens, and all the other bodies that surround us, as distinctly as we know the various crafts of our artisans, we might also apply them in the same way to all the uses to which they are adapted, and thus render ourselves the lords and possessors of nature.

These thinkers also contributed to our understanding of the workings and power of the natural world. But this language of domination — to conquer and subdue, becoming lords and possessors — is the language not of a baseball game but of war, which brings us to the relevance of this to Veterans for Peace. VFP members have seen through, and gone beyond, the egotistical rhetoric of our national fundamentalism — with all its fraudulent claims about “fighting for freedom” — to reject the U.S. wars of empire and stake out an audacious goal: “To abolish war as an instrument of national policy.”

We also need to see beyond the egotistical rhetoric of our technological fundamentalism — the claims that infinitely clever humans will solve all problems with gadgets — and stake out an even more audacious goal: To end the human war on the rest of living world.

Life is Hard

If all this seems too much to ask of ourselves, that’s because it is. We live in a time when we must face honestly the whole truth, but to do that is too much to bear. We struggle to claim our power at the moment when we are more powerless than ever, and find hope where there is no hope.

On power: Those of us in dissident movements understand we face difficult odds, fighting entrenched forces of the state and corporation. We know the keys to prevailing: Fight organized money with organized people; compromise to build a power base but never abandon core principles; find ways to delegitimize authority; raise the social costs for elites to pursue unjust policies; hang in for the long haul. Those organizing basics don’t change, though the application of them must constantly adapt to changes in the structure of power. But the ecological crises change the big picture.

First, we should not assume the long haul is as long as we’ve always imagined. No one can predict the rate of collapse if we stay on this trajectory, and we don’t know if we can change the trajectory. There is much we don’t know, but everything I see suggests that the world in which we will pursue political goals will change dramatically in the next decade or two, almost certainly for the worse. Organizing has to adapt not only to changes in societies but to these fundamental changes in the ecosphere. We are organizing in a period of contraction, not expansion.

Second, we can’t be satisfied with contesting imperialism in the nation-state and the concentration of wealth in corporate capitalism, but also must change the human relationship to the living world. Dissident movements have an advantage, given that a larger percentage of people involved in left/radical politics have less of a commitment to maintaining the dominant culture’s delusions. Radicals don’t have the wealth and power that can appear to insulate us from collapse, which means we have more room to think about what living arrangements are consistent with reality. Elites, who typically mistake temporary domination for real power, have a harder time recognizing that humans are powerless in the face of the forces we have been trying to conquer and subdue. In the end, we can never be the lords and possessors of something larger and more enduring in time. Many traditions recognize this basic reality: We don’t own the earth, the earth owns us. Our power comes in recognizing our powerlessness and adapting to the world as it is, not the world as we imagine it to be.

How does this approach give people hope? It doesn’t, and it shouldn’t, because hope is not something you give to people. The political organizers on the liberal/left who are always touting a new way to restore the American Dream are peddlers of false hope, offering allegedly exciting opportunities to allegedly new movements that are stuck in the same old failed ideology of the dominant culture, steadfastly ignoring the depth and scope of the ecological crises. Real hope comes with abandoning the false prophets and moving on to accomplish something. Authentic hope comes when we honestly confront our condition and dig in to create new, or revive old, forms of community. Hope comes from proving to ourselves that we are competent to manage our own lives. Hope doesn’t fall from the sky but rather is built from the ground up.

That hope doesn’t ask for guarantees that our movements will prevail. That hope doesn’t require us to pretend we know whether the human experiment will go on forever. That hope comes from the understanding that while we did not choose to live in a desecrated world, such is the world into which we were born. All we can do is act out of respect for ourselves, for each other, and for nature, in the hope that we can restore the sacredness of the individual, the human community in which individuals find meaning, and the living world of which human communities are a part.

Organizers have long said that the key to successful organizing is making it easy for people to do the right thing. Today, our task is to be honest about how difficult it is to do the right thing. Anyone who thinks it can be easy to do the right thing is part of the delusional culture. Rather than delude ourselves, let’s face the truth and recognize the difficulty of the path that lies ahead. Other social movements have prevailed in the face of great difficulty, but no social movement has had to face this simple but profound reality: We have to become the first species on the planet to practice restraint in the scramble for energy-rich carbon. All life on this planet is based on that scramble, but if we continue on the path unchecked, the planet will be incapable of sustaining human life as we know it. That is a brand new organizing challenge. In facing it, we need to leave the platitudes at home.

The radical political theology I believe we need for this moment in history would acknowledge, rather than try to mask, our confusion and uncertainty. We know we are in deep trouble; beyond that, it’s guess work. Facing that takes a new kind of courage. We usually think of courage as rooted in clarity and certainty — we act with courage when we are sure of what we know. Today, the courage we need must be rooted in the limits of what we can know and trust in something beyond human knowledge. In many times and places, that something has gone by the name “God.”

Religious fundamentalism offers a God who will protect us if we follow orders. Technological fundamentalism gives us the illusion that we are God and can arrange the world as we like it. A radical political theology leaves behind fear-based protection rackets and arrogance-driven control fantasies.

The God for our journey is neither above us nor inside us but around us, a reminder of the sacredness of the living world of which we are a part. That God shares the anxiety and anguish of life in a desecrated world. With such a God we can be at peace with our powerlessness and alive in hope. With such a God, we can live in peace.

1. Wes Jackson, New Roots for Agriculture (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1980), chapter 2. Many of my points in this talk were greatly influence by the work of Jackson and The Land Institute.
2. Tim Kasser, The High Price of Materialism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002).
3. Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2010).
4. Greg Brown, “Where Is Maria?” from the CD “Further In,” Red House Records, 1996.
5. Bill McKibben, Eaarth: Making Life on a Tough New Planet (New York: Times Books/Henry Holt, 2010), p. 2.
6. McKibben, Eaarth, p. 25.
7. McKibben, Eaarth, p. 123.

Hillary Clinton and President Sarkozy might loath to admit it, but the desire to turn back the clock on women rights in Libya constitutes one of the chief goals for NATO Rebels on the Transitional Council.

For NATO Rebels — who are overwhelmingly pro-Islamist, regardless of NATO propaganda¹ — it’s a matter of restoring social obedience to Islamic doctrine. However the abaya is more than a symbol of virtue and womanly modesty. It would usher in a full conservative doctrine, impacting women’s rights in marriage and divorce, the rights to delay childbirth to pursue education and employment—all the factors that determine a woman’s status of independence.

That makes this one War Libya’s women cannot afford to lose. For those of us who support Islamic modernity, there are good arguments that Gadaffi would be grossly irresponsible to hand over power to a vacuum dominated by NATO Rebels. Given the savagery of their abuses against the Libyan people¹ — and the Rebel’s agenda to reinstate Shariah and retract women’s rights, Gadaffi has an obligation to stand strong and block them for the protection of the people.

Indeed, it’s somewhat baffling that France or Italy would want to hand power to Rebels, outside of an election scenario. Elections would be a safeguard that would empower Libyan women to launch a leadership alternative that rejects the Abaya. That’s exactly what the Rebels fear, and it accounts for their deep, abiding rejection of the election process. Democracy poses a real threat to NATO’s vision of the “New Libya.”

The abaya carries so much weight in the battle for Islamic modernity that Gadaffi pretty much banned Islamic dress from the first days of his government. Getting rid of the abaya was part of Gadaffi’s larger reform package supporting women’s rights—one of the best and most advanced in the entire Arab world. The transformation of women’s status has been so great that the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran imposed a fatwa against Gadhaffi years ago, declaring his government blasphemous to Islamic traditions.

To gain insider perspective on Gadaffi’s reforms for women, members of a fact-finding delegation in Libya spoke with Najat ElMadani, chairwoman of the Libyan Society for Culture and Sciences, an NGO started in 1994. They also interviewed Sheikh Khaled Tentoush, one the most prominent Imams in Libya. Imam Tentoush has survived two NATO assassination attempts, one that was particularly revealing.

Tentoush said that he and 12 other progressive Imams were traveling to Benghazi to discuss a peaceful end to the conflict. They stopped for tea at a guest house in Brega — and NATO dropped a bomb right on top of them, killing 11 of the 13 Imams, who had embraced Islamic reforms that empower women’s rights and modernity.

There were no military installations or Gadaffi soldiers anywhere nearby that would have justified NATO bombing. This was a deliberate assassination of Islamic leaders who give religious legitimacy to Gadaffi’s modernist policies, and therefore pose a great threat to the conservative ambitions of Islamic Rebels. NATO killed them off.

What’s got radical Islamists so upset in Libya? Here’s a primer on women’s rights under Gadaffi:

No Male Chaperones in Libya

In Libya, women are allowed to move about the city, go shopping or visit friends without a male escort. Unbelievable as it sounds, throughout most of the Arab world, such freedoms are strictly forbidden. In much of Pakistan, for example, a 5 year old male child would be considered a suitable chaperone for an adult woman in the marketplace. Otherwise she’d better stay home. In Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, women are frequently locked in their apartments while their husbands, brothers or fathers go off to work. Yes, there are exceptions. Some families individually reject these practices. However, before readers protest this characterization, you must be honest and acknowledge that the Taliban in Afghanistan and the Saudis/Kuwaitis aren’t the only groups that constrain women’s freedoms in the Arab world. This is common social behavior throughout large swaths of Arab society.

In Libya, women are never locked in their homes, while their husbands, fathers and brothers go to work. Gadhaffi forbids restricting women’s mobility.

In Libya, women have full legal rights to drive cars—unlike their sisters in Saudi Arabia. In a lot of Arab countries, a woman’s husband holds her passport. So she cannot travel outside of the country without his approval.

