#....those same people had said. and it was done almost explicitly to get jews on their side during wwi.

[littledoggy-girlcollar]

do you think the holocaust was the only instance of antisemitic action or policy in europe. hey. look at me. do you think there wasn't antisemitism in europe before the 1930s.

#not commenting on the post this is related to bc this isn't the point of that post #but the post in question has some incredible.....let's call them 'fallacies' #also hey if we're gonna talk abt it the balfour declaration was just some shit they said that was in direct opposition to other things... #....those same people had said. and it was done almost explicitly to get jews on their side during wwi. #and actually yeah sure let's talk about the timeline from balfour to the holocaust. bf is proposed in 1917 #by the time the LON approved it in 1922 hitler had full control of the DAP. #the next time anything happens with it they're limiting the amount of people that can immigrate. this is in may 1939 #6 months post kristallnacht. and then they didn't talk about it for a while cause wwii officially broke out

[imhaitusncarnate]

I have very mixed feelings on that aot ending

Ok so the politics of Attack on Titan have been discussed by a lot of people, some of whom have a very surface- level understanding of the story. I would like to start by giving my disclaimer that Attack on Tiatan ABSOLUTELY isn’t fascist, its anti racism, anti bigotry and anti discrimination themes are extremely apparent in it’s examination of the Eldians inside Marley, and fascist views held by characters such as Gabi are explicitly condemned in the text and made clear to be misguided and false. 

I would now like to draw everyone’s attention to the openings of seasons 1 and 2. 

Images like these combined with lyrics like these:

You pigs who sneer at our will to step over corpses and march onwards Enjoy the peace of livestock false prosperity "freedom" of the dying wolves that hunger

We dedicate and sacrifice our hearts

And also the use of german lyrics:

Sie sind das Essen und Wir sind die Jaeger! (they are the food and we are the hunters)

O, mein Freund! Jetzt hier ist ein Sieg. Dies ist der erste Glorie. O, mein Freund! Feiern wir diesen Sieg, für den nächsten Kampf!

(O, my friend! Now, here is a victory. This is the first glory. O, my friend! Let us celebrate this victory for the next battle!)

This is the stuff that lead me to believe that this is a deliberate use of fascist imagery. If the show just wanted to go for a militaristic vibe for the aesthetic of it, references this explicit to fascist propaganda and the use of German lyrics was not necessary. Also, lines like this:

And plenty of evidence that things were not what they seemed it the world of aot and that the overly simplistic view of good vs evil (humans vs the titans) was incorrect led me to believe that Attack on Titan was a deliberate deconstruction. That it was putting the audience into the mindset of the fascists to pull the rug from under their feet later. And I was right. Sort of.

As the story progresses, the world becomes a more and more complex political landscape and we are led to believe that this black and white mentality is wrong. We are also informed that the people who can transform into titans, the Eldians, are an opressed minority, explicitly paralleled to the Jews during nazi Germany, from their living in internment camps, to them being called devils, to their armbands, to a large number of them (our heroes) being confined in an island with walls circling them, which is revealed by Isayama to be Madagascar. The island that the nazis originally meant to confine the Jewish population in before arriving at the conclusion that that would be too costly, and that genocide was preferable. 

This is the first of the story’s mixed metaphors. While the show’s heart is in the right place, being sympathetic to the Eldians and showing their plight under marleyan opression and persecution, there is one problem. The reason for the opression of the Eldians is because the world is afraid of their power, as they are a race with the ability to transform into titans. There is, therefore, a tangible, justification for their internment. The Jews were not in any conceivable way a danger to anyone, they were simply scapegoated for the complex socioeconomic problems of Germany in the time period. Also, if we take a look at those openings again, we observe that the Eldians (our main characters) who wish to free themselves from their shackles are framed as fascists. So... what is that saying?

 The idea, as I see it, is that the story is condemning fanaticism in general, as a biproduct of a militaristic black and white worldview. The monstrous titans that our (framed as fascist) heroes fight against are revealed to be human, just like them.

The same is the case for the Eldian “devils” that the Marleyans fight against. Gabi, the character who is most fanatically against Eldians (despite being an Eldian herself) is comfronted with the humanity of the people she hates once she gets to know them.

Again, Isayama’s heart is on the right place here, trying to condemn bigotry, however the explicit referencing of history is the imagery is kind of misplaced, for the reasons I previously mentioned. Now let’s have a look at Eren Yeager.

Eren starts the story as a kind of messed up kid. He kills the human traffickers who kidnapped Mikasa while screaming:

I mean, in this case he is certainly justified, but his rage and anger are definitely not normal for a child his age.

This is Eren. He can’t stand injustice when he sees it. And injustice is what happens to him when the titans attack. His already fiery attitude and mindset is what leads him to this declaration of revenge:

That side of Eren is visible throughout the story and it’s foreshadowing for what he will later become

Eren, however, is a natural product of his environment. Ravaged by socioconomic inequality, with the rich living in the centre of the walls and the poor living in the outskirts, constantly under the threat of the titans and unable to obtain any kind of freedom, Eren’s philosophy of the need to be strong to overcome one’s enemies makes sense. The mantra “the strong prey on the weak”, that he ends up teaching Mikasa (another allusion to fascist ideology) is a biproduct of the world he lives in. He does not know of the political intricasies outside the walls. All he knows is he must kill the titans.

Eren’s titan is described as the “manifestation of humanity’s rage. It is huge and monstrous, and could be seen as a metaphor for vengeful hatred in general. Keep that in mind, it’s relevant for the ending.

This manufactured and false black and white worldview shapes him as a character, and it’s what eventually, after the arrival at the much desired ocean, leads him to this:

“Will we finally be free?”

In the continuation of the story, Eren falls toward the dark side more and more, to the point of committing atrocities and war crimes that are explicitly framed as being similar to what he suffered as a child (see his actions in Liberio). He even acknowledges that, telling Reiner, the person who committed said war crimes against him, that he essentially has no hard feelings and understands that the two of them are similar, doing what “needs to be done”. The character of Gabi, who, after what happens in Liberio, becomes obsessed with revenge against the Eldian “devils” is meant to be a foil for Eren, and his obsession with killing the titans after what happened to him. 

Extremely interesting is the way in which certain ideas and images are flipped in the later seasons. Namely, in season 4, we see a character who idolizes Mikasa and supports Eren’s plans in a scene where she spouts the same mantra of “the strong prey on the weak” and says that Mikasa saving her is what showed her that only with strength she can defeat her enemies. Mikasa tells her to shut up, and she proceeds to do the salute, that has been so glamorized by the show’s openings thus far. Now, it is done by a person from a military faction with a fanatic worldview. The direction doesn’t glamorize it at all. It is a nuanced, almost masterful deconstruction. 

Levi, who has always looked for reasons for why his comrades had t die, justifying their heroism and convincing himself that their deaths were not pointless, ends up here:

At this point, I was in love with Attack on Titan. From here, it only figures that Eren ends up attempting a genocide of the people outside the walls. He has essentally become what he hated the most, and he’s a natural result of the world that created him. Despite his noble intentions, he has turned into a monster. Mikasa, the prerson who loved him the most, completes her character arc by killing him, thus rejecting her blind devotion to him and being free, while at the same time continuing to love the person he once was. It’s a sad and tragic ending, painting Eren as a tragic character and making a pretty strong political point, despite having a few mixed metaphors.

And then, chapter 139 came out...

And Eren apparently pulled a Lelouch. This is a “I purposfully turned myself into a monster to save the world and make my friends into heroes for killing me” kind of thing. It is important to state that the manga makes it clear that Eren would have trampled the world even if they didn’t stop him, because of his urge to be free. However, that urge, that fighting spirit, end up being a good thing. The death of our heroes in battle apparently wasn’t pointless after all. They say goodbye with a salute

The Yeagerists, who were previously framed as fanatics, end up in charge of the government

It is important to state that the real event, the catalyst of the ending, is that killing Eren, who has turned himself literally into the manifestation of humanity’s rage (which has now, through the intricacies of the story, taken the political meaning of hatred and intergenerational trauma), eliminates the power of the titans. The titans are no more. This, in of itself, is good, and in keeping with the spirit of the political commentary thus far. However, the war, is still not over, and Eren’s mantra ends up being correct

So the only way for the war to end is one of the races to be wiped out? 

Also, despite Eren’s genocide being wrong, it is, in the end, justified, as a necessary evil by the story. An Ozymandias kind of moment in which the ends justify the means, but Eren himself has to die, because his crime was too great for him not to suffer punishment. Essentially, this chapter undoes all of the insightful commentary the story had made so far, by proving the ideology of its main character right. Story- wise this isn’t a bad ending, but if we take into account the political references the series has made, and its desire to explicitly tie itself with such imagery makes the ending leave a really bad taste in my mouth. What it essentally says, is that, yes, bigotry and racism are bad, yes, blind hatred is bad, but the general idea of might makes right and the impossibility of reconciliation are true. Armin, who has, throughuout the story, been Eren’s opposite, in terms of looking for peaceful solutions to conflict is rendered meaningless in the end, because him alongside with the other characters were all playing into Eren’s plans. The hearts of our main characters as recruits were in the right place, their fighting spirit admirable, and the overall worldview we are presented with in the beginning of the story remains more or less unchallenged. 

So where does that leave this imagery?

The conclusion is that one must think very carefully before including allegory in their work. I am not accusing Isayama for fascism, and I appreciate the efforts at deconstructing it throughout the story. However, in the end he did an oops I accidentally justified the mentality I was trying to condemn. I still like Attack on Titan, I believe it has artistic value and is overall a pretty good anime, I even agree with its politics to an extent. However, it is very important to critically examine the things we like, and see where they may have gone south. And this ending is that for me.

#attack on titan #aot #snk #shingeki no kyojin #snk spoilers #snk meta #aot meta #politics #anime

[normal-thoughts-official]

Fandom racism anon here and yeah absolutely (I didn't realise I had anon on lol)

Because while LOTR has problems within its themes (ie the orcs can be seen as to be coded as people of colour, especially since they ride elephants) the explicit message of the book is evil bad

Because the only people who work for sauron are evil. There are no morally grey people, they aren't misguided or tricked they just are evil and want to take over the world

And yeah I totally agree that this is more of a literal take on like empirical war (is that the word) and that makes total sense considering Tolkiens history

Whereas I would say that the allegories in shaowhunters is way more based on racial conflict within a country itself especially slavery, I can't remember if this is show Canon but is it that they have the warlock tropheys? I remember that in the books magnus talks about shadowhunters hanging warlock marks on their walls? (sorry to bring the books up)

Idk it's very hollow to me, unlike with LOTR though it's a different allegory it's totally irritating to show many of these supremecists as morally misled. LOTR says bad guys are bad guys, shadowhunters says well yeah they did follow a guy which thinks that downworlders are subhuman and should be eradicated but they just made a mistake

I want to compare this to tfatws which while it isn't really fantasy I just feel like it shows how the priorities of the writer can impact the message of the show so powerfully (I know u aren't up to date so I'm gonna be pretty vague)

There's a scene in tfatws where the new white perfect captain America does something bad and doesn't pay for the consequences - done to comment on white privelege and how America condones white supremacy and how Sam is in comparison to that

Mayrse and Robert revealed to be part of the circle! And paid no consequences Shock horror my parents were the bad guys (even rho they were either implicitly or explicitly extremely racist the entire time) also I haven't finished the seires but do the lightwoods ever try to get their parents to face the consequences?)

Only one actual really critiques the situation and the reality behind it whereas the other one is just to centre the white characters once again and present them in a further sympathetic light

AND ANOTHER THING! I was mostly talking about show Canon here and I'm sorry to bring up the books but I literally can't believe I hadn't picked up in this before.

So like downworlders = people of colour, Simon is a vampire so is coded as a person of colour. However in the books in the last one he stops being a vampire and becomes a shadowhunters instead, coincidentally that's also when he starts dating Izzy HOW IS THIS ABLE TO HAPPEN!!????

I mean I know cassandra clare is lazy right? The original seires is by far the worst of all her writings but come ON!!!!! By the allegory has he become the white man!????? These books made no fuckin sense when I read them at 15 and they make no sense now I'm digressing anyways

I don't know man I wrote this ask because I was trying to find some fantasy book recommendations on booktube and SO MANY of them were about slavery or general ly extrême préjudice with à White protagonist to save this 'poor souls'.

Also I was watching guardians of the galexy the other day and realised nearly every movie set in space is just bigger stakes imperialism - planets instead of countries. Literally star wars, star trek, guardians of the galexy 2, avengers infinity war - all are facing genocidal imperialistic villains without actually paying much, if any attention to those effected

Just writing this ask made me exhausted I'm so tired of lazy writing and exploiting other people's struggle. I'm white and I'm trying to be more critical about the movies, shows and books I watch and read but let me know if I said something off here❤️❤️ you gotta get up to date with tfatws man, Sambucky nation is THRIVING!!!!

i'm not sure i agree that the whole "the evil people are evil" thing is a good thing, because i feel like more often than not making the bad characters just like... unidimensionally evil just means that the reader will be like "lol i could NEVER be that guy" and when it comes to racism that is a dangerous road to take because white people already believe that racism is something that Only The Most Evil People, Ergo, Not Me, Can Do, which makes discussions of stuff like subconscious racial bias and active antiracist work become more difficult because people don't believe they CAN be racist unless they're like, Lord Voldemort

which is not to say that racism should be treated as morally ambiguous, just that the workings of racism should be represented as something that is not done only by the Most Hardcore And Evil, but rather as a part of a system of oppression that affects the way everyone sees the world and interacts with it and lives in it

yes the warlock trophies are mentioned in the show, albeit very quickly (there is a circle member who tells magnus that his cat eyes will make "a nice addition to his collection" and then it's never mentioned again because this is sh and we love using racism for shock value but then not actually treating it as a serious plot point or something that affects oppressed ppl). and you are absolutely right, shadowhunters (and hp, and most fantasy books) has genocide as its core conflict and treats it, like you said, in a very hollow way, treating racism as both not a big deal and not something that is part of a system of oppression, but really the actions of a few Very Bad People. it's almost impressive how they manage to do both at the same time tbh

i think you hit the nail right on the head with this comment, actually. for most of these works, racism is SHOCK VALUE. it's just like "lol isn't it bad that this bad guy wants to kill a gazillion people just because they are muggles? now that is fucked up" but it's not actually an issue. in fact, when this guy is defeated, the whole problem is over! racism is not something that is embedded into that world, it's not a systemic issue, it's not even actually part of what drives the plot. the things that led to this person not only existing but rising to power and gathering enough followers to be a real threat to the whole world are never mentioned. it's like racists are born out of thin air, which is dangerously close to implying that racism is just a natural part of life, tbh

anyway my point is, it is never supposed to be questioned, it is never part of a deeper plot or story, its implications are barely addressed except for a few fleeting comments them and there; so, it's not a critique, it's shock value, even though it is frequently disguised as a critique (which is always empty and shallow anyway. like what is the REAL critique in works like hp or sh/tsc other than "genocide is bad"? wow such a groundbreaking take evelyn)

about simon and the book thing: i actually knew about this and the weird thing about this is that, like... simon is jewish, and he's implied to be ashkenazi (calls his grandma bubbe which is yiddish, which is a language spoken by the ashkenazi ppl), and it seems like cc is always toeing the line between him being accepted by shadowhunters and then not accepted by them, which sounds a lot like antisemitic tropes and history of swinging between (ashkenazi) jewish ppl being seen as the model minority myth and thus used as an example by white christians, and being hated and persecuted. i'm not super qualified to talk about this since i'm not jewish and i'm still learning about/unlearning antisemitism and its tropes, and i don't really have a fully formed thought on that, tbh; it just reminds me of the whole "model minority" swinging, where one second simon is part of the majority, the other he's not, but always he is supposed to give up a part of himself and his identity in other to be "assimilated" by shadowhunter culture. this article (link) covers a book on jewish people and assimilationism into USan culture, this article (link) covers british jews' relationship with being considered an ethnic group, and this article (link) talks a bit about the model minority myth from the perspective of an asian jewish woman

it just really calls to my attention that cc chose to make her ashkenazi jewish character start off as a downworlder and then become a shadowhunter. i don't think she made that decision as a conscious nod to this history, because it would require being informed on antisemitism lol but it's incredible how you can always see bigoted stereotypes shining through her narrative choices completely by accident. it just really shows how ingrained it is in our collective minds and culture

and anyway, making a character go from the oppressed group to just suddenly become the oppressor is just. wtf. not how oppression works, but most of all, really disrespectful, especially because she clearly treats it as an "upgrade"/"glowup" that earns him the Love Of His Life

also, out of curiosity, are you french? it seems like your autocorrect changed a few words and i'm pretty sure extrême and préjudice are the french versions of these words, and since u said ur white, that's where my money would be lol

#anti cc #anti tsc #anti tmi #anti sh #racism tw #antisemitism tw #reference #ask #residenthottiesamwilson

[eretzyisrael]

Has Joe Forgotten Joseph?

