Robert Mugabe Has a New Best Friend!

As the two mentalists meet, allies in being utterly wacky and killing people who dissent, a firm handshake is shared, a handshake seemingly supervised by a Jew. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad hides his loathing of the Jew well behind a rictus smile. Mugabe grins inanely, not being too sure what a Jew is.

With the Jew still loitering in the background, soon to be shot, Mugabe and Ahmadinejad double up on the handshake, making it a virtual hand sandwich. However, smiles quickly fade as the clamminess of the anti-Semite's skin upsets the mad old African ballbag, who keeps his "claws of death" (as he named them) in tip-top shape. The alliance of lunacy is in the balance...

  

Embarrassed by his clammy palms and realising the bat-shit crazy old loon is literally slipping from his grasp, Ahmadinejad throws caution to the wind and moves in for the reach around and embraces the mentally unbalanced honky-hater. Smiles all round as Mugabe loves this kind of man on man shit and anyway, the Arab makes him feel tall.

A quick change of suits after the successful (if slightly wet) handshake and full on cuddle, leaves the two dictators in a confident and sartorially smooth mood, so much so, that the two unlikely gays hold hands and prance about an airport where Mugabe has all the whites shipped out of the country and blames everything on the British.

Happy 'The Day a Jew Was Tortured and Killed' Day

Bible Study: A Very Confusing Book Indeed

Bible studies finished last week with humanity prostrating itself before the Bible in awe at how ruddy bloody amazing it all was. This subservience to the text meant that any queries about an odd passage of writing, or laws that were already out of date, could be dismissed with the idea that puny human language had splintered under the divine impact of God’s power. Reading the Bible literally was like looking at just the face but not the heart, seeing a flat land but ignoring the majestic mountains that surround it.

And if that didn’t work, a quick clip round the ear with the command to stop bloody thinking so much and get prostrating yourself before it.

All this interpretation and prostration led to, naturally, some odd interpretations to please God, such as Europe’s first act of communal cooperation as it crawled out of the primordial Dark Age sludge: the First Crusade. Quoting Jesus as literally as you possible could: “anyone who does not carry his cross and come after me cannot be my disciple” the crusaders, in a bizarre act of love for their God, hacked a few thousand Jews and Muslims to pieces.

Jews in the meantime, when not being attacked by eager to please Christians, were struggling with the two concepts of a God: one who walked, talked, sat on a throne, got jealous, angry and changed his mind…often and without much warning; with a god that was timeless, impassable, didn’t care about mundane events (such as prayers and other tedious business), didn’t create the cosmos because the cosmos and God were eternal.

A struggle that anyone who has contemplated the Abrahamic God will be more than familiar with.

Then came Martin Luther and the noble if not controversial idea that has shaped much of our religious landscape: sola scriptura, the idea that scripture alone is the guide to God’s will and in turn that the Bible can be digested alone, without guidance by anyone else. This gave everyone the right to interpret the ancient and complex documents how they saw fit, which in turn led to the vast raft of Christian sects we now have (there are some 20+ main branches of the faith but each of these has many offshoots), this religious liberty is indeed problematic

Sola scriptura is about the reader making annotations in the margins, erasing the traditional divine gloss and making it a living, breathing, personal document. At first, this method spearheaded by Martin Luther was Jesus-centric to an absurd length, famously leading to his ninety-five theses nailed to church doors and the rift with Rome, the word of the Bible versus sacramental tradition: “a simple layman armed with scripture is to be believed above a pope or a council without it”. Humanity no longer is looks up to the Bible but stands side by side with it, a comrade in life’s battles and a fundamental switch in how the Bible is perceived and used; it is now the tool of the many.

The came John Calvin, who sought a middle ground less fundamental than Martin Luther, one based on the concept that the large swathes of the Bible that didn’t mention Jesus were just as important, a re-connection with the Old Testament. Less edifying stories were seen as steps on a long path and did not have to be explained away with allegory and exegesis. Calvin also pushed the idea that the ever-burgeoning field of study called science was not contrary to religion but an extension of it. And if you seek scientific knowledge, you do not turn to the Bible but to scientific thought.

