Hey again! First off, thanks so much for taking the time to reply even though things are busy for you in RL--I totally understand how that is and hope everything is going fine.

Reading over your post, it occurred to me that there are actually some things we agree on. One thing, for instance, that I think we agree on is that dogma is very, very bad. Blindly following others is never going to lead to a good situation. Forcing others to do things "because that's the way we've always done it" is unlikely to give good results either.

Since I'm pretty sure we agree on this point, let's turn to the point we disagree on. As you said, "does religion bring the good stuff?" The answer to this question I think comes partly from how we're defining religion. If we're going to define religion very narrowly as dogma--a set of prescriptive rules about behavior and practice that everyone must follow--then clearly we answered the question in the last paragraph. Dogma isn't going to bring the good stuff, no. I'm absolutely with you on that.

However, I find such a definition of religion (i.e. religion = dogma) exceedingly narrow and frankly unrealistic. When you look at churches, or temples, or synagogues, or covens, or whatever you see that religion is much more than a set of prescribed rules. All religions are composed of people, and these people interact in very complex ways with both each other, with the religion's leadership, and with whatever religious texts are used. Religion to me, then, is a complex socio-cultural phenomenon. Looking at most churches in the U.S., for example, I don't see a lot of people blindly following the Bible, nor do I see the church leadership encouraging people to blindly follow the Bible (otherwise, I think the death rate from stonings in the U.S. would be much higher than it actually is). What I do see are people coming together to help themselves, help each other, and help their communities, using the Bible as a guide (note I said guide here--I know very few people who base their decisions solely on their religious text; also I chose Christianity for this example, but really you could substitute the religion of your choice there).

Based on these observations, I'm therefore going to quote Daisaku Ikeda, a prominent Buddhist leader. He once said, "Religion exists to serve people; people do not exist to serve religion." My definition of religion therefore is a set of practices that help us grow beyond our own selfish tendencies and serve a greater good. I personally find it irrelevant whether the practices are man-made or divinely inspired so long as they get people to behave more compassionately to each other. To me, that's religion. Anyone who is acting without compassion towards another human being is not following the teachings of their own religion. And any organization that preaches hatred or violence should not be considered a religion at all. If you look at the Bible, or the Koran, or the Buddhist sutras, the overarching message you see is one of love for fellow humankind: the Golden Rule. That is religion and that is what people should be practicing.

Clearly, therefore, I think proper religious practice does bring the good stuff. But can religious practice bring the bad stuff too? Yeah. I'm not denying that. When people choose not to think critically for themselves there will always be someone willing to come along and exploit them. I also think many religious organizations have organized themselves in such a way as to, as you said, be a drain on society and hide behind the banner of religion while carrying out atrocious crimes. But as I said above, I don't really consider the people doing those things as being religious or representing "religion" per se. And as we've talked about in previous posts, I don't think that the existence of such corrupt organizations are entirely religion's fault. If people weren't blindly following their preacher, they'd be blindly following the local village idiot, or blindly their President (or, as in the case of George W. Bush, both). My view on this is that power has a tendency to corrupt; that organizations (whether they be religions, corporations, or nation-states) have a tendency to demand blind obedience; and that there are many people who will willing close their eyes and follow others blindly in order to feel even the smallest sense of security.

In your post, you accused me of downplaying the bad stuff, but I'm going to turn that argument around and suggest that you are in fact downplaying the good stuff that religion has to offer. For every example that you might choose to offer, say the Inquisition or the 9/11 terror attacks, that supposedly show why religion needs to go I can offer you a historical counter-example like Martin Luther King, Jr. or Ghandi as to why religion is crucially important. I think such arguments based on history would end in a draw. But let's go beyond historical arguments. Let's talk about the effect of ordinary people's lives--getting people to donate to charity, volunteer in their communities, help and support each other. What about the drug addicts who find that religion gives them the strength they need to break their addiction, or the prisoners who use the support system religion affords to turn their lives around? Religion inspires ordinary people to lead better, more positive lives much more often than it inspires people to go out and, say, shoot abortion doctors. The problem is, the good stories are too mundane don't make the evening news, so mostly they are anecdotal. The empirical evidence we do have, though, shows religious people live longer, happier, and healthier lives overall.

