… now this may sound convoluted, but not if one tracks the cultural response of hostility from every passionate point of view when a leadership itself is so prone to unjustifiable violence and un-American diminishment of the constitution. What do you think is going to happen? What do you think the American hopeless will do…? We better consider what the fundamentalist within will put on our table…

This quote is from Sean Penn speaking last August in Denver, CO at a rally to open the presidential debates to “third parties” and independent candidates. This excerpt was part of Penn’s attempt at foreshadowing how violence could become the last line of defense against a corrupt government and debased political process that is devoid of substantive democratic debate and participation.

“Shooter”

Last Thursday afternoon at the initial press conference regarding the Fort Hood shooting, it would take General Cole over a minute – and a check of his notes — to quickly and begrudgingly clarify that “the shooter was a soldier”. To be fair, this was probably a difficult and embarrassing admission for the General; indeed, the reservation, disbelief, and shock that embodied the General’s speech and demeanor during this press conference smacked of genuine surprise and exigent circumstances as opposed to premeditated, administrative misdirection. Linguist John McWhorter has noted that the pervasive and grammatically incorrect use of the term “troops” to identify individual soldiers killed or sent to war is impersonal and demeaning; additionally, he states that “using a name for soldiers that has no singular form grants us a certain cozy distance from the grievous reality of war”. Nidal Hasan as “shooter”, and not the more accurate, descriptive, and clear “soldier”, further decouples the actions of the Major from the appropriate military context and pushes it into the realm of inexplicable civilian criminality.

Shock

The real shock of last Thursday’s events is that they were much of a shock at all. There was the justifiable visceral shock of individuals having to emotionally internalize and absorb this act of brutal violence and murder; on the other hand, there was a larger, needless, abhorrent, and dishonest intellectual shock and morally-bankrupt flight to fantasy used by individual actors within our reified mainstream media to explain the day’s events. This faux shock took the form of prejudiced, irresponsible, and sadistic language, images, and fabrications designed to cover-up our society’s colossal failures of military aggression (i.e., global war on terrorism), soldier care and protection, and American democracy as a whole. One General using the term “shooter” to allay the cognitive dissonance associated with his soldier’s behavior is perhaps understandable. The corporate-crafted-elite-friendly news coverage provided a nefarious distraction from the more obvious and likely motives, context, and factual circumstances of the event. The media projected the collective guilt and ramifications of this nation’s larger war ethos and bloodlust onto this “shooter” in an attempt to further ameliorate the discontent of the citizenry brought on by a duplicitous permanent war economy.

The Media

Last Thursday’s media spectacle unfolded as a disgusting montage of avoidance and denial. Prior to General Cole’s initial address to the media, TV news outlets focused on the more improbable and far-fetched scenario that outside actors penetrated the base to carry out an attack — stories and questions abound about lax and inadequate security measures, permeable gates, etc. The focus was traditional “terrorists”, like the ones we’re supposedly fighting overseas, or homegrown “domestic terrorists”. Though not impossible causes, given the type, breadth, and scope of operations of Fort Hood (soldier returning and debarking centers, psychological services, etc.), the media conveniently discounted the likely scenario that a soldier(s) instigated the attacks and instead focused on terrorist perpetrators working from the outside-in. Even after the General’s announcement that this was soldier-on-soldier violence, the language of the media did not embrace the basic facts — we continued to see “suspect”, “shooter”, the very convenient and oft-used “lone gunman”, and more problematic “Muslim” splash across our screens. Hasan was no longer a soldier — perhaps a justified, if not trite and childish redaction of a murderer’s factual stature – but now was part of a possible “sleeper cell” or domestic terrorist conspiracy. No evidence abound to substantiate these theories, but reiterating the factual scenario that this was an apparently stable, accomplished, and respected American soldier turned murderer had to be avoided — it begged the larger questions and challenged America’s narcissistic mores. Any factual and empirical analysis of context, one that could actually occur in the absence of the more tactical facts of that day, was avoided in deference to further innuendo and speculation. The potential spectacle of terrorism would be much more useful to state-corporate power than a humiliating analysis of America’s global military folly coming home to roost with devastating consequences.

The real story was not broached in deference to the morbid advertisement of the body count, a sadistic drive to understand the killer’s exact path through the buildings, how he managed to fire so many rounds, trite detail about where his handguns originated from, etc. The true thrust of the story should have been that the act was committed by a soldier, and why? Predictably, the only suitable means for the media to address this fact was not on the public policy level, but exclusively on the private level of neoliberal tenets: personal responsibility and individual pathology: What, literally, was wrong with Hasan’s brain? What about his personal life and religion? Why didn’t he have a wife? Why did he require psychological counseling? Did he not relate well to others? Was he exposed to interpersonal discrimination because he was a Muslim? Etc.

The media conveniently ignored the prescient questions and relevant policy issues that could have been informed by military experience and empirical fact. A more appropriate and probative line of questioning and investigation might have gone as follows: What is the prevalence of violence, murder, and/or other antisocial/self-destructive behavior among soldiers and veterans to our recent wars? Under what conditions and why have similar acts occurred — how have we addressed them? What drives other soldiers to resist deployment? What is fueling the soldiers’ and veterans’ record levels of domestic abuse, divorce, suicide, substance abuse, unemployment, poverty, bankruptcy, homelessness etc? What do the difficulties of our enlisted soldiers and veterans tell us about our war efforts? What ramifications of our wars could inspire such violent behavior? Does military violence overseas beget violence at home — how? Do civilian casualties of war inspire soldiers and others to commit crimes? Are soldiers empowered with a constructive way to stop civilian casualties within their work scope and operating procedures? Are objecting soldiers encouraged to leave active duty? Can soldiers object or opt-out of war and still maintain their military livelihood? Are soldiers helpless, powerless, disempowered, and driven to violence because they have no means to prevent their duplicity in unjust wars? Are foreign soldiers and civilians respected by our military? Are war crimes prosecuted adequately? Are appropriate reparations consistently granted to innocent civilians affected by our wars? Can soldiers be heard and bring charges against military personnel without retribution? Are military strategies coherent, defensive in nature, and do they have a moral and ethical foundation? Is military strategy and justification understood along the chain of command — is soldier input considered and valued? Is conscientious objector status too onerous? The military knows the wars are unpopular at home, abroad, and with soldiers — why weren’t they prepared? Shouldn’t this act have been expected? What does this say about our war efforts? Some of these questions seem naive, even after the killings, given the nature of the military and our pernicious appetite for invading; however, if they were seriously considered in the past, maybe we wouldn’t be counting the dead at Fort Hood.

The vile and cruel nature of the media was further evidenced by the impugning of Hasan’s reported history of psychological counseling. A simple sound bite in the news let viewers know what the proper cultural attitude should be: seeking psychological help is a sign of weakness; worst yet, by implication, it is a precursor to murderous rage. Major Hasan became a double-whammy of weakness: not only did he seek psychological counseling, but he inflicted it on other soldiers and thereby facilitated the weakness and stigmatization of his fellow soldiers. The hypocrisy of this media teaching is overwhelming. How many of the media-dubbed “heroes” killed by Hasan had sought psychological counseling due to their exposure to warfare? This malignant labeling by the media is akin to calling a soldier who seeks mental health support a “ticking time bomb” or “sleeper cell agent”. More importantly, it devalued the ongoing importance of mental health services in the military and diminished the level of cultural caring for those who suffer psychologically.

Similar correlations (i.e., not causality) were mangled in a prejudiced attempt to impugn Muslims. When soldier-on-soldier violence is between Caucasian parties of strong Christian faith, we don’t start investigating the perpetrator’s church and reverend as a source of motive. America’s imperialist wars disproportionately affect followers of Islam. It is common sense that many Muslims are resistors to our empire; however, the implication by the media that there is something inherent to being a Muslim that drives anti-American and antiwar sentiment is false. This assertion is only useful in a propaganda system designed to demean and devalue our enemies, to make those affected by aggression more disposable and invisible, and divert attention from the human toll of state terrorism.

The inconvenient truth is the deplorable act committed by Major Hasan cannot be a shock because we knew it was coming; in fact, it was foreseeable, unavoidable, and inevitable to a moral certitude. It takes no leap of imagination to understand this act as a predictable outcome of criminal wars of aggression, torture, and indifference to the slaughter and displacement of foreign peoples under the guise of freedom, democracy, and the market. The tragedy at Fort Hood represents a failure of the ubiquitous rotten soul shared by our major political parties — a soul that throws taxpayer capital and the weight of corporate campaign contributions behind the projection of American power and empire. Contrary to the current state of our nation’s maniacal foreign policy denial, the “liberated” foreign recipients of American interventionism are not disposable or invisible — Major Hasan’s mass murder was a simple violent inversion of our military expansionism. Last Thursday, in the absence of the more or less trivial, private, and logistical facts surrounding Major Hasan’s actions, our country’s blatant criminal indifference to the ramifications of expansive foreign policy is what truly informed the events of the day. If we disregard the media delving further into the sadistic and titillating spectacle of details — along with its use of discriminatory deflection masquerading as informed speculation — our focus could have been narrowed to the scant but significant known facts at the time: an apparently successful and otherwise stable American soldier had turned on his fellow soldiers in cold blood. The context in which to evaluate such an act is painfully obvious, empirical support abounds, and analogous events involving soldiers were readily available to use as a lens to understand Major Hasan’s actions. They were all discarded because of their common thread: what they tell us about war and how it affects people.

Scribd

The mangling of language surrounding Hasan was best evidenced by the yet unproven attribution of a Scribd comment to him regarding suicide bombings. Whether Hasan is the author is beside the point because the quote was used in a very real way by the media as disinformation, propaganda, and distraction. The quote was never addressed or explained in its full context; additionally, selective text and interpretation of the full post was leveraged by the media to create a false impression of equivalency. Omissions played on our nation’s larger cultural pedagogy of fear. Here is text of the full post:

NidalHasan scribbled: There was a grenade thrown amongs a group of American soldiers. One of the soldiers, feeling that it was to late for everyone to flee jumped on the grave with the intention of saving his comrades. Indeed he saved them. He inentionally took his life (suicide) for a noble cause i.e. saving the lives of his soldier. To say that this soldier committed suicide is inappropriate. Its more appropriate to say he is a brave hero that sacrificed his life for a more noble cause. Scholars have paralled this to suicide bombers whose intention, by sacrificing their lives, is to help save Muslims by killing enemy soldiers. If one suicide bomber can kill 100 enemy soldiers because they were caught off guard that would be considered a strategic victory. Their intention is not to die because of some despair. The same can be said for the Kamikazees in Japan. They died (via crashing their planes into ships) to kill the enemies for the homeland. You can call them crazy i you want but their act was not one of suicide that is despised by Islam. So the scholars main point is that “IT SEEMS AS THOUGH YOUR INTENTION IS THE MAIN ISSUE” and Allah (SWT) knows best.

What is immediately clear is that this is not in any sense a direct, first person equivocation of suicide bombing with a soldier sacrificing his own life to save his comrades. This is clearly a man using metaphor and real life examples to explain another man’s writing and interpretation of Islam relative to suicide and what are contemporaneously called suicide bombers. At any rate, this is hardly a direct endorsement of suicide bombing; additionally, neither example used in the post reference the killing of civilians.

Let’s take what the media intended to construe after they mangled, circumscribed, quoted out of context, and generally reshaped the meaning of this post: an American soldier throwing oneself on a grenade to save fellow soldiers is equivalent to a suicide bomber. We all know “suicide bomber” in western-corporate-media parlance means killing civilians. The media’s assertion is obviously true: throwing oneself on a grenade to save your fellow soldiers is in no way morally equivalent to preemptively killing civilians.

However, consider the following quote given that the civilian “kill ratio” of American drone bombings inside Pakistan have been reported by the Brookings Institution to be 90% (9 civilians are killed for every 1 “terrorist”) and perhaps much higher according to other sources:

      They tellin’ you to never worry about the future
      They tellin’ you to never worry about the torture
      They tellin’ you that you’ll never see the horror
      Spend it all today and we will bill you tomorrow
      Three piece suits and bank accounts in Bahamas
      Wall Street crime will never send you to the slammer
      Tell all the children in the arms of their mammas
      The F-15 is a homicide bomber

      – “Yell Fire!,” Michael Franti & Spearhead, 2006

So, how is our “homicide bomber” different from Hasan’s purportedly righteous suicide bomber? They aren’t — they are both the same: morally repugnant and based on the vacuous logic of preventive killing. This kind of preemptive, criminal murder is sanctioned and largely unquestioned US policy — the kind committed by our enemies is condemned. Moral equivocations that do not justify American empire are outside the spectrum of what is considered polite, acceptable political discourse. Perhaps our version is just more cowardly, as the bomber is not eviscerated in the cause and doesn’t become a martyr. Our bomber sits behind a computer, maybe flies a plane hopped-up on amphetamines, and is always in some manner detached enough (physically and psychically) from the act to confer continued legitimacy on the act’s criminal planners. The inevitable “collateral damage”, as it is repeated over time, is not aptly designated as state terrorism — it becomes an Orwellian “accident”. This is the policy of our President; a man Libertarian Christopher Dowd has called a “criminal sociopath” for labeling our misadventures in Iraq as an “extraordinary achievement”, among other things. Obama is the “Teflon Don” behind the uniquely American version of the suicide bomber: he is instant judge, jury, and executioner. He is a recidivist homicide bomber who will remain legally infallible until the civic imagination and courage of his countrymen put an end to his run.

Leadership

A cogent and fact-based analysis of the effects of unjust war on the health and attitudes of soldiers was lost on our “leadership” as well. It is indeed shocking to have to digest the mind-numbing hypocrisy of a President decrying “a horrific outburst of violence”, while he is on the verge of sending tens of thousands more “troops” to a bottomless pit of US-sponsored death and despair in the Middle East. Obama’s impending “surge” of violence and manpower in his “war of necessity” is of course acceptable when conducted by our corporate-imperial state. The results of this brand of leadership are as predictable as the events of last Thursday: more acts of criminal violence justified as legitimate resistance by the powerless, more budding jihadists overseas, and hundreds of thousands more innocent women and children slaughtered on foreign soil. Shocking is the deviousness of a leader willing to minimize the ramifications of bankrupt imperial hubris — his logic of preventive war and empire, through its own weight and internal logic, collapsing inward and consuming itself along with the victims at Fort Hood.

Our leaders are well aware of the bubbling undercurrent of rage and resistance regarding our unjust wars and the disproportionate-to-rank physical, mental, and moral toll it places on soldiers; they know all the reasons for the discontent of their “troops”; and they know that soldiers are disempowered, discouraged, punished, and stigmatized for speaking-out or seeking help. In doing absolutely nothing of significance to rein in our criminal wars, they are responsible to forestall the foreseeable violence that will be enlisted by soldiers who feels powerless, overwhelmed, and boxed-in, a la Major Hasan. They abrogated this responsibility and have yet to offer anything but puffery and palliative solutions when it comes to soldier discontent and preventing inevitable soldier-on-soldier violence.

Our President, oft dubbed a brilliant orator, didn’t manage to mention soldier-on-soldier violence during his initial remarks last Thursday at a Tribal Nations Conference. Instead, he opened with several minutes of inane rambling that included a mislabeled “shout out” to “Congressional Medal of Honor” winner Dr. Joseph Medicine Crow before vaguely addressing the situation at Fort Hood (Crow was award the civilian Medal of Freedom). Obama’s performance was eerily reminiscent of George Bush Jr.’s Booker Elementary fiasco on the morning of 9/11.

The President’s weekly radio address on Saturday was another dilatory exercise that reeked of distraction: Hasan, not mentioned directly, remained a “shooter”. Obama let us know that any painful exploration and reexamination of the unintended consequences of our war machine was off-the-table — preemptively. Obama divined: “We cannot fully know what leads a man to do such a thing.” No — but we are obligated to explore all causes, including the ones that lie beyond the waters-edge of personal responsibility, deviance, and unintelligible rage and murder. We also can’t brush aside the unpleasant, blatant, and searing facts staring us in the face — the ones that blind us from reality and conveniently remain outside the acceptable spectrum of American political discourse.

The suicidal and Pyrrhic forces unleashed as a result of 9/11 need to be addressed in the light of day, as part of a broader, civic self-examination of our nation. This seems to be a moral and ethical exploration that Obama is unwilling or incapable of leading. Obama’s real constituents, like campaign benefactor turned government-sponsored enterprise Morgan Stanley, announced in a report published that day after his election that “…Obama has been advised and agrees that there is no peace dividend…” Indeed, the opportunity costs of the daily outbursts of violence, suffered by citizens of all corners of the globe where US forces are deployed, could never be enumerated by a financial-sector sycophant such as Obama. Fort Hood is just another “no peace dividend” event to Barack. Torture, rendition, indefinite detention, criminal indifference to the suffering of civilians overseas — all these are a slap in the face to soldiers. Sending soldiers to unjust wars and letting them reap the whirlwind of consequences is an abrogation of leadership. Kowtowing to corporate leaches whose single-minded pursuit of profits, no matter the cost to the earth and mankind, does not instill hope. Change is accomplished by addressing the real twin deficits of our supposedly participatory democracy: corporate power and empire.

The second casualty of war: imagination

The events at Fort Hood were a massive security breakdown, not on scale but of type with 9/11; in fact, it was a double failure that we couldn’t protect the soldiers from harm at home, nor ensure the mental “security” of the very people entrusted to maintain the psychological well-being of soldiers. This fact represents a complete abject failure of military and civilian leadership at the highest levels: they know the havoc and despair we (as an imperialist nation) are heaping-on foreigners overseas; they know we are indiscriminately killing, displacing, or impoverishing millions in the Middle East; they know that our “accidents” and apologies do not justify criminal murder and fail to meet the standards of international law; they know that US military might is destroying any real hope and opportunities for change available to generations of Iraqi, Afghani, and Pakistani youth; they know that we are torturing, rendering, and denying basic human rights; they know we treat global justice and the sovereignty of nations with scorn; they know all these things — but most importantly — they know we know. Only arrogant denial and lack of caring on behalf of our leaders explain this security failure; that is the shock. This double failure of security merely informs a larger double failure and interdependency of our foreign and domestic policies: our imperial devastation overseas (killing civilians, spurring more budding jihadist, etc.) can only be driven by domestic degradation (police states, inadequate care for soldiers and veterans, civic disenfranchisement, economic exploitation, etc.)

We, as a society, can’t continue to pervert language and sideline the public-private linkages that drive the human cost of war to incalculable levels. We can’t continue to deny Hasan is an American Soldier, a Major, and our native son, just because he turned against our “wars of necessity”. He chose a deplorable and bankrupt path that mimics his own country’s policy of preventive executions and homicide bombings. Apparently we can’t handle this truth; it has to be terrorism and radical Islam; we’re unable to pray for his soul or our own. We can’t imagine the asymmetrical moral horror and evil that is our “extraordinary achievement” in Iraq, our continuously rebranded “Af/Pak” policy, and all our other malevolent “overseas contingency operations”. We can’t continue to avert our eyes from the private suffering of human beings due to these public policy failures.

Much needed and accessible democratic outlets don’t seem to exist in Obama’s corporatized worldview. As Chris Hedges has noted, moral autonomy and political agency are under attack; the results of which are docility and pacification, but also bouts of unfocused, unproductive, and abnormal rage, violence and desperation. Our morbid government-corporate alliance can’t continue to kill with impunity overseas, unleash a police state on the homeland, enslave the majority of Americans to neoliberal scraps from the economic table, and feign shock when homegrown resistance occurs in a radicalized form. Our leaders can’t ignore sane advice and expect peace — consider the following from a Rand Corporation report published last year titled “How Terrorist Groups End — Lessons for Countering al Qaida”:

Military force has rarely been the primary reason for the end of terrorist groups… and military force led to the end of terrorist groups in 7 percent of the cases… The evidence by 2008 suggested that the U.S. strategy was not successful in undermining al Qa’ida’s capabilities… Al Qa’ida has been involved in more terrorist attacks since September 11, 2001, than it was during its prior history.

In terms of recommendations, here is some of the language:

First, policing and intelligence should be the backbone of U.S. efforts… This means a light U.S. military footprint or none at all. The U.S. military can play a critical role in building indigenous capacity but should generally resist being drawn into combat operations in Muslim societies, since its presence is likely to increase terrorist recruitment.

As far as the thrust of last Thursday’s events, Nidal Hasan was a soldier who turned on his comrades with whom he spent years trying to ensure their psychological wellbeing given the theaters of war in which they operated. Why? Perhaps time will tell, but the private travails and motives of Hasan can’t be decoupled from the larger public policy issues and context that inform his actions.

Our myopic cultural obsession with terrorism forestalls antiwar debate and consideration of the trauma of war; it blinds us from recognizing that peace should be considered, weighed, and debated as an alternative. Peace has become devoid of value, delegitimized, and undeserving of human caring and championing. It has been stripped of cultural fit in a society constantly under the siege of fear; it has lost credibility in the neoliberal-friendly “emergency time” posited by Henry Giroux. Collectively, citizens must find a way to discuss Major Hasan’s action not only as a possible stress response, but as a misguided antiwar statement of a powerless man, in a hallowed-out democracy, that is increasingly devoid of personal political agency and power sharing. Explanation, understand, and cause should not be trumped by the fear of “justification” when a legitimate concern is expressed inappropriately. Murder is the desperate flight to fantasy of a “shooter” — why it became the only instrumentality left for a US citizen and soldier requires a pragmatic and realistic investigation of motive, not one moored in a fantasyland of “freedom-hating” Muslims and terrorists.

As a country, we can’t deny our self-destruction masked in the pride of nationalist glory and “justifiable” vengeance. Every soldier sent, every civilian killed, and every dollar spent is just another step in our own ruination, in service of a corporate-military agenda, against a much ballyhooed “evil” enemy. We don’t understand our real enemies, and we do not dare, lest we approach “justification” of their “terrorist” resistance to US military might. We disregard the legitimate concerns of Hasan and our enemies abroad, and they need do nothing but sit back and watch us self destruct as we “spread freedom” around the globe. “Preventive”, “preemptive”: both words mean pre-fact and pre-cause, and result in unjustified criminal violence and aggression. Our military’s self-ascribed omniscient, predictive, and existential abilities do not jive with the realities of the world.

The needs of capital are a critical player in the circle of violence that enveloped the life of Major Hasan and Fort Hood last Thursday. Corporate capital has become the means to its own ends via a publicly subsidized-for-profit-private militia that operates in tandem with the US military overseas. Opening markets by bringing “democracy” to unwilling foreign recipients dovetails perfectly with the needs of capital. In this sense, our county’s wanton, international excesses are inextricably linked to our domestic moral deficits. Our recent historical transfer of wealth upward, regressive tax cuts, corporate bailouts, a business paradigm of growth (profits) at any extrinsic cost, etc. –the preconditions and funding of these capital-friendly events can only be achieved by the exploitation and gutting of the welfare state, the social contract, and any social safety net.

For us citizens, this neoliberal umbrellas means more Hasan-like events, police states, privatization, crushing military expenditures, debt peonage, media consolidation, etc. and a blind eye to the suffering of our youth, soldiers, veterans, children, and all those that can’t survive in America’s high-stakes game of state capitalism. The constitution is shred and we are left to cleanup the carnage at Fort Hood. The circle is completed with the debasement of representative government via “regulatory capture”, the “revolving door” between the government and private sectors, and a complete debasement of the electoral process by corporate campaign contributions. Politicians are corrupted and left to engage in what Ralph Nader has called “the politics of avoidance” when explaining events like those that took place at Fort Hood last Thursday. Corporate-imperial leaders, the needs of capital, and overflowing campaign coffers demand continuous war at the reciprocal expense of social justice and real political, economic, and cultural “safety”.

How much more debased and perverted can our war language become? It isn’t just convenient that our enemies lack state affiliation and sponsorship — our culture has embraced and internalized the impersonal language that denies the human dignity of our enemies: “combatants”, “insurgents”, “detainees”, “terrorists”, “extremists”, etc. None of this misdirection changes the fact that our disrespect for them and de-legitimization of their resistance is evidenced in the same lack of care and security we afford our soldiers — both our “terrorists” and theirs are caught up in the same dehumanizing and destructive US imperial drive.

It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.

— Voltaire

Question: How many countries do you have to be at war with to be disqualified from receiving the Nobel Peace Prize?

Answer: Five. Barack Obama has waged war against only Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia. He’s holding off on Iran until he actually gets the prize.

Somalian civil society and court system are so devastated from decades of war that one wouldn’t expect its citizens to have the means to raise serious legal challenges to Washington’s apparent belief that it can drop bombs on that sad land whenever it appears to serve the empire’s needs. But a group of Pakistanis, calling themselves “Lawyers Front for Defense of the Constitution,” and remembering just enough of their country’s more civilized past, has filed suit before the nation’s High Court to make the federal government stop American drone attacks on countless innocent civilians. The group declared that a Pakistan Army spokesman claimed to have the capability to shoot down the drones, but the government had made a policy decision not to.¹

The Obama administration, like the Bush administration, behaves like the world is one big lawless Somalia and the United States is the chief warlord. On October 20 the president again displayed his deep love of peace by honoring some 80 veterans of Vietnam at the White House, after earlier awarding their regiment a Presidential Unit Citation for its “extraordinary heroism and conspicuous gallantry.”² War correspondent Michael Herr has honored Vietnam soldiers in his own way: “We took space back quickly, expensively, with total panic and close to maximum brutality. Our machine was devastating. And versatile. It could do everything but stop.”³

What would it take for the Obamaniacs to lose any of the stars in their eyes for their dear Nobel Laureate? Perhaps if the president announced that he was donating his prize money to build a monument to the First — “Oh What a Lovely” — World War? The memorial could bear the inscription: “Let us remember that Rudyard Kipling coaxed his young son John into enlisting in this war. John died his first day in combat. Kipling later penned these words:

    “If any question why we died,
    Tell them, because our fathers lied.”

