Here’s a fairly recent (not fairly new…however you’d like to word it) comment the good Archbishop made on Islam. Though I sometimes think that the Anglican Communion in general has lost its way at times, I have tremendous respect for those clerics such as Dr. Williams and the jointly intellectual and spiritual worldview that he has.
Though he ends with the comment that we, as Muslims, are probably more like Christians than many Christians might acknowledge or consider (to paraphrase), I think that the communal values that we have, especially in regard to marriage, equal rights, recognition of a sort of transcendental ‘dignity’ we share with our fellow creatures makes us far more like Christians than we, as Muslims, would often like to acknowledge. I’d venture so far as to say that we have a lot more in common with Christians than we do with those aggressive secularists – Dr Williams is a testament to what a clergyman should look like – erudite, sophisticated, firm in belief, and grounded spiritually. Whatever you think of him, and his attempts to reconcile religious belief in the modern world, I sometimes wish that we had more clerics like him living in the West, who had such a public platform. I’d even settle for more clerics like him in the Christian world.
Though we as Muslims find ourselves increasingly alienated in this ‘Christian’ country/world, I think that efforts on the part of people like Dr Williams as well as systematic work done by more Muslims, is the only way that we will survive spiritually in the torment of ‘modernity’, and be able to work toward the Divine human ‘project’.
Here’s the latter part of one of my favourite verses from the Qur’an, which is quite pertinent here (the whole verse is of course beautiful in its own right, too, but would need the sort of elaboration that I’m to unable to give. Nonetheless…):
“To each of you God has prescribed a Law and a Way. If God would have willed, He would have made you a single people. But God’s purpose is to test you in what he has given each of you, so strive in the pursuit of virtue, and know that you will all return to God [in the Hereafter], and He will resolve all the matters in which you disagree.” (Ma’ida:58)
Here’s a recent debate at the Cambridge Union featuring some rather interesting big-wigs – Drs. Rowan Williams, Richard Dawkins, Tariq Ramadan, among others! A friend once pointed out to me that sometimes, if not often, a lot of these debates are about rhetorical posturing -but we have come to an age where the only way you can make a systematic case, where people will actually pay attention to you, is if you host a public spectacle and allow charismatic people to speak (I’d say this is the tragedy of modern newscasting – although the latter is far more agenda-driven than most of us actually recognise). So, more power to those who partake and actually give up their precious time to engage with people who seem more interested in point-scoring than with any notion of ‘truth’.
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So, this is perhaps the first (and last) time I might find myself supporting Douglas Murray in anything – I was thoroughly impressed by his talk – at least in part- , despite the fact that on the whole, he has a knack for essentialising religion and religious people; however this was one of those rare occasions where I found, one the whole, that the ‘religious’ seemed to make a much more strong case in favour of their views. Now, despite being of a ‘religious temperament’, I tend to find that arguments from science, for example, as being a little lacking (to say the least), however I’m more convinced by Dr William’s/Ramadan’s/Douglas Murray’s (Lord help me for including Murray…!) arguments about human dignity, opposition to dogmatic humanism, and the search for meaning far more convincing and systematically sound – even if the latter disagreed with both the former Archbishop and the ‘Islamic Martin Luther’!
Anyhow, Rowan Williams – for whom I have a great respect – was on peak form (if only he had been allowed to speak like this regularly, and wasn’t demonised by the press as some sort of archaic despot overseeing an influential but fallacious worldview and dangerous power-structure)… Dr Ramadan made his usual case , polished, refined and I think quite fair (but I wish more people would take it seriously – somehow when hardened humanists face a reasonable ‘believer’, their minds somehow short-circuit and they often ignore what he actually has to say.
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Finally, did anyone spot the slightly sloppy “Nobody denies that correlation doesn’t entail causation, everyone who knows anything about it knows that correlation is evidence for causation…” – I’m no philosopher, and I don’t say this with any sort of polemical glee… but do they really let him teach at Cambridge…?! Or is he some sort of quintessential postcolonial subject whom they keep around for display purposes?
…Okay, that was a cheap-shot, I admit; nonetheless this perhaps demonstrates the fallacy, which Dr Ramadan accurately expressed, of essentialising someone with whom you disagree.