Marriage Rights

Tragically, in Kabul, Afghanistan, a young woman can be locked in Prison for rejecting her father’s choice of husband. Until she changes her mind, her prospective mother in law visits the prison every day, demanding to know why her son is not “good enough” for this girl. Why does she disobey those who know what’s best for her? That poor woman stays locked up in Kabul prison until she changes her mind. And it happens right under the noses of American and NATO soldiers. A NATO Occupation won’t protect Libyan women, either.

All over the Arab world—from Yemen to Jordan to Saudi Arabia to Iran — fathers and brothers decide what age a young woman will be given away in marriage, usually as soon as she hits puberty. She has no choice in the most important decision of her life. Frequently a young girl gets married off to one of her father’s adult friends or a cousin. Throughout the Arab world, it’s socially acceptable for a shopkeeper to ask a young Muslim girl if she has started to menstruate. A good Islamic girl is expected to answer truthfully.

Not in Libya. To his greatest credit, bucking all Islamic traditions—from the first days of government, Gadaffi said No Way to forced marriages. Libyan woman have the right to choose their own husbands. They are encouraged to seek love marriages. Under strict Libyan law, without exception no person can force a Libyan woman to marry any man for any reason.

Forced marriages have been such a problem throughout the Arab world, that in Libya, an Imam always calls on the woman if there is an impending marriage. The Imam meets with her privately, and asks if any person is forcing her to marry, or if there’s any reason she’s marrying this person other than her desire to be with this man. Both Najat and Imam Tentoush were very adamant on these points.

In Libya, the Imams are expected to protect the woman from abuse by relatives.

Right to End a Marriage

Divorce is brutally difficult for a woman throughout the Arab world. A husband can beat or rape his wife, or commit adultery or lock her in a room like a prison. No matter what a woman suffers, as a wife she has no legal rights to leave that marriage, even for her own protection. When her father negotiates that marriage contract, she’s stuck for life. A man can divorce a woman in front of two witnesses by repeating three times: “I divorce you. I divorce you. I divorce you.” He can text that message on a cell phone, and it’s over. The woman has no reciprocal freedom. She’s stuck in that marriage until her husband lets her go.

Not so in Libya. A Libyan woman can leave a marriage anytime she chooses. A woman simply files for divorce and goes on with her life. It is very similar to U.S. laws, in that a man has no power to stop her. It’s completely within her control to initiate a divorce.

In Libya, if a woman enters a marriage with her own assets and the marriage ends, her husband cannot touch her assets. The same is true of the man’s assets. Joint assets usually go to the woman.

These “abnormal” marriage rights stir deep anger among conservative Libyan men. Rebels particularly hate Gadhaffi’s government for granting marriage rights to women.

But consider how delaying marriage impacts women’s opportunities in society.

Delayed marriage means delayed childbirth, which empowers young women to continue education and gain employment. Not surprisingly then, Libyan women enjoy some of the best opportunities in the Arab world. That might also cause simmering resentments among conservative Libyan men.

Education of Libyan Women

In Libya more women take advantage of higher education than men, according to Najat. There are professional women in every walk of life. Many Libyan women are scientists, university professors, lawyers, doctors, government employees, journalists and business women. Najat attributes that freedom and the range of choices to Gadaffi, and his government’s insistence that women must be free to choose their lives and be fully supported in those choices. Najat and Tentoush said that some Imams in Libya would like it to be otherwise — especially those Imams favoring the Rebels —
but Gadaffi has always over ruled them. For example there are many women soldiers, and they are very strong and fully capable of contributing to the military defense of the country.

Women receive education scholarships equal to the men’s. All Libyans can go abroad and study if they so desire — paid for by Gadhaffi’s government. Single women usually take a brother or male relative with them, and Najat said all expenses are covered for both the woman and her companion.

In Libya, women are not required to seek a husband’s permission to hold a job, and any type of job is available to her. In contrast, many employment opportunities are proscribed in many other Arab countries, because work puts women in daily proximity to men who are not their husbands. That eliminates many types of job opportunities.
Bashing Women’s Rights

These are some of the reasons why Rebels consider Gadaffi an “infidel.” They frequently express a desire to reinstate the Shariah. It’s an open secret in Arab circles. In ignoring this point, NATO resembles the three monkeys. See no truth. Hear no truth. Speak no truth. But the Arab community understands this dynamic. Rebels are going to pat Hillary Clinton and Sarkozy on the head right up until they capture power. Then they’re going to do exactly what they started out to do. Reinstate Islamic law—under the protection of the United States and NATO governments. Conservative social codes will be enforced just like Afghanistan.

Libyans understand this point, even if Americans and Europeans are lost in denial. It should surprise no one, therefore, that some of Gadaffi’s greatest support comes from Libyan women. Nor should it surprise Libya watchers that Gadhaffi’s not exactly “clinging to power” as the corporate media likes to suggest. Quite the contrary, Gadaffi’s support has skyrocketed to 80 or 85 percent during this crisis. President Obama, Sarkozy and Bersculoni would be thrilled to enjoy such intense popular support.

NATO bombing has backfired and alienated the Libyan people from the Rebel cause, destroying community infrastructure that Libyans are truly proud of. Rebels are chasing pro-Gadaffi families out of Benghazi, a sort of political cleansing. But they have no street credibility that would give them power in negotiations with other Libyans, because losers don’t get to dictate the terms. NATO can propagandize until Sarkozy falls over in a fit, but the people have resoundingly rejected these Rebels.

NATO is pushing a political resolution, because Europe wants off the merry-go-round. In truth, the music is getting uglier every day. NATO never should have jumped on this bandwagon in the first place. There’s no sense to it. They’re fighting Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, and embracing Al Qaeda and conservative Islam in Benghazi.

Those of us who support Islamic modernity should be relieved that Libya’s people are smarter and savvier than NATO bureaucrats. And we should all say a prayer that Gadhaffi holds on.

1. see www.obamaslibya.com.

Since 2001, a group of scholars and intellectuals (for simplicity, and in line with current labels, we will call them the “New Atheists”) have become college campus celebrities for assailing the “irrationalism” of religious belief; some, like Daniel Dennett,¹ Christopher Hitchens,² and Richard Dawkins,³ already possessed laudable resumes, and some, like Sam Harris,⁴ rose in fame primarily because of their passionate pleas against faith in the immediate post 9-11 milieu. Although these thinkers differ in their analyses, their main theme is similar: religious faith is irrational and should eventually be discarded like a child’s toy by mature citizens in a modern, secular era. Although their arguments have not gone without criticism (see Atran⁵,⁶; also, see Hedges⁷ ), a healthy number of self-designated “free thinkers” have praised their work and continue to impugn the supposed benefits of belief. At times, this criticism can be healthy and productive; at others, it can be destructive and can devolve into ugly and uninformed attacks against Islamic civilization. At bottom, however, the most egregious problem with such attacks is that they ignore the real veil that distorts most people’s perceptions of reality, diverting attention from real political issues that affect millions of lives and convincing many intelligent college students that the chief problem in the world today is irrational religious conviction.

The New Atheists believe that they are carrying out the once stalled project of the enlightenment (See Richard Dawkins Foundation For Reason and Science Mission.⁸ ), of freeing minds from the shackles of religious fundamentalism and superstition so that they can perceive the unadulterated “scientific” truth about the nature of reality. This is a noble desideratum; the problem is that the real shackles of the mind–at least in the Western world–are not chained to religion but rather to mainstream political narratives. During the enlightenment, thinkers like Jefferson, Diderot, and Voltaire assailed religion and the churches that propagated it precisely because it was a dense and powerful curtain that was drawn over the eyes of humans. In the contemporary United States, however, the church is no longer an inordinately powerful institution and religion, even among believers, is not the most potent mythology. The most potent mythology is neoliberal nationalism⁹,¹⁰ and the most powerful institution is the corporation. In other words, the New Atheists have retained the outdated substance of the enlightenment but have left its vital spirit behind, have, as it were, mistakenly dragged a 200 year old corpse into the modern world. This would not be lamentable were it not for the profound influence that the New Atheists wield among intelligent and open minded students and intellectuals, the very students and intellectuals that progressives require to form a broad and effective coalition that can challenge the unprecedented power of corporations.

In this article, we will argue that that New Atheists are not heirs of the enlightenment and do not fundamentally challenge existing power structures and narratives in modern American society; instead they distract attention from important issues and scurrilously attack narratives that provide meaning for millions of people.¹¹ We will first look at the interaction between human nature and political structures and how that necessitates the development and propagation of political/religious narratives. We will then trace the decline of religious narratives and the rise of secular narratives, focusing on the modern American political narrative. We will end by criticizing the New Atheists–particularly Sam Harris–for contributing to the West’s growing Islamophobia while ignoring issue of much greater political significance. In part II, we will examine the true legacy of the Enlightenment and those who continue its mission.

Human political nature

In the wonderful book Hierarchy in the Forest anthropologist Christopher Boehm argues that humans possess strong proclivities toward egalitarianism and autonomy.¹² These tendencies, Boehm argues, do not lead to abhorrence of hierarchy but rather to a fondness for a “reverse” hierarchy. A reverse hierarchy is a system where political power is distributed among many people and despotic upstarts are thwarted by large groups of people. According to Boehm, however, humans are ambivalent and possess an undeniable potential for creating a tyrannical political system and submitting to it—especially if rapacious upstarts are not checked by the power of the many. These proclivities are illustrated by the palette of emotions humans possess and emit during perceived political events. Humans, for example, freely confer status upon certain individuals,¹³ submit to them,¹⁴ and often revere them; however, humans also detest individuals who appear despotic,¹² ridicule and scold them, and sometimes even assassinate them.¹⁵ Desirous of status and power but abhorring and envying those who possess it, humans are therefore in a precarious perch between despotism and egalitarianism.

