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badmousestuff-blog · 5 years

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The problem with Free Speech (Script)

One day I was helping out with the Free Palestine stall on Church Street. About an hour in a young dude came up to me, and gave us the usual conservative drivel.

He told me that he couldn’t support the left, because to him we were against free speech. Right below me were flyers detailing the extent of Israeli war crimes against Palestinians, and how little the world still hears about their plight. He stated that he wasn’t interested in our campaign, and bid me farewell. For, of course we must have our standards.

(Rowan Atkinson speech)

There’s never been a more unshakeable dogma in my lifetime than that of Freedom of Speech.

The real test of a country’s standards is if it allows people to criticise one another, especially the regime. The foundation of Liberty and Freedom and Friberty, is the story of free expression, after all, if you want to know who has the power, just look at which group you’re not allowed to criticise. Right?

Well no, I’m here to say that Free Speech isn’t just some base, flatline, monolith from which all societies are to be judged like an angelical truth, its a political concept, thought up by human beings, subject to critique, and frankly is in great need of one.

Let’s start with something simple.

Your concept that Free Speech is good, is only possible if your opponent also agrees with you, i.e. they’re not going to kill you if you disagree.

So therefore if your opponent doesn’t ?? and will use aggression against you, then you can’t really argue for free speech can you?

The conditions around you need to be such that nobody is going to die.

Right, whats next, oh I gotta do the Hitler bit, right…

Y’know the story, Weiner Republic, Full suffrage, large democracy, massive instability and debt caused from the prior war, enter the Nazis, and the German Communist party. Yes everyone seems to forget that the Commies were there too, headed by Ernst Thalmann, and at their peak gained 16% of the vote in 1932. Whilst Ernst was forward in his Anti-Fascism, the Social Democrats, and their newspapers, didn’t seem to understand the concept of a united front, they refused to confront the Fascists in an effective manner and simultaneously denounced the KDP as being a bunch of Muscovites, sporting the famous Iron Front symbol, The third arrow originally meant Anti-Communism, mind.

The SPD’s failure to effectively confront Fascism aided Hitler’s rise to power, sent the KDP underground, and Ernst to 11 years in the hole, followed by a firing squad.

So don’t tell me free-speech exists in vacuum, it doesn’t. In this video we’ll ask the necessary further questions.

Who dictates the media, who controls which advertisements we see, which views are more profitable? Does the removal of speech in given scenarios serve a common good? And if the enlightenment was correct why did Liberalism fail in its mission?

(Rowan Atkinson)

This clip was one of the first main intro points for me as well as many others into the realm of Super Free Speech, and it’s strange looking back just how dated it is. It’s not like we didn’t have the arguments back then, but moreso that nobody really cared, we were all swept up in the dogma, to challenge free speech would be on the same level as strangling a baby.

Anybody can go around today and talk about the joy of free speech, but it means nothing to a person who has no power with that speech, Freedom to Beg? That's not a freedom; that’s institutionalised sadism.

I’m not a believer in Maslow’s hierarchy but hypothetically, this really wouldn’t go number 2, it’d be right down at number… 27. Why do I say this? Well in the words of some philosophy guy people say I look like, “No rights matter if you’re dead”.

Food, Water, Healthcare, and Housing. These are all things you need in order to survive, in other words fulfil the other things that we consider ‘rights’ - rights that are worth struggling for. And despite the fact that the millions end up dying from the lack of these rights, even when they’re universally agreed upon, ever notice how this struggle goes very very quiet… Suspiciously quiet.

Sargon on the Socialists

I wonder…??? I wonder why the left seems to be largely committed to these causes, it’s something you find scantly addressed in the middle and right spheres with the exception of private individual charity (OSCAR WILDE), and Carl may find himself wondering why it is that these ideologies can barely create a solid solidarity towards these topics.

You might be a Liberal and say “Yeah yeah, I support that too though” but fact remains there’s no confidence here.

I see no outpouring of condemnation coming from you when Politicians like Bolsonaro press forward their restrictive measures, unlike what you have to say about this powerless Redhead. Why is that?

Count Dankula, who interestingly I had a couple scuffles with a while back without realising it, last year taught his dog to do a Hitler Salute, and he got fined £800. Now that’s probably one of the most petty excuses for a sentencing I’ll admit, but again this isn’t about whether it was justified, it’s about people’s standards.

Dankula received enormous support from, well, everyone, and he’s now more famous than he ever previously was, enough to be at the forefront of the free-speech festival later that year, and even use his fame to help push the emergence of UKIP. This is attention that people would pay top dollar for, way more than £800. He should be proud that he got a court hearing.

Frankly, me and my colleagues didn’t really care about this whole thing too much, just ask my IWW friend who I was with when this all went down. What happened around the same time that did catch some of our attention though was the plight of the J20 protesters who got arrested back during Trump’s inauguration.

Some of these people are on the butchers list to serve 60 year sentences for standing against a president who’s, a real dick, like I get the whole Liberal opposition is fucking corny but still he’s a dick, they’ve all been dicks, he’s just continuing what every dick who ever stood on centre stage ever started, this is America, you think Bernie’s going to save you? You think reforming the democrats can change the number one imperialist power?

Apologies. If you’re at all concerned that I didn’t give a toss about Dankula’s pug joke, if you’ve ever had friends like him this stuff isn’t too surprising, I know these are highly political times but a guy who votes UKIP is really not our number one concern right now.

I didn’t give a toss, but I know somebody who did, Mike Stuchbury, who you’ll remember from his childish twitter ramblings and dealings with Watson. Who proclaimed that the left needs to stand with Free Speech, A free-speech that is largely in the teat of Right-leaning discourse.

Sargon who was there with him, earlier that year got de-platformed by lefty-liberals in his debate with Muke.

The dogma is enforcing itself here, the left is all supposed to throw up our hands in swich liquor, of which vertu engendered is the flour, and decide Whether we should allow freedom of speech to our enemies, or not allow it, when the actual thing we should be doing, is taking hold of the narrative and putting forward our own ideas as the new talking point of discussion, instead of fucking Nazi Pug.

“Hey, you, what gives you the right to determine the narrative?”

Thats a good question, the hegemonic propaganda of our status quo is already setting the narrative, Noam Chomsky “I’m bored bye”

How can I make this more interesting… Ah ha…

IT’S TIME FOR FILM THEORY!!1 WOOOO

The Pursuit of Happiness.

In 2006 Will Smith told the story of Chris Gardner, a black man who struggled through poverty, separation, and fatherhood whilst living in San Francisco.

He gets an internship with a sales company and despite having to put up with a lot, by the end of the film he passes and at this point, we’re supposed to feel happy and redeemed, but to those who’ve watched it (surely I’m not alone) was it really a happy ending?

I’ll say that I walked out of the viewing feeling very uncomfortable and sour, but why is that?

Well for starters, that Internship he got was a 6 month unpaid one, in the most expensive US city might have something to do with it.

Then he’s got to deal with his wife leaving him, then he’s got to take care of his son, then he loses his source of income, then he’s got to deal with eviction, sleeping rough, not sleeping at all, by the end of the movie sure he gets his redemption but the message of ‘when life gives you lemons, just keep getting pummelled with those lemons and don’t ask why’ ultimately seems hollow.

Contrast that a more traditionally Anti-establishment film which was made by a literal Communist, where the exploiters are treated as they should be and thats what comes across on screen, with surprise horse-dick, and while Happiness doesn’t treat them like saints, they sure don’t come across as devils either.

6 months of free labour he and 19 other people who did not make the cut that they are effectively giving away for free.

What about those other 19 people, who ever tells their story?

The way his superiors always act like total dicks pushing him around and getting him to be their lobby boy, they lost nothing. And now he’s going to work for them.

Is the message here supposed to be “Well if this guy can survive the moon falling on him, what the hell are you complaining about?” Actually yeah, I think that consciously or not, this is what’s being said… Don’t worry we’re getting to the point of all this.

The extent of exploitation is naked, yet in the way the movie is presented I’m inclined to agree to this, and take it into my home, and sleep with it.

Now name me as many pieces of media that regurgitate this same old theme of rags to riches through adversity, to look at the man on centre stage, yet pay no attention to the millions locked in a cage.

Sure, say it how you will, Art is merely what you make of it and there’s not necessarily any devious agenda being pursued at any time. That’s one perspective I guess, another might be that there’s no such thing as Art for Arts sake, it all gears itself to differing political lines.

In a society based on private, individual enterprise, it's no surprise that Art would also foster themes that would support society as the normal and natural, even if they appear on the surface as radical.

Case in point, well the entire Hollywood Catalog.

On the Waterfront is literally Mccarthyism on celluloid, The People vs Larry Flynt guises pornification and billionairedom with a story of libel and freedom of speech.

And ironically enough probably the worst offender is, well I’m gonna lose some of you now, Billy Elliot, the Movie.

In which 2/3rds of the way through Billy’s dad strike breaks as a way to pay for his son to go to a prestigious arts school, y’know rather than maybe having him stay and use his skills to improve, embolden and enliven the downtrodden community, rather than leaving it to die.

Jackie’s very sympathetic in his devotion towards his son, except Striking is caring for your family, you’re fighting for a better future, together, as one, and it’s thrown away in favour of a much more individualistic get out of your circumstances, go and live your dream.

Now I’ve read Lee Hall, I know he didn’t intend for this to come through, but he is also no more aloof than any of us, we’re all susceptible to this ‘Common Culture’.

Just see the way our ‘Common Culture’ infiltrates into how Communism is talked about, in 2015’s Trumbo. The Hollywood screenwriter who was blacklisted for 2 decades for being a member of Communist Party.

Could make for some groundbreaking stuff right?...

Well no, instead we’re left with a film that focuses entirely on freedom of expression, which is ironic because if they represented him truthfully it would’ve resulted in a much more nuanced movie.

All we get is a 2 minute scene talking about Communist ethics and god its done in the most sanitised, unradical, storybook tale way possible, that doesn’t in any possible regard represent who the actual Dalton Trumbo was.

“If a book or play or film is produced which is harmful to the best interests of the working class, that work and its author should and must be attacked in the sharpest possible terms.”

I think I have a case that profit incentives are steering the way in which media is presented…

We have no problem pointing out the subtle propaganda messages in Soviet children’s cartoons (Cheburashka) but reverse that onto our society, prepare for some awkward stares.

You may argue that none of what I’ve just spoken about here has anything to do with censorship of free expression but this is the problem, our notions of censorship are stuck firmly behind the Berlin wall, and thats far too simplistic not to mention outdated.

Undoubtably Coca-cola has a far greater reach of expression than I ever will be able to ascertain, what says who can speak on a public forum, decide the content of a documentary, of a publication, of a movie, or a political campaign?

If a book is blacklisted by all publishers for political reasons, what difference does it make having 1 publishing house or 100?

If 90% of the movie market alone is controlled by just 7 companies, what kind of advice is “Just start your own business”.

If we want to talk about the free flow of expression and information, what little are these flyers (Free Palestine) when Zionism has a whole nation, and 2 continents supporting it?

This is the kind of expression we’re dealing with today, not the voices of individuals, but of multinationals. The fact that we had in any way an outpouring of sympathies towards one of these companies, Sony, for having their movie The Interview possibly censored by DPRK agents is a testament to how lost in the plot we have become.

And if by chance the media cannot direct the status quo by monopoly, it brings out its tried and tested method.

Commodify it.

I present to you Guerrillero Heroico, this photograph was allowed such free spread not simply because its bloody badass, but because there was no IP designated upon it, by Korda’s intention as a Communist himself he agreed with the free-flow of art. And what did this result in at the behest of Capitalist Corporations? The pastiche of revolution, to be bought and sold many times over.

Take any form of media, word, an expression, it will be hoisted away, slapped on a shirt, and sold back to you at a handsome price. You cannot escape this.

The moment that this (my tattoo) becomes the new Che it loses all its power, resistance is reduced to at worst LARPing, at best Nerd Fandom, and the winners are the profiteers.

If profit is the aim of the game, the speech that is supported will inevitably favour that which nurtures the economy, not destroys it, unless in farce. Speech ain’t a level base of which a country is determined by, its an apparatus held by those that dictate the game.

This is why there is a necessity for us to control the narrative, control the message, because if we don’t, they’re still going to.

Obligations:

When armies with unequal numbers go into battle, a draw is a defeat for the lesser side.

Make believe it or not Radical Centrist politics have their political leanings as well, even if just by effect.

Look I like free speech, I love it, I’m a goddamn youtuber, but I’m not stupid, I know what’s coming, I know that groups would try and silence me if they could. That’s politics.

You might go “All we’re talking about is the legal sphere”. Firstly the legal is the political, pure ideology to say otherwise, but second it’s difficult for you to call yourself a fighter for free speech when as I’ve explained there’s sooo much more to it than simply the judicial.

Many proponents will even side-step the judicial boundaries anyway when monopoly becomes involved, and if I have to explain how Monopoly is not an externality of our system but an inherent part of accumulation then… sigh.

Strange how we’re usually all skeptical of an Economic Free Market but the Free marketplace of ideas unlocks your inner Libertarian.

Its when I see stuff like this that I begin wondering if this is all just a trend that will eventually die off when people realise the complexities of their circumstances. I remember just a few years ago how many Libertarians were speaking the merits of free speech until they discovered that methodological individualism wasn’t actually achieving their goals. I count down the days when Lauren Southern finally calls for limits on speech just like her limits on borders. After all freedom is not free it must be defended right?

And btw folks usually aren’t as brave to actively advocate limits so they’ll always present justifications, such as that these views are mental disorders, or they’ll destroy civilisation, or these people are Degenerates.

This is a historic moment in political discourse, at this point ultimately we’re interested in picking sides, and you’ll do this just as much as anyone will.

On the left we like to talk a lot about Left Unity. I’m not necessarily against the idea, but a lot of the time people make a religion out of it, glossing over the fact that many aspects of various factions (???) contradict. It might not be immediately obvious, but when push comes to shove these conflicts become very apparent. There are some principles in which each side certainly doesn’t see eye to eye.

“Politics is pervasive, everything is political and the choice to remain apolitical is usually just an endorsement of the status quo”

If it wasn’t obvious, I’m a Communist, yeah yeah say what you want, I believe in the liberation of those who do all the work through armed struggle based upon material conditions. I’m going to therefore be in favour of real mass culture, the stuff that gets people focused on achieving liberating aims instead of just appealing to markets. Its for this reason that I’m not interested in defending the views of right-wing nationalists, fascists, reactionaries… my enemies in other words, the ideas largely speaking which regress the people and they’re not interested in defending me either, wouldn’t expect them to.

If all you’re talking about is the centre, you’re gonna get flanked, sorry.

You might bump in when I denounce Dankula stating “His punishment showcases the system is at fault” and I would agree. This system is at fault, its been at fault since before our constitution was written, and it’ll never stop being at fault until you solve the contradictions.

Liberalism did fail, its ideals never came to fruition and that’s the reason why Socialists bring forth the praxis to achieve it, sometimes that’ll involve using words, sometimes it’ll involve lots and lots of guns, but let me tell you, you can’t always fight a war by playing nice, sometimes you have to use a diversity of tactics to achieve it.