“The Constitution supposes what the history of all governments demonstrates, that the executive is the branch of power most interested in war, and most prone to it. It has accordingly with studied care vested the question of war in the legislature.” — James Madison, in a letter to Thomas Jefferson, April 2, 1798.

A wise measure, indeed, but one American president after another has dragged the nation into bloody war without the approval of Congress, the American people, international law, or world opinion. Millions marched against the war in Iraq before it began. Millions more voted for Barack Obama in the belief that he shared their repugnance for America’s Wars Without End. They had no good reason to believe this — Obama’s campaign was filled with repeated warlike threats against Iran and Afghanistan — but they wanted to believe it.

If machismo explains war, if men love war and fighting so much, why do we have to compel them with conscription on pain of imprisonment? Why do the powers-that-be have to wage advertising campaigns to seduce young people to enlist in the military? Why do young men go to extreme lengths to be declared exempt for physical or medical reasons? Why do they flee into exile to avoid the draft? Why do they desert the military in large numbers in the midst of war? Why don’t Sweden or Switzerland or Costa Rica have wars? Surely there are many macho men in those countries.

“Join the Army, visit far away places, meet interesting people, and kill them.”

War licenses men to take part in what would otherwise be described as psychopathic behavior.

“Sometimes I think it should be a rule of war that you have to see somebody up close and get to know him before you can shoot him.” — Colonel Potter, M*A*S*H

“In the struggle of Good against Evil, it’s always the people who get killed.” — Eduardo Galeano

After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, a Taliban leader declared that “God is on our side, and if the world’s people try to set fire to Afghanistan, God will protect us and help us.”⁴

“I trust God speaks through me. Without that, I couldn’t do my job.” — George W. Bush, 2004, during the war in Iraq.⁵

“I believe that Christ died for my sins and I am redeemed through him. That is a source of strength and sustenance on a daily basis.” — Barack Obama.⁶

Why don’t church leaders forbid Catholics from joining the military with the same fervor they tell Catholics to stay away from abortion clinics?

God, war, the World Bank, the IMF, free trade agreements, NATO, the war on terrorism, the war on drugs, “anti-war” candidates, and Nobel Peace Prizes can be seen as simply different instruments for the advancement of US imperialism.

Tom Lehrer, the marvelous political songwriter of the 1950s and 60s, once observed: “Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.” Perhaps each generation has to learn anew what a farce that prize has become, or always was. Its recipients include quite a few individuals who had as much commitment to a peaceful world as the Bush administration had to truth. One example currently in the news: Bernard Kouchner, co-founder of Medecins Sans Frontieres which won the prize in 1998. Kouchner, now France’s foreign secretary, has long been urging military action against Iran. Last week he called upon Iran to make a nuclear deal acceptable to the Western powers or else there’s no telling what horror Israel might inflict upon the Iranians. Israel “will not tolerate an Iranian bomb,” he said. “We know that, all of us.”⁷ There is a word for such a veiled threat — “extortion”, something normally associated with the likes of a Chicago mobster of the 1930s … “Do like I say and no one gets hurt.” Or as Al Capone once said: “Kind words and a machine gun will get you more than kind words alone.”

The continuing desperate quest to find something good to say about US foreign policy

Not the crazy, hateful right wing, not racist or disrupting public meetings, not demanding birth certificates … but the respectable right, holding high positions in academia and in every administration, Republican or Democrat, members of the highly esteemed Council on Foreign Relations. Here’s Joshua Kurlantzick, a “Fellow for Southeast Asia” at CFR, writing in the equally esteemed and respectable Washington Post about how — despite all the scare talk — it wouldn’t be so bad if Afghanistan actually turned into another Vietnam because “Vietnam and the United States have become close partners in Southeast Asia, exchanging official visits, building an important trading and strategic relationship and fostering goodwill between governments, businesses and people on both sides. … America did not win the war there, but over time it has won the peace. … American war veterans publicly made peace with their old adversaries … A program [to exchange graduate students and professors] could ensure that the next generation of Afghan leaders sees an image of the United States beyond that of the war.”⁸ And so on.

On second thought, this is not so much right-wing jingoism as it is … uh … y’know … What’s the word? … Ah yes, “pointless.” Just what is the point? Germany and Israel are on excellent terms … therefore, what point can we make about the Holocaust?

As to America not winning the war in Vietnam, that’s worse than pointless. It’s wrong. Most people believe that the United States lost the war. But by destroying Vietnam to its core, by poisoning the earth, the water, the air, and the gene pool for generations, the US in fact achieved its primary purpose: it left Vietnam a basket case, preventing the rise of what might have been a good development option for Asia, an alternative to the capitalist model; for the same reason the United States has been at war with Cuba for 50 years, making sure that the Cuban alternative model doesn’t look as good as it would if left in peace.

And in all the years since the Vietnam War ended, the millions of Vietnamese suffering from diseases and deformities caused by US sprayings of the deadly chemical “Agent Orange” have received from the United States no medical care, no environmental remediation, no compensation, and no official apology. That’s exactly what the Afghans — their land and/or their bodies permeated with depleted uranium, unexploded cluster bombs, and a witch’s brew of other charming chemicals — have to look forward to in Kurlantzick’s Brave New World. “If the U.S. relationship with Afghanistan eventually resembles the one we now have with Vietnam, we should be overjoyed,” he writes. God Bless America.

One further thought about Afghanistan: The suggestion that the United States could, and should, solve its (self-created) dilemma by simply getting out of that god-forsaken place is dismissed out of hand by the American government and media; even some leftist critics of US policy are reluctant to embrace so bold a step — Who knows what horror may result? But when the Soviet Union was in the process of quitting Afghanistan (during the period of May 1988-February 1989) who in the West insisted that they remain? For any reason. No matter what the consequences of their withdrawal. The reason the Russians could easier leave than the Americans can now is that the Russians were not there for imperialist reasons, such as oil and gas pipelines. Similar to why the US can’t leave Iraq.

Washington’s eternal “Cuba problem” — the one they can’t admit to

“Here we go again. I suppose old habits die hard,” said US Ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, on October 28 before the General Assembly voted on the annual resolution to end the US embargo against Cuba. “The hostile language we have just heard from the Foreign Minister of Cuba,” she continued, “seems straight out of the Cold War era and is not conducive to constructive progress.” Her 949-word statement contained not a word about the embargo; not very conducive to a constructive solution to the unstated “Cuba problem,” the one about Cuba inspiring the Third World, the fear that the socialist virus would spread.

Since the early days of the Cuban Revolution assorted anti-communists and capitalist true-believers around the world have been relentless in publicizing the failures, real and alleged, of life in Cuba; each perceived shortcoming is attributed to the perceived shortcomings of socialism — It’s simply a system that can’t work, we are told, given the nature of human beings, particularly in this modern, competitive, globalized, consumer-oriented world.

In response to such criticisms, defenders of Cuban society have regularly pointed out how the numerous draconian sanctions imposed by the United States since 1960 have produced many and varied scarcities and sufferings and are largely responsible for most of the problems pointed out by the critics. The critics, in turn, say that this is just an excuse, one given by Cuban apologists for every failure of their socialist system. However, it would be very difficult for the critics to prove their point. The United States would have to drop all sanctions and then we’d have to wait long enough for Cuban society to make up for lost time and recover what it was deprived of, and demonstrate what its system can do when not under constant assault by the most powerful force on earth.

In 1999, Cuba filed a suit against the United States for $181.1 billion in compensation for economic losses and loss of life during the first 39 years of this aggression. The suit held Washington responsible for the death of 3,478 Cubans and the wounding and disabling of 2,099 others. In the ten years since, these figures have of course all increased. The sanctions, in numerous ways large and small, make acquiring many kinds of products and services from around the world much more difficult and expensive, often impossible; frequently, they are things indispensable to Cuban medicine, transportation or industry; simply transferring money internationally has become a major problem for the Cubans, with banks being heavily punished by the United States for dealing with Havana; or the sanctions mean that Americans and Cubans can’t attend professional conferences in each other’s country.

These examples are but a small sample of the excruciating pain inflicted by Washington upon the body, soul and economy of the Cuban people.

For years American political leaders and media were fond of labeling Cuba an “international pariah.” We don’t hear much of that any more. Perhaps one reason is the annual vote in the General Assembly on the resolution, which reads: “Necessity of ending the economic, commercial and financial embargo imposed by the United States of America against Cuba”. This is how the vote has gone:

How it began, from State Department documents: Within a few months of the Cuban revolution of January 1959, the Eisenhower administration decided “to adjust all our actions in such a way as to accelerate the development of an opposition in Cuba which would bring about a change in the Cuban Government, resulting in a new government favorable to U.S. interests.”⁹

On April 6, 1960, Lester D. Mallory, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, wrote in an internal memorandum: “The majority of Cubans support Castro … The only foreseeable means of alienating internal support is through disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship. … every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba.” Mallory proposed “a line of action which … makes the greatest inroads in denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.”¹⁰ Later that year, the Eisenhower administration instituted the suffocating embargo.

1. The Nation (Pakistan English-language daily newspaper), October 10, 2009.
2. Washington Post, October 20, 2009.
3. Michael Herr, Dispatches (1991), p.71.
4. New York Daily News, September 19, 2001.
5. Washington Post, July 20, 2004, p.15, citing the New Era (Lancaster, PA), from a private meeting of Bush with Amish families on July 9. The White House denied that Bush had said it. (Those Amish folks do lie a lot you know.)
6. Washington Post, August 17, 2008.
7. Daily Telegraph (UK), October 26, 2009.
8. Washington Post, October 25, 2009.
9. Department of State, “Foreign Relations of the United States, 1958-1960, Volume VI, Cuba” (1991), p.742.
10. Ibid., p.885

The second thought I had upon reading about the Vatican’s decision was that this was the religious version of a corporate takeover. Look, says the Vatican to those disaffected Anglicans and Episcopalians, your spiritual stock may be down because of the decisions of your church elders to accept all of god’s children into its flock as equals, but our church would never do such a thing. So, invest your soul with us. It’s a masterstroke of corporate raiding. Not only does the Vatican pick up some membership in North America, where its numbers have been declining for decades, but it also picks up the monies those former members of the Anglican churches give to their churches. In fact, when one considers the money, it is truly a masterstroke, since the Vatican’s most recent adherents come from the planet’s poorer continents, especially Africa. With the potential increase in relatively wealthy homophobic converts, the full coffers of the Catholic Church should increase even more.

It would be false to pretend that the entire reason for the growing disenchantment of conservative Anglicans is the election of an openly gay bishop to head the Episcopal Church in the United States. However, it is safe to say that this election was the straw that broke the proverbial camels back for those members. As the Anglican churches have grown increasingly liberal in their doctrine and approach to social justice, more and more traditionally conservative parishes and individual members have become extremely uncomfortable. In other words, the social gospel of Jesus makes certain Christians uneasy. If one considers the historical relationship of the Anglican Church to the British monarchist social order, it makes particular sense that the liberal interpretation of that gospel would make many church members question their allegiance. Like the Roman Catholic hierarchy, which has its struggle between liberal and conservative elements, the Anglican churches are undergoing a crisis. At this moment in history, it looks like the more conservative elements of the Vatican have won in the arenas where it actually has influence (leaving its position opposing imperial war and decrying poverty caused by global capitalism intact but essentially irrelevant), while in the Anglican churches it appears that the liberal elements have the upper hand.

Of course, neither of these powerful churches have the political power of the Christian faithful that align themselves with the fundamentalist churches across the United States. We are all familiar with these believers role in US elections the past few decades. When the fundamentalist churches ally themselves with the Catholic hierarchy—most often around their opposition to birth control and abortion—they can turn elections. When these two forces align themselves with the Mormon Church, as they did in California’s most recent election referendum against gay marriage, they proved the even greater power of that trinity.

“A nation is a group of people united by a common mistake regarding its origin and a collective hostility towards its neighbours.”¹

As simple or even simplistic as it may sound, the quote above eloquently summarises the figment of reality entangled with modern Jewish nationalism and especially within the concept of Jewish identity. It obviously points the finger at the collective mistake Jews tend to make whenever referring to their ‘illusionary collective past’ and ‘collective origin’. Yet, in the same breath, Deutsch’s reading of nationalism throws light upon the hostility that is unfortunately coupled with almost every Jewish group towards its surrounding reality, whether it is human or takes the shape of land. While the brutality of the Israelis towards the Palestinians has already become rather common knowledge, the rough treatment Israelis reserve for their ‘promised soil’ and landscape is just starting to reveal itself. The ecological disaster the Israelis are going to leave behind them will be the cause of suffering for many generations to come. Leave aside the megalomaniac wall that shreds the Holy land into enclaves of deprivation and starvation, Israel has managed to pollute its main rivers and streams with nuclear and chemical waste.

The Invention of the Jewish People is a very serious study written by Professor Shlomo Sand, an Israeli historian. It is the most serious study of Jewish nationalism and by far, the most courageous elaboration on the Jewish historical narrative.

In his book, Sand manages to prove beyond any reasonable doubt that the Jewish people never existed as a ‘nation-race’, they never shared a common origin. Instead they are a colourful mix of groups that at various stages in history adopted the Jewish religion.

In case you follow Sand’s line of thinking and happen to ask yourself, ‘when was the Jewish People invented?’ Sand’s answer is rather simple. “At a certain stage in the 19th century, intellectuals of Jewish origin in Germany, influenced by the folk character of German nationalism, took upon themselves the task of inventing a people ‘retrospectively,’ out of a thirst to create a modern Jewish people.”

Accordingly, the ‘Jewish people’ is a ‘made up’ notion consisting of a fictional and imaginary past with very little to back it up forensically, historically or textually. Furthermore, Sand — who elaborated on early sources of antiquity — comes to the conclusion that Jewish exile is also a myth, and that the present-day Palestinians are far more likely to be the descendants of the ancient Semitic people in Judea/Canaan than the current predominantly Khazarian-origin Ashkenazi crowd to which he himself admittedly belongs.

Astonishingly enough, in spite of the fact that Sand manages to dismantle the notion of ‘Jewish people,’ crush the notion of ‘Jewish collective past,’ and ridicule the Jewish chauvinist national impetus, his book is a best seller in Israel. This fact alone may suggest that those who call themselves ‘people of the book’ are now starting to learn about the misleading and devastating philosophies and ideologies that made them into what Khalid Amayreh and many others regard as the “Nazis of our time.”

Hitler Won After All

Rather often when asking a ‘secular’ ‘cosmopolitan’ Jew what it is that makes him into a Jew, a shallow overwhelmingly chewed answer would be thrown back at you: “It is Hitler who made me into a Jew.” Though the ‘cosmopolitan’ Jew, being an internationalist, would dismiss other people’s national inclinations, he insists upon maintaining his own right to ‘self determination’. However, it is not really he himself who stands at the core of this unique demand for national orientation, it is actually the devil, master-monster anti-Semite, namely Hitler. Apparently, the cosmopolitan Jew celebrates his nationalist entitlement as long as Hitler is there to be blamed.

As far as the secular cosmopolitan Jew is concerned, Hitler won after all. Sand manages to enhance this paradox. Insightfully he suggests that “while in the 19th century referring to Jews as an ‘alien racial identity’ would mark one as an anti-Semite, in the Jewish State this very philosophy is embedded mentally and intellectually.”² In Israel Jews celebrate their differentiation and unique conditions. Furthermore, says Sand, “There were times in Europe when one would be labelled as an anti-Semite for claiming that all Jews belong to a nation of an alien type. Nowadays, claiming that Jews have never been and still aren’t people or a nation, would tag one as a Jew hater.”²

It is indeed pretty puzzling that the only people who managed to maintain and sustain a racially orientated, expansionist and genocidal national identity that is not at all different from Nazi ethnic ideology are the Jews who were, amongst others, the leading targeted victims of the Nazi ideology and practice.

Nationalism In General and Jewish Nationalism In Particular

Louis-Ferdinand Celine mentioned that in the time of the Middle Ages in the moments between major wars, knights would charge a very high price for their readiness to die in the name of their kingdoms; in the 20th century youngsters have rushed to die en mass without demanding a thing in return. In order to understand this mass consciousness shift, we need an eloquent methodical model that would allow us to understand what nationalism is all about.

Like Karl Deutsch, Sand regards nationality as a phantasmic narrative. It is an established fact that anthropological and historical studies of the origins of different so-called ‘people’ and ‘nations’ lead towards the embarrassing crumbling of every ethnicity and ethnic identity. Hence, it is rather interesting to find out that Jews tend to take their own ethnic myth very seriously. The explanation may be simple, as Benjamin Beit Halachmi spotted years ago. Zionism was there to transform the Bible from a spiritual text into a ‘land registry.’ For that matter, the truth of the Bible or any other element of Jewish historical narrative has very little relevance as long as it doesn’t interfere with the Jewish national political cause or practice.

One could also surmise that the lack of clear ethnic origin doesn’t stop people from feeling an ethnic or national belonging. The fact that Jews are far from being what one can label as a People and that the Bible has very little historical truth in it, doesn’t really stop generations of Israelis and Jews from identifying themselves with King David or Terminator Samson. Evidently, the lack of an unambiguous ethnic origin doesn’t stop people from seeing themselves as part of a people. Similarly, it wouldn’t stop the nationalist Jew from feeling that he belongs to some greater abstract collective.

In the 1970’s, Shlomo Artzi, then a young Israeli singer who was bound to become Israel’s all-time greatest rock star, released a song that had become a smash hit in a matter of hours. Here are the first few lines:

   All of a sudden
   A man wakes up
   In the morning
   He feels he is people
   And he starts to walk
   And to everyone he comes across
   He says shalom

To a certain extent Artzi innocently expresses in his lyrics the suddenness and almost contingency involved in the transformation of the Jews into people. However, almost within the same breath, Artzi contributes towards the illusionist national myth of the peace-seeking nation. Artzi should have known by then that Jewish nationalism was a colonialist act at the expense of the indigenous Palestinian people.

Seemingly, nationalism, national belonging and Jewish nationalism in particular create a major intellectual task. Interestingly enough, the first to deal theoretically and methodically with issues having to do with nationalism were Marxist ideologists. Though Marx himself failed to address the issue adequately, early 20th century uprising of nationalist demands in eastern and central Europe caught Lenin and Stalin unprepared.

“Marxists’ contribution to the study of nationalism can be seen as the focus on the deep correlation between the rise of free economy and the evolvement of the national state.”³ In fact, Stalin was there to summarise the Marxist take on the subject. “The nation,” says Stalin, “is a solid collaboration between beings that was created historically and formed following four significant phenomena: the sharing of tongue, the sharing of territory, the sharing of economy and the sharing of psychic significance…”³

As one would expect, the Marxist materialist attempt to understand nationalism is lacking an adequate historical overview. Instead it would be reliant upon a class struggle. For some obvious reasons such a vision was popular amongst those who believe in ‘socialism of one nation’ amongst them we can consider the proponents of a leftist branch of Zionism.

For Sand, nationalism evolved due to the “ rapture created by modernity which split people from their immediate past”.⁴ The mobility created by urbanisation and industrialisation crushed the social hierarchic system as well as the continuum between past, present and future. Sand points out that before industrialisation, the feudal peasant didn’t necessarily feel the need for an historical narrative of empires and kingdoms. The feudal subject didn’t need an extensive abstract historical narrative of large collectives that had very little relevance to the immediate concrete existential need. “Without a perception of social progression, they did well with an imaginary religious tale that contained a mosaic of memory that lacked a real dimension of a forward moving time. The ‘end’ was the beginning and eternity bridged between life and death.”⁴

In the modern secular and urban world, ‘time’ had become the main life vessel which illustrated an imaginary symbolic meaning. Collective historical time had become the elementary ingredient of the personal and the intimate. The collective narrative shapes the personal meaning and what seems to be the ‘real.’ As much as some banal minds still insist that the ‘personal is political,’ it would be far more intelligible to argue that in practice, it is actually the other way around. Within the post-modern condition, the political is personal and the subject is spoken rather than speaking itself. Authenticity, for the matter, is a myth that reproduces itself in the form of symbolic identifier.

Sand’s reading of nationalism as a product of industrialisation, urbanisation and secularism, makes a lot of sense when bearing in mind Uri Slezkin’s suggestion that Jews are the ‘apostles of modernity,’ secularism and urbanisation. If Jews happened to find themselves at the hub of urbanisation and secularisation, it shouldn’t then take us by surprise that the Zionists were rather creative as much as others in inventing their own phantasmic collective imaginary tale. However, while insisting on their right to be ‘like other people’ Zionists have managed to transform their imagined collective past into a global, expansionist, merciless agenda as well as the biggest threat to world peace.

There Is No Jewish History

It is an established fact that not a single Jewish history text had been written between the 1st century and early 19th century. The fact that Judaism is based on a religious historical myth may have something to do with it. An adequate scrutiny of the Jewish past was never a primary concern within the Rabbinical tradition. One of the reasons is probably the lack of a need of such a methodical effort. For the Jew who lived during ancient times and the Middle Ages, there was enough in the Bible to answer most relevant questions having to do with day-to-day life, Jewish meaning and fate. As Shlomo Sand puts it, “a secular chronological time was foreign to the ‘Diaspora time’ that was shaped by the anticipation for the coming of the Messiah.”

However, in the light of German secularisation, urbanisation, and emancipation, and due to the decreasing authority of the Rabbinical leaders, an emerging need of an alternative cause rose amongst the awakening Jewish intellectuals. The emancipated Jew wondered who he was, where he come from. He also started to speculate what his role might be within the rapidly opening European society.

In 1820, the German Jewish historian Isaak Markus Jost (1793-1860) published the first serious historical work on Jews, namely The History of the Israelites. Jost avoided the Biblical time, he preferred to start his journey with the Judea Kingdom, he also compiled an historical narrative of different Jewish communities around the world. Jost realised that the Jews of his time did not form an ethnic continuum. He grasped that Israelites from place to place were rather different. Hence, he thought there was nothing in the world that should stop Jews from total assimilation. Jost believed that within the spirit of enlightenment, both the Germans and the Jews would turn their back to the oppressive religious institution and would form a healthy nation based on a growing geographically orientated sense of belonging.

Though Jost was aware of the evolvement of European nationalism, his Jewish followers were rather unhappy with his liberal optimistic reading of the Jewish future. “From historian Heinrich Graetz on, Jewish historians began to draw the history of Judaism as the history of a nation that had been a ‘kingdom’, expelled into ‘exile’, became a wandering people and ultimately turned around and went back to its birthplace.”

For the late Moses Hess, it was a racial struggle rather than a class struggle that would define the shape of Europe. Accordingly, suggests Hess, Jews better return and reflect on their cultural heritage and ethnic origin. For Hess, the conflict between Jews and Gentiles was the product of racial differentiation, hence, unavoidable.

The ideological path from Hess’s pseudo scientific racist orientation to Zionist historicism is rather obvious. If Jews are indeed an alien racial entity (as Hess, Jabotinsky and others believed), they better look for their natural homeland, and this homeland is no other than Eretz Yizrael. Cleary, Hess’s assumption regarding a racial continuum wasn’t scientifically approved. In order to maintain the emerging phantasmic narrative, an orchestrated denial mechanism had to be erected just to make sure that some embarrassing facts wouldn’t interfere with the emerging national creation.

Sand suggests that the denial mechanism was rather orchestrated and very well thought out. The Hebrew University decision in the 1930’s to split Jewish History and General History into two distinct departments was far more than just a matter of convenience. The logos behind the split is a glimpse into Jewish self-realisation. In the eyes of Jewish academics, the Jewish condition and Jewish psyche were unique and should be studied separately. Apparently, even within Jewish academia, a supreme status is reserved for the Jews, their history and their self-perception. As Sand insightfully unveils, within the Jewish Studies departments the researcher is scattering between the mythological and the scientific while the myth maintains its primacy. Yet, it often gets into a stalling dilemma by the ‘small devious facts.’

The New Israelite, the Bible, and Archaeology

In Palestine, the new Jews and later the Israelis were determined to recruit the Old Testament and to transform it into the amalgamate code of the future Jew. The ‘nationalisation’ of the Bible was there to plant in young Jews the idea that they are the direct followers of their great ancient ancestors. Bearing in mind the fact that nationalisation was largely a secular movement, the Bible was stripped of its spiritual and religious meaning. Instead, it was viewed as an historical text describing a real chain of events in the past. The Jews who had now managed to kill their God learned to believe in themselves. Massada, Samson and Bar Kochva became suicidal master narratives. In the light of their heroic ancestors, Jews learned to love themselves as much as they hate others, except that this time they possessed the military might to inflict real pain on their neighbours. More concerning was the fact that instead of a supernatural entity — namely God — who command them to invade the land and execute a genocide and to rob their ‘promised land’ of its indigenous inhabitants, within their national revival project it was them as themselves, Herzl, Jabotinsky, Weitzman, Ben Gurion, Sharon, Peres, Barak who decided to expel, destroy and kill. Instead of God, it was then the Jews killing in the name of Jewish people. They did it while Jewish symbols decorate their planes and tanks. They followed commands that where given in the newly restored language of their ancestors.

Surprisingly enough, Sand who is no doubt a striking scholar, fails to mention that the Zionist hijacking of the Bible was in fact a desperate Jewish answer to German Early Romanticism. However, as much as German philosophers, poets, architects and artists were ideologically and aesthetically excited about pre-Socratic Greece, they knew very well that they were not exactly Hellenism’s sons and daughters. The nationalist Jew took it one step further, he bound oneself into a phantasmic blood chain with his mythical ancestors, not before long he restored their ancient language. Rather than a sacred tongue, Hebrew had become a spoken language. German Early Romanticist never went that far.

