18 Tuesday Mar 2014
I believe anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism are anti-human and not compatible with freedom – anyone’s freedom: a note to those who would mean to indulge in the dumb refuge of the former while desperately in want of the latter.
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13 Thursday Mar 2014
When I was in France about 4 years we found a man who was severely beaten in nearby park at 8 am. There was a police station nearby and we went there to get him help. Speaking in French, I told the policeman about the man, his injuries and where to find him. He stared bankly at me. I started to repeat it again. He stopped me and said I understand you, I just don’t know what you want me to do about it and told me to go away. They have lost their humanity.
Artist Michelle Vezina Peterlin responding to a report about a Jewish girl beaten in a suburb of Lyon, France when she was seen wearing on a necklace a Star of David.
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06 Thursday Mar 2014
Tags
conscience, consciousness, culture, empathy, language, philology, political, politics, Revolution, social values
Empathy with an emphasis on compassion, and here with that as related to casualties and displaced from Syria’s agonizing civil war, signals something good in the general humanity, but it’s not going to be enough to promote band-aids when the war is sustained on the absence of an armed force of a middle and perhaps now modern temperament.
It’s notable also that Russia pledged $10 million to refugee relief in Syria while spending $52 billion, the largest amount ever, for the winter Olympics at Sochi.
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My partner in the short conversation then said, “Humanity in the true sense has lost all its values.”
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Not really although it sometimes seems to. We’re a wild species suspended in about, oh, 6,900 living languages, each of which represents a cultural invention and technology and conveys from one generation to the next a behavioral program fit to the character of the language community in a given circumstance in place and time.
I believe the variance in that language-driven and language-derived behavior shapes consciousness and conscience and with regard to empathy, may emphasize the cultivation of that ability to meld emotion and imagination on behalf of someone else, or it may harden the heart against the same.
Other qualities may obtain similar support and the tapestry of whole cultures, whether that of, say, a living sun king or that of a god remote and separate from the mortal, becomes made of such threads. With the aforementioned 6,900 differences in cultural cognitive style wrapped in language, it’s amazing we don’t have more conflict on our plates than we do, but, ever optimistic here, if we drift toward a moderate middle together, we can clean up and forestall a lot of this kind of mess.
The modern dictator’s values — any side (one chessboard – same player on both sides, lol) — build on heroic myth to develop power over others for the purpose of obtaining continuous and inexhaustible “narcissistic supply” — the adoration and adulation of the realm: and they often sail themselves and their own to disaster on the wings of a grandiose messianic delusion.
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The inspiration for the above portion of threaded conversation appears to be a contrivance but quite pointed:
Most Shocking Second a Day Video – YouTube – 3/5/2014 – by Save the ChildrenUK.
Posted yesterday, it has already achieved 5.5 million views. The venue in which I first saw it: In These 93 Seconds, You Will See How War Can Turn a Child’s World Upside Down — Independent Journal Review (IJR) – 3/6/2014 (four hours ago, and on that site it has picked up 432 shares and 4,309 views).
The best way to save the children is, alas, to save the adults, get enough on to about the same page in their attitudes, ethics, ideals, and values with regard to others, and then get them to challenge, eject, or evolve the kind of deeply narcissistic and lost personalities who have attempted to paint reality for others through what they do in the pursuit of war.
Of the Assad regime and the al-Nusra et al. counterpoints, I’ve remarked “different talk: same walk”: each will use the lives of noncombatants for political chips. Perhaps nowhere in the whole sorry tragedy has that been made more clear than in the approach of each side to the Palestinian Yarmouk Camp, where one side laid siege as part became a rebel base, and the rebels, true to form, used the helpless and unarmed residents as their own human shields.
Is there anyone reading this post that might want to see that obscenity again?