Maybe we need 11 of them? (Shows book)

But thats more of a material answer and I know that most you don’t give a crap about some dead Chinese guy., but getting back to the original idea about responsibilities behind our speech, well, here’s something to think about.

So… here goes nothing.

If you’re a straight white male aged 11-16 in the UK and weren’t brought up to fit into the standard male dynamic, chances are you got picked on, sometimes a lot, sometimes that’s every day, not necessarily violence but words from numerous mouths are highly unnerving.

I did not have a particularly fun time adolescence. Every day was horrible, I never had a feeling going in that this would be exciting or, this would be a day where things would be different, everyday was a total black smudge with no end in sight.

Unlike other people, I never got to have a group that I fit into, so I had no escape, nothing to take my mind off things.

Looking back I don’t know why I bothered going in, I wasn’t getting amazing grades anyway.

When I went to Drama school and other clubs on the weekends and after school, I would also get picked on, but it wasn’t in spite, it was just general, friendly teasing. But there wasn’t a difference in my mind, because when you’ve had to deal with so much constant abuse, and paranoia, and humiliation 30 hours a week, it fucks you up.

So when Id say to the weekend buds “I dont like this” theyd go “Oh come on man its just a bit of fun, its okay, dont worry about it, its just a joke, its all okay”

Back then I didn’t have the nerve, I just put up with it, but if I could go back, Id say. No, actually its not Okay, because you don’t know for the life of me how much I have had to deal with this shit, to me that doesn’t come across like you’re being funny, like your laughing with me, it comes across like you’re a psychopath who wants to get pleasure out of my misfortune.

Of course the response to this would be obvious “Well what am I supposed to do? Just talk to you like a robot. You should just get over it, leave it in the past. Your making it harder for everyone” or some other faux-victimised response.

And sometimes y’know they might be right, maybe I should’ve not made worse a bad situation, but fact remains I still bleed.

To you, this is just having fun and games, to you and your other friends its normal, but to me its a threat.

Now today you can call me what you want I don’t care, I’m out of that place now and I’m all the better for it,

But even though some 7 or 8 years since then I’ve been able to recover, I still carry a hangover of it all, and it affected my decisions later on in life sometimes to a dire extent,

Its had the effect of making me feel both distrustful of people, and also like Im a burden to be around other people,

I never feel I should hang around for too long, I never want to take chances in friendship for fear I’ll embarrass myself, I say one thing out of tempo and suddenly flashbacks and an enormous shadow of mordor conjures over me. And I think most of all its been very difficult for me to express my emotions because I used to do it a hell of a lot.

Those 5 years were the single handed worst years of my life. And if you were at any point responsible for adding to that devastation and humiliation, then a large part of me wants to lash your goddamn skull inside out.

Because as trivial and generic as my story may be, that part of my life has been stolen from me, and those 5 years I will never get back.

So what’s the point of all this?

“Ossidents are sometimes surprised that, instead of buying a dress for their wife, the colonized buy a transistor radio. They shouldn't be, the colonized are convinced their fate is in the balance. They live in a doomsday atmosphere and nothing must elude them”

I want you to place the relatively minor experiences I received as a child, and translate those into other groups, victims of domestic abuse, victims of colonialism, racism, sexism, queer phobia. Like I said I’m out of that place now, but others aren’t, for many people they still live day to day in this ever pressing struggle, trying to just tell people “Please, just don’t do this”.

It’s not okay. But maybe together you’ll help me out with solving these problems?

My conclusion to this is simple,

Free Speech is not just something you can fling around to score political points, it doesn’t materialise simply because we all decide it should. If we want free-speech we need to break a few eggs to make an omelette.

We need to be sure that the conditions in society don’t proliferate toxic ideas that might even lead to the downfall of said society.

This very Tattoo that 90 years ago would’ve been Anti-Communist as hell has become a Pan-Left symbol against Fascism. Its living proof that with the correct methods the conditions of words, symbols, ideas can be resolved.

When class struggle subsides, when our social divides have been solved, when the conflict doesn’t oppose the existence of certain folks, then maybe, we can well and truly say that we can have free speech, and we’ll stand at a comedy show and yell “Yes, lets talk about those BEEP BEEEEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP” and be met with cheering applause from all sides. But until then, Don’t be a dick.

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chiseler · 5 years

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False ‘Victories’: Is the PA Using the ‘State of Palestine’ to Remain in Power?

The ‘State of Palestine’ has officially been handed the Chairmanship of the G-77, the United Nations largest block. This is particularly significant considering the relentless Israeli-American plotting to torpedo Palestinian push for greater international recognition and legitimacy.

It is now conclusive that the main mission for former United States Ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, was an unmitigated failure.

When Haley gave her infamous speech before the pro-Israel lobby, AIPAC, in March 2017 - declaring herself the ‘new sheriff in town’ on behalf of Israel - the US-Israeli designs were becoming clearer: never again will the US shy away from defending Israel at the UN as the previous Obama Administration had done in December 2016.

In retrospect, Haley’s tactics - the aggressive language, the constant threats and outright political bullying - amounted to nothing. Her short stint of two years at the UN has only managed to, once again, accentuate US dwindling power and influence on the international stage.

Instead of isolating Palestinians, the US ended up joining Israel in its own isolation. Unable to make any tangible ‘achievements’ in favor of Israel, a frustrated US administration carried out its threats as it quit crucial UN bodies like UNESCO, Human Rights Council, among others. In doing so, the US is now imprudently dismantling the very international order it helped create following World War II.

The Palestinian Authority, on the other hand, has taken full advantage of the obvious shift in world order. Being voted to the helm of the G77 - which bonds 134 countries from the South in a massive economic order - is an extraordinary event.

But what does this mean in terms of the Palestinian quest for statehood?

The PA seems to operate within two separate - and often contradictory - political spheres.

On the one hand, it is in full cooperation with Israel in terms of 'security coordination', at times serving as if Israel's policeman in the Occupied West Bank. Its constant crackdown on Palestinian dissent and its monopolization of Palestinian decision-making have been major obstacles before the Palestinian people in their fight for rights, justice and freedom.

On the other hand, the PA has been pursuing a determined path towards international recognition, starting with its successful bid to obtain a non-member observer status for the State of Palestine in November 2012.

That momentous event, which took place despite US-Israeli strong rejection and protests, opened up the door for Palestine to join various UN organizations such as the International Criminal Court.

Palestine is yet to acquire full UN membership, a pursuit that is being renewed at the moment. However, as of August 2015, the flag of Palestine has been fluttering at the UN headquarters, along with those of 193 other nations.

So how is one to reconcile between these two realities?

It goes without saying that the international support that Palestine is receiving at the UN is an outcome of existing solidarity and sympathy with the Palestinian people and their rightful struggle for human rights and independence. It has preceded the PA by decades, and will be there for many years to come.

The PA, however, has tactfully translated this international support and validation to political assets among Palestinians at home.

Indeed, much of the support that the PA and its dominant Fatah party continue to enjoy among ordinary Palestinians is driven by the following logic: every symbolic diplomatic ‘victory’ achieved by the PA abroad is followed by massive celebrations in Ramallah, fiery speeches of an imminent freedom and statehood.

But freedom, of course, remains elusive, partly because the PA is yet to develop a real strategy for resisting Israeli military Occupation and colonization. Its determination and vigor to acquire more international recognition is juxtaposed with utter laxity and disinterest in developing a unified national strategy in Palestine itself.

This points to an unmistakable conclusion: The PA’s strategy is merely focused on the very survival of the PA as a political apparatus, and on ‘Palestinian independence’ within an immaterial diplomatic sphere, without any tangible evidence of that ‘independence’ on the ground.

How else can one explain the fierce fight, in the name of Palestine and those suffering in Gaza, put up by PA President, Mahmoud Abbas, and his Ambassador, Riad al-Maliki at the UN, while the PA continues to withhold salaries from besieged Palestinians in the Gaza Strip?

The sad truth is that the fight for Palestinian recognition at the UN is, at its core, a fight for Abbas and his Authority to remain relevant, and solvent, in a changing international political order.

Meanwhile, for Palestinians, Abbas’ diplomatic achievements represent the proverbial morphine shots injected in the collective vein of an occupied and suffering people, desperate for a ray of hope.

According to the General Federation of Palestinian Trade Unions, poverty in the Gaza Strip has exceeded 80 percent, coupled with a 54.9% level of unemployment. The West Bank, too, is suffering, with the Israeli army and violent illegal Jewish settlers terrorizing the Palestinian population there. Thousands of Palestinian men and women languish in Israeli jails, hundreds of them held without trial.

Not only has the PA done little to challenge – or, at least, attempt to reverse - that reality, it has, at times contributed to it. Yet, oddly, the PA’s pitiful political discourse in Palestine is contrasted with a well-defined, articulate and purportedly courageous language outside.

“We will go to the Security Council for submitting our application,” to obtain full Palestinian membership at the UN, Palestinian Ambassador, al-Maliki, told reporters on January 15. “We know that we are going to face a US veto but this won't prevent us from presenting our application”.

In fact, this is the crux of the PA strategy at the moment. Knowing that it has little legitimacy among ordinary Palestinians, the PA is desperate to find an alternative source of legitimacy somewhere else.

While a greater support for the ‘State of Palestine’ is a positive sign indicating a changing world order, it is, sadly, used by the Palestinian leadership to sustain its own oppressive, futile and corrupt political gambit.

by Ramzy Baroud

- Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and editor of Palestine Chronicle. His latest book is The Last Earth: A Palestinian Story (Pluto Press, London, 2018). He earned a Ph.D. in Palestine Studies from the University of Exeter and is a Non-Resident Scholar at Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies, UCSB.

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mideastsoccer · 3 years

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Battle for the Soul of Islam

By James M. Dorsey

This story was first published in Horizons

TROUBLE is brewing in the backyard of Muslim-majority states competing for religious soft power and leadership of the Muslim world in what amounts to a battle for the soul of Islam. Shifting youth attitudes towards religion and religiosity threaten to undermine the rival efforts of Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Iran and, to a lesser degree, the United Arab Emirates, to cement their individual state-controlled interpretations of Islam as the Muslim world’s dominant religious narrative. Each of the rivals see their efforts as key to securing their autocratic or authoritarian rule as well as advancing their endeavors to carve out a place for themselves in a new world order in which power is being rebalanced.

Research and opinion polls consistently show that the gap between the religious aspirations of youth—and, in the case of Iran other age groups—and state-imposed interpretations of Islam is widening. The shifting attitudes amount to a rejection of Ash’arism, the fundament of centuries-long religiously legitimized authoritarian rule in the Sunni Muslim world that stresses the role of scriptural and clerical authority. Mustafa Akyol, a prominent Turkish Muslim intellectual, argues that Ash’arism has dominated Muslim politics for centuries at the expense of more liberal strands of the faith “not because of its merits, but because of the support of the states that ruled the medieval Muslim world.”

Similarly, Nadia Oweidat, a student of the history of Islamic thought, notes that “no topic has impacted the region more profoundly than religion. It has changed the geography of the region, it has changed its language, it has changed its culture. It has been shaping the region for thousands of years. [...] Religion controls every aspect of people who live in the Arab world.”

The polls and research suggest that youth are increasingly skeptical towards religious and worldly authority. They aspire to more individual, more spiritual experiences of religion. Their search leads them in multiple directions that range from changes in personal religious behavior that deviates from that proscribed by the state to conversions in secret to other religions even though apostasy is banned and punishable by death, to an abandonment of organized religion all together in favor of deism, agnosticism, or atheism.

“The youth are not interested in institutions or organizations. These do not attract them or give them any incentive; just the opposite, these institutions and organizations and their leadership take advantage of them only when they are needed for their attendance and for filling out the crowds,” said Palestinian scholar and former Hamas education minister Nasser al-Din al-Shaer.

Atheists and converts cite perceived discriminatory provisions in Islam’s legal code towards various Muslim sects, non-Muslims, and women as a reason for turning their back on the faith. “The primary thing that led me to atheism is Islam’s moral aspect. How can, for example, a merciful and compassionate God, said to be more merciful than a woman on her baby, permit slavery and the trade of slaves in slave markets? How come He permits rape of women simply because they are war prisoners? These acts would not be committed by a merciful human being much less by a merciful God,” said Hicham Nostic, a Moroccan atheist, writing under a pen name.

Revival, Reversal

The recent research and polls suggest a reversal of an Islamic revival that scholars like John Esposito in the 1990s and Jean-Paul Carvalho in 2009 observed that was bolstered by the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran, the results of a 1996 World Values Survey that reported a strengthening of traditional religious values in the Muslim world, the rise of Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and the initial Muslim Brotherhood electoral victories in Egypt and Tunisia in the wake of the 2011 popular Arab revolts.

“The indices of Islamic reawakening in personal life are many: increased attention to religious observances (mosque attendance, prayer, fasting), proliferation of religious programming and publications, more emphasis on Islamic dress and values, the revitalization of Sufism (mysticism). This broader-based renewal has also been accompanied by Islam’s reassertion in public life: an increase in Islamically oriented governments, organizations, laws, banks, social welfare services, and educational institutions,” Esposito noted at the time.

Carvalho argued that an economic “growth reversal which raised aspirations and led subsequently to a decline in social mobility which left aspirations unfulfilled among the educated middle class (and) increasing income inequality and impoverishment of the lower-middle class” was driving the revival. The same factors currently fuel a shift away from traditional, Orthodox, and ultra-conservative values and norms of religiosity.

The shift in Muslim-majority countries also contrasts starkly with a trend towards greater religious Orthodoxy in some Muslim minority communities in Europe. A 2018 report by the Dutch government’s Social and Cultural Planning Bureau noted that the number of Muslims of Turkish and Moroccan descent who strictly observe traditional religious precepts had increased by approximately eight percent. Dutch citizens of Turkish and Moroccan descent account for two-thirds of the country’s Muslim community. The report suggested that in a pluralistic society in which Muslims are a minority, “the more personal, individualistic search for true Islam can lead to youth becoming more strict in observance than their parents or environment ever were.”

Changing attitudes towards religion and religiosity that mirror shifting attitudes in non-Muslim countries are particularly risky for leaders, irrespective of their politics, who cloak themselves in the mantle of religion as well as nationalism and seek to leverage that in their geopolitical pursuit of religious soft power. The 2011 popular Arab revolts as well as mass anti-government protests in various Middle Eastern countries in 2019 and 2020 spotlighted the subversiveness of the change. “The Arab Spring was the tipping point in the shift [...]. It was the epitome of how we see the change. The calls were for ‘dawla madiniya,’ a civic state. A civic state is as close as you can come to saying [...], we want a state where the laws are written by people so that we can challenge them, we can change them, we can adjust them. It’s not God’s law, it’s madiniya, it’s people’s law,” Oweidat, the Islamic thought scholar, said.

Akyol went further, noting in a journal article that “too many terrible things have recently happened in the Arab world in the name of Islam. These include the sectarian civil wars in Syria, Iraq, and Yemen, where most of the belligerents have fought in the name of God, often with appalling brutality. The millions of victims and bystanders of these wars have experienced shock and disillusionment with religious politics, and more than a few began asking deeper questions.”

The 2011 popular Arab revolts reverberated across the Middle East, reshaping relations between states as well as domestic policies, even though initial achievements of the protesters were rolled back in Egypt and sparked wars in Libya, Yemen, and Syria.

Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, and Egypt imposed a 3.5 year-long diplomatic and economic boycott of Qatar in part to cut their youth off from access to the Gulf state’s popular Al Jazeera television network that supported the revolts and Islamist groups that challenged the region’s autocratic rulers. Seeking to lead and tightly control a social and economic reform agenda driven by youth who were enamored by the uprisings, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman “sought to recapture this mandate of change, wrap it in a national mantle, and sever it from its Arab Spring associations. The boycott and ensuing nationalist campaign against Qatar became central to achieving that,” said Gulf scholar Kristin Smith Diwan.

Referring to the revolts, Moroccan journalist Ahmed Benchemsi suggested that “the Arab Spring may have stalled, if not receded, but when it comes to religious beliefs and attitudes, a generational dynamic is at play. Large numbers of individuals are tilting away from the rote religiosity Westerners reflexively associate with the Arab world.”

Benchemsi went on to argue that “in today’s Arab world, it’s not religiosity that is mandatory; it’s the appearance of it. Nonreligious attitudes and beliefs are tolerated as long as they’re not conspicuous. As a system, social hypocrisy provides breathing room to secular lifestyles, while preserving the façade of religion. Atheism, per se, is not the problem. Claiming it out loud is. So those who publicize their atheism in the Arab world are fighting less for freedom of conscience than for freedom of speech.” The same could be said for the right to convert or opt for alternative practices of Islam.

Syrian journalist Sham al-Ali recounts the story of a female relative who escaped the civil war to Germany where she decided to remove her hijab. Her father, who lives in Turkey, accepted his daughter’s decision but threatened to disown her if she posted pictures of herself uncovered on Facebook. “His issue was not with his daughter’s abandonment of religious duty, but with her publicizing that before her family and society at large,” Al-Ali said.

Neo-patriarchism

Neo-patriarchism, a pillar of Arab autocratic rule, heightens concern about public appearance and perception. A phrase coined by American-Palestinian scholar Hisham Sharabi, neo-patriarchism involves projection of the autocratic leader as a father figure. Autocratic Arab society, according to Sharabi, was built on the dominance of the father, a patriarch around which the national as well as the nuclear family are organized. Relations between a ruler and the ruled are replicated in the relationship between a father and his children. In both settings, the paternal will is absolute, mediated in society as well as the family by a forced consensus based on ritual and coercion.

As a result, neo-patriarchism often reinforces pressure to abide by state-imposed religious behavior and at the same time fuels changes in attitudes towards religion and religiosity among youth who resent their inability to chart a path of their own. Primary and secondary schools have emerged as one frontline in the struggle to determine the boundaries of religious expression and behavior. Recent developments in Egypt, a brutal autocracy, and Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim-majority democracy, offer contrasting perspectives on how the tug of war between students and parents, schoolteachers and administrations, and the state plays out.

Mada Masr, Egypt’s foremost independent news outlet, documented how in 2020 Egyptian schoolgirls who refused to wear a hijab were being coerced and publicly shamed in the knowledge that the education ministry was reluctant to enforce its policy not to mandate the wearing of a headdress. “The model, decent girl is expected to dress modestly and wear a hijab to signal her pride in her religious identity, since hijab is what distinguishes her from a Christian girl,” said Lamia Lotfy, a gender consultant and rights activist. Teachers at public high schools said they were reluctant to take boys to task for violating dress codes because they were more likely to push back and create problems.

In sharp contrast, Indonesian Religious Affairs Minister Yaqut Cholil Qoumas issued in early 2021 a decree together with the ministers of home affairs and education threatening to sanction state schools that seek to impose religious garb in violation of government rules and regulations. The decree was issued amid a public row sparked by the refusal of a Christian student to obey her school principal’s instructions requiring all pupils to wear Islamic clothing. Qoumas is a leader of Nahdlatul Ulama, the world’s largest Muslim movement and foremost advocate of theological reform in line with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. “Religions do not promote conflict, neither do they justify acting unfairly against those who are different,” Qoumas said.

A Muslim nation that replaced a decades long autocratic regime with a democracy in a popular revolt in 1998, Indonesia is Middle Eastern rulers’ worst nightmare. The shifting attitudes of Middle Eastern youth towards religion and religiosity suggest that experimentation with religion in post-revolt Indonesia is a path that it would embark on if given the opportunity. Indonesia is “where the removal of constraints imposed by an authoritarian regime has opened up the imaginative terrain, allowing particular types of religious beliefs and practices to emerge [...]. The Indonesian cases study [...] brings into sharper relief processes that are happening in ordinary Muslim life elsewhere,” said Indonesia scholar Nur Amali Ibrahim.

A 2019 poll of Arab youth showed that two-thirds of those surveyed felt that religion played too large a role in their lives, up from 50 percent four years earlier. Nearly 80 percent argued that religious institutions needed to be reformed while half said that religious values were holding the Arab world back. Surveys conducted over the last decade by Arab Barometer, a research network at Princeton University and the University of Michigan, showed a growing number of youths turning their backs on religion. “Personal piety has declined some 43 percent over the past decade, indicating less than a quarter of the population now define themselves as religious,” the survey concluded.

With the trend being the strongest among Libyans, many Libyan youth gravitate towards secretive atheist Facebook pages. They often are products of the UAE’s failed attempt to align the hard power of its military intervention in Libya with religious soft power. Said, a 25-year-old student from Benghazi, the stronghold of the UAE and Saudi-backed rebel forces led by self-appointed Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar, turned his back on religion after his cousin was beheaded in 2016 for speaking out against militants. UAE backing of Haftar has involved the population of his army by Madkhalists, a branch of Salafism named after a Saudi scholar who preaches absolute obedience to the ruler and projects the kingdom as a model of Islamic governance. “My cousin’s death occurred during a period when I was deeply religious, praying five times a day and studying ten new pages of the Qur’an each evening,” Said said.

A majority of respondents in Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Turkey, and Iran said in a 2017 poll conducted by Washington-based John Zogby Associates that they wanted religious movements to focus on personal faith and spiritual guidance and not involve themselves in politics. Iraq and Palestine were the outliers with a majority favoring a political role for religious groups.

The response to polls in the second half of the second decade of the twenty-first century contrasts starkly with attitudes expressed in a survey of the world’s Muslims by the Pew Research Center several years earlier. Pew’s polling suggested that ultra-conservative attitudes long promoted by Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar that legitimized authoritarian and autocratic regimes remained popular. More than 70 percent of those surveyed at the time in South Asia, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa favored making Sharia the law of the land and granting Sharia courts jurisdiction over family law and property disputes.

Those numbers varied broadly, however, when respondents were asked about specific issues like apostasy and corporal punishment. Three-quarters of South Asians favored the death sentence for apostasy as opposed to 56 percent in the Middle East and only 27 percent in Southeast Asia, while 81 percent in South Asia supported physical punishment compared to 57 percent in the Middle East and North Africa and 46 percent in Southeast Asia. South Asia emerged as the only part of the Muslim world in which respondents preferred a strong leader to democracy while a majority of the faithful in all three regions viewed religious freedom as positive. Between 65 and 79 percent in all regions wanted to see religious leaders have political influence.

Honor killings may be the one area where attitudes have not changed that much in recent years. Arab Barometer’s polling in 2018 and 2019 showed that more people thought honor killings were acceptable than homosexuality. In most countries polled, young Arabs appeared more likely than their parents to condone honor killings. Social media and occasional protests bear that out. Thousands rallied in early 2020 in Hebron, a conservative city on the West Bank, after the Palestinian Authority signed the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women.

Nonetheless, the assertions by Saudi Arabia that projects itself as the leader of an unidentified form of moderate Islam that preaches absolute obedience to the ruler and by advocates of varying strands of political Islam such as Turkey and Iran ring hollow in light of the dramatic shift in attitudes towards religion and religiosity.

Acknowledging Change

Among the Middle Eastern rivals for religious soft power, the United Arab Emirates, populated in majority by non-nationals, may be the only one to emerge with a cleaner slate. The UAE is the only contender to have started acknowledging changing attitudes and demographic realities. Authorities in November 2020 lifted the ban on consumption of alcohol and cohabitation among unmarried couples. In a further effort to reach out to youth, the UAE organized in 2021 a virtual consultation with 3,000 students aimed at motivating them to think innovatively over the country’s path in the next 50 years.

Such moves do not fundamentally eliminate the risk that the changing attitudes may undercut the religious soft power efforts of the UAE and its Middle Eastern competitors. The problem for rulers like the UAE and Saudi crown princes, Mohammed bin Zayed and Mohammed bin Salman, respectively, is that the loosening of social restrictions in Saudi Arabia—including the emasculation of the kingdom’s religious police, the lifting of a ban on women’s driving, less strict implementation of gender segregation, the introduction of Western-style entertainment and greater professional opportunities for women, and a degree of genuine religious tolerance and pluralism in the UAE—are only first steps in responding to youth aspirations.

“People are sick and tired of organized religion and being told what to do. That is true for all Gulf states and the rest of the Arab world,” quipped a Saudi businessman. Social scientist Ellen van de Bovenkamp describes Moroccans she interviewed for her PhD thesis as living “a personalized, self-made religiosity, in which ethics and politics are more important than rituals.”

Nevertheless, religious authorities in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Turkey, Qatar, Iran, and Morocco continue to project interpretations of the faith that serve the state and are often framed in the language of tolerance and inter-faith dialogue but preserve outmoded legal categories, traditions, and scripture that date back centuries. Outdated concepts of slavery, who is a believer and who is an infidel, apostasy, blasphemy, and physical punishment that need reconceptualization remain in terms of religious law frozen in time. Many of those concepts, with the exception of slavery that has been banned in national law yet remains part of Islamic law, have been embedded in national legislations.

While Turkey continues to, at least nominally, adhere to its secular republican origins, it is no different from its rivals when it comes to grooming state-aligned clergymen, whose ability to think out of the box and develop new interpretations of the faith is impeded by a religious education system that stymies critical thinking and creativity. Instead, it too emphasizes the study of Arabic and memorization of the Qur’an and other religious texts and creates a religious and political establishment that discourages, if not penalizes, innovation.

Widening the gap between state projections of religion and popular aspirations is the fact that governments’ subjugation of religious establishments turns clerics and scholars into regime parrots and fuels youth skepticism towards religious institutions and leaders.

“Youth have [...] witnessed how religious figures, who still remain influential in many Arab societies, can sometimes give in to change even if they have resisted it initially. This not only feeds into Arab youth’s skepticism towards religious institutions but also further highlights the inconsistency of the religious discourse and its inability to provide timely explanations or justifications to the changing reality of today,” said Gulf scholar Eman Alhussein in a commentary on the 2020 Arab Youth Survey.

Pooyan Tamimi Arab, the co-organizer of an online survey in 2020 of Iranian attitudes towards religion that revealed a stunning rejection of state-imposed adherence to conservative religious mores as well as the role of religion in public life noted the widening gap “becomes an existential question. The state wants you to be something that you don’t want to be [...]. “Political disappointment steadily turned into religious disappointment [...]. Iranians have turned away from institutional religion on an unprecedented scale.”

In a similar vein, Turkish art historian Nese Yildiran recently warned that a fatwa issued by President Erdogan’s Directorate of Religious Affairs or Diyanet declaring popular talismans to ward off “the evil eye” as forbidden by Islam fueled criticism of one of the best-funded branches of government. The fatwa followed the issuance of similar religious opinions banning the dying of men’s moustaches and beards, feeding dogs at home, tattoos, and playing the national lottery as well as statements that were perceived to condone or belittle child abuse and violence against women.

Although compatible with a trend across the Middle East, the Iranian survey’s results, which is based on 50,000 respondents who overwhelmingly said they resided in the Islamic republic, suggested that Iranians were in the frontlines of the region’s quest for religious change.

Funded by Washington-based Iranian human rights activist Ladan Boroumand, the Iranian survey, coupled with other research and opinion polls across the Middle East and North Africa, suggests that not only Muslim youth, but also other age groups, who are increasingly skeptical towards religious and worldly authority, aspire to more individual, more spiritual experiences of religion.

Their quest runs the gamut from changes in personal religious behavior to conversions in secret to other religions because apostasy is banned and, in some cases, punishable by death, to an abandonment of religion in favor of agnosticism or atheism. Responding to the survey, 80 percent of the participants said they believed in God but only 32.2 percent identified themselves as Shiite Muslims—a far lower percentage than asserted in official figures of predominantly Shiite Iran.

More than one third of the respondents said that they either did not belong to a religion or were atheists or agnostics. Between 43 and 53 percent, depending on age group, suggested that their religious views had changed over time with 6 percent of those saying that they had converted to another religious orientation.

In addition, 68 percent said they opposed the inclusion of religious precepts in national legislation. Moreover 70 percent rejected public funding of religious institutions while 56 percent opposed mandatory religious education in schools. Almost 60 percent admitted that they do not pray, and 72 percent disagreed with women being obliged to wear a hijab in public.

An unpublished slide of the survey shows the change in religiosity reflected in the fact that an increasing number of Iranians no longer name their children after religious figures.

A five-minute YouTube clip uploaded by an ultra-conservative channel allegedly related to Iran’s Revolutionary Guards attacked the survey despite having distributed the questionnaire once the pollsters disclosed in their report that the poll had been supported by an exile human rights group.

“Tehran may well be the least religious capital in the Middle East. Clerics dominate the news headlines and play the communal elders in soap operas, but I never saw them on the street, except on billboards. Unlike most Muslim countries, the call to prayer is almost inaudible [...]. Alcohol is banned but home delivery is faster for wine than for pizza [...]. Religion felt frustratingly hard to locate and the truly religious seemed sidelined, like a minority,” wrote journalist Nicholas Pelham based on a visit in 2019 during which he was detained for several weeks.

In yet another sign of rejection of state-imposed expressions of Islam, Iranians have sought to alleviate the social impact of COVID-19 related lockdowns and restrictions on face-to-face human contact by acquiring dogs, cats, birds, and even reptiles as pets. The Islamic Republic has long viewed pets as a fixture of Western culture. One of the main reasons for keeping pets in Iran is that people no longer believe in the old cultural, religious, or doctrinal taboos as the unalterable words of God. “This shift towards deconstructing old taboos signals a transformation of the Iranian identity—from the traditional to the new,” said psychologist Farnoush Khaledi.

Pets are one form of dissent; clandestine conversions are another. Exiled Iranian Shiite scholar Yaser Mirdamadi noted that “Iranians no longer have faith in state-imposed religion and are groping for religious alternatives.”

A former Israeli army intelligence chief, retired Lt. Col. Marco Moreno, puts the number of converts in Iran, a country of 83 million, at about one million. Moreno’s estimate may be an overestimate. Other studies in put the figure at between 100,000 and 500,000. Whatever the number is, the conversions fit a trend not only in Iran but across the Muslim world of changing attitudes towards religion, a rejection of state-imposed interpretations of Islam, and a search for more individual and varied religious experiences. Iranian press reports about the discovery of clandestine church gatherings in homes in the holy city of Qom suggest conversions to Christianity began more than a decade ago. “The fact that conversions had reached Qom was an indication that this was happening elsewhere in the country,” Mirdamadi, the Shiite cleric, said.

