The Fruits of Religion: 500 Yazidis Killed, Some Victims Buried Alive

The fruits of religion

I try not to write about religion all the time, but the pestilence that religion is to humanity is hard to avoid.  From the Israel's murder of children in Gaza, to religious discrimination against gays, to the atrocities and genocide being committed by Sunni Muslims in Iraq, the common root of the hate division and death is religion.  Religion that justifies a mindset that anyone different or who subscribes to differing beliefs is subhuman and even worthy of death. Yet insanely, religion still is afforded special deference and privileges even in modern nations which by now ought to realize that religion outside of one's home or house of worship is not a positive good.  Oh yes, we hear of religious based charities, but in some total those good works pale in comparison to the evils done under the guise of sincerely held religious belief.  The ongoing horrors in Iraq underscore this reality (in the past, Christianity has caused similar horrors and widespread murder such as the Cathars in France and "old believers in Russia).  Here are highlights from the Huffington Post on the horrific fruits of religion in Iraq:

Islamic State militants have killed at least 500 members of Iraq's Yazidi minority, burying some alive and taking hundreds of women as slaves, an Iraqi government minister told Reuters on Sunday.

Human rights minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani accused the Sunni Muslim insurgents - who have ordered the community they regard as "devil worshippers" to convert to Islam or die - of celebrating a "a vicious atrocity" with cheers and weapons waved in the air. No independent confirmation was available.

Sudani said in a telephone interview that news of the killings had come from people who had escaped town of Sinjar, an ancient home of the Yazidis, a Kurdish-speaking community whose religion has set them apart from Muslims and other faiths.

"We have striking evidence obtained from Yazidis fleeing Sinjar and some who escaped death, and also crime scene images that show indisputably that the gangs of the Islamic State have executed at least 500 Yazidis after seizing Sinjar," he said

"Some of the victims, including women and children were buried alive in scattered mass graves in and around Sinjar."

Kurdish regional president Masoud Barzani urged his allies to send arms to help his forces hold off the militants, who have bases across the Syrian border. During a visit by French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, Barzani said: "We are not fighting a terrorist organization, we are fighting a terrorist state."

"In some of the images we have obtained there are lines of dead Yazidis who have been shot in the head while the Islamic State fighters cheer and wave their weapons over the corpses," he added. "This is a vicious atrocity."

A deadline passed at midday on Sunday for 300 families from the Yazidi community - followers of a religion influenced by the Zoroastrianism of ancient Persia - to convert to Islam or die. It was not immediately clear if the victims to whom the minister referred were from that group of families.

Obama said it would take more than bombs to restore stability, and criticized Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's Shi'ite-led government for failing to share power with Iraq's Sunni minority, which dominated before the U.S. invasion.

France joined the calls for Iraq's feuding leaders to form an inclusive government capable of countering the militants. "Iraq is in need of a broad unity government, and all Iraqis should feel that they are represented in this government," Foreign Minister Fabius said.

Maliki's critics say his sectarian agenda has prompted heavily armed Sunni tribes to join the insurgency. 

Personally, I believe Iraq needs to be divided - as it should have been at the end of World War I.  It has always been an artificially created country and  it is time to recognize the reality that maintaining Iraq as a unified country will likely never succeed.

Israeli Official/Leaders Call for Concentration Camps and Ethnic Clensing in Gaza

9-year-old Dina wounded when shrapnel pieces hit her eyes in an Israeli strike in Gaza, is treated at the Shifa Hospital in Gaza city on August 5, 2014.

I continue to be utterly shocked and dismayed by the horrible actions being undertaken by Israel in Gaza.  Worse yet are the calls for concentration camps and/or ethnic cleansing - a sanitized term for genocide - coming from Israeli figures who are not easily relegated to the category of the lunatic fringe.  What is all the more shocking is that if any ethnic/religious group ought to be sensitive to the dangers of such horrors it should be Jews who suffered so much under the Nazi "Final Solution."  Yet some like Moshe Feiglin, Deputy Speaker of the Israeli Knesset, are calling for actions all too reminiscent of Nazi actions against the Jews.  Equally disturbing is the fact that individuals like Feiglin seemingly do not care or grasp that Israeli is alienating those who formerly supported Israel.  A piece in the Daily Mail looks at the disturbing situation.  Here are excerpts:

An Israeli official has called for concentration camps in Gaza and ‘the conquest of the entire Gaza Strip, and annihilation of all fighting forces and their supporters’.

Moshe Feiglin, Deputy Speaker of the Israeli Knesset and member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ruling Likud Party, posted the inflammatory message on his Facebook page at the weekend.  