Now there arose a new king over Egypt, who knew not Joseph – Ex. 1:8

Ever since the day there arose a Pharaoh in Egypt who “did not know Joseph,” the dialectic of the Jewish people in diaspora has been the same. The Jews are first welcomed and treated well, but in time they grow numerous, and acquire wealth, influence, and position in society. They do exceedingly well. The reason for that is fraught with controversy, but the fact is undeniable.

And then the locals become unhappy with them. Perhaps they feel threatened, perhaps envious, perhaps greedy for the possessions amassed by the Jews. Perhaps they simply are repelled by the stubborn otherness of the Jews. Then the majority rises up, places restrictions on them, persecutes them, impoverishes them, expels them, murders them, or all of these.

It happened in Egypt, in the Roman Empire, in England, Spain, Byzantium, the Russian Empire, Iraq, and of course 20th century Europe. Over and over. Finally the Zionists realized that the only way to break out of this dialectic was to return to Jewish sovereignty, create a Jewish state of, by, and for the Jewish people. After a difficult struggle and a particularly horrific episode of large-scale mass murder, they succeeded to build a state in the historic homeland of the Jewish people.

But then the dialectic did not disappear. Rather, it raised itself to a higher level of abstraction, with the whole world playing the role of the diaspora nations and the Jewish state that of their Jewish communities; hence the expression “Israel is the Jew among nations” (usually attributed to Golda Meir).

Just like the various kings, princes, and sultans who adopted or spurned the Jews, the nations of the world took positions about the Jewish state. But as she became stronger and wealthier, and her people happier and more successful, resentment against her rose up throughout the world. Just as the Jews were accused of murdering Christian children to obtain their blood, the Jewish state was accused of horrendous crimes against Palestinians. A notorious parallel, called a 21st century blood libel, was the allegation that the IDF had murdered young Mohammed al-Dura, which became a cause célèbre for Israel-haters worldwide. Just as Jews were seen in medieval Europe as evil creatures for their refusal to accept the doctrines of Christianity, today Israel is called a racist and apartheid state.

What has happened is that while traditional Jew-hatred (although growing strongly under the radar, especially among lower economic classes in the West) has become at least publically unfashionable, misoziony, hatred of Israel no less extreme, irrational, and obsessive than Nazi antisemitism, is burgeoning. International institutions like the UN have adopted it as a pillar of their “moral” edifices, and it has become a litmus test for ideological purity on the left.

This didn’t happen by itself. It was a deliberate consequence of Soviet cognitive warfare. Starting in the 1960s, the KGB deliberately amplified anti-Israel sentiment, and worked to create it with every means at its disposal. The Soviets, well understanding the power that misoziony inherited from its Jew-hating roots, emphasized the demonization of Israel in its propaganda, contributing greatly to its strength and spread. In particular, the false identification of Zionism with racism and apartheid was a KGB creation.

Official American policy has been relatively non-misozionist since Harry Truman played the role of Cyrus the Great to the Jewish state in 1948. Elements in the State Department have always been biased against Israel to some extent, but in general US policy was rational, even friendly unless American interests (mostly connected to oil) dictated otherwise.

With the Obama presidency, America’s Mideast policy became driven by more than strict considerations of US interests. Barack Obama saw himself as motivated by moral concerns, but his moral principles were those of the contemporary Left (with a contribution from black liberation theology). He absorbed the Soviet conception of Israel as a colonialist exploiter of people of color, and saw Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu as a personal foe.

But he knew that the American people, especially including Evangelical Christians, weren’t ready for a president who would explicitly denounce Israel as a state that ought not exist. So he employed a dual strategy. On the one hand, he repeatedly assured Americans that he was committed to the security of Israel (“an unbreakable bond”), and he supported military aid to Israel, which sent a message of support while it provided leverage to control her, and weakened her domestic military industries.

On the other hand, he worked to weaken Israel and strengthen her enemies, including the PLO but especially Iran. The nuclear deal (JCPOA) with Iran, which had the effect of protecting Iran’s nuclear program instead of dismantling it, was a direct threat to Israel’s continued existence. And yet, the tortuous explanations of how this arrangement would benefit the US didn’t hold water. What is there about “death to America” that he didn’t understand? What is there about Iranian-sponsored drug trafficking that is in America’s interest? Had the Iranian regime ever done anything in response to the gifts it received from the US other than increase its support of terrorism and push harder to expand its sphere of influence, so as to surround its intended victims (Saudi Arabia, Israel, Jordan, and Egypt)?

The answer is that Obama had replaced the traditional interest-based policy with one based on his understanding of morality. Unfortunately his ignorance of history and skewed ideology produced an equally skewed morality, in which there is no room for a Jewish state. American policy had sometimes been less than supportive of Israel when the perception was that US interests required it. But for the first time, it became ideologically anti-Israel.

Obama was replaced by Donald Trump in 2017. Whatever his motives, Trump’s actions in both the symbolic and the concrete realms were consistently pro-Israel. In particular, he took the US out of the dangerous JCPOA and increased pressure on Iran, both by means of sanctions and by assisting the targets of Iran’s aggression, Israel and the Sunni Arab states. Trump’s policy severely weakened the highly unpopular regime in Iran (Obama had supported the regime when it was challenged domestically by the Green Movement in 2009).

Trump and his movement were defeated in a remarkably rancorous and brutal election struggle that left the US bitterly divided. The Joe Biden administration has chosen its foreign policy team almost entirely from former Obama Administration officials, and has appointed some particularly anti-Israel individuals to key positions, including those that will be concerned with Iran. In his first days, Biden has reversed several of Trump’s actions relating to the Palestinians, restoring aid to the Palestinian Authority and UNRWA, the UN Palestinian refugee agency, reopening the Jerusalem consulate that was the unofficial US embassy to “Palestine,” and pledging to allow the PLO office in Washington to reopen.

But it is in connection with Iran that the intention to continue Obama’s policies are the most concerning. Although Secretary of State Anthony Blinken (the “good cop” in the administration) has said that Iran will get no sanctions relief until it “returns to compliance” with the JCPOA, Biden has already given Iran several important gifts: he has said he will remove the Iran-sponsored Houthi guerrillas in Yemen from the list of designated terrorist organizations; he will no longer sell arms to Saudi Arabia in support of its war against the Houthis; and he has suspended the impending sale of F35 aircraft to the UAE, an Iranian enemy and recent ally of Israel.

Israel has been waiting for Biden to call PM Netanyahu, because Netanyahu wants to present evidence about Iranian nuclear development, and argue that rejoining the JCPOA as it stands or with minimal changes would be a serious error. Biden apparently would prefer not to have this conversation, which might result in an open break with Israel. So far he hasn’t called.

I don’t know where Biden himself is at, or indeed if he is at anyplace at all. But it seems certain that the new administration has returned to Obama-era policies on issues of concern to Israel. I wonder if any of them have questioned the rationality of helping the misogynist, homophobic, dictatorial, terror-propagating, expansionist Iranian regime get nuclear weapons?

Does the existence of a Jewish state bother them that much?

Abu Yehuda

#Jew Hatred #US-Israel Relations #Zionism

[hypomanicsatanicpanic]

you ever feel like a space that used to be a respite for you is now just...not? I don’t necessarily mean it’s not safe, just that going to a place which was once really productive and comfortable and energizing for you now feels stressful and uneasy? I (likely temporarily) stepped out of an organizing space that I’ve built up over the last year in order to deal with the intense workload around thesis/defense which is happening this upcoming Monday. Anyway, we started at three people and now we have a pretty robust core of about 20. What we’re trying to do is organize grad students into a union at the university where we all work, which is pretty fucking horrendous about how it treats us. This basically meant spending ~20hrs / week finding new students who wanted to organize, meeting with them, agitating, meeting with other unionizing grad students at other schools, managing personality conflicts in the group, etc as well as working on whatever campaigns/ social media stuff we were doing. All while doing grad school full time. It was energizing. We accomplished shit with only very few of us. While it’s explicitly in our bylaws that there is no “group leader,” a lot of things that would usually be directed to a president end up coming to me just because I’m the common person that everyone knows. Most folks in the group have zero other organizing experience; one has quite a lot, and two or three have basically been in the periphery of this one far left org (let’s call it WTF, for Women’s Task Force) in our very conservative small city. Most of us are quite left, though there are a decent number of centrists.   About WTF: basically there’s this one really...problematic? person who is employed by our university who leads WTF (which isn’t affiliated with the university). She, a white cis woman, collects people she can use as symbolic tokens (usually women of color, visibly disabled women, lesbians, and fat women) to use them in promo material, and get them to do errands for, and doesn’t help them gain more power or skills within the group. She consciously excludes transwomen and only allows AFAB nonbinary folxs, and not even those who have a more masc presentation much of the time. WTF is also massively outspoken about Palestine, which is usually a signal that a group may be pretty antiSemitic as well.  She uses her identity markers to shut down others who (legitimately) question her tactics.  WTF, in the 10ish years they’ve existed, has never made any actual policy or political changes in this town. They’ve never actually run a campaign. They basically just show up “in solidarity” with actions other people organize, and host fundraisers for themselves. So having to deal with them is pretty ick, because the people in that organization. WTF is basically bad news. The people from WTF--three women of color and two queer white women--are consistently bad about things which seem to be just fine for literally everyone else in the group. We understand that shit’s stressful as a grad student and that there are a lot of other things we could/ should all be doing in addition to organizing. But the few rules we have are freaking common sense/common courtesy, and not that hard to follow.  When people need to drop off the map for a while, they let others know that they’ll be out for a bit, and then get back in contact when their schedules free up again, so they can be caught up to speed at the next meeting. There’s also meeting notes which you can read to get back in the loop if you thought you’ve missed something: If you think you’re not going to be able to do something, you’re not supposed to commit to it.  If you can’t do something you committed to doing, give others a heads up so they can cover it. Last, since we’re trying to be a space that works for people across the political spectrum (not just like the total of 30 dedicated leftists here), we’re explicitly against callout culture. Meaning that if you have an issue with something someone says in meeting, you’re either supposed to hold it until the group evaluation (where there’s dedicated space for that), OR you’re supposed to have a conversation with the person about the situation, OR you’re supposed to talk to another neutral-party group member so they can have the conversation for you.  The WTF people have committed to following all of these rules and have been consistently bad at actually doing that, as per rules. They’ve consistently just not done the things they committed to, without actually telling anyone, leaving folks in the lurch. They consistently call people out in meetings in a way that alienates newcomers. They’ve consistently misgendered me, despite my asking them to not to, and speaking to them about it after meetings.   About five weeks ago, this started to become a really big problem as we planned a big public recruitment event. I had a few conversations with the people who’d primarily been affected by one of the WTF folks’ failure to follow through on commitments. They asked me to speak to her. So I took several days to plan and rehearse a conversation. She was extremely defensive (ok, that’s fine, whatever), and committed to a whole lot of other shit. My follow up with her was to meet on a regular basis, so we could check in and readjust. We met the week after that, shit seemed fine. The week after that, the day of the big event. she came to the 1:1 meeting we’d set up and basically yelled at me for an hour for promoting white supremacy in the group. I tried to ask her some questions but really it just was her telling me how I’m a white supremacist and by holding women of color accountable to rules which they too had voted for, in a UNANIMOUS VOTE, I’m promoting white supremacy. She suggested I go to WTF subgroup meetings called SURJ (showing up for racial justice), which is basically a reading circle for white people only to “deconstruct their complicitness in white supremacy.” One of my partners went once to learn more about antiblack racism, but was turned away because he’s South Asian, not white. So, nope. Not fucking happening--it’s a completely performative thing IMO. Also the WTF leader person consistently is there and I’m not comfortable around her. They are also definitely under the opinion that “Jews are white and benefit more from oppressing PoCs than other white people.” So not a good/safe place for me.  Maybe I wasn’t supposed to take it as a personal attack, but about halfway through the conversation she said it was specifically about me. So, yeah, a personal attack. She quit the organization and left, leaving us in the lurch for that night. The other thing that really bothered me about this conversation was that she was using her identity as a way to evade any and all accountability for repeatedly committing to things and disappearing. I would have been really happy to talk with her about how to make the space more accessible to her. In fact, we’d had multiple conversations about this. We’d implemented multiple things to help with the issues she’d mentioned...and she’d engaged with literally zero of them. Around that time, before the big event at a group meeting, another WTF member (also a WoC) was on the agenda to talk about “accountability.” Vague agendas are generally fine, so it was like, Of course! We should talk about that. That piece wasn’t really about accountability, it was literally just accusing the group of being a space for white supremacy, telling white people in the group to go to SURJ. Then she also left the group (though she waited until after the big event), though without the “Fuck y’all, I quit” meeting.  I’ve spoken to most other group members outside of WTF about this (both PoC and white folks), they agree that I’m not a white supremacist. Still, it’s probably a good idea to address the issue in more depth in the group. As a white person I really can’t say anything about how WTF members, unlike literally all other people in the group, were using callout culture and accusations of white supremacy to derail conversations, and to block any attempt at getting them to follow the same rules they not only expect others to follow but also that they themselves committed to following. We’ve had like 3 followup conversations in general meetings since then. So far, we’ve scared off 5 people that I’d recruited, as well as 3-4 others had recruited. Multiple opportunities to choose, plan, and launch campaigns have passed while we have these conversations. I can’t point any of this out because when I do, I’m just the white person who doesn’t want to talk about white supremacy.  Basically even though there are supportive people in the group that I absolutely love, I feel like the space has been emotionally polluted for me. I can’t deal with this fucking shit anymore, as much as I think unionizing is important to deal with the fucking bullshit from the university. This has become more of a stress for me than the shitty paychecks that come at unpredictable times; the shitty issues with my old PI/advisor; the really terrible benefits and leave policies; the expensive term fees.  I almost don’t want to go back. Is that terrible of me?