The world’s galloping modernisation was progressive and empowering but with it came an inbuilt intolerance towards religious extremism, so in 1620 a party of English settlers travelled across the Atlantic. The English puritans, radical Calvinists, were following the exodus mythology in the Bible, finding a mandate in the bible to repress the Native Americans, all the while seeing their exodus as a precursor to the last days…which so far haven’t come of course but more on that in the final edition of Bible Study.

What was established, in what became the United States of America, sums up many of the contradictions of the Bible. A single text that can be interpreted to serve diametrically opposed interests, from African slaves embracing the same exodus narrative of liberation against their Christian owners, who in turn claimed the Bible’s lax attitude towards slaves as justification for their actions. And from this Biblically justified rising up of the slaves against their owners came one of the most distorted Christian cults, the Klu Klux Klan who used the Bible to justify lynching.

Bible Study: The New Testament Has a Really Shit Ending

Much of what we call the New Testament is actually a bunch of letters written by Paul of Tarsus in an effort to answer questions put to him about the proto-Jewish cult he was the leader of and an effort to spread the word of the man he believed to be the Messiah. He had no idea, or indeed intention, that such missives would become scripture.

Paul also began the process of Christians treating the Torah and its accompanying texts as merely a prelude to the main event that is the coming of Jesus, an unfettering of the Jewish cult from its Jewish roots and its slipping into a new sphere, the world of the gentile, a massive captive audience looking for something outside of the exclusive covenant of Judaism.

And by the middle of the second century much of what would become the New Testament was written, Paul’s letters were joined by the Jesus biographies of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John but others, such as Thomas and the books of Ebionites and the Nazarenes are lost, along with what historians refer to as Q, the text that covered the teachings of Jesus and a far more detailed account of his trail, torture and death that was the source document used by Matthew and Luke for their writings. Books for the canon came and went, with only a few constants, which makes the current fad for the verbatim and infinitely wish nature of the terribly flawed document that is the Bible seem even more delusional.

Indeed the New Testament canon was not fixed until around the fourth century, quite simply because it took that long for Christianity to fully take shape into a coherent belief system. But by the time it was in place, it was already heavily edited so that many of the prophecies in the Old Testament rang true in the New, an early insight into the complex relationship that Christians would share with the faith that spawned them. A desire to be separate from the mother faith, to disown it but a desire to also have it anoint Jesus as the Messiah; remember that at this time Christianity was a cult that needed verification as a legitimate religion, something it actually got when Constantine converted in 312.

But that doesn’t stop the New Testament coming across as anti-Semitic, which it isn’t really as it was written by Jews, self-loathing Jews but Jews never the less but it does reflect a real disenchantment with Jewish religion and the aforementioned anxiety to reach out to the gentile world meant that much blame was placed on the authors own people, famously of course with Matthew’s words to the Jewish crowd at the death of Jesus:

“His blood be upon us and our children.”

A phrase that has pretty much been the one steady inspiration behind centuries and centuries of pogroms and raging anti-Semitism.

A special mention has to go out to the worst ending to a book that I’ve read in a long time: the Book of Revelation, which is a vile, toxic, bitter and fearful little snuff movie fantasy by John of Patmos, that very nearly never made it into the canon because it is so bad and ill-fitting. Indeed, many people still consider its entry a moot point, while for many it is all the Bible is. It doesn’t surprise me that it was stuck onto the end, like some embarrassing relative you don’t want in the family photo but its position has fooled many modern Christians into thinking it is the final word.

It is most definately not...

Bible Study: And in The Beginning There Was Exegesis...

For no reason other than I can, I've started re-reading certain bits of the Bible with Karen Armstrong's excellent "The Bible: The Biography" as my companion, as I delve back into the belly of the beast.

It confuses me as to why a literal interpretation of the Bible, such as we are now seeing influence much policy making and public discourse in the USA, is a relatively modern invention, only really dating from the late 19th century. Up until that point, the idea that Genesis, for example, was a de facto guide to the start of life was something only spouted by mentalists. For most of its history the Bible has been understood with the tools of allegory, exegesis, myth making and skilful interpretation. It is the modern age, with all of its reason and science, that has seemingly placed a massive pressure on the text and its readers have turned to dogma and fundamentalism in order to defend it. But more on that in a later blog post…

Let us begin with the Torah, because this is where the Bible began. It is clear to me that this document was supposed to be fluid, supposed to be and indeed still is, a work in progress; an every changing testimony constantly under exegesis. The early Jews always feared that the commuting of their faith to the written word and page would limit it, make it unmovable and dogmatic; the idea of being written in stone held no sway here; such confines were seen as restrictive, the oral tradition held sway with its organic approach that enables it to move and change with the times.