Attitudes and beliefs, including beliefs about Jews, about loyalty, about the west, about the Baath Party and the Soviet Union (or its ghost from 22 years ago) play a role in impeding the development of an effective and true Syrian people’s army. Moreover, but along similar lines, the three sides — Assad; more secular revolutionary forces; and, of course, the al-Qaeda types — have found themselves trapped in the immense shadows cast by the glorious wars of yesteryear, which for each is different: Bashar al-Assad has been trying to fight his father’s war, an armed insurrection against the state; the battles in mind, perhaps literally, for the al-Qaeda affiliates need little introduction and would seem to be expressed in battlefield and political behavior; and the moderates who seem to be carrying around the load of combined internationalist and Islamist hate for Israel, Jews, and “The West” just haven’t found their way to daylight.
I don’t know where to change that “Jew hate” that signals so much else about the three parties sewing Syria with destruction, and I’m not sure it’s my job alone to locate those cognitive switches in the languages alive on the fields of battle, but finding that would be a good place to start.
Syrians needs Syria — I know of no culture free of a relationship with its land and landscape — and they need to own it for themselves in peace.
To obtain that ownership and peace, the defense Syrians may need most of all, the defense most absent in the three years of continuous and brutal fighting, is not defense from Israel, which is treating Syrian wounded today, but defense from those among themselves who would seek their own excessive aggrandizement at the costs now well displayed in death, displacement, and suffering.
Related: If Britain were Syria: charity releases ‘brutally powerful’ ad – Al Arabiya News – 3/5/2014.
Related (updated 3/18/2014) from The Torah, Exodus 31-32:
31The LORD did as Moses asked, and removed the swarms of insects from Pharaoh, from his servants and from his people; not one remained. 32But Pharaoh hardened his heart this time also, and he did not let the people go.
Exodus 8:32 But this time also Pharaoh hardened his heart and would not let the people go.
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02 Sunday Mar 2014
In my last note, I’ve mentioned one of the “hate-peace peace groups” that might serve as a gateway to so many others. If you want chit-chat with Greta Berlin, one of the organizers of the Gaza Flotilla, she’s around; if with my generally conservative buddies. they’re in the mix too; if a whole other set, we might get it. “Humanism” — shall I refer to Felix Adler and “Ethical Culture” — provides a common thread across religious and state boundaries; however, it would support, if we’re really going to be good about this, cultural polyphony. The Roma should not be so abused! Nor the Jews. Nor the Rohingya of Burma. Wahhabi imperialism, Islamic expansionism — especially as the “Islamists” would have it, resurgent nationalisms (which has Hungarian Jobbik relating to Iranian roots, for pete’s sake), ensure we’re going to be in trouble for a while. Even so, we may pay more attention to autonomy, degrees of freedom, human dignity, human rights, and qualities of living — physical, psychological, and spiritual, across our 6,900 or so language cultures and adjust for co-evolution.
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I’m not the only one who tires of addressing, confronting, and arguing the issues (and the facts) of the “middle east conflict” (i.e., that would be the one involving The Jews, as the others, I suppose, want for less attention).
Felix Adler (professor) – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
I caught my second wind 🙂 in the 1980s with my “discovery” of Abraham Maslow while working on a Masters in “Outdoor Recreation Resources Management”. Perhaps for this venue, Maslow’s suggestion that if one is to pursue greater health (with actualization), one ought to study healthy people as much as those beset by pathology.
The radical Jews — whoever gathered in the desert more than 5,000 years ago — produced a religion in which one God had dominion over all and no man — not even Moses, not even Abraham — was like Him.
God, from the Jewish beginning, was “Master of the Universe”.
Many, by comparison, could barely master his own emotions.
Anti-deification and conflation with God characterizes a Jewish approach to scripture, every passage of which enjoys close reading and vigorous ethical and moral argument. Even “The Akedah” splits between the (option one) promotion of obedience and (option two) the call to speak back to God, which we today we refer to as “speaking truth to power.”
Jewish, Christian, Islamic humanism, social humanism, atheist humanism, secular humanism, etc. all suggest that while God has plans, we are none of us God, and if we wish to live in peace, a common peace, a peace for the democratic (small “D”) man, a peace for the Pacific Islander as well as the Iraqi, we’re going to have to help one another and, perhaps, quiet some of the egotism and noise, most ambitious and inventive, coursing through our minds, the gift of languages invented to cope with survival in bounded systems.