#personal #complaining #burnout #fuck this shit

[deepwaterministries]

Esther 6

- That same night, the king could not sleep, so he had the book of his reign be read to him. Bigthan and Teresh's plot to kill the king. How Mordecai had alerted the king to the plot.

- the king asked what honor was bestowed upon Mordecai for saving his life. His servants said nothing had been done.

- hearing this, the king immediately sought to fix it. He asked who was in the court.

- Haman had just come into the outer court to ask if he could hang Mordecai. The servant told him, and king summoned him in.

- when he arrived, the king asked him, what should be done for a man who I want to honor?

- Haman said to himself, who would the king want to honor more than me? So he described to the king what he would have done for himself, which is to be dressed in royal attire, a crown placed upon his head, and sat on the king's horse; then to be taken through the streets by one of the most noble princes, who will proclaim, "this is what happens to people the king wishes to honor!"

- "Excellent! Now go do that to Mordecai the Jew!"

- I think the poetic justice is evident here, and this was an important event for one other reason at least; for the Jews. For people for whom a brutal strike to them had come recently, seeing a fellow Jew (who they probably knew and respected) being lead by King Ahasuerus' most trusted advisor, who was proclaiming that the king respected him would have lifted spirits, boosted moral, and reinforced the hope that something could be done about the coming genocide.

- (most people wouldn't have known that Esther was Jewish. A couple of smart folk might have figured out where she came from, but it wasn't common knowledge at all.)

- also worth mentioning that even though Haman is used to getting whatever he wanted from the king, he still doesn't challenge his authority. This just shows again how incredibly powerful the king was. Even *he* couldn't go against his word.

- after the frustrating ordeal, Haman went home sorrowfully, and told his with and friends what happened. They then (going back on what they'd said before) told him that if Mordecai really was a Jew, then it would be dangerous to continue opposing him. Maybe it hadn't clicked for them before that he was Jewish, maybe they were starting to piece things together in the big picture, but whatever it was, they gave him sound advice that he proceeded to ignore.

Esther 7

- later, at the banquet, the king asked Esther again what her request is, restating that even as much as half the kingdom will be granted to her.

- she started by asking for her life and her people, leading into how they have been sold for the sake of being destroyed, slain.

- she essentially performed a blind study on the king, stating the consequences before starting who caused them. This is incredibly smart, because it got the king's honest, unbiased opinion on the issue without trying to get him to see through his ideas about Haman.

- because even though the king made the rule, it was Haman who designed it. She also bypasses Haman arguing about the fine print of the law, since she didn't state the *law itself* she stated the *consequences of that law*

- this tactic was employed by the prophet Nathan earlier, (in addition to a metaphor) when he confronted David about Bathsheba.

- only after the king explicitly asks who has done this did she tell him it was Haman.

- Haman stood terrified before them, realizing the whole gravity behind his actions. He realized that Esther was a Jew.

- the king stormed out into the garden in a fit of rage, and Haman, knowing the king, and knowing he probably already had something bad in plan for him, fell before the queen to beg for mercy.

- when the king re entered the house, he thought Haman was attacking Esther. Even though he wasn't, his behavior cemented that he was indeed guilty of what he was accused of.

- one of the chamberlains then came in, telling the king that a gallows was built on Haman's land, for the sake of hanging Mordecai, an ally of the king.

- the king ordered Haman to be hung on it, and it was done. Then the king was calm again.

Esther 8

- the king gave Esther all that Haman had possessed, and she, in turn, passed on to Mordecai. The king recognized the transaction with a ring that had belonged to Haman.

- Esther then pleaded with the king again to spare the Jews.

- he told her to write a decree that would fit the need of the Jews and seal it with the king's ring

- as I alluded to earlier, something signed with the king's ring could not be broken by anyone.

- so this new proclamation was sent out on the same way the other two in the book were, with a copy of the proclamation being in all the land

- I think Esther had a really good effect on Ahasuerus. Here we can see him, within a day of hearing that he had wronged the Jews, hurrying to make it right. He lets a man of the people, Mordecai, take charge of the actual proclamation so he can make it work best for a people that the king doesn't know well. He then sends it out with some of the fastest horses in the kingdom.

- the Jews could band together, defending themselves against their would-be attackers.

- one would think that the Jews would be doing that anyway, but the thing is *they just weren't allowed to*. The Jews would follow the law, because even if it killed them, God orders us to respect the authority as long as they don't go against God's word. The Jews essentially peacefully protested the law, but wouldn't have disobeyed it unless it went against God's law.

- so Mordecai went out from the palace dressed in royal blue, white and purple to proclaim to his neighbors the news. The Jews from every city and province rejoiced that day, and many became Jews because of it.

Esther 9

- on the alloted day, the Jews, with the whole kingdom behind them, bound together to kill those who would have killed them on that day. The Jews went from being an unknown people, living below the surface of society to being respected by all, with a huge voice in the governing. A voice directed by God. By the devotion of two people, one of the biggest kingdoms in the ancient world was benefited.

- perhaps leadership skills ran in the family, because Mordecai was promoted to the same position Haman had held. This was no coincidence either.

- through all of this, even thought the Jews killed many people, including ten of Haman's family, they stole nothing. They left the possessions to the rightful owners.

- after the day, the king told Esther all that had happened. He asked her what she would like done the next day.

- she asked that what was done today be done again tomorrow, in case the enemies decided to take revenge on the Jews. She also asked that the ten sons of Haman, who were against the Jews, be hanged.

- so the king commands it, and the Jews defend themselves again. It got the message through, because by the fifteenth, they rested. They feasted, some on the fourteenth, some on the fifteenth (of the month Adar), so the feast of Purim was celebrated on those two days. This was Mordecai's idea, and it was celebrated similar to how we celebrate Christmas, with giving food to each other and helping the poor.

- it was named after Pur, or the lot which Haman cast to determine the downfall of the Jews.

- the news of the feast spread throughout the kingdom, and the Jews still celebrate it to this day.

Esther 10

- the last 3 verses, the only ones in chapter 10, describe almost a return to normalcy. The king imposes a new tax, and the book ends with Mordecai becoming the prime minister and a description of how he continued to serve God through his position for the rest of the time we know of.

#bible study #esther 6 through 10

[dfroza]

“Every word I’ve spoken to you is a Spirit-word, and so it is life-making.

But some of you are resisting, refusing to have any part in this.”

A line from Today’s reading of the Scriptures in the 6th chapter of the book of John that points to the Son.

with the whole chapter:

After this, Jesus went across the Sea of Galilee (some call it Tiberias). A huge crowd followed him, attracted by the miracles they had seen him do among the sick. When he got to the other side, he climbed a hill and sat down, surrounded by his disciples. It was nearly time for the Feast of Passover, kept annually by the Jews.

When Jesus looked out and saw that a large crowd had arrived, he said to Philip, “Where can we buy bread to feed these people?” He said this to stretch Philip’s faith. He already knew what he was going to do.

Philip answered, “Two hundred silver pieces wouldn’t be enough to buy bread for each person to get a piece.”

One of the disciples—it was Andrew, brother to Simon Peter—said, “There’s a little boy here who has five barley loaves and two fish. But that’s a drop in the bucket for a crowd like this.”

Jesus said, “Make the people sit down.” There was a nice carpet of green grass in this place. They sat down, about five thousand of them. Then Jesus took the bread and, having given thanks, gave it to those who were seated. He did the same with the fish. All ate as much as they wanted.

When the people had eaten their fill, he said to his disciples, “Gather the leftovers so nothing is wasted.” They went to work and filled twelve large baskets with leftovers from the five barley loaves.

The people realized that God was at work among them in what Jesus had just done. They said, “This is the Prophet for sure, God’s Prophet right here in Galilee!” Jesus saw that in their enthusiasm, they were about to grab him and make him king, so he slipped off and went back up the mountain to be by himself.

In the evening his disciples went down to the sea, got in the boat, and headed back across the water to Capernaum. It had grown quite dark and Jesus had not yet returned. A huge wind blew up, churning the sea. They were maybe three or four miles out when they saw Jesus walking on the sea, quite near the boat. They were scared senseless, but he reassured them, “It’s me. It’s all right. Don’t be afraid.” So they took him on board. In no time they reached land—the exact spot they were headed to.

The next day the crowd that was left behind realized that there had been only one boat, and that Jesus had not gotten into it with his disciples. They had seen them go off without him. By now boats from Tiberias had pulled up near where they had eaten the bread blessed by the Master. So when the crowd realized he was gone and wasn’t coming back, they piled into the Tiberias boats and headed for Capernaum, looking for Jesus.

When they found him back across the sea, they said, “Rabbi, when did you get here?”

Jesus answered, “You’ve come looking for me not because you saw God in my actions but because I fed you, filled your stomachs—and for free.

“Don’t waste your energy striving for perishable food like that. Work for the food that sticks with you, food that nourishes your lasting life, food the Son of Man provides. He and what he does are guaranteed by God the Father to last.”

To that they said, “Well, what do we do then to get in on God’s works?”

Jesus said, “Sign on with the One that God has sent. That kind of a commitment gets you in on God’s works.”

They waffled: “Why don’t you give us a clue about who you are, just a hint of what’s going on? When we see what’s up, we’ll commit ourselves. Show us what you can do. Moses fed our ancestors with bread in the desert. It says so in the Scriptures: ‘He gave them bread from heaven to eat.’”

Jesus responded, “The real significance of that Scripture is not that Moses gave you bread from heaven but that my Father is right now offering you bread from heaven, the real bread. The Bread of God came down out of heaven and is giving life to the world.”

They jumped at that: “Master, give us this bread, now and forever!”

Jesus said, “I am the Bread of Life. The person who aligns with me hungers no more and thirsts no more, ever. I have told you this explicitly because even though you have seen me in action, you don’t really believe me. Every person the Father gives me eventually comes running to me. And once that person is with me, I hold on and don’t let go. I came down from heaven not to follow my own agenda but to accomplish the will of the One who sent me.

“This, in a nutshell, is that will: that everything handed over to me by the Father be completed—not a single detail missed—and at the wrap-up of time I have everything and everyone put together, upright and whole. This is what my Father wants: that anyone who sees the Son and trusts who he is and what he does and then aligns with him will enter real life, eternal life. My part is to put them on their feet alive and whole at the completion of time.”

At this, because he said, “I am the Bread that came down from heaven,” the Jews started arguing over him: “Isn’t this the son of Joseph? Don’t we know his father? Don’t we know his mother? How can he now say, ‘I came down out of heaven’ and expect anyone to believe him?”

Jesus said, “Don’t bicker among yourselves over me. You’re not in charge here. The Father who sent me is in charge. He draws people to me—that’s the only way you’ll ever come. Only then do I do my work, putting people together, setting them on their feet, ready for the End. This is what the prophets meant when they wrote, ‘And then they will all be personally taught by God.’ Anyone who has spent any time at all listening to the Father, really listening and therefore learning, comes to me to be taught personally—to see it with his own eyes, hear it with his own ears, from me, since I have it firsthand from the Father. No one has seen the Father except the One who has his Being alongside the Father—and you can see me.

“I’m telling you the most solemn and sober truth now: Whoever believes in me has real life, eternal life. I am the Bread of Life. Your ancestors ate the manna bread in the desert and died. But now here is Bread that truly comes down out of heaven. Anyone eating this Bread will not die, ever. I am the Bread—living Bread!—who came down out of heaven. Anyone who eats this Bread will live—and forever! The Bread that I present to the world so that it can eat and live is myself, this flesh-and-blood self.”

At this, the Jews started fighting among themselves: “How can this man serve up his flesh for a meal?”

But Jesus didn’t give an inch. “Only insofar as you eat and drink flesh and blood, the flesh and blood of the Son of Man, do you have life within you. The one who brings a hearty appetite to this eating and drinking has eternal life and will be fit and ready for the Final Day. My flesh is real food and my blood is real drink. By eating my flesh and drinking my blood you enter into me and I into you. In the same way that the fully alive Father sent me here and I live because of him, so the one who makes a meal of me lives because of me. This is the Bread from heaven. Your ancestors ate bread and later died. Whoever eats this Bread will live always.”

He said these things while teaching in the meeting place in Capernaum.

Many among his disciples heard this and said, “This is tough teaching, too tough to swallow.”

Jesus sensed that his disciples were having a hard time with this and said, “Does this rattle you completely? What would happen if you saw the Son of Man ascending to where he came from? The Spirit can make life. Sheer muscle and willpower don’t make anything happen. Every word I’ve spoken to you is a Spirit-word, and so it is life-making. But some of you are resisting, refusing to have any part in this.” (Jesus knew from the start that some weren’t going to risk themselves with him. He knew also who would betray him.) He went on to say, “This is why I told you earlier that no one is capable of coming to me on his own. You get to me only as a gift from the Father.”

After this, many of his disciples left. They no longer wanted to be associated with him. Then Jesus gave the Twelve their chance: “Do you also want to leave?”

Peter replied, “Master, to whom would we go? You have the words of real life, eternal life. We’ve already committed ourselves, confident that you are the Holy One of God.”

Jesus responded, “Haven’t I handpicked you, the Twelve? Still, one of you is a devil!” He was referring to Judas, son of Simon Iscariot. This man—one from the Twelve!—was even then getting ready to betray him.

The Book of John, Chapter 6 (The Message)

my personal reading of the Scriptures for Saturday, may 15 of 2021 with a paired chapter from each Testament of the Bible along with Today’s Proverbs and Psalms

A post by John Parsons that again looks at the significance of Shavout which is a holiday that begins Sunday at sundown (may 16 of 2021)

The Torah instructs us to count forty nine days – seven "weeks of days" – from the day following the Sabbath of Passover until the holiday of Shavuot (Pentecost or “Weeks”). This period of time is called Sefirat Ha’Omer (“counting the sheaves”). Every day during this season, a special blessing is recited naming exactly how many more days are left before the “seven weeks of days” are complete.

Surely God did not want the Jewish people to miss something important here! Could He have made it any clearer? It’s almost as if there was a dotted line pointing directly from Firstfruits to Shavuot - a “Jubilee” of days.

Traditional Judaism regards Shavuot as the anniversary of "mattan Torah" (מתן התורה), the time that the Torah was given at Mount Sinai. As one of the three required "pilgrimage festivals" (shelosh regalim), Jews from all over the world would come to Jerusalem to celebrate and reaffirm their commitment to the covenant made at Sinai.

