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April 01, 2002
In response to Bruce Thornton's
In response to Bruce Thornton's "Indifference to History," I sent the following. I borrowed some words from other bits I've written here. There's much more to be said about Thornton's somewhat blinkered view of the evolution of humanity's moral sensibilities (not to mention his seemingly simplistic view of history in general and in particular), but you only get 400 words for posts to the illustrious Front Page forums. This bit weighs in at a hefty 403 words. Let's see if they actually post it:
"In 1882, Zionist Leon Pinsker published an influential tract called “Auto-Emancipation: An Appeal To His People By A Russian Jew.” In it, he writes:
“If we would have a secure home, give up our endless life of wandering and rise to the dignity of a nation in our own eyes and in the eyes of the world, we must, above all, not dream of restoring ancient Judaea. We must not attach ourselves to the place where our political life was once violently interrupted and destroyed. The goal of our present endeavors must be not the "Holy Land," but a land of our own.”
Pinsker suggested establishing the Jewish homeland in Asiatic Turkey, or on a tract of land in the still-open ranges of North America. Pinsker knew that, however symbolically important Jerusalem and the ancient lands of Israel were to his people, the area was crowded with incompatible histories, rife with turmoil, and soaked in blood.
When Mr. Thornton speaks of “moral responsibility and the hard price one must pay for one's choices,” he seems to ignore the choice made by the early Zionist leadership to reject Pinsker's very sensible—and historically aware—admonition. Had they listened, the Jewish homeland might be located in a place where the Israelis are not beset by enemies on all sides and compelled to make impossible choices between humane behavior and necessary defense against an inhumane enemy.
That tantalizing historical possibility aside, Mr. Thornton seems to view history as an inevitable force that is entirely beyond human influence. He portrays it as a juggernaut that marches onward with unstoppable force. That view allows Mr. Thornton to claim that, because the idea of the nation is foreign to Islamic civilization, they have no right to adopt it, and any attempt to do so is suspect. If this is true, then what hope is there in appealing to the moderate elements in Iranian secular society? What is the purpose of overthrowing Sadaam Hussein? The tide of history has already borne the national ideal past them. It is too late for them.
Mr. Thornton's appeal to history is to be respected. However, the fact that history shows us that humanity has always behaved in a certain way does not mean that humanity must always behave in that way. I am no “right-thinking liberal,” but it seems to me that the simple existence of a historical precedent should not guarantee its conservation."
[It's posted. Good for them. --IW]
After a couple hours of
After a couple hours of struggling with my blog template, I've added a permanent link to each post. You can use it to send someone a link to specific post. If you're a PC person using MS Explorer, you can right-click on the link, select Copy Shortcut from the menu and paste the link wherever you need to.
You clever Mac types will have to figure out the Apple equivalent.
April 02, 2002
Leave it to USA Today
Leave it to USA Today to turn 3,000 dead people into an entertaining color graphic.
Once again, Frank Gaffney makes
Once again, Frank Gaffney makes the "there's fewer of them, so they're worth more" argument:
"First, the United States must stand with Israel -- a fellow democracy and close ally whose losses along its front (which now means practically everywhere in Israel) in the war on terrorism greatly exceed on a per capita basis those experienced by the United States on September 11."
How about this, Mr. Gaffney? I will trade Israel the sum total of its dead for the last two years for the sum total of our dead on September 11.
Sound good?
Didn't think so.
[FP posted my reply to Gaffney's math. Yahoo. --IW]
Okay: there is now a
Okay: there is now a simple comment system in place. Comment away.
April 03, 2002
Curse you, Andrew Sullivan! I
Curse you, Andrew Sullivan! I saw Tal G.'s blog from Jerusalem in the Israel category over at eatonweb, but didn't link to it immediately. So Sullivan has his scoop. Eh.
Anyway--it is a good thing to read the words of somebody who's There. The details concerning the calling up of reservists and corporate policy on carrying weapons at work illustrate, in a way that news offered by Standard Media, Inc. can't begin to approach, what it's like to actually live in the midst of the morass. No slant, no tilt, just a guy buying groceries and listening to distant (and not-so-distant) explosions.
Now: if we can just get a Palestinian to blog...
April 05, 2002
Tuesday night, I watched footage
Tuesday night, I watched footage from Israel presented by Our Man Peter Jennings. Quite graphic. First, a Palestinian civilian trying to enter Ramallah gets an Israeli truncheon in the face. Bash! Then there was the man--earnest but eerily calm—showing the camera the splayed corpses in his tiny shattered apartment. "Yes--my brother, and my mother," he said, pointing in turn to each of the bloodied and contorted bodies. His apartment had been strafed by an American-made Apache helicopter. Another suicide bomber in the making, I expect. Another enemy of Israel.
Read More...
Amos Oz, a founder of
Amos Oz, a founder of the Peace Now movement in Israel, differentiates between a just war for Palestinian self-determination and the unjust and futile war to destroy Israel. It's an interesting distinction to make, but I question it. If (as Oz states) Yasser Arafat is running both wars, and pretending they are one, and the suicide bombers make no distinction between the two (as Oz also states), then the distinction, it would seem, disappears into the morass of theoretical abstraction.