…Just in case you’re wondering what problem I have with it – the speaker cited that in Western countries that ‘more religious’ (however you measure that), there is an increase in all sorts of social problems, etc.; of course one could offer a counter-argument that secular states have historically been responsible for wholesale industrial death, in a greater scale than anything witnessed in history; moreover, tremendous demagoguery existed, nuclear weapons were discharged…hmm, correlation between a secular state and atrocity…ironic, ain’t it? Like I said, who in their right mind would let him teach Logic?
If I were a parent, I would not have taken part in this experiment, not even for a week. Thousands of parents don’t have a choice.
One week ago a Conservative councillor from York said that no one is starving in the UK. On the evidence of last week, he is wrong. Not because the income used in our experiment was a starvation rate, but because for those who have to exist on such precarious incomes it does not take much to push them over the edge.
“Lots of people living on the breadline are getting by most of the time, but then some kind of crisis hits,” says Molly Hodson of the Trussell Trust, the charity whose network of 298 food banks has given out more than 209,000 emergency food packages since April.
“Say you’re off work for a week and you end up on statutory sick pay, or your car breaks down and you don’t get to work and lose your job. Then the crisis spirals into a disaster. Even something as simple as cold weather: a lot of people on low incomes are on meters for electricity and gas. Whenever there’s a bout of very cold weather, people are making the decision between heating and eating.”
The above is an extract from a very sad piece from Saturday’s Independent, by Charlie Cooper, highlighting the extent of the plight, and most importantly, the hunger faced by so many millions of people in what should be one of the richest countries in the world. Do read it, and then if you have no tears in your eyes at the end, consider reevaluating your priorities.
This isn’t some attempt at piety from some guy who lives on the other end of your computer-screen; but whilst you’re eating your take-away and watching the latest episode of the X-Factor, as you undoubtedly will do sometime this coming year, do recognise how privileged your position is…or perhaps when you’re reading that article on The Sun’s website (don’t ask me how I found this piece…though I am looking for looking for a cup of disinfectant that I can leave my eyeballs in overnight) that Katie Price is marrying a builder/part-time stripper (which has been categorised as ‘News’) on your iPad whilst sipping your lunchtime latte, have a think about what it actually is that matters.
Then, why don’t you make a contribution or two toward a homeless shelter, a charity for families or elderly in crisis, perhaps? I won’t tell you which ones. Why not, with your guaranteed income for this month, set up a regular payment or two both here and abroad. One tragedy of all this penny-pinching is not just the effect it has on people at home – forcing them into prolonged hunger and political and economic oblivion – but the lack of good a larger public purse could do in the third world.
I’m reminded of a couple of quotes that I read last year, which were attributed to Imam Ali (may God’s blessings descend upon him always), that are very appropriate. Too bad our statesmen today haven’t the integrity to speak this way:
If a person starves it is due to the fact that his share has been taken by another.
And
I have not seen any excessive bounty which is not associated with a right which has been violated.
Weber defined the State as that entity which “upholds the claim to the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force in the enforcement of its order.” I imagine that in the logic of a state, it means that it is, or ought to be, the sole claim to legitimate physical force. I mean, why shouldn’t it be? Could you imagine what the state could do to you or me with that kind of power. I say this all rhetorically, of course; however speaking as a minority in an increasingly hostile West I give it ten years before the mass-deportations begin.
Maybe I’m turning into something of a conspiracy-nut (I wonder if Webster Tarpley has a ‘collected essays’ volume…?); I, too, given my experience these last few years given up really on institutions such as conventional medicine , and have begun to wonder what else I might question. The government seems like an easy-enough target – in the wake of the blatant lies told about the WMDs in Iraq, many Americans joined the 9/11 Truther movement – after all, if 9/11 could be the pretext to an illegal war of regime change in two sovereign countries, what else might they have been lying about?
Perhaps I’m too far a Leftist to actually be able to tolerate the likes of Jones, but I honestly have a soft-spot for him (probably right over my cerebral cortex). I think he raises some very valid concerns in his theorising – I am very sceptical of psychiatric interventions, for example…or vaccinations…the economic crisis affecting us all is another; moreover the alternative media has a great way of bringing to the public attention issues which don’t get a second look at in the mainstream…so what I’m saying is, despite not agreeing with everything this fellow and his ilk have to say on various subjects, they constitute and serve a critical function which cannot be provided by the corporate media (except on the odd occasion when they let people like Jones on their shows, as you will see below!)