And indeed such was the custom when God delivered the Substance of which the festival of Shavuot was merely a “type and a shadow.” For the New Testament reveals that Shavuot is the climax of God’s plan for our deliverance through Yeshua, the true Lamb of God (Seh Ha’Elohim). The countdown to Shavuot represents the ratification of the anticipated New Covenant (בּרית חדשׁה) to mankind, since it was on this very day that the Holy Spirit was given to the followers of the Messiah.

With a touch of divine irony, on the very day that Jews from around the world gathered in Jerusalem to reaffirm their commitment to the covenant of Moses, the Holy Spirit descended upon Israel to offer the promise of the New Covenant to all who would believe (see Acts 2:1-42). This new covenant makes Torah a matter of the heart, written by the God’s Spirit, and yielding a life fruitful in the praise of God (Gal. 5:22-23; Heb. 13:15). [Hebrew for Christians]

5.14.21 • Facebook

Today’s message from the Institute for Creation Research

May 15, 2021

The Perfect Priesthood of Christ

“If therefore perfection were by the Levitical priesthood...what further need was there that another priest should rise after the order of Melchisedec, and not be called after the order of Aaron?” (Hebrews 7:11)

As good as the Levitical priest system was, it was imperfect and the priesthood would need to be changed. Jesus Christ became the perfect priest who would never change.

Hebrews 7 describes the old priesthood as mortal: “And they truly were many priests, because they were not suffered [allowed] to continue by reason of death” (v. 23). There would no doubt be some breakdown of knowledge or interest on behalf of a person when his priest moved or died. Not so with the Lord Jesus Christ, “because he continueth ever” (v. 24), and because He is “the Son, who is consecrated for evermore” (v. 28). Therefore, we approach Him with confidence, knowing He “is able to save them to the uttermost that come unto God by him, seeing he ever liveth to make intercession for them” (v. 25).

The priesthood of men was also fallible. Daily they needed “to offer up sacrifice, first for [their] own sins, and then for the people’s” (v. 27). A system of sinful men offering imperfect animals whose blood was incapable of washing away sins must have left some of the priests longing for something more assuring and fulfilling. Jesus ushered in a priesthood so perfect and infallible that nothing would ever be the same. For Christ “needeth not daily” to offer sacrifices as Levitical priests did, “for this he did once, when he offered up himself” (v. 27). The one-time-only work of Christ was sufficient because of who offered it and what was offered: “Neither by the blood of goats and calves, but by his own blood he entered in once into the holy place, having obtained eternal redemption for us” (Hebrews 9:12). RJG

[quranreadalong]

#3, Surah 2

THE QURAN READ-ALONG: DAY 3

We’re almost... ten percent done with this horribly long surah. Today we’re going to cover 2:40-2:74, which is “Previously on Allah Talks To Prophets...”. In this case, Moses (or Musa).

2:40 and 2:41 are neutral introductory verses addressed to the Jews, telling them to fulfill “the covenant” by accepting Islam. To briefly explain: a large Jewish community lived in Medina. Before he actually moved there, Mohammed believed that they'd be accepting of his message. But, uh, they weren't. They didn't believe him at all. Over time, this would cause Mohammed to hate them, but not yet. This part of the surah was likely “revealed” not long after Mohammed and his crew arrived in the city, so while he was annoyed by the Jews, his rants against them weren't too full of frothing rage at this stage, at least compared to later suwar.

Allah continues:

Confound not truth with falsehood, nor knowingly conceal the truth. Establish worship, pay the poor-due, and bow your heads with those who bow (in worship). Enjoin ye righteousness upon mankind while ye yourselves forget (to practise it)? And ye are readers of the Scripture! Have ye then no sense?

Those three seem like good ayat when you ignore the context--the context being that Mohammed was accusing the Jews of lying about Allah and the Torah, and trust me y'all, we'll talk a lot more about that later on. “The poor-due” used throughout Pickthall’s translation is usually in reference to the zakat tax, the proceeds of which go to various groups including soldiers, tax collectors, the poor, etc. More on that later. 2:45 is also good, to a lesser extent, urging people to ask for patience while the following ayah reminds them that all will return to Allah.

Then we’re back in neutral recap territory, reminding us of Allah favoring the “children of Israel”. And then all that goodness and fluff goes straight into the bad crapper:

And guard yourselves against a day when no soul will in aught avail another, nor will intercession be accepted from it, nor will compensation be received from it, nor will they be helped.

Now, I’m not gonna include that in the kuffar hell counter, because it’s not explicitly mentioning either, but the “no one can save you from hell” thing is still pretty grim tbh!

So, too, is the threat of Allah’s “trials” and tests of faith, which pop up repeatedly throughout the Quran. The Biblical story about how the Egyptians were killing Jewish children, for example, is described as “a tremendous trial from your Lord”. What kinda over-the-top test is that?! But it does at least lead us from ranting about Mohammed's contemporary Jews to discussing the deeds of past Jews.

2:50-53 are yet more bland neutral recaps, this time about how the Egyptians were going to kill the Hebrews, how Yahweh/Allah saved them and drowned the Pharaoh’s army, how the Hebrews went astray by worshiping the golden calf while Moses was away, how Allah gave Moses the Ten Commandments, etc. All of that is just an abbreviated version of the Moses story in the Torah.

And then we get our first (bad) instance of Allah commanding death! Moses informs his people, regarding the calf-worshiping incident, that:

Ye have wronged yourselves by your choosing of the calf (for worship) so turn in penitence to your Creator, and kill (the guilty) yourselves. That will be best for you with your Creator and He will relent toward you. Lo! He is the Relenting, the Merciful.

("Allah is Merciful, so kill the idolators” is an incredible concept.)

Now 2:55-56 is the first of two parts in this section where I believe Mohammed may have made some serious errors in recounting Jewish stories. These ayat tell us that the Hebrews didn’t believe Moses was communicating with Allah. “How do we know you’re not just insane and making this all up?”, they asked... prompting Allah to send a lightning strike in reply. A lightning strike that killed them?! And then Allah brought them back to life so they would believe in Allah and be grateful that he (killed them and then) revived them??!?!

Very bad! But where on earth did this come from? It’s not in the Bible or any Jewish literature that I can find. Here is my theory. In the Book of Exodus, chapter 19, God tells Moses that he will allow the Hebrews to hear his voice so they will believe in him forever (19:9). Three days later, this happens:

On the morning of the third day there was thunder and lightning, with a thick cloud over the mountain, and a very loud trumpet blast. Everyone in the camp trembled.  Then Moses led the people out of the camp to meet with God, and they stood at the foot of the mountain.

Moses then receives the Ten Commandments in chapter 20, as the thunder and lightning continue, scaring those down below.

When the people saw the thunder and lightning and heard the trumpet and saw the mountain in smoke, they trembled with fear. They stayed at a distance and said to Moses, "Speak to us yourself and we will listen. But do not have God speak to us or we will die."

They were not actually killed by the lightning. They just saw the lightning (that came from God’s presence) and were afraid that they would die. Like the Quran’s story, this was God’s attempt to prove that he existed to the Hebrews around the time of Moses receiving the Ten Commandments. It seems like Mohammed perhaps misinterpreted the story above as being about God/Allah striking the Hebrews rather than being about the Hebrews being afraid of being struck.

Anyway, uh... after that... incident... we go back into more neutral territory. Allah sends the now non-idolatrous Hebrews mana to save them from starvation. Moses makes twelve springs of water flow from a rock to save them from thirst. Allah allows the Jews to go into towns to eat and sleep, as long as they say a certain prayer. But some mix up the words, resulting in punishment from above again, which is a bad bizarre story we will look at in more detail in a later surah. Again some details here are not present in the Biblical story--in the Bible, Moses creates just one miraculous spring from a rock, but later on they come across twelve regular springs. I think Mohammed mixed them up.

The Jews start complaining about having to eat mana all the time and we’re back to Allah being a bad jerk in 2:61: “humiliation and wretchedness were stamped upon them and they were visited with wrath from Allah”. This verse also says that the Jews killed some prophets or something but I have no idea what it’s referring to, nor does the Quran say which prophets we're talking about. What prophets in or before Moses' era were killed by Jews..? This accusation is repeated several times, mostly against the Jews of Medina, and we’ll look at it more in-depth later.

Now then... in a bit of a jarring transition, we come across a good but confusingly phrased verse. 2:62 reads:

“Those who believe (in that which is revealed unto thee, Muhammad), and those who are Jews, and Christians, and Sabaeans - whoever believeth in Allah and the Last Day and doeth right - surely their reward is with their Lord, and there shall no fear come upon them neither shall they grieve.”

The Quran is quite clear on who can get into jannah or heaven (only those who are Muslim). But note here it says those who believe in Mohammed’s words and some other members of Abrahamic religions will go to heaven. Yet as we will see later, the Quran also explicitly says that anyone who does not believe Mohammed is a prophet will go to hell (repeatedly), and says in many places that Christians in particular are hellbound. (Also, for the record, no Muslim scholars know for sure who the “Sabians” are; they may have been Mandaeans.)

So, about this ayah in particular, what does it mean? Ibn Kathir states that it refers to Jews, etc of previous generations and those who had not heard Mohammed’s “revelations” yet. They are allowed into heaven, as they have done nothing wrong. Only those who have heard Mohammed’s “revelations” (i.e., in his contemporary era) and deny that he is a prophet are hellbound.

So... uh. I’ll still call that good. Relatively speaking. There’s another variant of this same thought later on that clarifies matters further in a less tolerant direction.

Next up is another neutral recap of Allah complaining about how he was nice to the Jews and they were ungrateful. But now we get into some really uncomfortable territory. The two following bad ayat are used frequently today, and have been used frequently in the past, to justify antisemitism.

And ye know of those of you who broke the Sabbath, how We said unto them: Be ye apes, despised and hated! And We made it an example to their own and to succeeding generations, and an admonition to the God-fearing.

The implication here is that the Jews who broke the Sabbath were literally turned into animals and “despised and hated”. This is only one of multiple references to Allah turning Jews into animals--it’s a treatment only the Jews get. It is referred to later on as a “curse”, as we will see when we read the whole appalling incident. This is not in any Jewish text, as far as I know. I suspect Mohammed got this idea from the Talmud, not in a story about the Sabbath, but instead in the Tower of Babel story,

the faction that said: Let us ascend to the top of the tower and wage war, became apes, and spirits, and demons

But push that aside for a moment, because we’ve come to the moment of truth. THE COW.

2:67-74 is an absolutely bizarre but neutral story. Allah tells Moses to get the Hebrews to kill a specific cow. “Do you take us in ridicule?”, they (hilariously) ask, but Moses is 100% serious. Sighing, they try to guess which cow they are meant to slaughter, and they figure out Allah wants them to kill a yellow cow, specifically. So they do that. At some point a guy dies and no one knows who killed him, so Allah tells them to touch the dead guy’s corpse with a piece of meat from the cow, which revives the dead guy, who tells them who killed him?!?!?! But then the Hebrews still disobeyed Allah.

I.... what?! I have looked for some precedent for this story in some Jewish story, but I can’t find anything about a yellow cow. There is, however, a Biblical story about a red cow. Let me lay out my theory for what happened here.

This is God talking to Moses in the Book of Numbers:

Speak unto the children of Israel, that they bring thee a red heifer, faultless, wherein is no blemish, and upon which never came yoke. And ye shall give her unto Eleazar the priest, and she shall be brought forth without the camp, and she shall be slain before his face.

The cow’s body is burned and its ashes are placed in a jar with water. The contents of this jar are then used to ritually purify those who have come into contact with a corpse.

This, on the other hand, is from the Book of Deuteronomy:

If a slain person is found lying in the open country in the land which the LORD your God gives you to possess, and it is not known who has struck him, then your elders and your judges shall go out and measure the distance to the cities which are around the slain one. It shall be that the city which is nearest to the slain man, that is, the elders of that city, shall take a heifer of the herd, which has not been worked and which has not pulled in a yoke; and the elders of that city shall ... break the heifer’s neck there in the valley ... and say, ‘Our hands did not shed this blood, nor did our eyes see it. ‘Forgive Your people Israel whom You have redeemed, O LORD, and do not place the guilt of innocent blood in the midst of Your people Israel.’

Okay, so... uh. Let’s put this together. Mohammed heard this story about a cow of a certain color being sacrificed in order to obtain its ashes, which would restore someone who touched a corpse to purity.

Then he heard this other story about how a different cow, not of any specific color, should be sacrificed if there is an unsolved murder. This wouldn’t really accomplish anything other than making sure YHWH/Allah isn’t mad about it.

In his mind, though, he seems to have believed that these two were referring to the same incident... and that the goal of the sacrifice wasn’t merely to restore the purity of someone who touched a corpse, but rather to restore the corpse itself, so that people could know who killed him!! Allah out here playing CSI Miami via animal sacrifice.

This is the second time that Allah revived a dead person just in this mini-Exodus story, by the way. Take that, Jesus.

But, uh, that’s the cow in question, as in the name of the surah. The magic cow that brings dead guys back to life with its steak. Yep.

Next time: The Kuffar Hell Counter returns!

The Quran Read-Along: Day 3

Ayat: 34

Good: 5 (2:42-45, 2:62)

Neutral: 21 (2:40-41, 2:46-47, 2:50-53, 2:57-58, 2:60, 2:63-64, 2:67-74)

Bad: 8 (2:48-49, 2:54-56, 2:59, 2:61, 2:65-66)

Kuffar hell counter: 0

⇚ previous day | next day ⇛

#quranreadalong #surah 2 #al baqarah

[pastordorry-blog]

Called to Be Neighbors and Witnesses

Lent Week 3

Matthew 5:43-48

March 24, 2019

           We’ve been talking the last several weeks about God’s will.  Since we pray for it every week as we recite the Lord’s prayer, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven”, it seemed like a good idea for us to get some clarity about what we are really praying for, and be sure we really mean what we are saying!  In the gospel of Matthew, right before Jesus gives his disciples the Lord’s prayer, he tells them, “When you pray, do not keep babbling like the pagans.”  Matthew 6:7 has also been translated, do not heap up empty phrases, or do not repeat vain petitions.  We do not want the Lord’s Prayer to be a bunch of empty phrases, or babbling, or vain repetitions.  We want to leverage the power of this prayer!  When we end the prayer with the word, “Amen”, which means, I agree, or more accurately, this I vow—I know the people of Lima mean it.  We are vowing to do God’s will every time we pray the Lord’s Prayer.  

But, if you haven’t noticed already, God’s will is a mystery that we can only partially understand. It is not easy to define and articulate!  I was particularly thinking about this a couple weeks ago, reading yet again another news post about anti-Semitism in America.  I knew I wanted to address God’s will for us as it relates to our dealings with people of other religions, because this is a real-life issue for us.  Our key verse on the front of the bulletin this week is one we probably all have memorized:  Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.  And remember, I am with you to the end of the age. (Matthew 28:19-20)  We call this the Great Commission, and it is our marching orders as disciple of Jesus Christ.  Yet despite two thousand years of evangelism and witness, only about 1/3 of the world’s population identifies as Christian.

