6-2-16 – On the next JANET MEFFERD TODAY: The Bible is the blueprint for the values of Western Civilization. And yet, our culture has neglected the very framework that holds our liberties intact. How do we rescue it? Diana Weber-Bederman joins me to discuss that and her book, “Back to the Ethic.” Plus: The Left’s new attacks on Christian colleges — and how some Christian colleges are undermining their own mission. That and more on Thursday’s JANET MEFFERD TODAY.
While Judaism, Jewishness, and Zionism combine in the interest of Hebrew ethnolinguistic cultural and spiritual survival, the religion probably should not be confused with the practical motivation for related ethnic survival. For anti-Semites only, it’s all the same — Jews, Jewish faith, Israel, Zionism — but attacking Zionism in the age of tolerance becomes the more sustainable ploy.
In contemporary animus and conflicts targeting Jewish life, there are four themes:
1. Absolute Power — political power consolidated in one ruler; 2. Capricious Law — because the ruler is the law; 3. Idolatry – the ruler lays claim to divine right or historic inevitability for his legitimacy in power, and progressively conflates his image with God or the State, and expects followers to respond appropriately — or else! 4. Sadism — with confusion as to what is God and what is human, the permit to exercise a singular will to make others suffer with impunity comes into play.
However any may care to think about any number of political and religious figures in history, I feel the above describe the character of tyrants, small or large, or men or women on the way to becoming tyrants.
The Jewish program embedded in Christianity and Islam — attractive in Rome and useful in consolidating the Arab world — unfailingly promotes (from the git-go in Genesis) human consciousness, self-consciousness or self-awareness, and, most important of all, the possession of a human conscience. Moses later becomes the lawgiver who would oppose Pharaoh in the exercise of his contention that he himself was as if a god.
Game over.
The defense and transfer of concept over thousands of years has been apparently painful. The Jews, we Jews, are a mixed lot, including the atheist portion, but common to all has been mutual good regard, from Adam to Netanyahu, and the development of a conversation through time about divinity, ethics, and morality. We know discipline and order too, but Torah-derived or induced argument (regarding Isaac, should Abraham have talked back to God?) has led to a compendium of law sufficient for living, working, and trading in peace worldwide.
As an ethnolinguistic cohort, the Hebrews could grow only so much in numbers as Hebrews, but the uptake in Christianity and Islam fills in the story.
The “Abrahamic Faiths” should get off the bloody medieval and tribal merry-go-rounds and revisit their “operating instructions” line by line and in the context set by time — BCE, CE, feudal, medieval, mercantile, possibly “post-modern” — and eject the absurdity of global competition based on being born with a few labels in place.
As time is spacious and timeless, what other work than that of fostering ethnolinguistic cultural survival and co-evolution by producing a global political atmosphere in which mutual good regard matters.
While “The West” draws its shape also from Greek and Roman civilizations, the “Judeo-Christian” contributions in thought and in woefully bloody history serve to have produced so far deeply desired and survivable codes of conduct and of law. Whether we’ll be able to enlarge the familiar term to “Judeo-Christian-Muslim” contributions remains to be seen, for as implied by way of the awesome conversation, what Baghdadi has put on demonstration smacks of absolute power, capricious law, idolatry, and sadism, all of which greater portions of Islam seem to be rejecting as I type.
The belief in an ethical God makes it possible over time, to move from a society of tribes to a society of many tribes, held together with commonly shared beliefs, stories, and traditions, because this God demands that we care for the other, the stranger, because we know how a stranger feels; we were once strangers in a strange land (see Exodus 23:9) (p. 60).
Canadian author Diane Weber Bederman, a friend of BackChannels’ editor, has put together a brief compelling volume about the origins of compassion, empathy — a pervasive thoughtfulness most of all — in contemporary western thought by way of Biblical language and lore and the interaction of the Judeo-Christian vision of God and man as woven through the western experience.
Although composed as defense and reminder of western values, it may turn out the right book at the right time as regards broadening the channels for the appreciation of a number of aspects of cultural and intercultural survival:
Ethical monotheism is not the enemy.