This is an hysterically-charged interview in which Jones was perhaps most effective in the first four minutes – just watch those if you can’t be bothered to watch more!
I’m not sure what 9/11 had to do with the recent spree of mass-shootings – perhaps this was an attempt to discredit the guest, and thus very unprofessional – nonetheless Jones has a pretty broad church and no-doubt his points of view will resonate with large numbers, perhaps millions of Americans (not that millions are necessarily watching CNN…) when they get to hear about it.
I can understand how Jones fears that there will come a time where the population will have to bear arms against their government – I can’t decry him for his lack of patriotism -considering that there are now armed drones flying over the US and much of the rest of the world, moreover the NDAA has essentially created a state of martial law in the States – we know how wicked the US Government can be toward those whom she captures or wants killed – GTMO, Predator Drone strikes, Bagram, Renditions are just examples of the last decade…however for some reason I cannot but feel utterly sick when I think of guns and the harm they cause.
I loathe them with every aspect of my being, and I hate the culture that has emerged surrounding them. But then, I don’t necessarily approve of the culture surrounding states generally, and in particular, military institutions today. Leo Tolstoy once said of nationalism being:
the principle that will justify the training of wholesale murderers
A call for a ban on assault weapons or handguns is a red-herring; I’d much prefer calling on the banning of production of armaments, and the banning of exporting guns to international markets…so that they don’t then end up back in our hands, and nor can others kill because we enabled them by not insisting that the same taxes collected from the arms trade are helping to pay for our welfare state or Health Service, or feeding the hungry though international aid be rejected outright; the stigma should be such that these corporations might pack up and go elsewhere (I’d accept that as a start, but this would of-course take concerted efforts from activist groups across the Global North; we might then consider financial aid or some other mechanism to incentivise other governments to not allow these bloody corporations from starting ip elsewhere).
Our bodies should be temples; for metaphysical reasons I cannot grasp how we can feed ourselves with, or benefit from the effects of, funds gathered through such barbarism. Gun culture isn’t enough to explain such violence, especially given that the numbers of stabbings and muggings are on the rise in states even with such bans…this goes right to the core of our souls. As much as guns themselves have the power to create culture which manifests in the world, we tacitly do the same to our souls…
Maybe the Hobbesian or Weberian conceptions of the modern states, and world, ought to be done away with in favour of a new model of governance.
Or maybe I should be a pragmatist and support Chris Rock’s idea:
On a side note here’s an extract from an interview with the always prescient and logical Noam Chomsky in 1994 found here:
Q: Advocates of free access to arms cite the Second Amendment. Do you believe
that it permits unrestricted, uncontrolled possession of guns?
It’s pretty clear that, taken literally, the Second Amendment doesn’t permit
people to have guns. But laws are never taken literally, including amendments
to the Constitution or constitutional rights. Laws permit what the tenor of
the times interprets them as permitting.
But underlying the controversy over guns are some serious questions. There’s
a feeling in the country that people are under attack. I think they’re
misidentifying the source of the attack, but they do feel under attack.
The government is the only power structure that’s even partially accountable
to the population, so naturally the business sectors want to make that the
enemy–not the corporate system, which is totally unaccountable. After decades
of intensive business propaganda, people feel that the government is some
kind of enemy and that they have to defend themselves from it.
It’s not that that doesn’t have its justifications. The government is
authoritarian and commonly hostile to much of the population. But it’s
partially influenceable–and potentially very influenceable–by the general
population.
Many people who advocate keeping guns have fear of the government in the
back of their minds. But that’s a crazy response to a real problem.”
Here is an awesome lecture delivered by a scholar that I admire a great deal – he is perhaps the most important Islamic philosopher (certainly the most prolific, as far as I know) of the last century.
This talk outlines the theological differences between the two schools of thought, and he goes out of his way – and rightly so – to demonstrate that in terms of jurisprudence and for a great deal, theology, the differences in the schools of thought are quite minimal. He clearly demonstrates how the major theme in Islamic Thought today (especially that which is promulgated by certain state with petrodollars) resembles far less traditional Sunni orthodoxy than we in the West might think.