We know God’s ultimate will is that, one day in the future, Christ is going to come again, and according to the book of Revelation, every knee will bow and every tongue will confess Jesus as Lord. But for now, we live in a religiously diverse society.  What is God’s circumstantial will for us?  Given the reality of so many other competing religions, what should we do?  One strategy is to move toward isolation. Some communities, such as the Amish, do this in an extreme way.  Another strategy is to water things down and conclude, “We’re all the same.”  Most Christians reject both of those pathways, at least in theory.  We want to love others as neighbors and friends, even as we retain our distinct beliefs.  Our United Methodist Social Principles contain a resolution detailing this commitment, to be both neighbors and witnesses.

The resolution is important, because, we have, inadvertently, become somewhat isolationist.  I have had many conversations over the years with church members, encouraging them to invite their friends to worship—and the response I get is, “But Pastor Dorry, all my friends already go to church!”  What could I say to that?  I’m glad people have Christian friends!  But maybe we should be trying to make some new friends.  Maybe it would do us good to intentionally befriend some people who are quite a bit different from us.  Not only would that help us build community, I think it might help us better define and articulate what it is about our faith that matters so much.  One of the boys in my son’s cub scout troop was Jewish, and one time he told me, “My faith has served me well over the years.”  Then he proceeded to tell me what he valued most about being Jewish.  It really impressed me, and made me wonder how many Christians could do something similar.  

Christianity was born in to a religiously diverse world. Its immediate roots of course are Judaism.  But get out of Jerusalem, and right away there were other faiths, and of course, as the gospel spread throughout the Roman empire, it was one option among hundreds of religions.  This has always been a source of difficulty.  In the early church, violence and hatred and persecution were a part of things from almost the very beginning.  Later, it was the Christians who took up the sword, mostly against Muslims, in the Crusades. It would take an historian hours to name for us all the religiously inspired wars over the years.  Violence and hatred in the name of God continue, in heartbreaking ways, in our world today.

That any person of faith would think that hatred is God’s will is pretty troubling.  And especially that any Christian would think hatred is God’s will.  If there is anything we know about God’s will, it is this:  It is God’s will that we love one another (John 13:34).  This the new commandment Jesus gave his disciples on the night he was arrested and is the reason we call Holy Thursday, “Maundy Thursday”, from the Latin word mandatum, or commandment.  Jesus’ command, God’s will, is that we love one another.  The two central obligations of our faith are to love God with our whole beings, and to love our neighbors as ourselves.  And Jesus did not mean just the nice neighbors!  It is laid out very clearly for us in this gospel lesson, that we are called not only to love the neighbors we agree with, the ones who are easy to get along with, or the ones who love us.  We are called to love ALL our neighbors.  Even our enemies.  

But what about people who aren’t our enemies exactly, but they aren’t our friends, either?  Can you picture someone like that?  Maybe a family member whose choices you don’t agree with, who consumes more than their fair share of resources or commands more than their fair share of attention. Or maybe you have a co-worker like that, or even someone with you in this room right now!  You want to love them—but they are WRONG about so many things. Can you picture a person like that?

I sure hope so, otherwise I’m preaching a sermon that only I need to hear!  There’s a country song by Lee Brice, “I’m Hard to love, hard to love, I don’t make it easy.  I couldn’t do it if I stood where you stood.”  We can all imagine a hard to love person, and if we’re honest, we know it’s true of ourselves at times, too!  I think we can get some comfort from verse 45.  “I cause the sun to rise on the evil and the good.  I send the rain to fall on the righteous and the unrighteous.”  God’s love and provision extend to all people.  Not just the ones who agree with us or who like us! Thanks be to God for being all good, all the time!  

But after those words of comfort, Jesus goes on to challenge us to love better.  To love perfectly. Whew! Talk about a tall order. But loving God and neighbor perfectly is God’s will. That is God’s intentional will for us—what God wanted for us from the very beginning.  That is God’s ultimate will for us—what we will one day be able to do.  And it is God’s circumstantial will that we be working on it!  Or as John Wesley would say, we are “going on to perfection”.  We are called to be growing closer to God so we can love ourselves and our neighbors the way God loves us.  

It’s interesting how many people have fought wars for PURITY, so that a whole people would love and worship the same way.  But what God really wants is PURITY in each of our hearts, an ability to love that not only tolerates differences but blesses them!  Pray for your enemies.  We are called to transcend our conflicts, in part by respecting and even celebrating differences.

Have you heard that line, “God loves you, and there’s nothing you can do about it!”? It’s true!  The gospel of John says, “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten son.” The world—the whole world!  The Greek word there is ha cosmos.  The entire creation, the entire population, the good, the bad, the ugly is loved by god. Everyone.  God loves all people, and that is why God sent his son Jesus.  

I grew up singing, “Red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in his sight.  Jesus loves the little children of the world.”  But I want to tell you that, this week I realized that somehow along with that, I also absorbed the idea that God loves some people more than others, and that means it is okay for me to love some people more than others, too. Not that anyone ever said it so explicitly.  I learned it because that is how people acted.  I got the idea that God’s love has a hierarchy:  God loves Christians the most, and then Jews, and then maybe people of other faiths. And then there are probably some bad people God doesn’t love at all.

This may sound shocking to you, but I don’t think it’s uncommon.  When someone in my little dairy farming community bought a Japanese car in the early 1970’s, that was very controversial!  On paper maybe God loved everyone equally.  But the assumption was that everyone stilled hate the Japanese for what they did to us in World War II.  Many people thought it was okay to be mad at them, we certainly didn’t want to help them profit and flourish, and that seemed to me the prevailing “righteous” view.  

Here’s another example.  A few years ago I went to a preaching workshop the required staying in a college dorm with shared bathrooms.  I met a woman from Canada with beautiful red hair; all of us in the ladies’ room admired it.  But the woman from Canada said, where I come from, it’s not a source of admiration. It’s a source of shame.  Being a ginger gets you picked on.  She hated her red hair and felt terrible for passing it on to her children.  In theory she knew God loved her.  But her lived experience was, God loves red heads less than other people; it’s okay to pick on or treat certain people as less than because of some arbitrary characteristic.

This has given me a lot to think about.  I admit to you today that I do not have a single Muslim friend.   One-fourth of the world’s population identifies as Muslim, and I don’t know a single one. There is an Islamic Center in West Chester, and when I did some reading this week on their website, I was really impressed.  I am going to reach out to them.  I admit to you today that, although I don’t want this to happen, I sometimes have unkind immediate thoughts about certain groups of people.  That is racism.  That is sin. I admit to you today that I have had an unconscious belief, that God loves certain people more than others.  I admit to you today that I feel called to sort through the remnants of that belief, and see how it continues to influence me today.  

I like to plan worship well in advance, but honestly, I never really know where a sermon is going to take me until I sit down and write it.  As I anticipated this week, I thought I would feel convicted to draw my circle wider and get to know some “non-church” folks.  But as I worked on the sermon, I got convicted in an even bigger way.  I felt like God was holding a mirror in front of me and I could see things this week that I never saw before, and it was scary. Kind of like trying on a swim suit at the mall.  Do I look as bad in real life as I do in this dressing room?  I saw ugliness in my heart.  Maybe you are seeing some in your heart, too.  

So let me use this opportunity to assert one of our distinctively Christian beliefs:  God loves you, and there’s nothing you can do about it!  Nothing can separate us from God’s love for us, including our sin.  God is here today to give us a fresh start.  We call that fresh start grace.  It is what makes the rain to fall on the righteous and the unrighteous, and the sun to shine on the good and the evil.  This grace is available to us in its most potent form in the person of Jesus Christ.  This grace turns us from God’s strangers into God’s friends, and calls us to go and do likewise.  Amen.

[adambstingus]

What is grey culture, precisely? Here’s what the stats say

Whiteness is hard to define, but apparently it involves lots of veggies, alcohol and the arts and reputations like Yoder

A few months after I moved to New York, a magical communication happened that would radically shift my psyche forever. I was telling my friend that I had gone to his favorite shop and he expected:” Who sufficed you? Was it the tall lily-white guy ?”

I frowned and replied,” Are the rest of the staff not grey ?” to which my friend responded” Huh? What do you necessitate? No. I was just describing him .”

While he strayed off to get a beer, I stood dumbfounded. This was the first time I had discovered a white person’s hasten used as a casual descriptor, a simple phase of differentiation in what I perceive to be a grey nature.

As a Brit, I grew up in a country that was 86% white-hot, so “white” was the norm. That kid you were seeing in volumes like Roald Dahl’s was lily-white, unless you were told otherwise( which you never were ). The males paraded on the TV appearance Crimewatch were described as black when they were black, and short or towering or thin or fat once they are white.

Now I live in the United States, countries around the world that is 61% grey. Non-whiteness is much more visible here, and abruptly the distinguish of whiteness is very. But I’m still struggling to constitute the shift from my previous mindset, where grey is the default, the presume, the baseline. You don’t notice normalcy; you consider the divergences from it. So the word “white” could ever be hop-skip over as an adjective.

Now, “white” still feels like an absence: an absence of colour, an is a lack of food that is “different” and an is a lack of a mum who enunciates your mention differently from the room your friends do. But if my friend can use “white” as an adjective, then what exactly are they describing? What is grey culture, exactly?

I decided to find out by expecting the questions that I and many other non-white people have been asked over and over again. I looked for answers in data.

Q: What do white people dine? A: Vegetables.

The US Department of Agriculture’s latest data been demonstrated that the average lily-white American eats 16 lb more vegetables at home each year than do non-white Americans( that could add up to 112 medium-sized carrots, 432 cherry-red tomatoes, or God knows how much kale ).

The only thing that white people are likely to adore more than vegetables is dairy. White Americans chew 185 lb of dairy produces at home each year, are comparable to exactly 106 lb for pitch-black Americans.

But this isn’t just the result of our desires: all of these numbers are influenced by structural parts. For instance, fruit and vegetable uptake increases each time that a new supermarket is lent near to someone’s home, according to a 2002 study . That same study too found that grey Americans are four times more likely than pitch-black Americans to live in a census tract that has a supermarket.

Q: What do white people drink? A: Alcohol.

Almost a third of non-Hispanic greys had at least one heavy drinking day in the past year, according to the CDC. Only 16% of black Americans and 24% of Hispanic Americans said the same.

If you’re wondering which drinks white people are boozing, then you have the same question as a unit of researchers who followed 2,171 girls from the time they were 11 years old to the time the issue is 18. As per year extended, the researchers “ve noticed that” compared to the black girls, white-hot girlfriends imbibe a lot more wine-coloured( and beer, actually, and, er, hearts, more ).

Q: What’s a typical white-hot name? A: Joseph Yoder.

The Census Bureau did an analysis of 270 million people‘s last names to find those that are most likely to be held by particular hastens or ethnicities. Yoder had not been able to the more common family name in the US- only about 45,000 parties have it- but, since 98.1% of those people are white-hot, it’s just ahead of Krueger and Mueller and Koch as the whitest last name in their respective countries. Which means that statistically speaking, the Yoders of America are maybe the least likely white people to marry someone of a different hasten to themselves.

The most common grey last names. Sketch: Mona Chalabi

The most common Hispanic last names. Instance: Mona Chalabi

The most common pitch-black last names. Illustration: Mona Chalabi

The most common Asian last names. Illustration: Mona Chalabi

Many of these last names have German and Jewish descents. Which seems to run counter to my ideology of lily-white culture being intangible- Jewish culture “re a long way from” it. Having experienced discrimination, and having a distinct, tangible culture is sufficient to potentially disqualify you as white, as some American Jewish beings themselves ask the question: ” Are Jews White ?”.

As for Joseph, well, the best data I could find was the most popular child refers rolled by the hasten or the ethnicity of the mother( no mention of the father so some of these Josephs are possibly mixed hasten ). Even then, the numbers are exclusively from New York and were collected from 2011 to 2014. Still, I found that the most common white appoints are Joseph, David, Michael, Jacob and Moshe( seven of the most common refers were male because people tend to be more creative when they’ve delivery a girl ).

Q: What do white people do for merriment? A: Enjoy the arts.

I turned to my esteemed colleague and friend Amanda and asked what she would like to know about white people. Amanda, herself a white person, replied:” Why do they affection guitars so much better ?” Alas, despite two hours of online research, I couldn’t experiment her speculation about musical instruments and hasten.( Although I did find out that bassoons are more popular with women than servicemen, which led me to a YouTube clip of the status of women playing the bassoon with specific comments that spoke” THIS is how you bassoon “. It built me laugh so difficult I had to take a break from preparing the present .)

Instead, I looked at the latest American Time Use Survey. It was published after the Bureau of Labor Statistics expected 10,500 beings in the US how they expend their experience. White beings are the only ethnic or ethnic group in the dataset to have a number higher than zero for time spent attending museums or the performing arts. It’s only 36 seconds, but recollect, this is a daily median, so that adds up to 219 times each year.

I double checked my findings against a 2015 report from the National Endowment for the Arts, which found that white-hot Americans were almost twice as likely as pitch-black or Hispanic Americans to have done at least one arts activity in the past year. Their definition of an artworks task was pretty broad- it included” jazz, classical music, opu, musical and non-musical plays, ballet, and visits to an art museum or gallery “.

Pondering leisure activities. Instance: Mona Chalabi

These counts feel closely connected to home. When I was growing up, my family never set foot inside a museum, gallery or theatre. Not once. I didn’t think it was strange, I exactly thought it was like tripping in duos or taking coaches- specific activities reserved only for school trips.

And yet, despite having better access to these institutions, it seems like it’s some white people who seem to feel culturally deprived.

Remember Amanda? I mentioned her earlier- she’s my colleague with the disdain for guitars. In 2015, she interviewed black psychologists to ask their mind about Rachel Dolezal, a white-hot professor who intentionally misrepresented herself as an African American.

Anita Thomas, an assistant professor of counseling psychology at Loyola University, said:” In some paths it’s normal, but not at her age .” Thomas explained that numerous lily-white teens reacted similarly to Dolezal, attempting to take on what the fuck is perceived to be the types of another race while exploring their identities. Being “the other” sure as hell has its downsides, but it is about to change that not being “the other” does too- especially if you’re a teen.

” For white[ American] youth, “whos” disconnected from European patrimony or gift, it often feels like whiteness as a idea is empty ,” Thomas added in a quotation that has really protruded with me. It seems to tie together some disparate conceptions I have had on “white” as an adjective.

Dolezal was treated as if she were a “bizarre” outlier, but she’s part of a much bigger structure of white action. It includes Mezz Mezzrow, the 1930 s jazz musician who affirmed himself a” voluntary Negro” after marrying a black both women and selling marijuana. It includes the millions of white-hot Americans who take DNA tests and proudly reveal that they are in fact x percentage non -white. And it’s a structure that includes the grey Americans who listen to a” rights for whites” album that includes sungs designation Sons of Israel and Fetch the Noose. One reaction might seem ludicrous, the other frightening, but they are all eventually about meeting a concept of whiteness that isn’t empty.