But slowly the Jewish faith took form in the written word and I for one never realised that what we call the Old Testament wasn’t even finished by the time the New Testament was being constructed; their development ran side by side.

And then the Romans destroyed the Second Temple in 70CE and along with it, the majority of the varying Jewish cults but one of the few cults to survive and then prosper were of course the followers of Jesus and their musings are full of the horror of that destruction.

It’s odd that many of the things ascribed to Jesus are either not in the Bible or are never explicitly mentioned in it, such as Jesus claiming he is the Messiah, which he does not, it is his followers that do much to build the mythology around Jesus. It's also odd that many of the things that Jesus does say are selectively ignored, such as the personal example he and his followers set.

Let us recall the manifesto of Jesus that comes to us from the Bible: to live as devout orthodox Jews (revere the Torah, keep the Sabbath and observe the dietary laws) with no private property but to share goods equally, to endure voluntary poverty with a special remit for care of the poor and a loyalty to the cult over and above family ties. Finally, evil should always be met with non-violence and love.

Where has this religion gone? It is in the Bible but does not seem to be present on this Earth? Indeed the description of the Jesus cult reads like that of some kind of socialist, hippy squat manifesto. It is also fascinating how the Jewish roots of Christ have been subsumed and hidden.

In my next Bible Study blog I’ll be turning my attention to how a bunch of missives by a collection of cultists, who never ever dreamed that their words would become scripture, as they fully expected their Jesus to come back to them in their lifetime, ended up becoming the New Testament.

FLYING JEWS DO BATTLE WITH PIG AIDS!

You have to laugh, otherwise you'd cry.

A bunch of Rabbis chartered a plane on Monday and took to the air above Israel.

Why?

To ward off Swine Flu of course, by shouting prayers down those weird phones you have on airplanes and by blowing ceremonial horns (which is not a euphemism for their willys) as loud as they could. Needless to say, the chief Rabbi in charge of the airborne war on Pig AIDS thought this was a very wise move and would "stop the pandemic so people will stop dying from it".

After they'd finished rocking backwards and forwards and blowing into trumpets, the group of Rabbis proudly announced that: "we are certain that, thanks to the prayer, the danger is already behind us" although whether the danger has passed for Israel based Gentiles and God forbid, the Palestinians I've no idea. I presume that the tooting of horns and prayers bounce off the non-Jews and perhaps, if you are Palestinian, exacerbate your chances of getting Swine Flu?

File this one under yet another reason as to why religion, in all it's silly forms, holds back humanity and is a waste of bloody time.

Oh and on an interesting side note, Swine Flu or to give it it's unofficial title Pig AIDS, is labelled somewhat differently in Israel, due to the deep loathing of all things pork. It is instead called Mexican Flu (or Tex-Mex AIDS as I've snazzily called it), which is not at all offensive to Mexican people all around the world, after all, this is all their fault in the first place isn't it?

All (Insert Word Here) Will Burn in Hell

I was working in a school yesterday, I will not mention it by name but it is a faith school, or more precisely, a Muslim school.

I've only ever taught in a Muslim school once before, some time ago, girls only if I recall but the work I was doing was related to creative writing, so the issues that arose yesterday were no where to be seen.

It was an odd remit from the start, to work with the children on prejudice but we were forbidden from dealing with homophobia, there was also sensitivity around mentioning equality between men and women. This did not bode well and felt hypocritical and blinkered.

The sessions passed relatively normally, aside from the closing exercise, devised originally by Coretta Scott King, where various offensive sentences are read out loud but the object of each sentence is changed and the children respond with how it makes them feel. If it upsets them or makes them angry, they raise their hands and if they agree, they are to touch their ears.

When the key word used in the prejudiced sentences was Black, or Disabled Person, or White; the hands shot into the air but when the key word was switched to Jew, something quite disturbing happened: a few hands moved to ears.