Sorry for the long post. To sum things up, I do believe that the world needs more religion as I've defined it above. It sounds to me like your main problem with religion is in fact with organized religion and its tendency to steer towards dogma and blind obedience. I actually share your feelings to some extent--as I said above, if an organization is promoting intolerance or hatred, or is imposing its will by force then I think certainly it should be dealt with swiftly and critically. If there's one thing I hope you take away from our discussions on this topic, I suppose it is that religion as a concept is much larger than just organized religion; that it can be immensely healing and an immensely beneficial force in the world. And I would really hope that you would never dismiss someone's views because they happen to be religious. It seems to me that one of the biggest problems facing the world today is that people don't listen to each other--we don't even make the effort to see the other person's point of view.

I, for my part, throughout this dialogue have tried to put myself in your shoes and see things as you do. My goal is not to make you a "religious" person, but simply, I suppose, to further the dialogue a bit and even clarify my own thoughts on the matter by putting them down in words. Thanks for being a willing discussion partner in the process.

@Tymbrwulf No one expects the Red Tape Inquisition!

If you destroy Scientology now, who will run the soup kitchens in 100 years?
Robot slaves of course.

Why did older religions deserve time to moderate themselves but newer religions don't?

You're the only one that ever suggested they should, I certainly never did. I wasn't around during the days of the witch trials and the Inquisition, the best I can do is condemn them today as wrong, harmful and unworthy of any defense or protection.

People should be free to have dangerous and destructive beliefs right up to the point that they start violating the rights of others.

Agreed.

It's also exactly the line that Scientology systematically and routinely crosses.

It tries to use freedom of religion and play it against the rights of others that it is trampling. I believe that act itself should be enough to disqualify it from any such protection or status.

White people caused WW1 and WW2, carried out the inquisition, and murdered John Lennon. I guess they're just all the same.>> ^blankfist:

Hahaha. "Republicans walk the walk." Awesome. If it's partisan then you know it's true!

Eight years of Duhbya.>> ^kronosposeidon:

Q: What do you get when morality is based on ancient traditions superstition tea leaves card tricks faith?
A: Hmm, let's see..
- Roman persecution of Christians
- The Inquisition
- Thuggee murders
- Aztec human sacrifice
- Mountain Meadows Massacre
- Jonestown
- Witch trials
- Islamic Jihad
- The Holocaust
- The Crusades
- Thirty Years' War
- Armenian Genocide
- The Troubles in Northern Ireland
- The Taliban
and lest we forget
- The Middle Fucking East

Q: What do you get when morality is based on ancient traditions superstition tea leaves card tricks faith?

A: Hmm, let's see..

- Roman persecution of Christians
- The Inquisition
- Thuggee murders
- Aztec human sacrifice
- Mountain Meadows Massacre
- Jonestown
- Witch trials
- Islamic Jihad
- The Holocaust
- The Crusades
- Thirty Years' War
- Armenian Genocide
- The Troubles in Northern Ireland
- The Taliban

and lest we forget

- The Middle Fucking East

Watching these videos makes me sick. I have to pause and do something else for a while, or I'll get too mad. Fortunately, only that one guy in the first half had the real attitude problem, and the rest were inquisitive without being too arrogant.

But really, at what point will the general public start demanding better police training? A police officer should never have a problem being filmed in public. If they follow procedures, and have a "peace officer" attitude, it can be nothing but good PR. As soon as I see that somebody has a problem being filmed, I immediately know it's because they abuse their authority on a regular basis, and don't trust themselves to behave properly.

I can see what he's saying but I don't really buy that argument totally.

We share 90% of our DNA with all life because at the end of it all we all emerged from the same spark of life millions of years ago. We share DNA with almost all living things.

After that, let's think about it, Neil's arguement essentially levels all humans to the same level i.e. I can be as smart as Stephen Hawking. I believe that the difference between the average human being and Stephen Hawking is far larger then the difference between the average human and the chimpanzee. Out of our 6 billion people we have a small pool of highly educated and inquisitive people like Neil, Hawking and so on.

Furthermore, the more I read into the subject of INTELLIGENT alien life, the more I think it's fairly rare in our universe. There is alien life out there for sure, if life can arise near volcanic plumes then life is out there perhaps in the probable oceans of Europa.

A reading of our past and development as a species show how depended we were on some factors beyond the probable. We have had extinction events but not catastrophic enough to kill all life. We have a satellite that induces currents and what I believe contributed to life occurring. I recommend reading the Short History of Everything to further explore this topic.