Another important human political proclivity that influences the balance between despotism and egalitarianism is the creation of ingroups and outgroups.¹⁶ That is, humans tend to form coalitions that are based on perceptions of common interests. Originally, these were based on bonds of kinship;¹⁷ however, coalitions were soon created and maintained using the bonds of “fictive kinship”¹⁸ or “imagined communities.”¹⁹ So, whereas the first coalitions were units of blood relatives, later coalitions grew larger and more complicated and included entire territorial swaths like “the Roman Empire.” A member of the coalition “Roman Empire” felt him or herself to “belong” to a large unit of people through the use of collective narratives and symbols.²⁰ This coalitional tendency is important because it drastically affects the way humans perceive and treat each other. Perceived ingroup members, for example, are accorded respect and moral dignity, while perceived outgroup members are often accorded the status of “competitor” and extended little respect or moral dignity.²¹ The slaughter of outgroup members, if functional, is often lauded and outgroup suffering causes little guilt or compassion.²² As coalitions become larger and more complicated, they tend to “nest.” For example, a modern citizen of the United States might consider herself a member of the large coalition “U.S. citizen,” the smaller coalition “Democrat,” the even smaller coalition “Detroit Tigers fan” and the even smaller coalition “Member of the Pronin family.” Which coalition one emphasizes depends on social identity and environmental contingency. At a Tigers’ game, one would probably emphasize the “Tigers fan” coalition, but if a political debate broke out, one might emphasize the “Democrat” coalition. Coalitions often gain power through efficient coalitional nesting and networking and control of institutional structures.

The rise of states and the evolution of political narratives

Although scholars debate the details of the evolution of human societies, a general and useful framework organizes societies into bands, tribes, chiefdoms, and states, with the belief that societies evolve from bands into tribes and then chiefdoms and finally into complicated states.²³ According to scholars, bands are mostly egalitarian organizations of family units; leaders are not formally elected and their power is limited and ephemeral. Put in Boehm’s terms, the reverse hierarchy maintains a diffusion of power and overarching political narratives are not necessary because there isn’t intense conflict between competing political coalitions. Tribes are more complicated, generally egalitarian, units of organization; leaders are not formally elected, but there is a more palpable status order. Although there is still a healthy diffusion of power, there are narratives about family ancestors and more formalized “political” ceremonies. Chiefdoms are the first form of society where lineages are ranked and where hierarchies become formalized; status inequalities are hereditary and legitimizing narratives are needed to explain the inequitable distribution of power. These narratives are generally religious and most chiefs are recognized as “divine.” States are complicated congregations of peoples, with loose kinship bonds, and extremely formalized hierarchies of political power.²⁴,²⁵ Unlike other forms of social organization, states are territorial units; ruling elites have a monopoly of violence and require sophisticated narratives of legitimation. Historically, states were legitimized by a priestly class which acted as the guardians of state power.²⁶

There are a variety of reasons why religious narratives were the first and perhaps most powerful deployed to maintain social order and legitimize state power.²⁷,²⁸ Despite their power and efficacy, however, religious narratives in the West were eventually countered by currents of growing secularism. During the renaissance, for example, a number of thinkers began to emphasize the impressive power of human reason and began to analyze political order from a “proto-scientific” perspective, independent of references to religion (See, for example, Machiavelli²⁹ ). The seed of this style of thinking gradually blossomed into the intellectual movement known as the Enlightenment and led to the decline in prestige and effectiveness of religious justifications of power.³⁰ Thinkers like Voltaire and Dennis Diderot assailed the abject subjugation of reason to dying dogmas; eventually, other thinkers like Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson, attempted to extend the skepticism of the enlightenment to institutions like monarchy. Paine, in particular, was scathing in his assaults on anything that enslaved humans and defied the principles of reason.³¹ However, given the two important truths about human political nature addressed above, society did not become drastically more equitable or just³²: coalitions still competed for political power, resources were still unequally distributed, and such inequities still provoked outrage from those who did not benefit from the “new” and “enlightened” social order. New narrative themes were necessary.

The most prominent of the new secular themes was liberal nationalism, or the idea that the nation state formed a coherent coalition and that the interests of the state were the interests of all citizens.³³ This theme was buttressed with other themes about “freedom” and “equality” for all citizens; although it must be observed that some citizens were more “free” and more “equal” than others. Furthermore, unlike most religious narratives, which promised individuals happiness in the hereafter, liberal nationalism promoted the secular eschatology of progress, i.e. living conditions were improving and would continue to do so indefinitely.³⁴ Importantly, these new myths obviated the need for religious myths and replaced them with equally non-empirical but rationally effective myths about nations, replete, even, with mythical stories of founding heroes, like George Washington, who were almost supernatural in their ambition, altruism, and moral character.³⁵ Although purportedly “objective” and devoted to the “interests of all,” these narratives, like the earlier religious narratives, continued to serve the interests of the powerful and did little to mitigate the suffering of the less fortunate.

The modern American political narrative (refining the concept of narratives)

Marshal McLuhan, the famous media analyst, once noted that the last thing a fish would recognize in its environment is water.³⁶ Like the fish, the last thing a human recognizes, if at all, is the cultural/political narrative that surrounds her and shapes her thoughts, beliefs, opinions, and attitudes about the world. Although the New Atheists are often presented as a scientific vangard who have peered behind the painted veil of mythical illusions, they have left the West’s (and for purposes of this article, America’s) primary narratives alone, unanalyzed–instead, focusing on more obvious and less interesting religious narratives. Consider J. Anderson Thomson & Clare Aukofer’s (Thomson is a trustee of the Dawkins Foundation) passionate assertion: “We owe it to ourselves to at least consider the real roots of religious belief, so we can deal with life as it is, taking advantage of perhaps our mind’s greatest adaptation: our ability to use reason.”³⁷ Perhaps true enough, and a number of serious scholars have already done so–much more effectively, it should be added, than the New Atheists.³⁸,³⁹ On the other hand, how much more vital is it, then, to “consider the real roots” of policy in America, “so we can deal with” the political and economic world “as it is”? That is, instead of criticising the crippled institution of the church, responsible intellectuals should attack centers of concentrated power and the narratives that they propound. (We do not want to be misunderstood. Centers of power certainly use religious beliefs when they can; however, attacking religion qua religion ignores the larger point and leaves the more powerful political narratives and institutions alone.) To return to the fish, if we want to change our environment, we have to learn to recognize the water that surrounds us.

It is almost a truism that those who wield political and economic power also wield the power to choose which narratives get propagated into society. It is therefore important to understand not just the history of political narratives, but also the composition of power in America and how that shapes and determines the substance of political narratives. So what coalition or collection of coalitions, wields political power in America? The answer, it turns out, is simple enough: Those who have money–or own the means of producing income. This includes, the upper class, the corporate community, and the policy planning network.⁴⁰ (see figure 1)

Figure 1. The Power Elite

Taken from Domhoff, G.W. (2005). The class-domination theory of power.

The basic goals of this group of “oligarchs” (or “power elite”) are income accumulation (or more broadly, resource accumulation) and protection of gained income from taxation (income defense).⁴¹ Since the power elite are composed of roughly the top 1% (to use a conservative estimate; the truth might be closer to the top 1/10 of 1%),⁴² the accomplishment of these goals will often necessarily conflict with the interests of the majority of the people. The only concrete way for the power elite to achieve their goals is through the creation of favorable political/economic policies; however, because of human egalitarian and coalitional proclivities (“our coalition deserves better”), such policies would be decried by most people. That is, a member of the power elite cannot simply assert “we are creating policies that benefit only the top 1%, while the rest of the people’s wealth stagnates or declines.” As we have noted, religious justifications of massive resource inequality have lost prestige and efficacy; therefore, modern power elites have had to use the basic enlightenment narrative, adjusted, of course, to account for historical developments (e.g., the rise of corporations and the development of state subsidized capitalism). The outcome of this adjustment is America’s most salient political narrative: “neoliberal nationalism.”

The basic principle of neoliberal nationalism is that there is a unified coalition called the “United States” that is historically exceptional and that all members of the coalition share a preponderance of interests. (see figure 2)

Figure 2. The Neoliberal Nationalist Ideology

From this principle, it naturally follows that American foreign policy is based on noble intentions, and that its only faults stem from beneficent motives sometimes gone awry due to incompetence or misunderstanding and a propensity to “judge” itself “by higher standards” than the rest of the world.⁴³ Domestically, neoliberal nationalism propounds the idea that America is a free market country and that free markets promote happiness and justly recompense citizens for their economic behavior, or, more elegantly and oleaginously “free-market capitalism is far more than an economic theory. It is the engine of social mobility — the highway to the American Dream.”⁴⁴ This is coupled with the idea that America is a democracy that allows each citizen to have equal input into policy formation to create a “fairness” narrative that justifies the current state of affairs by noting that “free markets” are just and that all citizens have equal political say.

From these principles, a number of corollaries follow. For example, the idea that the mainstream media presents an accurate picture of political reality because all voices are allowed equal access to the media and are weeded out through the just and fair mechanisms of the free market–Fox, on the right, is balanced by MSNBC on the left. Or, the idea that the government should intervene only sparingly, if at all, into the operations of the market. This last notion, although accepted on faith in modern times, is rather strange and affords insight into the ways in which political narratives are tailored to interact with pre-existing human proclivities. Throughout the seventies and eighties, the government and its employees were depicted as “outsiders” or people who did not share interests with the majority of “real” Americans. The government was, in other words, an alien and hostile coalition working only to engorge itself on the wealth of regular Americans. As Larry Kudlow succinctly put it when discussing Obama’s campaign proposals on the economy, “This isn’t free enterprise. It’s old-fashioned-liberal tax, and spend, and regulate. It’s plain ol’ big government. The only people who will benefit are the central planners in Washington.”⁴⁵ (Notice that this is complicated: the same ideas about government were not extended into the realm of foreign policy.) In this way, Americans were/are taught to fear the tyrannical power of the government and to side with “benevolent” free market institutions like corporations. This also means that taxes are terrible because they pilfer money from average people and give it to government bureaucrats.