Anti-Semitism in nine year old children is never nice to see, even if it is unthinking, learned behaviour from parents and family but our job is to challenge, gently of course, such perceptions. The exercise is clever in that we can compare and contrast the reactions to the other key words, the rest of the sentence is the same and unpick why it is different for Jews.

The answers showed a moral absolutism, a resistance to the idea that this particular group should be exempt from prejudice and so, as a last straw, the word Muslim was used in the prejudiced statements to draw the connection between anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. The response to the use of the word Muslim in the statements was visceral, understandably because when the prejudiced lie is about you directly, it hurts all the more.

I was amazed to see that a hardcore still refused to accept the connection, that abuse of Jews was somehow justified based, no doubt in their young minds, on Jewish past actions. Indeed, it was the classic dehumanisation of the 'enemy' to fully enable hatred but in humans so young, it was a profoundly disturbing and distressing experience.

"It's a Very Long and Complicated Story..."

Yesterday, my doorbell rang and I went to answer it.

It was two elderly chaps who were trying to sell God to me, I kindly refused, saying that I wasn't religious at all and bid them good day.

One of them looked confused and pointed at my t-shirt, the penny dropped, I had forgotten I was wearing my "Jews For Jesus" tee, that I bought as a joke because I found the idea of Jews being for Jesus very funny indeed.

I looked down at the t-shirt and then back at the gentlemen and said:

"It's a very long and complicated story."

As a big fan of Keith Olbermann, I was glad when Hack alerted me to this wonderful piece by him that is an at times overwhelming wall of upsetting information regarding, quite possibly, the worst President of all time (you heard that right Warren G. Harding). We are within touching distance of Bush's passing but this is a timely reminder of the sheer weight of damage he subjected America and the world to.



And as the Gaza conflict grinds down into a no doubt brief faux-ceasefire, a wonderful piece by Jewish-British comedian Paul Kaye is most definitely worth your reading time; as he talks about the shame he feels at Operation Cast Lead, the urge to fight against revenge instincts when his wife's' mother was killed by a bomb and where he makes a very good case for a solution to the problem I share: an end to settlements and a return to the 1967 borders.

A dark fog has enveloped us indeed...

America's UN Resolution Abstention

Israeli PM Ehud Olmert getting Bush in a headlock to make sure the US abstains from the UN Resolution on a ceasefire in Gaza

Bush needed no convincing after Olmert shows him pictures of dead Arab children

Bush then looms behind Condoleezza Rice in order to humiliate her into abstaining from something she was going to support

The world demands it's free motherfucking cupcake!

I've done my level best to not blog on the current conflict in Gaza, mainly because I don't feel I can bring much to the debate in a blog format, when the issue at hand is so immensely complex and one false move can have you labelled an anti-Semite/Zionist.

And posting pictures of dead Arab children is exploitative and crass.

Having said that, my feelings on the issue can be best summed up by the fact that both Israel and the people of Gaza elected really awful people to represent them and they are reaping the dividends of those choices, as the two elements duke it out and the civilians get caught horribly in the middle.

My solution: Israel goes back to the Internationally approved 1967 borders, stops making illegal settlements and takes down the bizarre wall; then (the hardest bit) it has to bite it's tongue as Hamas (or whatever idiotic 'wipe Israel off the face of the map' political party is in charge) tries to provoke them into lowest common denominator battle. If Israel took the moral high ground and did all the things asked of it by the world, Hamas would still attack but then Israel would have the backing of the globe in its destruction. It's a win-win for them but all it takes is a long view and restraint, something Israel has lacked since its inception.

I'm more interested in the weight of power that Israel and Olmert seems to be able to exercise over Bush and his pals.

Rice it seems was all willing to vote for the ceasefire UN resolution, which would've made it a clean sweep of all 15 votes and total condemnation of Israel's activities from even it's closest allies. And on that note, I'll hand over to Olmert:

"When we saw that the Secretary of State, for reasons we did not really understand, wanted to vote in favour of the UN resolution...I looked for President Bush and they told me he was in Philadelphia making a speech. I said, 'I don't care. I have to talk to him now'.