He lays out a detailed plan for the destruction of Gaza -  which includes shipping its residents across the world - in a letter he addressed to the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

He says another important part of his plan is the 'conquest of the entire Gaza Strip, and annihilation of all fighting forces and their supporters.' 

In the letter he expresses his desire for the IDF to find areas on the Sinai border to establish 'tent encampments...until relevant emigration destinations are determined.'

He says that the supply of electricity and water to the Gaza would be disconnected before being 'shelled with maximum fire power.'

Understandably, Andrew Sullivan is appalled as well.  Especially because Feiglin is not an isolated fringe case.  Andrew explains and vents:

What is one to make of the fact that the deputy speaker of the Knesset has called for ethnic cleansing in Gaza?

He’s not an obscure blogger for the Times of Israel. He is a luminary of the Likud – a man who got 23 percent of the vote in a contest for the Likud Party leadership. He was appointed to his current high position by Benjamin Netanyahu.

You read that right. There will be temporary “camps” where the Gaza population will be “concentrated”; they will be expelled with subsidies; basic supplies of water and electricity will be cut off for those who remain. The war-time ethics he recommends are: “Woe to the evildoer, and woe to his neighbor.” He backs the “annihiliation” of Hamas and all their supporters. His strategic goal is to “turn Gaza into Jaffa, a flourishing Israeli city with a minimum number of hostile civilians.” (Modern Jaffa, of course, was built on the ethnic cleansing of most of its Palestinian inhabitants in 1948.)

The usual response to this kind of thing among the lockstep pro-Israel community is that it is a tiny fringe opinion. And I can only hope they’re right. But what concerns me is that this racist, genocidal bigot was appointed deputy speaker of the Knesset by the current prime minister. What concerns me are the statements of Ayelet Shaked, the telegenic young protege of Naftali Bennett, who is touted as a future prime minister. This is from a Facebook post she wrote the day before the gruesome lynching of an Arab teen who was forced to drink gasoline and then burned to death by Jewish extremists. Note that her call for war came before any Hamas rocket was fired:

Behind every terrorist stand dozens of men and women, without whom he could not engage in terrorism. They are all enemy combatants, and their blood shall be on all their heads. Now this also includes the mothers of the martyrs, who send them to hell with flowers and kisses. They should follow their sons, nothing would be more just. They should go, as should the physical homes in which they raised the snakes. Otherwise, more little snakes will be raised there.

Again, she and Feiglin dispense with the distinction between civilians and militants in Gaza. So too did the president of the New York Board of Rabbis, David-Seth Kirshner, at a recent 10,000 strong rally for Israel in New York.

I suppose someone will claim that the deputy speaker of the Knesset, and the former head of the National Security Council or the former chief rabbi in Israel or the head of the largest Jewish youth group in the world are fringe figures. But I note that, so far as I have been able to find, there have been no consequences for their statements for any of them. And I have to ask a simple question: which leader of another American ally has appointed a man who favors genocide and ethnic cleansing as the deputy speaker of the legislature? Which other democracy has legitimate political parties in the governing coalition calling for permanent occupation of a neighboring state – and deliberate social engineering to create a new demographic ethnic reality in that conquered land? Putin’s Russia has not sunk that low.

And we are not merely talking about a hypothetical situation. The grotesque death toll from Gaza is a distillation of this mindset – revealing at best a chilling contempt for Arab life and at worst, with the shelling of schools and shelters, a policy of indiscriminate hatred and revenge.

I concur with Andrew.  ALL American aid to Israel needs to be halted until the barbaric murder of children and civilians in obscene numbers ceases permanently.  To Senator Tim Kaine and Mark Warner, I say, grow a spine and call for cuts to aid immediately.

 

Are The Trigger Points for World War III In Place?

One Hundred years ago tomorrow, Germany invaded Belgium and Great Britain declared war on Germany.  While what became known as World War I had actually begun in the east a few days earlier when Germany declared war on Russia, August 4th was when the rest of the dominoes for that disaster for millions began in full earnest.  While the lead up to World War I differed in some ways  from German aggression in the late 1930's, a common thread in the events leading up to both wars was the same: imperial ambitions on the part of some rulers and rabid nationalism.  Some argue that one hundred years after the beginning of World War I, the triggers are now in place for World War III.  It would be nice to hope that humankind might have learned from the disasters and horrors of the past, yet if one looks at events in Ukraine and Gaza and and the personalities of Putin and Netanyahu, it is easy to see aspects reminiscent of Kaiser Wilhelm, Adolph Hitler, and Mussolini.  Here are excerpts from an article in The Atlantic which looks at today's triggers for disaster:

Pessimism is a useful prism through which to view the affairs of states. Their ambition to gain, retain, and project power is never sated. Optimism, toward which Americans are generally inclined, leads to rash predictions of history’s ending in global consensus and the banishment of war. Such rosy views accompanied the end of the Cold War. They were also much in evidence a century ago, on the eve of World War I.