Tal made me laugh today.
Tal made me laugh today. He writes:
"There's still lots of security: guards at storefronts, police, roadblocks. A cafe had a friendly looking security guard out front wearing a bright blue long sleeve shirt and an exposed pistol. And the media is around... I saw 2 camera crews (I think one was British; the other spoke French) .. and a car with multiple Danish flag stickers and "TV" written with masking tape on the side.
This latter trick (the "TV" thing) is done I think by most journalists that drive around the Palestinian territories. At the risk of oversimplifiying, it's code for "don't shoot me"."
April 09, 2002
*Yawn* I now return to
*Yawn* I now return to my post, having taken a much deserved rest from all the chaos and blood...or, at least, from reading about it and watching it on television. Not really the same as being there, is it? Nevertheless, even media exposure takes a certain toll on the head and the heart.
Before I set up Astonished Head, I was posting letters to FrontPage, many about Israel. Presumably in response to these letters, I got a few e-mails from a fellow named 'Baldur' who was using an anonymous remailer in Czechoslovakia. The e-mails invited me to visit a site to read some 'fearless commentary' by the editor of said site. Such fearless commentary consists of gems like this:
"The Jews, quite rightly, are afraid of nationalist ideas outside their own race. So they seek to suppress them by means fair and foul. The way the Jew treats the Arab in his country is the way you should treat the Jew in your country, White man."
Apparently, said editor has the courage to be a a racist idiot. And his readers are such brave people that they use anonymous remailers.
I find it discouraging that there are folks in the world who can read what I write and think that I might possibly be interested in ill-reasoned, poorly written racist screeds.
I just got yet another e-mail from this Baldur chap, to whom I say: you, sir, are a cretin and a primitive person who needs a good beating. Please fuck off.
A reader calls my attention
A reader calls my attention to this fascinating account by David Brooks of the roots of Muslim and European anti-Americanism in this week's Weekly Standard.
The broad outline of Brooks' "fear of the Bourgeois" theory is sound, but he does tend to gloss over some of the nastier bits in American and Israeli history. We may indeed posess a certain vitality and heroism that the Arab nations lack and the Europeans have lost, but at some point we're going to have to come to real terms with what happend to the People Who Got In Our Way.
In America, sociologists and psychiatrists
In America, sociologists and psychiatrists who treat adolescents have lamented the rise in self-destructive acts among our teenagers: self-mutilation ("cutting"), anorexia, bulimia, and so forth. The youthful and conflicting urges to disapear and to be known result in some peculiar behavior, indeed.
But we live the good life here. In the Territories, the adolescent urges to disppear and to be known find expression with the strapping on of a fashionable belt made from high-grade explosives and with dead bodies scattered in a marketplace. You think American parents have problems with their teens? Read Elizabeth Rubin's Bethlehem Dispatch in the New Republic.
"I am not for brainwashing;
"I am not for brainwashing; I am not for uncritical histories of America. I would, however, like every American to be able to understand and agree with what Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said: "Am I embarrassed to speak for a less than perfect democracy? Not one bit. Find me a better one. Do I suppose there are societies which are free of sin? No, I don't. Do I think ours is, on balance, incomparably the most hopeful set of human relations the world has? Yes, I do." That is what American children need to learn. I think that if children know the truth about America and her noble history, they will be behind the war."
William Bennet on how to regain American moral clarity, in the National Review.
April 10, 2002
Glenn Reynolds over at Instapundit
Glenn Reynolds over at Instapundit quotes a reader who wants to know "What's up with the journalistic convention of noting, whenever the Israelis use military force, that they're pounding the Palestinians with "U.S.-supplied" weapons?"
"Yeah, what is up with that?" Reynolds asks. "Like we don't know."
It would be a good thing if the paper editors exercised some parity and routinely named the suppliers of funds and explosives to various terrorists, provided that they could do so with reasonable certainty.
However, constant reminders that the Palestinians are being pounded with American weaponry probably ought to give us a clue about why US arbitration in the region is so problematic.
I would suggest that it may be difficult for Palestinians to believe in American impartiality when they're being targeted by Boeing Apache AH-64 helicopter gunships equipped with Longbow Fire Control Radars, Radar Frequency Interferometers, Target Acquisition Designation Sights, Pilot Night Vision Sensors, AGM-114L3 Hellfire II laser guided missiles, and M230 cannons that fire 1,200 30-millimeter rounds a minute.
The fact that we sell similar weapons platforms to Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates probably isn't much comfort.
George McGovern spouts idiocy in
George McGovern spouts idiocy in The Nation. Here are some questions he asks:
Would we be better off opening up diplomatic, trade and travel relations with rogue countries, including a well-staffed embassy in each?