Belief in the ethical God of the Christians and Jews counterbalances egoism and the idolization of another human being. I cannot place belief in any man perfecting himself. The evidence is overwhelmingly to the contrary. I wrote about that earlier, in my chapter “The Snake Tempted Me,” about the Enlightenment and the rise of secularism. More people have died from wars that embraced secular fundamentalist propaganda than have been killed in wars based on religious differences. Encyclopedia of Wars authors Charles Phillips and Alan Axelrod document the history of recorded warfare. From their list of 1,763 wars, only 123 are classified as involving a religious cause; these wars account for less than 7 percent of all wars and less than 2 percent of all people killed in warfare. It is estimated that more than 160 millions civilians were killed in genocides in the twentieth century alone, with nearly 100 million killed by the Communist states of USSR and China. Think of Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Kim Jong-il, and Adolph Hitler.
Why do we allow ourselves to give up our free will and instead by swayed by others? Why do we so easily forget God’s admonition, “Beware of letting your heart be seduced; if you go astray, serve other gods and bow down to them . . . you will quickly perish”? (Deuteronomy 11:16-17) . . . . (p. 101)
Bederman is right and rightly quotable, page after well researched and thoughtfully written page, for her book reminds of basic principles and tenets that form the bulwark of a healthy and productive western society.
The tour begins close to the thought, “Before ethical monotheism and the revelation at Mount Sinai, there was little concept of the intrinsic value of a human being. There was little concept of the sacredness of human life” (p. 11).
Given the spectacle created by dictator and “eye doctor” Bashar al-Assad in Syria with the help of Putin, Khamenei, and Baghdadi, one cannot discount Bederman’s observation of history and its present corollaries, for conscience, empathy, kindness, human rights, freedom, and love itself may not be givens in human affairs but transmitted through the oral and written traditions in language of a civilization born of suffering beneath the words, whips, and yokes of tyrants. For that, the Judeo-Christian experience has been (from Pharaoh to Hitler) immense.
Where Bederman quotes Thomas Paine — “Belief in a cruel God makes a cruel man” — she precedes the presentation of it with an observation drawn from commentary on the God of the Torah:
There is a commentary in one of the many books about the Bible that imagines God’s response to the happiness of the Israelites after the drowning of the Egyptians. God hears the angels singing and celebrating His great victory. But instead of rejoicing weeps and rebukes them. “Why are you singing?” He asks. “Why are you rejoicing? The Egyptians are My children, too, and they are dead, drowned in the sea. There is no cause for you to sing. Their deaths are not to be celebrated” (p. 38).
True, and to BackChannels’ mind memory of a passage in an old Haggadah serves up the same lesson.
We — of the Jews and the “mixed multitudes” that joined the flight from Pharaoh, of “the west”, of the world’s democratic open societies, of the realms of the considerate and lawful (as opposed to those more familiar with capricious justice) — don’t rejoice at death, not even the death of mortal enemies.
As a philosophy of ethics, Bederman takes on abortion, utilitarianism, geneticism, too accepting a multiculturalism, and, of course, moral relativism: “If ethics have no extrinsic or intrinsic substantive base, then ethical decisions will be made by those in power who can impose their beliefs on others” (p. 75).
Again, page after page, Back to the Ethic proves a rich and thoughtful reading, one also at times personal as when Bederman encounters her own passage through hell in the form of a costly medical misdiagnosis and the path she takes in response to it. However, the author does not dwell in the region of her own mortality but rather in the realm of the universal and its reflection in scripture and the defense through time of Judeo-Christian belief in the structuring of the western tradition and today’s compassionate, democratic, open, and most vibrant societies.
According to the Qur’an, Allah is the “best of deceivers” (3:54; 8:30). The phrase is often translated into English as “best of planners,” “best of schemers,” or “best of plotters,” but the root word (makr) means “deception.” Hence, the following Qur’an verses should be rendered as follows:
Qur’an 3:54—And they (the unbelievers) planned to deceive, and Allah planned to deceive (the unbelievers), and Allah is the best of deceivers.
Qur’an 7:99—Are they then safe from Allah’s deception? No one feels safe from Allah’s deception except those that shall perish.