The fact that more books exist today about the Shi’a than traditional ‘orthodox’ Islam (which comprises the largest majority as a percentage from within any major religion today) tells me, at the very least, that our faith is being highjacked in favour of a more ‘puritanical, rationalistic’ Islam. Moreover, his analysis of the modern state that is now Saudi Arabia is very astute – especially in his reference to the transfer of technology from the US to SA.
If you can take an hour out of your day to watch this lecture (and even take notes), I would certainly attest that it would be well-worth your time. We need more people like Dr Nasr who will try to highlight how similar the competing narratives of Islamic thought actually are, and that how historically we, as Muslims, lived in very congenial circumstances – and to a large degree still do. Predominantly, the great cause of this discord within the community is proliferated by the Islam that al-Qaeda tend to promote – not by those very minimal theological and jurisprudential differences orthodox (Sunni) Islam has hen compared to mainstream Shi’ism.
In fact, the major point of this talk is that we as Muslims can continue to coexist despite these differences, and despite the catastrophes and humanitarian disasters being created in the Middle East today; efforts are still ongoing today to build bridges and continue to acknowledge one-another – but I fear that to a large extent these efforts are being undermined by that new, puritanical form of Islam which underpins a tyrannical regime which is actively creating discord in the Muslim world.
As a Muslim who tends to fall closer to the Shi’i tradition, I still hurt when I read about the highjacking of the faith because no doubt do these people commit a great injustice to the Sunni tradition – I call on the Shi’a (though many already do this) to equally rise up to the challenge of defending the Sunni orthodoxy for all its beauty and contributions, as well as academic integrity and diversity. It is our duty as a community to not let the legacy of or beloved Prophet – the Mercy for all the worlds – to be desecrated in the name of these illegitimate ideologies; we ought not be divided at their hands and their colonial masters. Islam has so much good to contribute to our world – without unity and the acceptance of each other, we will fall short of creating the best possible world. The Shi’a tradition emphasises heavily our duty to the Mahdi – we cannot be fatalists and let our creed, and the dignity of our brothers, be destroyed from within.
I’m intrigued by this piece reported by the BBC; we’re living in a rapidly moving postmodern world where the likes of ‘scientists’ or ‘naturalists’ (or however else they style themselves) seem to be dominating the discourse in the area of pedagogy, science, natural history, politics…
So when you read that schools might lose their funding from the Government because those at the helm do not necessarily favour Evolution by Natural Selection as the sole model for determining how complex biological life came into being (obviously without invoking a higher power/God), is it just me or is this where science gets dangerous?
For the past couple of centuries the ‘secular’ model of governing a state seems to have been the preferred one, especially after the Enlightenment, as it was deemed then that religion would and already had become rather tyrannical and be inept at governing various groups of people fairly and without prejudice.
Yet I find myself living in a world now where the theory of Evolution by Natural Selection seems to have become the basic currency with which any discourse might be exchanged; now I have no problem per se with the theory of Evolution as a process for explaining to some degree of coherence the explanation for how life came to ‘be’ in the world – what troubles me is that Creationism is now being deemed as part of myth – i.e. religion.
(I must add here, of course, that it makes no sense to deem Creationism a mere folly – at its most basic level this lens suggests that there is a cause beyond this universe that at the very least, set our universe in motion. It does not necessarily mean that the world is some six-thousand years old as the Young Earth Creationists believe. I am happy to say that I am a Creationist who thinks life emerged, at least on the physical plane, out of a process of Evolution – remember of course, the gene-centered theory is now a minority position – but does that mean that I think that this is a necessary contradiction? I like the term Intelligent Designto sum this position up – what assumptions you make about my beliefs without questioning them, or by consigning them to meremythshouldn’t be a fault in me – rather it is the judgemental nature of science that we should take issue with (which ironically prides itself on being objective – something which modern studies in hermeneutics suggests is incredibly fallacious).
Moreover, I firmly believe that what defines ‘us’ as sentient beings has roots in something inexplicable by science – our ability to reflect on our own existence rather than be merely dominated by essentialist biological assumptions to me indicates that exists what Islam has always deemed the ‘fitrah’, that innate sense of the sacred essentially.
