Jerusalem is not even Israel’s to “return” to anyone but the Hebrews who created her 5,778 years ago. It cannot be returned to the Canaanites who melded with the Hebrews; it cannot be returned to the Romans who burned and sacked it early in the Common Era; it cannot be returned to the Nazis or the Ottomans who no longer exist but in the fantasies of a few bigoted Germans and Turks; and it cannot be returned to an “Ummah” that did not even think to exist until the 7th Century and that today finds itself bullied, controlled, slaughtered by its own zealots.
In the medieval mode, the evil demands property . . . just because.
Carol M. Highsmith’s photograph shows not only those towers but a sense of the site’s proximity to the Beltway, which is about 1,000-ft. The mosque complex under construction today will be about twice that distance (judging from the Google map).
About that visual impression off what is called the “outer loop of the beltway”, we shall see, literally.
* * *
Here is my question at the moment: how do Americans who are not Muslim feel about Islam today?
* * *
While the news gets around the terrorism-inspired “anti-Jihad” and “Islamophobe” communities, it also provides a moment for very loose social science measurement.
“It will be a place that will help counter an epidemic of “Islamophobia” in the United States, according to Turkish government officials who recently visited the construction site. The delegation was led by Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose goals include increasing Islamist influence in America.”
“The leaders of two U.S. Muslim Brotherhood entities in attendance included Naeem Baig, is the president of the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA). A 1991 U.S. Muslim Brotherhood memo lists ICNA as one of “our organizations and the organizations of our friends.” The memo says its “work in America is “a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within.” The memo even refers to meetings with ICNA where there was talk about a merger.”
From YouTube poster “Joseph Rudyard Kipling” whose attitude (with what sounds like the music from Platoon) needs no interpretation of the fine points:
“This monument will be a symbol of our understanding of culture and civilization,” Erdogan said.
The center will be a good way to show how wrong Islamophobia is by giving messages of Islam’s brotherhood and tolerance, Erdogan noted.
With the completion of the center, the state of Maryland will have a different richness, Erdogan said.
“With its multi functional character, the center would be a source of pride for the Turkish nation,” Erdogan indicated.
The Turkish American Culture and Civilization Center would be an expression of co-existence based on love and tolerance, Erdogan also said.
On the other hand, a blog titled “Stop Turkey” has a page devoted to remarks made by the state sponsor of the Turkish Culture and Civilization Center, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan — “Favourite Erdogan Quotes” — and those are not so friendly.
Ramp it up, as may The Thinking Mom — “Imagine a $100 million facility devoted to Nazi-ism on American soil with the complicity of the American government. The Turkish American Culture and Civilization Center is every bit as dangerous as that” — or wind it down as so many of decent and good conscience — and without reference to race, creed, color, or religion — may try, that mosque is under construction in my backyard.
If it were a synagogue of similar scale with some houses planted around it, no one would bat an eyelash.
* * *
“Fight those who do not believe in Allah or in the Last Day and who do not consider unlawful what Allah and His Messenger have made unlawful and who do not adopt the religion of truth from those who were given the Scripture – [fight] until they give the jizyah willingly while they are humbled.”
I repeatedly drag in Quran 9:29 for its being unambiguous and sticky, at least, and may be representative of the conversation that it will take great courage to have as regards the goodness and validity of an Islamic civilization clinging to the above and other off-putting and seemingly explicit instructions.
Here’s David Wood marching up to and through the talking points in relation to the recent beheading in Woolwich, UK:
When are we going to have this conversation?
My Muslim friends all over the world may approach this line in a different way, all of them well noting the persecuting character of the Taliban, Al-Nusra (an Al-Qaeda group in Syria today) and others around the fringes of their own lives and, tragically, sometimes in close and direct.
In the more central areas of the Islamic Small Wars, events like the “Boston Marathon Bombing” — an insult to all civilized hearts globally — hit the newspapers on a daily to weekly basis, and the same are similarly repudiated en masse, and yet . . . the text remains embraced, even if passively.
“Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, nor acknowledge the religion of Truth, (even if they are) of the People of the Book, until they pay the Jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued.”
Ali preferred the term “subdued” to merely “humbled”.
May one of the “People of the Book” or other “kafir” ask why not “conquered”, “enslaved”, or “subjugated”?
May an insider, a believer, ask, “Why attack the autonomy and dignity of another on the basis of faith at all?”
* * *
Maryland has a reputation as a deeply liberal and moderate state, one in which Catholics and Protestants learned to get along right quick, and so I have no doubt the citizenry will welcome the new mosque and regard it as a good sign of the power of development and investment in keeping life around the Capitol Beltway ever affluent, hopeful, and pleasant.
Should the figures be 100,000 rather than 300,000 Persian Jews prior to the establishment of the State of Israel?
I don’t know.
By any count, it seems fewer than 10,000 have chosen to remain in Iran.
