Looking for God's Love in All the Wrong Places
Below please find Robert Fisk on Jimmy Carter's brave bold book about Palestine and the world of good done for sales by the strident attacks of the Jewish lobby. Incredibly, that lobby now has the chutzpah to pretend it doesn't exist or have any influence on the Media. Fisk reminds his readers that Israel was cosy with South Africa when It was an apartheid state--yet its defenders insist it is an insult to compare policies in Nearly digested Palestine with Afrikaner polices in south Africa. I guess it would also be an insult to remind Zionists of arms deals with South Africa.
I've been thinking the last few days that I should have kept my Ramadan fast going, if only to keep constant link and vigil with the victims of American foreign policy in iraq and Israeli domestic policy in occupied Palestine. I know that it's a meager symmetry to suppose or hope voluntary missed meals in Narberth, PA have any equivalence with imposed starvation in Gaza. But symbolic deprivation is, at the very least, an act of prayer and solidarity.
In a few hours I have been asked to read a song by my teacher Bawa Muhaiyaddeen about the seeming failure of God to hear the prayers of the trampled. Only a believer could make such a credible case for the understandable but misguided agony of atheism (with which I sympathize). I am ashamed to admit how many times I have sung this bleak song in recent days. But Faith is supposed to do more than falter.
Sometimes, I confess, I think my birth-people believe it is their right and duty to make the world cry out in abandonment as they cried out between 1941 and 1945. If you listen on the streets of Gaza or in the West Bank, you will hear the sounds of Kristalnachts most days and nights. In those places, it won't be a white or blue or green Christmas. It will be a red one.
God forgive every People of the Book from using those books to sow and reap bloodshed. God further forgive the peoples of the book for shielding themselves from culpability for the mayhem they make. Scripture, history has taught me, is a pretty mean street on which to seek and find the word of God. I am tired of religious gang wars. As alternative, I suggest we listen to the voice within (a/k/a "original Mind," "Buddha Nature," "Nur Muhammed," "inner light," etc.) that still takes dictation from the soul. The first time Muhammed heard that voice, he hid under a blanket and almost drowned in a cold sweat. Subsequent transmissions were more welcome.
In any case, that voice is one in condemning violence and vowing peace. That voice is the living scripture. This was the voice that Jesus Christ and Buddha heard speaking only and always in the mother tongue of love and compassion. "Resist not evil," that voice commands.
"When will I finally meet my teacher?" my teacher was asked. "When you stand naked and alone with God," he answered. I think he meant "in God," dissolving like a sugar cube in coffee or, to use one of his favorite analogies, splitting like a seed to become a tree. That's when the trinity of father, son and holy spirit are no more or no more than one and all.
Nevertheless, to be honest, there will be days and nights when I accuse God of deserting humanity. It is that song sung by a man who never doubted God in all the time I knew him that I shall be honored to read this morning. It is the same song Christ quoted on the cross when he sobbed, "Father, why hast Thou forsaken me?" Like my teacher, he sang it for us and not himself.
Islam has a saint like Christ. His name was El Hilaj, condemned to death, as Christ was, for repeatedly proclaiming, "I am the way." Sentenced to be blinded, deafened, silenced, then drawn and quartered, the community took turns in throwing clods of dirt at him to signify personal assent to this terrible punishment. Like Peter denying Chirst, El Hilaj's own teacher took part in this ritual of repudiation. When he threw his clump of dirt at El Hilaj, his student groaned so deeply they say the earth shook. "Why did you groan like that?" the conscience-sticken teacher asked. El Hilaj answered, "They know not what they do, but you do."
It is not foolish or farfetched to see blazing similarities in the lives of Jesus and El Hilaj. But once we do, we who claim to follow these teachers and their teaching must make comparison with the teachers and disciples whose ignorance ensures Calvary. I'll remember Peter as much as Christ when I recite my teacher's words today. I'll remember guru and disciple and vow once again to watch with him in the garden as asked each time I fall asleep--and he awakens me.
Banality and Barefaced Lies
Here in America, I stare at the land in which I live and see a landscape I do not recognise
By Robert Fisk12/23/06 "The Independent" --
-- I call it the Alice in Wonderland effect. Each time I tour the United States, I stare through the looking glass at the faraway region in which I live and work for The Independent - the Middle East - and see a landscape which I do no recognise, a distant tragedy turned, here in America, into a farce of hypocrisy and banality and barefaced lies. Am I the Cheshire Cat? Or the Mad Hatter?