Then, as now, Europe had lived through a long period of relative peace, after the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Then, too, rapid progress in science, technology, and communications had given humanity a sense of shared interests that precluded war, despite the ominous naval competition between Britain and Germany. Then, too, wealthy individuals devoted their fortunes to conciliation and greater human understanding. Rival powers fumed over provocative annexations, like Austria-Hungary’s of Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1908, but world leaders scarcely believed a global conflagration was possible, let alone that one would begin just six years later. The very monarchs who would consign tens of millions to a murderous morass from 1914 to 1918 and bury four empires believed they were clever enough to finesse the worst.

The unimaginable can occur. That is a notion at once banal and perennially useful to recall. Indeed, it has just happened in Crimea, where a major power has forcefully changed a European border for the first time since 1945.

Events cascade. It is already clear that the nationalist fervor unleashed by Putin after a quarter century of Russia’s perceived post–Cold War decline is far from exhausted. Russians are sure that the dignity of their nation has been trampled by an American and European strategic advance to their border dressed up in talk of democracy, the rule of law, and human rights. Whether this is true is irrelevant; they believe it. National humiliation, real or not, is a tremendous catalyst for war. That was the case in Germany after the Treaty of Versailles . . . .  Russia, convinced of its lost greatness, is gripped by a Weimar neurosis resembling Germany’s post–World War I longing for its past stature and power. The Moscow-backed separatists taking over government buildings in eastern Ukraine and proclaiming an independent “Donetsk People’s Republic” demonstrate the virulence of Russian irredentism. Nobody can know where it will stop. Appetite, as the French say, grows with eating.

[T]he realization that the Russian bear can bite as well as growl is timely. It is a reminder that a multipolar world in a time of transition, when popular resentments are rising over joblessness and inequality, is a dangerous place indeed.

The international system does not look particularly stable. The Cold War’s bipolar confrontation, despite its crises, was predictable. Today’s world is not. It features a United States whose power is dominant but no longer determinant; a one-party China that is a rising hegemon; an authoritarian Russia giddy on nationalism and the idea of a restored imperium; and a weak, navel-gazing, blasé Europe whose pursuit of an ever closer union is on hold and perhaps on the brink of reversal.

Pacifist tendencies in western Europe coexist with views of power held in Moscow and Beijing that Bismarck or Clausewitz would recognize instantly.
A century ago, in the absence of clear lines or rules, it was just this kind of feel-good hope and baseless trust in the judgment of rival powers that precipitated catastrophe. But that, it may be said, was then. The world has supposedly been transformed.

But has it? Consider this article in my father’s 1938 high-school yearbook:

The machine has brought men face to face as never before in history. Paris and Berlin are closer today than neighboring villages were in the Middle Ages. In one sense distance has been annihilated. We speed on the wings of the wind and carry in our hands weapons more dreadful than the lightning … The challenge of the machine is the greatest opportunity mankind has yet enjoyed. Out of the rush and swirl of the confusions of our times may yet arise a majestic order of world peace and prosperity.

The ghosts of repetition reside alongside the prophets of progress. From the “rush and swirl” of 1938 where “distance has been annihilated” would follow in short order the slaughter of Stalingrad, the mass murder of European Jewry, the indiscriminate deaths in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the anguish of all humanity. We should not lightly discard a well-grounded pessimism or the treaties it has produced.

 

Millennials - And Others - Are Over Israel

Seemingly, I am not the only one who is over America's blind backing of Israel no matter what atrocities the IDF may commit (I got a letter from Senator Mark Warner in reply to my inquires that was just as mealy mouthed and unacceptable as Senator Tim Kaine's earlier in the week). A new Pew Research Center poll shows a huge generational shift in support of Israel so even though Congress has slavishly backed actions by Israel that seem aimed at genocide - several posts have appeared in the Times of Israel calling for out right genocide against Palestinians - , younger voters are not willing to close their eyes to the atrocities.  A piece in Salon looks at Israel's apparent effort to destroy long term American support for that nation.  Here are excepts:

It might seem counterintuitive to make the argument that Israel should no longer count on U.S. support for its policies as assuredly it has in the past.  After all, hasn’t the Senate just passed not one but now two resolutions by unanimous consent declaring its backing of Israel’s deadly attacks on and invasion of Gaza?