Of course! Setting up fully staffed embassies in Iran, Iraq and North Korea would allow those hostile to American interests to vent their frustrations by blowing them up, thus preventing future acts of terrorism. Similarly, we could send over groups of American tourists that could then be kidnapped and beheaded, with videotapes of each murder circulated among the disaffected, thus satisfying their blood-lust in the most economical manner possible in terms of lives lost. Brilliant! And let's not forget: if the governments of said countries still hate us, we can open up full trade relations with them so that they can finally get the cash flows they need to finish their nuclear ICBM programs. That will make them feel safe and secure, which is all that Sadaam Hussein, Kim Jong Il, and the Mullahs of Iran really want.
Isn't a rogue nation simply one we have chosen to boycott because it doesn't always behave the way we think it should?
Absolutely! After all, it's really not a big deal that Hussein experiments on his minority populations with chemical weapons, or that Jong Il is starving his population, or that Iran is providing high-grade explosives to Palestinian suicide bombers to increase their effectiveness. We should let those leaders know that we really do understand where they're coming from, and that it's perfectly alright with us if they want to kill, maim, and starve their citizens.
Is not the best way to diminish some of the international trouble spots, which might embroil our young men and women, by reducing the festering poverty, misery and hopelessness of a suffering world?
Yes! If we just provide Hussein and Jong Il with all the food their countries' populations need, I'm sure that they'll make certain that every citizen gets it before it rots on the docks. It is obvious that all of the world's problems can be solved if we just funnel more American tax revenues to other countries so that they can spend the money with the wisdom and responsibility that they have so clearly demonstrated in the past.
Is it possible that our well-intentioned President and his Vice President have gone off the track of common sense in their seeming obsession with terrorism?
Definitely possible! I mean, why be obsessed about three thousand American dead in our greatest city and our nation's capital? That's nothing to get upset about, after all…it's just mass murder. It's not like they're going to do it again, or anything. I'm sure that they've gotten it out of their systems, and feel no need to acquire nuclear or biological weapons so that they can kill tens of thousands of us. Bush and Cheney might in fact be downright loopy!
McGovern's absolute disconnection with the reality of the events of September 11 and the world we live in is beyond belief. It is, in a word, appalling. His glossing over of the complexity of the threats we face in order to service his simplistic, “all you need is love and foreign aid” pseudo-philosophy is an offense to our American dead.
This is a man who thinks that a stateless terrorist with a nuclear weapon is just like the Soviet Union with a field of missile silos. This is a man who has reduced the powdered ashes of the 2,077 still-missing bodies at the World Trade Center to the mischief of a ‘hobgoblin.'
This is a man who wanted to be President of these United States.
April 11, 2002
Somewhere around 1991 or 1992...
Somewhere around 1991 or 1992 - I'm not sure, because my journal files from that time are locked behind clever passwords I�ve since forgotten - I had a dream. The dream contained vivid images, accompanied by emotional impressions so potent that I�ve remembered it to this day. The image I remember most...the one that was foremost in my mind when I awoke...involved Interstate 95, the highway that ran near the town where I lived in New Jersey at the time. I-95 runs north/south, and is one of the major arteries that leads to New York City from New Jersey and other points south.
In this dream, I was looking northward along a familiar section of I-95 that ran near where I lived, from a slightly elevated position, as though I were standing on an overpass. The northbound lanes of the highway were nearly empty, but the southbound lanes were packed with slow-moving traffic. All of the crowded automobiles had their lights on. My impression was that they were fleeing, evacuating, heading south to escape. And, indeed, northward there lay a great darkness: an ominous, roiling, clouded darkness that seemed to stretch across the horizon. It filled my dream self with dread.
Prominently placed in this darkness, looming upwards and disappearing into the clouds, were two tall, square towers. There were fighter aircraft flitting around them, flying into and out of the clouds.
At the time, and for many years afterwards, I interpreted those tall towers disappearing into the smoky darkness as the legs of some giant, menacing creature or robot, something archetypal and biblical, a leviathan with the bulk of its massive body lost to view overhead. In the dream, its legs were massive things, that dwarfed me as an observer, and I had the impression of motion, as though they were slowly striding from the north towards me, bearing menace and danger.
It was only last week that it occurred to me: two towering structures. Dark clouds, swirling like smoke. Fighter aircraft. All key elements of that day in September.
Now, if that isn�t just downright odd, I don't know what is. I had this dream long before I lived in New York, and long before I worked near or even visited the World Trade Center.
There�s something that bothers me. Please allow me to indulge in some Mulderesque speculation, just for a moment. The towers: accounted for. The dark smoke: accounted for. The jet fighters: accounted for. But that scene of evacuation, the thousands of cars fleeing from the north, their headlights on to pierce the darkness from which they emerged...that hasn't happened. Not yet, anyway.
Let�s all hope I'm a crank with a vivid imagination.
Huh. I seem to have
Huh. I seem to have wrung every last bit of personal relevance out of the Middle East. I've got nothing more to say about it. That's good; I was getting bored.
I think I'll start publishing serialized fiction bits, now. That seems like fun, not so much of a drag...not so much with the heaviness and the death.
