The Prophet of Islam has said, “Whoever has not fought for his Imam or does not wish for Jihad, he will die a hypocrite.”
Now in compliance with the Great Prophet of Islam and to show his obedience to his Imam, the Chief Commander of the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC), Major General Mohammad Ali Jafari, has recently stated that “we are ready for the big fight with the United States”. Although the General comes from a generation that has already passed a practical test of Jihad with much honor and glory, his wish for Jihad is actually a statement on behalf of the younger generation who has not tasted the sweet flavor of Jihad and wish for this holy war in order not to die a hypocrite.
While the kingdom’s quest has often been set in the context of countering Iran’s atomic programme, it is now possible that the Saudis might be able to deploy such devices more quickly than the Islamic republic.
Earlier this year, a senior Nato decision maker told me that he had seen intelligence reporting that nuclear weapons made in Pakistan on behalf of Saudi Arabia are now sitting ready for delivery.
Welcome the worst of all possible worlds, i.e., a nuclear arms race in the middle east, and the contenders in the pursuit of the threat of boiling glory for one or the other turn out — no surprise — Iran and Saudi Arabia.
Someone asks you a question a cogent question about an issue in the news — and, granted, the question has to do with your own religious attitudes and may be thought of as provocative — but you assault him.
I’m looking forward to reading about the arrests and following the trial.
With this anti-Semitic outburst, the powder was already formulated and tamped, the sensitivity to Everything Islam in the News, from associated honor killings (if not Qur’an-based, tolerated and transmitted within cultures that have embraced Islam) to dress-code challenging hijab headlines, had already raised the heat, and it turns out the question was the match.
On one point I may express ambivalence: what are we doing with others and our recording devices in public? Are we all suddenly broadcasters and journalists?
I’ll tell you one thing about me today: if you see very few people in my photography (a recent collection from Antietam has been picking up page views lately), it’s because I wish to avoid the complexities involved in creating social relationships between myself and strangers while outdoors with a camera. I’d have no problem with the imprimatur of a media assignment or, perhaps, a well thought out social photography project, but if you’re wearing a burqa or hijab and happen to see me coming toward you with a camera, not to worry: I’m not interested in you or what you’re wearing and am on my way to photographing something else.
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In the past year alone, the Jewish cemeteries in Warsaw and Myślenice have been vandalized; gravestones in Blonie, Kalisz and Otmuchowie have been defiled and destroyed, and anti-Semitic graffiti has been scrawled at the monument to resistance hero Mordechai Anielewicz in the Warsaw ghetto and on the synagogues in Gdansk and Zamoc.
There are routine incidents of anti-Semitism, too, at soccer matches in Lodz and Krakow, and statements from public figures such as prominent historian Krzysztof Jasiewicz, who argued in April that the Holocaust “was only possible because the Jews themselves participated in the murder of their own people.”
The boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement, a thriving Palestinian-led initiative that attacks institutional links to Israel’s illegal settlements, has been gaining in popularity. In Australia, the movement has been slowly growing as Israel continues to defy international law – and it now faces one of its greatest opportunities in the court of public opinion.
Along with hate in a coffee shop and bigotry expressed in graveyards, it seems we have hate justified in the anti-Semitic anti-Zionist portion of the liberal press.
I saw worse on Facebook this morning (“. . . and death is very sweet when it is for the sake of our Palestine . . . .”), but the points are about the same: the Jews stole the land and subjugate the Palestinians worse than the Nazis did the Jews themselves.
Bunk.
And the Palestinians, whose own police are funded by the United States and trained by Israelis (in Jordan) know it; the tunnel millionaires know it; the Palestinians working in Israel know it; the farmers trading with Israel know it; the utilities managers — electricity, water, roads, municipal construction — know it; Palestinian doctors know it; but the promoters of hate — still the PLO amply joined in similar spirit by Hamas — and their useful peacocks ascending the crumbling barricades of the New Old Now Old Lost and Far Out Left don’t seem to know it.
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That the BDS movement and its supporters, now tacitly endorsed by the AAUP, have been given a platform to single out Israel as absolutely the worst society on Earth is distressing and is nothing less than a “ready-made conclusion” of the most extreme sort.
The AAUP should stand up against such polemicists; instead it legitimizes them by offering them a platform to promote racism.
Hate, much like deception, mentioned yesterday, is easy too.
Love, like truth, is hard.
How much of language do we memorize and then report out as thought?
How much of language do we actually synthesize to produce original expression?
I’d rather academics delve into those questions than how it has come about that Arabs keep Arabs in Arab refugee camps bereft of normal state-based rights while in Gaza and on the west bank teachers, in fact, continue to teach their children how to hate The Jews.
When I was a little iddle boy, debates like the one at the address above would have fallen into the category that is “thinking about the unthinkable”. These days, that unthinkable has to be thought about around the world, not only on the Korean peninsula or around Kashmir in the completely absurd India vs. Pakistan debacle or other now old nuclear armed regions but in the middle east as well, and there not only Israel (perhaps) vs. Whoever (this playing the anti-Semites line of rant) but Whoever vs. Whoever.
During the above debate, those who tune in will hear description of the thinking that would be at work in a “poly-nuclear”middle east.
