An Eye For An Eye

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Islam, Judaism, Middle East, Palestine, politics, religion, violence

 

I keep waiting for the Imam or Mullah of substance to say, “Every time a Muslim carries out an act of violence, he or she is desecrating Islam and the Holy Quran.” I keep waiting, too, for the Islamic scholar daring to suggest that the Quran needs a thorough editing, existing, as it does – we know for certain after the discovery of a Quranic graveyard in the Yemen of multiple variant texts – in numerous forms, mostly transcribed from oral sources. Like every other scripture, it is most definitely not the Word of God. It is also written in a form of Arabic so basic and obscure that a full third of it is incomprehensible. Thus, every translation of it is, of necessity, an interpretation. Muslims are not expected, or allowed, to discuss the text and its meaning, merely to recite it. The very word ‘Quran’ means ‘verses’ and its first injunction is to ‘recite’. The questioning of Allah, or God, is as forbidden in orthodox Islam as it is encouraged in Judaism and Christianity, where doubt is a valued aspect of faith. Muslims are told that doubt reveals the presence of Satan. Like the pre-Reformation Roman Church, Islam prefers its congregations to remain ignorant of the sacred text, its clergy preaching sections from it, or telling apocryphal stories related to it. Anyone who can read the New Testament in its original Greek can easily understand why the Church acted as if its own Latin translation was the authentic version – the Greek writing, with the exception of St. John’s gospel, is poor stuff, a vernacular form of the language barely recognizable to early scholars. Much of the Quran is similarly primitive, though can sound quite beautiful when chanted. Many Muslims learn it by heart, yet few can understand the meaning of what they recite. This leaves the religion open to chronic abuse by sects like the Saudi Wahhabites, as well as pseudo-religious organizations like Islamic Jihad, whose erstwhile leader I once had the dubious pleasure of interviewing.

With the current escalation of violence between Israel and the Palestinians, I once again wait for that Imam or Mullah, and now the Rabbi willing to state that the appropriate response to violence is not more violence. If someone killed my children I would indubitably want to kill them with my bare hands – this kind of vengeance is human nature – yet I would not want to kill their neighbours, relatives, or anyone in the vicinity where they lived. The Palestinians have a legitimate grievance, no question, but every time they fire rockets at random into Israel they undermine the legitimacy of that grievance. And what do they expect in return? Well, they get it: air attacks from Israel, whose weapons are at least somewhat more accurate than the Palestinian rockets. In both cases, the result is innocents, women, children, the old and infirm, dead. Allied with Islamic Jihad, the Hamas militants, like ISIS or ISOS, with its spiteful, ridiculous ‘Emir’ al-Baghdadi, and the disparate al-Quaeda factions, are no more Muslims than a herd of swine. They are destroyers of the faith they profess, which is why they so despise the Sufis, and other Islamic factions, who teach love, not hate.

As I tried to tell factions in Iraq, during the U.S. invasion, Ghandi won his revolution through non-violence. If they sat peacefully in front of American tanks, the whole world would be watching, and on their side. If they adopted a policy of reconciliation, putting sectarian differences into the past, they would have a prosperous thriving country with a magnificent future. Instead, of course, the path of violence and revenge was taken, the road most often travelled – and the results speak for themselves.

Many in Israel realise that retaliation and increased violence are no solution at all. Many Arabs also recognize the same irrefutable truth. Crown Prince Hassan of Jordan is, I believe, the only person in West Asia who understands that the necessary dialogue for peace is between religious leaders, not politicians. He has, quietly, pursued the organization of such dialogues for years now. At least a dialogue exists; it is a start.

Just as I await the righteous Muslim cleric to condemn all forms of violence, I also wait for the righteous Rabbi willing to explain that “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” is not the sanction for revenge, but rather an illustration of the impossibility of its rectitude – what human can judge the exactitude of his or her revenge? An eye for an eye would blind the whole world, without the remotest claim to true justice. Are we not also told, “Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord”? The silence of religious leaders on these issues is deafening, or else prevaricates with empty rhetoric. Let Pope Francis go and stand in Gaza, or under the Hamas rockets, and I will believe his sincerity. As always, though, I wait for someone with the courage of their convictions to speak and act, if they wish their various creeds and faiths to be taken seriously by the rest of us – and if they themselves wish to take them seriously.

 

Paul William Roberts

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Your Right to Human Rights

Tags

democracy, human rights, new-Conservatism, philosophy, politics, privacy

I was listening a lecture by Professor A.C. Anthony Grayling on human rights, at the end of which he was asked, by a member of the audience, an interesting question: in short, what about those vast areas of the planet where his idea of human rights is considered Euro-centric — alien notions which we are attempting to import into, or impose upon, their own unique and cherished traditions? The professor really had no answer to this, beyond citing the idea, in Confucian China, that the community was more important than the individual, whose attempt to rebel from this would be viewed as anti-social. He did mention that the various Islamic judicial traditions held vastly different ideas about the rights of women compared with our own (recent) views, yet merely urged the need for more dialogue between dissenting groups. As I said, he had no answer.