German intellectuals during the 19th century were also fully aware of the distinction between Athens and Jerusalem. For them, Athens stood for universal, the epic chapter of humanity and humanism. Jerusalem was, on the contrary, the grand chapter of tribal barbarism. Jerusalem was a representation of the banal, non-universal, monotheistic merciless God, the one who kills the elder and the infant. The Germanic Early Romantic era left us with Hegel, Nietzsche, Fichte and Heidegger and a just a few Jewish self-haters, leading amongst them, Otto Weininger. The Jerusalemite left us with not a single master ideological thinker. Some German Jewish second-rate scholars tried to preach Jerusalem in the Germanic exedra, amongst them were Herman Cohen, Franz Rosenzveig and Ernst Bloch. They obviously failed to notice that it was the traces of Jerusalem in Christianity, which German Early Romanticists despised.

In their effort to resurrect ‘Jerusalem,’ archaeology was recruited to provide the Zionist epos with its necessary ‘scientific’ ground. Archaeology was there to unify the Biblical time with the moment of revival. Probably the most astonishing moment of this bizarre trend was the 1982 ‘military burial ceremony’ of the bones of Shimon Bar Kochva, a Jew rebel who died 2000 years earlier. Executed by the chief military Rabbi, a televised military burial was given to some sporadic bones found in a cave near the Dead Sea. In practice suspected remains of a 1st century Jew rebel was treated as an IDF casualty. Clearly, archaeology had a national role, it was recruited to cement the past and the present while leaving the Galut out.

Astonishingly enough, it didn’t take long before things turned the other way around. As archaeological research become more and more independent of the Zionist dogma, the embarrassing truth filtered out. It would be impossible to ground the truthfulness of the Biblical tale on forensic facts. If anything, archaeology refutes the historicity of the Biblical plot. Excavation revealed the embarrassing fact. The Bible is a collection of innovative fictitious literature.

As Sand points out, the Early Biblical story is soaked with Philistines, Aramaic and camels. Embarrassingly enough, as far as excavations are there to enlighten us, Philistine didn’t appear in the region before the 12th century BC, the Aramaic appears a century later and camels didn’t show their cheerful faces before the 8th century. These scientific facts lead Zionist researchers into some severe confusion. However, for non-Jewish scholars such as Thomas Thompson, it was rather clear that the Biblical is a “late collection of innovative literature written by a gifted theologian.”⁵ The Bible appears to be an ideological text that was there to serve a social and political cause.

Embarrassingly enough, not much was found in Sinai to prove the story of the legendary Egyptian Exodus, seemingly 3 million Hebraic men, women and children were marching in the desert for 40 years without leaving a thing behind. Not even a single matzo ball, very non-Jewish one may say.

The story of the Biblical resettlement and the genocide of the Canaanite which the contemporary Israelite imitates to such success is another myth. Jericho, the guarded city that was flattened to the sounds of horns and almighty supernatural intervention was just a tiny village during the 13th century BC.

As much as Israel regards itself as the resurrection of the monumental Kingdom of David and Salomon, excavation that took place in the Old City of Jerusalem in the 1970’s revealed that David’s kingdom was no more than a tiny tribal setting. Evidence that was referred by Yigal Yadin to King Solomon had been refuted later by forensic tests made with Carbon 14. The discomforting fact has been scientifically established. The Bible is a fictional tale, and not much there can ground any glorifying existence of Hebraic people in Palestine at any stage.

Who invented the Jews?

Quite early on in his text, Sand raises the crucial and probably the most relevant questions. Who are the Jews? Where did they come from? How is it that in different historical periods they appear in some very different and remote places?

Though most contemporary Jews are utterly convinced that their ancestors are the Biblical Israelites who happened to be exiled brutally by the Romans, truth must be said. Contemporary Jews have nothing to do with ancient Israelites, who have never been sent to exile because such an expulsion has never taken place. The Roman Exile is just another Jewish myth.

“I started looking in research studies about the exile from the land” says Sand in a Haaretz interview, “but to my astonishment I discovered that it has no literature. The reason is that no one exiled the people of the country. The Romans did not exile peoples and they could not have done so even if they had wanted to. They did not have trains and trucks to deport entire populations. That kind of logistics did not exist until the 20th century. From this, in effect, the whole book was born: in the realization that Judaic society was not dispersed and was not exiled.”

Indeed, in the light of Sand’s simple insight, the idea of Jewish exile is amusing. The thought of Roman Imperial navy was working 24/7 schlepping Moishe’le and Yanka’le to Cordova and Toledo may help Jews to feel important as well as schleppable, but common sense would suggest that the Roman armada had far more important things to do.

However, far more interesting is the logical outcome: If the people of Israel were not expelled, then the real descendants of the inhabitants of the Kingdom of Judah must be the Palestinians.

“No population remains pure over a period of thousands of years” says Sand. “But the chances that the Palestinians are descendants of the ancient Judaic people are much greater than the chances that you or I are its descendents. The first Zionists, up until the Arab Revolt [1936-9], knew that there had been no exiling, and that the Palestinians were descended from the inhabitants of the land. They knew that farmers don’t leave until they are expelled. Even Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, the second president of the State of Israel, wrote in 1929 that, ‘the vast majority of the peasant farmers do not have their origins in the Arab conquerors, but rather, before then, in the Jewish farmers who were numerous and a majority in the building of the land.’”

In his book Sand takes it further and suggests that until the First Arab Uprising (1929) the so-called leftist Zionist leaders tended to believe that the Palestinian peasants who are actually ‘Jews by origin’ would assimilate within the emerging Hebraic culture and would eventually join the Zionist movement. Ber Borochov believed that “a falach (Palestinian Peasant), dresses as a Jew, and behaves as a working class Jew, won’t be at all different from the Jew”. This very idea reappeared in Ben Gurion’s and Ben-Zvi’s text in 1918. Both Zionist leaders realised that Palestinian culture was soaked with Biblical traces, linguistically, as well as geographically (names of villages, towns, rivers and mountains). Both Ben Gurion and Ben-Zvi regarded, at least at that early stage, the indigenous Palestinians as ethnic relatives who were holding close to the land and potential brothers. They as well regarded Islam as a friendly ‘democratic religion’. Clearly, after 1936 both Ben-Zvi and Ben Gurion toned down their ‘multicultural’ enthusiasm. As far as Ben Gurion is concerned, ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians seemed to be far more appealing.

One may wonder, if the Palestinians are the real Jews, who are those who insist upon calling themselves Jews?

Sand’s answer is rather simple, yet it makes a lot of sense. “The people did not spread, but the Jewish religion spread. Judaism was a converting religion. Contrary to popular opinion, in early Judaism there was a great thirst to convert others.”

Clearly, monotheist religions, being less tolerant than polytheist ones have within them an expanding impetus. Judaic expansionism in its early days was not just similar to Christianity but it was Judaic expansionism that planted the ‘spreading out’ seeds in early Christian thought and practice.

“The Hasmoneans,” says Sand, “were the first to begin to produce large numbers of Jews through mass conversion, under the influence of Hellenism. It was this tradition of conversions that prepared the ground for the subsequent, widespread dissemination of Christianity. After the victory of Christianity in the 4th century, the momentum of conversion was stopped in the Christian world, and there was a steep drop in the number of Jews. Presumably many of the Jews who appeared around the Mediterranean became Christians. But then Judaism started to permeate other regions — pagan regions, for example, such as Yemen and North Africa. Had Judaism not continued to advance at that stage and had it not continued to convert people in the pagan world, we would have remained a completely marginal religion, if we survived at all.”

The Jews of Spain, whom we believed to be blood related to the Early Israelites seem to be converted Berbers. “I asked myself,” says Sand, “how such large Jewish communities appeared in Spain. And then I saw that Tariq ibn Ziyad, the supreme commander of the Muslims who conquered Spain, was a Berber, and most of his soldiers were Berbers. Dahia al-Kahina’s Jewish Berber Kingdom had been defeated only 15 years earlier. And the truth is there are a number of Christian sources that say many of the conquerors of Spain were Jewish converts. The deep-rooted source of the large Jewish community in Spain was those Berber soldiers who converted to Judaism.”

As one would expect, Sand approves the largely accepted assumption that the Judaicised Khazars constituted the main origins of the Jewish communities in Eastern Europe, which he calls the Yiddish Nation. When asked how come they happen to speak Yiddish, which is largely regarded as a German medieval dialect, he answers, “the Jews were a class of people dependent on the German bourgeoisie in the east, and thus they adopted German words.”

In his book Sand manages to produce a detailed account of the Khazarian saga in Jewish history. He explains what lead the Khazarian kingdom towards conversion. Bearing in mind that Jewish nationalism is, for the most part, lead by a Khazarian elite, we may have to expand our intimate knowledge of this very unique yet influential political group. The translation of Sand’s work into foreign languages is an immediate must.

What Next?

Professor Sand leaves us with the inevitable conclusion. Contemporary Jews do not have a common origin and their Semitic origin is a myth. Jews have no origin in Palestine whatsoever and therefore, their act of so-called ‘return’ to their ‘promised land’ must be realised as an invasion executed by a tribal-ideological clan.

However, though Jews do not constitute any racial continuum, they for some reason happen to be racially orientated. As we may notice, many Jews still see mixed marriage as the ultimate threat. Furthermore, in spite of modernisation and secularisation, the vast majority of those who identify as secular Jews still succumb to blood ritual (circumcision) a unique religious procedure which involves no less than blood sucking by a Mohel.

As far as Sand is concerned, Israel should become “a state of its citizens.” Like Sand, I myself believe in the same futuristic utopian vision. However, unlike Sand, I do grasp that the Jewish state and its supportive lobbies must be ideologically defeated. Brotherhood and reconciliation are foreign to Jewish tribal worldview and have no room within the concept of Jewish national revival. As dramatic as it may sound, a process of de-judaification must take place before Israelis can adopt any universal modern notion of civil life.

Sand is no doubt a major intellectual, probably the most advanced leftist Israeli thinker. He represents the highest form of thought a secular Israeli can achieve before flipping over or even defecting to the Palestinian side (something that happened to just a few, me included). Haaretz interviewer Ofri Ilani said about Sand that unlike other ‘new historians’ who have tried to undermine the assumptions of Zionist historiography, “Sand does not content himself with going back to 1948 or to the beginnings of Zionism, but rather goes back thousands of years.” This is indeed the case, unlike the ‘new historians’ who ‘unveil’ a truth that is known to every Palestinian toddler; i.e., the truth of being ethnically cleansed; Sand erects a body of work and thought that is aiming at the understanding of the meaning of Jewish nationalism and Jewish identity. This is indeed the true essence of scholarship. Rather than collecting some sporadic historical fragments, Sand searches for the meaning of history. Rather than a ‘new historian’ who searches for a new fragment, he is a real historian motivated by a humanist task. Most crucially, unlike some of the Jewish historians who happen to contribute to the so-called left discourse, Sand’s credibility and success is grounded on his argument rather than his family background. He avoids peppering his argument with his holocaust survivor relatives. Reading Sand’s ferocious argument, one may have to admit that Zionism in all its faults has managed to erect within itself a proud and autonomous dissident discourse that is far more eloquent and brutal than the entire anti-Zionist movement around the world.

If Sand is correct, and I myself am convinced by the strength of his argument, then Jews are not a race but rather a collective of very many people who are largely hijacked by a late phantasmic national movement. If Jews are not a race, do not form a racial continuum and have nothing to do with Semitism, then ‘anti-Semitism’ is, categorically, an empty signifier. It obviously refers to a signifier that doesn’t exist. In other words, our criticism of Jewish nationalism, Jewish lobbying and Jewish power can only be realised as a legitimate critique of ideology and practice.

Once again I may say it, we are not and never been against Jews (the people) nor we are against Judaism (the religion). Yet, we are against a collective philosophy with some clear global interests. Some would like to call it Zionism but I prefer not to. Zionism is a vague signifier that is far too narrow to capture the complexity of Jewish nationalism, its brutality, ideology and practice. Jewish nationalism is a spirit and a spirit doesn’t have clear boundaries. In fact, none of us know exactly where Jewishness stops and where Zionism starts as much as we do not know where Israeli interests stop and where the Neocon’s interests start.

As far as the Palestinian cause is concerned, the message is rather devastating. Our Palestinian brothers and sisters are at the forefront of a struggle against a very devastating philosophy. Yet, it is clearly not just the Israelis whom they fight with rather a fierce pragmatic philosophy that initiates global conflicts on some gigantic scale. It is a tribal practice that seeks influence within corridors of power and super powers in particular. The American Jewish Committee is pushing for a war against Iran. Just to be on the safe side David Abrahams, a ‘Labour Friend of Israel’ donates money to the Labour Party by proxy. More or less at the same time two million Iraqis die in an illegal war designed by one called Wolfowitz. While all the above is taking place, millions of Palestinians are starved in concentration camps and Gaza is on the brink of a humanitarian crisis. As it all happens, ‘anti-Zionist’ Jews and Jews in the left (Chomsky included) insist upon dismantling the eloquent criticism of AIPAC, Jewish lobbying and Jewish power posed by Mearsheimer and Walt.

Is it just Israel? Is it really Zionism? Or shall we admit that it is something far greater than we are entitled even to contemplate within the intellectual boundaries we imposed upon ourselves? As things stand, we lack the intellectual courage to confront the Jewish national project and its many messengers around the world. However, since it is all a matter of consciousness-shift, things are going to change soon. In fact, this very text is there to prove that they are changing already.

To stand by the Palestinians is to save the world, but in order to do so we have to be courageous enough to stand up and admit that it is not merely a political battle. It is not just Israel, its army or its leadership, it isn’t even Dershowitz, Foxman, and their silencing leagues. It is actually a war against a cancerous spirit that hijacked the West and, at least momentarily, diverted it from its humanist inclination and Athenian aspirations. To fight a spirit is far more difficult than fighting people, just because one may have to first fight its traces within oneself. If we want to fight Jerusalem, we may have to first confront Jerusalem within. We may have to stand in front of the mirror, look around us. We may have to trace for empathy in ourselves in case there is anything left.

1. When And How The Jewish People Was Invented Shlomo Sand, Resling 2008, p 11.
2. Sand, p 31.
3. p 42.
4. p 62.
5. p 117.

First, I passionately believe in the right of Israel to exist, to defend itself and to live in peace and security. Not just because of the tragedies of history. Not only because of the realities of today. Not simply because of my party’s unstinting support for Israel through the decades, but also because it’s something I feel very deep inside of me.
– David Cameron, June 21, 2009.

You see, it’s like this. They own the land, just the mere land and that’s all they do own; but it was our folks, our Jews and Christians, that made it holy, and so they haven’t any business to be there defiling it. It’s a shame and we ought not to stand it a minute. We ought to march against them and take it away from them.
– Tom Sawyer to Huck Finn in Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer Abroad, 1894.

David Cameron, leader of the Conservative Party in Britain, recently described his personal support for Israel in startling anatomical terms.¹ The game changer for Cameron, as he admits, is not the Holocaust, not oil, not even hallowed party tradition. Rather it is an inchoate something lodged so deeply in the Cameron innards that it apparently defies description.

But we already know what that something is. Tom Sawyer gave it a rough prescience more than 100 years ago. Jimmy Carter had no trouble pinpointing it two years ago when he penned a watery defense of his book Peace not Apartheid in “A letter to Jewish citizens of America” saying: [T]he overwhelming bias for Israel comes from among Christians like me who have been taught since childhood to honor and protect God’s chosen people from among whom came our own savior, Jesus Christ.²

(Carter’s pious blathering puts me in mind of the confession of an acquaintance raised a good Baptist who realized that after she stopped attending church and started dancing she was inexplicably dating only Jewish men. Eventually she realized that this peculiar attraction was simply a behavioral manifestation of her childhood theology. Nearer my God to Thee indeed!)

The public confessions of both Carter and Cameron passed with little notice, although naturally Cameron’s anatomical revelations received favorable coverage in the Jerusalem Post this past June. Expressions of religious fanaticism by Western leaders fail to excite the breathless commentary occasioned by those from bearded, swarthy monotheists.

The value of all of these confessions is that they shine a light on the dark heart of the relationship that Christendom has with the Zionist project or, as Angry Arab As’ad Abu Khalil calls it, the usurping entity. In fact, the left’s inability to grasp the emotionally charged and historic nature of Christendom’s religious relationship to Palestine is monumentally harmful. The effects of this deep culturally ingrained religiosity – Israel Shahak’s “weight of history” – cannot be underestimated. When such subjects are tabooed, as Shahak points out, their power over the discourse is strengthened. The dark underbelly of Christendom’s support for the usurping entity is rarely exposed to the light of day thus retaining its firm hold on Western public imagination.

However much the West boasts of its dedication to the Enlightenment, the document known as the Bible has Christendom securely in its vise-like grip. And the Bible (as Zionists will remind you) is nothing less than the founding document of their project. As the autobiography of what Gore Vidal has called the “Great Realtor in the Sky”, the Bible’s contents are by and large unlovely. The Realtor’s ongoing displeasure with just about everything and everyone and the violence resulting thereof fills its pages, so much so that The Skeptic has adjudged 26 of the 39 books of the Old Testament to have “no good stuff” whatsoever.³

With its long history of broad dissemination in the West (just look in the drawer of that bedside table when next you check into a motel) the Bible has for centuries functioned as an instructional tool, literary repository, law book and cultural arbiter. For all the condescending mockery Westerners made of Mao’s Little Red Book, the late Chairman’s musings can’t hold a candle to the Bible as far as intensity of influence or range of distribution. No other single document has so permeated and affected every aspect of Western society, its influence increasing rather than lessening as the centuries passed.

But only within the borders of Christendom. Consider if you will this anecdote. A Palestinian Christian gentleman of my acquaintance – now deceased – took to delivering home Sunday school lessons to his numerous family after they were violently expelled from their village in northern Palestine by Zionist thugs in 1948. Wielding his “tawrat” (Old Testament) and with a foul Tatli cigarette smoldering from the corner of his mouth, he would gather the kids round him in the one room dwelling that was their post-Nakba shelter and proceed to read out hair-raising verse after hair-raising verse detailing the mayhem, expropriation, rapine, massacre, child abuse, drought and death visited by The Realtor on some hapless folk or other. He would then slam the covers shut and proceed to deliver his own commentary on the day’s text. “This is why we’re in this mess” he would rant, “Because of people who believe in this sort of crap.”

Denizens of Christendom these days are unable to make such connections, not the least because they have largely been spared from being on the business end of Biblical-inspired weaponry in recent history. In the past, when they did put two and two together, retribution was swift and fatal as in the case of brave Phoebe Ward, condemned to death because she “took a mighty disgust at Things of Religion” and was duly hanged at Tyburn in 1711 right around the same time jolly Jonathan Swift was publishing his satires on religion.⁴ Little good did Swiftian satire or Phoebe’s imprecations do. Over the centuries Christendom’s masses were gradually disciplined by the rope, the stake, the lash, the workhouse, transportation, slavery, the factory or the prison and finally anesthetized by wealth, patriotism and excess. As a result, blasphemy is rare these days. More’s the pity.

We are imprisoned by the Bible here in Christendom’s heartland: Personal names, geographic names, hundreds of years of literature oozing with Biblical themes and allusion, the Ten Commandments on courthouse lawns, politicians tripping over each other to swear fealty to The Realtor, pledges of allegiance, in God we trust — you name it — Biblical influence has seeped into the entire cultural and political structure of the West in ways no other religious document has done anywhere else.

And then there are those Crusades, themselves inspired by the notion of Biblical ownership and lust for plunder, their spirit embodied in the Zionist project today. Clearly in spite of the passing of centuries they are still a sore spot, as Tom Sawyer reminds us. It is not for nothing that George Bush first referred to the war on terror as a “crusade”. It is not for nothing that Tony (“Tony’s Christian faith is part of him, down to his cotton socks”) Blair answered the question put to him by Jeremy Paxman, “Did you and President Bush pray together?” with a rattled negative followed by an inexplicable grin.⁵ It is even unremarkable that Frenchy Papist Jacques Chirac conveniently remained mute on Bush’s 2003 ravings about combating Gog and Magog in the Middle East until only recently.⁶ Christian solidarity is apparently paramount when waging the Crusade.

Even with the enormous historic weight behind Christendom’s unshakeable support for the usurping entity, the power of the Zionist lobby is nothing to sniff at. Highly organized, heavily funded, and brandishing a personal land contract from The Realtor, it has thousands of dedicated sayanim at the ready and is a force to be reckoned with. But because it operates on the pliant and welcoming home court of Christendom its perpetual success is assured for the nonce.⁷

There is nothing left but to continue to point out the rank hypocrisy of Christendom’s command and control central; an American hypocrisy and spite projecting outwardly on poor, dark-skinned folks its own imperial religious fanaticism in the endless “war on terror” with its correlate, lavish and craven support for the usurping entity. The Crusades are going strong these days, in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Gaza and the US penal gulag.

The doctrine of preemption – that uniquely Talmudic and Calvinist construct — has replaced presumption of innocence. The gloomy patron saint of Protestantism lays down for us the Biblical legality behind the “indiscriminate and promiscuous slaughter” so expertly practiced today by both the armies of Christendom and the usurping entity:

The indiscriminate and promiscuous slaughter [of Joshua in Jericho], making no distinction of age or sex, but including alike women and children, the aged and decrepit, may seem an inhuman massacre, had it not been executed by the command of God. But as he, in whose hands are life and death, had justly doomed those nations to destruction, this puts an end to all discussion…. If anyone object that children, at least, were still free from fault, it is easy to answer, that they perished justly, as the race was accursed and reprobated.⁸

A new Krak de Chevalier has been erected in Baghdad’s Green Zone. Hundreds of American military bases — latter-day Rumeli Hisars — dot the globe, serving as Christendom’s armed outposts. The disconnect between Christendom’s pretense to humanism, secularism and enlightenment while providing full support for a vicious crusader theocracy engaged in a slow, deliberate and completely public genocide is ignored. Sending forth drones in Pakistan, murderously occupying and destroying Iraq, showering captive civilians with white phosphorus are all actions rooted in preemptive Biblical prerogative. From dispensationalists, to liberals, from the Green Party to left-wing Zionism, belief in the Bible’s land contract is a shared yet unacknowledged currency.

No doubt David Cameron smugly regards himself as the very epitome of an enlightened English gentleman. But for all the philosophy and politics the privileged Tory read down at Oxford he still admits to a seemingly mysterious intestinal affinity to the usurping entity. The weight of history is hard to face and even harder to purge. And as what passes as Christendom’s progressives sink into a terminal docility, Obama and the Zionists vigorously prosecute the new Crusade on all its fronts. The Bible tells them so.

1. Jerusalem Post, June 21, 2009.
2. Jimmy Carter Issues Letter to Jewish Community on Palestine Peace Not Apartheid, December 15, 2006.
3. The Skeptic’s Annotated Bible.
4. Peter Limbaugh, The London Hanged, p.148.
5. ”Bush and Blair never prayed together, their wives say,” March 2, 2009. Also see: “Blair believed God wanted him to go to war to fight evil, claims his mentor.”
6. James Haught, “A French Revelation, or the Burning Bush.”
7. ”Home Court Advantage: Religion and the Israel Lobby.”
8. John Calvin, Commentaries on the Book of Joshua, c. 1533

The move followed the arrest of the movement’s leader, Sheikh Raed Salah, on Tuesday on suspicion of incitement and sedition. Police accused Sheikh Salah of calling for a “religious war” in recent statements in which he warned that Israel was seeking a takeover of the Haram, which includes the al Aqsa mosque.

Sheikh Salah was released a few hours later on condition that he stay away from Jerusalem for 30 days. The decision was widely interpreted as a move to damp down a possible backlash from Israel’s 1.3 million Palestinian citizens, many of whom regard the sheikh as a spiritual leader. Police were deployed in large numbers throughout Jerusalem yesterday.

An Islamic Movement spokesman, Zadi Nujeidat, told the Haaretz newspaper: “We will continue our activities and call for a continued presence in and around the mosque. We are used to arrests.”

The move against the Islamic Movement follows a series of pronouncements from Sheikh Salah, echoing statements from Palestinian officials in the occupied territories, that have infuriated the Israeli government.

This week he called on Muslims who could reach the compound – access to which has been heavily restricted by the Israeli police – to “shield the [al Aqsa] mosque with their bodies”. Sheikh Salah himself has been barred by the courts from entering the Haram compound for several months.

At his annual “Al Aqsa is in danger” rally in his hometown of Umm al Fahm in northern Israel last week, he warned tens of thousands of supporters that Israel was trying to prise away control of the compound from the Islamic religious authorities. He added that, should Israel force a choice between martyrdom and renouncing al Aqsa, “we will clearly choose to be martyrs”.

Like many other Palestinian leaders, Sheikh Salah fears that, as well as “Judaising” East Jerusalem, Israel is engineering a takeover of the Haram – known to Jews as the Temple Mount because the remains of the destroyed first and second Jewish temples are believed to lie under the mosques.

He has raised repeated concerns that Israel is secretly digging under the mosques, as it did before opening the Western Wall tunnels in 1996. Then, clashes led to the deaths of 75 Palestinians and 15 Israeli soldiers.

A delegation of Palestinian leaders from inside Israel who visited the compound yesterday warned that there was strong evidence of such excavations.

In an interview with Haaretz on Monday, Sheikh Salah also warned against “infiltration of extremist Jewish elements” into the compound – a reference to Messianic cults that want the mosques destroyed so a third temple can be built.

Muslim leaders throughout the region have expressed growing concern that the Israeli police are secretly escorting such groups into the compound following a decision by Israel in 2003 to allow non-Muslims to visit the Haram without oversight from the Islamic authorities.

Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza, meanwhile, are unable to reach Jerusalem, and Israel has increasingly limited access to the mosques for Palestinians with Israeli IDs.

During clashes at the compound on Sunday, the Islamic Movement’s deputy, Kamal Khatib, and the Palestinian Authority’s minister in charge of Jerusalem, Hatem Abdel Khader, were arrested. Both were released on bail and banned from Jerusalem for 15 days.