Qur’an 8:30—And (remember) when the unbelievers plotted deception against you (O Muhammad), to imprison you, or kill you, or expel you. They plotted deception, but Allah also plotted deception; and Allah is the best of deceivers.
The historical background for the verse is that the Jews ‘planned’ evil in order to get Jesus arrested and crucified. And Allah in the verse says as they planned evil, so too Allah planned to thwart their wicked plan. Christian missionaries have an issue with the words used for both the Jews and Allah. They prefer to translate this way:
“and [they] deceived and Allah deceived and Allah is the best of deceivers”
The above translation does not exist. It is only made up by crazy deluded missionaries in order to lead people astray. Arabic word(s) makr, Makara can be used negatively and for good. So when the Jews planned to get Jesus arrested and crucified, that was evil, whereas when Allah thwarted their evil plan by saving Jesus, this was good.
True, the Jewish authorities and those who followed their lead pressed for the death of Christ;(13) still, what happened in His passion cannot be charged against all the Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today. Although the Church is the new people of God, the Jews should not be presented as rejected or accursed by God, as if this followed from the Holy Scriptures. All should see to it, then, that in catechetical work or in the preaching of the word of God they do not teach anything that does not conform to the truth of the Gospel and the spirit of Christ.
Verily methinks the woman was deceived, the Jews were libled — the whole lot, and the post-Holocaust Vatican compelled to clarify the truth of its position in relation to the Jewish People.
Ironically related reference on the Soviet framing of WWII’s Pope Pius XII as “Hitler’s Pope”: Pacepa, Ion Mihai and Rychlak, Ronald J. Disinformation. Washington, D.C.: WND Books, 2013. (BackChannels readers will find more of similar in “The Russian Section” of the resident library).
Further related and more conveniently accessed: Akin, Jimmy. “How Pius XII Protected Jews.” Catholic Answers, n.d.: “Hochhuth’s fictional image of a silent (though active) pope has been transformed by the anti-Catholic rumor mill into the image of a silent and inactive pope—and by some even into an actively pro-Nazi monster. If there were any truth to the charge that Pius XII was silent, the silence would not have been out of moral cowardice in the face of the Nazis, but because the Pope was waging a subversive, clandestine war against them in an attempt to save Jews.”
As people lie — engage in deception — either to hide something or to get something, we know, this according to Ms. Lessing, what the ignoble imam was after; and according to Jimmy Akin as well as the breathtaking revelations of Pacepa and Rychlak (2013), we know what the noble Pope Pius XII was hiding for good cause.
The Discover the Truth blog goes on to note the moral ambiguity involved in the term “makr” this way: “The word, makr in Arabic denotes a subtle and secret move or plan. If this is for a good purpose, it is good; and if this is for a bad purpose, it is bad.”
The argument places the determination of good deed or evil beyond the declaration of Surat 3:54: “And (the unbelievers) plotted and planned, and Allah too planned, and the best of planners is Allah” (Yusuf Ali’s translation).
Again: “The word, makr in Arabic denotes a subtle and secret move or plan. If this is for a good purpose, it is good; and if this is for a bad purpose, it is bad.”
It would appear that “being the best of planners” — being the most proficient among the makers of subtle and secret moves or plans — would be a thing separate from being either good or evil, i.e., the statement is about facility in the making of “subtle and secret moves” and neutral about ethical and moral virtue, plain dealing, and straight talk as behaviors civil, desirable, good, and lawful in and of themselves.
Given so much encouragement and license for the making of “subtle and secret moves”, who then — or what — determines the qualities of good cause?
I’ll leave that question rhetorical.
One might suppose that had Lessing’s imam been honest with her, Lessing may yet be wearing her hijab with pride.
Little did I know what I was going to see by way of a cable connection, a home-built computer, and the English language editions of foreign newspapers.
Add Facebook.
Zoom forward seven years.
I / we — my readers here, my 600+ “Facebook buddies” — admittedly, I know more of most than they know of me, but still — have formed through so much online “chatyping” (also: add Skype) an extraordinary but still fragile global political intelligentsia.