Most of his talk revolved around the struggle to answer Socrates’ question about the nature of a good life, placing inordinate value on the evolution, during the so-called ‘Enlightenment’ (who or what was ‘enlightened?), of various bills and declarations of rights, from that of the French Revolution (freedom is the quintessential right), through those of the American Revolution (some people have rights, others – slaves, aboriginals – do not), with all amendments (if we don’t like your rights we can kill you), to the U.N.’s post-WWII Universal Declaration of Human Rights (meaningless, for the above-cited reasons – it is in no way ‘universal’). The rights we now seek to export, or impose upon, the rest of the world are not even ones we ourselves subscribed to a hundred years ago – or, in the shameful case of America, fifty years ago. When I tell my children that, during my own childhood, Afro-Americans could not vote, nor could they travel in the same buses, or eat in the same restaurants as white people, they don’t believe me. The great Platonic and Ciceronian ideals of democracy – upon which our own are based — are barely recognizable as ‘democratic’. Rights were limited to land-owning males. The poor, women, and slaves were essentially regarded as sub-human. Plato, presumably quoting his guru, Socrates, states that, upon death, a bad man is reborn as a woman; and a bad woman is reborn as a dog. Professor Grayling made much of advances made in European citizens’ rights over the past 400 years, announcing that, now, “we all live like lords” in comparison with the erstwhile lack of freedoms. We can now make individual choices regarding the sort of lives we wish to lead, the kind of things in which we wish to believe, etc. Yet is this really true?

The French revolutionary ‘Committee for Public Safety’ effectively stifled all freedoms in the Revolution’s Bill of Rights with Robespierre’s guillotine, and his banning of religion. America’s Declaration and subsequent Constitution were sheer hypocrisy cloaked in lofty rhetoric. All men were not born free, and did not have ‘certain inalienable rights’—take slavery, or the theft of Indian lands and massacre of their inhabitants. Thomas Jefferson, chief author of these documents, himself owned some 200 slaves while writing the words “all men are born free”. He even ‘fathered children upon’ at least one of them – as the hagiographer delicately puts this rape of a human chattel.

Grayling rightly warned that it is under the guise of ‘protecting’ citizens that freedoms are eroded, and the loss of them is seemingly greeted willingly. I say ‘seemingly’ because public opinion is manipulated by a fear-mongering corporate media, owned by the same organizations that essentially are the government. Although it is certainly possible to ferret out the truth behind our daily news on the Internet or in libraries, how many voters have the time or inclination to do so? Many are functionally illiterate – my own son among them – in spite of the best education possible, and parental encouragement. They can read, but they don’t. Most people’s lives are dominated by mind-numbing jobs five days a week, leaving them drained and capable only of watching television. Anyone with ambitions in the corporate world understands, without being told, that he or she will have to work a twelve-hour day, six or even seven days a week. The carrot-and-stick of severance, ‘down-sizing’, or promotion is in constant use. After 40 years of this stressful existence, most are only fit for a brief and troubled retirement (what to do now there is nothing to do, and no ringmaster goading you on?). If, in Socrates’ phrase, “the unexamined life is not worth living”, then such lives are surely wasted ones. With taxes, bills, mortgage payments, fees for every imaginable service that used to be free, and educations not worth their extortionate cost to finance, what time is left for thought?

And this is just the way rulers want it to be. Free thought is a bigger threat than nuclear holocaust. The outrageous invasions of privacy, through cell phone intercepts, or the collection of computer data, are always masked by the terms of terror: pedophiles; identity theft; credit-card fraud; terrorism itself. The removal of freedoms is always consensual now, because it is always for our own protection. Little wonder that Orwell’s Nineteen-Eighty-Four is currently being read so avidly. The most frightened populations always have the strongest governments. Keep the fear going. Show the images of horror and devastation afflicting people without adequate protection. If the evil within does not work, then there’s nothing like a good war to unite the nation, making citizens positively keen to throw away their rights, often along with their lives. If you’re doing nothing wrong, why should you worry about cameras watching you on every street, in every store, even in washrooms? Why not have cameras in your house? You would be safer.

Life is risk – fact. Security without freedom is not worth having, since it denies life by pretending to protect it. If you think your rulers really care about your security, you are an idiot. Why would they send you to wars, or force you to work harder than Roman slaves just to survive, if they cared about you? Why are they so keen to keep you in debt from university on?