I can never too highly recommend reading Daniel Everett’s Don’t Sleep, There are Snakes or this thoughts in Language: The Cultural Tool.
We’re a wild species, but our war technologies have exceeded many natural limitations, and they really can destroy humankind, while our advanced technologies have become comparatively fragile, “glass” plates beneath a blazing sun converting light to electricity.
We have a way to go, but, whatever we do, we’re going to go there together — and we’re not going to outwit God, nature, or the universe along the way.
Linguistic Society of America | Advancing the Scientific Study of Language
World Council of Anthropological Associations – WCAA
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02 Sunday Mar 2014
Tags
anti-Semitism, anti-Zionism, BDS, bigotry, epistemology, Israel, political, political psychology, politics, propaganda, rhetoric
“Arabs were made to pay for the crimes of the Europeans by the creation of Israel.”
I know that is what has been heard and the fiction constructed around it total, but Zionism predates WWII, and thousands of Arabs were drawn before it to the agricultural fields of the nascent Jewish state.
If you believe statehood in the name of religion must go, then Rome must go, as must Pakistan, Saudi Arabia — well, actually all Islamic kingdoms and dictatorships — as the same have become “real headaches for the entire civilized world, completely engulfed in injustice and violence.”
The only “inescapable issue” in the reconstruction that is the modern State of Israel is the 5,000+ year existence of Jews and Jewish culture — beliefs, calendar, customs, language, religion — on the land and continuously. Ancient Israel, the Roman “Palestine”, and modern Israel have never been “Judenrein” (as some might wish).
Jews don’t “deserve a homeland” — Jews have a homeland.
Regarding terrorism, have a look independently into war and low-intensity conflict across 2,000 years.
Regarding genocide, let’s keep these two buddies in mind: http://www.tellthechildrenthetruth.com/…/2-mufti2_jpg… (Hussaini-Hitler handshake).
Also, you may want to look into how Ben Gurion crushed the terrorist Irgun at the earliest opportunity.
Your emphasis tells where you want to go (anti-Semitic / anti- Ziionist, actually, anti-justice) but the deeply poisonous programming and scripting that got you there has to this hour stayed out of the picture.
I beg you for patient new introspection and scholarship, for fresh ears and eyes, for skepticism in regard to a destructive loyalty.
I ask no less of myself and do read, say, Ma’an and look into issues having to do with the refugees of 1948 and their humanity, which one may believe better than that of their leaders who build and disseminate libels for a living.
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The response was to a writer in India who ran through the common anti-Semites screen, from declaring the State of Israel a colonial project directly and only corresponding to the destruction of the Jews of Europe in the Holocaust of World War II to suggesting the entire state should have been constructed elsewhere.
What a load of fictional crapola one wakes to if participating the “middle east conflict”, which has weirdly become the signifier for Israel’s conflict with the Arab world while the same Arab world melts down in conflicts within its portion of the Islamic Small Wars (e.g., signaled by political violence in Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Yemen, Syria).
Nowhere is the “Religion of Peace”, nor the states founded on it, at peace, and not even within themselves, the Muslim Brotherhood gangs ever threatening established state power, the same state power incompletely in control of powerful families willing to back al-Qaeda and its affiliates and likenesses.
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02 Sunday Mar 2014
Tags
anti-Semitism, book review, books, Debenedetti, fascism, Holocaust, Islamism, Nazism, racism
For more than fifty years, Giacomo Debenedetti’s October 16, 1943 has been considered one of the best and most accurate accounts of the shockingly brief and efficient roundup of more than one thousand Roman Jews from the oldest Jewish community in Europe for the gas chambers of Auschwitz.