Yesterday’s note from a Brazilian stranger took less than a second to reach me, fewer than ten minutes to translate, add thirty minutes to an hour to publish, a little more time to propagate, and then, behind the scenes, less than an hour to identify the U.S. Ambassador to Brazil (Liliana Ayalde), Brazil’s president (Dilma Rousseff) — truly, one starts from scratch with each country heard from — and Israel’s ambassador to Brazil, Rafael Eldad.
So here’s the problem in rough form and without delving into Brazil’s hospice industry or its distribution of health services in general: if one is shown a picture of a elderly woman dying (anonymously with her back turned toward the camera) next to an IV (intravenous fluids) stand on the floor of some kind of care facility in São Paulo, does one (education + broadband + computer + new awareness and knowledge) have an obligation to do something about it, first by squawking?
If so, and out of whatever combination of ethical and personal motivations — altruism, boredom, Judaism, love, narcissism — is there a next step?
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Data –> Information –> News –> Opinion –> Political Action and Policy
In the old days — oh my how the children of the 1960s and early 1970s have aged — one might wind up in community activism (“Think Globally, Act Locally” was a popular slogan back when) or in advocacy or social journalism. A Studs Turkel or Jonathan Kozol — I’ve arrived: my apartment’s 850-sq.ft., or so, and my library exceeds 2,000 volumes, and there’s a background to match — would write a book, cultivate an academic audience, and perhaps influence the influential. A Ralph Nader could wear out some shoe leather on the way to building cases for causes, bringing the mighty into court, and generally speaking truth to power from bare-bones offices.
Now, for at least the past seven years, I / you / we / they have had an incredibly fast global communicating system.
So today add two minutes to find a politician — or former one — in São Paulo and Tweet one’s latest forward, essentially not only putting the matter in his mind but effectively also reaching out to those who should be able to wire together a more ethical and responsive public policy and public policy result in full view of their respective public audiences.
Such reading leads into the political ecology of place and the values driving arrangements of public programs. One hopes that along with criticism and examination comes progress. With that in mind, I thought this juxtaposition of articles worth noting:
It would seem Brazil has been working its levers to expand and improve its health care system, a far cry from the complaint that no one listens, no one cares.
However, listening and caring — and writing both for professional and lay audiences about such matters — would seem to fall short of the broadest distribution of basic community services as well as the acquisition of nifty items like cots and washable mattresses or mattress systems for the dying doing their dying in underfunded institutions or, in any case, ones unable to meet persistent demand.
* * *
In the country as a whole, about 35 per cent of the population lives in poverty, on less than two dollars a day. But in Brazil’s rural areas poverty affects about 51 per cent of the population . . .
Cyberspace may be just catching up to real space as regards finding ways to obtain improvements in specific dimensions of “qualities of living” — physical, psychological, even spiritual — for any given political space (village to state to region), but whoever we may be and wherever we just happen to be sitting, remote challenges, by way of the web, may be no longer so remote.
You have asked a difficult question. The sentimental guidance offered by Hillel the Elder seems insufficient in the face of immense suffering, not only in Syria, but in Burma (genocide targeting a tribal Muslim people), in Congo (the land of child slaves and child soldiers), and a thousand other places (probably fewer, but still, it’s pretty bad): “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am not for others, what am I?”
What is our humanity? What is our obligation as regards the humanity of others?
Gaza officialdom may bleat, hate, and whine about Zionists, but Gaza business and labor and basic service providers work every day with Israel in the interests of commerce and development.
Jews go everywhere — even to the other side, lol — where need exists.
With everyone else, we / Jews / Israel are helping Syrians with emergency medicine and supplies — not leading the pack (I don’t know who is) but there even with a minimum of recognition.
The remaining residents of the Yarmouk Camp, kept separated from Syrian, used as tools for some future Arab war of annihilation to erase Jewry and Judaism (the better to claim originality for Islam, I guess), are starving — being made to starve — between armies. What did they — now women, children, and old men — do to deserve or bring on that fate?
No one has intervened militarily in Yarmouk Camp because no one outside of the Syrian conflict knows how to play a rescue operation, much less coordinate one with so many parties ringside.