Iran itself trots out the Neturei Karta — http://www.adl.org/extremism/karta/ — a cult, a fringe, at best, in the Jewish community both in Israel and the Diaspora.
[Responding to how I feel about five Israel deaths or 100 Palestinian deaths]:
“What bothers me most is not that Arabs kill our children, but that they force us to kill theirs.” Golda Meir, National Press Club, Washington, D.C., 1957.
The Jews I know have never felt differently.
Don’t you think it’s time to stop lobbing rockets at Israel? At the Jews?
Contemplating the destruction of the Jews?
Demonizing the Jews?
Hamas, heavily taxing its constituents, including “tunnel millionaires”, moving goods inbound and outbound with the cooperation of the IDF, purchasing electricity from Israel, ferrying its sick to Israeli hospitals when necessary, etc., nonetheless launched more than 1000 rockets, some supplied by Iran with a range of 45 miles, into Israel in 2012. Targets: any Israeli: Muslim, Christian, Jewish, adult or child, man or woman.
And then by design, Hamas has kept their own in harm’s way, launching within 1/2 block of residences, gasoline stations, schools, mosques, etc.
Hamas and Israel have entered a ceasefire at this time.
We’ll see how it holds up.
Trust the Jews, at least, for having the integrity to keep their side of the bargain (as they did ejecting their own from Gaza in 2005, a bid to “trade land for peace,” leaving Gaza Judenfrei).
Those who remember, know the band well and true name of the music: Yes and “I’ve Seen All Good People”.
Theirs was a part of the ethos of the English-borne 1970s.
And here, 2012, far from those halcyon days, their art for the ears continues to resonate.
“Don’t surround yourself with yourself” — I should take the advice and perhaps others should take it for themselves as well.
My interest in the narcissistic dimension of political psychology started off with the direct and real space experience of personalities exhibiting mild to severe bipolar disorder and narcissistic personality disorder while in cyberspace I happened to be surfing conflicts and discovering for myself any number of autocratic regimes and the mess and misery they were able to bring to their hapless constituents.
(For this blog, the “Conflict – Culture – Language – Psychology” category should suffice, as I hope the whole production will not be so all over the place as the other, which I had created to showcase some other things I could do).
(In science, it is generally taken as a good thing to arrive at similar observations and insights by way of separate tracks — remember: theories stand until disproved, always, but they may be strengthened too by the arrival of new data — and that appears to be what has happened).
To move on: politics draw a variety of social competitors — advisers, leaders, warriors — and among the same, some may carry within themselves the over-the-top, unconstrained, boundary-confused, and often sadistic egotism of the malignant narcissist, and these too full of themselves no one needs.
As I type this, the intelligence of the world moves quickly in tens upon tens of thousands of communications per hour, and so it is I happen to participate in the Facebook presence of the Rationalist Society of Pakistan (the organizational site has been listed to the left). One of my Facebook buddies, Lakhkar Khan Hoti, posted there a statement by President Obama extolling the contributions made by Islam to humanity, which I interpret as part of the President’s promise to “extend the hand of peace” to Islam, and requested comment.
As professionals in a social-networking community may do, the original poster was asked to cite his source.
“To the Muslim world, we seek a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect.
To those leaders around the globe who seek to sow conflict or blame their society’s ills on the West, know that your people will judge you on what you can build, not what you destroy.”
There are some things humans — individually, in aggregate, without regard to legacy — may wish to entertain as twined language, technology, and trade capacities continue to contract and integrate lives and lifestyles across our ever gregarious species. Start with the meaning and significance of self-concept in relation to others and whether certain degrees of glorious narcissistic self-aggrandizement have a place in anyone’s better future, not least of all Pakistan’s.
My interest in political psychology and the dimension referred to as “narcissism” was inspired by encountering in my web-borne travels so many tawdry dictatorships — the junta in Burma; Robert Mugabe (thank him for reintroducing cholera to his people) in Zimbabwe; Paul Biya whose French connections and chateau keep him comfy while his people starve in Cameroon; etc. Copy and paste “African Dictator” into your browser, and you should come up with a blog titled and devoted to just that subject, quite colorful. And awful.
One might suggest there’s some difference too between overt religiosity and deep and rightly cherished spirituality.
There may be a good track in humanity enforced by our natural and overwhelming propensity to enjoy one another despite whatever hardships we may be enduring.
Where conditions have become untenable, whether by the hand of Pharaoh or through the failure of ambition as represented by the will to war — other ideas and policies proving bankrupt beneath the hands of lost autocrats and warmongers both — most people resign themselves to suffering or leave for what they hope will prove a healthier situation.
A bully anywhere — schoolyard, saloon, state, tribe, region — drives humanity away, and one may suggest that even God’s love goes with those who leave.
Time and again, and without understanding the sources of their own ruin, time reduces the malignant and all they have done to rags and relics, not to mention the diminishing of their reputation down into the class of assorted “bad examples” in lessons to new generations.
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