Doesn't that sound nice?
April 12, 2002
Greetings in the name of
Greetings in the name of He With The Healthy Pantaloons!
There is now no reason to be fearful, because He of the Holy Wealth & Hellfare Department is come in a big ship of light bearing hundreds of pairs of black sneakers. Look, it's on the flickering box! With a 1-800 number and a website.
We are talking some SERIOUS SALVATION here, Saints! This is the kind of offer that only comes oh once every two thousand years or so. Time to jump on board the big MESSIAH SHIP and flitter off to the throneroom of Heaven!
god@eternity.com
Plus, if you act now, you get this free set of steaknives. They'll cut through a tin can and still slice a theologian like this! and that! and...that!
But wait--there's more!
Yes indeed! Try Judeo-Christianity for thirty days risk-free and receive Islam for only $4.99! Complete your collection and save a Whopping Eighty Percent! It's a small price to pay for COMPLETE COVERAGE. Act now!
[Quality of experience may vary. The distributer assumes no liability implicit or implied and is not responsible for misinterpretations, wars, sloppy thinking or mistranslation of original supplied texts. Manufacturer's warranty does not cover damage to exterior buildings, the smashing of temples, or the success of an ethnicity. Your results may vary.]
But wait--there's more!
"Who put this stuff in
"Who put this stuff in the same part of the world, anyway? What idiot thought that this would work? Did they say, 'Ooo...hey, here's one! We take three faiths, right? And we make it so that the same place is really holy to each one, right? And then we take the pantheists, give them all kinds of trade access and a hardy national character. All within...say, five thousand miles of each other. Won't that be a scream?' Now look at this fucking mess!"
--Gabriel
Archangel of the Holy Sefiroth
Angel of Aspirations, Truth, Joy, Childbirth, Death, Vengeance, Revelation,
the Annunciation, the Resurrection, and the Apple Tree
Chief Ambassador of God to Humanity
Ruler of the Sixth Heaven
Ruling Prince of the Cherubim and of Justice
Divine Herald and Husband
Trumpeter of the Last Judgment
Governor of Eden
60 Minutes
October 2, 2006
So I was on the
So I was on the train and there was a young Hassidic fellow there
all in black and scraggle-beard with sacred loops of hair
and I thought:
You look the way you do because the Romans smashed a synagogue
--admittedly a very nice one, but a Temple to G-d nonetheless--
nearly two thousand years ago
You are dressed in black to mourn the tumbling of stone from stone
the smashing of the gilt facade
the crucifixion of thousands on the hills of Jerusalem
You wrap your scroll around your arm and head
read from a language that was old when Yeshua was young
You rock in ecstasy at the Wall while the Jerusalem postmaster
stuffs letters to G-d into the cracks between the stones
You talk to G-d in the language of the Chosen Tribes
Everyone around you talks to G-d
The hardy virus of your faith transcends the mutant sects
that have infected the world
A clear unbroken line from Brooklyn to Jerusalem
from Jerusalem to Egypt
from Egypt to times of blood sacrifice
golden calves and prostitutes of a sacred nature
The wandering in the desert...
wandering...
There he stood on the subway
a living artifact of faith thirty-five hundred years old
Thirty-five hundred years of idea mutation and alteration
had left him with poor skin
the ears and teeth of English royalty
eyes myopic behind thick-lensed glasses
reminding me somewhat of the Amish features
not in the similarity but in the commonality
A faith in a god that is in the DNA
reflected outwardly
intertwined with a resurrected language
A nation brought back from the dead
A fierce defiance in the face of a world
that tried to kill them all
And where does such a faith lead?
What kind of questions does a chosen people
ask of a god that seems to want them dead?
"We'll build more houses here
and sooner or later
we'll build the Third Temple."
NEW YORK TIMES December 31,
NEW YORK TIMES
December 31, 2006
NEW YORK - The man claiming to be Jesus Christ has apparently vanished, three days after his remarkable and unexpected appearance on "Nightline" with Ted Koppel. Many are already calling this a hoax. "The greatest hoax in the history of media," said Ted Turner, owner of the TNT and ABC cable networks. In an exclusive videophone interview with this reporter, Mr. Turner has denied any involvement. "I feel that the public has been defrauded, and that my networks have been used to perpetuate that fraud."
"I thought that it was
"I thought that it was the most...profoundly moving experience that I have ever had. It accounts for, in large part, my decision to retire from public life. I've had God on my program. With a career in media, where could I possibly hope to go from there?"
--Ted Koppel
So it happened pretty much
So it happened pretty much the way they thought it would. Some buncha nuts somewhere got all the right parts, and put them together, and built a bomb. They put it in a little dingy at the end of some dead-end Jersey City street, and one martyr putt-putted that little rubber boat across the water, right up against the West Side Highway, and pop! off went a tiny little 18-kiloton boomboom. Three million people died outright...another three hundred thousand within the week as the city descended rapidly into chaos. A much higher toll, it turned out, than the Government had accounted for in its projected fatalities reports. Fallout emptied Jersey City, Newark...