In 2007, Lebanese Defense Forces managed to evacuate Nahr al-Bared, another refugee “camp”, by checking through residents at one gate and busing them away to another camp. By agreement with other Arab states, they were forbidden to enter Nahr al-Bared, so they got the residents out, left the foreign fighters in, and using tanks razed the entire city, once of 30,000 souls, to the ground — and then they bombed what was left of resistance in tunnels.
Yarmouk? It’s like watching people drown and no one can get through the sharks surrounding them to save them.
Since day one of live fire, Syrians on the receiving end — now millions either dead, maimed, displaced, or refugee — have begged the world for help, and the great politicians surrounding have played like gamblers at a felt table: one wants things to be as they were, primarily because the money was very good with the way things were — and it’s still very good with the way things are; another wants a moderate messianic miracle, i.e., an Arab democracy, capitalist, open, and in love with Israel.
Some 130,000 casualties later plus six million souls robbed of their former lives and their businesses, jobs, and homes, business seems to be booming around the care of the victims of war, not that it’s making money, but it seems easier delivering tents, clothing, food, and water, and some medicine to those bereft than it does producing sufficient international cooperation to remove Assad, shut down the al-Qaeda affiliates, and freeze Syria (no pun intended) into a state (of existence) approachable for constitutional and physical reconstruction.
* * *
In an unprecedented incident yesterday, Wednesday, Turkish jets attacked a Jihadist convoy on Syrian soil after 2 of their own military vehicles had been fired upon near the Turkish/Syrian border.
The incident happened near the Cobanbey border crossing in the south of Turkey. The jets reportedly destroyed a pick-up, a truck and a bus all belonging to the extreme Jihadist group Islamic State of Iraq and Levant (ISIL or ISIS). There were no casualties on the Turkish side.
I don’t know whose using money to sew so much chaos in the middle east, but now pressured by an immense refugee challenge, the want to get at its sources all around may be quite high.
It appears yesterday’s strike by Turkey involved a clear tit-for-tat exchange of fire, but the Turkish military, which has traded with Israel for its hardware, more a while ago, I’m sure less today, and has NATO cooperation in the region, is the more formidable power.
Perhaps the Turks have also had enough of “spillover” from Syria’s civil war.
On YouTube, “TeachESL” noted (two days ago), “the man at 0:53 says: “We do not want Palestine or something. We want them to get us out here. We ask for Israeli citizenship, we do not want the right of return, we have sold Palestine. We do not even know anything about Palestine! We do not want Mahmoud Abbas. There are 1 billion and 300 million Muslims and they can do nothing! If there were even a single Israeli child in the Yarmuk camp, the problem would have been solved a long time ago.”
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So what may the Jews do, whether of Israel or the Diaspora?
I know: these are the sworn enemies of Israel, determined to overlook the defeat of Arab armies in a war of annihilation (of the Jews, period) in 1948; brainwashed to believe the Land of Israel magically, innately Arab when the ground itself tells of the continuance presence of Jewry on the land for more than 3,000 years and beyond; and trained by anti-Semitic image, lies (like “The Protocols”), by bombastic and narcissistic and manipulative power to hate Jews and erase Judaism, which is more a world to discover than extinguish, and a good and great world at that. And yet there they are, the residents of Yarmouk Camp, trapped between a tyrant and his equally tyrannical opponents.
Neither Bashar al-Assad nor al-Nusra could give a flying crap about what they — no one else, not Israelis, not Russians, not Americans, God forbid — are doing to the humanity they have overrun and subjugated for the amusement of their own immense and unbridled egos.
Jews have stood against that kind of tyranny since the Exodus from Egypt, and whether in fact or in our heads makes no difference.
Jewish ethical universalism, whether joined by hand-wringing Christians or forward-looking Islamic Humanists, cannot today — and as too many among the powerful may do — look away from Yarmouk Camp.
The twisted rhetoric of The Palestine Chronicle (the fulcrum for that in language behavior splits loyalty away from integrity) notes the following:
There is no doubt that the Yarmoukian Palestinians are in Syria because of a historic injustice imposed upon them by a settler-colonial enemy that does not spare any effort to exacerbate their suffering and prolong their exile. However, this indisputable historic occurrence should not blind us from the fact that independent of what Israel has planned to increase Palestinian suffering, the party responsible for the current crisis (and here I must reiterate my emphasis on the word ‘current’) is the brutal and inhuman Syrian regime and its leader Bashar El-Assad.