Yet even with these unambiguous resolutions emanating from the Senate, we find more and more evidence that support for Israel from the American public is slipping.  A recent report in the Washington Post noted that “A new Pew Research Center poll is the second in the past week to show a huge generational split on the current conflict in Gaza. While all age groups north of 30 years old clearly blame Hamas more than Israel for the current violence, young adults buck the trend in a big way. Among 18 to 29-year olds, 29 percent blame Israel more for the current wave of violence, while 21 percent blame Hamas.”

Clearly there are a number of possible explanations for this; here are three that come to mind.

First, . . . . As much as the world should strongly and unambiguously condemn such acts of anti-Semitism, to focus on a “second Holocaust” is to ignore the actual reason why anti-Semitism has today reared its ugly head again. It is not because of some essential, primordial racism against Jews. It is because of the actions of the state of Israel in staging a brutal, prolonged attack on the Palestinian people that is replete with violations of human rights and international law. That Hamas has also committed attacks on civilians does not erase the fact that Israel’s violence violates basic international humanitarian laws regarding proportionality.

International support for Israel is ebbing because the Holocaust narrative can no longer offer an omnipotent shield against a critique of the second narrative regarding the founding of the state of Israel.  Israel is in fact risking losing the narrative war altogether, as more and more of the global public is asking questions that probe into that history, prompted by the evidence of Israeli’s current efforts to continue and expand Israeli power and land, efforts that are now increasingly regarded not as survival tactics but as violent colonial ones.

More and more younger Americans, growing up well past the postwar era, find the Holocaust narrative to be less than absolutely and unquestionably a good reason to support the horrible killings in Gaza.  And as they learn more, their support will wane further.

Second, the massive attack on Gaza and its obscene civilian death toll is now delivered to a global audience via a variety of media forms that far exceed the mainstream media.  

Younger people are open to these modes of narrative, curious to know more, and morally puzzled and deeply concerned, and they in turn become conveyers of opinion and witnessing, as seen in the Tumblr site, TheWorldStandsWithPalestine which documents the demonstrations taking place around the world by means of uploaded photos from the participants themselves.

The Senate’s criticism of the U.N.’s findings on Gaza thus is immediately made questionable by stories like these and many others that create a cognitive dissonance in our minds between the claim of “equal violations” and the actual, not fabricated, figures that give quantitative weight to the visual images of disproportionate Palestinian death and destruction.

Finally, support for Israel is going to wane because unlike before, those who wish to criticize Israel today have already well-established and well-recognized modes of protest available to them. Most important of course is the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, which was established in 2005. 

The fact that more and more younger Americans are increasingly skeptical of supporting Israel’s military efforts is encouraging in the long run.  But we should not lose sight of the tremendous humanitarian crisis we are witnessing today. Change might be coming, but for now action is needed.

Israel may continue to plead and play the role of the victim, but the endless barrage of  photos and video clips that show what is really taking place will increasingly erode support for Israel.  Actions have consequences and the fact that Israel - and the U.S. military for that matter - may have gotten away with committing atrocities in the past no longer guarantees that such will be the case in the future.  Murdering hundreds of children is not what a victim does.  It's that simple. Netanyahu and his fellow henchmen hopefully will figure this out sooner as opposed to later.  Meanwhile, I personally support a 100% cessation of US military aid to Israel.  

Israel Has Lost All Moral Authority

The image above (which a blogger friend shared via Facebook) is horrible and perhaps I am susceptible to easy emotion because I have young grandchildren in the same general age bracket as the young victim of Israeli war crimes (at least that's how I see the situation).  Ironically, once upon a time I was sympathetic to Israel and thought its military action against Palestinians justified if not overly palatable.   But no more.  Under Netanyahu and his government, Israel acts more like 1940's Nazi murderers that helped prompt Israel's creation.  Hamas supposedly represents a threat to Israel, yet the dead are over 10 to 1 Palestinian versus Israeli.  And the number of children being killed is horrific.  

I for one am tired of being forced to unwillingly subsidize Israel's murder of children through American military aid to Israel.  I've told my U.S. Senators as much.  Tim Kaine sent me a mealy mouthed response that basically said nothing and which I take as an insult to my intelligence.  Mark Warner hasn't even bothered to reply - his campaign just got a pretty nasty e-mail from  me that I will share with readers if I do not get a response tomorrow.

Part of what bothers me in addition to the deaths of innocents is the mindset evidenced by Israel which mirrors the Christofascists/Tea Party elements of the GOP base: if one isn't of the same skin color and/or religious belief construct, then you are not human and are worthy of death and mayhem.  Religion is a poison and it is what needs to be eradicated from the face of the planet.