Seeing the converts as an Israeli asset, Moreno backed production of a two-hour documentary, Sheep Among Wolves Volume II, produced by two American Evangelists, one of which resettled on the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, that asserts that Iran’s underground community of converts to Christianity is the world’s fastest growing church.

“What if I told you the mosques are empty inside Iran?” said a church leader in the film, his identity masked and his voice distorted to avoid identification. Based on interviews with Iranian converts while they were travelling abroad, the documentary opens with a scene on an Indonesian beach where they meet with the filmmakers for a religious training session.

“What if I told you that Islam is dead? What if I told you that the mosques are empty inside Iran? [...] What if I told you no one follows Islam inside of Iran? Would you believe me? This is exactly what is happening inside of Iran. God is moving powerfully inside of Iran?” the church leader added. Unsurprisingly, given the film’s Israeli backing and the filmmaker’s affinity with Israel, the documentary emphasizes the converts’ break with Iran’s staunch rejection of the Jewish State by emphasizing their empathy for Judaism and Israel.

Reduced Religiosity

The Iran survey’s results as well as observations by analysts and journalists like Pelham stroke with responses to various polls of Arab public opinion in recent years and fit a global pattern of reduced religiosity. A 2019 Pew Research Center study concluded that adherence to Christianity in the United States was declining at a rapid pace.

The Arab Youth Survey found that, despite 40 percent of those polled defining religion as the most important constituent element of their identity, 66 percent saw a need for religious institutions to be reformed. “The way some Arab countries consume religion in the political discourse, which is further amplified on social media, is no longer deceptive to the youth who can now see through it,” Alhussein, the Gulf scholar, said.

A 2018 Arab Opinion Index poll suggested that public opinion may support the reconceptualization of Muslim jurisprudence. Almost 70 percent of those polled agreed that “no religious authority is entitled to declare followers of other religions to be infidels.” Similarly, 70 percent of those surveyed rejected the notion that democracy was incompatible with Islam while 76 percent viewed it as the most appropriate system of governance.

What that means in practice is, however, less clear. Arab public opinion appears split down the middle when it comes to issues like separation of religion and politics or the right to protest.

Arab Barometer director Michael Robbins cautioned in a commentary in the Washington Post, co-authored with international affairs scholar Lawrence Rubin, that recent moves by the government of Sudan to separate religion and state may not enjoy public support.

The transitional government brought to office in 2020 by a popular revolt that topped decades of Islamist rule by ousted President Omar al-Bashir agreed in peace talks with Sudanese rebel groups to a “separation of religion and state.” The government also ended the ban on apostasy and consumption of alcohol by non-Muslims and prohibited corporal punishment, including public flogging.

Robbins and Rubin noted that 61 percent of those surveyed on the eve of the revolt believed that Sudanese law should be based on the Sharia or Islamic law defined by two-thirds of the respondents as ensuring the provision of basic services and lack of corruption. The researchers, nonetheless, also concluded that youth favored a reduced role of religious leaders in political life. They said youth had soured on the idea of religion-based governance because of widespread corruption during the region of Al-Bashir who professed his adherence to religious principles.

“If the transitional government can deliver on providing basic services to the country’s citizens and tackling corruption, the formal shift away from Sharia is likely to be acceptable in the eyes of the public. However, if these problems remain, a new set of religious leaders may be able to galvanize a movement aimed at reinstituting Sharia as a means to achieve these objectives,” Robbins and Rubin warned.

Writing at the outset of the popular revolt that toppled Al-Bashir, Islam scholar and former Sudanese diplomat Abdelwahab El-Affendi noted that “for most Sudanese, Islamism came to signify corruption, hypocrisy, cruelty, and bad faith. Sudan is perhaps the first genuinely anti-Islamist country in popular terms. But being anti-Islamist in Sudan does not mean being secular.”

It is a warning that is as valid for Sudan as it is for much of the Arab and Muslim world.

Saudi columnist Wafa al-Rashid sparked fiery debate on social media after calling in a local newspaper for a secular state in the kingdom. “How long will we continue to shy away from enlightenment and change? Religious enlightenment, which is in line with reality and the thinking of youth, who rebelled and withdrew from us because we are no longer like them. [...] We no longer speak their language or understand their dreams,” Al-Rashid wrote.

Asked in a poll conducted by The Washington Institute of Near East Policy whether “it’s a good thing we aren’t having big street demonstrations here now the way they do in some other countries”—a reference to the past decade of popular revolts in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Algeria, Lebanon, Iraq and Sudan—Saudi public opinion was split down the middle. The numbers indicate that 48 percent of respondents agreed and 48 percent disagreed. Saudis, like most Gulf Arabs, are likely less inclined to take grievances to the streets. Nonetheless, the poll indicates that they may prove to be more empathetic to protests should they occur.

Tamimi Arab, the Iran pollster, argued that his Iran survey “shows that there is a social basis” for concern among authoritarian and autocratic governments that employ religion to further their geopolitical goals and seek to maintain their grip on potentially restive populations. His warning reverberates in the responses by governments in Iran, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere in the Middle East to changing attitudes towards religion and religiosity. They demonstrate the degree to which they perceive the change as a threat, often expressed in existential terms.

Mohammad Mehdi Mirbaqeri, a prominent Shiite cleric and member of Iran’s powerful Assembly of Experts that appoints the country’s supreme leader, described COVID-19 in late 2020 as a “secular virus” and a declaration of war on “religious civilization” and “religious institutions.”

Saudi Arabia went further by defining the “calling for atheist thought in any form” as terrorism in its anti-terrorism law. Saudi dissident and activist Rafi Badawi was sentenced on charges of apostasy to ten years in prison and 1,000 lashes for questioning why Saudis should be obliged to adhere to Islam and asserting that the faith did not have answers to all questions.

Analysts, writers, journalists, and pollsters have traced changes in attitudes in the Middle East and North Africa as well as the wider Muslim world for much of the past decade, if not longer. A Western Bangladesh scholar resident in Dacca in 1989 recalled Bangladeshis looking for a copy of Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses as soon as it was banned by Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini, who condemned the British author to death. “It was the allure of forbidden fruit. Yet, I also found that many were looking for things to criticize, an excuse to think differently,” the scholar wrote.

Widely viewed as a bastion of ultra-conservatism. Malaysia’s top religious regulatory body, the Malaysian Islamic Development Department (Jakim), which responsible for training Islamic teachers and preparing weekly state-controlled Friday sermons, has long portrayed liberalism and pluralism as threats, pointing to a national fatwa that in 2006 condemned liberalism as heretical. “The pulpit would like to state today that many tactics are being undertaken by irresponsible people to weaken Muslim unity, among them through spreading new but inverse thinking like Pluralism, Liberalism, and such. The pulpit would like to state that the Liberal movement contains concepts that are found to have deviated from the Islamic faith and shariah,” read a 2014 Friday sermon drafted and distributed by Jakim.

The fatwa echoed a similar legal opinion issued a year earlier by Indonesia’s semi-governmental Council of Religious Scholars (MUI) labelled with SIPILIS as its acronym to equate secularism, pluralism, and liberalism with the venereal disease. The council was headed at the time by current Vice President Ma’ruf Amin, a prominent Nahdlatul Ulama figure.

Challenging attempts by governments and religious authorities to suppress changing attitudes rather than engage with groups groping for greater religious freedom, Kuwaiti writer Sajed al-Abdali noted in 2012 that “it is essential that we acknowledge today that atheism exists and is increasing in our society, especially among our youth, and evidence of this is in no short supply.”

Al-Abdali sounded his alarm three years prior to the publication of a Pew Research Center study that sought to predict the growth trajectories of the world’s religions by the year 2050. The study suggested that the number of people among the 300 million inhabitants of the Middle East and North Africa that were unaffiliated with any faith would remain stable at about 0.6 percent of the population.

Two years later, the Egyptian government’s religious advisory body, Dar al-Ifta Al-Missriya, published a scientifically disputed survey that sought to project the number of atheists in the region as negligible. The survey identified 2,293 atheists, including 866 Egyptians, 325 Moroccans, 320 Tunisians, 242 Iraqis, 178 Saudis, 170 Jordanians, 70 Sudanese, 56 Syrians, 34 Libyans, and 32 Yemenis. It defined atheists as not only those who did not believe in God but also as encompassing converts to other religions and advocates of a secular state. A poll conducted that same year by Al Azhar, Cairo’s ancient citadel of Islamic learning, concluded that Egypt counted 10.7 million atheists. Al Azhar’s Grand Imam, Ahmad al-Tayyeb, warned at the time on state television that the flight from religion constituted a social problem.

A 2012 survey by international polling firm WIN/Gallup International reported that 5 percent of Saudis—or more than one million people—identified themselves as “convinced atheists” on par with the percentage in the United States; while 19 percent described themselves as non-religious. By the same token, Benchemsi, the Moroccan journalist, found 250 Arab atheism-related pages or groups while searching the internet, with memberships ranging from a few individuals to more than 11,000. “And these numbers only pertain to Arab atheists (or Arabs concerned with the topic of atheism) who are committed enough to leave a trace online,” Benchemsi said, noting that many more were unlikely to publicly disclose their beliefs.

The picture is replicated across the Middle East. The number of atheists and agnostics in Iraq, for example, is growing. Iraqi writer and one-time Shiite cleric Gaith al-Tamimi argued that religious figures have come to represent all that’s inherently wrong in Iraqi politics society. Iraqis of all generations seek to escape religious dogma, he says, adding that “Iraqis are questioning the role religion serves today.” Fadhil, a 30-year-old from the southern port city of Basra complained that religious leaders “overuse and misuse God’s name, police human bodies, prohibit extramarital sex, and police the bodies of women.” Changing attitudes towards religion figured prominently in mass anti-government protests in Iraq in 2019 and 2020 that rejected sectarianism and called for a secular national Iraqi identity.

Even in Syria, a fulcrum of militant and ultra-conservative forms of Islam that fed on a decade of brutal civil war and foreign intervention, many concluded in the words of Al-Ali, the Syrian journalist, that “religious and political authorities are ‘protective friends one of the other,’ and that political despotism stems from religious absolutism. [...] In Syria, the prestige sheikhs had enjoyed was undermined alongside that of the regime.” Religion and religious figures’ inability to explain the horror that Syria was experiencing and that had uprooted the lives of millions drove many forced to flee to question long-held beliefs.

Multiple Turkish surveys suggested that Erdogan’s goal of raising a religious generation had backfired despite pouring billions of dollars into religious education. Students often rejected religion, described themselves as atheists, deists, or feminists, and challenged the interpretation of Islam taught in schools. A 2019 survey by polling and data company IPSOS reported that only 12 percent of Turks trusted religious officials and 44 percent distrusted clerics. “We have declined when religious sincerity and morality expressed by the people is taken into account,” said Ali Bardakoglu, who headed Erdogan’s Religious Affairs Department or Diyanet from 2003 to 2010.

Unaware that microphones had not been muted, Erdogan expressed concern a year earlier to his education minister about the spread of deism, a belief in a God that does not intervene in the universe and that is not defined by organized religion, among Turkish youth during a meeting of his party’s parliamentary group. “No, no such thing can happen,” Erdogan ordained against the backdrop of Turkish officials painting deism as a Western conspiracy designed to weaken Turkey. Erdogan’s comments came in response to the publication of an education ministry report that, in line with the subsequent survey, warned that popular rejection of religious knowledge acquired through revelation and religious teachings and a growing embrace of reason was on the rise.

The report noted that increased enrollment in a rising number of state-run religious Imam Hatip high schools had not stopped mounting questioning of orthodox Islamic precepts. Neither had increased study of religion in mainstream schools that deemphasized the teaching of evolution. The greater emphasis on religion failed to advance Erdogan’s dream of a pious generation that would have a Qur’an in one hand and a computer in the other. Instead, reflecting a discussion on faith and youth among some 50 religion teachers, the report suggested that lack of faith in educators had fueled the rise of deism. Teachers were unable to answer the often-posed question: why does God not intervene to halt evil and why does he remain silent? The report’s cautionary note was bolstered by a flurry of anonymous confessions and personal stories by deists as well as atheists recounted in newspaper interviews.

Acting on Erdogan’s instructions, Ali Erbas, the director of Diyanet, declared war on deism. The government’s top cleric, Erbas blamed Western missionaries seeking to convert Turkish youth to Christianity for deism’s increased popularity. Erbas’ declaration followed a three-day consultation with 70 religious scholars and bureaucrats convened by the Directorate that identified “Deism, Atheism, Nihilism, Agnosticism” as the enemy. Erdogan’s alarm and Erbas’ spinning of conspiracy theories constituted attempts to detract attention from the fact that youth in Tukey, like in Iran and the Arab world, were turning their back on orthodox and classical interpretations of Islam on the back of increasingly authoritarian and autocratic rule. Erdogan thundered that “there is no such thing” as LGBT and added that “this country is national and spiritual, and will continue to walk into the future as such” when protesting students displayed a poster depicting one of Islam’s holiest sites, the Kaaba shrine in Mecca, with LGBT flags.

“There is a dictatorship in Turkey. This drives people away from religion,” said Temel Karamollaoglu, the leader of the Islamist Felicity Party that opposes Erdogan’s AKP because of its authoritarianism. Turkey scholar Mucahit Bilici described Turkish youths’ rejection of Orthodox and politicized interpretations of Islam as “a flowering of post-Islamist sentiment” by a “younger generation (that) is choosing the path of individualized spirituality and a silent rejection of tradition.”

Saudi authorities view the high numbers in the WIN/Gallup International as a threat to the religious legitimacy that the kingdom’s ruling Al-Saud family has long cloaked itself in. The groundswell of aspirations that have guided youth away from the confines of ultra-conservatism highlight failed efforts of the government and the religious establishment going back to the 1980s. The culture and information ministry banned the word ‘modernity’ at the time in a bid to squash an emerging debate that challenged the narrow confines of ultra-conservatism as well as the authority of religion and the religious establishment to govern personal and public life.

False Equation

The threat perceived by Saudi and other Middle Eastern autocrats and authoritarians as well as conservative religious voices is fueled by an implicit equation of atheism and/or rejection of state-imposed conservative and ultra-conservative strands of the faith with anarchy.

“Any calls that challenge Islamic rule or Islamic ideology is considered subversive in Saudi Arabia and would be subversive and could lead to chaos,” said Saudi ambassador to the United Nations Abdallah al-Mouallimi. Echoing journalist Benchemsi, Muallimi argued that “if (a person) was disbelieving in God, and keeping that to himself, and conducting himself, nobody would do anything or say anything about it. If he is going out in the public, and saying, ‘I don’t believe in God,’ that’s subversive. He is inviting others to retaliate.”

Similarly, Sheikh Ahmad Turki, speaking as the coordinator of the anti-atheism campaign of the Egyptian Ministry of Endowments, asserted that atheism “is a national security issue. Atheists have no principles; it’s certain that they have dysfunctional concepts—in ethics, views of the society and even in their nationalistic affiliations. If [atheists] rebel against religion, they will rebel against everything.’’

Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have sought to experiment with alternatives to orthodox and ultra-conservative strands of Islam without surrendering state control by encouraging Al Azhar to embrace legal reform that is influenced by Sufism, Islam’s mystical tradition. “There is a movement of renewal of Islamic jurisprudence. [...] It’s a movement that is funded by the wealthy Gulf countries. Don’t forget that one reason for the success of the Salafis is the financial power that backed them for decades. This financial power is now being directed to the Azharis, and they are taking advantage of it. [...] Don’t underestimate what is happening. It might be a true alternative to Salafism,” said Egyptian Islam scholar Wael Farouq.

By contrast, Pakistan, a country influenced by Saudi-inspired ultra-conservatism, has stepped up its efforts to ringfence religious minorities. In an act of overreach modelled on American insistence on extra-territorial abidance by some of its laws, Pakistan laid down a gauntlet in the struggle to define religious freedom by seeking to block and shut down a U.S.-based website associated with Ahmadis on charges of blasphemy.

Ahmadis are a minority sect viewed as heretics by many Muslims that have been targeted in Indonesia and elsewhere, but nowhere more so than in Pakistan where they have been constitutionally classified as non-Muslims. Blasphemy is potentially punishable in Pakistan with a death sentence.

The Pakistani effort was launched at a moment that anti-Ahmadi and anti-Shiite sentiment in Pakistan, home to the world’s largest Shia Muslim minority, was on the rise. Mass demonstrations denounced Shiites as “blasphemers” and “infidels” and called for their beheading as the number of blasphemy cases being filed against Shiites in the courts mushroomed.

Shifting attitudes towards religion and religiosity raise fundamental chicken and egg questions about the relationship between religious and political reform, including what comes first and whether one is possible without the other. Indonesia’s Nahdlatul Ulama argues that religious reform requires recontextualization of the faith as well as a revision of legal codes and religious jurisprudence. The only Muslim institution to have initiated a process of eliminating legal concepts in Islamic law that are obsolete or discriminatory—such as the endorsement of slavery and notions of infidels and dhimmis or People of the Book with lesser rights—Nahdlatul Ulama, a movement created almost a century ago in opposition to Wahhabism, the puritan interpretation of Islam on which Saudi Arabia was founded, is in alignment with advocates of religious reform elsewhere in the Muslim world.

Said Mohammed Sharour, a Syrian Quranist who believed that the Qur’an was Islam’s only relevant text, dismissed the Hadith—the compilation of the Prophet’s sayings and the Sunnah, the traditions, and practices of the Prophet that serve as a model for Muslims: “The religious heritage must be critically read and interpreted anew. Cultural and religious reforms are more important than political ones, as they are the preconditions for any secular reforms.” Shahrour went on to say that the reforms, comparable to those of 16th century scholar and priest Martin Luther’s reformation of Christianity, “must include all those ideas on which the people who perpetrated the 9/11 attacks based their interpretations of sources. [...] We simply have to rethink the fundamental principles. It is [...] said that the fixed values of religion cannot be rethought. But I say that it is exactly these values that we must study and rethink.”

The thinking of Nahdlatul Ulama’s critical mass of Islamic scholars and men like Shahrour offers little solace to authoritarian and autocratic leaders and their religious allies in the Muslim world at a time that Muslims are clamoring not only for political and religious change. If anything, it puts them on the spot by offering a bottom-up alternative to state-controlled religion that seeks to ensure the survival of autocratic regimes and the protection of vested interests.

James M. Dorsey is Senior Fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies of Nanyang Technological University, Senior Research Fellow at the National University of Singapore’s Middle East Institute, and an Honorary Senior Non-Resident Fellow at Eye on ISIS. You may follow him on Twitter @mideastsoccer.

#saudi arabia #uae #iran #turkey #indone

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xtruss · 4 years

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Opinion // Palestinians Pay the Price For Israel’s Slavery to the Memory of the Holocaust

When saying ‘Never again’ is the only way Israel engages with the past, it can be used to justify undemocratic, militaristic rule over the Palestinians - and now, annexation

— Daniel Barenboim | Haaretz | May 12, 2020

Israeli soldiers block Palestinian demonstrators near the Israeli settlement of Yitzhar, near the West Bank city of Nablus. Feb. 21, 2020. Majdi Mohammed, AP

This week, the 35th government of the State of Israel will be sworn in, 75 years after the end of the Holocaust. In its coalition agreement, the new government declares that it plans a vote of the government and/or in the Knesset on annexing parts of the West Bank (the Jordan Valley and the settlements), on the basis of the Trump administration’s "peace plan."

This plan is one more step in the direction of anything but a peace agreement with the Palestinians. It is nothing short of catastrophic.

Historically, the fact that Israel is a functioning liberal democracy – often called the only democracy in the Middle East – has been its main political capital, a capital also based on a claim to exemplary morality which has been at the root of Jewish existence throughout history.

One of the central declarations of the Torah, echoed in many injunctions, is "Justice, justice shalt thou pursue." The pursuit of justice has indeed been a fundamental tenet of Judaism since its very beginning. Jewish tradition’s universal teachings about responsibility toward all human beings and to the entire world reflect a deep commitment to the ethical principles of righteousness and justice.

But Israel is spending this historical capital at warp speed, for two interconnected reasons: the ethics of its memory of the Holocaust and its continuing treatment of the Palestinians.

At the end of the 19th century, Theodor Herzl had a beautiful dream of the Jewish homeland. But unfortunately, only a few years later, a lie snuck into the narrative: Palestine as "A land without a people for a people without a land."

This was simply not true: in 1914, the Jewish people comprised only 12 percent of the total population of Palestine. No one can honestly claim that Palestine was then a land without a people (for a people without a land,) and this fact is at the core of the Palestinians’ historical inability to accept the existence of the State of Israel.

That opposition has no connection to hating Jews. Accusing the Palestinians of being anti-Semitic is unacceptable, because their refusal to accept a Jewish presence in what today is the State of Israel has a clear historical basis. It has nothing at all in common with the wide-spread European anti-Semitism which found its most horrific expression in the Holocaust.

Israel only remembers the past of the Jewish people. But it has lost its capacity to recollect. To remember means to recall from one’s memory whereas to recollect means to collect one's thoughts again, especially about past events. The perfectly correct necessity to say “never again” when speaking of the Holocaust must not be the only form of engagement with the past. There has to be an additional constructive aspect attached to remembering, there has to be recollection.

Of course, the Holocaust must be recognized by the whole world including the Palestinians, it must be studied and understood so that it is not allowed to be repeated. At no time and nowhere. Edward Said understood this perfectly, and fought against the stupidity and cruelty of Holocaust deniers.

He was clear that a lack of understanding of the human devastation of the Holocaust and its racist denial would be opening the door to a repetition and would be cruel, both to the memory of those who perished and the reality of those who survived.

But understanding in the Spinozian sense has another, deeper meaning: Knowledge and understanding are distinct. Knowledge is something you accumulate but understanding comes from a profound process of reasoning and leads to freedom.

Applied to the memory of the Holocaust, this means that acquiring knowledge through the understanding of its very essence will allow us to not to be a slave to a memory we must not forget. Otherwise it will offer justification of undemocratic and militaristic tendencies which gravely endanger the present and future of both the Israeli and Palestinian societies.

The horror of the inhumanity of the Holocaust and its tragedy belongs to humanity as a whole. I am convinced that only the ability to see it as such will give us the necessary clarity of thought and emotional capacity to deal with the conflict with the Palestinians. If it is true that the Palestinians will not be able to accept Israel without accepting its history, including the Holocaust, it is equally true that Israel will not be able to accept the Palestinians as long as the Holocaust is its only moral criteria for existing.

So what about Israel and its new government? Not only are its ethics of memory flawed, but maintaining the occupation and creating new settlements, and now even planning to annex additional territories, have made the Palestinians morally superior.

But Israelis and Palestinians are and will be permanently interconnected. Israelis are not only the occupiers and Palestinians are not only the victims. Each is an "other" but only taken together, they make a complete unit.

Therefore, it is essential to each to understand not only their own narration, but also the human experience of the other. We can learn this from music: Music never tells a single narrative, there is always a dialogue or counterpoint. If in political debate there is only one voice, it is a rigid ideology. That could never happen in music.

— Daniel Barenboim is general music director of La Scala, the Berlin State Opera and the Staatskapelle Berlin. Together with the late Edward Said, he co-founded the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, a Seville-based orchestra of young Arab and Israeli musicians

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medicinemane · 7 years

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I’ve been looking for my copy of one of Asimov’s autobiography for ages (I think he says in there it’s his 3rd), specifically for this one chapter on anti-semitisim. I think it’s brilliant, and I think it has real words of wisdom for any time, but right now in particular. Which is why I’m going to transcribe it below the cut. I’d really recommend give in a read

Anti-Semitisim

This leads me to a more general discussion of anti-Semitisim.

My father told me rather proudly that there was never any pogrom in this little town, that Jews and Gentiles got along. In fact, he told me that he was good friends with a Gentile boy, whom he helped with his schoolwork. After the Revolution, that boy turned up as a local functionary of the Communist Party and helped my father with the paperwork required for emigration to the United States.

This is important. I have frequently had hotheaded romantics assume that our family fled Russia to escape persecution. They seem to think that the only way we got out was by jumping from ice flow to ice flow the Dnieper River, with bloodhounds and the entire Red Army in hot pursuit.

No such thing. We were not persecuted and we left in a quite legal manner with no more trouble than one would expect from any bureaucracy, including our own. If that’s disappointing, so be it.

Nor do I have horror tales to tell about my life here in the United States. I was never made to suffer for my Jewishness in the crass sense of being beaten up or physically harmed. I was taunted often enough, sometimes openly by young yahoos and more often subtly by the more educated. It was something I accepted as an inevitable part of the Universe that I could not change.

I also knew that vast areas of American society were closed to me because I was Jewish, but that was true in every Christian society in the world for two thousand years, and I accepted that too was a fact of life.

What was really difficult to endure was the feeling of insecurity and even terror, because of what was happening in the world. I am talking about the 1930s now, when Hitler was becoming more and more dominant and his anti-Semitic madness was becoming ever more vicious and murderous.

No American Jew could fail to be aware that the Jews, first in Germany, then in Austria, were being endlessly humiliated, mistreated, imprisoned, tortured, and killed, merely for being Jewish. We could not fail to realize that Nazi-like parties were arising in other parts of Europe, which also made anti-Semitism their central watchword. Even France and Great Britain were not immune; both had their Fascist-type parties and both had long histories of anti-Semitism.

We were not safe even in the United States. The undercurrent of genteel anti-Semitism. was already there.The occasional violence of the more ignorant street gangs always existed. But there was also the pull of Nazism. We can discount the German-American Bund, which was an open arm of the Nazis. However, people such as Catholic priest Father Charles Coughlin and the aviation hero Charles Lindbergh openly expressed anti-Semitic views. There were also homegrown Fascist movements that rallied round the anti-Semitic banner.

How could American Jews live under this strain? Why did they not break down? I suppose that most simply practiced “denial.” They tried hard not to think about it and went about their normal way of life as best they could. To a large extent, I did this too. One simply had to. (The Jews in Germany did the same thing till the storm broke.)

I also had a more positive attitude. I had enough faith in the United States of America to believe it would never follow the German example.

And, as a matter of fact, Hitler’s excesses, not only in his racism but in his nationalistic saber rattling, his increasingly obvious paranoia, were rousing disgust and anger among important sections of the American population. Even if the United States was, on the whole, rather cool to the plight of Europe’s Jews, it was becoming increasingly anti-Hitler. Or so I felt, and I found comfort in that.

I also tried to avoid becoming uncomfortably hooked on anti-Semitism as the main problem in the world. Many Jews I knew divided the world into Jews and anti-Semites, nothing else. Many Jews I knew recognized no problem anywhere, at any time, but that of anti-Semitism.

It struck me, however, that prejudice was universal and that all groups who were not dominant, who were not actually at the top of the status chain, were potential victims. In Europe, in the 1930s, it was the Jews who were being spectacularly victimized, but in the United States it was not the Jews who were worst treated. Here, as anyone could see who did not deliberately keep his eyes shut, it was the African-Americans.

For two centuries they had been enslaved. Since that slavery had come to a formal end, the African-Americans remained in a position of near-slavery in most segments of American society. They were deprived of ordinary rights, treated with contempt, and kept out of any participation in what is called the American dream.

I, though Jewish, and poor besides, eventually received a first-class American education at a top American university, and I wondered how many African-Americans would have the chance. It constantly bothered me to have to denounce anti-Semitism unless I denounced the cruelty of man to man in general.

Such is the blindness of people that I have know Jews who, having deplored anti-Semitism in unmeasured tones,would, with scarcely a breath in between,got on the subject of African-Americans and promptly begin to sound like a group of petty Hitlers. And when I pointed this out and objected to it strenuously, they turned on me in anger. They simply could not see what they were doing.

I once listened t a woman grow eloquent over the terrible ways in which Gentiles did nothing to save the Jews of Europe. “You can’t trust Gentiles,” she said. I let some time elapse and the asked suddenly, “What are you doing to help the blacks in their fight for civil rights?” “Listen,” she said, “I have my own troubles.” And I said, “So did the Gentiles.” but she only stared at me blankly. She didn’t get the point at all.

What can be done about it? The who world seems to live under the banner: “Freedom is wonderful - but only for me.”

I broke out, under different conditions, once in May od 1977. On that occasion I shared a platform with others, among them Elie Wiesel, who survived the Holocaust (the slaying of six million European Jews) and now will talk of nothing else. Wiesel irritated me when he said that he did not trust scientists and engineers because scientists and engineers had been involved in conduction the Holocaust.

What a generalization! It was precisely the sort of thing an anti-Semite says. “I don’t trust Jews because once certain Jews crucified my Savior.”

I brooded about that on the platform and finally, unable to keep quiet, I said, “Mr. Wiesel, it is a mistake to think that because a group has suffered extreme persecution that it is a sign that they are virtuous and innocent. They might be, of course, but the persecution process is no proof of that. The persecution merely shows that the persecuted group is weak. Had they been strong, then, for all we know, they might have been the persecutors.”

Whereupon Wiesel, very excited, said, “Give me one example of the Jews ever persecuting anyone.”

Of course, I was ready for him. I said, Under the Maccabean kingdom in the second century B.C., John Hyrcanus of Judea conquered Edom and gave the Edomites a choice - convert to Judaism or the sword. The Edomites, being sensible, converted, but, thereafter, they were in any case treated as an inferior group, for though they were Jews, they were also Edomites.”

And Wiesel, even more excited, said, “That was only one time.”

I said, “That was the only time the Jews had the power. One for one isn’t bad.”

That ended the discussion, but I might add that the audience was heart and soul with Wiesel.

I might have gone further. I might have referred to the treatment of the Canaanites by the Israelites under David and Solomon. And if I could have foreseen the future, I would have mentioned what is going on in Israel today. American Jews might appreciate the situation more clearly if they imagined a reversal of roles, or Palestinians ruling the land and of the Jews despairingly throwing rocks.

I once had a similar argument with Avram Davidson, a brilliant science fiction writer, who is (of course) Jewish and was, for a time at least, ostentatiously orthodox. I had written an essay on the Book of Ruth, treating it as a plea for tolerance as against the cruelty of the scribe Ezra, who forced the Jews to “put away” their foreign wives. Ruth was a Moabite, a people hated by the Jews, yet she was pictured as a model woman, and she was the ancestress of David.