I tried teaching the Periodic Table of Elements; Solids, Gasses & liquids; and Transparent, Translucent and Opaque.

It was fun for a while, then we moved on and didn't get bogged down.
I'm lucky, my kids seem to Straight A (Principal's List) students (Knock on wood).
I'd like to attribute it to their inquisitive nature, It might be that I've always liked answering their questions, or maybe I just got dam lucky!

...to hell with sports stats and teams, and in Canada, no one cares who the past Prime-ministers were!

Here's a translation from here. It's actually for the lo
nger news video which is this video with a few extra minutes.

N - newscaster
T - teacher
P - police officer

The scene opens up, with the teacher's hand on the cop's torso.

T: Why do you want to put your hands on me?
P: I don't want to ma'am. (unsure of this) What have I done to you? [he walks out of the doorway to get some distance, not taking his eyes off her]
T: You put your hands on me a few times
P: Don't pull me. Be careful... [as they walk out and, I'm assuming she pulls his jacket/arm (view is blocked by his torso). He deflects her arm by grabbing it and pushing it to the left.]
T: [with her now free arm, she backhands the cop and says] Get the hell out of here or I'll slap the shit out of you! (Note: she doesn't curse, but that's about the closest translation I can come up with that conveys in English the true sentiment behind the words. The literal translation is "Go away from here because I will give you such a slap that you will not see yourself." See, it's just not the same Smile)
P: Ioooooooi. (A Romanian exclamation that conveys, in this case, "Oh no she didn't!") [Cop puts his glasses on. Queue Won't Get Fooled Again by The Who.]
T: Why are you putting your hands on me repeatedly? Why? (Or "a hundred times" to quote her exactly") [Teacher stands her ground, looking furious and aggrieved.]
P: [slaps the teacher]
T: [gasps! Puts her hand on her face, looking shocked. Starts a fake (at least to me it sounds fake) cry.]
T: [walks away crying, raises her arm slightly]
P: [flinches at the threat of another possible slap. Grabs the teacher's arm.]
T: [wails something intelligibly, possibly about gypsies]
[old batiked woman woman opens door of another classroom and says something about this having to stop]

N: The protagonists of this fight are a teacher and a police officer, and the scene is the school in Sanpaul from the county Mures. The two representatives of the state institutions started quarreling and exchanging slaps in front of cameras and in a place with children. (Oh noes, think of the children!!) The police officer had been called to settle a conflict in which the teacher was implicated, after several parents [cue scene of angry-looking parents in a wintry scene] from the town of Sanpaul had accused the teacher of being aggressive towards the other teaching staff. The angered professor also lunged at the reporter from Antena 3 (the channel broadcasting this). [Cue scene with teacher pushing jacketed and scarfed man]

Reporter: We have it on camera.
T: Good. (something intelligible) [Angrily] So I'll push you as he's pushing me!!

N: The parents of some children are unhappy that the teacher is violent in school.

[cue angry parents shouting angrily, not at aaaaaall angry like the teacher]

Woman in white, shouting: What kind of example is this for children, tell me!

[cut to head of police in the area]

Head: Madam teacher was here at the police precinct. She said that she was slapped by another teacher. She will go to the forensic expert and she will file a complaint.

N: The teacher is defending herself and maintains that she is the one who is being aggressed by her colleagues.

T: [very serene and nonchalant] It was about discrimination. I'm very sorry for the incident, but I didn't aggress any teacher. Everything was planned. (As in, this was done to make her look bad.)

N: The Education Minister has started an administrative inquisition in the case of the teacher, and sanctions can be as grave as excluding her from teaching. And as far as the police man who slapped her is concerned, authorities have declined to respond.


There's no question she's nuts. Whether the cop should've done what he is is the only debatable point, though he did stun her enough to get her to stop her crap without any kind of tasering or true physical force. In another vid, she gets called up by a TV show for an interview and basically denies hitting anyone even though it was caught on camera, and then starts yelling at the host for not letting her talk. That vid is here, but nothing to see since it's just a video of a phone call. Translation for it is a good read though, which is here.