This narrative serves two important functions for the power elite: 1) it constrains cognition and 2) it narrows the range of acceptable debate. It constrains cognition because it literally makes it difficult to contemplate the world outside of its framework. Just as a religious person cannot think of reality outside of the framework presented by his or her theology, so the average American cannot think of politics outside of the framework presented by the neoliberal nationalism narrative. And it narrows the range of acceptable debate because discourse that does not accept the narrative’s basic principles is misunderstood and ridiculed. The bounds of acceptable debate, in other words, are determined by its principles. One can argue, then, that America’s war in Iraq was “dumb” or “rash”; one cannot argue, however, that America’s invasion of Iraq was a massive war crime, no different in motive from the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan.⁴⁶ Or, one can argue about whether or not the mainstream media are “too liberal” (meaning, too far to the left of the accepted narrative) or “too conservative” (meaning, too far to the right of the accepted narrative), but one cannot not do a straightforward institutional analysis of the media and American foreign policy without being labeled a “Marxist” or a “conspiracy monger” (see for example, George Shadroui’s screed against “anti-Americans” such as Noam Chomsky and Chalmers Johnson).⁴⁷ In other words, this narrative shackles the mind to a superstition every bit as powerful and quite a bit more pernicious than religion; and it does so in a way that benefits elite coalitions at the expense of the majority of the peoples of the world.

The New Atheism as a betrayal of the enlightenment, focusing especially on Sam Harris

Voltaire once sardonically noted that “the human brain is a complex organ with the wonderful power of enabling man to find reasons for continuing to believe whatever it is that he wants to believe.”⁴⁸ Although certainly true, the goal of enlightenment thinkers–like Voltaire himself–was to make those reasons more difficult to find, and, in a sense, to make humans face the truth about themselves more directly. It is even more important to accurately perceive the motives and behaviors of powerful people because their actions entail greater consequences. Certainly, there will never be a paucity of justifications for the even the most rapacious and brutal of behaviors; however, if we strain to see beyond the webs of an erroneous narrative, we can at least grasp at political reality and attempt to guide political policy in a more salubrious direction. This makes the New Atheists all the more disappointing. Instead of using their considerable intellectual talents to deconstruct the powerful myth of neoliberal nationalism, they waste them on attacking various religions, most of which have little direct influence on the welfare of American citizens. Worse still, some, like Dawkins and Harris, use their talents to disparage Islam, blaming the tragedy of 9-11 on “Islamic fundamentalism,” despite evidence that such blame is an extremely simplistic footnote in a much larger story.⁴,⁵,⁴⁹,⁵⁰

While Dawkins seems to believe that superstition can compel all kinds of horrific atrocities, and therefore that all religions have the capacity to compel horrendous acts of terror, Harris deserves special ridicule for his singular and anti-enlightenment insistence on attacking Islam and making baseless assertions about ethical and political issues, while sedulously avoiding anything too critical of official state dogmas. While Harris does sometimes offer vague “support” for “moderate Muslims,”⁵¹ he more often than not denigrates Islam for being a violent religion, the very tenets of which “are a threat to us.”⁵¹ In fact, according to Harris, we are not at war with “terroism,” but rather with “Islam,” in a phrase that would no doubt impress the most fervent of religious votaries during the Crusades.⁵¹ For Harris, any kind of criticism of the ghastly and grisly effects of American foreign policy is essentially beside the point and can be dismissed, if he does not like it, as “leftist unreason.”⁵² To be fair, Harris follows a familiar script and concedes that the United States has been guilty of tremendous crimes in the past⁵³ but notes that such crimes would not be tolerated anymore. (This is a standard, “yeah we made mistakes in the past, but we have changed” statement. Notice this would provoke only laughter if made by an official enemy; so if Saddam had said, “We have done some horrible things but that is in the past,” before the invasion of Iraq, few would have taken him seriously.) Harris also parrots the neoliberal nationalist narrative, noting that we are, in many respects, a well-intentioned colossus;⁵⁴ apparently this means that our atrocities are “well-intentioned” and therefore superior to the “ill-intentioned” atrocities of others.

Harris professes to love science and reason and asserts that the time has come to “subject our religious beliefs to the same standards of evidence we require in every other sphere of our lives.”⁵¹ Unfortunately, Harris does not inform us what these standards are and judging from his writings, they are not very stringent. For example, the majority of his asseverations about the unspeakable evil that is Islam are made in an empirical vacuum. He often asks his readers to engage in “thought experiments,” surprisingly discovering that the answers he desires are the ones his hypothetical reader must have come to.⁵⁵ The reason Harris must resort to such tactics is that the precise causal links between religion, war, and terrorism are not well understood. As Harris must know, there is little extant empirical evidence on this complicated issue and confident pronouncements cannot take the place of rigorous research.⁵ Ignoring for the moment the geopolitical situation of the Middle East (see part II), what evidence we have suggests that Harris’ views of Islam are incorrect. For example, Arab opinion of the US is highly contingent upon perceptions of US foreign policy. When Obama was elected, the number of Arabs who viewed the United States favorably increased dramatically. However, as Obama’s policies unfolded, Arab opinion of the United States dropped to levels as low as during the last years of the Bush presidency. Most of this change in opinion was tied to dashed hopes. Arabs do not despise the United States because they consider it a part of “Dar al-Harb” but rather because they are against the continuing occupation of Palestinian lands and American interference in the region.⁵⁶ It is also worth noting that Arabs comprise less than 20% of the world’s Islamic population, in sharp contrast with common perceptions in the United States.⁵⁷ In short, the “religious war” that Harris and others persistently warn about is a figment of the imagination.

Turning to domestic issues, Harris is only slightly less confused but equally irrational. Dismissing other less obvious but more potent reasons, e.g., corporate owned media, Harris opines that “religion is the reason why our political discourse in this country is so scandalously stupid.”⁵⁸ And he further laments that Obama’s candidacy is “depressing” because “it demonstrates that even a person of the greatest candor and eloquence” has to feign religious belief to have a successful political career. Apparently Obama’s (and the Democrats in general) abject subservience to the corporate sector (especially Wall Street) and dedication to American imperialism are non-issues, but his feigned faith is tragic because it insults Harris’ reason.⁵⁹

Like the other New Atheists, Harris appears to possess an unhealthy fixation upon a peculiar notion of religious belief, betraying the spirit of the enlightenment, and attacking “the hideous fantasies of a prior age” while fully embracing the hideous fantasies of the modern age.⁶⁰ As such, it is not difficult to discern the reasons for Harris’ rise to fame in the United States. He has chosen the appropriate out-group to denigrate, while comforting powerful state and corporate coalitions. In the end, one is entitled to ask whether or not Harris “is ready for the audacity of reason,” or if he would prefer to continue his religious quest to rid the world of his accepted definition of “superstition.” One is also entitled to believe, as Voltaire did, that “an atheist who is rational, violent, and powerful, would be as great a pestilence as a blood-mad, superstitious man”– a statement born out by the many atrocities of our blood stained century.⁶¹

Conclusion: The true spirit of the enlightenment

As we have discussed, humans possess propensities for creating reverse dominance hierarchies and coalitions with sharp ingroup/outgroup divisions. These tendencies have interacted with technological, environmental, and ideological innovations to give rise to the modern state. Although humans can be egalitarian, there is a struggle against individual and coalitional upstarts; one of the most effective weapons that powerful coalitions wield against subservient and less organized coalitions is the legitimation narrative. Such a narrative attempts to convince the rank and file that their interests are identical (or close to identical) with the powerful; it also often prevents them from forming their own unified coalitional counterweight by fomenting strife between different groups (e.g. workers and immigrants, Christians and Muslims, Caucasians and minorities, et cetera). Enlightenment thinkers attempted to demystify the narratives of powerful aristocrats, monarchs, and clergymen because those were the most powerful coalitions (individuals) of their day and as such controlled the most powerful institutions (e.g., the church and state). The New Atheists have continued the Enlightenment’s emphasis on the value of religious skepticism, but have forgotten its purpose; they have consequently distracted attention from the real inequities of modern society. Instead of attacking the powerful and the narratives that they propound, the New Atheists have kicked up a cloud of confusing dust, impelling many to write passionate pleas from both sides of the faith divide that unfortunately amount to little more than a side show to real issues of political importance.

This article has focused on the New Atheists and the betrayal of the Enlightenment. In part II, we will explore legitimate heirs of the Enlightenment, focusing especially on Noam Chomsky and on how the praiseworthy goals of the Enlightenment can be accomplished in the modern world.