I picked up Jimmy Carter's new book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid at San Francisco airport, and zipped through it in a day. It's a good, strong read by the only American president approaching sainthood. Carter lists the outrageous treatment meted out to the Palestinians, the Israeli occupation, the dispossession of Palestinian land by Israel, the brutality visited upon this denuded, subject population, and what he calls "a system of apartheid, with two peoples occupying the same land but completely separated from each other, with Israelis totally dominant and suppressing violence by depriving Palestinians of their basic human rights".
Carter quotes an Israeli as saying he is "afraid that we are moving towards a government like that of South Africa, with a dual society of Jewish rulers and Arabs subjects with few rights of citizenship...". A proposed but unacceptable modification of this choice, Carter adds, "is the taking of substantial portions of the occupied territory, with the remaining Palestinians completely surrounded by walls, fences, and Israeli checkpoints, living as prisoners within the small portion of land left to them".
Needless to say, the American press and television largely ignored the appearance of this eminently sensible book - until the usual Israeli lobbyists began to scream abuse at poor old Jimmy Carter, albeit that he was the architect of the longest lasting peace treaty between Israel and an Arab neighbour - Egypt - secured with the famous 1978 Camp David accords. The New York Times ("All the News That's Fit to Print", ho! ho!) then felt free to tell its readers that Carter had stirred "furore among Jews" with his use of the word "apartheid". The ex-president replied by mildly (and rightly) pointing out that Israeli lobbyists had produced among US editorial boards a "reluctance to criticise the Israeli government".
Typical of the dirt thrown at Carter was the comment by Michael Kinsley in The New York Times (of course) that Carter "is comparing Israel to the former white racist government of South Africa". This was followed by a vicious statement from Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League, who said that the reason Carter gave for writing this book "is this shameless, shameful canard that the Jews control the debate in this country, especially when it comes to the media. What makes this serious is that he's not just another pundit, and he's not just another analyst. He is a former president of the United States".
But well, yes, that's the point, isn't it? This is no tract by a Harvard professor on the power of the lobby. It's an honourable, honest account by a friend of Israel as well as the Arabs who just happens to be a fine American ex-statesman. Which is why Carter's book is now a best-seller - and applause here, by the way, for the great American public that bought the book instead of believing Mr Foxman.
But in this context, why, I wonder, didn't The New York Times and the other gutless mainstream newspapers in the United States mention Israel's cosy relationship with that very racist apartheid regime in South Africa which Carter is not supposed to mention in his b ook? Didn't Israel have a wealthy diamond trade with sanctioned, racist South Africa? Didn't Israel have a fruitful and deep military relationship with that racist regime? Am I dreaming, looking-glass-like, when I recall that in April of 1976, Prime Minister John Vorster of South Africa - one of the architects of this vile Nazi-like system of apartheid - paid a state visit to Israel and was honoured with an official reception from Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin, war hero Moshe Dayan and future Nobel prize-winner Yitzhak Rabin? This of course, certainly did not become part of the great American debate on Carter's book.
At Detroit airport, I picked up an even slimmer volume, the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group Report - which doesn't really study Iraq at all but offers a few bleak ways in which George Bush can run away from this disaster without too much blood on his shirt. After chatting to the Iraqis in the green zone of Baghdad - dream zone would be a more accurate ti tle - there are a few worthy suggestions (already predictably rejected by the Israelis): a resumption of serious Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, an Israeli withdrawal from Golan, etc. But it's written in the same tired semantics of right-wing think tanks - the language, in fact, of the discredited Brookings Institution and of my old mate, the messianic New York Times columnist Tom Friedman - full of "porous" borders and admonitions that "time is running out".
The clue to all this nonsense, I discovered, comes at the back of the report where it lists the "experts" consulted by Messrs Baker, Hamilton and the rest. Many of them are pillars of the Brookings Institution and there is Thomas Freidman of The New York Times.
But for sheer folly, it was impossible to beat the post-Baker debate among the great and the good who dragged the United States into this catastrophe. General Peter Pace, the extremely odd chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, said of the American war in Iraq that "we are not winning, but we are not losing". Bush's new defence secretary, Robert Gates, announced that he "agreed with General Pace that we are not winning, but we are not losing". Baker himself jumped into the same nonsense pool by asserting: "I don't think you can say we're losing. By the same token (sic), I'm not sure we're winning." At which point, Bush proclaimed this week that - yes - "we're not winning, we're not losing". Pity about the Iraqis.