Calls from Israeli officials for Sheikh Salah’s arrest and restrictions on the Islamic Movement have been growing all week.

The deputy prime minister, Silvan Shalom, of prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, told Israel Radio on Tuesday: “Sheikh Raed Salah should be behind bars.”

The cabinet meeting on Sunday will discuss a law to ban the Islamic Movement being drafted by the far-right Yisrael Beiteinu party of Avigdor Lieberman, the foreign minister. The bill is expected to be presented to ministers a week later.

The interior minister, Eli Yishai, of the Shas party, announced on Tuesday he would withdraw funding for imams who “incited” against Israel and was investigating whether he could fire them.

The Islamic Movement has rapidly grown in popularity by focusing on charitable and welfare work and has won control of several councils since the 1980s.

Despite eschewing terrorism, the movement is regarded with great suspicion by Israeli officials, who have shut down its charities and newspaper on several occasions. Sheikh Salah and four other leaders of the Islamic Movement were arrested in 2003 accused of supporting terrorism but released two years later in a plea bargain that significantly reduced the charges.

It is unclear how Israel would ban the Islamic Movement.

Analysts say the government could use the 1945 emergency regulations from British rule but the move would be unlikely to withstand judicial scrutiny. Traditionally, the security establishment has argued that it is better not to push the Islamic Movement underground.

The US state department was reported this week to have expressed concern to Israel that it and the Palestinian Authority not “inflame tensions” over the Haram al Sharif.

Don’t You Mess With Our Shoa

Israelis love their Shoa, for the Shoa is no doubt their best selling Hasbara (propaganda) product. It somehow allows them to kill en masse and to do it indistinguishably while insisting that it is they who happen to be the victims.

“I went to a villa in a suburb of Berlin called Wannsee.” Said Netanyahu. “There, on January 20,1942, after a hearty meal, senior Nazi officials met and decided how to exterminate the Jewish people.”

PM Netanyahu, if you are genuinely interested in ‘extermination plans’ you do not have to travel to Wannsee, Berlin. All you have to do is visit your IDF’s headquarters in Tel Aviv. Your chief commanders will guide you through their IDF ‘solutions’ for the Palestinians. At the end of the day, it is your army that surrounds Palestinians with barbed-wire, it is you who keep civilian populations in a siege with inadequate food supplies and medicine. It is your army that poured WMD over the most densely populated neighbourhoods on this planet. While the real meaning of the ‘Nazi Final Solution’ (Die Endlösung) is still discussed by historians who fail to agree between themselves what it really meant, the true reality of the Israeli murderous solution has been seen by us all.

However, it is almost amusing to see PM Netanyahu rushing to defend the Zionist holocaust narrative. Looking at Netanyahu presenting the protocol of the Wannsee conference to the UN assembly gives a clear impression that the Israeli PM believes that the Shoa needs an urgent pump of credibility. For the first time, the Shoa is on the defence.

“Here is a copy of the plans for Auschwitz-Birkenau, where one million Jews were murdered. Is this too a lie?” asks the Israeli PM.

PM Netanyahu, may I suggest to you that not a single humanist cares about the exact numbers: whether it was one or four million Jews who died in Auschwitz, no one doubts that the camp was a horrible place. Yet, two questions must be answered once and for all: how is it that the Jews, who suffered so much during that war, managed to get themselves involved in a colossal racist crime against the Palestinians (1948 Nakba) just three years after the liberation of Auschwitz? How is it that the Israeli leadership, that happens to be so sensitive to Jewish suffering, manages to neglect the pain they inflict on millions of Palestinians?

Supremacy and Beyond

As a National movement, Zionism fails to respect other national and popular movements. Seemingly Netanyahu fails to respect the Iranian people and their regime. “Wherever they can, they impose a backward regimented society where women, minorities, gays or anyone not deemed to be a true believer is brutally subjugated.” Netanyahu, must know that the Judaic law is not very different from Islam on these matters. He must also remember that it is in his country that gays were murdered in the street just a month ago. It is almost amusing that Netanyahu chooses to equate Iran with Barbarism and the Middle Ages for its treatment of minorities. As far as minorities are concerned, the Jewish state is actually the darkest place on this planet. In Netanyahu’s promised land half of the population cannot participate in the democratic game just for failing to be Jewish.

Israel according to Netanyahu is the embodiment of Western modernity: “We (the Westerners) will crack the genetic code. We will cure the incurable. We will lengthen our lives. We will find a cheap alternative to fossil fuels and clean up the planet. I am proud that my country Israel is at the forefront of these advances.”

I must admit that I am not at all overwhelmed by Israeli scientific or technological achievements. Nor have I ever seen any evidence of Israeli attempts to save humanity or even the planet. In fact all I see is quite the opposite. However, if Netanyahu welcomes scientific progress, he should be the first to rally for the Iranian nuclear project. As we all know, this doesn’t seem to be the case. He, for some reason, thinks that, at least regionally, nuclear energy and weapons must remain Jew only property.

Netanyahu argues that “if the most primitive fanaticism can acquire the most deadly weapons, the march of history could be reversed for a time.” Netanyahu may well be correct but one should point out to him that the above applies to Israel more than any other country, state or society. For the time being it is the Jewish State that has been caught pouring WMD on its imprisoned civilian population. It is the Jewish State that is dragging us all into an ‘eye for an eye’ primitive Biblical fanaticism. As if this is not enough, it is also America and Britain that launched illegal wars orchestrated by Zionist led Neocons and fundraisers. This war has cost more than one million lives so far.

However, for once I agree with Netanyhau:

“The greatest threat facing the world today,” he says, “is the marriage between religious fanaticism and the weapons of mass destruction.”

In fact, no one could describe the danger posed by the Jewish state and Zionism any better. Israel is indeed a deadly marriage between Old Testament gross genocidal barbarism, Zionist fanaticism and a huge arsenal of WMD, chemical, biological and nuclear that has already been partially put into action.

Sabbath Goyim

Like other Zionist operations around the world, Netanyahu is convinced that the Goyim should fight the Jewish wars. “Above all, will the international community stop the terrorist regime of Iran from developing atomic weapons, thereby endangering the peace of the entire world?”

I actually would like to stress that PM Netanyahu is all wrong here. If the United Nation is interested in bringing peace to this region and the world, it is of the essence to help Iran to develop its nuclear project and even its military nuclear capacity. This seems to be the only thing that may curb the English Speaking Empire’s lethal expansionist enthusiasm as performed recently in Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan. It will surely stop the Zionists from celebrating their symptoms at the expense of their neighbours.

Following the successful transformation of the American and British armies into an Israeli subservient mission force, Netanyahu seems to expect the UN to follow and to fulfill the very same role. “Hamas,” he says, “fired from Gaza thousands of missiles, mortars and rockets on nearby Israeli cities. Year after year, as these missiles were deliberately hurled at our civilians, not a single UN resolution was passed condemning those criminal attacks.” I guess that someone should remind the Israeli PM that the dispute between Hamas and Israel is not exactly an international quarrel, for Palestine is not a sovereign state and Gaza is nothing less than an Israeli-run concentration camp. In other words, the practicality of the matter is simple. The UN should only deal with war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by Israel, its leadership and its army. It is not down to the UN to pass any kind of judgment on the oppressed.

Mass Murder Fantasies

It doesn’t take long before Netanyahu lists his ideological mentors and the core of his lethal inspiration “When the Nazis rocketed British cities during World War II…” Actually the allies levelled German cities, causing hundreds of thousands of victims… By these twisted standards, the UN Human Rights Council would have dragged Roosevelt and Churchill to the dock as war criminals. What a perversion of truth. What a perversion of justice. Delegates of the United Nations, will you accept this farce?”

Netanyahu is almost correct. In his recounting of the 2nd WW he surely admits here that Israel follows Roosevelt’s and Churchill’s mass murder tactics. But he surely fails to realise that if it was indeed down to ethics and Justice (rather than the usual dirty politics) Roosevelt and Churchill would have been charged with war crimes on a most severe scale. Shockingly enough, Netanyahu falls into the most obvious legal trap equating Israeli activity with acts of carpet bombardment on a huge scale. For those who fail to see it all, this is a rapidly blinking red light hazard. In Netanyahu’s perception of reality nuking countries and flattening towns is a justifiable act. Roosevelt and Churchill seem to be his moral entitlement. In fact these statements are enough to make it clear to every reasonable human being that Israel is a genocidal entity that is capable of bringing our civilisation to a devastating end.

This is a wake up call: it is not just the Palestinians or the Iranians. It is actually all of us.

Bibi¹ the Peace Maker

By now, the Israeli PM is ready to state his Judeo-centric peace mantra. “Ladies and Gentlemen, all of Israel wants peace.” Yet as far as statistics are concerned, we have recently learned that 94% of the Israeli Jews also approved the carpet bombardment of their next door neighbours. It is impossible not to see a clear discrepancy between the ‘peace loving’ verbalism and the murderous reality.

“We ask the Palestinians to finally do what they have refused to do for 62 years: Say yes to a Jewish state.” Once again, I happen to agree with PM Netanyahu. The Palestinian may as well say YES to a Jewish state, but not in Palestine or in the Middle East. If Obama, Brown, Merkel or any other deluded world leader who is still insisting to approve the validity or necessity of a racially orientated ‘Jewish national homeland,’ he or she is more than welcome to allocate land to such a project within his or her own territory. Palestinians should say NO to a Jewish state in the Holy Land or in the region. Palestinians should never agree to the existence of a Jewish state on their land. In fact the UN must follow this line and do whatever it can to dismantle this evil apartheid regime.

Khazarian United

To a certain extent, Netanyahu’s UN speech expresses some deep concerns Jews tend to keep to themselves. At the end of the day, the Israelis and Ashkenazi Israelis in particular know pretty well that Palestine is not exactly the land of their ancestors. If the Israeli Ashkenazi Jews, including Netanyahu, do want to find their roots, Khazaria is the place to start. However, Netanyahu tries to defuse these historical facts. “The Jewish people are not foreign conquerors in the Land of Israel. This is the land of our forefathers… We are not strangers to this land. It is our homeland,” says Netanyahu with total conviction.

PM Netanyahu, I will make it plain and clear. Not only are you foreign to the land, you are also foreign to almost every possible understanding of the notion of humanity. In fact, the Separation Wall that is going to be left after the inevitable disappearance of your ‘Jew only democracy’ will serve generations to come with an astonishing historical monument of Jewish national identity estranged from ethics, universalism and human brotherhood. The crime against humanity committed by the Jewish state in the name of the Jewish people is not something that will be wiped out from the history text books in a short time. Quite the opposite; it will stand as another mythological chapter in this never-ending saga of supremacist compulsive pathological self-loving.

“We must have security” says Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu as he ends his speech. And I am here to disappoint him. Israel will never be secured. It was born in a sin, and its existence surpasses any notion of ethics or human existence. The Jewish state has passed the ‘no return zone.’ It is doomed to vanish. We can only hope that once this happens the process of Jewish assimilation and integration into humanity will re-embark. At the end of the day Jewish Nationalism both left, right and centre was there to keep Jews apart. The history of the 20th century teaches us that this tendency to segregate oneself is bad for humanity and it is also devastating for the Jews.

1. Netanyahu’s nickname is Bibi

Yeah, I didn’t think it was funny either.

But at least one atheist group did, as Tara Lohan reported 9/02/09 on Alternet.org, an organization calling itself Earthbound Pets has offered to take care of Raptured Christians’ pets if the second coming came to past. With this being the day that so many the hard core Evangelical Christians have been looking forward to, to have their literally “holier-than the-rest of our” behinds raptured on out of here up to heaven to sit among the chosen 144,000 who sit on the right hand of God and get to hang with the J-man himself while the whole world roils in the torments brought by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and so on.

Insignificant, comic, glorious or absolutely terrifying depending on where you stand in the sliding scale from seriously Christian to seriously non-Christian, today, 9/09/09 is one of the most horrifying days for some true believers, certainly the worst since 6/06/06, when the gods unleashed that horror of horrors, the remake of The Omen and it was so scary it was in fact a bomb.

I’m not surprised if you haven’t kept up on the latest Revelationist lore; but some people do. Some folks take this more seriously than the Super Bowl and are expecting a hell of a light show. Maybe you personally are not a Revelationist, but you shouldn’t ignore the fact that hundreds of millions of people around the world are living their lives expecting that the Beast, the anti-Christ and the Whore of Babylon are soon to be their future dominatrix. Talk about making it hurt so good.

So, if you are not one of the true believers who thinks that today is the day that Obama is going to detonate the world and your little pumpkin patch is among the 144,000 most earnest, then joke lightly on your Christian brethren today, my fellow Americans, you will have no idea of the terror some of our fellow citizens might be feeling all day today. There are so many things to fear.

Like the number 144,000, a darn small eye of a needle to shove a rich man through. Once upon a time, i.e. 1st century AD Judea, 144,000 of the most devout Christians was somewhat selective but a fairly encompassing number of the number of potentially anointed. You could probably even get away with being somewhat of a slack-tivist martyr and still find a ticket in coach. Nowadays, there are something like two point two billion folks around the world who claim to be Christians all competing for a berth in steerage when the Rapture Express lifts off. The math breaks down to only one out of every 15,277.8 Christians will get a golden ticket. It’s enough to have kept the fans of LaHaye and Jenkins up all night planning how to decorate their little piece of heaven when their kingdom comes. And, apparently wondering who will take care of their pets.

Some people will say, ‘why do I pick on these poor people, just trying to practice their religion? Why make it about religion?’ My answer is, of course, I never would want to tease about somebody’s religion. Except, of course, when that religion wants me dead.

But like other vengeful gods throughout history, the Christian god has been used to brutalize the multitudes and the god of Revelations intends to throw a whole bunch of us into a lake of fire. This is how he will show his brotherly love for mankind. Percentage wise, none of us have more than a .0000020571% chance of making it to heaven. That’s some pretty slim odds even for Vegas casinos, even when the fix is in. Sounds like the kind of guy our US government leaders should work against if they were indeed looking out for the people. But sad to say that is rarely the case.

Every since the founding deists created the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution; some Christians have been working on tweaking the rules so they can gain more power. It must be the ones unfamiliar with the passage about the meek inheriting the earth.

In recent history, many of our American Christian religious and political leaders have been openly Revelationist, believing that god’s will is that they should do all in their power to bring about the biblical Armageddon. Two of the most notable would be Billy Graham and his acolyte George Bush. In comparison to destroying the entire planet for the sake of a population the size of Gilbert (though perhaps with better malls), it makes Jeremiah Wright’s little “Goddamn America” dance seem downright silly.

Unless of course you believe you are one of the chosen, one of the very, very few to be chosen. If you are one of those elite then everyone else is expendable, right? In America alone that’s something like three hundred million eight hundred and fifty-six thousands Americans killed, making their fantasized for 9/09/09 something like 102,285.333 times worse than the real world 9/11. So many terrifying thoughts shredding the nerves of poor Christians as they try making their way through 9/09/09 today, which is indeed 666 … if your sense of the whole world is upside down. Like:

What if they’re the ones driving when the Rapture hits and their cars wreck and kill others or even their family. Can lawyers get a hold of the area code for heaven? What if you get Raptured, but your honey does not? Can you borrow one of a Moslem martyrs’ forty-nine virgins? What if you get to heaven and the only other family member that gets there is that one uncle you always hated and he wants to pal around? What if the rest of your family goes, or that annoyingly overfriendly Buddhist down the street is actually the good soul that gets Raptured and it turns out you weren’t nearly as holy as you thought?

And don’t forget the ever pressing issues of whose going to feed Fido and clean the cat box?

But most of all the question that will torment some Christians today is the thought that has terrified Christians for Millennia: what if the whole thing’s just wrong and you and all you devout ancestors have been duped and used as tools? As another foretold date comes (and hopefully) goes unfulfilled, many Christians may have their entire worldview shaken today and have to face up to a different Revelation: the Copernican one—that they and their god are not the center of the universe.

Which makes them only about five hundred years behind the times.

Let’s pray they hurry and catch up.

The campaign is especially strong on university campuses where many voices have been raised in support of human rights for the Palestinians.

One such example is the attempt to suppress the Public Interest Research Group, founded by Ralph Nader, at the University of Ottawa for their support for Palestinian human rights.

Similar anti-Palestinian campaigns have occurred at many universities in Canada including the University of Toronto, the University of Western Ontario and York University.

An attack against a student group that was sympathetic to the Palestinians occurred at the University of Western Ontario in 1982. The student group was refused official recognition because of its support for the Palestinians and for sponsoring Palestinian and Arab speakers. After this refusal a complaint was made to the Ontario Human Rights Commission.

After a long battle, and with the support of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association and its General Counsel Alan Borovoy, and a supportive editorial in The Globe & Mail, the Ontario Human Rights Commission compelled the University Students Council at the University of Western Ontario to issue a statement of regret and to ratify the student group. The refusal was deemed discriminatory against Palestinians and persons associated with Palestinians.¹

Despite this successful legal precedent at Western Ontario there have been many attacks against individuals and groups across Canada and the United States because of their support for human rights for Palestinians. Over the last few years there is a concerted attempt to suppress discussion of the Palestinian issue in North America.

There also is a campaign to punish those individuals who have spoken out in support of the Palestinians by cutting funding and by denying them tenure and even getting them terminated from their positions of employment.

Two well-known examples of firings are the campaigns that targeted Jewish professors’ Norman Finkelstein (author of many books on Israel and Zionism including Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestinian Conflict (Verso Press, New York, 1995) and Joel Kovel (author of Overcoming Zionism: Creating a Single Democratic State in Israel/Palestine (Pluto Press: London, 2007)) for their attacks on Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians.

Another tactic is to smear such individuals who have supported the Palestinians with allegations of anti-Semitism. One such individual was Arch Bishop Desmond Tutu. A few complaints from the Jewish community led to the Noble Prize winner being banned from speaking on campus by the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota. Tutu was attacked because of statements he made criticizing Israeli policy toward the Palestinians that some Jewish individuals said were “anti Semitic.”

Marv Davidov, an adjunct professor with the Justice and Peace Studies program at the University of St. Thomas said:

As a Jew who experienced real anti-Semitism as a child, I’m deeply disturbed that a man like Tutu could be labeled anti-Semitic and silenced like this,…

I deeply resent the Israeli lobby trying to silence any criticism of its policy. It does a great disservice to Israel and to all Jews.

After provoking a strong backlash against the decision, and a campaign lead by Jewish Voice for Peace in support of the Arch Bishop which produced more than 6,000 letters of protest, the University rescinded the ban.

Professor Bill Robinson was also a target of a similar campaign about alleged anti Semitism to get him fired at the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB). Ultimately the University administration defended Robinson’s academic freedom and the right to express his opinions in his global politics class. Robinson, who is Jewish, distributed an email prepared by a pro-Palestinian Jewish activist that compared the Israeli attack on Gaza to the Nazi attack on the Warsaw Ghetto. In response to this attack on Professor Robinson, more than 100 UCSB faculty members signed a petition asking the university to dismiss the charges against him. In addition, 16 university department chairs wrote letters to the University authorities asking them to dismiss the case against Robinson.

Sir Gerald Kaufman, one of the founders of Independent Jewish Voices in Britain, also used his position as a Member of Parliament in London, England to criticize Israeli policy toward the Palestinians. Members of Kaufman’s family perished at the hands of the Nazis and in the Holocaust. As one of the U.K.’s harshest critics of Israeli policies, Kaufman routinely compared the Jewish state’s treatment of Palestinians to Nazi Germany’s treatment of Jews.²

This campaign to silence critics of Israel and to demonize supporters of the Palestinians is most disturbing and a violation of free speech, academic freedom and violation of Palestinian human rights.

It is also a violation of basic democratic rights when a government does it. For example, the recent cuts to the Canadian Arab Federation’s funding by Citizenship and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney. The punitive action taken by Minister Kenney is a denial of the fundamental freedoms and rights which are guaranteed in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

The Charter guarantees the right of free speech and freedom of conscience and protects the individual and organizations from government sanction.

This campaign is also an attack on the numerous dissenting Jews who support human rights for the Palestinians.

Canadian Jewish groups like Not in Our Name (NION) and Jewish Independent Voices (Canada) and their support for the Palestinians and their criticism of the “Jewish State” are simply ignored. For political purposes, they simply do not exist.

The mainstream media also rarely covers these alternative Jewish perspectives. However, there are rare exceptions and sometimes views critical of Zionism are published in the mainstream North American press. Here is one notable example:

“It’s hard to imagine now, but in 1944, six years after Kristallnacht, Lessing J. Rosenwald, president of the American Council for Judaism, felt comfortable equating the Zionist ideal of Jewish statehood with “the concept of a racial state — the Hitlerian concept.” For most of the last century, a principled opposition to Zionism was a mainstream stance within American Judaism.

Even after the foundation of Israel, anti-Zionism was not a particularly heretical position. Assimilated Reform Jews like Rosenwald believed that Judaism should remain a matter of religious rather than political allegiance; the ultra-Orthodox saw Jewish statehood as an impious attempt to “push the hand of God”; and Marxist Jews — my grandparents among them — tended to see Zionism, and all nationalisms, as a distraction from the more essential struggle between classes.

To be Jewish, I was raised to believe, meant understanding oneself as a member of a tribe that over and over had been cast out, mistreated, slaughtered.

Millenniums of oppression that preceded it did not entitle us to a homeland or a right to self-defense that superseded anyone else’s. If they offered us anything exceptional, it was a perspective on oppression and an obligation born of the prophetic tradition: to act on behalf of the oppressed and to cry out at the oppressor.

For the last several decades, though, it has been all but impossible to cry out against the Israeli state without being smeared as an anti-Semite, or worse. To question not just Israel’s actions, but the Zionist tenets on which the state is founded, has for too long been regarded an almost unspeakable blasphemy.

Yet it is no longer possible to believe with an honest conscience that the deplorable conditions in which Palestinians live and die in Gaza and the West Bank come as the result of specific policies, leaders or parties on either side of the impasse.

The problem is fundamental: Founding a modern state on a single ethnic or religious identity in a territory that is ethnically and religiously diverse leads inexorably either to politics of exclusion (think of the 139-square-mile prison camp that Gaza has become) or to wholesale ethnic cleansing. Put simply, the problem is Zionism.”³)

Most of the rest of the World has a much more critical view of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land and supports the right of Palestinians to self determination.

For example in one vote at the United Nations, held on December 19, 2006 on the Israeli Palestinian issue, the tally was 176 to five in favor of the Palestinians.

The countries that supported Israel were the United States, the Marshall Islands, Palau and Micronesia.

Five countries abstained. They were: Australia, Canada, Central African Republic, Nauru and Vanuatu.

The entire rest of the World voted in favor of the right of Palestinians to self-determination. However, to read the mainstream North American press you almost never hear of these one-sided votes.

All human beings are entitled to basic human rights. However, the well documented human rights violations of the Palestinians at the hands of the Israelis, by respected organizations such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, The International Red Cross, the United Nations, and even by Israeli organizations such as B’Tselem, Rabbis for Human Rights and the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel and by many Israeli journalists, are attacked and buried under a barrage of criticism that they are biased, are unfair for singling out the Jewish State or are even anti-Semitic.

My own record as a lawyer representing refugee claims for Palestinians from the Occupied Territories made against Israel, is 28 positives to one negative or a 96.5% success rate.

However, in the eyes of the supporters of Israel this does not mean that there are serious human rights problems in the Occupied Territories.

Israel can do no wrong. It is the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada that is “anti-Semitic” and the Jewish members of the IRB who rendered positive decisions on Palestinian refugee claims made against Israel are “self-hating Jews.”

A Palestinian is simply an inhabitant or citizen of Palestine. There are Jewish, Christian, Muslim and non-believers who are Palestinian. The indigenous Palestinian Jews were opposed to the European Jewish settlers who were flooding into Palestine with the support of Great Britain. A Palestinian is simply a national designation like that of being Canadian or American.

There is no racial, ethnic or religious criteria for being a Palestinian. Only by right of birth, naturalization and descent that one becomes a Palestinian, just like in most other countries.

The Jewish State’s citizenship and Immigration process are unique in the World. To qualify as a “Jew” in “the Jewish state” one must meet a racial or ethnic criteria or in the alternative, a religious criterion.

The Jewish Law of Return grants almost immediate citizenship rights to Jews from anywhere in the World. Palestinians who were born in the country and forcibly expelled are, for the most part, forbidden to return.

The Zionist state of Israel defines itself as “Jewish” and structures itself to advance the interests of Jews at the expense of non-Jews and especially against the indigenous Christian and Muslim Palestinian population.

In March 1919 United States Congressman Julius Kahn presented an anti-Zionist petition to President Woodrow Wilson as he was departing for the Paris Peace Conference.

The petition was signed by 31 prominent American Jews. The signatories included Henry Morgenthau, Sr., ex-ambassador to Turkey; Simon W. Rosendale, ex-attorney general of New York; Mayor L. H. Kampner of Galveston, Texas; E. M. Baker, from Cleveland and president of the Stock Exchange; R. H. Macy’s Jesse I. Straus; New York Times publisher Adolph S. Ochs; and Judge M. C. Sloss of San Francisco. Part of the petition read:

…we protest against the political segregation of the Jews and the re-establishment in Palestine of a distinctively Jewish State as utterly opposed to the principles of democracy which it is the avowed purpose of the World’s Peace Conference to establish. Whether the Jews be regarded as a “race” or as a “religion,” it is contrary to the democratic principles for which the world war was waged to found a nation on either or both of these bases.

There is much controversy over what is Zionism and how to define the “Jewish State.” As Akiva Orr writes,

The Zionist movement and its State- ISRAEL, do not represent the Jewish people. They never did.