Avram Davidson took umbrage at my implication that the Jews were intolerant and he wrote me a letter in which he waxed sarcastic indeed. He too asked when the Jews had ever persecuted anyone.

In my answer, I said, “Avram, you and I are Jews who live in a county that is ninety-five percent non-Jewish and we are doing very well. I wonder how we would make out, Avram, if we were Gentiles and lived in a county that was ninety-five percent Orthodox Jewish.”

He never answered.

Right now there is an influx of Soviet Jews into Israel. They are fleeing because they expect religious persecution. Yet the instant their feet touched Israeli soil, they became extreme Israeli nationalists with no pity for the Palestinians. From persecuted to persecutors in the blinking of an eye.

The Jews are not remarkable for this. It;s just that because I’m a Jew I am sensitive to this particular situation - but it’s a general phenomenon. When pagan Rome persecuted the early Christians, the Christians pleaded for tolerance. When Christianity took over, was their tolerance? Not on your life. The persecution began at one in the other direction.

The Bulgarians demanded freedom for themselves from an oppressive regime and made use of that freedom by attacking ethnic Turks in their midst. The Azerbaijani demanded freedom from the centralized control of the Soviet Union, but they seemed to want to make use of that freedom to kill all the Armenians in their midst.

The Bible says that those who have experienced persecution should not in their turn persecute: “Thou shalt neither vex a stranger, nor oppress him; for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Exodus 22:21). Yet who follows that text? When I try to preach it, I merely make myself seem odd and become unpopular.

-Isaak Asimov

I.Asimov

#Isaak Asimov

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watchmanis216 · 4 years

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Germany’s Decline, Christianity’s Demise, America’s destiny’

Germany’s decline is occurring and is tied to Hitler’s rule and the Muslims. But we see Christianity declining in Europe, the UK, and in America. Thus the globalist America is headed for the destiny to which it must owe to its own doing. Whether you like it or not, America is catapulted headlong into a system of globalism that will implode into war and in the end we will find the Beast of Revelation 13 at the head!

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Table of Contents

America, Germany, and Politics: The abyss of bad policies. 1

World War Two Aftermath: Hitler, Himmler, and Al-Husseini 1

The influence of Al-Husseini and Islamic Jihad. 2

The Example of Merkel’s Germany and rise of Islamic influence there. 3

Innocent blood, Germany, and fall of Christianity. 4

World Cataclysm on the Brink. 5

American policies, Islamic jihad, and Christianity. 6

“But the safety of the people of America against dangers from foreign force depends not only on their forbearing to give just causes of war to other nations, but also on their placing and continuing themselves in such a situation as not to invite hostility or insult; for it need not be observed that there are pretended as well as just causes of war.” –John Jay, Federalist No. 4, 1787

America, Germany, and Politics: The abyss of bad policies

Germany has been on the international front for many decades and of late it has been led by Angela Merkel. It is this German leader whom Hillary Clinton would like to emulate. According to Hillary’s own words that heap high praise on Angela Merkel. Hillary has known Angela as far back as the 1990’s and even appeared on the same German TV show together. Hillary has gone so far as to say “She is, I think, a really effective strong leader and right now the major leader in Europe, not just Germany”. Donald Trump said Monday in a detailed policy speech on radical Islam that Hillary was in fact aiming to be “America’s Angela Merkel”.

Further; a Breitbart report pointed out that Clinton, if elected would push to ‘resettle close to one million Muslim migrants in her first term as President alone.’ This is according to the latest data from Homeland Security. While many democrats led by Barack Obama have no qualms about such a massive influx of Muslim immigrants, there is much to consider. Especially if we look at Angela Markel’s Germany we will find how unstable Germany is today. Does America want to mirror the E.U. or say Germany? I think not!

World War Two Aftermath: Hitler, Himmler, and Al-Husseini

Today we can look under the rug and see the political policies of Merkel and those who side with her over the allowance of Islamic tides of refugee’s into the German nation. We can see that Germany’s relation to and for Muslims goes back to Hitler. At the time it was expedient for Hitler to have help fighting not only the whole of Europe and the Americans. However Hitler’s new deal included the riddance of the world’s Jews! Hitler’s aim was to extinguish the light of world Jewry wherever the Nazis could find them. But in the Muslim, the German leader found an ally! This is further revealed in a November 2, 1943 telegram, which Himmler wrote to the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem saying:

The National Socialist movement of Greater Germany has, since its inception, inscribed upon its flag the fight against the world Jewry. It has therefore followed with particular sympathy the struggle of freedom-loving Arabs, especially in Palestine, against Jewish interlopers. In the recognition of this enemy and of the common struggle against it lies the firm foundation of the natural alliance that exists between the National Socialist Greater Germany and the freedom-loving Muslims of the whole world. In this spirit I am sending you on the anniversary of the infamous Balfour declaration my hearty greetings and wishes for the successful pursuit of your struggle until the final victory. Reichsfuehrer S.S. Heinrich Himmler”

The Final victory according to Himmler who led Hitler’s policies was a world without Jews! It is Al Husseini who did much in the Middle East to push his plans for a greater and united Arab world. Al Husseini ‘recruited Bosnia Muslims’ so they could fight for the ‘German Waffen SS’. These Muslim Nazi warriors were Albania and Bosnia. But in Yugoslavia alone this brigade of Muslim Nazis ‘was responsible for the murder of over 90 percent of the Yugoslavian Jewish Population’. After the war the Mufti of Jerusalem by this time was fleeing the wrath of the allies who conquered Hitler. The Muslim leader of the Nazis wound up in Egypt. His role was not finished. He was the most important influence there was and his scheme was devious as his policies would challenge generations of Muslims to fight Jews.

The influence of Al-Husseini and Islamic Jihad

We find further evidence of this on the Middle East Forum. Husseini’s place in history is firm, as he is a heralded as a Palestinian hero. Today you can find references to him in textbooks and is viewed as one of the founding fathers of the nation. His plans are well documented.

The absurdities for which Husseini became famous in the 1940s have continued to play a far too prominent role in the Palestinian political culture ever since. He did incite others to murder Jews. He did spread ridiculous conspiracy theories comparable to those of the Nazis. He did all that he could to help the Nazis in a failing effort to spread the Holocaust to the Middle East and to win the war in Europe. He left behind a legacy of hatred, paranoia, religious fanaticism and celebration of terror so long as it was aimed at Jews and Israelis. The Palestinian authority and Hamas even more so has kept that legacy is alive and well and fills the heads of Palestinian teenagers with rubbish that has led to the terror wave of recent weeks. Middle East Forum Netanyahu, Husseini, and the Historians, 2015

It is this same branded Islamic fervor which we find in the Middle East today. Although the target for Husseini was Jews and Palestine, today the war has extended to America, Europe, and the world.

However today after the push by Angela Merkel of Germany to accept so many Muslim refugees, it is no wonder why Germany has the largest Muslim community in Europe. France was considered to have the largest Muslim community. Germany the second, times they say; have changed. It is in Germany because of Merkel’s policies, where the number of Muslims in Germany could reach Five million, thus making it the largest.

“We could suddenly have five million Muslims,” said Thomas Volk, an Islam expert at the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, a think tank associated with Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party.

The Example of Merkel’s Germany and rise of Islamic influence there

As a result you can see Islam taking over Germany. The irony is that that Hitler accepted the Muslims and their radical hate for the Jews. It was Hitler who first used the combination of radical Islamic hate for Jews and Hitler’s desire to rid the world of Jewry that combined so long ago. But again we find irony in that today Germany and the German people are radical pacifists. While on the other hand the Muslims have an even greater hate and purpose to destroy the Jews. But to this add on the global aspirations of ISIS, Iran, and others who see a global Islamic caliphate or Mahdi taking over the nations of the world. The stepping stone for this is Europe and the main brick in that have been Germany and its former Reich ruler, Adolf Hitler and his henchmen.

Using the Husseini brigades of Muslim Nazis came in handy to help fight the war and in the process exterminate Jews. Yet as Hitler did accept the Muslim and his fomenting hatred into Germany it should come no surprise that Post Germany is seemingly overrun by Muslims. A fact led by Merkel’s own policies and also something Hillary Clinton would like to emulate. Certainly Barack Obama has followed the policy of Muslims first, and then only a few Christians allowed in the United States.

Is it fitting judgment for Germany to be facing a flood of Muslims, a rise of Atheism, and the fall of Christianity? After all, if we ask ourselves was this not the nation that lauded Hitler, and did nothing to stop his holocaust not only on the Jews but on Europe. Was it not Germany’s partner Japan who brazenly attacked America, forcing the nation into the Second World War? Although we are in a post-World War Two era and many have forgiven both Germany and the Germany people for their role in this chapter of world history, the facts are the facts.

Furthermore, is this not a modern Germany led by Angela Merkel who the German’s have sat by and allowed to flood their nation with foreigners? Today Germany sits as a major player in the E.U. and it is failing in many ways, not to mention that the very existence of the nation itself is threatened by German Islam or a related brand of Islamic teachings. Germany is going the way of many in the Middle East being taken over by social jihad and bad politics. The E.U. is in the same boat. Christianity is declining there and Islam today has done what their efforts during the crusades could not do, which is to infiltrate Europe and slowly take the whole place over and institute Islamic rule.

Again as I said before, it is this same political and social agenda led by Angela Merkel that Hillary Clinton wants to imitate! It is clear that if Hillary gets in, America will become more like Europe, Germany, and others who have become targets for Islamic social jihad. Make no mistake there are those in America that look forward to a United Muslim States of America.

Innocent blood, Germany, and fall of Christianity

In addition, all these years later the innocent blood spilled in Europe during World War Two, both of Jews and others at the hands of the Nazis and their Muslim counterparts is still on the land. The land is infected with this curse of innocent blood, although Germany was defeated; they today are reaping results of the Hitler regime and his connection to the Muslims.

What is more, we find that Christianity is being extinguished in Germany. This is a trend we find in Europe as well. Not to mention America where we do have Christian influence but it is waning and giving way to liberal policies that will destroy America.

The fall of German Christianity leaves an emptiness that seems likely to be filled by a more multicultural and Islamic society. That is why Germany’s finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, just called for the creation of a “German Islam.” Merkel’s powerful ally linked the rise of a German Islam with the national demographic disaster. “Demographic change is one of our great challenges,” said Schäuble. Germany today houses Europe’s largest Muslim community. Gatestone Institute

Der Spiegel says that the ‘citizens of the former German Democratic Republic have by far the ‘world’s highest rate of Atheism.’ It is here that in Post Hitler Germany, the East German portion became communist East and it is documented that in this area a high portion of those living under such communist rule were atheists. This today has affected Germany who is now rejoined with both East and West under one nation.

A new study released by an American research organization found that just 13 percent of people in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) say they have always believed in God. Der Spiegel

The term used in Germany by one professor of religious sociology is coined as “the New Atheism” and the author of this phrase is *Detlef Pollack. In East Germany only 4% of Protestants attend a church regularly. But it is not just atheism that is changing as those watching the decline of Christianity in Germany have also said the Catholic Church is declining their as well.

Germans have been leaving the Catholic Church in droves. In 2015, 181,925 Germans formally chose apostasy. By comparison, only 2,685 people have converted to Catholicism. The number of baby baptisms has also decreased by one third, from 260,000 baptized in 1995 to 167,000 in 2015. The situation is even more dismal for weddings. Twenty years ago, 86,456 couples married in a church. Last year, the number dropped by almost half: in a nation of 80 million people, only 44,298 couples sworn eternal love in a church. The proportion of people who attend church has declined from 18.6% in 1995 to 10.4% in 2015. *Gatestone, Lights out in Germany

World Cataclysm on the Brink

It also bears repeating, that the problem Germany faces is one that Europe and also America faces. Solving the problems in the Middle East and also stopping the Islamic Jihad mentality for taking over the world is paramount. Nevertheless, the jihad mentality is one that has been stirred and planted, nurtured and watered since the time of Al-Husseini and his relationship with Hitler’s Nazi regime. Today the Jews in Israel know certainly well that this hatred continues and global war is around the corner. In fact the war in Syria and Iraq has been touted as the Third World War. Even Putin has been warning of a global nuclear war with the United States. Further we find NATO in the same respects speaking of a nuclear war with Russia. Things could never be more unstable today that it is right now!

Iran on War:

Our strategy now is that if we feel our enemies want to endanger Iran’s national interests, and want to decide to do that, we will act without waiting for their actions,”

Putin warning Foreign journalists of Nuclear warn with America and NATO:

We know year by year what’s going to happen, and they know that we know. It’s only you that they tell tall tales to, and you buy it, and spread it to the citizens of your countries. You people in turn do not feel a sense of the impending danger – this is what worries me. How do you not understand that the world is being pulled in an irreversible direction? While they pretend that nothing is going on. I don’t know how to get through to you anymore.

Putin Ally Warns of Nuclear War:

“Relations between Russia and the United States can’t get any worse. The only way they can get worse is if a war starts,” said Zhirinovsky, speaking in his huge office on the 10th floor of Russia’s State Duma, or lower house of parliament. “Americans voting for a president on Nov. 8 must realize that they are voting for peace on Planet Earth if they vote for Trump. But if they vote for Hillary it’s war. It will be a short movie. There will be Hiroshimas and Nagasakis everywhere.”

Make no mistake Islamic Jihad works best when nations are in turmoil. Today the refugee influx worldwide has pushed this turmoil. When nations find themselves in such chaos, it makes it better for Islamic jihad to strike. Their purpose is to take over. They could not defeat many of these western nations and European nations outright. But if a war broke out, well just as Hitler used Muslims to back his agenda, so too Muslims will embark on their own branded form of war. They will take over the systems from within. The enemy therefore is among us! Neither Hillary, nor Merkel, and certainly not the E.U. recognizes the threat of all this.

American policies, Islamic jihad, and Christianity

Barack Obama has fostered his own brand of ill-conceived world affairs as is par for the course for America. It is because of Obama that a weak response to Syria, Iraq, and his feeling that ISIS is a Junior varsity team that has allowed such a flood of refugees to swarm the world. As they do enter into European and Western societies, they take over. Further the push of Islam, Islamic teachings, and social jihad are all part and parcel of this. Even more destructive policies was Obama’s Iran policies that have allowed the Shia state to push ahead with Nuclear ambitions and also secure its money, sell its oil, and be free to do as it pleases. Iran is a state sponsor of Islamic jihad and terrorism. While many fear ISIS’ Sunni Islam brand of a caliphate, Iran’s Shia policies are headed a threat as well. They look establish and help bring in their Mahdi, who they believe will take over the world and establish worldwide Shia Islam.

The problem with all this is that not only is the UK, E.U., and Germany blind to this. We find America surely blinded as they pursue globalist policies and ignore America’s foundation. Today in America while we have churches, seminaries, and many denominational aspects to our Christianity here, the fact is we have radical Islam here as well. Under Obama’s watch we have also seen more Islamic terror strikes in this nation while at the same time the administration does all it can to not say it is ‘Islamic terrorism’. As America falters and the foundational aspects of this nation are under attack, including traditional Christian beliefs, the threats to this nation cannot be any more perilous than with the current crops of political amoralists and globalists we have. These include both Republicans and Democrats.