I pondered this madness during a bout of severe turbulence at 37,000 feet over Colorado. And that's when it hit me, the whole final score in this unique round of the Iraq war between the United States of America and the forces of evil. It's a draw!
© 2006 Independent News and Media Limited
I've been thinking the last few days that I should have kept my Ramadan fast going, if only to keep constant link and vigil with the victims of American foreign policy in iraq and Israeli domestic policy in occupied Palestine. I know that it's a meager symmetry to suppose or hope voluntary missed meals in Narberth, PA have any equivalence with imposed starvation in Gaza. But symbolic deprivation is, at the very least, an act of prayer and solidarity.
In a few hours I have been asked to read a song by my teacher Bawa Muhaiyaddeen about the seeming failure of God to hear the prayers of the trampled. Only a believer could make such a credible case for the understandable but misguided agony of atheism (with which I sympathize). I am ashamed to admit how many times I have sung this bleak song in recent days. But Faith is supposed to do more than falter.
Sometimes, I confess, I think my birth-people believe it is their right and duty to make the world cry out in abandonment as they cried out between 1941 and 1945. If you listen on the streets of Gaza or in the West Bank, you will hear the sounds of Kristalnachts most days and nights. In those places, it won't be a white or blue or green Christmas. It will be a red one.
God forgive every People of the Book from using those books to sow and reap bloodshed. God further forgive the peoples of the book for shielding themselves from culpability for the mayhem they make. Scripture, history has taught me, is a pretty mean street on which to seek and find the word of God. I am tired of religious gang wars. As alternative, I suggest we listen to the voice within (a/k/a "original Mind," "Buddha Nature," "Nur Muhammed," "inner light," etc.) that still takes dictation from the soul. The first time Muhammed heard that voice, he hid under a blanket and almost drowned in a cold sweat. Subsequent transmissions were more welcome.
In any case, that voice is one in condemning violence and vowing peace. That voice is the living scripture. This was the voice that Jesus Christ and Buddha heard speaking only and always in the mother tongue of love and compassion. "Resist not evil," that voice commands.
"When will I finally meet my teacher?" my teacher was asked. "When you stand naked and alone with God," he answered. I think he meant "in God," dissolving like a sugar cube in coffee or, to use one of his favorite analogies, splitting like a seed to become a tree. That's when the trinity of father, son and holy spirit are no more or no more than one and all.
Nevertheless, to be honest, there will be days and nights when I accuse God of deserting humanity. It is that song sung by a man who never doubted God in all the time I knew him that I shall be honored to read this morning. It is the same song Christ quoted on the cross when he sobbed, "Father, why hast Thou forsaken me?" Like my teacher, he sang it for us and not himself.
Islam has a saint like Christ. His name was El Hilaj, condemned to death, as Christ was, for repeatedly proclaiming, "I am the way." Sentenced to be blinded, deafened, silenced, then drawn and quartered, the community took turns in throwing clods of dirt at him to signify personal assent to this terrible punishment. Like Peter denying Chirst, El Hilaj's own teacher took part in this ritual of repudiation. When he threw his clump of dirt at El Hilaj, his student groaned so deeply they say the earth shook. "Why did you groan like that?" the conscience-sticken teacher asked. El Hilaj answered, "They know not what they do, but you do."
It is not foolish or farfetched to see blazing similarities in the lives of Jesus and El Hilaj. But once we do, we who claim to follow these teachers and their teaching must make comparison with the teachers and disciples whose ignorance ensures Calvary. I'll remember Peter as much as Christ when I recite my teacher's words today. I'll remember guru and disciple and vow once again to watch with him in the garden as asked each time I fall asleep--and he awakens me.
Banality and Barefaced Lies
Here in America, I stare at the land in which I live and see a landscape I do not recognise
By Robert Fisk12/23/06 "The Independent" --
-- I call it the Alice in Wonderland effect. Each time I tour the United States, I stare through the looking glass at the faraway region in which I live and work for The Independent - the Middle East - and see a landscape which I do no recognise, a distant tragedy turned, here in America, into a farce of hypocrisy and banality and barefaced lies. Am I the Cheshire Cat? Or the Mad Hatter?
I picked up Jimmy Carter's new book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid at San Francisco airport, and zipped through it in a day. It's a good, strong read by the only American president approaching sainthood. Carter lists the outrageous treatment meted out to the Palestinians, the Israeli occupation, the dispossession of Palestinian land by Israel, the brutality visited upon this denuded, subject population, and what he calls "a system of apartheid, with two peoples occupying the same land but completely separated from each other, with Israelis totally dominant and suppressing violence by depriving Palestinians of their basic human rights".