They represent a particular trend within the Jewish people, namely- the nationalist trend. To find out whether Israel is a Jewish State or a Zionist State one need only ask any religious Orthodox Jew anywhere. His answer will be unambiguous: a Jewish State must be ruled by Jewish religious law- “ Halakha”. Israel is not ruled by “Halakha” laws, but by secular laws. Therefore Israel is not a Jewish State. The fact that it provides refuge to Jews does not make it a Jewish State . . . Zionism and Judaism are different entities. They have contradictory qualities.⁴

The argument is often made that criticism of Israel, or more appropriately the self described “Jewish State,” the meaning of which is not defined, is anti-Semitic. The fact that many Jews have criticized Israel and Zionism is deemed irrelevant. These Jewish critics are attacked as “self-hating Jews.”

There is no rational basis for the argument that criticism of the State of Israel and the political ideology of Zionism is anti-Semitic. The logic for this view is obviously flawed.

For example it makes no sense to accuse an individual who criticizes Apartheid South Africa’s racist policies toward the blacks as evidence of racism toward Whites.

Or that criticism of the Nazi policy toward the Jews should not be allowed because it is evidence of racism against Germans.

Similarly, if you criticize American policy toward the Iraq war and torture at Abu Ghraib Prison or the Jim Crow laws that institutionalized discrimination against blacks in the southern states, then you are racist against Americans. This argument is obviously absurd and should not even need a response.

To quote one American Jewish academic on the comparison of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians to the racist Jim Crow laws in the United States: “I grew up as a white girl in the Jim Crow South and I have spent my adult life in the study of racism; what I see when I go to Palestine is Jim Crow on steroids.”⁵

It is a basic right to evaluate and to criticize a political ideology or political movement and to review and even criticize a state’s policies.

The argument should be evaluated on the merits and the truthfulness of the facts presented. It is also a right to present alternative facts and to have a debate.

However, when one side wants to avoid debate, divert the discussion or suppress the topic and launches personal attacks against their opponents, it is almost a certain proof that they are hiding some uncomfortable truths.

Dr. Joel Beinin in an article, “Silencing critics not way to Middle East peace,” published in the San Francisco Chronicle, on February 4, 2007, discussed the campaign to silence critics of Israeli policy.

Beinin is a professor of History at Stanford University and is Jewish. He is active with Jewish Voice for Peace. Here is what Beinin had to say about the campaign to attack critics of Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians.

“Why discredit, defame and silence those with opposing viewpoints? I believe it is because the Zionist lobby knows it cannot win based on facts.

An honest discussion can only lead to one conclusion: The status quo in which Israel declares it alone has rights and intends to impose its will on the weaker Palestinians, stripping them permanently of their land, resources and rights, cannot lead to a lasting peace.

We need an open debate and the freedom to discuss uncomfortable facts and explore the full range of policy options. Only then can we adopt a foreign policy that serves American interests and one that could actually bring a just peace to Palestinians and Israelis.”

The ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, as well as the massacres, rapes and illegal confiscation of Palestinian property, is well documented by Israeli historians. These include Simcha Flapan, The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities (New York: Pantheon Books, 1987); Benny Morris, The birth of the Palestinian refugee problem 1947-1949, (Cambridge University Press: New York, 1987); Nur Masalha, Expulsion of the Palestinians (Washington D.C.: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992); Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi, Original Sins, (Olive Branch Press: New York, 1993); and Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, (Oneworld Publications: Oxford, 2006).

There are many more Israeli authorities that confirm the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians in 1947-1949 and again in 1967. In fact it is still going on today in what some Israelis call the “slow motion ethnic cleansing” of the Palestinians.⁶

If the Palestinians, or their supporters, complain about the well-documented facts surrounding the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, losing their property to which they had legal title to, losing their personal belongings and even their bank accounts, having 531 villages destroyed, losing their country and their right to a citizenship, and then not being allowed to return to their homes in contravention of international law; or complain about discriminatory policies of the Jewish National Fund or the discrimination involved in the Jewish Law of Return; or complain about the house demolitions, the more than 600 Israeli military check points in the West Bank, the 42 years of military Occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, the program of targeted assassinations, the well-documented cases of torture; and the imprisonment of more than 11,000 Palestinians including women and children, many held without charge under what is called Administrative Detention, or the recent slaughter in Gaza, that these complaints and to expose these facts is anti-Semitic!

The view that it is anti-Semitic to criticize Israel, or its actions, is pure and simple racism against Palestinians. The Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims have many legitimate reasons to criticize the policies and actions of “the Jewish State.” A state that aggressively, and repeatedly, attacks its neighbours and is slowly but systematically ethnically cleansing its non-Jewish population is not above criticism.

No state is above criticism. You should be very afraid of a political ideology that you must accept without question.

There is also much to criticize in the Arab world but it would be absurd to say that one cannot criticize the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia for its treatment of women or its human rights record, because it is racist against Arabs or is anti-Muslim. A person who made such an argument would be laughed at. No one would take them or the argument seriously.

Yet this allegation of anti-Semitism is a frequent smear tactic that has been used against individuals who have publicly supported Palestinian human rights.

These individuals include former US President Jimmy Carter, Arch Bishop Desmond Tutu, Nelson Mandela, Bertrand Russell, Mahatma Gandhi, Arnold Toynbee, George Orwell and many, many others who have expressed public support for the Palestinians. Most of the strongest critics of Zionism and Israel’s policies are Jewish.

The only Jewish member of Lloyd George’s cabinet when Great Britain first threw its weight behind Zionism in 1917, Sir Edwin Montagu, was adamantly opposed to the creation of a Jewish state. He attacked the Balfour Declaration and Zionism because he believed they were anti-Semitic. Montagu argued that Zionism and anti-Semitism were based on the same premise, namely that Jews and non-Jews could not co-exist.

Ironically, people like me who want Jews to remain in our society, be an important part of our community and be safe from discrimination and racism are diametrically opposed to the Zionist goal of ingathering all of the Jews to Palestine.

Zionists want to “save the Jews” because they are not safe in the diaspora and face the threat of persecution due to the intractable anti-Semitism that exists in non-Jewish societies. To quote one Zionist commentator,

The Law [of Return] and the Clause and, for that matter Zionism and the Jewish State are necessary so long as the threat to our people continues; so long, in other words, as Diaspora exists…..So the Law of Return continues to be necessary for Jewish survival, to serve its essential function in Zionist theory and practice. The Law defines Israel’s Zionist mission, our state as protector and refuge for threatened Diaspora Jewry.⁷

Without the history of Christian anti-Semitism that has existed in Europe and the centuries of persecution of the European Jewish community political Zionism would be considered a deranged and absurd political philosophy. Without anti-Semitism, Zionism has no legitimacy.

Sir Edwin Montagu was also afraid that a Jewish state would undermine the safety of Jews in other countries. It appears that this fear was realized in that the safety of the Arab Jewish community was undermined, to a large extent deliberately, so that they would be forced to immigrate to Palestine to strengthen the Jewish presence there.

Montagu’s opposition to Zionism and the Balfour Declaration was supported by the leading representative bodies of Anglo-Jewry at the time, the Board of Deputies and the Anglo-Jewish Association, and in particular, by three prominent British Jews Claude Montefiore, David Alexander and Lucien Wolf.

Many Jews are anti-Zionist and opposed the settlement of Jews in Palestine.

In fact, historically Zionism was not supported by the majority of Jews. In the process of creating the state of Israel the political Zionists destroyed Palestine and ethnically cleansed more than 700,000 Palestinians from their homes and villages in order to create a demographic Jewish majority in their newly created “Jewish state.”

There is a very respected and honored Jewish tradition of opposition to injustice and human rights violations. There is no monolithic position for Jews when it comes to Israel and the Palestinian issue.

My article “Jewish Criticism of Zionism” which lists more than 160 Jewish critics of Zionism. This article lists many prominent Jewish intellectuals that are extremely critical of Israel’s policies towards Palestinians. There is a long distinguished line of Jewish critics of Zionism and Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians.

This list includes Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Hannah Arendt, Franz Kafka, Isaac Asimov, I.F. Stone, Norton Mezvinsky, Alfred Lilienthal, Silvain Levi, Eric Rouleau, Tony Judt, Sara Roy, Ronnie Kasrils, Eric Hobsbawn, Saul Landau, Noam Chomsky, Hans Kohen, Eric Fromm, Bruno Kreisky, Pierre Mendes France, Richard Falk, Harold Pinter (the Nobel prize winner for Literature), Philip Roth, Michael Selzer, Don Peretz, Immanuel Wallerstein, Rabbi Michael Lerner, actor Ed Asner and many other leading Jewish intellectuals and religious figures.

Isaac Asimov was one of the greatest writers of the Twentieth Century and wrote on many topics. He expressed his views about Zionism in a number of pieces. One example is found in the second volume of his autobiography In Joy Still Felt. There he tells of having dinner in 1959 with some friends and his wife. Asimov wrote:

As usual, I found myself in the odd position of not being a Zionist and of not particularly valuing my Jewish heritage…. I just think it is more important to be human and to have a human heritage; and I think it is wrong for anyone to feel that there is anything special about any one heritage of whatever kind. It is delightful to have the human heritage exist in a thousand varieties, for it makes for greater interest, but as soon as one variety is thought to be more important than another, the groundwork is laid for destroying them all.

Asimov also commented on Zionism in a chapter titled “Anti-Semitism” in I. Asimov, his third autobiographical volume.

There, Asimov discussed how he was distressed by the capability of the historically oppressed (such as the Jews) to in turn become oppressors if given the chance.

Asimov wrote: “Right now, there is an influx of Soviet Jews into Israel. They are fleeing because they expect religious persecution. Yet at the instant their feet touched Israeli soil, they became extreme Israeli nationalists with no pity for the Palestinians. From persecuted to persecutors in the blinking of an eye.”

Tens of thousands of religious Jews today are adamantly opposed to Zionism including the orthodox Neturei Karta and the Satmar sects. Rabbi Yisroel Weiss is the international spokesman for Neturei Karta. Hundreds of thousands of religious Jews in Israel reject the secular political movement of Zionism which created “the Jewish State.”

There is an important book written by Dr. Yakov M. Rabkin, a professor of History at the University of Montreal. It is titled A Threat from Within: A Century of Jewish Opposition to Zionism, (Zed Books: London, 2006). This book examines Jewish religious opposition to Zionism and details the long history of religious opposition to Zionism as a political movement to establish a Jewish state in Palestine. Rabkin describes present day Jewish religious anti-Zionism as follows:

… the rejection of Zionism in the name of the Torah, in the name of Jewish tradition. Such rejection is all the more significant in that it can in no way be described as anti-Semitic, recent attempts to conflate any expression of anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism notwithstanding.

At first glance this seems to be a paradox.

After all, the public almost automatically associates Jews and Israel. The press continues to refer to “the Jewish State.” Israeli politicians often speak “in the name of the Jewish people.”

Yet the Zionist movement and the creation of the State of Israel has caused one of the greatest schisms in Jewish history.

An overwhelming majority of those who defend and interpret the traditions of Judaism have, from the beginning, opposed what was to become a vision for a new society, a new concept of being Jewish, a program of massive immigration to the Holy land and the use of force to establish political hegemony there.⁸

Israel’s founders were in fact atheists who wanted to transform Judaism from being a religion into a secular national movement based on race or ethnicity. This explains why Jewish religious leaders were strongly opposed to secular Zionism. Theodore Herzl was seen as an anti-Semite due to his hostility to religious Jews.

In 1943, a group of 92 Reform rabbis, and many other prominent American Jews, created the American Council for Judaism with the express intent of combating Zionism.

Included in the Council’s leadership were Rabbi Morris S. Lazaron of Baltimore; Lessing J. Rosenwald, the former chairman of the Sears, Roebuck & Company, who became president of the Council; Rabbi Elmer Berger who became its executive director; Arthur Hays Sulzberger, publisher of The New York Times; and Sidney Wallach of the American Jewish Committee.

An example of their views on Zionism is Palestine, a pamphlet published by the American Council for Judaism, 1944, p.7 [American Council for Judaism Records (1942-1968), American Jewish Archives. Cincinnati, OH] which stated as follows: “… the concept of a theocratic state is long past. It is an anachronism. The concept of a racial state — the Hitlerian concept — is repugnant to the civilized world, as witness the fearful global war in which we are involved.”

The American Council for Judaism was founded to expressly oppose Zionism.

It was created in response to a 1942 Zionist Conference in the US, which proposed the formation of a Jewish army in Palestine before the state was founded.

The Council send letters to various governments and officials expressing their objection to such a notion as a ‘religious’ state, especially since they believed that: “that Jewish nationalism tends to confuse our fellowman about our place and function in society and diverts our own attention from our historic role to live as a religious community wherever we may dwell.”⁹

Membership in the Council grew to more than 15,000. Its members were highly articulate and greatly angered the Zionist leadership, who wanted the American Jewish community to present a united front on the Palestine question.

The book Jews Against Zionism: The American Council for Judaism 1942-1948, by Thomas A. Kolsky, (Temple University Press, Philadelphia, 1990) is a history of the anti-Zionist American Council for Judaism during the period just before the creation of the “Jewish State.”

After Israel’s spectacular success in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, however, a change in the policy towards Zionism occurred in the American Council for Judaism.

Anti-Zionist Jewish author Alfred Lilienthal has suggested that “Zionist infiltration” succeeded in “neutralizing” the Council. A separate organization was subsequently established in 1969 called American Jewish Alternatives to Zionism (AJAZ).

The new group, which was based in New York, continued the original anti-Zionist tradition of the American Council for Judaism. Rabbi Elmer Berger served as president of AJAZ and also editor of its publication the AJAZ Report until shortly before his death in 1996.

The American Council for Judaism is still in existence but has softened its strict anti-Zionist position but today it is non-Zionist and highly critical of the “Jewish State’s” policies toward the Palestinians.

Their publications frequently carry anti-Zionist Jewish criticism. Allan C. Brownfeld is the Editor of Issues, their quarterly newsletter and also editor of their Special Interest Report. Stephen L. Naman is President of the Council.

Adam Shatz, the literary editor of The Nation magazine, has edited a book titled Prophet’s Outcast. The book contains essays written by 24 prominent Jewish scholars and intellectuals which are very critical of Zionism and Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians.¹⁰

Another important book is The Other Israel: Voices of Refusal and Dissent, edited by Roane Carey and Jonathan Shainin. It contains articles very critical of Israel’s policies, written by 27 prominent Israelis.

The Forward was written by a prominent Israeli author and journalist Tom Segev. The Introduction is written by Anthony Lewis, the two-time Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, who worked at The New York Times between 1969 and 2001. Lewis is now the James Madison Visiting Professor at Columbia University.

There are many Israeli critics of Zionism and anti-Zionist Jews in Israel where the conflict with the Palestinians is most apparent. These include Avraham Burg, former head of the World Jewish Agency and former Speaker of the Knesset; Shulamit Aloni, a former Minister of Education; Yossi Sarid a former Knesset member and past leader of Meretz; Uri Avnery former Knesset member and leader of Gush Shalom; the late Israel Shahak former Chair of the Israeli League for Human and Civil Rights; former General and Knessett Member Mattityahu Peled; Meron Benvenisti, former Deputy Mayor of Jerusalem; Jeff Halper head of Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions; Felica Langer, a well known human rights lawyer; Michael Warschawski, co-founder of the Alternative Information Center; University of Oxford historian Avi Shalim; Eitan Bronstein Chair of Zochrot, which means “Remember,” and works to remind Israelis about the Nakba or Palestinian catastrophe; the late linguist and journalist Tanya Reinhart; New Israeli Historian Ilan Pappe; Uri Davis, author of Israel: An Apartheid State (London: Zed Books, 1987); Tikva Honig-Parnass, editor of Between the Lines; and journalists Gideon Levy, Amira Hass, A.B. Yehoshua, Yitzhak Laor, Akiva Eldar, Meron Rapoport, B. Michael, and Gideon Spiro to name only a few of the many Israelis who are anti-Zionist, non-Zionist or extremely critical of Zionism and Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians.

There was an interesting book review published in Haaretz, on February 29, 2008, written by Tom Segev. It was a review of a book titled, When and How Was the Jewish People Invented? (published by Resling in Hebrew). It is authored by Israeli historian Shlomo Zand (also spelled Sand). Prof. Zand teaches history at Tel Aviv University. The book became a best seller in Israel. Segev writes:

… in one of the most fascinating and challenging books published here in a long time. There never was a Jewish people, only a Jewish religion, and the exile also never happened — hence there was no return. Zand rejects most of the stories of national-identity formation in the Bible, including the exodus from Egypt and, most satisfactorily, the horrors of the conquest under Joshua. It’s all fiction and myth that served as an excuse for the establishment of the State of Israel, he asserts.

This information and arguments have been around for a long time but it is interesting to see them published in one of Israel’s leading daily newspapers and presented in a book written by an Israeli historian. Here is how Segev summarizes the arguments in Zand’s book:

According to Zand, the Romans did not generally exile whole nations, and most of the Jews were permitted to remain in the country. The number of those exiled was at most tens of thousands. When the country was conquered by the Arabs, many of the Jews converted to Islam and were assimilated among the conquerors. It follows that the progenitors of the Palestinian Arabs were Jews. Zand did not invent this thesis; 30 years before the Declaration of Independence, it was espoused by David Ben-Gurion, Yitzhak Ben-Zvi and others.

If the majority of the Jews were not exiled, how is it that so many of them reached almost every country on earth? Zand says they emigrated of their own volition or, if they were among those exiled to Babylon, remained there because they chose to. Contrary to conventional belief, the Jewish religion tried to induce members of other faiths to become Jews, which explains how there came to be millions of Jews in the world. As the Book of Esther, for example, notes, “And many of the people of the land became Jews; for the fear of the Jews fell upon them.”

Zand quotes from many existing studies, some of which were written in Israel but shunted out of the central discourse. He also describes at length the Jewish kingdom of Himyar in the southern Arabian Peninsula and the Jewish Berbers in North Africa. The community of Jews in Spain sprang from Arabs who became Jews and arrived with the forces that captured Spain from the Christians, and from European-born individuals who had also become Jews.

The first Jews of Ashkenaz (Germany) did not come from the Land of Israel and did not reach Eastern Europe from Germany, but became Jews in the Khazar Kingdom in the Caucasus. Zand explains the origins of Yiddish culture: it was not a Jewish import from Germany, but the result of the connection between the offspring of the Kuzari and Germans who traveled to the East, some of them as merchants.

We find, then, that the members of a variety of peoples and races, blond and black, brown and yellow, became Jews in large numbers.

According to Zand, the Zionist need to devise for them a shared ethnicity and historical continuity produced a long series of inventions and fictions, along with an invocation of racist theses. Some were concocted in the minds of those who conceived the Zionist movement, while others were offered as the findings of genetic studies conducted in Israel.¹¹

It is somewhat ironic that issues and subjects that relate to the Palestinians and Zionism that are virtually taboo in North America are openly discussed in Israel.

These same subjects are much more openly discussed in Europe and in the rest of the World.¹²

Here is what noted financier, George Soros, writing in the New York Review of Books, on April 12, 2007, had to say on this the lack of debate in the United States on the Palestinian issue:

The current policy is not even questioned in the United States. While other problem areas of the Middle East are freely discussed, criticism of our policies toward Israel is very muted indeed. The debate in Israel about Israeli policy is much more open and vigorous than in the United States. This is all the more remarkable because Palestine is the issue that more than any other currently divides the United States from Europe.

The Jerusalem Post wrote:

… For an example of the type of discussion that goes on in Israel is the following statement made by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert: “For sixty years there has been discrimination against Arabs in Israel. This discrimination is deep-seated and intolerable.” Olmert made this statement while addressing a meeting of the Knesset committee that was investigating the lack of integration of Arab citizens in public service.¹³

Another example is the current Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin (from the right-wing Likud Party) who called for a fundamental change in relations between Jews and Arabs in Israel. He urged the founding of a “true partnership” between the two sectors, based on mutual respect, absolute equality and the addressing of “the special needs and unique character of each of the sides.”

The Speaker was reported to say all this in an address to be delivered at the president’s residence in Jerusalem on August 3rd, 2009. Quoting from Rivlin’s prepared speech which was released to the media:

The establishment of Israel was accompanied by much pain and suffering and a real trauma for the Palestinians (in large part due to the shortsightedness of the Palestinian leadership). Many of Israel’s Arabs, which see themselves as part of the Palestinian population, feel the pain of their brothers across the green line – a pain they feel the state of Israel is responsible for.

Many of them,” Rivlin says, “encounter racism and arrogance from Israel’s Jews; the inequality in the allocation of state funds also does not contribute to any extra love.¹⁴

Can you ever imagine a top American or Canadian politician making statements like these, or a leading Canadian or American newspaper publishing an article like this one? If they did make statements like these what would be the reaction?

However, Rivlin still tried to focus the blame on the Palestinian leadership for the problems and does not fully acknowledge Israel’s part in the expulsions. These expulsions and massacres started before the official declaration of Israel’s Independence on May 14, 1948. According to Israeli Historian Ilan Pappe, there were expulsions of the Palestinians from 30 villages after the War had ended in 1949.

Rivlin also does not address the land seizures from Palestinians who fled or were expelled from their homes but remained in Israel.

These individuals were considered Israeli citizens, but still lost all of their property. These individuals are called “present Absentees,” an Orwellian phrase if there ever was one.

Here is how one Israeli academic, Gabriel Piterberg, describes the phrase and how it relates to Israel: “How the founding myths of Israel dictated conceptual removal of Palestinians, during and after physical removal. The invention of ‘retroactive transfer’ and ‘present absentees’ as the glacial euphemisms of ethnic cleansing.”¹⁵

Nor does Rivlin acknowledge that most of the Zionist leadership wanted all of Palestine without its Arab population and this wish “miraculously” came true. Palestinian leadership, inept as it was, cannot be blamed for everything.

Another important book on this topic is Reframing Anti-Semitism: Alternative Jewish Perspectives published by the Jewish Voice for Peace. It contains articles written by eight Jewish American writers. One of the articles is written by Judith Butler, the Maxine Elliot Professor in Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California at Berkley.

Her article is on the question of whether criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic. Her answer and article is titled: “No, Its Not Anti-Semitic.”¹⁶

Another book that examines Jewish criticism of Zionism and Israel’s policies is Wrestling with Zion: Progressive Jewish-American Responses to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, edited by Tony Kushner and Alisa Solomon (Grove Press: New York, 2003).

Kushner is an award winning playwright and Solomon a staff writer at The Village Voice and a professor at Baruch College-City of New York. This book contains a collection of 53 prominent American Jewish writers’ critical analysis of Zionism and Israel’s policies. This list includes such distinguished writers as Arthur Miller, Susan Sontag, Marc Ellis, Naomi Klein (actually a Canadian) and Rabbi Arthur Waskow among many others.

Another important book on Jewish criticism of Zionism and Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians is A Time to Speak Out: Independent Jewish Voices on Israel, Zionism and Jewish Identity (Verso: London, 2008). It is edited by four prominent British academics, Anne Karpf, Brian Klug, Jacqueline Rose and Barbara Rosenbaum. This book contains the highly critical writings of 27 Jewish academics and thinkers on the issues of the Occupation, Israel and Zionism.

There are a number of other anthologies and collections of writings from anti-Zionist Jews. These include Zionism Reconsidered, edited by Michael Selzer, (The MacMillian Company: London, 1970); Zionism: The dream and the reality: A Jewish Critique, Gary V. Smith ed. (Barnes & Noble Books: New York, 1974); Jewish Critics of Zionism and The Stifling and Smearing of a Dissenter, by Moshe Menuhin, (Association of Arab University Graduates, 1976); Judaism or Zionism, EAFORD & AJAZ (American Jewish Alternatives to Zionism) eds., (Zed Books: London, 1986); The End of Zionism and the Liberation of the Jewish People, Eibie Weizfeld ed. (Clarity Press: Atlanta, 1989); Radicals, Rabbis, and Peacemakers: Conversations with Jews against the occupation, edited by Seth Faber (Common Courage Press, Monroe ME, 2005).

Faber’s book contains a series of interviews with leading American dissident Jews’ Noam Chomsky, Steve Quester, Joel Kovel, Norton Mezvinsky, Ora Wise, Norman Finkelstein, Phyllis Bennis, Adam Shapiro, Daniel Boyarin, Rabbi David Weiss, and includes a speech and an essay by Marc Ellis.

Mordecai Richler, the late esteemed Canadian author, wrote an article entitled “Israel marks 50th anniversary out of favor with many Jews,” Toronto Star, February 15, 1998. Many other Canadian Jews are opposed to Zionism or are critical of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians.

Many Canadian Jews were against the war on Gaza. These dissenters include academics and writers Judy Rebick, Naomi Klein, Avi Lewis, Rick Salutin, Bernard Avishai, Howard Skutel, Yakov Rabkin, Klaus Herrmann, Janet Weinroth, Judith Weisman, Michael Neumann, Alan Sears, Gabor Mate, Judy and Larry Haiven, Michael Mandel, Ursula Franklin, Abbie Bakan, Mordecai Briemberg, Eibie Weizfeld, Zalman Amit, Rabbi Reuben Slonim, pianist Anton Kuerti, Ralph Benmergui broadcaster and producer and Judy Deutsch head of Science for Peace to name but a few.

The Jewish Outlook Society, headquartered in Vancouver, Canada, publishes Outlook. They describe their magazine as, “An Independent, secular Jewish publication with a socialist-humanist perspective.” Carl Rosenberg is the Editor and Sylvia Friedman is the Managing Editor. Harold Berson is in charge of circulation. They have over 40 Jewish individuals, primarily living in Canada, who serve in various capacities with the organization and their publication.

Outlook takes a critical view of Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians and frequently publishes Jewish anti-Zionist perspectives.

Independent Jewish Voices (IJV) (Canada) currently has more than 100 members. Dylan Penner, Sid Shniad and Diana Ralph serves as coordinators for IJV. The Steering Committee is composed of 24 Canadian Jewish activists including Fabienne Presentey, Sandra Ruch, Andy Leher and Harry Shannon. The IJV is a member-led organization, with chapters in Vancouver, Winnipeg, Toronto, Hamilton, Ottawa, Montreal, and Halifax.