It’s late in the day but welcomed, if with a grain of salt, nonetheless.
* * *
In the Yarmouk camp, more than 55 people have died from hunger and the majority of children are suffering from malnutrition, according to Abdullah al-Khatib, a Palestinian activist living there. Most people are consuming soup made from water and spices, Khatib said, and some are reportedly eating grass for survival.
Reminder: Russian President Vladimir Putin means to keep Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in business (possibly unless or until he runs out of money or his sponsor in Tehran, that kindly smiling white bearded sower of sorrows, does — and that’s not going to happen in the foreseeable future).
* * *
I have long believed that that I’d engage Gideon Levy’s discourse in its disingenuous Israel-bashing facet, and so I might do so here with suggestion that the IDF — who else? — magically and miraculously transport the Yarmouk Camp to someplace peaceful like Judea and Samaria.
Bar’el was restrained as he referred to Yarmouk as resembling a World War II ghetto, and even this description fell on deaf ears. Only 20,000 people remain in the camp, where 150,000 lived before the civil war. Only the weak and helpless remain – to live in destruction under siege. The rest have suffered their second expulsion . . . . After the terror of Yarmouk, Israel should show a measure of humanity. It should try to save the 20,000 besieged residents – natives of this land, remember – and declare that its gates are open to them to reunite with their families.
Nonetheless, disagree though we may — and as may the Yarmouk Camp resident quoted — we are all standing by watching a war crime in the making.
* * *
What is remarkable is that the save Yarmouk initiative has infiltrated all fields and has been adopted and picked up by political groups that have not seen eye to eye.
Although the Al-Monitor article confines itself to telling of the in-solidarity feelings inspired between Fatah and Hamas and pro-Palestinian groups, that I’ve played up this story tells that our barriers may not be as strong as we believe.
“Al-Qaeda are good!” he told me, with a smile and a double thumbs up. “I hope that they’ll accept me and that one day I can set off a suicide bomb in a regime area.”
I haven’t funds for myself, much less war zone stringers.
Not that harping about conflict from the Internet’s “second row seat to history” warrants funds.
Nonetheless, one wakes to these items passing by on the computer’s screen, and on this one, it appears Reuters engaged a teenage shutterbug to report from within the Syrian Civil War, and not only didn’t the teen make it but on the way to not making it forged some alliance with al Qaeda.
I you have clicked and looked, what is the worth of the young photographer’s death in light of the news value of that 15-item slide show?
The Telegraph notes (fourth frame) that Barakat, in fact, never joined al-Qaeda. The phrase used elsewhere: ” . . . tried to join . . . .”
Whether he joined or not, or was 17 or 18 in combat, we may wonder at ourselves as well as the seasoned pros at Reuters as to the judgment displayed in encouraging so young a soul to stand in harm’s way for a picture.
* * *
On the other hand: how many early illegal sign-up legends have accompanied World War II and other lore all down the line?
How old was “Johnny” when he went to join his brother in the Confederacy, and Hell itself couldn’t and didn’t stop him?
Syria left the League of Low Intensity Conflicts some time ago.
One may wonder if some of the flack heading Reuters’ way hasn’t to do with deflecting attention from the war’s wholesale destruction of children (mostly by Assad’s bombing “strategy”) and of childhood itself.
Despite the injunctions ever present in the minds of journalists — even the youngest — for “clear, accurate, and complete” reporting, also “objective” as possible, and so on, wars come freighted with politics, the variables of which may have an effect on the reception of tips to events as well as access to officials or action. Motives for fudging, not good, or chancing, which leads to glory when it works out and infamy when it doesn’t, may have to with other than underlying alliance or sentiment.
As with other theaters of the Islamic Small Wars, integrity is not welcomed — if it were, such wars would disappear with its presence — and journalists with integrity are generally not welcomed either: the armed sides would rather have favorable PR, the kind promoted by state-sponsored “reporting”.
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