One percent of the population has the leisure to think, and what they think about is their own power and wealth, not your health and security. Funded thinkers, in labs and universities, increasingly work on either government-approved projects, or else stunningly obscure or pedestrian irrelevancies. Under the guise of human rights and democracy, this one percent seeks to extend their power, and thus increase their wealth, by imposing their very cunning system of theoretical democracy over the entire planet. The author of The End of History – once a neo-conservative scripture extolling democracy as history’s final phase – has even now refuted his own text, detailing its errors. The problem is that much of this planet is not in the 21^st Century. There are places where the calendar reads ten minutes after the Neolithic period. Was Europe ready for so-called democracy a millennium ago? Consensual agreement to neo-slavery has never been easier to obtain than it is now in the West. With bread, the media circuses, and a constant diet of fear, we’ve become cowering imbeciles. Napoleon had to shut down some 100 newspapers to obtain support for his tyranny. Hitler did a bit of that, too; but he also had the state-controlled radio and cinema to aid Nazi propaganda. Thanks to Leo Strauss, the godfather of neo-conservatism – whose escape from Germany was aided by Carl Schmidt, founder of Hitler’s judiciary – fascist ideas, like lying to the public, and ruthlessly persecuting enemies, found favour with many adherents to the ‘Chicago School’, including Iraq war-monger Paul Wolfowitz, and Canada’s current Prime Minister, Stephen Harper (let’s hear the interviewer who dares question him about his devotion to Straussian neo-conservatism!). Today’s tyrants, using Straussian principles, are in every nook and cranny of our lives; they can even exert some control over our minds – and they will strive for even greater control. The Internet may well be the last battlefield, the final barricades from which to fire on those who would strip us of all genuine rights. Already, attempts to block certain websites, or make them unendurably slow to load, are in progress. Such efforts ought to be resisted by every possible means, while we still have the ability and freedom to do it.

As someone recently said, “The Internet is a television that watches you.” Find the open-source software to close its eyes. As someone else remarked, “Republicans care about you before you’re born, yet once you’re alive they don’t give a damn.” Don’t vote against your own interests. Think! Examine your life. Respect the lives and beliefs of others, so long as they do not try to force them upon you. Don’t let very tiny minorities of sick, deranged, or ignorant people – pedophiles and terrorists are a tiny fraction of one percent of the population – scare you into sacrificing the freedoms of the 99.9%. My freedom is also your freedom; your imagined security, however, is my prison.

Paul William Roberts

Canada Day

Tags

Canada, England, France, Immigration, politics, Quebec, taxation, welfare

What do we have to celebrate? A lot, I would say. I still believe that this is the best place to live on earth, in spite of those who would make it otherwise. What can we, as Canadians, do to protect what we have? Well, there are radical ideas, like the overthrow of a governmental system that is antiquated and dysfunctional; or there are less disruptive notions, like learning from the mistakes of other nations. Take Britain, where three trillion pounds annually of taxpayers’ money is spent on welfare projects, much of which is squandered on people perfectly able to work, yet finding the prospect irksome, this idleness encouraged by an administration more concerned with its own beaurocracy and red-tape than it is with executing the task at hand. For example, a woman with three children, from three different fathers, is given free housing, plus assistance for herself and her three children, until they are eighteen. No part of the system is given the task of finding a way in which she can work while her children are cared for. In other words, the system is designed to offer free money to those who fulfill certain, all too rudimentary, requirements. And these requirements are determined by a form, filled out with help from a ‘social services officer’, and not by any investigation of circumstances. The result is a country overwhelmed by debt and social chaos, one in which the rich get richer on the backs of the middle-class taxpayer. Another example: Paris is now a city of 60 million inhabitants, twice the population of Canada, the second-largest country in the world. This is a consequence of immigration policies resulting from the misguided, and ever burgeoning, Euro Zone, which differ slightly from the punishments of colonialism and empire (in which the conquered were, naturally, entitled to citizenship in the conquerors’ nations). An economic union between advanced industrialized countries, like Britain, France, Germany, Austria, and the Scandinavian nations, made sense. To devise a common currency, among such countries, even made sense. But to include such places as Romania, Spain, and Greece – not to mention others on the list – was sheer idiocy. The consequences of this folly are now all too evident, and may well result in the dissolution of the whole union. The resultant waves of emigration to welfare havens, like France and the U.K., are causing severe social unrest. The erudite, and much misunderstood, British politician, Enoch Powell, predicted this back in the sixties, when immigrants from Pakistan, India, and the West Indies, began swelling the population of London, and other cities, like Birmingham. Powell stated that this would lead to racial warfare, and he was right. Unfortunately, Powell gained support from unsavory neo-fascist elements, like the National Front, and the Skinheads. Diana Macleoud, daughter of the great English politician, Ian Macleoud, once told me that her father, who was a great friend of Enoch Powell, told him that he was stirring up neo-fascist sentiments and racism with his views, and was regarded in some quarters as a new Sir Oswald Moseley (whose pro-Nazi Blackshirts had once terrorised the streets of London during the years leading up to World War II). Powell, Macleaoud had told his daughter, was appalled at this news, and had no intention of provoking such sentiments. He kept his views to himself thereafter. But his predictions were right. In a country where unemployment is high, there will always be resistance to an influx of immigrants seeking the same elusive jobs.

