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There’s a Syrian section in this piece — https://conflict-backchannels.com/2014/03/19/its-hard-helping-you-when-you-are-anti-semitic-among-other-things/ — that tells when I followed leads (online) toward the Facebook presence of the Syrian revolution, it didn’t take long to find what could be interpreted here as Sunni-based anti-Semitic cant about a step removed from the common browsing public, but I’m not sure I’m that common.
🙂
Sometimes I keep “clicking” around a problem.
The Syrian state view and opposition world view that have as a habit of mind ready and vicious (and vacuous) anti-Semitic / anti-Zionist rant haven’t a palatable program for the secular or humanist and post-Enlightenment drivers of the western mind.
The absence of a sympathetic modern human program for the state (Assad’s baggage) and the axis of power that represents political absolutism opposite NATO has tragically kept NATO in position to avoid nuclear Russia while also assigning permit for the disaster to Russia (which pledged $10 million for Syrian relief while spending $51 billion on Sochi).
At the end of each day, whatever our civilizational and religious affiliations may be and their related “self-concepts”, what the Jewish contingent and “Greco-Roman Judeo-Christian” civilization represents is the amassed historical weight of hard won western principles and values.
It’s not that a Jew is worth more than a Muslim, or vice versa, or that the Northern Hemisphere has ruthlessly enslaved the Southern Hemisphere or other such manipulative tripe. It — agape, love, the foundation of a good ethics and experience of a good life — is about dwelling on such an observation as, say, “whosoever destroys a soul, it is considered as if he destroyed an entire world. And whosoever that saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world” (Hillel repeated by Muhammad) and dwelling on the meaning of that long enough to get it and develop some empathy and regard for other souls.
That empathy is not a given in nature: it’s cultivated.
These that get far astray do some damage — and then they do what they do under many ideological banners.
I’ll see how I feel about that on in the morning.
Maybe I’ll like it.
Maybe I won’t.
I don’t like the overuse of “dwelling” but will leave it as authentic verbal jazz.
A little more and I will drop the conversation.
Some social scientists believe that any attitude devolves to some set of beliefs having valence (good thing / bad thing) and intensity (not too bad . . . extremely bad) and primacy. Our legacies in culture and religion, in name and early acquired messages about ourselves (as early as “language uptake”) seem to me primary because we forget having learned such things and then we go an build on them throughout our lives. Our survival includes the perpetuation of these signifying elements of our existence. I think they’re important and believe in evolutionary cultural polyphony but a few have problems with that. Add greed, hormonal motivation, psychological problems, and so fascist dictators and followers are born, and when they grow up and become like BadDaddy with his Islamic Hate terrifying the neighborhood, they are hard to switch off.
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