Assholes like Victoria Cobb, Maggie Gallagher, and Tony Perkins, et al, spend millions against gay marriage and the dissemination of hatred when there are far larger evils to be defeated, starting with religious based bigotry and hatred.  If they are what Christianity is all about, please consider me an atheist.  Their God is nothing less than horrifically evil.  Ditto for Netanyahu's God.

Israel: A Study in Alienating Public Opinion and Fueling Anti-Semites

Dead children killed by Israeli forces

Like many others I am growing weary with more images every day of children slaughtered by Israeli military forces in Gaza.  Yet as the carnage continues, some are calling anyone  who criticizes Israel an "anti-Semite."  The leadership in Israel continues to be blind to what the war on Hamas is doing for Israel's moral standing in the world not to mention that the daily murder of children can only result in more and more hard core enemies of Israel among Palestinians.  Just because one can do something militarily, doesn't automatically make it the right or smart thing to do.  It is a lesson America has failed to learn from its own disastrous Middle East policies.   Andrew Sullivan looks at some thoughts as to how Israel my be defeating itself:

In effect, what Israel can do militarily is to kill a lot of people, the majority of which will probably be Hamas members or supporters, but which will do nothing to politically advance Israeli security beyond demonstrating to Palestinians and their supporters that in favorable circumstances Israel can do what it wants with international support.

Yet the Israeli superiority that needs to be demonstrated is political not military; no sane Palestinian believes they can defeat the Israelis in battle. … In the end there will be a cease-fire, and Hamas will have survived by virtue of the campaign they forced Israel to wage, even if every single current Hamas member in Gaza is somehow killed by the IDF. After all, Hamas is already being treated by mediators as an almost equal of Israel while the Palestinian Authority is all but forgotten. At that point what truly will have been accomplished?

It is Netanyahu who proved that the PA’s moderate strategy is futile – since Israel has only rewarded that moderation with more aggressive settlements. It is Netanyahu’s hysterical and belligerent exploitation of the deaths of three Israeli teens that elevated Hamas to a position it would never have achieved on its own. And this awful cycle of extremism from Jerusalem has now forged a unanimous Security Council resolution for an immediate ceasefire. But once the dogs of war have been released, it’s hard to rein them back in:

I can’t help but ask myself, What is this end they’re striving toward? Even if each and every Hamas fighter is taken out, does anyone truly believe that the Palestinian people’s aspiration for national independence will disappear with them?

The Israeli military can win the battles, but peace and quiet for the citizens of Israel will only be achieved through political compromise. But this, according to the patriotic powers running the current war, is something that we’re not supposed to say, because this kind of talk is precisely what’s stopping the I.D.F. from winning. Ultimately, when this operation is over and the tally is taken of the many dead bodies, on our side and theirs, the accusing finger will once again be pointed at us, the saboteurs.

Noting that Israel has carried out over 2,400 airstrikes since the start of the war, Robert Beckhusen explains why Israel’s air power is so ineffective against Hamas:

Whether Israel is justified or not in attacking Hamas, the choice the Israeli military to rely heavily on air power to achieve its objectives has resulted in disproportionate civilian losses compared to the threat Hamas poses. … The result is that either way, Hamas will probably come out of the fight with enough Israeli dead on its hands to claim some kind of victory. Hamas will likely be hurting badly. But Israel’s reliance on air power to destroy Hamas’s rockets will also likely fall short. Without a political solution, the conflict will almost certainly resume again.

Winning the battle sometimes nonetheless results in losing the longer term war.  This message seems lost on Israel's leaders at the moment.   They are creating endless propaganda opportunities for their enemies and losing the support of former supporters.

Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East

As noted in one or more previous posts, much of the disaster which is today's Middle East stems from the aftermath of World War I when the victorious French and British carved up what had been the Ottoman Empire and drew boundaries to nations such as what became Iraq with no regard to the ethnic and religious divisions of the region - much to the dismay of T.E. Lawrence, a/k/a Lawrence of Arabia.  Even the ongoing violence in Gaza traces in part back to the bad decisions made in 1919-1920.  A book, "Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East," looks at this reality and also the troubled life of the real Lawrence of Arabia who may have suffered from what we now know as post traumatic stress disorder.  Here are excerpts from an introduction to the book:

On the morning of October 30, 1918, Colonel Thomas Edward Lawrence received a summons to Buckingham Palace.  The  king had requested his presence.