>> ^bobknight33:
Science can not prove the creation of the universe/man but you would rather believe this theory but not the Bible. Both are taken on faith. One takes the supposition that a meteor with some type of bacteria traveled through the radiated universe hit the earth and managed to live through the impact and evolved into what we see all around us today.
The other is believing that some great all knowing power made everything is 7 days.
Both take a boatload of faith.
One thing is for sure is that we all have had or know of some event that is not of this world. We all heard of some event like the sister living 3000 miles away and felt the presence of her just died sister in the room before she was told of the event. We all know that something IS out there, we just cant see it.

First you say "There is a GOD Just look around you are surrounded by HIS creations." and then you say "We all know that something IS out there, we just cant see it." It only took you 2 comments to contradict yourself.


Science is the process with which we "see" what isn't so apparent to our limited senses and to understand our place in the universe and how we got here. We do this through experiment, data, hypotheses, and conclusions. How it differs from religion is that it's always progressing. As we learn more, we understand more. A faith-based world view is old, rigid and incongruent to what we know as possible, probable, and rational. If you believe the things that happened in the bible, then you don't have a firm grasp on reality and you're hiding from science and knowledge because it contests those things that we thought we knew thousands of years ago. I, for one, am glad I'm not reading the same texts of a man thousands of years ago as fact. It would be silly.

And what kind of statement is "There is a GOD Just look around you are surrounded by HIS creations" anyway? The argument isn't that there's things around us. The argument is whether it was created by a god. So just looking around doesn't do anything but make the inquisitive wonder and seek and make the laymen lazily "revel" in god's creation.

Let's say, for your sake of argument, that there is a being that created all that we experience. Let's say, too, that the being gives a damn about our journey. Why would he gift us with the ability to solve this puzzle of his creation, and not encourage us to use it? If we were created in its image, why then would it make us just to praise it from an ignorant standpoint and not from the understanding of its creation's intricacies and complexities? I'd say, if there were a god on a dimension we cannot comprehend, it'd appreciate the inquiring mind over the weak mind of one with blind-faith.

I'd like to shrink myself to a small size and ride the smooth parts of your brain like a water slide.

Diagnosing Benny Morris
The Mind of a European Settler
by Gabriel Ash


Israeli historian Benny Morris crossed a new line of shame when he put his academic credentials and respectability in the service of outlining the "moral" justification for a future genocide against Palestinians.

Benny Morris is the Israeli historian most responsible for the vindication of the Palestinian narrative of 1948. The lives of about 700,000 people were shattered as they were driven from their homes by the Jewish militia (and, later, the Israeli army) between December 1947 and early 1950. Morris went through Israeli archives and wrote the day by day account of this expulsion, documenting every "ethnically cleansed" village and every recorded act of violence, and placing each in the context of the military goals and perceptions of the cleansers.

Israel's apologists tried in vain to attack Morris' professional credibility. From the opposite direction, since he maintained that the expulsion was not "by design," he was also accused of drawing excessively narrow conclusions from the documents and of being too naive a reader of dissimulating statements. Despite these limitations, Morris' The Birth of the Palestinian Refugees Problem, 1947-1949 is an authoritative record of the expulsion.

In anticipation of the publication of the revised edition, Morris was interviewed in Ha'aretz. The major new findings in the revised book, based on fresh documents, further darken the picture.

The new archival material, Morris reveals, records routine execution of civilians, twenty-four massacres, including one in Jaffa, and at least twelve cases of rape by military units, which Morris acknowledges are probably "the tip of the iceberg." Morris also says he found documents confirming the broader conclusions favored by his critics: the expulsion was pre-meditated; concrete expulsion orders were given in writing, some traceable directly to Ben Gurion.

Morris also found documentations for Arab High Command calls for evacuating women and children from certain villages, evidence he oddly claims strengthen the Zionist propaganda claim that Palestinians left because they were told to leave by the invading Arab states. Morris had already documented two dozen such cases in the first edition. It is hard to see how attempts by Arab commanders to protect civilians from anticipated rape and murder strengthen the Zionist fairy tale. But that failed attempt at evenhandedness is the least of Morris' problems. As the interview progresses, it emerges with growing clarity that, while Morris the historian is a professional and cautious presenter of facts, Morris the intellectual is a very sick person.