"I saw it coming from
"I saw it coming from the East. It went right over my head and then smashed into the hill over yonder. Then I seen the horses."
--Bud Atkins
farmer and witness
April 15, 2002
More mumblings from idiots while
More mumblings from idiots while other folks who ought to be smart but somehow keep raving like imbeciles carry bravely on.
What can we do with a man like Ariel “The Tank” Sharon? When asked by Dan Rather about how his meeting with Colin Powell went, he replied: “It was a friendly meeting. I welcomed him to Jerusalem, the capitol of the Jewish people for over 3000 years, and the united and undivided capital of the state of Israel forever.”
I watched him say that, and it came out of him like a mantra, a chant, a dogmatic assertion of irrational faith that trumps all reason, brooks no compromise, permits no internal dissent. It was the weak brain-fart of an old man who can no longer think about anything other than how utterly important a miserable city in the middle of a wretched swatch of earth is. For the sake of that dirty, stinking town, birthplace of so much prejudice, hatred, and death, we must all suffer.
What can we do with a man like Yasser “Bubble-lips” Arafat? Who writes by way of encouragement to his brigades of martyrs, “The [Palestinian] nation, indeed, broke out its intifada in order to pave with its pure and clean blood the sidewalks, alleyways, and roads of the holiest of holies, the capital of the independent Palestinian state.” He too wants that pale fell city for his own, seeing its crusted stones as worthy of blood, and above all else, as a meaningful place of legend, of ethnicity, of god.
Let us drop a nuclear device on Jerusalem. There! we shall say. Now no one can have it.
April 16, 2002
"I'm not saying it's safe
"I'm not saying it's safe for humans. I'm not saying it's unsafe for humans. All I'm saying is it that it makes hermaphrodites of frogs."
April 17, 2002
"In the beginning there was the head, and the head was God, and the head was with God. When in the course of the head's divine fruitiness there came the time within which to divide the land from the sea, it was done. When the fullness of unfolding had been reached with the meaning that now was the bit where the fusion furnaces of the stars ignite, it was so. When it was time for tea, it was had with a sugar and half a cream with a bit of lemon wedge, and a nice biscuit."
Big Big Book Of Bog
1:1
"It is plain to see from this creation account that the fruity head is indeed the essence of God, if not God itself. It is within the loopy nonsense of the head's divine commedia d'el arte that the firmaments are separated and the stars "ignited" with just enough time for a snack left besides. Surely this fruity heady God is worthy of obeisance and much slaughter."
from "Just A Terrible Mistake"
Ralph Hitler
"It is Mr. Hitler's continued insistence on the supposed transexualism of his infamous namesake that ultimately detracts from what is, after all, purported to be an exposition on the art of paper dolls."
Daily Telegram
Ipswich
"Certainly the time is now, if ever. There can be no denying that once we bang this fellow into a tree, there will be no more of this Apocalypse nonsense from the Jews or the Christians. And once the Muslims finish turning their deserts into biological wastelands, we can all join together in world harmony to help the mutant children of the Arabic Wars. It will be a great moment for the reconciliation of humanity."
Lord Alfred "The Bastard" Wembsley
London
"And he's not actually a Lord. He's just some fucking lunatic upper-crust dink that they let roam about the place. It's kind of grotesque, actually... like making fun of a crippled monkey."
Robert Willis
Gardener To The Queen
April 18, 2002
How long, O Lord? When
How long, O Lord? When will I get what’s coming to me?
How long must I bathe in goat’s blood?
How long must I do Your required funny dance that disturbs my masculinity(1)
and mocks my sensible parentage?
How long will I sit in this desert?
I’d like an answer, pretty damn quick,
and some keen knowledge, so that I will be smart in the head,
for now all look at me agape, and wonder at my stickiness,
and hurl flaming dung into my tent at night.
I’d like to trust in You, much more than I do,
but Your rites are silly, and uncomfortable,
and to be frank, I’m not at all sure that You exist,
or that I’m not just a goat-killing vaguely effeminate loon.
(1) lit., “shrinks my tree.”
Bog Songs, 79
April 19, 2002
I'm tired. Of all the
I'm tired. Of all the endless debate. Thornton with his peculiar view that historical precedent ought to guarantee present acceptance. Sullivan with his insistence that it all boils down to Anti-Semitism. Buchanan's idea that terrorism has a venerable pedigree (which is a variation on Thornton's ‘historical precedent' view). Said's oh-so-ideological contention that it is the Israelis, and not the Arabs, who are bent on genocide. All of Europe wrestling with the ghosts of their past. America trying to find friends to go the war with.
Zoom out now, in true CGI style, and view the entire planet. Witness the big big bash that wiped out the dinosaurs, observe the spread of the green wealth of carbon-dioxide-hungry plants and the emergence of the furry mammals. Look! There in Africa, monkeys are coming down from the trees, and bashing each other on the head with rocks. See that one? He's bigger, with a bit of a bigger brain-pan, and testicles that produce just a dram or so more per bang than his fellows. Look at all his progeny! Leaping and swinging into the caves, beating in the heads of mastodons, they trek northward, and—speeding up now—look at them go! Spreading across the face of the earth, like mold on a rotting apple.