Is it just me or is science, of Scientism going to be come the new tyranny? I don’t buy that Science can be necessarily a moral agent for world, nor necessarily the prioritised objective lens through which we view it; historically it was the view of science and scientists that the world was created by a God which drove further explorations into His Mystery (forget the whole Galileo episode for a little while). Religion, or a God-oriented view of nature, as Professor Steve Fuller of Warwick University says, has been an instrumental driverof science – I am convinced that the meaning we ascribe to science was hermeneutically born out of the belief in God (just look at the science that came out of the Islamic world or in Europe); if we forget where science actually came from, and to how much it owes to religion, then science fails to have any significant meaning, nay, purpose, which scientists and apologists for Scientism suggest is a necessary agent for their work.
But science – more specifically the theory of Evolution by Natural Selection – shouldn’t have to be the modern meta-narrative of our world – the fact that we one day might be able to explain the physical processes that constitute our existence and the world that we observe around us does nothing to help us actualise in the world. Our purpose to understand or to know, or to create (all things that are certainly valuable things -and as yet science cannot explain the need for our aesthetic agency) did nothing to stop the catastrophes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, for example; except to tell us that those that are weak (and now I mean this in a sociological sense) are doomed to perish, either at the hands of the strong or out of the actions of the strong.
Proponents of science today that are trying to systematically reject the normative narrative that religions have to offer fail to see that their commitment to pure, objective science that might some day explain the world is becoming a force that can be just as tyrannical. It is because of philosophy and religion that we endeavour to feed and clothe and heal the hungry, the homeless that exist far enough outside of our communities to have no impact on our own worlds and our abilities to thrive in them; according to science, altruism is merely a biological function and not a end-good, moreover Evolution by Natural Selection has its own normative process and agency – that the strong survive and that the weak shall perish. Though we see it happen in the animal kingdom we do not see it as a moral problem – yet when we see injustices and such cruel realities in our own, we find them morally and normatively abhorrent. Why? As Dr Seyyed Hossein Nasr says – if indeed we are merely composed of atoms banging against one-another then our attempts at being ‘moral agents’ is pure ‘sentimentality’. So far I cannot think of an adequate argument against this.
Somehow it has come in vogue that invoking a deity seems to be something that is unscientific – as if to say that by invoking God one has just filled an empty space with an explanation, which in itself cannot be explained; yet the trouble is that within the philosophy of science, no-one can seriously claim that all explanations require further explanations for them to become true – in our cause and effect universe within which we find ourselves, that is tantamount to invoking an infinite regress.
Remember, Newton didn’t know what gravity actually was, rather, he was able to explain the effects of gravity were – does that mean that gravity itself doesn’t exist or is an inadequate explanation for what he observed? Of course not.
If indeed we emerged out of a slow process of biological evolution which by some miraculous chance allowed us to exist despite tremendous odds against that chance, does that mean that because we cannot explain the origins of the universe within which we are found, that same universe in which evolution could actually occur, does that mean necessarily that it is an unscientific explanation? Certainly not on this account too.
Now whether you favour a ‘naturalistic’ explanation to the cause of our universe, or whether you think that it is better explained by an uncaused cause – surely you should be allowed to offer both, or other explanations, as part of a scientific education. Moreover, surely educators should be allowed to express which of those theories they actually believe in.
In my experience it was those teachers that expressed their opinions in the classroom that had the most profound impact on my education, those who spoke out, who weren’t afraid to challenge the conventional wisdom (recall, this is constantly being redefined – not a hundred years ago were women considered cattle or the expendable commodities of men, not a few centuries was it certain that the world was flat, not a month ago was it believed that a supermassive black hole could ‘exist’ at the centre of a small galaxy etc). Today, science tells us that biological life for a given individual begins at the point when two gametes meet, yet that same science cannot tell us whether it is actually ethical to terminate that life, even though it increasingly provides us the means to do it.
As a student of history and politics at university, or as someone who has an interest in religion and philosophy – the theory of Evolution has done very little to change my approach to these disciplines; the notion of the survival of the fittest as a model for perpetuating life has very little to do with my studies of the past, or my ability to grasp theological positions. Moreover, having studied both the theories of Evolution and the case for ‘Creationism’ (argh I hate that term), I have come to a conclusion for myself. I do not think that scientists have the right to tell me what to believe – knowledge has to come from a perspective of reflection. The obsession with purity or an arrogance of superiority is/are what were traditionally ascribed to organised religion; today as religion is increasingly dying in our society we see science filling that space. Nature does indeed abhor a vacuum, after all. But scientists cannot agree to it because they refuse to recognise their own fallacies.