His sickness is of the mental-political kind. He lives in a world populated not by fellow human beings, but by racist abstractions and stereotypes. There is an over-abundance of quasi-poetic images in the interview, as if the mind is haunted by the task of grasping what ails it: "The Palestinian citizens of Israel are a time bomb," not fellow citizens. Islam is "a world in which human lives don't have the same value as in the West." Arabs are "barbarians" at the gate of the Roman Empire. Palestinian society is "a serial killer" that ought to be executed, and "a wild animal" that must be caged.

Morris' disease was diagnosed over forty years ago, by Frantz Fanon. Based on his experience in subjugated Africa, Fanon observed that "the colonial world is a Manichean world. It is not enough for the settler to delimit physically, that is to say, with the help of the army and the police, the place of the native. As if to show the totalitarian character of colonial exploitation, the settler paints the native as a sort of quintessence of evil � The native is declared insensitive to ethics � the enemy of values. � He is a corrosive element, destroying all that comes near it � the unconscious and irretrievable instrument of blind forces" (from The Wretched of the Earth). And further down, "the terms the settler uses when he mentions the native are zoological terms" (let's not forget to place Morris' metaphors in the context of so many other Israeli appellations for Palestinians: Begin's "two-legged beasts", Eitan's "drugged cockroaches" and Barak's ultra-delicate "salmon"). Morris is a case history in the psychopathology of colonialism.

Bad Genocide, Good Genocide

When the settler encounters natives who refuse to cast down their eyes, his disease advances to the next stage -- murderous sociopathy.

Morris, who knows the exact scale of the terror unleashed against Palestinians in 1948, considers it justified. First he suggests that the terror was justified because the alternative would have been a genocide of Jews by Palestinians. Raising the idea of genocide in this context is pure, and cheap, hysteria. Indeed, Morris moves immediately to a more plausible explanation: the expulsion was a precondition for creating a Jewish state, i.e. the establishment of a specific political preference, not self-defense.

This political explanation, namely that the expulsion was necessary to create the demographic conditions, a large Jewish majority, favored by the Zionist leadership, is the consensus of historians. But as affirmative defense, it is unsatisfactory. So the idea that Jews were in danger of genocide is repeated later, in a more honest way, as merely another racist, baseless generalization: "if it can, [Islamic society] will commit genocide."

But Morris sees no evil. Accusing Ben Gurion of failing to achieve an Arabian Palestine, he recommends further ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, including those who are Israeli citizens. Not now, but soon, "within five or ten years," under "apocalyptic conditions" such as a regional war with unconventional weapons, a potentially nuclear war, which "is likely to happen within twenty years." For Morris, and it is difficult to overstate his madness at this point, the likelihood of a nuclear war within the foreseeable future is not the sorry end of a road better not taken, but merely a milestone, whose aftermath is still imaginable, and imaginable within the banal continuity of Zionist centennial policies: he foresees the exchange of unconventional missiles between Israel and unidentified regional states as a legitimate excuse for "finishing the job" of 1948.

Morris speaks explicitly of another expulsion, but, in groping for a moral apology for the past and the future expulsion of Palestinians, he presents a more general argument, one that justifies not only expulsion but also genocide. That statement ought to be repeated, for here is a crossing of a terrible and shameful line.

Morris, a respectable, Jewish, Israeli academic, is out in print in the respectable daily, Haaretz, justifying genocide as a legitimate tool of statecraft. It should be shocking. Yet anybody who interacts with American and Israeli Zionists knows that Morris is merely saying for the record what many think and even say unofficially. Morris, like most of Israel, lives in a temporality apart, an intellectual Galapagos Islands, a political Jurassic Park, where bizarre cousins of ideas elsewhere shamed into extinction still roam the mindscape proudly.

Nor should one think the slippage between expulsion, "transfer," and genocide without practical consequences. It is not difficult to imagine a planned expulsion turn into genocide under the stress of circumstances: The genocides of both European Jews and Armenians began as an expulsion. The expulsion of Palestinians in 1948 was the product of decades of thinking and imagining "transfer." We ought to pay attention: with Morris's statement, Zionist thinking crossed another threshold; what is now discussed has the potential to be actualized, if "apocalyptic conditions" materialize.

The march of civilization and the corpses of the uncivilized

It is instructive to look closer at the manner in which Morris uses racist thinking to justify genocide. Morris' interview, precisely because of its shamelessness, is a particularly good introductory text to Zionist thought.