As we see Europe go and with it those nations like Germany, we also see the free world, western Christianity, and our way of life as we know it. In America we have become our own worst enemy! We have that anything goes belief and with any moral proclivity has been trampled asunder especially any biblical Christian morals left in this nation. Thus this is damning our nation to judgment. Far worse will America be than that of Nazi Germany. We must awaken out of our abyss of tolerance and apathy. We must stop the globalist agendas and if it must, so let it come. Here let it reflect the parting of the ways between that which is good and that which is evil. Let the reader understand what this means!

“But should the people of America once become capable of that deep simulation towards one another, and towards foreign nations, which assumes the language of justice and moderation while it is practicing iniquity and extravagance and displays in the most captivating manner the charming pictures of candor, frankness, and sincerity, while it is rioting in rapine and insolence, this country will be the most miserable habitation in the world; because we have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” –John Adams, To the Officers of the First Brigade of the Third Division of the Militia of Massachusetts, 1798

This paper is not meant to be an in-depth treatise on all aspects of Hitler, Himmler, Husseini, Germany, or the current geo-political setting.

Psa 24:6-10 (6) This is the generation of them that seek him, that seek thy face, O Jacob. Selah. (7) Lift up your heads, O ye gates; and be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors; and the King of glory shall come in. (8) Who is this King of glory? The LORD strong and mighty, the LORD mighty in battle. (9) Lift up your heads, O ye gates; even lift them up, ye everlasting doors; and the King of glory shall come in. (10) Who is this King of glory? The LORD of hosts, he is the King of glory. Selah.

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Germany’s Decline, Christianity’s Demise, America’s destiny Germany’s Decline, Christianity’s Demise, America’s destiny’ Germany’s decline is occurring and is tied to Hitler’s rule and the Muslims.

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republicstandard · 6 years

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The Ballad of Count Dankula & The Nazis

Ash Sharp Editor

God save the Queen, the fascist regime.

As it happened, it appears The Sex Pistols were 40 years early, and about 400 miles too far south with their assessment of the undemocratic nature of Britain. The fascism in the United Kingdom lives not in Buckingham Palace, nor even in the hearts of the bin-bag wearing Mosque door-steppers, Britain First.

It lives in the mind of a petite scotch lady with a penchant for power suits. A microcosmic tartan-clad Clinton. Fascism lives in Scotland, under the regime of a political party that is both Socialist and Nationalist at once. What could go wrong with such a combination?

The cry of humans yearning for freedom is intrinsically tied to the Scottish experience. This is partly thanks to the descendants of Scottish emigrants around the world, and also to the popularity of a certain movie featuring a particularly red-pilled Australian playing William Wallace. Even the anthem Flower of Scotland dubs the Scots as brave fighters for liberty, ready to see off the encroachment of cheeky wee English devils from the south.

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All the more interesting then, that one of the most curious explorations into the modern understanding of freedom of speech has taken place in this country. The curious case of Mark Meehan, a pug named Buddha, and Adolf Hitler, transcends merely the price for transgressing polite public conduct. Meehan and Buddha have found themselves built into a bête noir; ironic, as Buddha is tan in color.

I'll describe the gist of the tale in short, in case you are not familiar. Mark Meehan makes YouTube videos as a hobby, under the name Count Dankula. Yes, he doth smoke the Devil's Lettuce. His girlfriend owns a small pug, named Buddha. Mark likes the dog very much. Mark's girlfriend likes the dog very much. She thinks he is very cute. Meehan -being quite the joker- decided to change this reality slightly, for comedy effect. For a giggle, Meehan has trained Buddha to behave like a Nazi. A Nazi pug. An Uberpug. Buddha now responds to phrases like 'Jews' and 'Do you want to gas the Jews' by turning his head, thinking a treat might be coming. He is a dog, let it be said again for clarity. He is utterly unaware of what a Nazi actually is, just as he is incapable of reading Mein Kampf- or Das Kapital, for that matter.

Buddha will also imitate the Roman Salute with better accuracy than most Neo-Nazi Live Action Role Players when given the command, 'Sieg Heil'.

youtube

Incredibly, you cannot even share the original video from Meehan's channel. YouTube have removed the ability to do so, even going so far as to remove the ability to embed the video in articles like this one.

When Meehan made the video, his channel audience was small. As happens with funny videos, Buddha being a Nazi went viral, and Meehan found his YouTube channel growing apace. The video also came to the attention of the Scottish Police.

Arrested for violating hate-speech laws, Meehan has been subjected to multiple court dates, the most recent of which have carried with them the possibility of Meehan not returning home and being sent straight to jail.

He lives in a country where the state will take an interest in a video of a dog performing tricks. We can admit the humor is risque, but what is at stake here is curious in the extreme. Who, exactly, is the butt of the joke in Mr. Meehan's video?

It is not Jewish people. It cannot be Jewish people unless we are now to say that to mention the word 'Jews' is offensive. Is the word Jew offensive? Is it only offensive when spoken by non-Jews? Perhaps it is the phrase 'Do you want to gas the Jews' which is the problem. If this is the case, then it can only be the case that regardless of context, the words 'gas the Jews' is always offensive. In many cases, this will be an offensive phrase, particularly if it is said with venom, in public, to incite people to carry out violence or promote anti-Semitism. It cannot be so, that to say 'gas the Jews' is always offensive. If that is the case, then I may be arrested (were I in Scotland) for writing these words down, as should the writers of all the other articles about this case. Context has to matter, or nothing makes sense at all, and we live in a society without meaning.

Is training a pug to respond to 'Do you want to gas the Jews' anti-Semitic?

The butt of Mr. Meehan’s joke is not Buddha the dog, nor is it his girlfriend (who no doubt has the patience of several saints). The butt of Meehan's joke is the Nazis. It is called irony, the Scottish court should look it up. Incidentally, so should the Mirror, the Telegraph And the Mail Online.

This is definitely what we should focus on. Not context. Context is for Nazis.

It requires an uncharitable reading of this comedy sketch in extremis to extrapolate anti-Semitism. The title of the video should be enough to indicate the comedian's intent; Mate, your dog is a Nazi. (Translation from Scotch- mine.)

There exists such a concept as dog-whistling, which is to say that there is a hidden subtext to a piece of art, or an article or even a tweet, which secretly conveys another meaning to other extremists. This allows you to accuse someone of just pretending to not be a Nazi while mocking Nazis, because really you are a Nazi after all.Irony; a sketch featuring an actual dog is accused of being a Nazi dog-whistle. Hitler loved dogs too, you know.

Does your dog want to build the thousand-year Reich?

I will go further, and argue that Meehan unintentionally presaged the leftist lunacy of 2017 with their punch a Nazi rhetoric, and is mocking the hysteriical Antifa activists and other proponents of violence too. Although the video in question is now over two years old, watch it again and remember that people have been assaulted for the suspicion of being a Nazi.

The concept of the joke is that Buddha the pug is a Nazi. Pugs are very silly dogs indeed. They look silly. They act silly. Therefore Nazis are silly. The people who want to punch Nazis are also silly. Silliness begets silliness and now, stupidity, as Meehan is facing jail for making edgy jokes. As a writer who enjoys a joke as much as the next guy, I am most annoyed at having to explain a joke. Imagine how Mr. Meehan has felt, for the last two years. Imagine having to go to the same party over and over again, where the same boorish prigs demand you explain a joke you made two years ago.

The curiosity is not that the state is too humorless to spot that Meehan is mocking Nazis by training a pug to imitate their salute. The curiosity is that the state is making an example of Mr. Meehan. Not out of revulsion against anti-Semitism or opposition to the Nazis; oh no. Mr. Meehan will be the example to show what can happen to you if you step out of line.

The whiff of religious bigotry is easy to find in some parts of Scotland. Sectarianism between Catholics and Protestants runs deep. This long-running blood feud has not been targeted with the same level of resources as has Meehan and his evil Nazi dog. Occasionally the police will denounce anti-papist songs of the fans of Glasgow Rangers. We must ask, what is the motivation here? Scotland has no history of Anti-Semitism, beyond the support for Palestinian rights among the supporters of Glasgow Celtic Football Club.

I contend that this court case contains a hidden message. A dog-whistle to all citizens, if you will.

The longer this case drags on and the more notorious and misreported it becomes in the press, the greater the impact of Meehan's sentence will be; should he be found guilty and jailed. Such a case will send a message to all Scotland- don't speak about any other religious or ethnic group; no matter what. There will be a new crime on the books. You will be charged with being white while in charge of an edgy sense of humor. Meehan is far from the first Scot to be a comedian on the cusp of taste and decency. Frankie Boyle to name but one has made a career from offending sensibilities at will, with jokes about cot death, incest, rape – the list goes on. What separates Boyle from Meehan is that Boyle is overtly politically left-wing, with a column in The Guardian newspaper to espouse his views, whilst Meehan has resolutely ignored inquest into his political leanings and was, up until now, a private citizen.

As we see today, this is a damning indictment of Scottish society that to be protected from the state, you must be a tribalist of some variety. If Meehan had performed his sketch while having previously declared his allegiance to a group- almost any group- then he would have had the support of that interest group to fight his case to the press, to the public. As it stands, Meehan is, like most people, merely a citizen. A citizen who wanted to make his friends laugh. There is nothing more tragic to my mind, that a supposedly free society is punishing individuals when they have done no harm- although as we see, the Scottish state is claiming that words are literally harmful in this case.

But who benefits? Politically, The Scottish National Party (SNP) is a separatist party with pro-European Union leanings and a pro-immigration stance; as most leftist parties are in Europe. Benefitting as the Democrats in the United States do from a strong base among migrants and descendants of migrants, Meehan and his dog represent a great opportunity for the SNP to forge a weapon with which to purge the land of those who would dissent against their policies. There can be no other explanation for the obsessive pursuit of Mr. Meehan by own government. The motive is not to protect any group from evil men who wish to incite bigotry. It is about control. It is a public flogging on the altar of modern multicultural society.

Two Jews, The Ayatollah Khomeini, and Caitlyn Jenner's lawyer walk into a brothel.

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If you are unable to make jokes, you are unable to speak your mind. If the state is able to interpret this comedy video as a hate-crime, then you may not speak against, for example, disproportionate crime rates among migrant populations. That too will be a hate crime. You may not speak about the predilection of Pakistani males to rape white children. This is a hate-crime. This case is not concerned with a man saying the word 'Jew'.

This case is the state of Scotland against the idea of being offensive itself. Being offended is no longer possible, as all offensive behavior is against the law. You are not offended. You are the victim of a crime- even if you are not the target of a joke, you can be offended on behalf of your conception of the alleged target of the joke. Though I am averse to bringing up the topic of race, we would no doubt see a different response from the state if Meehan was an ethnic minority. A sad thing to say. Worse, that it is undoubtedly true.

If the Scottish legal system fails Mr. Meehan and jails him for the crime of mocking Nazis on the internet, the Flower of Scotland no longer will represent the land of the free. It will become a symbol co-opted and perverted by a fascistic state, just as the Third Reich co-opted and perverted the swastika. No one will be able to crack a joke in Scotland for fear of being misunderstood, misrepresented or taken out of context.

In an effort to purge herself of bigotry, Scotland will become what she claims to hate the most.

I think that's what they call ironic. Good luck, Count Dankula. Good luck, Buddha. Thanks for the laughs, and long may they continue.

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cyberneticsystm · 7 years

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Bibi’s Revenge at U.N. Risks Israel’s Bid for Security Council Seat

The Council election last month condemning Israeli negotiations hit a substantial whack towards the worldwide reliability that was Jewish state’s. However the quality additionally confronted anything much more tangible Minister behind-the-moments push-to get a chair about the 15 to Israel – security body.

Within an campaign, Israel has involved for that previous year to secure 1 of 2 Safety Council chairs earmarked for American authorities for 2019-20 — an objective that’ll want it to defeat out possibly Belgium or Philippines.

That work has become in risk as U.S. President-elect Israel Donaldtrump, and its own followers within the Congress threaten to retaliate from authorities that backed the things they see like a seriously unjust quality and the Un. The transfer might alienate actually possible followers of an bid.

Netanyahu summoned the envoys of Safety Council member-states on Holiday to state his frustration. He introduced that Israel may reassess its relationships using the Un and slice help to 2 African followers of the quality, Angola and Senegal. This elevated the chance the Group, which makes up about 54 ballots within the 193-associate U.N. General Construction, might hit back.

Israel’s reaction to the negotiations resolution is not useful to their strategy. The African team won’t like this.”

An Arab diplomat named it “definitely a problem for them — not due to the election, by itself, but their a reaction to it.”

“They are back again to block one,” the Arab diplomat informed Foreign Policy.

A ambassador stated Israel hasbeen “pretty seriously interested in their candidature” in the last year, but-its charm offensive has struck the negotiations quality against a solid wall.

“I genuinely believe that it’s around,” the Western diplomat informed FP. “I never believed they might get anyways.”

In Washington the -managed Congress is planning regulation to reduce U.S. financing towards the Un. Trump, meanwhile, cautioned on Facebook that U.S. relationships using the Un is likely to be suffering from the election. “As towards the U.N., issues is likely to be various after ” Trump tweeted following the negotiations election.

A request was rejected by a spokesperson for Israel’s objective towards the U.N. for opinion. Israeli authorities identify they encounter a constant battle to get a Safety Council chair, but wish the atmosphere that is governmental may enhance from the period the Overall Assembly ballots within 2018’s summer.

Meanwhile, Israeli authorities therefore are likely to sponsor their next visit by ambassadors to Israel later this season and stay devoted to seeking their strategy.

In middle-Dec, as Palestinian regulators lobbied assistance for that Protection Council’s disapproval of negotiations, Israel’s U.N. Ambassador Danny Danon located a delegation of U.N. ambassadors from Africa, Japan, Latin America, and Europe to get a five-evening workshop on Israeli efforts in farming, counterterrorism, and cybersecurity.

the National Jewish Board structured and financed the journey. It received U.N. that was mature -centered diplomats from 14 nations — including Uganda, and Albania Botswana Mexico — to Israel to listen to its situation is made by the federal government on Israel’s efforts towards the worldwide group. It incorporated a-side visit to Ramallah, where the international delegation and a Palestinian authorities satisfied.

Netanyahu, meanwhile, released a public attractiveness final month to Kazakhstan Leader Nursultan Nazarbayev to back Israel’s bet. “If you will want actual change on the planet,” Netanyahu stated, “imagine a situation of Israel within the Safety Council of the Usa Nations.”

Israel’s expect a location in the Protection Council’s legendary horseshoe desk may be the newest phase of its continuing diplomatic outreach strategy centered on improving relationships with authorities all over the world, including African claims which have typically compared Israel in the U.N. and its own former Arab opponents in the Centre East.

Netanyahu visited to four nations that were African — Uganda, and Ethiopia Rwanda — to shore relationships up. In June, Netanyahu fulfilled with increased than the usual dozen African leaders and envoys across the sidelines of the Overall Assembly. Israel asked other leaders along with Rwandan Leader Paul Kagame on development and engineering to some meeting at headquarters in Africa. Netanyahu is likely to go Africa this season.