October 16, 1943/Eight Jews // Books // University of Notre Dame Press
October 16, 1943: Eight Jews: Giacomo Debenedetti, Estelle Gilson: 9780268037130: Amazon.com: Books
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The earliest documentary evidence relating to Jews in Rome is Valerius Maximus’ Factorum ac Dictorum Memorabilium stating that the Praetor Gnaeus Cornelius Hispanus expelled the Chaldaeans, astrologers, and some Jews from Rome in 139 B.C. In 63 B.C. Pompey conquered Jerusalem and brought an unknown number of Jewish prisoners of war to Rome. Trastevere was the chief Jewish quarter: (STET)
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There is a brighter side to the story of the Holocaust in Rome though. The Nazis arrested only 1,259 Jews in the October 16 raid. In the following months, they were able to arrest only a few hundred more, even after offering cash rewards. The total number of Roman Jews exterminated was approximately 1,970.20 Over eighty percent of the Roman Jews survived the Holocaust. None were killed before the German occupation. The total number of Italian Jews known to have been killed during the Holocaust is 7,922 out of approximately 40,000. Again, over eighty percent survived.
The Holocaust in Rome: 1943-1944 | REPUBLK – 10/23/2012.
There was no “brighter side to the story” — what if only “1,259” (and “1,970.20” is not an approximation) persons had included your family, friends, associates?
The perhaps inherent youth factor implicit in Daniel T. Murphy’s Masters thesis (1993) may fit with how the Jews of Rome on October 16, 1943 were rounded up by lists developed in accord with Italian racial laws enforced under the fascist government preceding the interim government of Prime Minister Pietro Badoglio, who in his flight from imminent German army occupation would leave the same intact — “Badoglio’s bureaucrats refused to destroy their many lists of Jewish names and addresses” says historian Susan Zuccotti as quoted by translator Estelle Gilson, translator of Debenedetti’s book — for their Nazi successors.
Enriching the experience of reading Giacomo Debenedetti’s gem in Holocaust lore are Estelle Gilson’s introduction plus an end-note, “The Fate of the Roman Jewish Libraries”, and an historic preface by Alberto Moravia.
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Contrary to general opinion, Jews are not distrustful by nature. Or to put it more clearly, they are distrustful in the same degree that they are perceptive about small matters, but credulous and disastrously ingenuous when it comes to large ones. In regard to the Germans, they were ingenuous, almost ostentatiously so. There are several possible reasons for this. Convinced by centuries of experience that it is their fate to be treated like dogs, Jews have a desperate need for human sympathy; and to solicit it, they offer it. To trust people, to rely on them, to believe in their promises, is precisely such a proof of sympathy. Will they behave this way with the Germans? Yes, unfortunately. With the Germans there would also come into play the classic Jewish attitude toward authority. Even before the first fall of Jerusalem, authority has exercised absolute, arbitrary, and inscrutable power of life and death over Jews. This has operated in such a way that both in their conscious and unconscious minds authority has assumed the form of an exclusive, jealous, and omnipresent God. To distrust His promises, whether good or bad, is to fall into sin for which sooner or later one will have to pay, even if that sin remains unexpressed, and is only an intention, or a mumbled complaint. And finally, the fundamental idea of Judaism is justice. The mission of the Jews was to bring this idea to Eastern civilization. Renan makes this expressly the theme of his interpretation of the entire history of Israel, including the great eschatological statements, including the Messianic wait, and the promise that on that Day of the Lord, tomorrow or who knows when, He will light His dawn at the height of the millennia precisely to bring back the reign of justice upon this earth.
For these reasons, Rome’s Jews had a certain kind of faith in the Germans . . . .
So sad, so tragic, so horrifying a story as Debenedetti tells continues today in the anti-Semitic / anti-Zionist rants and machinations of political movements as diverse as Arab Baathism and resurgent eastern European nationalism.
Enlarged in scope, the same immense black cloud descends on the Christian west, on the Christian communities of the middle east under assault today by the forces funded along the Muslims Brotherhood and Wahhabi fronts with their black flags flying where once stood crosses, and on Muslim communities worldwide as a red death explodes in unpredictable but numerous roadside and suicide bombings, assassinations, and countless beheading.