1. Dennet, D.C. (2006). Breaking the spell: Religion as a natural phenomenon. New York: Viking.
2. Hitchens, C. (2007). God is not great: How religion poisons everything. New York: Twelve Books.
3. Dawkins, R. (2008). The god delusion. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
4. Harris, S. (2004). The end of faith: Religion, terror, and the future of reason. New York: Norton.
5. Atran, S. (2010). Talking to the enemy: Faith, brotherhood, and the (un)making of terrorists. New York: Harper Collins.
6. An Edge Discussion of BEYOND BELIEF: Science, Religion, Reason and Survival, Salk Institue, La Jolla November 5-7, 2006
7. Hedges, C. (2008). I don’t believe in atheists. New York: Free Press.
8. The Mission Statement reads: “Support scientific education, critical thinking and evidence-based understanding of the natural world in the quest to overcome religious fundamentalism, superstition, intolerance and human suffering.”
9. Harvey, D. (2005). A brief history of neoliberalism. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
10. Chomsky, N. (1999). Profit over people: Neoliberalism and global order. New York: Seven Stories Press.
11. We wish to note that the New Atheists are not a monolithic group and that Dennett in particular has expressed great respect for the accomplishments of religion. What we are attacking, to a certain degree, is the image of the New Atheists presented by the media and by many college campus groups with which we have had contact. It is true, however, that Harris and Dawkins, especially, have scurrilously and unintelligently attacked religious traditions in a way that appears mean spirited and short sighted.
12. Boehm, C. (1999). Hierarchy in the forest: The evolution of egalitarian behavior. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
13. Henrich, J., & Gil-White, F. (2001). The evolution of prestige: Freely conferred deference as a mechanism for enhancing the benefits of cultural transmission. Evolution and Human Behavior, 22, 165–196.
14. Mazur, A. (2005). Biosociology of dominance and deference. Lanham, MD: Rowland and Littlefield.
15. Boehm, C. (1993). Egalitarian behavior and reverse dominance hierarchy. Current Anthropology, 34, 227-254.
16. Berreby, D. (2005). Us and them: Understanding your tribal mind. New York: Little, Brown.
17. Geary, D.C. (2010). Male/female: The evolution of human sex differences (2nd ed.). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
18. Atran, S. (2003). Genesis of suicide terrorism. Science, 299, 1534-1539.
19. Anderson, B. (1983). Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. London: Verso.
20. Livy, T. (1962). A History of Rome (M. Hades & J.P. Poe, Eds.). New York: The Modern Library. Livy, for example, has this colorful quote about the origins of Rome:
    And if license is allowed any nation to exalt its inception and make the gods its sponsors, so towering is the military glory of Rome that when it avows that Mars himself was its father and the father of its founder, the races of mankind can submit to the claim with as little qualm as they submit to Rome’s dominion. (p. 18).
21. Gat, A. (2006). War in human civilization. New York: Oxford University Press.
22. Chagnon, N.A. (1988). Life histories, blood revenge, and warfare in a tribal population. Science, 239, 985-992.
23. LeBlanc, S. and Register, K.E. (2003). Constant battles: The myth of the peaceful, noble savage. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
24. Flannery, K.V. (1972). The cultural evolution of civilizations. Annual review of ecology and systematic, 3, 399-426.
25. Carniero, R.L. (1970). A theory of the origin of the state. Science, 169, 733-738.
26. Fukuyama, F. (2011). The origins of political order: From prehuman times to the French Revolution. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.
27. Wade, N. (2009). The faith instinct: How religion evolved and why it endures. New York: Penguin.
28. It is important, however, to note that religious narratives can also be used to attack state power, as is evidenced by the history of early Christianity and the subsequent developments of liberation theology; see, for example, Stark, R. (1996). The rise of Christianity: How the obscure, marginal Jesus movement became the dominant religious force in the Western world in a few centuries. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
29. Machiavelli, N. (1532/2005). The prince. New York: Penguin.
30. Hobsbawm, E. (1962/1996). The age of revolution: 1789-1848. New York: Vintage Books.
31. Paine, T. (1791/1984). Rights of man. New York: Penguin.
32. This is not to say that there was no improvement in social conditions. The extent that morality progresses is debatable, but we remain hopeful.
33. Hobsbawm, E. (1992). Nations and nationalism since 1780: Programme, myth, reality. New York: Cambridge University Press.
34. Wallerstein, I. (1995). After liberalism. New York: The New Press.
35. Geary, P.J. (2002). The myth of nations: The Medieval origins of Europe. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
36. Quote from McLuhan, M.
37. J. Anderson Thomson & Clare Aukofer (July 18, 2011). Science and religion: God didn’t make man; man made gods. Los Angeles Times.
38. Boyer, P. (2001). Religion explained: The evolutionary origins of religious thought. New York: Basic Books.
39. Barrett, J.L. (2004). Why would anyone believe in god? Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press.
40. Domhoff, G.W. (2010). Who rules America? Challenges to corporate and class dominance (6th ed.). New York: McGraw Hill.
41. Winters, J. (2011). Oligarchy. New York: Cambridge University Press.
42. Joe Stiglitz (May, 2011). Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%. Vanity Fair.
43. Dinesh D’souza (April, 2002). In praise of American empire. Christian Science Monitor.
44. George W. Bush (Nov 13, 2008). Bush’s speech on the economic crisis, November 2008. Council on Foreign Relations.
45. Larry Kudlow (February 28, 2008). Obama’s Big-Government Vision. Townhall.
46. These words are taken from Obama’s supposedly devastating 2002 speech against going to war with Iraq. Since that speech he has, of course, “tempered” his criticisms. Note that he never once says that going to war would be a crime or an act of aggression. Rather, it would be rash and dumb. See, Barak Obama (October, 2002). Speech Against the Iraq War delivered at the Federal Plaza in Chicago.
47. George Shadroui (September 6, 2004). Dissecting Chomsky and Anti-Americanism. Intellectual Conservative.
48. Voltaire quote.
49. Richard Dawkins (September 15, 2001). Religion’s misguided missiles. The Gaurdian.
50. Ginges, J., Hansen, I., & Norenzayan, A. (2009). Religion and support for suicide attacks. Psychological Science, 20, 224-230.
51. Sam Harris (February 16, 2006). Who are the Moderate Muslims? Huffington Post.
52. Harris, S. (2004). The end of faith: Religion, terror, and the future of reason. New York: Norton: 138.
53. Harris, S. (2004). The end of faith: Religion, terror, and the future of reason. New York: Norton: 138-147.
54. Harris, S. (2004). The end of faith: Religion, terror, and the future of reason. New York: Norton: 142.
55. Harris, S. (2004). The end of faith: Religion, terror, and the future of reason. New York: Norton: 146.
56. Zogby Internationl (accessed July 21, 2011). Arab Attitudes, 2011.
57. PBS Caught in the Crossfire (accessed July 22, 2011).
58. Sam Harris (March 21, 2008). What Barack Obama Could Not (and Should Not) Say. Huffington Post.
59. Paul Street (November 4, 2008). Barack Obama as a Ruling Class Candidate. ZNet.
60. Sam Harris (accessed July 24, 2011). Science Must Destroy Religion. Edge.
61. Sam Harris (December 1, 2004). Mired in a Religious War. Washington Times.

Alabama’s Court of the Judiciary unanimously had ordered Roy S. Moore removed from office in November 2003 after he refused to remove from the judiciary building rotunda a 5,280 pound granite monument to the Ten Commandments. Around its base were extracts from the Declaration of Independence, quotes from the Founding Fathers, and the National Anthem. The three foot square by four foot tall monument was funded by private contributions.

As circuit judge, Moore had placed onto the wall of his courtroom a wooden Ten Commandments plaque he had carved, and opened each court session with a Protestant prayer. He also had defied a Circuit Court ruling to remove the plaque and to cease prayers. A suit filed in the Alabama Supreme Court was dismissed for technical reasons, and Moore said he would continue to hold prayers before court.

His campaign for Chief Justice, supported by the Christian Family Association, was to return “God to our public life and restore the moral foundation of our law.” On July 31, 2001, about six months after he was inaugurated as chief justice, Moore personally supervised the installation of the granite monument, stating that the Supreme Court needed something grander than the wooden plaque in the Circuit Court. In the subsequent lawsuit, Glassroth v. Moore, the chief justice, using the words of the Alabama Constitution, argued “in order to establish justice we must invoke ‘the favor and guidance of almighty God.’” The Ten Commandments, he said, are the “moral foundation” of American law; the presence of the monument recognizes “the sovereignty of God.” What Moore didn’t state is that Exodus and Deuteronomy have different versions, and subsequent Christian religions have at least three versions. It is a Protestant version that was carved into the granite.

The federal court ruled that placement of the monument, and Moore’s repeated statements that the monument represented God’s sovereignty over all matters judicial and moral, violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. That decision was upheld by the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals.

With strong popular support, Moore said not only were the courts’ rulings illegal, but that he would continue to defy them. Moore frequently cited the Alabama Constitution that justice was determined by “involving the favor and guidance of Almighty God.” The message sent to the citizens was that it’s acceptable to disregard two centuries of legal history that gave the federal constitution supremacy over states, and to violate federal law if you disagree with it. For a citizen to do so carries penalties; for a judge to do so carries removal from office.

Even eight years after his removal from office, Moore says he “would still make the same decision.” The role of government, says Moore, “is to secure those rights that [a Christian] God has given us.”

He says that while he supports religious diversity, the “source of our morality stems from our belief in a god, and a specific god.” However, in his Dec. 13, 2006, column for WorldNetDaily, Moore stated that Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), a Muslim, should be denied the right to hold office because “in the midst of a war with Islamic terrorists we should not place someone in a position of great power who shares their doctrine.”

Roy Moore says he is running for the presidency because “there’s a need for leadership in the country,” and neither President Obama nor the leaders of both parties in Congress are providing that leadership. “Petty politics,” he says, are taking precedence over the needs of the country. “We can’t get anything done,” he says, “because decisions are [made] not what’s good for the country but what is good for the party.”

Moore identifies a weak economy as “the foremost problem today.” The nation “is going the wrong way,” he says. He acknowledges that much of the problem came under the Bush–Cheney Administration, “but was increased by Obama.” Although the Republicans propose cutting critical social programs rather than raising the debt ceiling, every Congressional leader, Democrat and Republican, voted to increase the debt ceiling during the past decade, with the highest increases under Republican presidents: Ronald Reagan (189%), George H.W. Bush (55%), and George W. Bush (86%). In Bill Clinton’s two terms the debt ceiling was increased only 37 percent; Barack Obama is asking for a 35 percent increase.