And now, witness the pattern: they gather together, finding affinity. The groups claim bits of land, plant crops, prosper, and invent many gods. Other groups wander through and try to take it from them; conflict erupts, blood is spilled, the victor's god-ideas are reinforced by their success, walls are built, buildings, temples, cities. Eventually, in one arid patch of desert, economy of thought kicks in and many gods become few, then one. All in an endless ebb and flow of swelling populations, conflict, disease, death, birth. Over and over.
Then the entire planet convulses, millions on the march, mechanical winged-and-footed creatures assist us as we all pound each other into the mud for important and meaningful reasons. Hot metal shreds us by the hundreds of thousands, then the tens of millions, ovens are built, greasy smoke belches into sky. Finally in a southern ocean the very stuff of matter is split and towering fire blooms…twice. Many tens of thousands flake into ash. We pause. We take a breather, occasionally swatting at each other. Waiting. Resting up for the next round.
And what is important and meaningful to us this time? What draws our attention?
That patch of desert, where a god-idea bloomed.
It's not about Israel, people. It's not about Palestine. It's not about self-determination, or oppression, or rights.
It's about god.
You want to solve the problem? Kill god, if you can.
April 20, 2002
"I fell from the sky,
"I fell from the sky, and landed hard. Dust caked my brow. A boy goatherd saw me, and ran across the hills, leaving his crooked staff and his bleating charges behind him. I stayed where I was, and watched three sunrises from that place. Then, the goatherd’s family approached, and others from his village. They asked me questions. I gave them answers. They went away from me, and did not return. I stayed where I was, and watched twenty-seven sunrises from that place. Then, important personages from a far city approached, led by the goatherd, his family, and others from his village. The important personages asked me questions. I gave them answers. They went away from me, and did not return. I stayed where I was, and watched one hundred and seventy sunrises from that place. Then, a great city was built around me. It had towering pale walls, and in the center a temple was built over where I stood. I stayed where I was, but I could no longer watch the sunrise from that place. So I departed."
Book of the Prophet Akib
7:1
April 23, 2002
"Both autocratically through the courts
"Both autocratically through the courts and democratically at the ballot box, America is being de-Christianized; becoming a pagan country. As Vaclav Havel said, what we seem to be trying to create is 'the first atheistic civilization in the history of mankind.'"
So laments Pat Buchanan. To be blunt: paganism is not atheism, Pat, it's just not your brand of theism. So sorry. The shedding of YHWH is a necessary step in the evolution of ethical humanity. The question is whether we've done it too soon, because old man Allah is up and running and strong. There is a problem there, and a big one. While the Books of the Jews do indeed contain that old tribal magic, that Chosen People ethos, all of the tribes that the Israelites hated, killed and defeated--the Amalekites, Amorites, Ammonites, Hittites, Girgashites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, Jebusites, and so on--are merely names now, and have faded into the strata of history. Not so the Book of the Muslims. In it, their Most Holy Prophet says that Allah commands hatred of the Jews, and the Jews as a people are still very much with us. We don't need to hem and haw about how "maybe" the tribes mentioned in the Muslim Book are "related" to the modern Jews, the way that some try to relate the Canaanites to the modern Arabs.
Read More...
April 24, 2002
I haven’t addressed the whole
I haven’t addressed the whole pedophile priest thing here—that’s more Sullivan’s bag—but now that the Big Big Pontiff has spoken, I feel it’s time to throw my two pennies in.
The fundamental cause of the current crisis in the Catholic Church is that the authorities of the Church--priests, nuns, bishops, and the Pope--have no real understanding of what human sexuality is or how it affects people's lives. The reason for this is simple: they don't have sex. Many of them have never had sex. Sex for them is a theoretical abstraction that they attempt to force into a procreative model that is centuries old. When people who don't have a clue about a subject act as authorities on that subject, they make foolish mistakes.
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"Personally, my faith in a
"Personally, my faith in a possible resolution has been shaken, thrown to the ground, and run over by a thousand tanks."
U.S. special envoy Anthony Zinni, in today's Onion (of course).
April 25, 2002
Have you read the latest
Have you read the latest NYT headline? “Saudi to Warn Bush of Rupture Over Israel Policy.”
Apparently Crown Prince Abdullah is going to warn President Bush that his support of Ariel Sharon will indicate that Saudi national interests are no longer American national interests. They’re threatening to use the “oil weapon” and throw us out of our Saudi bases. Good thing we’ve been moving all of our stuff to Qatar and Kuwait.
How about this, Prince? “American to Warn Abdullah that if Any More of His Citizens Crash Planes into American Buildings America Will Fuse His Oil Wells Shut with Nuclear Weapons.”
Or, “American to Warn Abdullah that When The Revolution Comes and His Outraged Populace Puts Him Against The Wall Along With His Entire Corrupt Regime, He’s on His Own.”