Before the onslaughts of al-Qaeda and Company, who is not a Jew?
This blogger, having read this extraordinary book, October 16, 1943 / Eight Jews, is to return to the news of similar persecutions taking place right now worldwide.
incunabula (printing) — Encyclopedia Britannica
Pietro Badoglio – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Italian Racial Laws – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Ernest Renan – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Susan Zuccotti – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Giacomo Debenedetti – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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26 Wednesday Feb 2014
Tags
conflict, Islam, Islamic Small Wars, language, philology, political, politics, programming, scripting, tribalism
Here’s an interesting divide: do we choose the security of a loyal untruth over the presence of a disloyal but uncomfortable truth?
As you know, because you have read “Shimmer”, I track Pamela Geller as a friend (friendly) but not as the final word on Islam: I know and love too many “Islamic Humanists”, Muslim Americans living with all Americans no differently than Christian Americans or Jewish Americans or Sikh Americans or Hindu Americans (the list of religious affiliations and differentiation in America gets quite long). I enjoy the effort of Irshad Manji and and Mudar Zahran and others to know the location of their hearts and ethics and find it in their lives as Muslims.
The American anti-Jihad and counter-terrorism and related communities — not to mention the consultant-watchers of NSA and other organizations about — is fairly extensive and scholarly in their reading (I haven’t friend Robert Spencer) in their reading of Qur’an and Hadith in something like the manner in which those elements are interpreted by terrorists who are Muslim and who carry out their crimes with what they believe accords injunction found in the Qur’an.
Geller rakes muck, perhaps doesn’t follow up as meticulously as she should, and she writes with interest, so we may frame her in the “special interest” press, not far off the Coptic press, the Catholic one, the Jewish one, or, alas, the jihad ones with the black flags. Nonetheless, and having looked, I must accept Jeremy D. Mayer’s criticism, she’s on a right track IF we’re chatyping about al-Qaeda, al-Shabaab, Boko Haram, the Muslim Brotherhood as exemplified in the policies and practices demonstrated so swiftly by former Egyptian President Morsi, etc. She asks — as Sinem Tezyapar might ask — what kind of human, what kind of Muslim, troops into Mumbai, for example, and commits the atrocities committed there? Were those humans Muslims or not? New York – London – Madrid: same question. Westgate Shopping Mall, Nairobi, Kenya: Muslim? Not Muslim? Something else?
Here’s where I differ some from Pamela Geller: I’m willing to recognize the humanity in my humanist, reformation, trying hard Muslim friends because they recognize humanity in me, a Jew, a Zionist, and have in their deeds and in their words both goodness and integrity.
It’s that last word that the fighting — all of it, from the Gaza Strip to to whatever’s going on today in Iraq — is all about.
Is it permissible to deceive the infidel? Or not? In the name of Islam?
There’s a lot of money tied up in conflict, and not all of it — probably little of it — goes into fighting. It goes into extraordinary self-aggrandizement (count the number of Saddam’s palaces – and we rue the day we did business that way: that’s an era that has passed, God willing). It goes into “skimmers” who use their political power to dip their hands into the state’s wealth, or leverage it (Putin-Assad-Khamenei could not be more different in their talk, but for the character of their person, they are the same person, until one, and only one has the power today, turns around).
So what manner of Muslim these days – “Carlos” solidarity, OBL base, out into the universe with Rumi (I like him), tenuously holding on to balance like Musharraf, promoting the whole program like Zia Haq? This is hard stuff. The Jews, for the most part, are arranged differently: we don’t take the word of God at face value (because we believe He doesn’t want us to but rather means for us to discover His meaning from one generation to the next: it doesn’t give us a lot of room for launching offensives in the manner of Constantine or other generals; we don’t conflate men with God; and we search tirelessly for better answers in accord with Hillel’s question: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am not for others, WHAT am I?”
Pamela Geller isn’t about hate. She’s about love. So I believe are many others I have met and what they have in them may be less the province of religion and more the nature of a decent and still emerging humanity.