The collective mood in London that day was euphoric. For the past four years and three months, Great Britain and much of the rest of the world had been consumed by the bloodiest conflict in recorded history, one that had claimed the lives of some sixteen million people across three continents. Now, with a speed that scarcely could have been imagined mere weeks earlier, it was all coming to an end. On that same day, one of Great Britain’s three principal foes, the Ottoman Empire, was accepting peace terms, and the remaining two, Germany and Austria-Hungary, would shortly follow suit. Colonel Lawrence’s contribution  to that war effort had been in its Middle  Eastern theater,  and he too was caught quite off guard by its rapid close. At the beginning of that month, he had still been in the field assisting in the capture of Damascus, an event that heralded the collapse of the Ottoman army. Back in England for less than a week, he was already consulting with those senior British statesmen and generals tasked with mapping out the postwar borders of the Middle East, a once-fanciful endeavor that had now become quite urgent. Lawrence was apparently under the impression that his audience with King George V that morning was to discuss those ongoing deliberations.

He was mistaken. Once at the palace, the thirty-year-old  colonel was ushered into a ballroom where, flanked by a half dozen dignitaries and a coterie of costumed courtiers, the king and queen soon entered. A low cushioned stool had been placed just before the king’s raised dais, while to the monarch’s immediate right, the lord chamberlain held a velvet pillow on which an array of medals rested. After introductions were made, George V fixed his guest with a smile: “I have some presents for you.” 


Except Lawrence didn’t kneel. Instead, just as the ceremony got under way, he quietly informed the king that he was refusing the honor.  There followed a moment of confusion. Over the nine-hundred-year history of the monarchy, the refusal of knighthood was such an extraordinary event that there was no protocol for how to handle it. Eventually, King George returned to the lord chamberlain’s pillow the medal he had been awkwardly holding, and under the baleful gaze of a furious Queen Mary, Colonel Lawrence turned and walked away.

TODAY,  MORE  THAN  seven  decades  after  his death,  and  nearly  a century since the exploits that made him famous, Thomas Edward Lawrence—“Lawrence of Arabia,” as he is better known—remains one of the most enigmatic and controversial figures of the twentieth century. Despite scores of biographies, countless scholarly studies, and at least three  movies, including one considered a masterpiece, historians have never quite decided what to make of the young, bashful Oxford scholar who rode into battle at the head of an Arab army and changed history.

One reason for the contentiousness over his memory has to do with the terrain he traversed. Lawrence was both eyewitness to and participant in some of the most pivotal events leading to the creation of the modern Middle East, and this is a corner of the earth where even the simplest assertion is dissected and parsed and argued over. In the unending debates over the roots of that region’s myriad fault lines, Lawrence has been alternately extolled and pilloried, sanctified, demonized, even diminished to a footnote, as political goals require.

[T]he cardinal sin of these debates is that they obscure the most beguiling riddle of Lawrence’s story: How did he do it? How did a painfully shy Oxford archaeologist without a single day of military training become the battlefield commander of a foreign revolutionary army, the political master strategist who foretold so many of the Middle Eastern calamities to come?

The short answer might seem somewhat anticlimactic: Lawrence was able to become “Lawrence of Arabia” because no one was paying much attention.  Amid the vast slaughter occurring across the breadth of Europe in World War I, the Middle Eastern theater  of that war was of markedly secondary importance. Within that theater, the Arab Revolt to which Lawrence became affiliated was, to use his own words, “a sideshow of a sideshow.” . . . .  in the view of British war planners, if a young army officer left largely to his own devices could sufficiently organize the fractious Arab tribes to harass their Turkish enemy, all to the good. Of course, it wouldn’t be very long before both the Arab Revolt and the Middle East became vastly more important to the rest of the world, but this was a possibility barely considered indeed, it could hardly have been imagined—at the time.

But this isn’t the whole story either. That’s because the low regard with which British war strategists viewed events in the Middle East found reflection in the other great warring powers. As a result, these powers, too, relegated their military efforts in the region to whatever could be spared from the more important  battlefields elsewhere, consigning the task of intelligence gathering and fomenting rebellion and forging alliances to men with résumés just as modest and unlikely as Lawrence’s.

[T]here remain at least two compelling reasons why T. E. Lawrence and his story should reside firmly at its center. The  modern Middle East was largely created by the British. It was they who carried the Allied war effort in the region during World War I and who, at its close, principally fashioned its peace. It was a peace presaged by the nickname given the region by covetous Allied leaders in war- time: “the Great Loot.” As one of Britain’s most important and influential agents in that arena, Lawrence was intimately connected to all, good and bad, that was to come.

Second, and as the episode at Buckingham Palace attests, this was an experience that left him utterly  changed, unrecognizable in certain respects even to himself. Victory carries a moral burden the vanquished never know, and as an architect of momentous events, Lawrence would be uniquely haunted by what he saw and did during the Great Loot.