Carter quotes an Israeli as saying he is "afraid that we are moving towards a government like that of South Africa, with a dual society of Jewish rulers and Arabs subjects with few rights of citizenship...". A proposed but unacceptable modification of this choice, Carter adds, "is the taking of substantial portions of the occupied territory, with the remaining Palestinians completely surrounded by walls, fences, and Israeli checkpoints, living as prisoners within the small portion of land left to them".
Needless to say, the American press and television largely ignored the appearance of this eminently sensible book - until the usual Israeli lobbyists began to scream abuse at poor old Jimmy Carter, albeit that he was the architect of the longest lasting peace treaty between Israel and an Arab neighbour - Egypt - secured with the famous 1978 Camp David accords. The New York Times ("All the News That's Fit to Print", ho! ho!) then felt free to tell its readers that Carter had stirred "furore among Jews" with his use of the word "apartheid". The ex-president replied by mildly (and rightly) pointing out that Israeli lobbyists had produced among US editorial boards a "reluctance to criticise the Israeli government".
Typical of the dirt thrown at Carter was the comment by Michael Kinsley in The New York Times (of course) that Carter "is comparing Israel to the former white racist government of South Africa". This was followed by a vicious statement from Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League, who said that the reason Carter gave for writing this book "is this shameless, shameful canard that the Jews control the debate in this country, especially when it comes to the media. What makes this serious is that he's not just another pundit, and he's not just another analyst. He is a former president of the United States".
But well, yes, that's the point, isn't it? This is no tract by a Harvard professor on the power of the lobby. It's an honourable, honest account by a friend of Israel as well as the Arabs who just happens to be a fine American ex-statesman. Which is why Carter's book is now a best-seller - and applause here, by the way, for the great American public that bought the book instead of believing Mr Foxman.
But in this context, why, I wonder, didn't The New York Times and the other gutless mainstream newspapers in the United States mention Israel's cosy relationship with that very racist apartheid regime in South Africa which Carter is not supposed to mention in his b ook? Didn't Israel have a wealthy diamond trade with sanctioned, racist South Africa? Didn't Israel have a fruitful and deep military relationship with that racist regime? Am I dreaming, looking-glass-like, when I recall that in April of 1976, Prime Minister John Vorster of South Africa - one of the architects of this vile Nazi-like system of apartheid - paid a state visit to Israel and was honoured with an official reception from Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin, war hero Moshe Dayan and future Nobel prize-winner Yitzhak Rabin? This of course, certainly did not become part of the great American debate on Carter's book.
At Detroit airport, I picked up an even slimmer volume, the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group Report - which doesn't really study Iraq at all but offers a few bleak ways in which George Bush can run away from this disaster without too much blood on his shirt. After chatting to the Iraqis in the green zone of Baghdad - dream zone would be a more accurate ti tle - there are a few worthy suggestions (already predictably rejected by the Israelis): a resumption of serious Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, an Israeli withdrawal from Golan, etc. But it's written in the same tired semantics of right-wing think tanks - the language, in fact, of the discredited Brookings Institution and of my old mate, the messianic New York Times columnist Tom Friedman - full of "porous" borders and admonitions that "time is running out".
The clue to all this nonsense, I discovered, comes at the back of the report where it lists the "experts" consulted by Messrs Baker, Hamilton and the rest. Many of them are pillars of the Brookings Institution and there is Thomas Freidman of The New York Times.
But for sheer folly, it was impossible to beat the post-Baker debate among the great and the good who dragged the United States into this catastrophe. General Peter Pace, the extremely odd chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, said of the American war in Iraq that "we are not winning, but we are not losing". Bush's new defence secretary, Robert Gates, announced that he "agreed with General Pace that we are not winning, but we are not losing". Baker himself jumped into the same nonsense pool by asserting: "I don't think you can say we're losing. By the same token (sic), I'm not sure we're winning." At which point, Bush proclaimed this week that - yes - "we're not winning, we're not losing". Pity about the Iraqis.
I pondered this madness during a bout of severe turbulence at 37,000 feet over Colorado. And that's when it hit me, the whole final score in this unique round of the Iraq war between the United States of America and the forces of evil. It's a draw!
© 2006 Independent News and Media Limited
posted by David Federman @ 12:18 AM
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