Moore, a “states’ rights” advocate, shares the views of most conservative candidates for the Presidency. Among those views are:

● the federal income tax should be abolished.

● Abortion, for any reason, should not have federal funds because not only does it “contradict the right to life contained in the organic law of our country,” it violates the 14th Amendment.

● People should “have the right to choose their own employment,” instead of having to join unions. Therefore, says Moore, all states should have “right-to-work” laws. If Moore’s vision is enacted, these laws would effectively cripple unions from representing the workers.

● Same sex marriage, says Moore, violates the will of God. In one case, while he served as chief justice, he argued that homosexual behavior is “a crime against nature, an inherent evil, and an act so heinous that it defies one’s ability to describe it.”

However, on a couple of issues, his views lean closer to those of liberals. He opposes the nation’s entry into war without Congressional authorization. Moore is a graduate of West Point, who became an MP company commander at the end of the Vietnam War, and then graduated from the University of Alabama law school. He opposes the U.S. intrusion into Libya on both military and legal grounds. “It’s very easy for a president to be sucked into global wars,” he says, “but it’s not our goal to go over there [Libya] and take out a leader just because we don’t like him.” Unlike many Republicans, he acknowledges that the Libyan attack, like the U.S. invasion of Iraq under the Bush–Cheney Administration, should have had Congressional approval under the War Powers Act of 1973.

Moore, who owns horses—he once spent a year as a cowboy in Australia working for a fundamentalist Christian—believes that the dwindling population of wild horses and burros in the Southwest, and all wild animals, should be protected. Both the Bush–Cheney and Obama administrations have failed to do so, often influenced by the cattle and meat industry.

Moore, near the bottom of the pack in the polls, probably won’t become the Republican nominee. But, unlike some conservative candidates, he doesn’t parade his religious beliefs to gain votes. He lives the life of his religious convictions, and isn’t afraid to make sure everyone knows what they are, especially when they provide the base for his political and judicial views.

Dante evoked the descent into the underworld to intimate the understanding that darkness is an aspect of human nature and that self-awareness arrives only after an exploration of the hidden, self-censored regions of one’s psyche. Only after passing through the inner most circle of the frozen hellscape does it become possible for Dante to look upward and gaze upon Beatrice’s splendor among the spheres of Heaven.
 

His Journey began, lost in a dark woods, with his path blocked by a hungry she-wolf and fierce lion. Then, led there by the pagan poet, Virgil, the adamantine gates of Hell (posting that famous sign regarding hope forever abandoned) slammed shut behind him. But the poet’s descent deep into the unsavory aspects of his nature made possible those glimpses of beatific light.
 

You, darkness, that I come from
I love you more than all the fires
that fence in the world, 
for the fire makes a circle of light for everyone
and then no one outside learns of you.
 
But the darkness pulls in everything — 
shapes and fires, animals and myself, 
how easily it gathers them! — 
powers and people –
 
and it is possible a great presence is moving near me
 
I have faith in night
 
– Rainer Maria Rilke

 
Otherwise, as is the case with the Puritan/Calvinist imagination, an individual risks becoming purity-obsessed and light-intoxicated i.e., lacking in the will and ability to see the dark side of their nature; hence, one is prone to project one’s own motives on the actions of others.
 
Possessed by this state of mind, an individual is capable of inflicting a great amount of damage on his own psyche. Witness: the raging, lower order demons, inhabiting their own personal hellscapes, as channeled by the likes of Bachmann, Palin, and the Reverend Robertson.
 
Yet, rationalistic devices such as reductionist reasoning and humanistic psychology have proven useless in breaching the high walls of delusion bulwarking fundamentalist, free-floating crazy.
 
Why? Reductionism is a bi-product of the western Puritan/Calvinist tradition, and as such is prone to the pathologies inherent in the cosmology…wherein there exists: an habitual winnowing down of perception to controllable, exploitable bits; the dismissing of all things (the veracity of imagination, the emanations of nature and the souls of animals) that do not serve narrowed agendas (which are defining characteristics of its scion — the corporate state — and those within its institutions who have internalized its raison d’être).
 
Both Fundamentalist and reductionist mindsets are cemented in certitude. In fact, each is the shadow side of the other; hence, hyper-rationalists and religious literalists are locked in contemptuous embrace. Both evince, with their obsession with the other, a longing for rapprochement with their missing half, yet their encounters become a courtship dance of animus and antagonism, whereby their mutual yearning for union is expressed as a compulsion to transform the other.
 
Therefore, the rationalist is driven to proffer balms of superstition-purging logic, as, in turn, the religious true believer frets over the doomed-to-eternal-damnation, mortal soul of the salvation-bereft rationalist. Yet both causation-clutching logicians and credulous lambs of the lord share this trait: both have banished from their respective belief system the appropriation of empathetic imagination and a poetic approach to mystery.
 
Accordingly, the ideal use of poetic insight, intellectual rigor, and quicksilver wit is to deploy these tools (at times, weapons) of the mind — in the manner the hubris-hating gods intended — to confront bullies, rednecks, liars, prigs and hypocrites (including our own self-serving casuistry), to disarm (or, at least, annoy) the brutal, conniving and witless, and, in general, paraphrasing Whitman, “to cheer up slaves and to horrify despots.”
 
Yet, today, if a poet were to merge his body with the body of America, instead of discovering a Body Electric, he would find himself endowed with the hulking, putrefying corpse of a shambling zombie. Accordingly, he must tear a rotting arm from the monster and beat his own laughing corpse with it. Creating a movable autopsy, a Book Of The Dead for a dying empire.
 
Worse, in the world beyond U.S. self-reference, the earth’s oceans are dying — as, on a personal level, Fukushima’s isotopes penetrate our bones like parasitic beetles boring into the trunks of dying trees
 
And this is not simply a view of the world. In fact, this is the state of the world.
 
Don’t defend the indefensible — the soul-defying banality of the present system. The neo-liberal superstate is unsustainable and will bring on its own demise.
 
Instead, like a mourner in a New Orleans funeral march, dance with the dread involved. The music of sorrow is more real than the magical thinking required to believe an insane system is salvageable. Don’t stand, back pressed to the wall, frozen in rationalization and equivocation…Exalt in the unfurling mystery of it all.
 
Crackpot realists demand solutions and Christian Fundamentalist pray for finality. I demur. I stand in awe of the ragged glory immanent in sublime futility.

“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.”
– Samuel Beckett

I suspect this attitude arrives from the southerner/Native American collision of genes in me. One’s broken places allow the spirit in. No need to fix the problem, for the problem is the solution. No call for satanic caulk to seal the cracks in one’s soul that reveal one’s character.
 
And why is this important, particularly, at a time when our opponents are unflagging in their certitude? Because even when our reason to fight has merit, and nuance is banished, the larger truth that life itself contains paradox and is comprised of ambiguity remains. Thus, fascist fantasies of infallibility are toppled and the misguided trudge toward the mirage of paradise is waylaid…perhaps leveling a measure of humanizing grace.
 
“None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.”
– Goethe

The Sicarii played a principal role in provoking the Roman onslaught against the Jewish population in Jerusalem and in the eventual destruction of the city. Their identifying characteristics: victim hood, no compromises, use of daggers to resolve issues, generating hate, and creating victims. Two questions still require responses: Why did the Sicarii pursue a suicide effort and why did the first century Jews tolerate their presence?

History tells us that populations never learn from history and proceed to commit the same mistakes. The Jews have followed this principal; Sicarii have been prevalent throughout Jewish history and have often brought tragedy to Jewish populations.

Roman crushing of the Jewish rebellion in Jerusalem in 67 AD did not stop Jewish rebellions in Roman territories. Thirty eight years later, Jewish tribes in Crete, Cyrenaica (modern day eastern Libya), Cyprus, Mesopotamia and the Aegean took advantage of Roman struggles with attacks from other nations to start the Kitos war. According to Roman history, the war “spiralled out of control resulting in a widespread slaughter of Roman citizens and others by the Jewish rebels. The rebellions were finally crushed by Roman legionary forces, chiefly by the Roman general Luseis Quietus, whose name gave the conflict its title.”

The Jewish Encyclopedia describes the Cyrene massacres:

By this outbreak Libya was depopulated to such an extent that a few years later new colonies had to be established there.

In Cyprus a Jewish band under a leader named Artemion had taken control of the island, killing thousands of civilians. Under the leadership of one Artemion, the Cypriot Jews participated in the great uprising against the Romans under Trajan, and they are reported to have massacred 240,000 Greeks (Dio Cassius, lxviii. 32). A small Roman army was dispatched to the island, soon reconquering the capital. After the revolt had been fully defeated, laws were created forbidding any Jews to live on the island.

Wars undertaken with no possibility of permanent victory; just the opposite, certain destruction of the Jewish populations. And all this done when history considers the Jews relatively accepted and free to practice their religion in the Roman Empire.

In the first century AD, Jews lived across the Roman Empire in relative harmony.

Protected by Rome and allowed to continue their religion, everything was fine until rebellion in Judaea led to a major change in the practice of their faith.

By the beginning of the first century AD, Jews had spread from their homeland in Judaea across the Mediterranean and there were major Jewish communities in Syria, Egypt, and Greece. Practicing a very different religion from that of their neighbors, they were often unpopular. As a result, Jewish communities were often close-knit, to protect themselves and their faith.

Jews had lived in Rome since the second century BC. Julius Caesar and Augustus supported laws that allowed Jews protection to worship as they chose. Synagogues were classified as colleges to get around Roman laws banning secret societies and the temples were allowed to collect the yearly tax paid by all Jewish men for temple maintenance.

There had been upsets: Jews had been banished from Rome in 139 BC, again in 19 AD and during the reign of Claudius. However, they were soon allowed to return and continue their independent existence under Roman law.