But what does all that searching yield? I’m not sure I can answer the issues to” what is white culture ?” but I’m certain we should try. If whiteness takes no chassis, then the concrete organizations that shaped it( and often benefit from it) remain invisible very- the supermarkets, the unions, and the museums that stir these numbers what they are. If the “somethingness” of grey culture is never quite pinned down, it remains both” good-for-nothing, certainly” and” well, everything “.

If white culture remains vague, then it can lay claim to every recipe, every garment, every suggestion “thats really not” explicitly “non-white”. That would mean that my identity is just a summing-up, that my “non-whiteness” can only be understood as a subtraction from the totality of “whiteness”. I refuse to be a remainder.

This article will be published in the March edition of The Smudge .

Do you have conceives on white-hot culture? We want to hear them! Please leave a comment below or email me at mona.chalabi @theguardian. com .

from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/what-is-white-culture-exactly-heres-what-the-stats-say/ from All of Beer https://allofbeercom.tumblr.com/post/182730797017

[barrypurcell]

[Title Redacted]

 How Not to Address Holocaust Denial and Anti-Semitism

When initially asked about Facebook’s refusal to remove the InfoWars page, John Hegeman, head of Facebook’s News Feed, said, “I guess just for being false that doesn’t violate the community standards.” More recently, however, InfoWars was banned from YouTube, iTunes, Spotify and Facebook, all within a twelve-hour period.

Although it might seem uncontroversial to keep objectively awful content off social media, historically, censorship and de-platforming has done nothing at all to slow down its spread. In fact, as many conspiracy theories are centered around a victim complex, censorship of any kind can make that complex worse. What has, historically, slowed down the spread of false information is exposure.

In 2009, when Facebook was initially asked to remove holocaust denial pages, their official position was that “being offensive or objectionable doesn’t get it taken off Facebook.” More recently, Mark Zuckerberg said that he wasn’t going to remove Facebook pages advocating holocaust denial, because “there are things that different people get wrong” and it’s more or less impossible to “understand the intent” of such pages. Conversely, the AskHistorians subreddit has pre-emptively banned all Holocaust denial, and strongly urged Facebook to do the same.

Does Facebook Have a Point?

To the delight of an unlikely alliance of authoritarian left wingers and right-wing Israelis, Holocaust denial is explicitly or implicitly illegal in Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hungary, Israel, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Slovakia and Switzerland.

While there can be no reasonable doubt that the Third Reich did its best to eliminate an entire race of people, along with Jehovah’s Witnesses and gays, inter alia, a problem arises when you legally prevent people from saying that this never happened. These governments have taken it upon themselves to censor people’s opinions. The fact that these opinions are incorrect or that they stem from people with a Nazi ideology is irrelevant: freedom of speech is meaningless if you are only free to speak the right opinion.

Anti-Semitism

In 1979, French academic Robert Faurisson was fined 21,000 francs and given a suspended sentence for denying the Holocaust on national television. Hundreds of people (most notably Noam Chomsky) signed a petition, registering their concern about the consequences for civil rights in France. The following year, Faurisson used a copyright-free essay by Chomsky in defense of the general principles of free speech—without Chomsky’s permission—as the preface to his book, “Mémoire en Défense: contre ceux qui m’accusent de falsifier l’histoire”. Although he specifically rejected the idea that he was defending Faurisson in the piece, Chomsky was subsequently vilified as a Nazi sympathizer and anti-Semite.

Claims of anti-Semitism are so commonly used to silence everything from the mildest criticism of Israeli government policy to genuinely egregious attempts at historical revisionism that it’s almost impossible to assess such accusations objectively. It doesn’t make things any easier that the Israeli government is quite open about its official organization, hasbara, which trains and deploys people to intervene in any and all criticisms of Israel found everywhere from Facebook comment sections to campus debating societies, and has been criticized by the Israeli press for acting as a “substitute for policymaking.”

What we can say, with some certainty, is that anti-Semitic attacks have been measurably on the rise in Europe and the United States. We may not know for some time whether this alarming rise is causing, or caused by, the recent lurch to the right of the electorate in the developed world.

The Holocaust Denial Mind

The more you learn about the Holocaust, the more grotesque and horrifying it seems. The human mind recoils so much that you may even momentarily entertain the thought that surely such a thing could not possibly have happened. But it is important for the study of history, politics and the human mind to understand that it did.

In 1980, the right-wing Institute for Historical Review, whose mission was to promulgate Holocaust denial, announced a $50,000 reward for anyone who could prove that Jews were gassed at Auschwitz. Auschwitz survivor Mel Mermelstein applied for the reward. When they refused to pay, Mr. Mermelstein took them to court and effectively won his case. In 1985, the institute issued a formal apology to Mr. Mermelstein “for the pain, anguish and suffering he and all other Auschwitz survivors have sustained” as a result of their having made such an offer.

If you trawl the dark corners of the internet, where conspiracy theories breed, you will encounter lots of Holocaust deniers. They occupy the same mental space (and sometimes the same physical space) as people who question the JFK assassination, or who believe that the 9/11 bombings were an inside job. The psychology behind these conspiracy theories is easy enough to understand. First, it’s much more comfortable to believe that dark forces are causing these terrible things than to accept that sometimes genuinely awful things happen for fairly banal reasons. Secondly—much like praying to a god—holding secret knowledge about the “real” explanations for significant events gives a sense of control to the kind of people who have often been excluded from avenues of power.

There are two aspects to Holocaust denialism. The first, of course, is to deny the Holocaust: to claim that it either never happened, or has been wildly exaggerated for reasons which invariably include the idea that this is all a marketing exercise to ensure sympathy for the formation of a Jewish state—to assert that all the records were faked, all the witnesses were lying. I’ve seen people claim, for instance, that around 500,000 Jews were killed, instead of the generally accepted figure of 6 million. Only an anti-Semitic mind could believe that killing 500,000 Jews for any reason would not itself be noteworthy. There are also those who claim that Hitler wasn’t as bad as he has been made out to be, and that he was perfectly fair to Jews in Germany.

The second common gambit is to explain at length how Jews are destroying the world, how they only look after their own kind, how they run the banks and the movies, how they’re also somehow in charge of the labor movements, and how the whole world economy is just a front for Jews who want to get rich from the labor of others. Some even urge that the Jews need to be stopped by any means necessary. Though it is rarely explicitly stated, there is a strong undercurrent to this sort of thinking—that no one could really have blamed Hitler for killing so many Jews.

So, according to this view, the Jews were not killed in the Holocaust, and anyway, if they were, they had it coming. As it turns out, the anti-Semitic thread running through all these arguments is precisely the same sort of hateful rubbish that led to an environment of acceptance of genocide. At the very least, the more hate you promulgate towards the Jews, the greater the demonstration of how much worse it must have been when hating Jews was socially acceptable.

In 1987, revisionist historian David Irving published a book called “Churchill’s War”. In 1993, historian Deborah Lipstadt published “Denying the Holocaust”, which referred to “Churchill’s War” and accused Irving of using different standards of evidence, depending on whether or not a piece of information fit his anti-Semitic theories. In 1996, Irving sued Lipstadt for libel. Despite the fact that he purposefully filed the case in an English court, where the lower standards of evidence required made it easier to prosecute a case for defamation than in any other jurisdiction in which Lipstadt’s book was published, the judge ruled that “he is an active Holocaust denier; that he is anti-Semitic and racist.”

Irving was bankrupted by the case, and his career was destroyed, as historians pored over his previous works in the light of Lipstadt’s book. In the end, what destroyed Irving was not his repeated de-platforming all over the world, but the presentation of Lipstadt’s more compelling view, backed up by more convincing facts.

In 2005, Austrian police arrested Irving on the basis of a 1989 warrant for publicly denying the Holocaust. During these proceedings, he said he had changed his mind: “I made a mistake,” because “The Nazis did murder millions of Jews.”

Stopping Hate

One of the problems with fascism, like other fringe political movements, is that it thrives in the dark. The idea that some things can’t be talked about feeds into the victim complex that far-right ideology requires. Censorship doesn’t shut fascists down: it empowers them. Removing offensive opinions from public discourse does not remove them from our lives, but, like vampires, they explode when sunlight hits them.

For Facebook, whose primary interest is in making money, rather than acting as a fact-checking site for political propaganda, mass action on hate speech is very difficult, given that it’s a demand-side rather than a supply-side problem. Although it probably doesn’t feel like it at the time, people choose when and how to take offence. There is always a risk that people will get offended by worthwhile ideas that are nevertheless very unpopular, and safeguarding people from toxic ideologies could turn into babysitting the most offendable users. Catering to the most sensitive members of the audience has a stultifying effect on public discourse, and presumably the more worthwhile values are not so fragile that they require paternalistic protection from being questioned. The best response to bad ideas will always be good ideas and it still counts as censorship even if the thing you’re not allowed to say is incredibly stupid.

One of the prices of free speech is the risk that charismatic malefactors might influence others to do harm, but free speech is objectively more important than that risk. Freedom of speech necessarily supersedes anything you have to say.

The original title of this article was the ironic “Was The Holocaust Really That Bad?” The fact that the title had to be redacted, to ensure it avoided ending up on a list on a server in a dark basement somewhere demonstrates the need for this sort of discussion. The fact that people would have reacted with outrage without actually reading any of the article is part of the problem. Censoring all references to it merely prevents public access to the information necessary to understand why Holocaust denial is such an odious ideology.

Areo Magazine, 9 August 2018

#anti-Semitism #antisemitism #censorship #deplatforming #holocaust denial #hate #Jews

[mdye]

WASHINGTON ― A mysterious source contacted multiple news outlets this week to share emails between the influential ambassador of the United Arab Emirates, Yousef Al Otaiba, and top figures in the American foreign policy community, including former Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

Behind the scenes, Otaiba ― an extremely powerful figure in Washington, D.C., who is reportedly in “in almost constant phone and email contact,” with Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s adviser and son-in-law ― is seen pushing for the U.S. to close down its military base in Qatar and otherwise poking at issues that could drive a wedge between the U.S. and that Arab nation. He also says that his country’s de facto ruler is supportive of a wave of anti-Qatar criticism in the U.S. that Qatar recently called a smear campaign.

The anonymous leakers told HuffPost they sought to expose the UAE’s efforts to manipulate the U.S. government, and denied any allegiance to Qatar or any other government.

Regardless of the leakers’ intent, the revelations promise to heighten tensions between the two U.S. allies. If the UAE succeeds in damaging America’s decades-old partnership with Qatar, the result could dramatically undermine U.S. goals in the Middle East. The two American allies’ escalating rivalry could worsen conflict in war zones where they support different proxy forces ― notably Libya, which has become a haven for smugglers, warlords, and terrorists ― while distracting attention from bigger international priorities, like restoring stability in Syria and Iraq after the expected battlefield defeat of the Islamic State.

The UAE and Qatar have taken their rivalry public in recent days following a controversial report in Qatari media. Qatari authorities soon claimed that the May 23 story ― which suggested that Qatari ruler Sheikh Tamim gave a speech describing his respect for Iran, his support for the Palestinian militant group Hamas and his ties with Israel ― was the result of a hack. But news sources based in the UAE and Saudi Arabia still suggest that it exposed his true feelings.

Though Qatar and the Emirates are putative allies, they have drifted apart since 2011 because of their differing reactions to the Arab Spring protests that year. As the largely non-violent Muslim Brotherhood movement gained power across the region, Qatar supported it, seeing it as a vehicle for the Middle East’s democratic aspirations. The UAE calls the group a terror front. With a new U.S. administration in power, the time is ripe for one or the other to push for American action in its own interests.

Otaiba, who has been the UAE’s ambassador to the United States since 2008, is known as one of Washington’s best-connected diplomats. He makes frequent high-profile appearances around Washington and the U.S. speaking circuit, and he’s ensured that the Trump administration has already cozied up to the Emirates, which hosts a recently opened Trump golf course.

The leakers provided HuffPost with three batches of emails from Otaiba, some as recent as May and others from as far back as 2014, the last time the UAE supported a major effort to spread skepticism about Qatar in the United States. HuffPost contacted eight of the individuals who’d exchanged messages with the ambassador and shared the contents of those emails; none denied that the exchanges took place. Though Otaiba did not respond to repeated HuffPost requests for comment, a UAE Embassy spokeswoman confirmed to the Daily Beast that the Hotmail address used for the messages belongs to him.

Otaiba’s emails show an effort to build alliances and a focus on Qatar.

The night before former U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates was scheduled to speak at a high-profile Washington conference on Qatar, for instance, Otaiba wrote him an artfully worded note. “The subject of the conference has been a neglected issue in U.S. foreign policy despite all the trouble it’s causing,” the diplomat wrote. “Coming from you, folks will listen carefully.”

Gates emailed back that he thought he had “the chance to put some folks on notice.”

Otaiba offered to buy the former Cabinet official lunch and passed along a message from his boss back home. “MBZ sends his best from Abu Dhabi,” the ambassador wrote. “He says ‘give them hell tomorrow.’”

The next day, Gates offered a scathing assault on Qatar, excoriating its support for Islamists, at an event hosted by the hawkish Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “The United States military doesn’t have any irreplaceable facility,” he said. “Tell Qatar to choose sides or we will change the nature of the relationship, to include downscaling the base.”

The powerful Washington-based foundation features heavily in the Otaiba emails. While many of those messages show the ambassador helping its analysts plan trips to the UAE, they also contain two of the most striking revelations about Otaiba: He explicitly advocated for moving the U.S. base out of Qatar ― something he hasn’t done publicly ― and he discussed the idea of pressuring companies in U.S.-friendly countries in order to hurt Iran.

An Arab’s Favorite Pro-Israel Group

The Foundation for Defense of Democracies spends much of its time trying to strengthen ties between Washington and right-wing political forces in Israel. But despite the UAE’s refusal to establish diplomatic ties with Israel, the think tank and others in the pro-Israel lobby have found common ground with the Emirates on two major issues: Both want to contain Iran and political Islam. Both suffered a high-profile defeat when the U.S. and other nations reached a nuclear deal with Iran in 2015. And for the past year or so, both have been pushing to make the future of U.S. relations with Qatar a debate in Washington.

Emirati critiques of Qatar often raise the same points the foundation’s scholars bring up in their frequent appearances before Congress and in the media: The Qatari government provides, in the words of the U.S. Treasury Department, a “permissive jurisdiction” for fundraisers and donors hoping to aid violent Muslim extremists. In supporting the rights of protesters and democracy activists (at least compared to its neighbors), Qatar is accused of promoting Islamists who claim to be peaceful but really seek to impose brutal Shariah law. And it frequently offers a platform to hatemongers targeting Israel, Jews, the minority Shiite community within Islam, LGBTQ individuals and others ― generally on its marquee media property, Al Jazeera.

But experts on the region note that Qatar’s flaws as an American partner are not unique: Kuwait has also been called a “permissive jurisdiction,” and Saudi Arabia and the UAE also host terror financiers and clerics who spread hate speech. The vendetta against Qatar, they say, is driven by more defensive concerns, namely the pro-Israel side’s focus on Hamas and anyone who supports that group, and the UAE’s worry that the Muslim Brotherhood could threaten its own ruling regime.

Otaiba made his views about the U.S. base in Qatar clear in an April 28 message this year to John Hannah, a senior counselor at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a former aide to Vice President Dick Cheney.