Here is what Independent Jewish Voices (Canada) said, in their February 19, 2009 Press Release, about Stephen Harper Conservative government’s position on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict and Minister Jason Kenney’s cutting off funding for English Second Language training programs run by the Canadian Arab Federation:

We believe that Mr. Kenny [sic] and his Conservative government is threatening CAF’s funding because CAF stands for justice for Palestinian people and because it expresses principled criticism of oppressive Israeli policies.

As Jews, we affirm that criticizing Israeli policies is NOT anti-Semitic. Anti-Semitism refers to hostility and/or prejudice against Jews. Like any other government, Israel has obligations under international law.

To responsibly raise critical concerns about the discriminatory, illegal, and brutal policies of another government is an ethical imperative, which our government should support.

However, the Conservative government has gone further than any previous Canadian administration in endorsing illegal and brutal Israeli assaults on Palestinian and Lebanese people.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper has pledged complete allegiance with Israel and labels as “anti-Semitic” any criticism of Israeli actions (including the Gaza massacre, house demolitions, use of illegal phosphorous and DIME weapons against civilians, etc.).

As Jews, we believe this is a dishonest smoke-screen, a ploy to discredit principled calls for humanity, justice, and compliance with international law.

There are hundreds, and probably thousands, of Jewish critics of Zionism and of Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians who have published articles or written books on the subject. Yet many Zionists, and their supporters, claim that there is a monolithic Jewish position in support of Zionism, Israel and the occupation of Palestinian land.

This claim of near universal Jewish support for the Zionist state and its actions toward the Palestinians is so far from the truth that it is laughable.

One has only to open your eyes and review the written record to see that there is no Jewish consensus on these issues and a great deal of criticism and outright opposition to Zionism exists in Jewish intellectual and religious circles, both in the past and today.

Israel’s supporters shamelessly use the argument that to criticize Israel is anti-Semitic no matter what Israel does. This argument is almost entirely false and politically motivated. Not to tell the truth, or to suppress discussion, about what is going on in Palestine is racist and a crime against the Palestinian people and a crime of silence and indifference not unlike the one committed against Jews in the Second World War.

To quote George Soros on the use of anti-Semitism, a tactic he described “the most insidious argument,” to silence the political debate on Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians.

… Any politician who dares to expose AIPAC’s influence would incur its wrath; so very few can be expected to do so. It is up to the American Jewish community itself to rein in the organization that claims to represent it.

But this is not possible without first disposing of the most insidious argument put forward by the defenders of the current policies: that the critics of Israel’s policies of occupation, control, and repression on the West Bank and in East Jerusalem and Gaza engender anti-Semitism.

The opposite is the case. One of the myths propagated by the enemies of Israel is that there is an all-powerful Zionist conspiracy. That is a false accusation. Nevertheless, that AIPAC has been so successful in suppressing criticism has lent some credence to such false beliefs. Demolishing the wall of silence that has protected AIPAC would help lay them to rest. A debate within the Jewish community, instead of fomenting anti-Semitism, would only help diminish it.

Billionaire George Soros can hardly be considered a leftist. He is also Jewish.

Here is what Ben Ehrenreich, the author of the novel The Suitors, wrote in the Los Angeles Times on the issue of criticism of Zionism being anti-Semitic.

Meanwhile, the characterization of anti-Zionism as an “epidemic” more dangerous than anti-Semitism reveals only the unsustainability of the position into which Israel’s apologists have been forced. Faced with international condemnation, they seek to limit the discourse, to erect walls that delineate what can and can’t be said.

It’s not working. Opposing Zionism is neither anti-Semitic nor particularly radical. It requires only that we take our own values seriously and no longer, as the book of Amos has it, “turn justice into wormwood and hurl righteousness to the ground.

Establishing a secular, pluralist, democratic government in Israel and Palestine would of course mean the abandonment of the Zionist dream. It might also mean the only salvation for the Jewish ideals of justice that date back to Jeremiah.”³

There is clearly a wide range of opinion on Zionism that exists within the Jewish community. This fact needs to be recognized. We also need to reject specious arguments and reject false allegations of racism and anti-Semitism. We need to fight for freedom of speech, academic freedom, critical inquiry and democratic debate, at all universities and colleges, in the media, in the halls of political power and all across North America. Individuals should be allowed to decide for themselves questions about Zionism and the Palestinians based on open debate, the facts and informed opinion not on suppression of debate, intimidation and censorship.

1. See “The Palestinian Question at the University: The Case of Western Ontario,” American-Arab Affairs, Summer 1987, pp. 87-98.
2. See for example, “We Cannot Allow These Murders to Go Unpunished: We can demand these homicidal Israeli soldiers be prosecuted for war crimes,” by Gerald Kaufman, The Independent, April 12, 2006.
3. “Zionism is the problem: The Zionist ideal of a Jewish state is keeping Israelis and Palestinians from living in peace,” by Ben Ehrenreich, Los Angeles Times, March 15, 2009.
4. See Occupation Magazine, 25 July, 2009.
5. “A Jewish state — or Jewish values?,” by Tema Okun, Mondoweiss, 21 July, 2009).
6. For example, see “Slow Motion Ethnic Cleansing,” By Uri Avnery, CounterPunch, 7 October 2003.
7. “Hands off the Law of Return!,” David Turner, Jerusalem Post, December 10, 2007.
8. Yakov M. Rabkin, A Threat from Within: A Century of Jewish Opposition to Zionism (Zed Books: London 2006), p. 2.
9. America Council for Judaism, Series A. Correspondence, Subseries 1: General, 1942-1953.
10. Ed Corrigan, “Jewish Criticism of Zionism,” Middle East Policy, Winter 1990-91.
11. “An Invention Called ‘The Jewish People,’” By Tom Segev, Ha’aretz, February 29, 2008.
12. For example see, “New Israeli Scholars Face up to Israel’s Origins,” by Eric Rouleau and “Are the Jews an Invented People?” by Eric Rouleau, Le Monde diplomatique, 10 May, 2008; and “A crisis in Judaism: For many Jews today, Israel is not a normal state – it is a cause or ideal, and therein lies the problem,” Brian Klug, Guardian, 15 January, 2009; “Israel’s war crimes,” Richard Falk, Le Monde diplomatique, English edition, 3 March 2009; “Israel’s Lies,” Henry Siegman, London Review of Books, 29 January, 2009.
13. See “PM slams ‘discrimination’ against Arabs,” By Elie Leshem and Jpost.com Staff, Jerusalem Post, Nov 12, 2008.
14. See “Knesset Speaker: Establishment of Israel caused Arabs real trauma,” Haaretz Service, Haaretz, 3 August 2009.
15. See “Erasures,” Gabriel Piterberg, New Left Review, July-August 2001.
16. Edward C. Corrigan, “Book Review of Reframing Anti-Semitism: Alternative Jewish Perspectives,” Middle East Policy Council, Volume XIII, Spring 2006, Number 1.

This year, instead of the usual sparsely attended events, town hall meetings across the United States have turned into raucous free-for-alls as opponents of President Barack Obama’s health care reform proposals have taken to shouting down a host of senators and congresspersons.

Over the years, one could slice and dice just about any period of U.S. history and determine that a “civility” project might have been useful. During the past few decades, however, churlish and bombastic invective has often prevailed over carefully calibrated discourse.

When former Republican Party vice presidential candidate and former governor of Alaska Sarah Palin recently commented about Obama’s health care reform initiatives, she claimed that his “death panels” would decide who would live and who would die.

Palin was not only playing to the Republican Party’s wired up base, she was clearly displaying a lack of civility (she later reversed course and came out in favour of civility).

Mark DeMoss, a long-time Christian Right/Republican-oriented public relations expert who believes that today’s political landscape is completely out of whack, has launched “The Civility Project,” an attempt to provide guidelines so that political opponents can disagree without being disagreeable.

So if you were DeMoss, and you were starting up something as high-minded as “The Civility Project,” would you start off by bashing gays and lesbians?

Recognising society’s division and polarisation, and concerned “about the hate and animosity being aimed at men and women with whom we may disagree on one issue or another”, DeMoss, a conservative Southern Baptist whose clients have included the late Rev. Jerry Falwell, recently “reached out to some people from various political, racial and religious backgrounds to see if we could join our hearts and minds together in calling others to civility”, he wrote in a statement titled “Welcome to the Civility Project.”

Unfortunately, DeMoss started out by attacking gays and lesbians. “I had spent about two years volunteering for Mitt Romney, and I saw a lot of ugly rhetoric and behaviour aimed at Mormons and then at me,” DeMoss said.

“And then the results of the Proposition 8 vote in California [the constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage that passed last November'] contributed to my thinking – when you saw gay activists responding to the… vote by vandalizing churches and temples,” he claimed.

DeMoss’s comments were an odd way to get started in the civility business. Over the past several decades, the Religious Right’s fortunes have in part been built on demonising gays and lesbians. By recognising that history, DeMoss might have started out on better footing.

DeMoss is the president of a public relations outfit called The DeMoss Group, which, on its website claims that it is “the largest PR firm specializing in faith-based organizations and causes.” The DeMoss Group focuses on communications, media relations, marketing, non-profit management, and crisis management.

According to its website, “The Civility Project [is] a collection of liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, blacks and whites, and people of various faiths – or no faith – who agree that even in sharp disagreement we should not be disagreeable.”

“I decided to launch a project where I would talk not about unity, not about tolerance, not about getting along, not about compromise, but just about civility,” DeMoss said.

Participants are invited to “Take the Civility Pledge”, in which signatories agree to: “Be civil in my public discourse and behavior; be respectful of others whether or not I agree with them; stand against incivility when I see it.”

The key Democrat supporting The Civility Project is Lanny Davis, a tough political combatant who has been a longtime adviser to the Clintons, and who has served three terms on the Democratic National Committee.

According to CitizenLink, a news service of the conservative group Focus on the Family, “DeMoss was so impressed with Davis’s civil tone [while he was involved in Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign] that he wrote him a letter:

“I suspect that politically you and I may have nothing in common,” DeMoss wrote. “But as I’ve watched you conduct yourself in the public arena, I’ve always appreciated how you handled yourself, how you handle your adversaries, how you show respect for those who disagree with you, and for modeling civility in an increasingly uncivil town.”

Davis said the letter came as a surprise: “I’m getting all this hate mail, and I get this amazing letter from a perfect stranger who identifies himself as an evangelical Christian. I always try to give deference to somebody who disagrees with me. That is the point Mark made in his letter, that he noticed that about me, that I always try to be respectful of people who are of a different opinion.”

Writing about the Civility Project at Religion Dispatches, Candace Chellew-Hodge pointed out that perhaps the religious right was “taking its cue from George Barna’s book UnChristian, which calls for conservative Christians to be kinder [and] … soften their rough and often hateful rhetoric, especially toward gays and lesbians.”

“DeMoss has no intention of learning about the person on the other side of the issue,” Chellew-Hodge maintained. “He’s not interested in tolerating them, or finding a place of common ground where there can be unity, or compromising on his principles, or even getting along — it’s simply about being polite to one another — to not yell at one another, but to still push our own agendas.”

“In short, DeMoss has no interest in dialogue. He has no interest in learning about what those who oppose him think or believe, or even how they arrived at that thought or belief. He just wants them to smile, slap him on the back, and get out of his way while he pursues his agenda,” she asserted. “If they don’t, then he can paint them as the ‘uncivil’ person or group who is obstructing his progress.”

Many questions remain as to the efficacy of The Civility Project.

How will the third point in the civility pledge, the one about “standing against incivility when I see it”, manifest itself?

Does it mean that when former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin gives a speech, Ann Coulter writes a column, Rush Limbaugh broadcasts, and Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly and Lou Dobbs take to the air, Civility Project folk will be monitoring their speech?

Thus far, the project has not issued any statements condemning the current Republican/insurance lobby-sponsored tactic of aggressively breaking up town hall meetings in districts of Democratic Party Congressional representatives.

Is DeMoss sincere with his plea for civility, or is he reading the political tea leaves (the Republicans and the Christian Right have hit low points in public opinion polls)?

Candace Chellew-Hodge characterised DeMoss having started out by gay-bashing as an example of “bigotry with manners.”

The municipality of Beersheva, the capital of southern Israel, is racing to put the finishing touches to repairs of the city’s long-neglected and unused Great Mosque, built more than 100 years ago by the Ottoman rulers of what was then Palestine.

But, over the protests of Beersheva’s thousands-strong community of Muslims, the Jewish-run municipality is not planning to restore the city’s only mosque to its former glory as a place of worship. It wants to convert it into a museum.

The building’s fate now rests with the Supreme Court, which is expected to rule in the coming months on whether to give the go-ahead to the municipality or insist on the mosque’s return to local Islamic authorities from whom it was confiscated 61 years ago.

Muslim campaigners, however, are not hopeful. After seven years of foot-dragging by the judges, they fear the court will not risk setting a precedent that might force the return of dozens of other Islamic holy places seized decades ago by Israel.

“There is so much paranoia from the government, the municipality and the courts about Muslims using this mosque again,” said Nuri al Uqbi, a 67-year-old Bedouin activist in Beersheva. “It was built with money raised from the local Bedouin and we should have the right to pray in it.”

Israel’s treatment of the Great Mosque has been a major source of friction for decades with the country’s 1.3 million Palestinian citizens, and especially the 180,000 Bedouin living close to Beersheva in the southern semi-desert area known as the Negev.

Following Israel’s establishment in 1948, when Beersheva was emptied of its Palestinian population, the mosque’s status as a holy place was ignored, and officials approved its use first as a prison and then for the exhibition of archaeological finds.

The building has been unused since it was declared structurally unsound in 1991. Through the early 1990s, the mosque became distinctive chiefly for a giant menorah, a candelabrum used in Jewish religious rituals, that was mysteriously erected and left in place on the roof.

“The authorities let it become an eyesore,” said Mr al Uqbi, one of the leading campaigners for the mosque’s restoration. “The courtyard was filled with graffitied curses in Hebrew, it was strewn with rubbish, beer bottles and pigeon droppings, and it attracted drug addicts and prostitutes.”

Opposition to what Mr al Uqbi called the “desecration” of the mosque has been slow in building.

Military rule, which was imposed on the Negev’s surviving tribes of Bedouin until the early 1970s, ensured that Beersheva was mostly off-limits.

“Today, the situation is entirely different,” said Morad al Sana, a Bedouin lawyer based in the city. “There are several thousand Muslims living here and thousands more come to work, shop, use the banks and so on. But they have nowhere to pray.”

A small group, including Mr al Uqbi, first tried to pray in the mosque in 1977. When they were leaving the building, he recalled, they found police had confiscated their shoes, which, as is customary, had been left at the entrance. “I was barefoot as they arrested me for trespassing,” said Mr al Uqbi. “As I was taken away, I asked the policeman: ‘Can I have my shoes back, please?’”

Several hundred members of the Islamic Movement, the main Islamic party in Israel, tried to stage prayers at the mosque in 1997, provoking scuffles with right-wing local Jewish residents and council officials. Tipped off by police beforehand, the council had sprayed cow manure in the yard, forcing the worshippers to pray on plastic sheets.

Mr al Uqbi was arrested for a second time in 2000 after he painted “The Great Mosque of Beersheva” on its gates. He still faces the threat of jail for refusing to pay a fine of $1,200. “The walls were full of graffiti and yet no one apart from me has ever been charged,” he said.

Another campaigner, Sheikh Uda Abu Sirhan, a resident of the nearby Bedouin town of Tel Sheva, told the Haaretz newspaper that Muslims in Beersheva were desperate for the mosque’s restoration. “People pray in streets, in parking lots — it’s a disgrace, especially when they are so close to a holy site.”

The nearest mosque, he pointed out, was 15km away.

The council’s obduracy partly reflects a fear that Beersheva, which has a growing Arab population, may one day be recognised as a “bi-national city”, said Oren Yiftachel, a geography professor at the city’s Ben Gurion University.

In recent years, Beersheva’s 180,000 Jewish residents have been joined by at least 5,000 Muslims, mostly Arab professionals from the Galilee in northern Israel. The Bedouin visit from the surrounding Negev.

Mr al Sana, who works for Adalah, an Arab legal centre, pointed out that there are more than 250 synagogues in Beersheva, or one for every 700 Jewish residents. Parity with Jews would entitle the city’s Muslims to at least eight mosques, he said.

Mr al Uqbi and Adalah jointly submitted a petition to the Supreme Court in 2002 demanding the mosque be used as a place of worship again. Officials responded in 2004 that the petition was motivated not by religious conviction but by “the ultranationalist aspiration to turn back the wheels of history to the situation that prevailed before 1948.”

In short, the state’s defence is that the use of the mosque would open the door to wider Palestinian claims for a right of return, thereby threatening Israel’s existence as a Jewish state.

To bolster their case, officials have cited security arguments, including that opening the mosque would create civil unrest between Jews and Arabs and that anyone climbing the minaret would have a bird’s-eye view of the army’s nearby southern headquarters.

An eight-member committee established by the government in 2003 to find a solution failed to include an Arab or Muslim representative. Its report published a year later argued that Beersheva was a Jewish town and that Muslims should pray elsewhere.

Itzhak Nevo, a philosophy professor at Ben Gurion University who testified before the committee, said Beersheva had a duty to acknowledge its Ottoman history. “The Bedouin cannot help but feel humiliated, and that their history, rights and identity are being denied,” he said. “This is not a wise policy.”

The judges have been slow to make a decision, said Mr al Sana, because they are aware it could set a precedent entitling Israel’s Palestinian citizens to reclaim many of the other Arab holy places they have been denied access to for decades.

A report published in 2004 by the Arab Human Rights Association, based in Nazareth, identified 250 places of worship, both Islamic and Christian, that had either been destroyed or made unusable since Israel’s establishment in 1948. Nearly 200 were razed in the wake of the 1948 war, but the threat of destruction hangs over many surviving places of worship too. The century-old mosque of Sarafand, on the coast near the northern city of Haifa, was bulldozed in July 2000 after local Muslims started restoring it.

Other buildings, including mosques in Tiberias and Beit Shean, have been the target of repeated arson attacks. The famous Hasan Bek mosque in Tel Aviv is regularly vandalised and was desecrated in 2005 when a pig’s head bearing the name of the Prophet was thrown into its yard.

Two historic Galilee mosques that are still standing, at Ghabsiyya and Hittin, have been left to fall into ruin surrounded by fences and razor wire. The latter was built by Saladin in the 12th century to celebrate the defeat of the Crusaders.

In Palestinian villages now re-invented as Jewish communities, such as at Ein Hod and Caesariya, mosques have been refurbished as bars or restaurants. In at least four cases, mosques have been converted into synagogues. And Jewish farming communities sometimes use remote holy places as animal pens or warehouses.

In the case of the Beersheva mosque, the court tried to settle the dispute three years ago by urging the parties to reach a compromise. It has suggested that the building be converted into an Islamic heritage centre where no prayer would take place or that it become a coexistence centre.

Both sides rejected the offers.

Adalah discovered in 2004, two years after it launched its petition, that the municipality had secretly issued a tender to convert the mosque into a museum. The court ruled the renovations could go ahead but only if they were restricted to protecting the structure.

A visit last month revealed that the municipality had ignored the injunction and was close to completing the mosque’s refurbishment as a museum.

In a recent interview, President Chirac recounted an experience that left him deeply troubled. Through a secret phone call, placed in early 2003, George Bush tried to explain how his plans for war were in direct correlation with biblical prophecy: “Gog and Magog are at work in the Middle East…. The biblical prophecies are being fulfilled…. This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people’s enemies before a New Age begins.”

All this, coming on the heels of new allegations that former Blackwater CEO, Erik Prince, purposefully operated his disgraced private mercenary machine as a modern-day crusade battalion against the evil forces of Islam—found dominant in the middle-eastern region. And just a few months after the release of tapes showing soldiers in Afghanistan being told to “hunt people for Jesus” and to “get them into the kingdom.”

Of course, this is hardly surprising for those who watched closely the unfolding and aftermath of the Iraq war. A great number of reasons to justify its moral imperative were put forth, but none took repugnance to a new low more than those provided by the former President, such as claims, on countless occasions, and to countless foreign leaders, that “God” was the driver of his war ship, that “God” had instructed him to “go and end the tyranny in Iraq,” that his 2003 war was, essentially, “the lord’s will.”

Many reports have also detailed private conversations Bush had with foreign Head of States about the “love” of God. And with GQ magazine’s exposé, published March this year, of the biblical quotes former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld regularly laced his top-secret memos with (“Open the Gates that the Righteous Nation May Enter,” “Behold, the eye of the Lord is on those who fear Him to deliver their soul from death”), the implications couldn’t be more startling.

Is it any wonder that those most eager to talk about their love for “God” are often the ones most likely to do the devil’s bidding?

Raised in a firm, Judeo-Christian home, I appreciate the roles spirituality and morality play in providing a young child with much needed structure against the many impurities this world contains; but “religion mis-overstood,” as the rap artist Nas once put it, is “poison.” And religious extremists, who’ve convinced themselves that the only true path to the afterlife is that which they’ve chosen to follow, are no less dangerous than the man who led the whole world into war based on conversations he imagined to be having with his “God.”

Conservative Christianity is chief culprit for a lot of the twisted pathologies our society partakes in today, but bigotry isn’t exclusive to the right only. Books by Sarah Posner (God’s Profits: Faith, Fraud, and the Republican Crusade for Values Voters), Bill Press (How the Republicans Stole Christmas: Why the Religious Right is Wrong about Faith & Politics and What We Can Do to Make it Right), and Frank Schaeffer (Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back) have outlined poignantly the right-wing’s co-optation of Christianity for commercial political causes, but not enough has been written on the fundamentalism of religion, and how easy it is for even the most well-meaning of liberals, leftists, or progressives to contribute to the chaotic conditions humanity remains subject to.

In 2009, no one is still left unsure whether religion, and its struggle for supremacy, has been the greatest dividing factor this world has entertained. The results—millions of lives lost (and counting)—is plenty proof. Innocent blood has been shed, and will continue to be shed, for as long as religion remains a deciding factor in the public spaces that govern our everyday concerns and careers.

My faith (small f) is private and I hope it remains that way. And though I believe I’m doing right by my maker, I’m not so arrogant as to proselytize it to everyone who comes my way. I don’t hold anyone to a lesser standard for refusing to commit to the same religion-based belief system I’ve adopted. I chose the prophetic route of theology, which puts at center the burdens of the disenfranchised above all other entities, but I’m not so quick to denounce atheists or agnostics as heathens whose special place in hell awaits them—if they don’t repent and turn from their wicked ways some time soon.

With the increase in church shootings, mosque bombings, and synagogue attacks, the need for inter-faith dialogue is more critical than it’s ever been. Pastors, Imams, Monks, Rabbis, Priests, Atheism Scholars, and all other religious/non-religious leaders must make a commitment, within the next decade, to broaden the discourse of faith, that it may include all those who find inequality distasteful enough to engage it in a way that frees the yoke of the oppressed and brings to justice the oppressors.

At the core of each credible faith is the belief that reciprocity should guide the believer’s actions, reminding him/her that no God is worthy of worship who lets injustice go unpunished or a good deed go unrewarded. For those who truly cherish life over death, peace over war, liberation over imperialism, that should be common ground we can all gather around.

Nico Tarosyan and Olga Samosvatov chose to tie the knot in a special ceremony on Tuesday — watched by family, friends and curious passers-by — after Orthodox rabbis had denied them the right to wed.

The rabbinate says that Mr Tarosyan cannot prove he is Jewish according to its strict standards and therefore should not marry Ms Samosvatov, who is considered a proper Jew.

Mr Tarosyan, aged 34, who moved to Israel from Moscow in 1995, called his treatment by the rabbis “humiliating”.

“In Russia we were hated because we were Jews, and here in Israel we are discriminated against as Russians,” he said.

An underclass of Jews has emerged in Israel since the early 1990s, when more than one million immigrants began pouring into Israel following the collapse of the former Soviet Union. Many were entitled to emigrate to Israel under the Law of Return, which requires only that they have a single Jewish grandparent. But the authorities — keen to bolster the number of Jews in Israel’s demographic battle with the Palestinians — also allowed some to arrive with little documentation or faked papers.

This set the new immigrants on a collision course with Israel’s Orthodox rabbis, who regard themselves as guarding the Jewish people’s ethnic and religious purity, said Ofer Kornfeld, the chairman of Havaya, an organisation that officiates at unrecognised weddings like the one conducted in Tel Aviv this week.

“Civil marriages are not possible in Israel,” he said. “So the rabbis get to decide who can marry and who cannot.”

Israel has passed control of all matters relating to personal status — births, marriages and divorces, and deaths — to rabbis belonging to the strictest stream of Judaism, Orthodoxy.

Havaya, said Mr Kornfeld, offered unrecognised, secular and non-Orthodox Jews the chance to marry in a ceremony that retained Jewish rituals while tailor-making the event to their own convictions.

Official figures show that as many as 350,000 Jews are classified by the rabbinate as having “no religion”, and are therefore unable to marry in Israel. Their only option is to wed abroad — the marriage is then recognised on their return.

These immigrants face major hurdles in seeking to prove their Jewishness to the rabbis’ satisfaction. They must produce evidence that they have a Jewish mother or grandmother in a procedure that can be upsetting to those affected, said Mr Kornfeld.

“Many don’t even try because they know it’s a difficult and humiliating process that can take months or even years to complete and there is no guarantee of success.”

For a man, the rabbis demand that he prove he is circumcised and produce a birth certificate stating that his mother was a Jew, a proof many immigrants from the former Soviet Union have difficulty providing.

“It may help if you can prove that your mother spoke Yiddish or, if she is dead, supply a photo of her gravestone with a Magen [Star of] David,” said Mr Kornfeld.