If fighting and losing two wars against impossible odds was not sufficiently punishing, Simon Bar Kokhba, a proclaimed Messiah, commandered another revolt against the Roman Empire during the years 132–136 AD. The revolt temporarily succeeded in establishing an independent state of over parts of Judea for two years before the Roman army overcame the rebellion. Result: The Romans barred Jews from Jerusalem, except for Tisah B’av, a fast day that commemorates the destruction of the Jerusalem Temples

Sicarrii among the Jews continued for centuries with false Messiahs and troubling figures who defied authority in losing causes.

For several reasons, the initial Zionist thrust resembled the Sicarii actions.

Althought their philosophy had little appeal to the Jewish people of the late 19th century, Zionists behaved as if they spoke for the Jews, and their actions threatened them.

The first Zionist Congress (1887) was to have taken place in Munich, Germany. However, due to considerable opposition by the local community leadership, both Orthodox and Reform, it was decided to transfer the proceedings to Basle, Switzerland. Theodore Herzl acted as chairperson of the Congress which was attended by some 200 participants. (Only 69 were delegates)

The Reform Judaism’s (representing most of American Jews at that time) 1885 Pittsburgh Platform called for Jews to adopt a modern approach to the practice of their faith.

Instead of a nation, the Pittsburgh Platform envisions Jews as a religious community within a nation. For this reason, there was an explicit rejection of Zionism, which was viewed as unnecessary because American Jews were at home in America.

The 19th century emancipation movements liberated west and middle European Jews and permitted them to integrate into European society. The Russian Jews, who had major problems, didn’t consider Zionism as a relief for their difficulties.

Between 1881 and 1914, 2.5 million Jews migrated from Russia–2 million to America and only 30,000 to Palestine. Another 500,000 went to the large capitals of Western Europe.

Bernard Avishai, The Tragedy of Zionism

Rather than benefiting world Jewry, the Zionist message endangered it. Nations were uncertain about their Jewish citizens, who were portrayed by Zionists as having different consciences and mind-sets. Zionism presented Jews as having allegiance to an external ideal, willing to leave their native country if the opportunity became available.

By 1914 the original Zionism had become a stagnant adventure. The Balfour Declaration and the allied victory in World War I revived the Zionist mission. Despite the revival and the establishment of the state of Israel, it’s unproven that the original Zionism succeeded or even has a presence. The Jews who immigrated to Israel immediately after 1948 arrived for mainly economic and political reasons and not to fulfill a Zionist mission. Israel even claims the massive number of immigrants from North Africa and the Middle East (Mizrahi) did not arrive voluntarily, but were forced out of their homes. Zionism has not persuaded a great number of Jews to leave their western nations, not deterred them from greatly participating in their nations’ economic and social gains and not prevented them from integrating themselves into their nations’ cultures. The Economist (Jan.11, 2007) mentions that only 17% of American Jews regard themselves as pro-Zionist and only 57% say that “caring about Israel is a very important.” Even if Israel were not primarily a Jewish nation, but politically similar to other western nations and willing to give the immigrants special largesse, the odds favored the willingness of the North African and Middle East Jews to leave their homes and move to any democratic nation in the Middle East, Jewish or non-Jewish..

The attempt to recruit the world in an embargo against Nazi Germany in 1933 can be considered a Sicarii effort.

Jewish organizations initiated an international boycott campaign as a response to German discriminatory policies and abuses of German Jews. In March 1933 the American Jewish War Veterans and the American League for the Defense of Jewish Rights launched the first US Jewish boycott campaign.

Although, undoubtedly originated with proper intentions, the boycott was doomed and counterproductive. Nations struggling with economic depressions did not want to disturb world trade, had enough of their own problems and weren’t prepared to encounter Germany. The Nazis, who would never have been moved by any embargo, took advantage of the intended boycott to try to prove their argument that Jews engaged in international conspiracies. The boycott campaign further enraged the Nazis against the Jews and tightened the discrimination against them.

The underground war fought by Jewish militias against the British Mandate exposed more Sicarii.

The Altalena, carrying members of the right-wing Irgun militia, was sunk in 1948 after arriving in Tel Aviv against the Israeli government’s orders. The encounter left 16 Irgun members and three IDF soldiers dead.

The King David Hotel bombing in Jerusalem on 22 July 1946 killed 91 people, including17 Jews.

The Jewish underground organization Lehi assassinated British Minister Resident in the Middle East Lord Moyne, and United Nations mediator Folke Bernadotte. Although banned by the Israeli government and called “a criminal group of terrorists” by the UN, Israel granted a general amnesty to Lehi members on 14 February 1949.

Eventual Israeli Prime Ministers committed each of these atrocious actions. David ben Gurion ordered the sinking of the Atalena; Menachem Begin carried out the King David hotel bombing and Isaac Shamir was known as a leading member of the Lehi.

The modern Sicarii, those who claim to speak for the Jewish people but are bringing them to eventual decline, have replaced metal daggers with character assassination, defamation, attacking words, wounding innuendos and bludgeoning malice towards their fellow Jews. They have a unique focus of utmost loyalty to the state of Israel. Jews who don’t share their views and refuse to profess similar loyalty receive their daggers of condemnation.

Neither historical, scientific, or archaeological findings and knowledge, supports a great Hebrew civilization. Jewish legal claims to the Levant, and singular heritage to Jerusalem, contradict the Iscarii focus. Nevertheless, the Iscarii consider fellow Jews who are educated with this knowledge as stupid and deceived traitors and unleash their wrath to intimidate and silence them. Preposterous expressions, such as ‘self-hating’ Jews, anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism, and all those who are antagonistic to Israel are anti-Semites, exhibit a lexicon of hate that guides their actions. The over-used epithets expose the Sicarii’s lack of facts, reality and logic to support their arguments. The rights of others – no consideration at all.

These insulting and ugly epithets solicit examples of “Jewish baseness,” Jewish lack of regard for others, and Jewish feelings of superiority and fuel anti-Jewish feeling. The Iscarii promote the objects they rally against, and which they actually need to validate their existence.

Iscarii websites unashamedly list fellow ‘self-hating’ Jews.

http://www.heebz.com/categories/Self-Hating-Jews
http://masada2000.org/list-K.html

These lists pit Jew against Jew, upset innocent persons and defame Jews. Some persons noting the social quality of individuals in the list have asked to be placed on it. However, the lists are not jokes, but an insult to the Jewish people.

Words beget violence and the more radical Iscarii are driven to violence. The most well known appearance of their violence is the attacks on Tikkun’s Rabbi Lerner.

Only one day after Rabbi Lerner presented the Tikkun Award to South African Justice Richard Goldstone, at a celebration of Tikkun‘s twenty-fifth anniversary attended by over 600 people at the University of California, Berkeley, Lerner’s home was again assaulted by extremist Zionists who once again plastered posters over his home. This is the third assault on Lerner’s home since he announced he would be presenting the award to Justice Goldstone, whose report on Israel’s human rights violations during the Israeli assault on Gaza in Dec. 2008 and Jan.2009 was denounced by the State of Israel and by the AIPAC-dominated House of Representatives last year.¹

An array of well known and consistent dagger throwers in universities, radio, television and print media target those who criticize Israel by trying to curtail professorial tenure, halt publication of books, prevent production of plays, and sidetrack printing of articles. These attackers don’t dialogue or debate issues. They are not interested in truth or reality. Sparked by, “We are always right,” they engage in character assassination, slander and defamation to subdue their rivals. Most disconcerting is their use of the World War II Holocaust to advance their agenda. In addition to appointing themselves as the voice of live Jews, the Iscarii assume themselves to be the voice of dead Jews.

A true story of a typical Iscarious

Seated at breakfast in a Jerusalem hostel, a forty year old English woman explains why she is a new arrival in the West Bank settlement Ma’ale Adumim. She never felt at home in an England filled with anti-Semites. Here, in Israel she feels she has come home. Turn to an American who is asked if he feels the same. He explains he never faced anti-Semitism in his life and never felt anything else but being an American. His words enrage the British expatriate who leaps up and utters: No, first you are a Jew. Then, you are an American.

It is natural that many Jews, regard their birth nation as their primary faith and remain separated from Israel. Many regard Israeli laws to be intolerant, not protective of minorities and somewhat comparable to the Nazi Nuremburg laws. Some relations:

• Since Jews can only be married in Israel by orthodox rites, Jews cannot receive an intermarriage ceremony within the state.
• Although the term right of return refers to a principle of international law and gives any person the right to return or re-enter his country of origin, the Israeli Right of Return only permits foreign Jews to immediately gain citizenship and does not permit immigration of non-Jews, such as Palestinian refugees.
• An Israeli, according to the so-called Nakba law, must wholeheartedly and unreservedly celebrate the founding of the Jewish state in 1948. Any groups or institutions that mourn the event, which was accompanied by the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Arab residents from their homes – the Nakba, or Catastrophe – or that deny the state’s “Jewish and democratic nature” can now be denied state funds.
• The Citizenship Law allows the state to revoke citizenship and imprison anyone convicted of acting against “the sovereignty of the state”.
• Fifty rabbis signed a declaration calling for Jews not to let Arabs rent apartments in their communities. The state owns almost all the land and, except for special situations, refuses land sales to non-Jews.

In Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt noted similarity between the racist foundation of the state of Israel and the 1935 Nuremburg laws. Both laws were based on an idea of Judaism as a race, not as a religious practice, regardless of whether individuals identified themselves as a Jew or belonged to the Jewish religious community.

Many Jews refuse to accept the rationalization that the oppression of the Palestinian people is a temporary measure brought about by Israel’s security considerations. They see no reason to be drawn into the conflict in which they have no part. Not so with the new Iscarii.