They got him off the podium, brought him to another room and I spoke to him. I told him, 'You can't vote in favour of this resolution.' He said, 'Listen, I don't know about it, I didn't see it, I'm not familiar with the phrasing.' He gave an order to the Secretary of State and she did not vote in favour of it, a resolution she cooked up, phrased, organised and manoeuvred for. She was left pretty shamed and abstained on a resolution she arranged."

And lo, it came to pass that the US abstained on the UN security resolution with the White House overruling the State Department (yet again), fighting to the very last day of their miserable existence, to perpetuate their unconditional backing for Israel.

The official line from the White House is: "We've seen these press reports and they are inaccurate." So either Olmert is lying and posturing like the corrupt old toad he is, or the White House is lying...again...and again...and again.

"Along with something to do and someone to love, having hope is one of life's essentials..."

I stole that quote from A C Grayling and an article of his in The Independent about President-elect Barack Obama and the optimism he embodies. And I couldn't agree more. Unfortunately, much of what I read in the blogosphere is quite frankly, a pile of horse shit; as right-wing bloggers lose (unlike McCain) without dignity and seem to think that socialism, Sharia law and the end of Israel are all coming at once.

The left-wing side of things is little better, with a whole raft of people who've spent the last 8 years moaning incessantly about things, suddenly having to cheer the fuck up and failing quite badly. It took about 24 hours after Obama's election for the miserable nay-sayers to start laying into the President-elect and guessing how bad it's going to be and to be honest, I'm glad these people are as far away from the political process as possible, I find liberal overreach as unappealing as a conservative one.

One of the many reasons that Obama's phenomenal achievement is worth celebrating, is that it brings an end to one of Ronald Reagan's worst tactics (utilised by the Bush dynasty and McCain): that appeal to the fears of the white Southerner, playing on the working class American to vote against their economical self-interest, by exploiting issues such as abortion, gun control and gay marriage.

What disgusts me most, is that the wealthy and highly intelligent men who ran these campaigns didn't give a shit about those issues but they knew that they could exploit the 10% of the electorate that did. Distract the idiots with morality, fag bashing, godless liberals and wetbacks and watch them lap it up, as those in power laugh all the way to the bank.

I also remain hopeful and positive because I believe Obama will renounce torture, extradition, extra-judicial imprisonment and abduction; the Geneva Convention will once again have value in America. As former President Jimmy Carter articulated:

"My country will never again torture a prisoner. My country will never again attack another country unless our security is directly threatened. My country will respect the rule of law and dignity of every human person as the foundation of our foreign policy."

Amen to that brother.

We live in hope.

Free at Last, Alan Johnston is Free at Last!

Wonderful news broke today, BBC journalist Alan Johnston, after nearly 4 months in captivity, has been freed thanks to work by Hamas and no doubt made easier with the pressure applied by people across the world; especially the voices of concern coming from the Palestinian territories themselves.

What a relief and delight, it’s made my day to see the beaming face of Mr. Johnston as he celebrates his deserved and newfound freedom.

But who would’ve credited Hamas with being a key broker in the deal? They flexed both military and political muscle to free Alan Johnston and have laid down a marker that they are a genuine force for change in the Middle East.

I watch with interest…

The Horror of Gaza

Madness has seemingly descended upon the thin sliver of land bequeathed to the Palestinian people; that is little more than a ghetto for the 1.4 million or so residents.

The conditions in the Gaza Strip are bad enough; it is little more than a glorified refugee camp with poor infrastructure and high levels of child mortality and other far-reaching health implications. The last thing it needs is a senseless and brutal conflict between Palestine’s two political forces, which will frankly have massive consequences across the region.

After a terse and tense 3-month joint government between Fatah and Hamas, the status quo has collapsed into a bloodbath, with some 100 people dead already. The result is that once again Palestinian politics takes a step backwards, backwards to guns, violence and the creeping infringement of a fundamentalist Islamic government, close to the borders of Israel.

I have mixed feelings on the matter, on one hand I have respect for Hamas as a genuine political organisation that has the backing of large swathes of the Palestinian population; backing that stems in a frustration with the more gentle and therefore negated approach of Fatah (once again we are seeing a militarisation of the Islamic faith, caused by desperation with political isolation). On the other, I see behaviours and actions that will feed a Zionist and US response that will further damage the claims of the Palestinian people to a land of their own. They are playing directly into the hands of those that wish them the greatest harm.