Mr Tarosyan, a computer engineer, said that, although he failed to impress the rabbis, both his parents were considered Jews in Russia. In Moscow, he said, neighbours had daubed anti-Semitic graffiti on the family’s door.

Ms Samosvatov, 29, who immigrated from Ukraine with her mother when she was 15, said although the couple considered this week’s wedding in Tel Aviv to be the true ceremony, they were saving to travel to Prague later in the year to conduct a recognised wedding.

Mr Kornfeld said they would be following in the path of a growing number of Israelis. “About 6,000 couples wed abroad each year, often in eastern Europe. That’s about a fifth of all marriages.”

It is not only Jews classified as without a religion who are forced to leave the country, he said. Many recognised but secular Jews, who do not wish to submit to an Orthodox ceremony, tie the knot abroad, as do those marrying across religious divisions.

Israel’s Muslim, Christian and Druze citizens — comprising nearly a fifth of the population — have their own separate religious authorities who are given exclusive oversight of weddings.

Demands to reform the law have been growing for more than a decade, but every parliamentary bill on civil marriage has been defeated, usually following stiff resistance from the religious parties.

However, a new bill, approved by a ministerial committee last month, seems more likely to become law. It allows for a limited form of civil marriage that applies only to couples where both lack a religious status. Mr Tarosyan and Ms Samosvatov would not qualify as the rabbis consider one of them a Jew.

The religious parties were forced to agree to the Civil Marriage Bill as a condition for entering the government of Benjamin Netanyahu in the spring. The compromise was needed because civil marriage was the key platform of another coalition partner, the far-right Yisreal Beiteinu party of Avigdor Lieberman, the foreign minister, who is now facing corruption charges. The party draws heavy support from the Russian-speaking population.

The liberal Haaretz newspaper welcomed the bill as a “first crack in the religious monopoly” on marriage, but other observers have doubts.

Avirama Golan, writing in the same paper, warned that the law would apply only to a tiny number of couples and would in practice entrench the power of the rabbis, who before approving a wedding would still force couples to submit to lengthy and humiliating investigations to ensure that neither was a Jew.

She added that such couples would be forced into a ghetto, giving “birth to their shunned children who will marry among themselves and be registered separately in the communal records”.

The rabbis’ agreement to the reform, analysts point out, was possible because the bill maintains barriers preventing assimilation between the majority designated as real Jews and those the rabbis consider “without religion”.

Mr Kornfeld said the rabbis’ grip on marriage has continued even though nearly 70 per cent of Israeli Jews defined themselves as secular. Even among the religious, some regard themselves as belonging to the more moderate Reform and Conservative streams of Judaism.

Conversion to Orthodoxy is tightly restricted by the rabbinate, with only a few hundred people approved each year. Those converting are forced to adopt a strictly observant lifestyle for themselves and their children.

A general lack of sympathy for the problems of recent Russian immigrants was reflected in a survey conducted by the Israel Democracy Institute this week. It found that half of all Israelis polled believed that only those born in Israel could be a “true Israeli”. Conversely, only 28 per cent of Russian-speaking immigrants in their 30s saw their future in Israel.

         O, here
   Will I set up my everlasting rest
   And shake the yoke of inauspicious stars
   From this world-wearied flesh. Eyes, look your last!
   Arms, take your last embrace! And, lips, O you
   The doors of breath, seal with a righteous kiss
   A dateless bargain to engrossing death!

Edward, a knighted, 85-year-old British music conductor, had serious health problems and was almost blind and deaf. Joan, a 74-year-old former dancer, choreographer and TV producer, had cancer.

Rather than suffer under the “yoke of inauspicious stars” or perish at the whim of their increasingly decrepit, “world-wearied flesh,” the Downes’ chose to pass on together with shared grace, dignity and courage. Unfortunately, they had to travel to Switzerland to do it.

Assisted suicide and euthanasia are banned in Great Britain as they are in most places here in the United States. The healthy majority generally believes it knows what’s best for the rest, and the chorus of misery that emanates from many of the terminally ill and the grotesquely suffering ultimately gets drowned out by a din of Christian rhetoric and ludicrous moral posturing.

In Romeo and Juliet, the abrupt, hardly weighed suicides of the protagonists are considered romantic. Almost 500 years later, the peaceful, deliberate passing of the Downes–a couple that had been together 54 years–is frowned on by many as selfish, immoral and damning.

Some say it’s a direct violation of God’s law. Others quote Corinthians 6:19, 20 (KJV): “Know ye not that your body is a temple of the Holy Ghost, which is in you, which ye have of God, and ye are not your own.” They believe God has proprietary rights and we mortal chattel dare not question His plans, even after His arguably having been asleep at the wheel for the last couple of millennia.

I couldn’t disagree with them more. Their stance suggests that terminally ill folks should voluntarily play Job, regardless of the pain and anguish that accompanies these often horrendous and hopeless deaths.

I think what God allowed to happen to Job was a sin and worse than a sin. The Book of Job reads like a bet between two sadistic guards at a Nazi concentration camp. If two human beings of sound mind choose to die quietly, bravely, and determine their time, their own end, to alleviate their sufferings or agony or induce their own demise before they’ve lost all semblance of their lives or themselves–if they decide they’ve played Job long enough, how can we fault them for cheating their torturers and how can any good god punish them for refusing to fulfill the wager?

Religion is not all that demands this abridgement of free will, this prohibition of peaceful oblivion. America used to be at the forefront of compassionate ideas. Now, we lag behind, hobbled by short-sighted conservatism and wide-eyed profit-mongers. The powers that be have no problem with us killing ourselves slowly with cigarettes or alcohol or their unnecessary drugs or the synthetic poisons they peddle or indirectly place in our food, air and water supplies. Each and every one of us is a captive consumer and even after we can no longer eat, drink or defecate their poisons on our own and we’ve forgotten who we are or were, they can still make money off us rotting away under hospice care or in a nursing home.

Who are we to take matters in our own hands? Who are we circumvent the burgeoning assisted “living” industry?

I’d like to think we’re human beings. I’d like to think we would be treated humanely. Unfortunately, only the states of Oregon and Washington have “Death with Dignity” laws in place.

Here in Texas, regardless of how identity-erasing, volition-robbing, life-transmogrifying, excruciating, needless or pointless a dying person’s wasting away may be, he or she is expected to grin and bear it.

What we want doesn’t matter. Even after there’s hardly anything left of us, they still place the cross, the yoke and the burden on our shoulders. It’s a state-sanctioned martyrdom for God and Capitalism.

There seems to be a great effort on the part of those who think they have a mission to not only describe but also shape our culture to dampen any signs of disagreement between the scientific and the religious perspectives that have often appeared, to this untrained eye, to suggest some antagonism in the very public battles between them. Thus, many reporters, social commentator’s, religionists and even scientists have held forth on the necessity to promote harmony between these “nonoverlapping magisteria,” to borrow the late Stephen Jay Gould’s phrasing. (See “The trouble with NOMA” for my view of Gould’s description.)

Thus, accommodation between the religious and the scientific is presented as something to be desired, if not at all costs, certainly in the overwhelming majority of cases. And those obstreperous individuals, of whom Richard Dawkins—unfairly, in my view—appears to have become the prototype, who dare to suggest the accommodation may mask a sellout of basic scientific values are just being rude. According to the mavens of accommodation, those who cannot say anything nice about religion should just shut up about it. Now they are not quite gutsy enough to come out and declare such a requirement openly, but it is implicit in their constant insistence that those who won’t “play nice” with religion are damaging our public discourse and doing a disservice to the many believers who are not fundamentalists and who do, for the most part, believe in science.

All of this noise obscures, in the public mind at least, an obvious and, for the religious, uncomfortable fact—the “elephant in the room” that everyone seems to be ignoring. Science and religions are not just different ways of looking at things, they are in fundamental disagreement about the nature of reality. They are, in a word, incompatible.

This does not mean that a scientist may not believe in a god or practice a religion and still be a good scientist. Human beings function at high levels in all walks of life and practically every one of them believes in contradictory and, at times, mutually exclusive ideas. For example, we are very good at compartmentalizing our minds so that our fantasies can coexist with our perceptions and understanding of the real world. As long as we don’t force the issue, the two may cohabit quite peacefully, neither one intruding on the other. People do this sort of thing all the time. However, saying that two ideas may coexist in the same mind, or the same culture, should not be taken as evidence those ideas are compatible with one another. That a scientist may believe in a god says nothing about whether or not his or her religious beliefs are compatible with science.

Science is based upon observation, experimentation and demonstration. In order to be acceptable, scientific evidence must be susceptible to independent verification. When evidence cannot be verified, when experiments cannot be repeated, any conclusions drawn from them are either held in abeyance, pending further study, or disregarded. Science is about asking questions and challenging the answers. As a consequence, science is always unfinished, always contingent upon what we know today and what we may learn tomorrow. Above all else, science is a reason-based process. It is inherently rational. Science is a method of learning about the universe and everything in it through the application of human cognition.

Those who advocate accommodation between science and religions are fond of declaring that science answers the “how” questions and religions answer the “why” questions. They are not, however, very clear about exactly what that means. Sometimes how and why are inextricably intertwined so that it is not possible to understand one without the other. For example, one cannot understand how the human genome works without understanding why it is put together the way it is. It is not possible to understand the “why” of nuclear fission without understanding the “how” of atomic theory.

Of course, religionists will complain what they mean is that religions supply the answers to the “really big” questions of human existence. “Why am I here?” “What is the meaning of existence?” Those kinds of questions. There are, of course, perfectly good answers to those questions supplied by science. The first answer is that I am here because my parents engaged in sexual activity and I was the result. The second is that existence appears to supply its own meaning. Existence is an end in itself and requires nothing more than that to make it meaningful.

“No. No. That is not what we mean either,” the religionists will declare. They claim to be talking about ultimate meanings and that sort of thing. What religions answer are those ultimate questions that cannot be addressed by science. In other words, religions claim to be able to answer questions for which there are no satisfactory answers except by appeal to the irrational and the indefinable. But what sort of answers are supplied thereby?

Here is the rub. It is all well and good to ask “Why is there something rather than nothing?” as many people have. However, there is no way to get to a verifiable answer. Since we cannot see beyond the event, the “Big Bang,” which led to the development of this universe, we cannot know what conditions were before it came into existence. Maybe something always has existed. Maybe the universe is a unique event, a cosmic hiccup that will never be repeated. Maybe universes are as common as galaxies or solar systems. Maybe the universe we occupy was created as a bauble for the children of a species of cosmic overlords, something to keep the kiddies occupied whilst they were in their cribs. Maybe it is the accidental byproduct of extreme flatulence by the Invisible Pink Unicorn. Maybe the answer is simply “Why not?”

Obviously, some of those answers might deserve more consideration than others and one, or maybe two of them are intended only in jest. However, there is no method known to us to prove any of them false. But what sort of answer is “God?” It really is no answer at all. Positing a god as an answer to unanswerable questions tells us absolutely nothing about anything. It is simply a pietistic way of begging those questions.

So what exactly is it about religions that science must accommodate?

This is an important question, one to which I have yet to hear a satisfactory answer. As a method of finding out about what exists, science brings a lot to the table. Religions offer nothing that is helpful in that endeavor. Instead they offer verbal slight of hand, phrases like “the ground of all being” or “a god outside of space and time” or new age gobbledygook that sounds like “the ineffable essence at the core of an inexplicable reality.” That kind of thing. Such language may be appropriate for the ethereal meanderings of theologians who rarely offer anything useful in the real world, but they are scarcely helpful in finding out about what is going on in the universe we all occupy and why it appears to operate the way it does.

It is no virtue that the only territory religion can claim for its own is that which is outside the ken of rational inquiry. In that terrain anything is possible, and nothing can be verified. It is the realm of mystic visions, spiritual entities and things that go bump in the night. The gods who populate such regions may be the creators and destroyers of worlds or the ethereal panaceas and placebos who have fed the fantasies of all manner of delusional people. And while it may be impossible to demonstrate that such fanciful notions are false, there is not the slightest bit of verifiable evidence to suggest they are true. Attempting to shoehorn such notions into scientific theories does a disservice to the work of the scientific enterprise as a whole. It also goes a long way toward destroying the credibility of the scientists who make the attempt.

Consider the “fine-tuning” argument so beloved by theists. There is a set of physical properties that need to have the values they have in order for human beings, or any complex life forms, to have evolved. Thus, it is claimed, a divine agent must have set things up so that the universe we occupy would have those values. Ergo, “God”—or whatever you want to call the agent in question—must exist, or we could not be here. Now whether it is expressed as a probability or only a possibility, this argument has no place in science. (For more treatments of this subject and a variety of arguments on both sides of the issue, I refer you here.)

The late Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and other works, once compared this notion to a mud puddle declaring that the hole it occupied must have been created for it because otherwise it could not have fit so well. (Here’s a youtube audio of Adams making the point.) Any universe occupied by complex life must be organized to accommodate that life. There’s no reason to suppose a divine agent had anything to do with it. It’s a bit like declaring that human legs are proof there must be a god because no matter how tall you are, they are exactly the right length for your feet to reach the ground.

We expect to hear this sort of pap coming from religionists. However, it is surprising to hear it put forth by any scientist, whether they have a background in astrophysics or not. Certainly, the constants exist. That’s not the point. The point is that their existence is evidence of nothing except that certain conditions may be necessary for life to evolve. Positing “God” as the source of those constants violates the most basic rules of science. It is not even a good hypothesis because there is absolutely no way to test it. Making declarations about what is necessary for a universe like ours to exist is an exercise in futility anyway. Ours is the only universe we know anything about. You simply cannot form valid conclusions about the conditions necessary for a phenomenon to exist when you have only one example of that phenomenon.

There are no concepts put forth by religions to which science must accommodate itself. However, science puts forth many ideas to which religions must accommodate their own beliefs if they wish to retain any semblance of intellectual respectability. Here in the United States, many religious people deplore evolution, dismiss modern cosmology and declare their preference for ignorance and superstition. Now, people have the right to believe such things. They have no right, however, to require anyone else to respect such nonsense. Religions that preach the world was created by a deity 6,000 years ago (or in any similar time frame) ought not be allowed to influence the way biology is taught in modern science classrooms in public schools because the theory of evolution offends their religious sensibilities. A person’s right to be an ignoramus does not translate into a right to impose ignorance on others.

Religions and science need not be in conflict. When they are, it is usually religions who pick the fight. They pick it because they see their dominance over the minds of humankind slowly being eaten away. For tens of thousands of years, supernaturalism dominated the human narrative and gave us thousands of gods and hundreds of thousands of religions. Religions, like all other human cultural artifacts, have evolved to meet the changing conditions in which they have found themselves. Today, however, modern science has evolved a new narrative that makes the hoary tales told by religions seem quaint and parochial and, at times, destructive. The story science tells us about who we are and how we came to be is far grander and far more inspiring than the puny myths peddled by modern religions.

So religions may well need to accommodate themselves to modern science if they are to have any prospect for survival in the coming centuries. But science has no need and no reason to accommodate itself to the beliefs of any religion. And unless religion can bring more to the party than wishful thinking and unverifiable observations, it would be a violation of its very nature for science to try.

1. If you are interested in this subject and want to track the debate, two of the best sources of information are P.Z. Myers blog, Pharyngula, and Jerry Coyne’s blog, Why Evolution is True. Both could be characterized as anti-accommodationist, I suppose, but their reactions are informed by science, and they cite references, including those to whom they are reacting. Both blogs are well-written and informative, touching on many areas.

With all the talk of the Clash of Civilizations, the need for an alternative paradigm which does not use a fallacious abstraction as a justification to extend power and influence is underscored. With the current state of things as they stand, we may be moving towards the clash that Huntington predicted, but the understanding that such a clash is not inevitable, and that it does not have to be so, is extremely important. Such a clash, if approaching, can and must be prevented. There is need for understanding, co operation and dialogue on both sides. Unity and tolerance for each other, respect for cultures or religions that may be different is required. Intellectuals, writers, scholars, academics, the media and political leadership have a very important duty to highlight the grounds for co operation between cultures and civilizations.

This said, however, the imperatives of a successful and effective framework for dialogue between civilizations must first be established, otherwise all attempts to create an alliance between civilizations through dialogue will be little more than chasing an illusory ideal. Dieter Senghaas points out the flawed strategy in contemporary attempts at bringing civilizational representatives to the talking table. He contends that participants in the dialogues sponsored by the West (as in fact all dialogues have been, so far) are not true representatives of the sides to the conflict. Particularly, Muslim representatives in the Dialogue are almost invariably those of the West’s choosing — believers in a ‘moderated’ Islam which does not enjoy any sizeable following in the Muslim world: “On the whole, the Muslim participants are not hard-boiled representatives of Orthodox Islam. They are all the representatives of a ‘modern’ Islam (whatever that means).”³ On the other hand, Senghaas notes, Western participants are rather naive and unaware of the Muslim standpoint, with little to offer. Such a dialogue, as Senghaas terms it, is ‘intellectually exhausted’, leading to a dead end.

Another danger the West needs to guard against for a genuine dialogue between civilizations is the belief in one’s own culture to be essentially unique and exclusive. The West must pull itself out of the Cold War mentality of creating and bloating up enemy images in order to direct an ambitious foreign policy at an adversary — real or imagined. The West should reject attempts at demonization of the enemy and understand that its version of modernity cannot be imposed on the Muslim world. It must allow other communities to develop according to their own orientation and essential values. Besides, the West must engage with authentic, popular representatives of the Muslim world: “An intellectual debate should rather be dealing intensively with the concepts of the democratic representatives of the Islamic world… How do writers, scientists, politicians, the representatives of social and especially religious groups envisage a desirable political constitution for their increasingly complex societies?”⁴

On both sides of the current divide, voices of conciliation, tolerance and peacemaking need to be empowered over and above the call to isolate and avenge. Religion has a very significant role in the process of reconciliation. A number of religious personalities, scholars, organisations and institutions are engaged in the task of reconciliation, peacemaking and rapproachment through religion. However, their contribution and potential has largely been unacknowledged and unrecognized: “We do not know most of these people, nor do we understand their impact, because we in the West have had a tendency in the modern period to view religion as only the problem in the human relations of civil society, never part of solutions.”⁵ However, it is also true on the other hand that religion is also misused for generating violence, hatred and conflict. Religion, therefore, has the potential both for peacemaking and conflict resolution as well as violence and conflict. It is the peacemaking and conciliatory role of religion that ought to be highlighted and emphatically asserted, through interpretation of the sources of religion:

At the end of the day, it will come down to interpretation, selection and the hermeneutic direction of religious communities. That, in turn, is deeply tied up with questions of the economic and psychological health of their members, the wounds of history, and the decisions of key leaders to direct their communities’ deepest beliefs, practices and doctrines towards healing and reconciliation or towards hatred and violence.⁵

This can help create a global civil society based on the sanctity of human rights and the necessity of conflict resolution. However, to truly accord that position and role to religion, it must be learnt that “Religion does not kill. Religion does not rape women, destroy buildings and institutions. Only individuals do those things.”⁶ This is particularly true for the West to understand in its perception of Islam which has, unfortunately, plummeted sharply after September 11, 2001, bringing the prospects for a clash closer. Instead of viewing violence as an intrinsically ‘Muslim’ phenomenon, the West needs to take responsibility for ill advised policy victimizing Muslims that has raised apprehension and mistrust in the Muslim world.

In his speech at the ‘Dialogue Between Civilizations’, President Khatami spoke of Islam’s role in peacemaking and arbitrating between civilizations:

I should also highlight one of the most important sources that enriched Iranian thought and culture, namely Islam. Islamic spirituality is a global one. Islam has, all through the history, extended a global invitation to all the humanity. The Islamic emphasis on humane quality, and its disdain for such elements as birth and blood, had conquered the hearts of those yearning for justice and freedom…⁷

Several writers and intellectuals throughout history have recognized the extraordinary potential of Islam as an arbiter between civilizations through its emphasis on equality, justice and brotherhood that goes beyond all distinctions of nationalism, race or creed. According to H.A. R Gibb:

But Islam has a still further service to render to the cause of humanity. It stands after all nearer to the real East than Europe does, and it possesses a magnificent tradition of inter-racial understanding and cooperation. No other society has such a record of success uniting in an equality of status, of opportunity, and of endeavours so many and so various races of mankind … Islam has still the power to reconcile apparently irreconcilable elements of race and tradition. If ever the opposition of the great societies of East and West is to be replaced by cooperation, the mediation of Islam is an indispensable condition. In its hands lies very largely the solution of the problem with which Europe is faced in its relation with East. If they unite, the hope of a peaceful issue is immeasurably enhanced.⁸

Ample evidence for the aforesaid is present in the sources of Islam. According to Islamic tradition, the Prophet (PBUH), in his Last Sermon made to the entirety of his living followers at that point in time said:

O people! Verily, Allah says, ‘O mankind! We have indeed created you from a single male and a female, and then We made you into nations and tribes so that you may recognize (or identify) each other. Indeed, the most honoured among you in the Sight of Allah is the one who is the most righteous.’(In the light of this verse), no Arab has a superiority over a non Arab, nor does a non Arab have any superiority over an Arab; and a black does not have any superiority over a white, nor is a white superior to a black, except by one thing: righteousness. Remember, all human beings are the sons and daughters of Adam (A.S), and Adam (A.S) was made from dust. Be warned! All (false) claims of blood and of wealth are under my feet.⁹

The huge stumbling block towards an understanding of Islam as an egalitarian, emancipatory, humanistic tradition in the West is the Orientalist lens with which the West has always viewed Islam. Due to a very flippant, superficial understanding of it, violence in the Muslim world is seen as intrinsic to Islam and Muslim society, while the role and responsibility of the West in provoking militancy through its policies is overlooked. This mindset becomes obvious in the Palestine-Israel conflict, a weeping sore in the modern world which embodies in itself all the prejudice, misunderstanding, hate, mistrust with which human beings have viewed others on the basis of difference in religion or race or country. Karen Armstrong states,

It is not sufficient for us in the West to support or condemn parties to the conflict. We are also involved and must make our own attitudes our prime responsibility… Crusading is not a lost medieval tradition: it has survived in different forms in both Europe and the United States and we must accept that our own views are blinkered and prejudiced. The prophets of Israel, the parents of all three faiths, proclaimed the necessity of creating a new heart and a new soul, which was far more important than external conformity. So too today. External political solutions are not enough. All three of the participants in the struggle must create a different attitude, a new heart and spirit. In the Christian West we must try to make the painful migration from our old aggressions and embark on the long journey towards a new understanding and a new self.¹⁰

Overcoming this stumbling block requires acknowledgement of the West’s debt to the Orient and to Islam, and reaching the realization that Islam in fact is central and not extrinsic to Western civilization. In his speech to the Muslim world, U.S President Barack Obama mentioned Europe and America’s debt to Islam:

As a student of history, I also know civilization’s debt to Islam. It was Islam — at places like Al-Azhar University — that carried the light of learning through so many centuries, paving the way for Europe’s Renaissance and Enlightenment. It was innovation in Muslim communities that developed the order of algebra; our magnetic compass and tools of navigation; our mastery of pens and printing; our understanding of how disease spreads and how it can be healed. And throughout history, Islam has demonstrated through words and deeds the possibilities of religious tolerance and racial equality.

I know, too, that Islam has always been a part of America’s story. The first nation to recognize my country was Morocco. In signing the Treaty of Tripoli in 1796, our second President John Adams wrote, ‘The United States has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Muslims.’ And since our founding, American Muslims have enriched the United States.¹¹

The West needs to reinterpret history and do away with the narrow, parochial understanding of an exclusively ‘Western’ individualism that its history celebrates. It needs to acknowledge the debt, for only through that will mankind be able to seek the common thread buried beneath the morass of clash and conflict. Effort needs to be made to create the realization in the Western mind, of the historically attested fact that “The Western heritage is not simply Judaeo-Christian, but rather Judaeo-Christian-Islamic. Islam belongs to the same Abrahamic family of religions as Judaism and Christianity, and modern Western civilization has inherited a large part of Islamic intellectual and scientific culture.”¹²

The task ahead is to overcome the stumbling blocs in order to acquire a balanced world view, through which to strive to reach a middle ground on the basis of a system of sharing, exchange and intercultural communication between civilizations on an egalitarian basis. At the heart of the process is the understanding that we may be different, but we also share our humanity, and must make the most of this shared, indissoluble bond.