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Most conversations like the above that I’ve encountered take place in a spectrum of what I call “middle east hate-peace peace groups”. Some are nasty. It’s easy to meet through chatyping the most strident of Israeli nationalists and the worst of hidebound anti-Semites, not that I’m about to name names. Some are closed and collegial and inclined to scrape up the documents and narratives of hurtful histories but, alas, with parochial spin.
I co-moderated one such group on another social network a long time ago (or, here in cyberspace, what seems like a long time ago). Since then and with the memory of my first encounter with deeply embedded anti-Semitism have arrived at some thought that is close to the heart of this blog, i.e., that “attitudes and beliefs” are contingent on early language uptake programming — how we are taught to listen and to know what is important to listen to — and scripting, which is the transmitted way of a (language) culture. To navigate through and out of conflict that has its life primarily in the mind means addressing some early programming and scripting with the knowledge that some things need to become the artifacts of age left behind.
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26 Wednesday Feb 2014
Israel isn’t doing anything TO the Palestinians but trying to help them with economic development (Israel is an employer and trading partner), education (Israel’s universities accept Palestinians), health care (the system frequently steps in to provide services unavailable in Palestinian hospitals), legal assistance and advocacy — amazingly, Israelis are more free to advocate on behalf of the refugees than are the refugees under the the watch of Fatah and Hamas.
Check out Israel’s own far left.
The thematic “get the Jews” / “get Israel” is a part of language behavior and not corresponding with any political reality — it’s a reality in the head, rule based, and perception fixing. Some part flows down from Soviet cant about “American imperialist ambitions” and some about Muhammad’s statements promoting the superiority (by divine edict) of Islam along with the division and subjugation (to dhimmi) of Jews and Christians, as bogus a play as Soviet imperialist ambitions in Afghanistan.
Israel (and the Jews) keep getting in the way of barbarians, dictators, and fanatics.
The truth is the refugees of 1948 wouldn’t be so had the Arabs accepted Palestinian statehood at the time, but the thought of a Jewish state ( on purchased land sparsely populated) would seem to have been perceived as an affront to Islamic ambition, and there proceeded from that three wars (or more) of annihilation against the “Zionist entity”, which won each, claimed territory, enfranchised its immediate Arab Christian and Muslim population, and struggled on to maintain the possibility of a Palestinian state responsibly governed. For its troubles, which includes the evacuation of Jews from Gaza in a “Land for Peace” deal, it primarily provided Hamas and Company a rocket base (8,000 received before “Cast Lead”).
Islam’s best demonstration project today is burning itself up in Syria between fighting a brutal dictatorship, a cause with which only Putin and the Ayatollah would disagree — and possibly only for so long as fewer than 7 percent of his constituency can get around RT and read English freely — and fighting one another, and that to the extent that al-Qaeda as an organization seems to have repudiated ISIL as an affiliate — and there’s more nonsense and betrayal going on back there with money and arms today.
Anti-Semitism founded in the glorious dream of magical Islamic secession just doesn’t work, and governance in Islam — Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Iraq, Syria, Algeria (has had problems this past year as well) is a mess.
In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood discovered intolerance toward itself inside of a single year’s foray into power.
Should Egyptians be or feel trapped between authoritarian personalities and systems?
Of course not.
Nor should Syrians, who in essence have no army defending their reasonable interests — rather Syria’s malignant narcissists (different talk, same walk on both sides) continue taking the country down brick by brick, and whether by barrel bomb or truck bomb hardly matters.
Perhaps I should think about it before hitting the WordPress “Publish” button.
Okay — a few additional comments . . . .
Egyptians with modern businesses, interests, and investments needs must have a security system guarantying their freedom to sustain their efforts in relation to them.
Syrians perhaps need an army that is not all about itself and its immediate lines of affiliation and alliance, but rather about the interests of the constituents of the land.
A great religion or a strong one affords hope, faith, and solace inclusively, not exclusively. The continuous perception of division — and take that further: trivial division! — drives the Islamic Small Wars.
The want of exclusive favor may do that.
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