Three huge granite stones rest comfortably on the top of Midbar Sinai Street, in Givat Havatzim, Jerusalem’s northernmost district. Cut to specification, the imposing stones represent one of several preparations by the Temple Mount and Land of Israel Faithful Movement’s to erect a Third Temple on the Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount. Since the Islamic Wafq owns and controls all the property on the Haram al-Sharif, by what means can these stones be transferred to the Temple Mount and how can a Temple be constructed there? Not by any legal means. The stones are a provocation, which the Israel government refuses to halt. Since the Iscarii now have the occupation forces on their side, it becomes obvious they will be more threatening. In ancient times, their efforts contributed to the destruction of Jerusalem. Now it could be the entire Middle East.

1. Zionist Extremist Hate Crime Against Rabbi Lerner: Third Attack on His Home and the Limits of “Freedom of the Press,” 3/17/2011, Berkeley, California

Rifat Kassis, co-ordinator of Kairos Palestine, said he was “deeply troubled” by the Archbishop’s “inaccurate and erroneous remarks” about the situation of Christians in the Middle East. He called the Archbishop’s failure to mention the Israeli occupation and the regime’s oppressive policies “shocking”.

In a letter to the Archbishop he said:

We were deeply saddened by your declarations because we know that Your Grace is well informed… and you know very well that in the Bethlehem area alone there are 19 illegal Israeli settlements (such as nearby Har Homa built on Jabal Abu Ghneim) and the wall that have devoured Christian lands and put Bethlehem in a chokehold. You know well that only 13% of Bethlehem area is available for Palestinian use and the wall isolates 25% or the Bethlehem area’s agricultural land. Not to mention the situation of Christians in Jerusalem, which you know very well, since you should have received reports from the Anglican Bishop in the City whose residency permit was denied by the occupying power.

Mr Kassis ended by saying:

We would like to remind Your Grace that Christian Palestinians need advocates for the truth. It is the truth, and only the truth, that will lead to peace and justice in our home.

So what did Archbishop Rowan Williams say to the BBC that so infuriated his Palestinian brethren?

Apparently it was the way he talked about the ethnic cleansing of Christians referring to extreme pressure in Iraq while suggesting that the exodus of Christians from Palestine was due to “a much more un-dramatic but equally steady and strong pressure”.

Interviewer: But that’s a strong term to use isn’t it, ethnic cleansing?

Archbishop: It is a strong term but I think not disproportionate where Iraq is concerned. The level of violence has been extreme.

However, Williams seemed careful to avoid connecting the term ‘ethnic cleansing’ with Israel’s programme to dispossess and terrorise Palestinians.

The interviewer then asked: Do you think that the British government, other governments, should be more vocal in their support for Christians who you are seeing at the moment under great difficulty in a number of these countries?

Archbishop: “Well, to be honest I think at the moment there is quite a lot of support. And I can’t fault what’s been said by our government on this issue because I think the issue of religious freedom in general has very high priority in the Foreign Office at the moment. So I hope that continues.”

The truth is that the British Foreign Office is staffed with pro-Israel placemen and has not lifted a finger for religious or any other freedoms in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

The Archbishop continued:

Also I think people in the West know perfectly well that if foreign powers take up the cause of a minority in another country, it can be utterly counterproductive.

Was he, by any chance, thinking about the foreign powers that implanted Jewish aliens in the Holy Land in 1947 and the running sore ever since?

He went on to  say:

I think there are still perhaps too few people in this country who are aware of the haemorrhaging of Christian populations from the Holy Land.   The fact that Bethlehem, a majority Christian city just a couple of decades ago, is now very definitely a place where Christians are a marginalised minority. We want that to be a little bit higher on people’s radar…

Interviewer: Would you see what’s happening in Bethlehem as another example of what you’ve described as ethnic cleansing?

Archbishop: It’s not ethnic cleansing exactly because it’s been far less deliberate than that I think. What we’ve seen though is a kind of Newtonian passing on of energy or force from one body to another so that some Muslim populations in the West Bank, under pressure, move away from certain areas like Hebron, move into other areas like Bethlehem. And there’s nowhere much else for Christian populations to go except away from Palestine.

I’m sure that trapped and imprisoned Palestinian Christians will be relieved to hear that their misery is all down to Newtonian energy effects.

Archbishop Williams’s comments about Bethlehem were “particularly faulty and offensive”, according to Rifat Kassis, especially his claim that Muslims coming into the Bethlehem area, where space is limited, was forcing Christians to leave.

Are the Archbishop and his Anglican Church the ‘advocates for the truth’ so desperately needed?

It is not the first time the Archbishop has upset Palestinian Christians. For decades the Israelis’ game has clearly been to obstruct and paralyse Christianity in the Holy Land. When Palestine was under British mandate, Christians accounted for 20 per cent of the population. Sixty-three years of hostilities, dispossession, interference and economic ruination have whittled their numbers down to less than 2 per cent. At this rate there will soon be no Christians left in the land where Christianity was born.

And in November 2008, while Israel was planning its murderous assault against Gaza’s civilians (including the Christian community), the Archbishop of Canterbury was gallivanting with the Chief Rabbi, Sir Jonathan Sacks, on a visit to the former Nazi camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland to demonstrate their joint solidarity against the extremes of hostility and genocide.

“This is a pilgrimage not to a holy place but to a place of utter profanity,” said the Archbishop, “a place where the name of God was profaned because the image of God in human beings was abused and disfigured. How shall we be able to read the signs of the times, the indications that evil is gathering force once again and societies are slipping towards the same collective corruption and moral sickness that made the Shoah possible?”

Evil was again gathering its forces and corruption and moral sickness were on the rampage even as he spoke. And did the Archbishop and the Chief Rabbi afterwards go to sniff the stench where the name of God had been profaned in the ruins of the Gaza Strip and utter the same brave words?

Did they hell!

When the Church of England’s head honcho finally visited Gaza, the Israelis refused him access to the Strip but at the last minute allowed him into the shattered enclave for just one-and-a-half hours, enough time to show his face at the hospital and no more. He said nothing about his experience to the House of Lords where he has a seat and the support of a large gaggle of bishops.

This despite his claim to be “in a unique position to bring the needs and voices of those fighting poverty, disease and the effects of conflict, to the attention of national and international policy makers”, despite his declaration that “Christians need to witness boldly and clearly”, and despite his urging greater awareness of the humanitarian crisis to ensure that the people of Gaza are not forgotten.

The Archbishop’s website, however, did report how he hobnobbed with the Chief Rabbinate of Israel, paid his respects to Yad Vashem and the Holocaust, and talked with the President of Israel. There was no mention of any similar get-togethers with senior Islamic figures, leaving a question-mark over his real commitment to inter-faith engagement.

The Archbishop’s agreeing to accept the hospitality of Jewish political and religious dignitaries while they squished his wish to carry out his Christian duties in Gaza, tells us a great deal.

So is the guy a closet Zionist like so many other so-called Christians?

I’m reminded of the words of Desmond Tutu: “Where there is oppression, those who do nothing side with the oppressor.”

“Christianity destroyed not by Muslims but by Israel.”

The Archbishop has a chance to redeem himself with the international conference on Christians in the Holy Land he plans to hold next month. For two days I’ve been asking his press office for details of delegates, keynote speakers, etc. but have received nothing.  We are left to speculate.

It would be nice if the conference were addressed by that excellent trio from the Holy Land — Archbishop Theodosius Hanna (Greek Orthodox Church), Monsignor Manuel Musallam (Latin Catholic) and Mr Constantine Dabbagh (Executive Director of the Middle East Council of Churches)? These courageous spiritual leaders and human rights defenders toured Ireland last November to raise awareness of the situation in their homeland under Israeli military occupation and the plight of the dwindling Christian community. Their central message was simple: “We need only one thing, to be protected by the world against the crimes of Israel” (For details please see my article “No such thing as justice in the Holy Land”, 14 December 2010.)

Fr Manuel told members of the Irish Government:

Christianity in the region has been destroyed not by Muslims but by Israel. Israel destroyed the church of Palestine and the church of Jerusalem beginning in 1948. It, not Muslims, has sent Christians in the region into a diaspora… Christians in Palestine are not suffering persecution, because we are not considered to be a religious community, but rather the people of Palestine. We have the same rights and the same obligations.

We have spoken to Israel for more than 18 years and the result has been zero. We have signed agreements here and there at various times and then when there is a change in the Government of Israel we have to start again from the beginning. We ask for our life and to be given back our Jerusalem, to be given our state and for enough water to drink…  I have not seen Jerusalem since 1990.

However, given the Anglican Church’s recent form, it wouldn’t surprise me if the conference is hosted by the CMJ (the Church’s Ministry among Jewish People). The CMJ is “propelled by devotion to God and the fulfillment of His promises to His people Israel”. In its statement of faith the CMJ says Christians have “a special responsibility to love, defend and share the Gospel with God’s historic, chosen People, the Jews”.

The CMJ’s attitude to the Israel-Palestine struggle is unhelpful to the Palestinians. For example…

• Gentiles are “fellow-citizens with God’s people”…
• CMJ rejoices that, after 2000 years… the Jewish people now, at last, have returned to the land from which the majority were dispersed in AD70…
• CMJ recognizes that the State of Israel was set up as a result of a majority vote of the United Nations in 1947… However the Ministry does not hold any official position as to the appropriate location of the borders of the state.

That signifies approval for Israel’s continuing land-grab and lawlessness.  If CMJ recognizes the UN’s partition, it should also accept the borders on which it was based.

According to Wikipedia, “CMJ has always adopted a Zionist position, and expressed the view that the Jewish people deserved a state in the Holy Land decades before Zionism began as a movement.”

The CMJ was adopted as an official ministry of the Church of England in 1995 and has been operating in the shadows ever since. It is, if you like, the Church of England’s Zionist wing.