This does not mean, however, that personal identities ought to be diluted, distinctions erased, barriers eliminated. That is neither practical nor advisable. What is needed is a delicate balance between civilizational (inclusive of religion, culture and all other identities short of singular humanness) and human identity. Edward Said reiterated the same concept when asked what commonalities can unite the human race:

There are already commonalities that need to be recognized. I do not, however, suggest that differences should be eliminated. Things cannot be flattened out and homogenized. However, the other extreme is that everything is clashing. I think that is a prescription for war, and Huntington says that. The other alternative is coexistence with the preservation of difference. We have to respect and live with our differences. I do not suggest a unified, simplified, reduced culture, but the preservation of differences while learning to coexist in peace.²

The potential and promise of Islam in fostering the ‘fraternity’ or the ‘alliance’ between civilizations is immense, as in fact, Islam has achieved this tremendous undertaking at several high points in its history. Spain under Muslims is an ideal worth emulating. Malaysian Professor Osman Bakar states,

Was not the civilization built in Spain by Muslims, Jews and Christians under the banner of Islam a universal civilization? A number of Jewish and Christian thinkers think so. Max Dimont makes the remarkable claim that the Jewish Golden Age in the medieval period coincided with the Golden Age of Islam, thus implying that what Muslims, Jews and Christians had built together within the Islamic civilization was truly universal in nature. There exists among some European scholars nostalgia for the Andalusian culture and civilization. They wish to return to the universality of Andalusia because post modern Western civilization has become particularistic and exclusionary.¹³

Despite the essential differences between Islamic and Non Islamic tradition, historically Islam has never had ‘adjustment problems’ or difficulties in creating pluralistic societies where peoples of diverse religious traditions have lived together and prospered. In fact, Islam has a rich pluralistic tradition unsurpassed by any other civilization. It has a vast experience of interaction and alliance with non Muslim communities. Instances of conflict between Muslims and Non Muslims have never been, it must be observed, over ‘civilizational differences’. The idea, therefore, that Islam’s differences in worldview with non Islamic civilizations makes a clash inevitable is falsified by the history of Islam itself. Rather, the history of Islam presents a veritable model of a ‘world civilization’, as stated by Professor Bakar:

Huntington’s view that the idea of the possibility of a universal civilization is exclusively Western conception is not supported by history. It is a historical fact that Islam built the first comprehensive universal civilization in history even if we go by all the modern criteria of universality. Islam was the first civilization to have geographical and cultural borders with all the major contemporary civilizations of the world, and it was Islam that had the most extensive encounter with other civilizations.¹⁴

Where, then, does a Clash emerge? It emerges as a corollary to interventionist, adventurist, exploitative policies vis a vis the Muslim world by the ascendant West steeped in the compulsions of its espoused Materialism and Capitalism. The Clash is not inevitable, but it can become possible if such policies are mindlessly and relentlessly pursued by the West and if the Muslim world does not engage in self criticism and undertake a rediscovery of the pristine message of Islam. As long as the West keeps pursuing its ill advised course, insecurity and militant responses will proliferate among the Muslims. In such a case, Muslim opinion leaders will be compelled to rally together their people for strengthening, fortifying and gearing up for the West’s assault on what is most precious to them. Given the insensitivity and superficial grasp of the West over the prevalent mood in the Muslim world, the vicious cycle of hostility will go on. This is exactly the self-destructive path towards the Clash of Civilizations which in the long run will be in the interest of none.

1. Michael Dunn, ‘The Clash of Civilizations and the War on Terror,’ 49th Parallel, Vol.20 (Winter 2006-2007).
2. Remarked by Professor Edward W Said in his 1998 lecture titled “The Myth of the Clash of Civilizations” at University of Massachusetts, Amherst, United States of America.
3. Senghaas, Dieter, The Clash Within Civilizations, Routledge, London, 2002., p. 105.
4. Ibid, p. 107.
5. Marc Gopin, “Religion and International Relations at the Crossroads,” International Studies Review, Vol III issue III, Fall 2001.
6. Stated by Giandomino Picco, quoted in United Nations Year of Dialogue Between Civilizations 2001, Introduction, www.un.org/dialogue
7. “Empathy and Compassion,” The Iranian, September 8, 2000.
8. H.A.R. Gibb, Whither Islam, London, 1932, p. 379.
9. Quoted by Martin Lings, Muhammad (SAW): His Life Based on the Earliest Sources, Vermont, Rochester (USA), Inner Traditions, 2006.
10. Karen Armstrong, The Crusades and their Impact on Todays World, New York, Random House, Inc, 2001, p.539.
11. ABS-CBN News, Text of Obama’s speech to Muslim world, June 4, 2009.
12. Osman Bakar, Islam and Civilizational Dialogue, Kuala Lumpur, University of Malaya, 1997, p.42.
13. Ibid, p. 10.
14. Ibid.

If we examine these lists closely, we find internal contradiction, limits of application and other exceptions to strict adherence, but we don’t really understand these devices as absolute anyway, but rather as guides. Even those that have the force of law, like the Bill of Rights, must be adjudicated in specific situations since a few words can do no more than offer direction for a journey, not prescribe its every turn.

It is in this spirit that I offer this list of the Real Seven Deadly Sins. The limits and contradictions may seem especially glaring, but this is only because we are not use to them – and I will deal with some of the exceptions.

The “original” Seven Deadly Sins have a long history, quite a variety of inclusions and have been 5, 7, 10 and more sins at different turns. A society picks its sins; they are adaptive.

We have come to a time when we desperately need a new list. This is not to say that the list that evolved from Dante (lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy and pride) has become acceptable, although fashion has certainly changed for several; in fact, if we had been more serious about these, we might not be in such a present pickle. But we need to refocus on those activities and, especially, the principles that have morphed from sin to saw.¹

These are the New Sins:

1) Progress
2) Economic growth
3) Property
4) Excess
5) Censorship
6) Repression
7) Religion

One of the first things that you might note from the new list is that it is easily adaptable to collective action, where as the Dante list is more easily seen as the unfortunate qualities of individuals. For this and other reasons, we might best keep those seven available for personal use. The new list is, in some cases, the “originals” writ large.

It is, today, our institutions that are dominating human action, and human institutions are not just the summing up of individual human behavior, but are, under the Consciousness System of Order, developing into new entities with new properties for which new guidance is needed.

1) Progress

This is the most insidious sin and one from which some others receive their motive force. We have come to see this greatest source of devastation as the essential positive value – and we rarely question it; taking the assertion, “It is progress,” as a substantive and often final argument.

Progress is change that arises from some previous condition, change that is judged by some humans as an improvement. But it has come to pass that the only guiding principle for the design of change is a previous condition that formed from some even earlier progress. That this seems perfectly normal to you is a measure of just how insidious this sin is.

Living things “progress” by adapting to the biophysical realities of the living space. Of course, they begin with what they have, but the changes occur in a universal context of long scale forces and processes. In humans, progress has come to mean changes that modify some existing condition arising in the human context, a condition that came to exist with the last round of progress. The speed of adaptation and the power to discover and use specific bits of information about how the biophysical world functions has allowed humans to ‘defeat’ certain biophysical rules. By bringing enough energy to bear and using mechanical physics, heavier than air machines can fly. By concentrating specific chemical species a concentrated consequence can be made to happen: poison, acid, lighter than air balloons, metals, etc. There are millions of examples. These things we call progress.

An evolutionary system would have to integrate every consequence that occurs within evolution’s time frame. Consciousness Order system time frames are so much more rapid than biophysical time frames that we have avoided the consequences of our behaviors. This we call progress.

Progress is building dikes to keep the waters out – both literally and figuratively; and then building buildings behind and on the dikes, and then building more and better pumps to remove the water that seeps through, and then, and then… The reality is that the water level is higher that the land level. Think for a moment on this from a position of sanity.

The sin of progress is to act outside of the context of the biophysical time frame, to make changes in response to existing conditions in such a way that the biophysical costs are deferred to other humans, other species and the future. Our societies today are dependent on billions of jobs that are the products of progress and all but a handful are made from the overcoming of the overcoming. We now have to keep trying to overcome the very fabric of universal reality to continue to ‘make progress.’ Such is the depth of our depravity.

And so Progress is a sin. Rather than seek it, we must make appeal to attempt it; must be able to demonstrate that the proposed changes enhance integration into biophysical reality, not attempt to defeat reality with some slight of hand. We would continue to change, to learn and to use the living and physical worlds, but at a pace to which all living and physical process on earth could adapt; a pace that will not create the dramatic synergies of a convulsive rejection of living things as the consequence of our progress.

2) Economic Growth

The sinfulness of growth is more obvious than the sin of progress. One need only think for a moment of the concept of the exponent. And it needs to be clear that human capacity has created a new model for growth; it is not the same process as growth of biological systems – just the same word. Biological growth is replenishment with the capacity to exceed its bounds, but fully inhibited by homeostatic feedback so that ecosystems are no-growth, sustaining systems.

Economic growth means an increase in the volume and speed of transactions of exchange. Transactions of exchange are the trading of one thing for another. Since there are basically three kinds of things (material/energy, behaviors and abstract tokens of exchange) there are a variety of forms that exchange can take, but ultimately increasing amounts of real stuff must be extracted, moved, modified and consumed as an economy grows. To some extent the need to actually raise crops, dig in mines and cut forests brings perspective to our economic growth, but…

economic growth can occur, so long as participants believe that tokens of exchange represent real things, as a result of trading those tokens – really betting on how many of a particular token will be required to trade for a particular real thing at a particular moment. This allows ‘not real things’ to increase in amount without limit. If the tokens are in a demand relationship with real things, then it is possible for there to be more ‘real stuff’ represented by tokens than there is or ever can be. The result is that demands are made of the earth’s capacities that cannot be met; the reality of the effort and limits of extraction is overcome in the perception. This is a sin.

A component of economic growth is investment: I loan you a hatchet to cut firewood and you return the hatchet plus a bit of cut wood, or I could loan you tokens to trade for a hatchet and you give me back the tokens plus a few extra. Either way you have to cut more wood than you require. The amount of material or behavior traded becomes more and more dependent on the obligation and less and less on the actual state of need. Economic growth mutates into increasing states of obligation.

If there is not a constantly increasing need or obligation, then there can be no more than momentary or situational occasions for investment. And so – placing the cart squarely in front of the horse – our economic system sustains the investment model without regard to the relationship of human economics to the natural biophysical economy. This is a sin.

3) Property

Property once seemed so simple; I learned it at my father’s knee: It is mine, you may not use it or touch it without my permission. I hold it by a force as close to a divine right as such things get. And yet, my ball (hat, toy or _____ ) could be taken and tossed around and eventually tossed onto a roof in the age old game of ‘humble the property owner’, AKA ‘keep away.’

I have discovered that humans come with a great variety of respect for property. Some have arm’s length rules and others will take even useless things. Different groups of people define property in different ways – what can be property, degrees of holding property, what must be done to identify property.

“Keep away” offered this instruction: property and force are intimately related. Property is mine so long as I am willing and capable to use sufficient force to keep it. A powerful man in my town lived at the end of a long road; the sign at his gate, “If you trespass, you will be shot.” This was not at his front door – his house could not be seen – but was at the most easily approached edge of the 30 or 40 acre mountain valley to which he lay claim. Records show that his family drove out the previous inhabitants with legal trickery and one punctuating dynamite explosion.

There are 3 ways that we can view property: 1) that which is, 2) that which is ours (or theirs) and 3) that which is mine (or his or hers).

“That which is” belongs to all and to no one. You may use it only as long as you don’t change it or deny its use to any other organism or process. “That which is ours” belongs to the commons, the community decides potential uses and what compensations and ablutions are required. “That which is mine” belongs to me; again, however, the community decides what can be personal property and often the limits of control and use – this should tell us something. The attempt to turn ‘that which is mine’ into absolute domination without regard to the rest of existence is a sin.

It is circumstance and excess that moves the sustaining to the sinful. Human progress and economic growth have driven property from balanced patterns of use, compensation and replenishment to the assumption of more and more private ownership; so that today we claim we can not only own the contents of our pockets and immediate living space, but we can own the land, the water, the air, living things, DNA, chemical processes and ideas. And we have even added a specialized instrument of private ownership called the corporate collective to own in even greater amounts and with greater force. This is sin.

4) Excess and Wealth

Excess has almost always been a sin in almost every culture. Yet, in our present condition the application of Sins 5 and 6 (censorship and repression) have led the way in justifying excess, usually claiming envy as the reason of objecting to wealth. This is quite simply sin supporting sin.

Excess is a sin because it perpetuates the sins of property, is the product of growth and can only be justified by dishonest and coercive means. But, primarily it is a sin because it damages the human relationship to the planet and to each other.

Ultimately the excess of wealth (both private and societal) can only be extracted from the universal commons and it can only be extracted by the coercion of one human entity by another. It is difficult to say who is harmed more in the existential sense, the miner who must dig or starve, yet retains some vestige of specieshood or the owner who believes in the madness of his right of power to steal the life and labor of the miner and the product of the land. It is, of course, not difficult to see who lives in the greatest distress of the moment.

5) Censorship

It is obvious to many that we must not speak of dangerous, harmful and distressing things. To do so would bring upset and disruption to our settled lives: speak the Devil’s words and call the Devil.

There is, as there always is, a major difficulty: How are we, or who is, to decide? We are ultimately faced with this simple choice: freedom of speech with only the most limited restrictions or speech controlled by whoever can wrest power over its methods and topics.

Control of speech is control of idea, is control of possibility. And yet we cannot live in a world without design, a world that limits and organizes possibility. The probability of glucose moving through a cell membrane in controlled by insulin, which is controlled by a dozen other conditions of the organism. We can expect nothing less for a super-organism collective like human societies. But there the analogy fails; the process by which biological evolution designs physiological function leaves out nothing. Every force and movement of the natural world gets its say without inhibition because it is exists in the total reality. Again, we can have nothing less for our collective social order.

Lying is a special form of censorship that denies access to a factual basis for action, but lying should be no more reviled than demanding that the truth of another’s understanding not be spoken.

This is an especially dangerous sin as new and powerful forms of human super-organism are demanding and receiving the power to censor speech that challenges their domination by controlling the means of speech and using that means to control the topics of speech.

6) Repression

The rejection of one identifiable racial, ethnic, language, cultural or behavioral group by another is one of the oldest human actions. When there was space and available niches, this was less sin and more signal to spread the species around. It even served certain other useful functions by reducing the spread of disease and supplying gene pools from which vigorous crosses could test the genetic waters.²

But today and for some many hundreds of years the repression of one group by another as been in the service of quite other forces: economic and political power. Billions of human lives have been lived out in the greatest of distress – truly painful, brutal and short because of the sin of repression.

Life has never had a guarantee – or so is my belief – but to assign beforehand that billions of lives will be lived in horror and pain is a sin. And this is a sin that is likely to continue to increase dramatically as it has over the last few thousand years. Never have so many lived such deprived and devastated lives as in today’s moment.

Two hundred years ago there were one billion people on the earth, nearly half of whom lived in deep poverty at the advancing edge of European expansion and industrialization and in islands of industrial servitude. One hundred years ago there where two billion people on the earth, nearly half of whom lived in the deepest poverty as the first world nations were converting the rest of the world into their larder. Today there are almost 7 billion, nearly half of whom live at the edge of survival. Local sustaining practices have been so damaged and demonized that even those who are not in immediate peril today are but one global economic decision away from dust.

7) Religious Piety

Religion is one of the least understood of human behaviors. Its supporting structures and designs are deep in our origins, but it has become a chimera, a crossing with politics, economics and the institutional super-organism. Religion is a developmentally dysfunctional entity demanding the privilege of an infant while having the strength of a powerful adult.

In its origin religion was the combined effect of the Stories that integrated human action within the environment and the instinctual emotional connections to environment and community. It gave strength to the adaptations that formed the basis of human success. It did not create the behaviors, but responded to them as the collected Stories that organized the behavior of a group, carrying them through space and time.

Devotion to religious story has become the central madness of our time and one of the greatest inhibitions to our survival. There were in the past many thousands of religions because there were thousands of situations in which people lived. Since religion’s function is to define a way of life, then it must be completely connected to immediate and sustaining reality – it used to be! Now religions are devoted to the remains of Stories that once had some relational meaning, but are no longer connected to reality. This makes the Stories of religion easy prey for any entity to use as devices of censorship and repression.

Summary

These are the sins that we need to “hold in our hearts” as unacceptable. These are the sins that are devastating our world. 30 years ago drunk driving was a laughing matter (even as people were killed), but became a matter of scorn and rejection as people incorporated into their habits of thought, into their lists of sins, driving drunk. We need to see these seven sins in the same way. Just as with the original seven deadly sins a small number of people are empowered by them if allowed, but if enough people reject those behaviors, actively reject them, they will be weakened and more of us may begin to see them for what they are.

1. It is an irony of our time that those who claim to champion individual freedom are really speaking for the institutional collective and the individual’s subservience to it, while those who are accused of socialist “collectivism” see the collective in service of the individual.
2. Cultural habits combining with instinctual behaviors associated with incest created complex rules that often involved either males or females moving from one group to another.

Taking the American side, the leader of the parliamentary opposition, Tzipi Livni, was quick to accuse Netanyahu of superfluously creating an impediment in US-Israel relations. In April, we recall, when Netanyahu asked Livni and her party to join his government, she rejected his bid because he had refused to commit to the principle of “two states for two peoples.” She took the position that the border between the states, as agreed to by the Palestinians in their talks with her, would anyhow leave the settlement blocs in Israel’s hands. Yet without commitment to a two-state solution, construction in those blocs would be hard to justify.

Netanyahu understood the message. In his Bar Ilan speech, intended as his answer to Obama, he came out for a Palestinian state. However, he took pains to present certain principles that eliminated any real possibility for its coming into existence: Palestine, he said, must recognize Israel as a Jewish state; it must be demilitarized (this implies not only the lack of an army, but also lack of control over borders and air space, and no possibility of forging alliances); and, finally, the dropping of all demands that the refugees be permitted to return to Israel. He pledged to expropriate no further lands for settlements, but he pointedly omitted any mention of a construction freeze. It is no wonder that the Palestinians rejected these conditions. The Americans, however, tried to make the best of the speech, while continuing to push for an Israeli commitment to stop construction in the settlements.

As expected, Netanyahu’s Bar Ilan speech did not get anything started. On the contrary, Foreign Secretary Avigdor Lieberman, in a press conference with Hillary Clinton, enunciated Israel’s outright refusal to freeze construction. The result followed quickly: a scheduled meeting with America’s special envoy to the region, George Mitchell, was canceled.

After the Israeli Foreign Secretary had burned his bridges with the US (and not only with the US: consider French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s recommendation to Netanyahu that he fire Lieberman), Defense Minister Ehud Barak was sent to pull the chestnuts out of the fire. This journey led to negotiations on a temporary freeze. Yet once again, Israeli preconditions torpedo any chance that this will happen. In return for the temporary freeze, according to the local press (Yediyot Aharonot and Haaretz, week of July 2, 2009), Israel demands a commitment by the Arab states to normalize relations; Palestinian recognition of Israel as a Jewish state; and the promise that a future Palestinian state will be demilitarized. In short, the Palestinians are to forfeit all their bargaining chips in return for a temporary freeze on Israeli settlement construction, and with no commitment on Israel’s part to withdraw to the 1967 borders or dismantle even one illegal outpost.

For the American administration, an Israeli commitment to a construction freeze in the settlements would enable Washington to jumpstart a political process within the Palestinian Authority (PA), aimed at bolstering the shaky position of its president, Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen). The radical elements in the Arab world, and especially Hamas (which has ruled the Gaza Strip since its bloody ejection of Abbas supporters in 2007) see no reason for concessions as long as Israel’s right-wing government abides by its refusal. True, both Arab extremists and moderates welcomed Obama’s Cairo speech, but they raised questions about his ability to influence, saying, in effect, Let’s see you translate words into action.

A commitment to freeze construction in the settlements could result in the breakup of the present Netanyahu government; meanwhile, the PA is already divided, leaving Abbas no authority to reach binding agreements. Recently the reconciliation talks between Hamas and Fatah, conducted in Cairo under Egyptian mediation, collapsed for the umpteenth time. With American assent, Abbas avoids renewing the negotiations with Israel because of its refusal to stop settlement construction, and at the same time he hardens his positions toward Hamas. For its part, Hamas demands liberty for 800 of its supporters imprisoned by the PA in the West Bank, as a condition for an agreement that will enable new presidential and parliamentary elections in January 2010.

Obama is operating on two fronts. On one he presents Netanyahu with hard choices, and on the other, he exerts enormous pressure on Hamas, demanding that it forgo armed struggle and accept the Oslo agreements. In this context we may understand the green light given by Washington to the establishment of a new Palestinian government under Salam Fayyad, whom it trusts (and whom Hamas detests). Likewise, we can understand why Washington exerts no pressure on Israel to lighten the siege of Gaza.

The intention is clear: America seeks to prevent, at all costs, a (likely) Hamas victory in the next elections. It doesn’t want to repeat the mistake of 2006, when Hamas won – and instead of moderating its positions, used the victory as a springboard for taking over Gaza and strengthening itself in the West Bank. If Hamas desires new elections, it will have to recognize the legal framework on which the PA is based. One plays by the rules or one does not play.

But Obama stands before two leaders who refuse to play by the rules. One refuses to recognize Israel, the other refuses to recognize Palestine. The first is Khaled Mashal, head of Hamas, and the second is Binyamin Netanyahu. Both would endanger their political futures by accepting the American conditions. Thus we find a strange common interest between the two, each using the other’s existence to justify non-entry into a process aimed at ending the conflict.

Obama too has a lot to lose. The Republican opposition is waiting for him to slip. But let us suppose that his plan were to work: Hamas agrees to forgo armed struggle and play by the rules, and Israel freezes construction in the settlements — what then? Now arises the question: what does Obama have in mind when he says “two states”? He has indeed proclaimed his commitment to a Palestinian state, but he is also committed — and this above all – to Israel’s security. If so, then what kind of Palestinian state are we talking about? What kind of sovereignty will it have? Will it enjoy territorial contiguity? What will be done with Jerusalem? What will be the fate of the refugees? Given America’s strategic commitments to Israel — and given Obama’s silence concerning these questions — we cannot but worry that he basically accepts the Israeli version of a Palestinian state, a version that empties it of all content.

Obama’s basic problem when it comes to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is the same as his problem when it comes to America’s economic issues: he is trying to bring about far-reaching change within a failed framework. His apparent inability to go outside the box — global capitalism on the one hand, and the Oslo agreement on the other — is likely to be his nemesis. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict requires a solution within a new strategic framework. Here Israel must no longer be the dominant player, rather one among the nations of the region. It must no longer occupy the land of others, but must gain acceptance on the basis of its readiness to respect the sovereignty of its neighbors, including Palestine.

According to the New Bethel Church website, the “Open Carry Celebration” was held on a Saturday instead of a Sunday, so that it was clear that it was “not a church worship service, where the focus is on Jesus and our responsibility to Him. Rather,” Pagano, a former Marine weapons instructor, pointed out, “this is merely a church-hosted event, similar to any other event that any other church may do to celebrate their heritage.”

The “Open Carry Celebration” was held several weeks after Pagano had encouraged his parishioners to bring the guns to a church-sponsored picnic. “Honestly, I would really like to see this mushroom into a Thunder over Louisville, where we are just inundated with civil-minded responsible gun owners,” Pagano said.

“As a Christian, I believe, and as an American this country was founded on the deep-seated belief in God and firearms — without which we wouldn’t be here today,” Pagano told FOX News during the run-up to the “Open Carry” event. “There is nothing illogical nor immoral about being a God-fearer and a decent community-minded individual who believes in rights to bear arms and use firearms for self-defense if necessary or just for sporting purposes.”

Ministry Today reported that “Pagano got the idea after hearing several of his congregants voice concern over the Obama administration’s views on gun control.” (During last year’s presidential campaign, Obama’s comment during a San Francisco fundraiser — just before the Pennsylvania primary – that it was “not surprising” that in tough economic times, people then “get bitter, [and] they cling to guns or religion …“ continues to feed the right wing rumor mill that the Obama administration has plans to fiddle around with the Second Amendment.)

Pagano had recently “preached a sermon called, ‘God, Guns, Gospel and Geometry,’ and during the [‘Open Carry Celebration’] … he met applause after declaring, ‘But for a deep-seated belief in God and firearms, this country would not be here today,’” Ministry Today reported.

Pagano’s “Open Carry Celebration,” which had been announced on the heels of the murder of Dr. George Tiller in a Wichita, Kansas church, was not without its critics. “I’m not opposed to people having guns. I have three,” said Rev. Jerry Cappel, president of the Kentuckian Interfaith Community, a coalition of local religious leaders in the Louisville area, “You can be OK with the right to carry arms, but still find that joining the right to carry and Christ to be misguided,” Cappel added.

Pam Gersh, a Louisville resident who helped organize a Million Mom March against gun violence in the area in 2000, told ABC News that “The serious issue of gun violence [wa]s not being addressed. I don’t really understand the purpose of what Pagano is doing here.”

“Where there are killings of people like Dr. Tiller in church and there is no discussion of gun violence and only of abortion, then it shows there’s no real open dialogue about how to solve this problem,” said Gersh.

Lynn Joyce Hunter recently pointed out at politicsdaily.com that “Pagano’s plan may indicate the rise of a new phenomenon in American religion: the NRA Christian.” Hunter pointed out that “even putting aside the Sermon on the Mount and such biblical imagery as the beating of swords into plowshares, one must question whether an embrace of guns is the best way to claim a national identity and celebrate our patriotism — in or out of church.”

Hunter maintained that what particularly bothered her about “Pagano’s bring-your-gun-to-church-day, … [was] not the thought of Independence Day revelers enjoying a Second Amendment theme party, but the advent of NRA Christian evangelism. The murder of George Tiller was particularly eerie because he was shot and killed in his church. Christian churches have long been considered places of peace, and sanctuaries from societal violence. When this presumption of sanctuary becomes violated — from Archbishop Thomas Becket’s murder in 1170 in Canterbury Cathedral to the 1980 slaying of Salvadorian Archbishop Oscar Romero — there is a sense that our worship has been desecrated.”

Earlier this year, the Arkansas House of Representatives created quite a stir when it was considering a bill that would have allowed concealed hand guns in churches across the state. In late February, the state’s Senate Judiciary Committee voted not to allow that bill out of committee.

Pagano, who appears to maintain that without the Second Amendment – the right to bear arms – there would be no First Amendment – the right to free speech – and therefore no America as he knows it, has again placed the issue of carrying guns in the pews on the table. At the same time, his well-publicized event gave the pastor more than his fifteen minutes in the national spotlight.

As for the debate over guns, in a short post at Beliefnet, Rabbi Brad Hirschfield, author, radio and TV talk show host, and President of CLAL-The National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership, asked: “Whatever one thinks about guns, gun ownership, or gun laws, do we really need any more religious leaders officiating over a marriage between faith and firearms?”

One Hirschfield reader responded unambiguously: “The US Constitution is divinely inspired, and nowhere is the hand of the Almighty in the creation of our country more evident in the glorious right of all its citizens to defend themselves enshrined in the Sacred Second Amendment. To me, bringing firearms to church, synagogue, or mosque is a joyful act of worship and thanksgiving for this our most sacred right, to defend our very lives from royal oppression.”