Morris' racism isn't limited to Arabs. Genocide, according to Morris, is justified as long as it is done for "the final good." But what kind of good is worth the "forced extinction" of a whole people? Certainly, not the good of the latter. (Morris uses the word "Haqkhada," a Hebrew word usually associated with the extinction of animal species. Someone ought to inform Morris about the fact that Native Americans aren't extinct.)

According to Morris, the establishment of a more advanced society justifies genocide: "Yes, even the great American democracy couldn't come to be without the forced extinction of Native Americans. There are times the overall, final good justifies terrible, cruel deeds." Such hopeful comparisons between the future awaiting Palestinians and the fate of Native Americans are common to Israeli apologists. One delegation of American students was shocked and disgusted when it heard this analogy made by a spokesperson at the Israeli embassy in Washington.

Morris's supremacist view of "Western Civilization," that civilization values human life more than Islam, has its basis in the moral acceptance of genocide for the sake of "progress." Morris establishes the superiority of the West on both the universal respect for human life and the readiness to exterminate inferior races. The illogicalness of the cohabitation of a right to commit genocide together with a higher level of respect for human lives escapes him, and baffles us, at least until we grasp that the full weight of the concept of "human" is restricted, in the classic manner of Eurocentric racism, to dwellers of civilized (i.e. Western) nations.

This is the same logic that allowed early Zionists to describe Palestine as an empty land, despite the presence of a million inhabitants. In the end, it comes down to this: killing Arabs -- one dozen Arabs or one million Arabs, the difference is merely technical -- is acceptable if it is necessary in order to defend the political preferences of Jews because Jews belong to the superior West and Arabs are inferior. We must be thankful to Professor Morris for clarifying the core logic of Zionism so well.

The color of Jews

Morris assures us that his values are those of the civilized West, the values of universal morality, progress, etc. But then he also claims to hold the primacy of particular loyalties, a position for which he draws on Albert Camus. But to reconcile Morris' double loyalty to both Western universalism and to Jewish particularism, one must forget that these two identities were not always on the best of terms.

How can one explain Morris' knowledge that the ethnic Darwinism that was used to justify the murder of millions of non-whites, including Black African slaves, Native Americans, Arabs, and others, was also used to justify the attempt to exterminate Jews? How can Morris endorse the "civilizational" justification of genocide, which includes the genocide of Jews, even as he claims the holocaust as another justification for Zionism? Perhaps Morris' disjointed mind doesn't see the connection. Perhaps he thinks that there are "right" assertions of racist supremacy and "wrong" assertions of racist supremacy. Or perhaps Morris displays another facet of the psychopathologies of oppression, the victim's identification with the oppressor.

Perhaps in Morris' mind, one half tribalist and one half universalist, the Jews were murdered to make way for a superior, more purely Aryan, European civilization, and the Jews who are today serving in the Israeli army, both belong and do not belong to the same group. They belong when Morris invokes the totems of the tribe to justify loyalty. But when his attention turns to the universal principle of "superior civilization," these Jews are effaced, like poor relations one is ashamed to be associated with, sent back to the limbo they share with the great non-white mass of the dehumanized. In contrast, the Jews of Israel, self-identified as European, have turned white, dry-cleaned and bleached by Zionism, and with their whiteness they claim the privilege that Whites always had, the privilege to massacre members of "less advanced" races.

False testimony

It would be marvelous if Morris the historian could preserve his objective detachment while Morris the Zionist dances with the demons of Eurocentric racism. But the wall of professionalism -- and it is a very thick and impressive wall in Morris' case -- cannot hold against the torrent of hate.

For example, Morris lies about his understanding of the 2000 Camp David summit. In Ha'aretz, Morris says that, "when the Palestinians rejected Barak's proposal of July 2000 and Clinton's proposal of December 2000, I understood that they were not ready to accept a two state solution. They wanted everything. Lydda, and Akka and Jaffa."

But in his book Righteous Victims, Morris explains the failure of the negotiations thus: "the PLO leadership had gradually accepted, or seemed to�Israel...keeping 78 percent of historical Palestine. But the PLO wanted the remaining 22 percent. � At Camp David, Barak had endorsed the establishment of a Palestinian state�[on only] 84-90 percent of that 22 percent. � Israel was also to control the territory between a greatly enlarged Jerusalem and Jericho, effectively cutting the core of the future Palestinian state into two�" Morris' chapter of "Righteous Victims" that deals with the '90s leaves a lot to be desired, but it still strives for some detached analysis. In contrast, in Ha'aretz Morris offers baseless claims he knows to be false.