We have thrived for millennia without understanding Evolution in the way science explains it – I do not see it as the theory that will be our Saving Grace. For that, we need to look within ourselves, not merely at ourselves.
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Finally – it’s worth watching Steve Fullers short interview on Intelligent Design – it’s about 7 minutes long and worth every second, in my humble opinion.
EDIT: Read this – What Really Happened in Gaza this year. – funny, eh, that a week after the US elections the Israelis began their assault – no-doubt Netanyahu was banking on a Romney victory, which would have seen a ground-invasion and a massacre of the Palestinians and possibly even an all-out war in the Middle East.
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Am I so ignorant that I should be astounded at the gall of the Israeli Government. As Press TV reports (and I assume this is accurate), in retaliation of the state of Palestine being recognised once more by the UN – and the vote was pretty resounding, with 9 opposed and 41 abstentions), the Israelis are now going to build three-thousand more units in the already occupied West Bank.
Intriguingly, one has to wonder whether this wasn’t going to happen anyway – as we have seen in the last few years there has been an escalation in building of settlement blocks and outposts in what is called the disputed territories – which, to be honest, is only a designation used by the guilty party that has violated every UN resolution on this matter since November of 1967, when Israel gained (illegally) a tremendous amount of land (it has since only relinquished the Gaza strip, and subsequently moved those settlers to the West bank – Quelle surprise!
But the point is this – that the Israelis to this day do not want negotiations to begin with any preconditions (i.e. following the spirit of UN-242 which divides the land, however unfairly, in Israel’s favour nonetheless), as the Israeli apartheid wall (which I’ve seen) that was allegedly built for defensive purposes already violates that Resolution; taking up at least 10 percent of the West Bank – not to mention the settlement ‘blocks’ of road and water infrastructure which some estimates say will take up as much as forty percent of what (for the moment remains) the West Bank.
Of course the irony ought not be wasted on you that Netanyahu’s remarks at AIPAC and elsewhere suggest that Israel be recognised by the Palestinians as the Jewish Homeland (which of course is a straw-man argument since the Palestinians have actual proof that what is now Israel is where their homeland was up until they were forcibly removed from it, and moreover one-fifth of the Israeli population is of Arab stock) and secondly, that Jerusalem entirely be recognised as her capital – again, in illegally occupied Palestinian territory – East Jerusalem also being the centre for Palestinian economic and social and cultural life (thank you, Drs Chomsky and Benvenisti).
Moreover, for a state that claims its enemies would like to wipe it off the map (among other absurd things), and also is a state ‘committed’ to a two-state settlement with Palestine – Avigdor Lieberman aside (just as a side note the former club bouncer who is now Foreign Minister is a very different breed to the well-educated Israeli politicians that once existed – however unprincipled they were), – one has to wonder why they are so opposed to the UN recognising Palestine as a state-entity – considering that that is their apparent end game again the irony shouldn’t be wasted on you that their actions speak louder than ;the point is that Israel is acting like a spoiled child that knows its guilt but will continue to attempt to emotionally manipulate and bully those that try to curtail her ability to act out.
As we can see, the only way for Israel to retain whatever thread of esteem she might have in the ‘world’ (i.e. the West – the world that actually counts for anything these days) is to decide to define the borders with Palestine, as well as what the Palestinian legal border might actually look at. As we saw at Taba in 2001, the Palestinian Authority were willing to let Israel keep half of the settlements to that point – which was a tremendously generous offer considering that Israel wasn’t entitled to any of it – recall, it is inadmissible to acquire territory by land and to transfer your population to that land – Israel is guilty on both accounts.
Robert Fisk has often remarked that a two-state solution is now dead (from what I gathered from his interviews on RT and elsewhere), given the vast network that Israel is building – as a colonial occupying power, so long as the Palestinians resolve never to suffer total humiliation, the only way for this settler colony to remain relatively safe is to continue to maintain a presence in the whole of the West Bank – how else will she police those roads built exclusively for Jews and Jews only, or how else will she continue to usurp Palestinian water-rights, or how else will she stop the Resistance from rebuilding and coming back stronger….
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Here’s me musing….