Hannah had emailed the ambassador a Forbes article noting that an Emirati-owned hotel would actually be hosting a Hamas conference in “Muslim Brotherhood-loving” Qatar. Otaiba appeared taken aback by the hotel’s involvement.

“Shouldn’t we be trying to move the base?” he wrote. “I don’t think it’s fair to point the finger at an Emirati company on this one.”

Hannah responded by saying he agreed about the military base. But he said criticism of the decision to host Hamas was fair no matter who owned the hotel. Otaiba snapped back that the UAE would move its hotel when the U.S. moved its base.

“Hah. Bu don’t move the hotel,” Hannah answered. (“Bu” or “Bu Omar,” which translates in Arabic to “father of Omar,” appears to be a nickname for Otaiba, who has a young son called Omar.) “Just force Hamas to reschedule at a different venue not owned by Emiratis.”

On Friday, Hannah told HuffPost that the communications were business as usual.

“As a leading Washington think tank, [the foundation] is engaged in policy discussions with a range of actors across the Middle East and elsewhere. My own relationship with Ambassador Otaiba goes back years, including both my time in government and out,” he wrote in an email.

Mark Dubowitz, the foundation’s CEO, lobbied Otaiba on a different issue in a March 10, 2017, email. Dubowitz provided Otaiba with a list of mainly Western companies that operate in the UAE and Saudi Arabia and are looking to do business in Iran, following the lifting of some sanctions as a result of the nuclear deal.

“This is a target list for putting these companies to a choice, as we have discussed,” Dubowitz wrote the ambassador. The group includes businesses based in Austria, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, South Korea and the U.K.

In response to HuffPost’s inquiries, Dubowitz noted that he has openly called for U.S. Gulf partners to target such companies.”I have discussed this policy idea many times in public including in published pieces and reports,” Dubowitz wrote in a Friday email. “I sent these public pieces, reports and the list of companies as an example to a number of people in Washington and abroad to get feedback on the idea.”

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

[repwinpril9y0a1]

Someone Is Using These Leaked Emails To Embarrass Washington's Most Powerful Ambassador

WASHINGTON ― A mysterious source contacted multiple news outlets this week to share emails between the influential ambassador of the United Arab Emirates, Yousef Al Otaiba, and top figures in the American foreign policy community, including former Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

Behind the scenes, Otaiba ― an extremely powerful figure in Washington, D.C., who is reportedly in “in almost constant phone and email contact,” with Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s adviser and son-in-law ― is seen pushing for the U.S. to close down its military base in Qatar and otherwise poking at issues that could drive a wedge between the U.S. and that Arab nation. He also says that his country’s de facto ruler is supportive of a wave of anti-Qatar criticism in the U.S. that Qatar recently called a smear campaign.

The anonymous leakers told HuffPost they sought to expose the UAE’s efforts to manipulate the U.S. government, and denied any allegiance to Qatar or any other government.

Regardless of the leakers’ intent, the revelations promise to heighten tensions between the two U.S. allies. If the UAE succeeds in damaging America’s decades-old partnership with Qatar, the result could dramatically undermine U.S. goals in the Middle East. The two American allies’ escalating rivalry could worsen conflict in war zones where they support different proxy forces ― notably Libya, which has become a haven for smugglers, warlords, and terrorists ― while distracting attention from bigger international priorities, like restoring stability in Syria and Iraq after the expected battlefield defeat of the Islamic State.

The UAE and Qatar have taken their rivalry public in recent days following a controversial report in Qatari media. Qatari authorities soon claimed that the May 23 story ― which suggested that Qatari ruler Sheikh Tamim gave a speech describing his respect for Iran, his support for the Palestinian militant group Hamas and his ties with Israel ― was the result of a hack. But news sources based in the UAE and Saudi Arabia still suggest that it exposed his true feelings.

Though Qatar and the Emirates are putative allies, they have drifted apart since 2011 because of their differing reactions to the Arab Spring protests that year. As the largely non-violent Muslim Brotherhood movement gained power across the region, Qatar supported it, seeing it as a vehicle for the Middle East’s democratic aspirations. The UAE calls the group a terror front. With a new U.S. administration in power, the time is ripe for one or the other to push for American action in its own interests.

Otaiba, who has been the UAE’s ambassador to the United States since 2008, is known as one of Washington’s best-connected diplomats. He makes frequent high-profile appearances around Washington and the U.S. speaking circuit, and he’s ensured that the Trump administration has already cozied up to the Emirates, which hosts a recently opened Trump golf course.

The leakers provided HuffPost with three batches of emails from Otaiba, some as recent as May and others from as far back as 2014, the last time the UAE supported a major effort to spread skepticism about Qatar in the United States. HuffPost contacted eight of the individuals who’d exchanged messages with the ambassador and shared the contents of those emails; none denied that the exchanges took place. Though Otaiba did not respond to repeated HuffPost requests for comment, a UAE Embassy spokeswoman confirmed to the Daily Beast that the Hotmail address used for the messages belongs to him.

Otaiba’s emails show an effort to build alliances and a focus on Qatar.

The night before former U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates was scheduled to speak at a high-profile Washington conference on Qatar, for instance, Otaiba wrote him an artfully worded note. “The subject of the conference has been a neglected issue in U.S. foreign policy despite all the trouble it’s causing,” the diplomat wrote. “Coming from you, folks will listen carefully.”

Gates emailed back that he thought he had “the chance to put some folks on notice.”

Otaiba offered to buy the former Cabinet official lunch and passed along a message from his boss back home. “MBZ sends his best from Abu Dhabi,” the ambassador wrote. “He says ‘give them hell tomorrow.’”

The next day, Gates offered a scathing assault on Qatar, excoriating its support for Islamists, at an event hosted by the hawkish Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “The United States military doesn’t have any irreplaceable facility,” he said. “Tell Qatar to choose sides or we will change the nature of the relationship, to include downscaling the base.”

The powerful Washington-based foundation features heavily in the Otaiba emails. While many of those messages show the ambassador helping its analysts plan trips to the UAE, they also contain two of the most striking revelations about Otaiba: He explicitly advocated for moving the U.S. base out of Qatar ― something he hasn’t done publicly ― and he discussed the idea of pressuring companies in U.S.-friendly countries in order to hurt Iran.

An Arab’s Favorite Pro-Israel Group

The Foundation for Defense of Democracies spends much of its time trying to strengthen ties between Washington and right-wing political forces in Israel. But despite the UAE’s refusal to establish diplomatic ties with Israel, the think tank and others in the pro-Israel lobby have found common ground with the Emirates on two major issues: Both want to contain Iran and political Islam. Both suffered a high-profile defeat when the U.S. and other nations reached a nuclear deal with Iran in 2015. And for the past year or so, both have been pushing to make the future of U.S. relations with Qatar a debate in Washington.

Emirati critiques of Qatar often raise the same points the foundation’s scholars bring up in their frequent appearances before Congress and in the media: The Qatari government provides, in the words of the U.S. Treasury Department, a “permissive jurisdiction” for fundraisers and donors hoping to aid violent Muslim extremists. In supporting the rights of protesters and democracy activists (at least compared to its neighbors), Qatar is accused of promoting Islamists who claim to be peaceful but really seek to impose brutal Shariah law. And it frequently offers a platform to hatemongers targeting Israel, Jews, the minority Shiite community within Islam, LGBTQ individuals and others ― generally on its marquee media property, Al Jazeera.

But experts on the region note that Qatar’s flaws as an American partner are not unique: Kuwait has also been called a “permissive jurisdiction,” and Saudi Arabia and the UAE also host terror financiers and clerics who spread hate speech. The vendetta against Qatar, they say, is driven by more defensive concerns, namely the pro-Israel side’s focus on Hamas and anyone who supports that group, and the UAE’s worry that the Muslim Brotherhood could threaten its own ruling regime.

Otaiba made his views about the U.S. base in Qatar clear in an April 28 message this year to John Hannah, a senior counselor at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a former aide to Vice President Dick Cheney.

Hannah had emailed the ambassador a Forbes article noting that an Emirati-owned hotel would actually be hosting a Hamas conference in “Muslim Brotherhood-loving” Qatar. Otaiba appeared taken aback by the hotel’s involvement.

“Shouldn’t we be trying to move the base?” he wrote. “I don’t think it’s fair to point the finger at an Emirati company on this one.”

Hannah responded by saying he agreed about the military base. But he said criticism of the decision to host Hamas was fair no matter who owned the hotel. Otaiba snapped back that the UAE would move its hotel when the U.S. moved its base.

“Hah. Bu don’t move the hotel,” Hannah answered. (“Bu” or “Bu Omar,” which translates in Arabic to “father of Omar,” appears to be a nickname for Otaiba, who has a young son called Omar.) “Just force Hamas to reschedule at a different venue not owned by Emiratis.”

On Friday, Hannah told HuffPost that the communications were business as usual.

“As a leading Washington think tank, [the foundation] is engaged in policy discussions with a range of actors across the Middle East and elsewhere. My own relationship with Ambassador Otaiba goes back years, including both my time in government and out,” he wrote in an email.

Mark Dubowitz, the foundation’s CEO, lobbied Otaiba on a different issue in a March 10, 2017, email. Dubowitz provided Otaiba with a list of mainly Western companies that operate in the UAE and Saudi Arabia and are looking to do business in Iran, following the lifting of some sanctions as a result of the nuclear deal.

“This is a target list for putting these companies to a choice, as we have discussed,” Dubowitz wrote the ambassador. The group includes businesses based in Austria, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, South Korea and the U.K.

In response to HuffPost’s inquiries, Dubowitz noted that he has openly called for U.S. Gulf partners to target such companies. ”I have discussed this policy idea many times in public including in published pieces and reports,” Dubowitz wrote in a Friday email. “I sent these public pieces, reports and the list of companies as an example to a number of people in Washington and abroad to get feedback on the idea.”

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

from DIYS http://ift.tt/2sq1KpU

#DIYS

[porchenclose10019]

Someone Is Using These Leaked Emails To Embarrass Washington's Most Powerful Ambassador

WASHINGTON ― A mysterious source contacted multiple news outlets this week to share emails between the influential ambassador of the United Arab Emirates, Yousef Al Otaiba, and top figures in the American foreign policy community, including former Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

Behind the scenes, Otaiba ― an extremely powerful figure in Washington, D.C., who is reportedly in “in almost constant phone and email contact,” with Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s adviser and son-in-law ― is seen pushing for the U.S. to close down its military base in Qatar and otherwise poking at issues that could drive a wedge between the U.S. and that Arab nation. He also says that his country’s de facto ruler is supportive of a wave of anti-Qatar criticism in the U.S. that Qatar recently called a smear campaign.

The anonymous leakers told HuffPost they sought to expose the UAE’s efforts to manipulate the U.S. government, and denied any allegiance to Qatar or any other government.

Regardless of the leakers’ intent, the revelations promise to heighten tensions between the two U.S. allies. If the UAE succeeds in damaging America’s decades-old partnership with Qatar, the result could dramatically undermine U.S. goals in the Middle East. The two American allies’ escalating rivalry could worsen conflict in war zones where they support different proxy forces ― notably Libya, which has become a haven for smugglers, warlords, and terrorists ― while distracting attention from bigger international priorities, like restoring stability in Syria and Iraq after the expected battlefield defeat of the Islamic State.

The UAE and Qatar have taken their rivalry public in recent days following a controversial report in Qatari media. Qatari authorities soon claimed that the May 23 story ― which suggested that Qatari ruler Sheikh Tamim gave a speech describing his respect for Iran, his support for the Palestinian militant group Hamas and his ties with Israel ― was the result of a hack. But news sources based in the UAE and Saudi Arabia still suggest that it exposed his true feelings.

Though Qatar and the Emirates are putative allies, they have drifted apart since 2011 because of their differing reactions to the Arab Spring protests that year. As the largely non-violent Muslim Brotherhood movement gained power across the region, Qatar supported it, seeing it as a vehicle for the Middle East’s democratic aspirations. The UAE calls the group a terror front. With a new U.S. administration in power, the time is ripe for one or the other to push for American action in its own interests.

Otaiba, who has been the UAE’s ambassador to the United States since 2008, is known as one of Washington’s best-connected diplomats. He makes frequent high-profile appearances around Washington and the U.S. speaking circuit, and he’s ensured that the Trump administration has already cozied up to the Emirates, which hosts a recently opened Trump golf course.

The leakers provided HuffPost with three batches of emails from Otaiba, some as recent as May and others from as far back as 2014, the last time the UAE supported a major effort to spread skepticism about Qatar in the United States. HuffPost contacted eight of the individuals who’d exchanged messages with the ambassador and shared the contents of those emails; none denied that the exchanges took place. Though Otaiba did not respond to repeated HuffPost requests for comment, a UAE Embassy spokeswoman confirmed to the Daily Beast that the Hotmail address used for the messages belongs to him.

Otaiba’s emails show an effort to build alliances and a focus on Qatar.

The night before former U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates was scheduled to speak at a high-profile Washington conference on Qatar, for instance, Otaiba wrote him an artfully worded note. “The subject of the conference has been a neglected issue in U.S. foreign policy despite all the trouble it’s causing,” the diplomat wrote. “Coming from you, folks will listen carefully.”

Gates emailed back that he thought he had “the chance to put some folks on notice.”

Otaiba offered to buy the former Cabinet official lunch and passed along a message from his boss back home. “MBZ sends his best from Abu Dhabi,” the ambassador wrote. “He says ‘give them hell tomorrow.’”

The next day, Gates offered a scathing assault on Qatar, excoriating its support for Islamists, at an event hosted by the hawkish Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “The United States military doesn’t have any irreplaceable facility,” he said. “Tell Qatar to choose sides or we will change the nature of the relationship, to include downscaling the base.”

The powerful Washington-based foundation features heavily in the Otaiba emails. While many of those messages show the ambassador helping its analysts plan trips to the UAE, they also contain two of the most striking revelations about Otaiba: He explicitly advocated for moving the U.S. base out of Qatar ― something he hasn’t done publicly ― and he discussed the idea of pressuring companies in U.S.-friendly countries in order to hurt Iran.

An Arab’s Favorite Pro-Israel Group

The Foundation for Defense of Democracies spends much of its time trying to strengthen ties between Washington and right-wing political forces in Israel. But despite the UAE’s refusal to establish diplomatic ties with Israel, the think tank and others in the pro-Israel lobby have found common ground with the Emirates on two major issues: Both want to contain Iran and political Islam. Both suffered a high-profile defeat when the U.S. and other nations reached a nuclear deal with Iran in 2015. And for the past year or so, both have been pushing to make the future of U.S. relations with Qatar a debate in Washington.

Emirati critiques of Qatar often raise the same points the foundation’s scholars bring up in their frequent appearances before Congress and in the media: The Qatari government provides, in the words of the U.S. Treasury Department, a “permissive jurisdiction” for fundraisers and donors hoping to aid violent Muslim extremists. In supporting the rights of protesters and democracy activists (at least compared to its neighbors), Qatar is accused of promoting Islamists who claim to be peaceful but really seek to impose brutal Shariah law. And it frequently offers a platform to hatemongers targeting Israel, Jews, the minority Shiite community within Islam, LGBTQ individuals and others ― generally on its marquee media property, Al Jazeera.