If Morris lies about recent history, and even grossly misrepresents the danger Jews faced in Palestine in 1948, a period he is an expert on, his treatment of more general historical matters is all but ridiculous, an astounding mix of insinuations and clich�s. For example, Morris reminds us that "the Arab nation won a big chunk of the Earth, not because of its intrinsic virtues and skills, but by conquering and murdering and forcing the conquered to convert." (What is Morris' point? Is the cleansing of Palestine attributable to Jewish virtues and skills, rather than to conquering and murdering?)

This is racist slander, not history. As an example, take Spain, which was conquered in essentially one battle in 711 A.D. by a small band of North African Berbers who had just converted to Islam. Spain was completely Islamized and Arabized within two centuries with very little religious coercion, and certainly no ethnic cleansing. But after the last Islamic rulers were kicked out of Spain by the Christian army of Ferdinand and Isabel in 1492, a large section of the very same Spanish population that willingly adopted Islam centuries earlier refused to accept Christianity despite a century of persecution by the Spanish Inquisition. 600,000 Spanish Muslims were eventually expelled in 1608.

Obviously, Islamic civilization had its share of war and violence. But, as the above example hints, compared to the West, compared to the religious killing frenzy of sixteenth century Europe, compared to the serial genocides in Africa and America, and finally to the flesh-churning wars of the twentieth century, Islamic civilization looks positively benign. So why all this hatred? Where is all this fire and brimstone Islamophobia coming from?

Being elsewhere

From Europe, of course, but with a twist. Europe has always looked upon the East with condescension. In periods of tension, that condescension would escalate to fear and hate. But it was also mixed and tempered with a large dose of fascination and curiosity. The settler, however, does not have the luxury to be curious. The settler leaves the metropolis hoping to overcome his own marginal, often oppressed, status in metropolitan society. He goes to the colony motivated by the desire to recreate the metropolis with himself at the top.

For the settler, going to the colony is not a rejection of the metropolis, but a way to claim his due as a member. Therefore, the settler is always trying to be more metropolitan than the metropolis. When the people of the metropolis baulk at the bloodbath the settler wants to usher in the name of their values, the settler accuses them of "growing soft," and declares himself "the true metropolis." That is also why there is one crime of which the settler can never forgive the land he colonized -- its alien climate and geography, its recalcitrant otherness, the oddness of its inhabitants, in sum, the harsh truth of its being elsewhere. In the consciousness of the settler, condescension thus turns into loathing.

Israeli settler society, especially its European, Ashkenazi part, especially that Israel which calls itself "the peace camp," "the Zionist Left," etc., is predicated on the loathing of all things Eastern and Arab. (Now, of course, we have in addition the religious, post-1967 settlers who relate to the Zionist Left the way the Zionist Left stands in relation to Europe, i.e. as settlers.) "Arab" is a term of abuse, one that can be applied to everything and everyone, including Jews. This loathing is a unifying theme. It connects Morris' latest interview in Ha'aretz with Ben Gurion's first impression of Jaffa in 1905; he found it filthy and depressing.

In another article, published in Tikkun Magazine, Morris blames the "ultra-nationalism, provincialism, fundamentalism and obscurantism" of Arab Jews in Israel for the sorry state of the country (although Begin, Shamir, Rabin, Peres, Netanyahu, Barak, Sharon, and most of Israel's generals, leaders, and opinion makers of the last two decades are European Jews). For Morris, everything Eastern is corrupt and every corruption has an Eastern origin.

One shouldn't, therefore, doubt Morris when he proclaims himself a traditional Left Zionist. There is hardly anything he says that hasn't been said already by David Ben Gurion or Moshe Dayan. Loathing of the East and the decision to subdue it by unlimited force is the essence of Zionism.

Understanding the psycho-political sources of this loathing leads to some interesting observations about truisms that recur in Morris' (and much of Israel's) discourse. Morris blames Arafat for thinking that Israel is a "crusader state," a foreign element that will eventually be sent back to its port of departure. This is a common refrain of Israeli propaganda. It is also probably true. But it isn't Arafat's fault that Morris is a foreigner in the Middle East. Why shouldn't Arafat believe Israel is a crusader state when Morris himself says so? "We are the vulnerable extension of Europe in this place, exactly as the crusaders."