I wonder now, given how the plight of the Palestinians is an exclusively European-caused problem – that if the Palestinians saw themselves as Arabs and decided that because of sixty years of persecution they might return to their ancestral home – (let us say for a second that we ignore the studies that show that Jews and Palestinians are actually of similar genetic origin – that they share a common ancestry), say, Saudi Arabia, an important client state to the US, how that would seem. After sixty years of persecution and the existence of up to seven millionrefugeesscattered to the four winds, many living in Jordan, Lebanon and Syria as stateless people and in refugee camps, and others in the ‘West’, where is their case for having their own state?
You see, dear sympathisers of Israel, your logic falls here – at this point, the persecution of the Jews historically is rather moot – for they now have their own homeland, the fourth largest defence infrastructure in the world as well as a formidable nuclear arsenal, and moreover are internationally recognised – they are inflicting tremendous and barbaric suffering on the Palestinians whom they continue to subdue out of some sense of historical entitlement to the land which most of their ancestors had left some seventeen-hundreed years before; in exchange, they occupy a land that to this day have Palestinian claimants (these documents do exist) which has been their ancestral homeland continuously for centuries, if not longer .
To suggest these Palestinian Arabs return to say Saudi Arabia or wherever else is a preposterous suggestion – so why do you so gleefully support the right of the Zionists to do the same? Shame on you; may your mothers weep for you.
Here is part of the debate where someone suggested to me that in my world, the only price I might accept for Israeli crimes is Israeli blood. Then he invoked the Holocaust….does he have no shame?
“You see, dear friend, I am not as cynical. My hatred of Israelis doesn’t run as deep as the one you think I’m expressing. I’d be satisfied if they just gave the land back, or compensated adequately the Arabs who have fled, and ended the barbaric sanctions. But you see, if they did that, they would have to admit that they did indeed “steal land from…Arab[s]” – forcing hundreds of thousands into refugee camps and the others into total destitution and refugee status all over the world.
People talk about Holocaust as if it was the sole greatest crime ever perpetrated in human history – that is absurd. …[Certainly, it is a dark stain on the slate of human history, nonetheless…] There were, at least, they tell me, 80 MILLION indigenous people across the Americas that were slain barbarically; elsewhere in the world, others were napalmed – some are still suffering the effects of chemical warfare in Vietnam, Laos etc., to this day. I don’t think you see this, because in your logic, it appears, the blood of a Jew is more valuable than that of an Arab. The Holocaust cannot be the benchmark of human suffering – just because the Jews suffered in the Holocaust cannot mean that they have a right to self-preservation to the extent that they can induce suffering in the Palestinians – who had nothing to do with the Holocaust in the first place….it [just] doesn’t compute in the moral universe.
My grandparents, who are both now dead, had refugee status out of Zanzibar – fleeing during the Revolution. As it stands, I wouldn’t dream to go back there today and evict the African family now living where their home used to be, who probably had nothing to do with my grandparents’ loss; neither would I seek to put sanctions on them to starve them, squeezing them into submission. What kind of objective morality is this? ”
Incidentally, I have nothing against Jewish people, nor really Israeli people. Certainly, the crimes of their forefathers in displacing the Palestinians cannot be the sole reason for my opposition toward the Zionist project – after all, how can one blame someone totally for the accident of their birth. But that does not mean I can idly accept the crimes against the Palestinians perpetrated today. The vast majority of Israelis can, no-doubt.
How very true. Why don’t more people in high office pay attention to what he has to say? He was deserving of the Presidential Medal of Freedom (not that he’d accept it) – not that despicable creature Peres.
There is no pit deep enough for these fundamentalist warmongers – ‘I think even Hell will spit out Netanyahu in disgust.’ We just wait, and pray for our Gazan brothers and sisters this day, who are so barbarically trapped in that tiny spec of land yet are enduring the harshest of realities.
How very true. Why don’t more people in high office pay attention to what he has to say? He was deserving of the Presidential Medal of Freedom (not that he’d accept it) – not that despicable creature Peres.
There is no pit deep enough for these fundamentalist warmongers – ‘I think even Hell will spit out Netanyahu in disgust.’ We just wait, and pray for our Gazan brothers and sisters this day, who are so barbarically trapped in that tiny spec of land yet are enduring the harshest of realities.
Heightened Senses 