I can only hope that in the aftermath, Palestinian diplomats come to the fore rather than the war mongers, who still believe the gun and the bomb will break their repression rather than engaging with the world politick to highlight and solve their woes.

Peace be with you all this weekend.

For Alan Johnston

The observant amongst you may have noticed an icon, low down on the right hand side of my blog, an icon that is there to show support for the hostage BBC journalist Alan Johnston.
Alan Johnston was kidnapped, it seems now by the Army of Islam, on the 12th March 2007 and since that time there has been a great deal of concern and sadness as the events have unfolded.

The great shame, apart from the travesty of the enforced imprisonment of a journalist, is that Alan was a real voice for the people of Palestine; one of the only Western journalists remaining and willing to highlight the plight of the Palestinian people.

As time went on, fears grew for his safety and journalists far and wide came together, along with the people of Palestine and it’s leaders, to lobby for his release.

Thankfully today, a short video of Alan has been released; soon I hope it will be Alan Johnson himself that will be returned safely to his family and to carry on doing his job.

American-Jewish Lobby

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee is not only one of the largest, richest and most powerful lobbying groups in the US (with some 6,000 activists plus 100,000 members and a $57 million war chest), it is also one of the most dangerous.

The AIPAC has the ear of all leading politicians in America, with both parties scrambling to appear the most pro-Jewish, and is a major driver behind not only the frankly useless Middle East policy of the Bush regime (see the afore-mentioned scrambling for the Jewish vote; no decent solution can be expounded when one side is so heavily favoured) but also the hawkish disposition of the AIPAC when it comes to regime change in nations such as Iraq and Iran.

Serious questions have to be asked about who exactly is guiding and benefiting from America's distorted and disastrous foreign policy across the globe.

Questions also have to be asked about the amount of aid secured for Israel, which is the largest recipient of US funds above all other countries.

The special relationship between the United States and Israel is perhaps reaching a point of overreach but it has already caused a great deal of harm in the current global atmosphere of polarised realpolitik.

Observation From Sunday Night in Camden

Jews for Jesus?

That's complicated.

Reminds me of this bullshit.

God’s Foreign Policy

One thing that has always confused me about the Christian Right in the United States is its obsessional support for the Zionist regime in Israel.

The United States has always been the political heavyweight behind the idea of a homeland state for the Jewish people, from enthusiastic support of the concept of Israel under Truman to what is now a frankly bizarre relationship that feeds conspiracy theorists across the globe as to what exactly America could be getting out of such a one sided partnership.

America’s close ties with Israel not only jeopardise any attempts it makes to stabilise the Middle East but also further antagonises the International community who view the aggressively expansionist and human rights infringing nation as a threat to world peace. America pumps some $1.2 billion into Israel, set to increase to $2.4 billion as well as loaning them some $9 billion, it is of little surprise that Israel is at the very top of America’s foreign aid list.

And there seems to be no clear answer as to why? Where is the payback? America’s special relationship with Israel is a disadvantage in foreign policy terms, especially as the Zionist agenda has leaned further and further to the right and the war crimes carried out against Palestinian civilians increase in their severity. The case is clearly for a socio-political foothold in the Arab-Muslim world but Israel behaves more like a proxy aggressor, American funded violence carried out by Zionist lackeys.

And there can be no stranger ally for Israel than the Christian Right but in Christians United for Israel, they have that partner but unlike America’s funding of this apartheid nation the answer to why is a little clearer: the Apocalypse.

You’d think the fact that Jews don’t recognise Christ as the Messiah and are still waiting for their saviour would put evangelical Christians right off but no, it seems that the Holy Land has be saved and populated with Jews in order for the second coming to come off, although the fact that Jews would then have to convert to Christianity and accept the second coming of Christ as their Messiah or burn forever in hell, doesn’t seem to put Israel off from building ties with these mentalists.

Frankly, Israel needs allies wherever they can get them and the Christian Right forms a powerful lobbying group in US politics so even if they don’t agree with the Christianisation behind the concept of End Times, they’ll bite the religious bullet to make an unlikely ally in difficult political times.