It is Morris -- like the greater part of Israel's elite -- who insists on being a foreigner, on loathing the Middle East and dreaming about mist-covered Europe, purified and deified by distance. If Israel is a crusader state, and therefore a state with shallow roots, likely to pack up and disappear, it is not the fault of those who make that observation. It is the fault of those Israelis, like Morris, who want to have nothing to do with the Middle East.

Morris is deeply pessimistic about Israel's future; this feeling is very attractive in Israel. The end of Israel is always felt to be one step away, hiding beneath every development, from the birthrate of Bedouins to the establishment of the International Court of Justice.

Naturally, every Palestinian demand is such a doomsday threat. This sense of existential precariousness can be traced back to 1948; it was encouraged by Israel's successive governments because it justified the continuous violence of the state and the hegemony of the military complex. It may eventually become a self-fulfilling prophesy.

But this existential fear goes deeper. It is rooted in the repressed understanding (which Morris both articulates and tries to displace) of the inherent illegitimacy of the Israeli political system and identity. "Israel" is brute force. In Morris' words: "The bottom line is that force is the only thing that will make them accept us." But brute force is precarious. Time gnaws at it. Fatigue corrodes it. And the more it is used, the more it destroys the very acceptance and legitimacy it seeks.

For Israel, the fundamental question of the future is, therefore, whether Israelis can transcend colonialism. The prognosis is far from positive. In a related article in The Guardian, Morris explains that accepting the right of return of the Palestinian refugees would mean forcing Israeli Jews into exile. But why would Jews have to leave Israel if Israel becomes a bi-national, democratic state? One cannot understand this without attention to the colonial loathing of the Middle East which Morris so eloquently expresses.

But taking that into account, I'm afraid Morris is right. Many Israeli Jews, especially European Jews who tend to possess alternative passports, would rather emigrate than live on equal terms with Palestine's natives in a bi-national state. It is to Frantz Fanon again that we turn for observing this first. "The settler, from the moment the colonial context disappears, has no longer an interest in remaining or in co-existing."

Related Articles:

* The Education of Benny the Barbarian by Ahmed Amr
* Genocide Hides Behind Expulsion by Adi Ophir

Gabriel Ash was born in Romania and grew up in Israel. He is a regular contributor to Yellow Times.org, where this article first appeared (www.yellowtimes.org). Gabriel encourages your comments: gash@YellowTimes.org

Erm, he's not assigning his own meaning, it's the truth.

The local cane toads, when accosted by my dog, sit still and puff right up (as that toad in the video is) which get's their poison flowing, and will always keep their back facing the inquisitive dog so that the greatest surface area is exposed to the mouth. That is what they do when they are threatened, the logical extrapolation of that is they are scared.

From Google Video: For further research of the claims made in this video, AstroTheology & Shamanism: Thousands of years ago, in the pre monarchic era, sacred plants and other entheogenic substances highly respected for their ability to bring forth the divine, Yahweh, God, The Great Spirit, etc., by the many cultures who used them.

Often the entire tribe or community would partake in the entheogenic rites and rituals. These rites were often used an initiation into adulthood, for healing, to help guide the community in the decision process, and to bring the direct religious experience to anyone seeking it. In the pre literate world, the knowledge of psychedelic sacraments, as well as fertility rites and astronomical knowledge surrounding the sun, stars, and zodiac, known as astrotheology, were anthropomorphized into a character or a deity; consequently, their stories & practices could easily be passed down for generations. Weather changes over millennia caused environmental changes that altered the availability of foods and plant sacraments.

If a tribe lost its shamanic El-der (El - God), all of the tribe's knowledge of their plant sacraments as well as astronomical knowledge would be lost. The Church’s inquisitions extracted this sacred knowledge from the local Shamans, who were then exterminated.

>> ^kymbos:
That's why John Paul the Second... what?


"That's why John Paul the Second apologised for the Spanish Inquisition."

Eddie had been doing a bit about how it was meant to be more of a casual chat than an inquisition, but his mime for stretching someone on the rack was like grinding a barrel organ, which got him on to monkeys and then Charlton Heston, so the above line was him smoothly linking back to where he had left off.