Though not mentioned in the introduction, relevantt to me at least is the fact that Lawrence is considered to have been gay - he once wrote that the love of his life had been an Arab youth who died during the war and left Lawrence emotionally devastated.  Despite the Christofascist and Catholic Church efforts to denigrate gays, we have played critical roles through out history and on many occasions, perhaps the world's future would have been better if others had listened to our insights.

No Empathy for Others: What Republicans, the Israeli Leadership and Christofascists Have in Common

GRAPHIC PHOTO; I apologize for the horror of this photo, but we need to open our eyes to what Israel is doing.  By Mahmood Bassam/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images.

With brutality running amok in Ukraine and Gaza to name a few "hot spots" of war and Republicans and Christofascists preaching the antithesis of the Gospel message (which both factions claim to honor), one has to wonder how men (and women) can be so cruel to others.  Particularly when religion is a consistent undercurrent behind the war and mayhem and general treatment of those who are different as refuse.  To me, it comes down to a common lack of empathy for others.  If someone looks different, holds a different faith, or is of a different sexual orientation, suddenly they are worthy of being murdered, stripped of their legal rights and subjected to an almost less than human status.  Here in America, we see the Republicans (think Paul Ryan) and the GOP's Christofascist base waging a constant war on the poor, gays and most recently undocumented children and youth from Central America.  Even more horrifically, in Gaza we see Israel we see the Israeli army killing hundreds of Palestinians - many children - while claiming to act in self defense even though the death toll is roughly one Israeli for every 10 Palestinians.  Personally, I am disgusted with the godly folk, their political whores and Israel.  I'm almost to the point of ending all US aid to Israel.  A piece by Noam Sheizaf looks at the horrors unfolding in Gaza:

In The Fog of War, Errol Morris’ excellent documentary, former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara speaks about a certain inability to understand the enemy – one that stems from a lack of empathy.

In the film, McNamara, a brilliant systems analyst, who is today associated more than anything with the Vietnam War, says that part of President Kennedy’s successful management of the Cuban Missile Crisis was his administration’s ability to put itself in the shoes of the Soviets and understand their point of view. “In the case of Vietnam,” he says, “we didn’t know them well enough to empathize.” As a result, each side had a completely different understanding of what the war was about.

This understanding came to McNamara only in 1991, when he visited Vietnam and met with the country’s foreign minister. McNamara asked the foreign minister whether he thought it was possible to reach the same results of the war (independence and uniting the south with the north) without the heavy losses.
“You were fighting to enslave us,” yelled the foreign minister at McNamara, who in turn replied that that is an absurd notion. The two nearly came to blows. But as time passed McNamara understood. “We saw Vietnam as an element of the Cold War,” he says, whereas what the foreign minister was trying to tell him was that for the Vietnamese it was a war of independence. Communism was not the heart of the matter for the Vietnamese. They were willing to make the worst sacrifices because they were fighting for their freedom – not for Marx or Brezhnev.

I’ve exchanged emails with people in Gaza in the past few days. These are people who don’t care much for Hamas in their everyday lives, whether due to its fundamentalist ideology, political oppression or other aspects of its rule. But they do support Hamas in its war against Israel; for them, fighting the siege is their war of independence. Or at least one part of it.

Israelis, both left and right, are wrong to assume that Hamas is a dictatorship fighting Israel against its people’s will. Hamas is indeed a dictatorship, and there are many Palestinians who would gladly see it fall, but not at this moment in time. Right now I have no doubt that most Palestinians support the attacks on IDF soldiers entering Gaza; they support kidnapping as means to release their prisoners (whom they see as prisoners of war) and the unpleasant fact is that most of them, I believe, support firing rockets at Israel.

 For the Palestinians, the choice is between occupation by proxy in the West Bank and a war in Gaza. Both offer no hope, and neither are forms of freedom. The Israeli promise — that an end to armed struggle will bring freedom — is not trustworthy, as the experiences of past years has shown. It simply never happens. The quiet years in the West Bank have not brought the Palestinians any closer to an independent state, while the truce in between wars in Gaza has not brought about a relief from the siege. One can debate the reasons for why this happened, but one cannot debate reality.

Israelis are convinced they are fighting a terror organization driven by a fundamentalist Islamic ideology. Palestinians are convinced Israelis are looking to enslave them, and that as soon as the war is over the siege will be reinforced. Since this is exactly what Israel intends to do, as our government has repeatedly stated, they have no reason to stop fighting.