Israeli commanders think in growing their outreach, they’ve created substantial advances.

In an talk towards the General Construction, Netanyahu stated Israel has relationships with more than 160 nations, almost double as when he offered as ambassador the amount. Netanyahu traced this towards the proven fact that many authorities — in comparison using their — identify Israel could be a companion that was useful, having a world-class knowledge in from cybersecurity to improvements that may gain their people and intellect company. Israel offers cast essential, unofficial and although extremely subtle, relationships with rich Persian Gulf claims, including Qatar Saudi Arabia, and also the United Arab Emirates, which reveal its worries of the increasing Iran.

Israel is definitely an unbelievable aspirant for account within the U.N.’s protection body. The U.N. is regularly slammed by Netanyahu like a hypocritical, anti- organization that’s invested when it acknowledged Israel’s freedom, whichever ethical pressure it might have held. In his newest tackle, he mocked the U.N. General Construction like a “moral farce.”

But in the same period, Netanyahu has acquired and brought Israel’s long term work to stabilize relationships with additional states in the Un — a drive supported from the Usa. Your time and effort goes back towards the Clinton management, when subsequently-U.S. Richard Holbrooke served one of many local blocs that work the Un, Israel gain account within the European Yet Others Team. The improvement permitted Israel to contend for articles on committees. Israel continues to be the only real Middle-East nation that’s never offered about the Safety Council, but announced that its cap would toss in to the band.

However the 2018 election, while significantly coming, nevertheless shows you will find to far Israel may continue limitations. For a long time, Netanyahu has thought he might “minimize the significance of the problem and gain by forging useful relationships in East Asia Africa, and Europe, stated a Middle-East specialist in the Middle to get a Fresh American Protection, Goldenberg.

“The growing, peaceful protection assistance between Israel and several of the Arab claims is just a testament to that particular strategy, and also to increasing widespread pursuits in countering Iran,” Goldenberg informed FP. “The negotiations quality was a this technique has limits.”

Goldenberg stated the stalemated peace approach will probably “continue to correct a cost on Israel internationally.” But within the longterm, he included, Israel may proceed to increase its worldwide strategy to “seek to achieve higher worldwide acceptance.”

But have an period of time. It should gather 129 ballots, or two thirds of the Overall Assembly’s 193 nations, prior to the 2018 choice.

Israeli authorities understand that actually prior to the negotiation election, they confronted an uphill fight to secure a chair about the authority. However they nevertheless think they are able to get assistance that is enough — especially within an election where their ballots can be throw by associates anonymously. In July, to seat among the Common Assembly’s main subsidiary systems Israel was chosen for that very first time, beating hard resistance from Islamic and Arabic -bulk nations. Israel guaranteed 109 of the 175 ballots cast towards the Sixth Panel, which runs lawful issues for the Assembly. 2 yrs previously, in 2014, Israel was chosen vice-chair of the individual U.N. General Construction part body coping with decolonization.

Skeptics of capability to develop assistance that is enough governmental state Security Council decision demonstrates that is nevertheless mattered by Jerusalem’s negotiation guidelines — which missing a change that is revolutionary, Israel has of attaining the chair without any chance.

“Most Arab nations wish to move ahead in the Palestinian problem, but it’s furthermore apparent they can’t achieve this so long as the profession and also the negotiation plan proceeds because it is,” stated Hussein Ibish, a mature student in the Arab Gulf States Start in California.

From doing this, muchas proper measurements desire them to try and discover a way,” he included opinion as well as their own ideals avoid them. “Israel isn’t likely to obtain a Safety Council seat.”

Although Israel’s reputation might be been better, within the gutter. Lawmakers in both parties have dropped themselves to oppose the Barak administration’s choice to refrain from the Council election.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (DEB-N.Y.) named the abstention “extremely irritating, discouraging, and confounding.” Republicans in Congress went several actions more, vowing to move numerous promises in the Home and Senate condemning the U.N. election. (An election is planned in the Home on Friday.)

Meanwhile, three senators — Heller of Vegas and Cruz of Tx — launched legislation Wednesday to move the Embassy. All pro is projected for by the enthusiasm – prior Democratic has compared hawks.

Trump cranked the U.N. soon after the Safety Council election, contacting it “just a membership for individuals to obtain together, chat, and also have a great time.”

A driver for excitement that is such may be the National Public Affairs Panel, a strong expert- lobbying business that blows hundreds of huge amount of money to lawmakers meant for hard line jobs.

However the vote with one abstention, for that Safety Council quality, confirmed that pro-Israel fervor is significantly away from conventional so far as the worldwide group can be involved.

Along with a study Thursday unveiled shows that National emotion that is public isn’t operating Congress’ actions. Forty three percentage of U.S. voters haven’t noticed significantly, or anything more, concerning the quality condemning Israeli negotiations, based on the Politico/Day Consult study. With 28-percent in assistance and 28-percent saying they’re unlawful voters are dramatically split on assistance for Israel’s negotiation guidelines.

U.N. election that was “The was an enormous whack towards the mythology that guidelines are basically no further a questionable issue within the worldwide community Ibish said.

“The indisputable fact that Israel’s worldwide position quickly improved, despite its guidelines towards the Palestinians, is a pillar recently towards the Israeli community of Mr. message .

“But wherever he was mistaken, and deceive the general public, was within the idea that nobody truly cares anymore about Israel’s guidelines which the Palestinian problem has become a dead-letter, long-forgotten and dumped by both worldwide group and also the Arabic countries.”

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learningrendezvous · 7 years

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Democracy and Democratization

GERMANS & JEWS

Director: Janina Quint

Today, Europe's fastest growing Jewish population is in Berlin. Germany is considered one of the most democratic societies in the world, assuming the position of moral leader of Europe as they embrace hundreds of thousands of refugees. Through hard work, grassroots action, and productive confrontation of the moral responsibilities of democratic citizenship, the German people have given Hitler his greatest defeat.

Through personal stories, Germans & Jews explores Germany's transformation as a society, from silence about the Holocaust to facing it head on. Unexpectedly, a nuanced story of reconciliation emerges. What began as a private conversation between the two filmmakers and friends, Tal Recanati (Jewish) and Janina Quint (non-Jewish German), grew into a cultural exchange among many. Sitting in on a dinner party of the Germans and Jews featured in the film, we see a people whose lives are inextricably linked through the memory of the Holocaust. What does it mean to take responsibility for the past? How can we do it? The scholars, intellectuals, and citizens in this film are diligently and actively seeking thoughtful and honest answers.

This is a lesson in modern history, as well as a measured study in the most radically successful example of social and cultural reconciliation in modern times. Watch and learn how tolerant and thoughtful confrontation of the past can radically re-form the social fabric of the present and create a shared vision for a united and enlightened future. Great mechanisms of democracy - the school classrooms, public discourse, public art - are productively at work. As movements in the United States such as Black Lives Matter shed light on persisting racial injustice and the deep trauma of unresolved conflict, those who want to imagine what it would look like to successfully encounter the legacy of white privilege can look to Germans & Jews as an essential roadmap to meaningful progress.

Germans & Jews is at once uncomfortable and provocative, unexpected and enlightening.

DVD (English and German with English subtitles) / 2015 / 76 minutes

BIGGER HAMMER, THE

What really happened behind the scenes of the historic 2008 presidential election? The Bigger Hammer tracks the message wars of the Obama-McCain race with the leading strategists and spinners, uncovering how politics, thirty second TV ads, and history shaped the race for the White House. Hear from insiders how the key political decisions were made -- and how celebrities, golf carts, Corinthian gardens, seven houses, preachers, hairstyles, and a plumber shaped one of the most important and entertaining elections in recent history.

DVD / 2014 / (Senior High, College) / 101 minutes

MONEYOCRACY

The 2012 Presidential election was the most costly ever in the U.S. history.More than $6 billion have been spent by the campaigns and independent groups to get their candidate elected. But for what purpose?

MONEYOCRACY focuses on the rise of Super PACs and their affiliated secret organizations ¡V the 501(c)(4)s - and documents how these organizations influenced the political debate and American voters during the 2012 presidential campaign and beyond through political advertising.

DVD / 2014 / (Senior High, College) / 54 minutes

PRICE OF KINGS, THE: OSCAR ARIAS

In the 80s, Central America was in crisis. Wracked by brutal civil wars, death squads and militia backed by the warring Superpowers of the Cold War. Yet one man at the center of this conflict decided to take action against the chaos. 'The Price of Kings: Oscar Arias' explores the legacy of this man: the former President of Costa Rica and lone leader without an army who had the courage to forge peace with his neighbors against the will of US President, at risk to his own life and the impoverishment of his people. Arias' diplomacy and leadership brought an end to the bloodshed, for which he received the Nobel Peace Prize and the adoration of his people. Now his contraversial policy choices leave his reputation destroyed. Arias' pursuit of peace and prosperity for his people came at a significant personal cost, and his story reveals that even the best intentions can be held against you.

DVD / 2013 / (Senior High, College) / 62 minutes

PRICE OF KINGS, THE: YASSER ARAFAT

Yasser Arafat's political legacy is one marred by controversy. To some, he was a heroic revolutionary who fought for the freedom of Palestine and the rights of his people; to others he was a terrorist and leader of a corrupt state. Yet regardless of the dichotomy, Yasser Arafat's position at the heart of the Middle East conflict for over forty years makes him a character of incredible significance. With groundbreaking access to the people who knew Yasser Arafat best; his wife, Suha Arafat, his political allies and his adversaries, the film delves into Yasser Arafat's history, the personal struggles he faced and sacrifices he made seeking to establish peace with Israel, whilst at the same time trying to build a Palestinian nation for his people.

DVD / 2013 / (Senior High, College) / 62 minutes

TORTURE MADE IN USA

Directed by Marie-Monique Robin

Examines the George W. Bush administration's systematic use of torture and questions whether key members could be prosecuted for war crimes?

Exactly how did the world's most powerful democracy construct and implement a dubious legal framework that not only legalized the use of torture but legitimized it to politicians, academics, intellectuals, and media pundits alike? Who exactly was behind this dark and hotly debated chapter in American history?

Internationally acclaimed journalist and fimmaker Marie-Monique Robin set out to investigate the historic events and machinations of key policy leaders that led the U.S. to use systematic torture on a massive scale in Afghanistan, Guantanamo and Iraq in the name of national security and the War on Terror.

Mixing stunning archival footage and on-the-ground detective work, the film includes exclusive interviews with several key players including General Ricardo Sanchez, former commander of the coalition forces in Iraq (who speaks for the first time on camera); Larry Wilkerson, Colin Powell's former Chief of Staff; Matthew Waxman, former advisor to Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice; Alberto Mora, former US Navy General Counsel; and Michael Scheuer, chief architect of the CIA's Extraordinary Renditions program.

Award ~ Special Jury Prize, Festival des Libertes, Brussels, Belgium ~ Olivier Quemener-RSF Award, FIGRA Le Touquet, France

DVD (Closed Captioned) / 2010 / (Grades 10-12, College, Adult) / 85 minutes

TORTURING DEMOCRACY

Directed by Sherry Jones

Tells the inside story of how the U.S. government adopted torture as official policy in the aftermath of 9/11.

In a riveting and dramatic narrative, TORTURING DEMOCRACY tells the inside story of how the U.S. government adopted torture as official policy in the aftermath of 9/11. With exclusive interviews, explosive documents and rare archival footage, the documentary has been called the definitive broadcast account of a deeply troubling chapter in recent American history.

Produced by Emmy and Dupont award-winning broadcast journalist Sherry Jones, the film relies on the record to connect the dots in an investigation of interrogations of prisoners in U.S. custody that became "at a minimum, cruel and inhuman treatment and, at worst, torture," in the words of the former general counsel of the United States Navy, Alberto Mora. Producer Jones carefully presents the evidence that leads straight to the top of the chain of command - and so lays to rest the "rotten apple" defense for abusive interrogations at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and elsewhere.

In the film, former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage describes - for the first time on-camera - being waterboarded during military training before he was sent to Vietnam. When asked if he considered waterboarding to be torture, he answered, "Absolutely. No question." He added: "There is no question in my mind - there's no question in any reasonable human being, that this is torture. I'm ashamed we're even having this discussion."

The documentary traces how the secret U.S. military training program - "Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape" or SERE - became the basis for many of the harshest interrogation methods employed first by the CIA and subsequently by interrogators at Guantanamo and in Iraq. The tactics designed to "inoculate" elite American troops mirror tactics used by "a totalitarian, evil nation with complete disregard for human rights and the Geneva Conventions," according to Malcolm Nance, former SERE master trainer for the U.S. Navy.

Besides Armitage and Mora, government and military interviewees include Major General Thomas Romig, Judge Advocate General for the U.S. Army; veteran Air Force interrogator Colonel Steven Kleinman; military prosecutor Colonel Stuart Couch; former Pentagon lawyer Richard Shiffrin; and Martin Lederman, senior advisor in the Justice Department.

Award ~ Best US Television Program, Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Awards

DVD (Color, Closed Captioned) / 2008 / (Grades 10-12, College, Adult) / 90 minutes

WAR ON DEMOCRACY, THE

John Pilger reports that, in spite of a history of repeated US-backed suppression, popular democratic movements are gaining ground in Latin America.

The War on Democracy demonstrates the brutal reality of the America's notion of 'spreading democracy'; that, in fact, America is actually conducting a war on democracy, and that true popular democracy is now more likely to be found among the poorest of Latin America whose grassroots movements are often ignored in the west.

John Pilger conducts an exclusive interview with President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. Pilger also goes to the United States and in some remarkable interviews, speaks exclusively to US government officials who ran the CIA's war in Latin America in the 1980s. This reveals more about US policy than all the statements and postures of recent times; it also reveals how what's happened in Latin America is a metaphor for how the rest of the world is being "ordered."

The War on Democracy, however, is a hopeful film, for it sees the world not through the eyes of the powerful, but through the hopes and dreams and extraordinary actions of ordinary people. Although set mostly in Latin America, it is a metaphor for all the world.

The thrust of John Pilger's latest film is a constant theme in all his work: that great, rapacious power is far from invincible and that people power is enduring. Photaographed in high definition video, few films have been as timely as The War on Democracy.

Award ~ Best Documentary, One World Media Awards

DVD (Color, Closed Captioned) / 2007 / (Grades 10-12, College, Adult) / 94 minutes

20TH CENTURY PRESIDENTS: WILLIAM CLINTON 1993 - 2001

During the administration of Clinton, the U.S. enjoyed more peace and economic well-being than at any time in its history. He was the first Democratic president since FDR to win a second term in office.

DVD / 2006 / (Elementary, Senior High) / 14 minutes

20TH CENTURY PRESIDENTS: WOODROW WILSON 1913 - 1921

Like Roosevelt before him, Wilson regarded himself a personal representative of the people, who proclaimed America's entrace into World War I a crusade to make the world "safe for democracy."

DVD / 2006 / (Elementary, Senior High) / 14 minutes

SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY, THE: A EUROPEAN INVENTION

Democracy is not an invention. It is a process that provides mankind with a sound foundation for peaceful coexistence in every aspect of life. Universal democracy is also a must if we are to survive. But its history has been brief. In an increasingly boundless world, democracy faces new dimensions, challenges and threats.