Or even, “American to Warn Abdullah: Go Ahead, Make My Day.”
This bluster is so much hot, dry, desert air. As though Saudi Arabia’s national interests have ever been ours. As though, when push comes to shove, we won’t finally tell them to take their hate-filled Madrassas, their Qu’rans, their murderous jihadists, and their oil and insert them forcefully into their colons along with a heaping quantity of the sand which comprises 90% of their “nation’s” territory.
I remember vividly something that one of bin Laden’s cohorts said, as they were videotaped laughing about the 9/11 attacks. Referring to the attack on the Pentagon, this chortling associate remarked, “They must have thought there was a coup.”
That was the moment when I realized that many if not most of the Arabs have absolutely no idea about the nature of what’s been built here in America. I said to the terrorist on the television, “We don’t have coups here, you jackass.” He couldn't even conceive of a nation where violent civil unrest is the exception rather than the rule and the government hands power over to its successor without chaos, bloodshed, and death. Such a place was entirely outside of his experience, and I suspect there are many like him throughout the Arab world.
For all its scandals, blemishes and flaws, our government still governs by consent of the governed. Unlike the Crown Prince, President Bush doesn’t have to worry that the oppressed, ignorant and illiterate masses will rise up and kill him and his entire family, because (believe it or not) our masses are largely free, educated, and literate, and they know better. The depth of the ignorance of those who have sworn to destroy us and of those who—like Prince Abdullah—aid and support them is astounding. Watching the video of that tiny-minded would-be tyrant enjoying his momentary success made me realize, then and there, just how much we really are the City on the Hill, and just how strongly those seething, hating masses resemble the dark barbarian hordes.
We should pull out of the region entirely, and pay eight dollars a gallon for gas. We’ll surround the area with ships, planes and troops, to keep them from getting out. And then we’ll watch as they tear each other apart and destroy everything that’s been built there since 1900. Then, maybe—if we’re feeling magnanimous, and if they haven’t decided to hit America again in some way—we’ll help them rebuild. That’s what we did for Germany. That’s what we did for Japan.
Of course, we only did that because we’re corrupt oppressors who hated the Germans and the Japanese and wanted to destroy their faith and their way of life.
The parsing of the Good
April 26, 2002
In the midst of a
In the midst of a long and somewhat muddled piece in The Nation by Michael Massing (in which, despite the fact that practically every Afghan he spoke to is happy with American involvement in their country, he worries and frets that we're Not Doing The Right Thing there) I found the following tidbit:
"Indeed, Marla Ruzicka, who came to Afghanistan on behalf of Global Exchange, the activist group, to organize families victimized by the US bombing to demand compensation from Washington, told me that she was encountering a problem: People were so pleased with the results of the bombing that many were reluctant to protest it too vocally. (A report on her activities in the New York Times, headlined Shattered Afghan Families Demand U.S. Compensation, did not mention this.)"
That article--published way back on April 8--is now considered a moneymaker by the New York Times, so I couldn't read it (view an abstract here). I suspect, however, that the NYT article and Massing's work are of a piece. Massing gives the distinct impression that it is somehow the Americans who will bear the blame when civil conflict inevitably returns to the war-torn land. This is despite the fact that
"Daily, two filled-to-capacity UN planes fly in development experts and humanitarian workers from Islamabad, Pakistan. In an effort to combat rampant malnutrition, the World Food Program (WFP) is providing food to more than 6 million Afghans. The Danes are helping to de-mine the country, the Germans to rebuild its water and sanitation systems, and the Japanese to reconstruct its housing. In the Marco Polo restaurant, a modest but well-lit establishment that serves the usual Afghan fare--lamb kebabs, fried chicken, sautéed spinach--NGO officials squawk into their global-reach telephones, directing relief efforts."
Apparently, the United States will be held accountable if the European-headed reconstruction efforts fail. Massing is supported in his effort to demonstrate the all-encompassing responsibility of the United States by several on-site European critics, who suggest that the American military mindset will result in disaster. He calls US reconstruction efforts in the region "illusory" a paragraph after writing:
"The United States is financing an estimated 80 percent of all the food aid being distributed by the WFP in Afghanistan. The US Embassy was so involved in helping plan a recent back-to-school event in Kabul that when I asked for some background material, I was inadvertently handed a detailed script specifying each official's every move."
Later, he states
"The United States is providing the country large sums of humanitarian and economic aid."
For a nation whose President has emphatically denied his desire to engage in nation-building, we're doing quite a bit of it. This, of course, is on top of the billions we spent forcing the tyrannical Taliban government from power, not to mention offering political, financial, and military support to a stabilizing interim government. But according to Massing and the Europeans, we're just not doing it right. Apparently we're not clever enough, or subtle enough, or blessed with the acute sense of history required to rebuild a nation.