With every dead Palestinian child Israel is creating more and more ardent enemies.   Moreover, as the murder of children continues, more and more citizens in other nations will come to believe that it is the Israelis, not the Palestinians who are the real terrorists.  I am not anti-Semitic or anti-Israel, but I do have to wonder when the Hell someone in Israel will wake up and realize they are destroying support for Israel.  Come out of the fog of war and realize how others are viewing the conflict.  I'd also add that just because a child is Palestinian, it does not make the less a child or less human.  One would think Israeli would have learned something from the anti-Jewish nightmare of Nazi Germany.  Apparently not.

P.S. I have children of my own and now grandchildren as well.  Anyone responsible for harming any of them would find me to be a life long enemy out for very brutal revenge.  I suspect Palestinians feel precisely the same way.

Israel PR Disaster Continues to Mount

On Saturday night I detailed how the boyfriend and I found ourselves in the midst of an anti-Israel demonstration while in New York City. The photo at bottom shows what we stepped out into when we exited the show we had gone to see earlier in the day. I continue to believe that regardless of its objectives, Israel has likely set itself up for a PR disaster in terms of the ongoing assault in the Gaza Strip. The destruction and deaths being wrought on Palestians (as seen in the photo above of the legs of the body of one of three Palestinian siblings killed by an Israeli tank shell from Andrew Sullivan) seems to far out weigh the losses suffered by Israel and I fear will further undermine support for Israel and been seen as validating Palestinian grievances. Here are some highlights from the Daily News about the demonstration:

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Chanting "Free Palestine," thousands of Palestinian supporters demonstrated in Times Square Saturday to protest Israel's punishing military offensive in Gaza. The wave of protesters stretched across three blocks, dwarfing the dozens of boisterous supporters of Israel assembled across Seventh Ave.

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"What's happening in Gaza is something that shouldn't be tolerated anywhere in the world," said Bassal Omar, 29, an American-born Palestinian from the Bronx. "It's a humanitarian crisis, and it's just going to get worse."

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Apparently some supporters of Israel are catching on and becoming appalled by the deaths of Palestinian children as evidenced by these comments from J Street:

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Israel has a special place in each of our hearts. But we recognize that neither Israelis nor Palestinians have a monopoly on right or wrong. While there is nothing "right" in raining rockets on Israeli families or dispatching suicide bombers, there is nothing "right" in punishing a million and a half already-suffering Gazans for the actions of the extremists among them.

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And there is nothing to be gained from debating which injustice is greater or came first. What's needed now is immediate action to stop the violence before it spirals out of control. The United States, the Quartet, and the world community must not wait - as they did in the Israel-Lebanon crisis of 2006 - for weeks to pass and hundreds or thousands more to die before intervening.

Israel Invades Gaza

I often do not understand the reasoning behind Israel's actions - not at least if the leadership has any care about the media and propaganda advantage that is being given to the Palestinians. Coming out of a show on 42nd Street today here in New York City, the boyfriend and I found ourselves about to be enveloped in an anti-Israel/pro-Palestinian demonstration, complete with signs reading "Stop the Gaza Holocaust" and similar things. The protesters included Islamic looking women and children and all were decrying the deaths of innocent civilians caused by the Israeli actions. I truly do not favor one side or the other in the conflict. Instead, I just wish all the violence and killing being done by both sides would end. When I see photos of dead children, I at times think right is on the side of neither of the opposing factions. Here are a few highlights from the New York Times:

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In unleashing a series of punishing attacks in Gaza last week, Israel clearly aimed to hand Hamas a defeat from which it could not recover anytime soon. The campaign may succeed, experts here and in Israel say, but it could also backfire. Either way, the political consequences could reverberate throughout the Middle East, all the way to Iran, and help determine the ability of President-elect Barack Obama to pursue his stated goals of calming the Middle East through diplomacy.

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While Israeli leadership was not stating wider goals, there was clearly hope in the country — as tanks and troops massed late in the week — that the assault in Gaza would do more than just stop the rocket fire with which Hamas had broken a cease-fire last month. The larger hope was that subduing Hamas would delegitimize the group’s leadership in the eyes of the Palestinian people and eliminate its power to prevent a two-state solution.

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In a highly optimistic scenario for Israel and the United States, a clear victory for Israel would make it easier for Egypt, Jordan and countries farther afield to declare common cause against Islamic militancy and its main sponsor in the region, Iran. A two-state treaty could follow, and then perhaps peace between Israel and Syria, leaving Iran isolated behind the buffer of a newly democratic and peaceful, if not particularly friendly, Iraq.

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But Israel’s attacks also could fail outright, and history suggests that as the more likely scenario, Middle East experts across the political spectrum said. The strikes — and the Arab anger over scenes of death and destruction — have highlighted divisions in the Middle East that can prevent Arab nations from working with Israel.