In Canada, we are faced with a similar, yet also utterly different, situation. While it behooves us to take in refugees from such nightmares as Syria, Somalia, and so on, we need to ensure that these refugees will not clog the major cities with self-enclosed communities increasingly hostile to the rest of the population. The current anti-Muslim feelings, promoted by some media, all but guarantee this. “I and all schoolchildren learn,” wrote W.H. Auden, “that those to whom evil is done do evil in return.”

Although our country is vast, and we desperately need more people to help pay the taxes, this influx of immigrants and refugees cannot be allowed to settle in the major cities. Where then should they go? The Harper Government’s obsession with eradicating the national deficit – a sum so paltry that most U.S. congressmen could pay it off, with a little help from their friends – ignores the more important concerns of infrastructure, especially within cities. To accommodate hordes of immigrants and refugees, besides providing work for those welfare vampires sucking our tax blood, there need to be enormous projects, not unlike the Pharaonic Pyramids, to occupy thousands profitably, and for many years. The opening-up of the North, thanks to Climate Change, also provides opportunity for an abundance of similar massive projects. It is, I suggest, the job of a government, not to balance books, but to dream big. To gaze into a distant future, rather than at the next election, or bottom-line.

I left Toronto four years ago, for personal reasons, yet also because the city I knew for thirty years was becoming just another overcrowded metropolis. It seemed to me that someone had decided the function of cities was to grow, and grow, and grow. Is there an example on earth of a city that has benefitted from excessive growth? Ottawa still strikes me as a reasonable place, an environment in which it is still pleasant to live. Montreal, however, from which I am 90 minutes away, is culturally vibrant, to be sure, yet also a chaotic hell for the driver, and, in addition, a place redolent of the kind of racism pervading some British cities. The unlamented ex-premier of Quebec even cited immigration as the cause of the terrorism afflicting Britain. She was not entirely wrong, though extravagantly unaware that her own anti-Islamic non-policies were the real causes behind such home-grown terrorism.

Quebec claims to be a non-multicultural society, within a multicultural Canada, yet such notions are as antiquated as the guillotine. The future of this country, which includes Quebec, and always will, relies upon some intelligent thinking by whomsoever is in control of it. Allow in as many immigrants as possible, by all means, but distribute these people across this enormous land, rather than allowing them to create mini-nations within every province – ones that will, someday, harbour the same separatist idiocies that continue to cripple Quebec’s future. You leave your country for ours, you leave your nationality behind. You swear allegiance to our Queen and Country, and that oath is binding. Anyone breaking it, I suggest, has lost their right to live here.

In the same way, anyone living on welfare, while being capable of working, is a tax-vampire. As someone who now lives on a monthly disability pension – ‘lives’ being a scarcely appropriate term – I can honestly say that I would take any employment of which I was capable, if offered, in order to pay my way. Why is there no organization to find work for those on welfare? We do not wish to find ourselves in the disastrous state which Britain now faces, do we? Unpopular as it may be – among those who don’t vote anyway – a plan of work-fare makes eminent sense, and ensures a future not over-burdened by idlers, encouraged in their idleness by a dysfunctional system. Philanthropy when it was a private endeavour, focussed on the needy, not the greedy. With our enforced system of philanthropy, via taxation, it is surely the right, and duty, of citizens to decide who deserves assistance, and who does not – just as it ought to be our right, by democratic vote, to decide if our taxes are well-spent on $40 billion-worth of warplanes for a military we cannot use effectively, nor can afford. I believe it is the right and duty of every Canadian citizen to report on suspected abusers of welfare, as it is to decide how and where their tax dollars are best invested. We cannot, and ought not try to compete with the U.S.A., which can no longer even uphold the role of Global Cop, to which it once believed itself elected, let alone cope with its domestic social and economic chaos.

I still remember when the Maple Leaf button assured one safe passage through the world’s disaster zones. Canada then meant equitable dealing, unbiased politics, and decent, humanitarian concerns. These qualities are worth all the biased, tough-guy posturing we hear today; and they are, and ought to remain, the essence of this wonderful land. We stand on guard for thee—and the price of liberty is eternal vigilance.