Fine. I'll grant Massing that. Then how about this: why don't all of those clever, subtle, historically-minded Europeans stop their armchair grousing and commit more of their billions to rebuilding Afghanistan? Let them fund the other 80% of the WFP's budget, and let them head out into the Afghan countryside to make nice with all of the various warlords. Since America isn't very good at all of that complicated stuff--Massing says we have neither "the will [nor] the skill" to address the problems--wouldn't it make more sense to simply let the Europeans handle it entirely, so that we can concentrate on making it possible for them to formulate more philosophical objections to our lowbrowed militaristic worldview?
Perhaps I'm missing something. Perhaps, figuring that they could rely on the American military machine to defend them if the need arose, the governments of Europe have invested all of their extra cash into massive social programs to improve their citizens' quality of life. That must be it. Europe doesn't have the money to rebuild Afghanistan itself, just like it doesn't have the strength to smash tyrannical governments when necessary. Therefore, it will be up to the United States to prevent civil war, because the Danes, the Germans, the UN, all of the NGOs, and an International Security Assistance Force made up of soldiers from 18 European nations are (somehow) powerless to do so.
Sullivan echoes my points about
Sullivan echoes my points about the Catholic clergy's inexperience with sexuality in today's Dish. He also makes a distinction that I wish I hadn't edited out: that it is the fullness of sexual relationship, rather than the momentary burp of sexual release, that the clergy so sorely lacks. Ah well. The readers of the San Francisco Bay Guardian, which is printing my Bit in their weekly, will have to make do with my bludgeoning prose. [The Guardian decided to publish less than half of the letter. I suppose I should have expected as much from a free weekly with a guide to area nude beaches as the most prominent link on its website. --IW]
Also of interest on the topic is Michael Sean Winters' piece in The New Republic, referenced by Sullivan. Winters tackles the whole range of potential causes, from the aforementioned lack of sexual experience to clerical cronyism and the infirmity of the Pope. Another point I wanted to add to the Bit...if this had happened ten or fifteen years ago, when the Pope was in his prime, we'd be watching an entirely different play.
Ho-hum. So the Crown Prince
Ho-hum. So the Crown Prince wasn't really so head-up after all. Apparently the anonymous source "close to Abdullah" extensively quoted in yesterday's NYT Saudi bluster article holds the title of Guy In Charge Of Making Sure That It Looks Like The Crown Prince Is Really Standing Up To The Great Satan.
And hey: I'm echoed again, by Bernard Lewis. Discussing bin Laden's misplaced confidence in American softness, he writes: "It was a natural error. Nothing in his background or his experience would enable him to understand that a major policy change could result from an election." That's quite right. Where he comes from, one tyrant is much like the other, and they all behave in much the same way.
Huh. A good day for my ego, so far.
April 30, 2002
A reader calls my attention
A reader calls my attention to this Weekly Standard piece on Sayyid Qutb, rightly called “the most effective Islamic critic of the West and the most eloquent advocate of pan-Islamic revival.”
Qutb believed that while Western democracy is based on freedom, Islamic society is based on virtue. Hence, the repentant adulterers who insisted upon confession to Muhammad and were then stoned to death in accordance with the law of Allah are to be celebrated for their virtue, that is, their desire to be pure when they finally met Allah. Furthermore, the democratic insistence that ‘the People' rule places them above God as a kind of idol, thus making democracy idol worship in the same way that capitalism is market worship.
Author Dinesh D'Souza is quite right in calling for intellectual responses to Qutb's far-reaching and highly influential critique: “To counter this idea will require a full-bodied defense of freedom as understood in the West, as a gift from God and a necessary pre-condition for true virtue.”
There is a problem with that, however. To argue that freedom is a gift from God will require reference to God's words, in some form or another. What form of God's words should be used? The Jewish Torah? The Christian Testaments? The Vedas, perhaps? The only reference acceptable to Qutb's disciples will be, of course, the Koran. Since they will probably reject any Koran-based critique of Qutb offered by a non-Muslim, it once again falls to the Muslims themselves to reform their own religion.
There is no rationally coherent defense of God, which is why a society based entirely on a chosen Book of God will always be incoherent. Freedom, or free will, is indeed a necessary pre-condition for virtue. Convincing the radical adherents of a religion whose very name demands submission to the will of Allah that free will is a necessity strikes me as an impossible task.
The debate, therefore, ought not to be about “gifts from God,” but about the very viability of the god-idea as the foundation of a modern society. Can a state based on the premise that one's individual spiritual life is most properly directed by external authorities be a just state? Is it ethical to demand that non-adherents observe religious law? Is the required public observance of religious law more important than private faith and conviction? All of these questions do not presume the existence of God or God's authority. Instead, they are concerned with what constitutes a just and ethical society, and whether or not a theocracy can insure the just and ethical treatment of its citizens. The followers of Qutb and those who sympathize with them are not and will never be interested in what we in the West have to say about his ideas. We must engage those Muslims who are interested in the broader questions about the role of God in secular society. Those who deny the very viability of secular society will not listen to us.
By requiring that the intellectual defense of Western values be grounded in theistic belief, D'Souza dooms the effort from the start.
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