But experts on the region note that Qatar’s flaws as an American partner are not unique: Kuwait has also been called a “permissive jurisdiction,” and Saudi Arabia and the UAE also host terror financiers and clerics who spread hate speech. The vendetta against Qatar, they say, is driven by more defensive concerns, namely the pro-Israel side’s focus on Hamas and anyone who supports that group, and the UAE’s worry that the Muslim Brotherhood could threaten its own ruling regime.

Otaiba made his views about the U.S. base in Qatar clear in an April 28 message this year to John Hannah, a senior counselor at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a former aide to Vice President Dick Cheney.

Hannah had emailed the ambassador a Forbes article noting that an Emirati-owned hotel would actually be hosting a Hamas conference in “Muslim Brotherhood-loving” Qatar. Otaiba appeared taken aback by the hotel’s involvement.

“Shouldn’t we be trying to move the base?” he wrote. “I don’t think it’s fair to point the finger at an Emirati company on this one.”

Hannah responded by saying he agreed about the military base. But he said criticism of the decision to host Hamas was fair no matter who owned the hotel. Otaiba snapped back that the UAE would move its hotel when the U.S. moved its base.

“Hah. Bu don’t move the hotel,” Hannah answered. (“Bu” or “Bu Omar,” which translates in Arabic to “father of Omar,” appears to be a nickname for Otaiba, who has a young son called Omar.) “Just force Hamas to reschedule at a different venue not owned by Emiratis.”

On Friday, Hannah told HuffPost that the communications were business as usual.

“As a leading Washington think tank, [the foundation] is engaged in policy discussions with a range of actors across the Middle East and elsewhere. My own relationship with Ambassador Otaiba goes back years, including both my time in government and out,” he wrote in an email.

Mark Dubowitz, the foundation’s CEO, lobbied Otaiba on a different issue in a March 10, 2017, email. Dubowitz provided Otaiba with a list of mainly Western companies that operate in the UAE and Saudi Arabia and are looking to do business in Iran, following the lifting of some sanctions as a result of the nuclear deal.

“This is a target list for putting these companies to a choice, as we have discussed,” Dubowitz wrote the ambassador. The group includes businesses based in Austria, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, South Korea and the U.K.

In response to HuffPost’s inquiries, Dubowitz noted that he has openly called for U.S. Gulf partners to target such companies. ”I have discussed this policy idea many times in public including in published pieces and reports,” Dubowitz wrote in a Friday email. “I sent these public pieces, reports and the list of companies as an example to a number of people in Washington and abroad to get feedback on the idea.”

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

from DIYS http://ift.tt/2sq1KpU

#DIYS

[stormdoors78476]

Someone Is Using These Leaked Emails To Embarrass Washington's Most Powerful Ambassador

WASHINGTON ― A mysterious source contacted multiple news outlets this week to share emails between the influential ambassador of the United Arab Emirates, Yousef Al Otaiba, and top figures in the American foreign policy community, including former Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

Behind the scenes, Otaiba ― an extremely powerful figure in Washington, D.C., who is reportedly in “in almost constant phone and email contact,” with Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s adviser and son-in-law ― is seen pushing for the U.S. to close down its military base in Qatar and otherwise poking at issues that could drive a wedge between the U.S. and that Arab nation. He also says that his country’s de facto ruler is supportive of a wave of anti-Qatar criticism in the U.S. that Qatar recently called a smear campaign.

The anonymous leakers told HuffPost they sought to expose the UAE’s efforts to manipulate the U.S. government, and denied any allegiance to Qatar or any other government.

Regardless of the leakers’ intent, the revelations promise to heighten tensions between the two U.S. allies. If the UAE succeeds in damaging America’s decades-old partnership with Qatar, the result could dramatically undermine U.S. goals in the Middle East. The two American allies’ escalating rivalry could worsen conflict in war zones where they support different proxy forces ― notably Libya, which has become a haven for smugglers, warlords, and terrorists ― while distracting attention from bigger international priorities, like restoring stability in Syria and Iraq after the expected battlefield defeat of the Islamic State.

The UAE and Qatar have taken their rivalry public in recent days following a controversial report in Qatari media. Qatari authorities soon claimed that the May 23 story ― which suggested that Qatari ruler Sheikh Tamim gave a speech describing his respect for Iran, his support for the Palestinian militant group Hamas and his ties with Israel ― was the result of a hack. But news sources based in the UAE and Saudi Arabia still suggest that it exposed his true feelings.

Though Qatar and the Emirates are putative allies, they have drifted apart since 2011 because of their differing reactions to the Arab Spring protests that year. As the largely non-violent Muslim Brotherhood movement gained power across the region, Qatar supported it, seeing it as a vehicle for the Middle East’s democratic aspirations. The UAE calls the group a terror front. With a new U.S. administration in power, the time is ripe for one or the other to push for American action in its own interests.

Otaiba, who has been the UAE’s ambassador to the United States since 2008, is known as one of Washington’s best-connected diplomats. He makes frequent high-profile appearances around Washington and the U.S. speaking circuit, and he’s ensured that the Trump administration has already cozied up to the Emirates, which hosts a recently opened Trump golf course.

The leakers provided HuffPost with three batches of emails from Otaiba, some as recent as May and others from as far back as 2014, the last time the UAE supported a major effort to spread skepticism about Qatar in the United States. HuffPost contacted eight of the individuals who’d exchanged messages with the ambassador and shared the contents of those emails; none denied that the exchanges took place. Though Otaiba did not respond to repeated HuffPost requests for comment, a UAE Embassy spokeswoman confirmed to the Daily Beast that the Hotmail address used for the messages belongs to him.

Otaiba’s emails show an effort to build alliances and a focus on Qatar.

The night before former U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates was scheduled to speak at a high-profile Washington conference on Qatar, for instance, Otaiba wrote him an artfully worded note. “The subject of the conference has been a neglected issue in U.S. foreign policy despite all the trouble it’s causing,” the diplomat wrote. “Coming from you, folks will listen carefully.”

Gates emailed back that he thought he had “the chance to put some folks on notice.”

Otaiba offered to buy the former Cabinet official lunch and passed along a message from his boss back home. “MBZ sends his best from Abu Dhabi,” the ambassador wrote. “He says ‘give them hell tomorrow.’”

The next day, Gates offered a scathing assault on Qatar, excoriating its support for Islamists, at an event hosted by the hawkish Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “The United States military doesn’t have any irreplaceable facility,” he said. “Tell Qatar to choose sides or we will change the nature of the relationship, to include downscaling the base.”

The powerful Washington-based foundation features heavily in the Otaiba emails. While many of those messages show the ambassador helping its analysts plan trips to the UAE, they also contain two of the most striking revelations about Otaiba: He explicitly advocated for moving the U.S. base out of Qatar ― something he hasn’t done publicly ― and he discussed the idea of pressuring companies in U.S.-friendly countries in order to hurt Iran.

An Arab’s Favorite Pro-Israel Group

The Foundation for Defense of Democracies spends much of its time trying to strengthen ties between Washington and right-wing political forces in Israel. But despite the UAE’s refusal to establish diplomatic ties with Israel, the think tank and others in the pro-Israel lobby have found common ground with the Emirates on two major issues: Both want to contain Iran and political Islam. Both suffered a high-profile defeat when the U.S. and other nations reached a nuclear deal with Iran in 2015. And for the past year or so, both have been pushing to make the future of U.S. relations with Qatar a debate in Washington.

Emirati critiques of Qatar often raise the same points the foundation’s scholars bring up in their frequent appearances before Congress and in the media: The Qatari government provides, in the words of the U.S. Treasury Department, a “permissive jurisdiction” for fundraisers and donors hoping to aid violent Muslim extremists. In supporting the rights of protesters and democracy activists (at least compared to its neighbors), Qatar is accused of promoting Islamists who claim to be peaceful but really seek to impose brutal Shariah law. And it frequently offers a platform to hatemongers targeting Israel, Jews, the minority Shiite community within Islam, LGBTQ individuals and others ― generally on its marquee media property, Al Jazeera.

But experts on the region note that Qatar’s flaws as an American partner are not unique: Kuwait has also been called a “permissive jurisdiction,” and Saudi Arabia and the UAE also host terror financiers and clerics who spread hate speech. The vendetta against Qatar, they say, is driven by more defensive concerns, namely the pro-Israel side’s focus on Hamas and anyone who supports that group, and the UAE’s worry that the Muslim Brotherhood could threaten its own ruling regime.

Otaiba made his views about the U.S. base in Qatar clear in an April 28 message this year to John Hannah, a senior counselor at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a former aide to Vice President Dick Cheney.

Hannah had emailed the ambassador a Forbes article noting that an Emirati-owned hotel would actually be hosting a Hamas conference in “Muslim Brotherhood-loving” Qatar. Otaiba appeared taken aback by the hotel’s involvement.

“Shouldn’t we be trying to move the base?” he wrote. “I don’t think it’s fair to point the finger at an Emirati company on this one.”

Hannah responded by saying he agreed about the military base. But he said criticism of the decision to host Hamas was fair no matter who owned the hotel. Otaiba snapped back that the UAE would move its hotel when the U.S. moved its base.

“Hah. Bu don’t move the hotel,” Hannah answered. (“Bu” or “Bu Omar,” which translates in Arabic to “father of Omar,” appears to be a nickname for Otaiba, who has a young son called Omar.) “Just force Hamas to reschedule at a different venue not owned by Emiratis.”

On Friday, Hannah told HuffPost that the communications were business as usual.

“As a leading Washington think tank, [the foundation] is engaged in policy discussions with a range of actors across the Middle East and elsewhere. My own relationship with Ambassador Otaiba goes back years, including both my time in government and out,” he wrote in an email.

Mark Dubowitz, the foundation’s CEO, lobbied Otaiba on a different issue in a March 10, 2017, email. Dubowitz provided Otaiba with a list of mainly Western companies that operate in the UAE and Saudi Arabia and are looking to do business in Iran, following the lifting of some sanctions as a result of the nuclear deal.

“This is a target list for putting these companies to a choice, as we have discussed,” Dubowitz wrote the ambassador. The group includes businesses based in Austria, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, South Korea and the U.K.

In response to HuffPost’s inquiries, Dubowitz noted that he has openly called for U.S. Gulf partners to target such companies. ”I have discussed this policy idea many times in public including in published pieces and reports,” Dubowitz wrote in a Friday email. “I sent these public pieces, reports and the list of companies as an example to a number of people in Washington and abroad to get feedback on the idea.”

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[quranreadalong]

#60, Surah 9

THE QURAN READ-ALONG: DAY 60

Warning: this section yet again requires a lot of context, so it’s gonna be long af. And the day after tomorrow I’m gonna start a five-part history lesson of military expeditions in Mohammed’s era. Y’all gonna be experts on Islamic history by the time this surah is done, sorry.

But let’s talk about this section itself. In the intro to this surah, I mentioned the Battle of Hunayn. Mohammed talks about it in 9:25-26:

Allah hath given you victory on many fields and on the day of Huneyn, when ye exulted in your multitude but it availed you naught, and the earth, vast as it is, was straitened for you; then ye turned back in flight; Then Allah sent His peace of reassurance down upon His messenger and upon the believers, and sent down hosts ye could not see, and punished those who disbelieved. Such is the reward of disbelievers.

The reward of disbelievers is death in battle, evidently. Bad. I guess 9:25 is neutral on its own, describing the Muslim soldiers almost fucking up the whole battle despite having a very large army.

This battle occurred shortly after Mecca was conquered and its surrounding areas were made to submit to Mohammed, though the details are extremely thin and shaky compared to the earlier battles we’ve seen. The enemies this time were members of a Hijazi tribe called the Banu Hawazin along with their various branch tribes, which included both Bedouin and settled peoples. The most prominent of the settled tribes was the Banu Thaqif, which led the southern city of Taif. Don’t feel bad if you don’t recognize the name--it’s because we haven’t seen them before! Nothing is said about Mohammed’s interactions with the Hawazin in Islamic history books until this battle.

Ibn Ishaq informs us that Mohammed learned about the leaders of the Hawazin assembling tens of thousands of people, mostly from Bedouin clans--men, women, and children--in a certain spot called Hunayn. They had all their animals and possessions with them, too. (This may sound like Mohammed’s people just attacked some place to steal shit, but Ibn Ishaq assures us that the evildoers just gathered all their women, children, and possessions in one place to motivate them. Sure!) Mo sent spies to this spot and they informed him that the Hawazin were planning on attacking Mecca. So Mohammed rounded up his troops, which included both the army he used to conquer Mecca and a couple thousand new additions following the submission of the Quraysh, and marched out to Hunayn. The area is about a three-days’ journey from Mecca.

So the Muslims had a large and united army, some motivated by faith and others by greed, as Mohammed had promised them war booty. But the Hawazin were defending their civilians and property, so they had their own motivations. The Hawazin sewed confusion and chaos with projectiles, ranging from arrows to rocks, then a group of men on horseback quickly blitzed the confused army. The troops scattered; Mohammed had to personally wrangle them back together and order them to press onwards, which they did, resulting in a Muslim victory. A total of five Muslim fighters are listed as killed in action during this battle.

This implausible series of events is all we get on what happened at Hunayn. Neither sahih sources nor other early sources tell us anything on the background of the battle, and instead focus on its outcome: the Muslim army getting a lot of spoils of war.

There are a couple of tragicomic ahadith about Hunayn. Here’s one wherein Mohammed states that one of his own followers is hellbound, and then feels vindicated when that guy is mortally wounded and kills himself to escape the pain (thus going to hell).

We participated in the Battle of Hunain along with the Messenger of Allah (ﷺ). He (the Holy Prophet) said about a man who claimed to be a Muslim that he was one of the denizens of the Fire (of Hell). When we were in the thick of the battle that man fought desperately and was wounded. It was said: Messenger of Allah, the person whom you at first called a denizen of Fire fought desperately and died. Upon this the Messenger of Allah (ﷺ) remarked: He was doomed to the Fire (of Hell). Some men were on the verge of doubt (about his fate) when it was said that he was not dead but fatally wounded. When it was night he could not stand the (pain of his) wound and killed himself. The Apostle (ﷺ) was informed of that. He (the Holy Prophet) observed: Allah is Great, I bear testimony to the fact that I am the servant of Allah and His messenger.

One of Mohammed’s own soldiers risks his life for Islam, but Mohammed says he’s going to hell, and is then happy when he kills himself because it means he’s right. I..... okay?!

Back to the Booty Topic. As Mohammed had promised them, the conquest of Hunayn resulted in a lot of loot. 6,000 women and children were enslaved, tens of thousands of animals were taken, silver, currency, and household goods. Here’s a hadith where Mohammed’s troops complain that he’s not distributing the stuff stolen from the people of Hunayn fairly, and he basically says:

When it was the day of Hunain, Prophet favored some people over some others (in the distribution of the booty). He gave Al-Aqra' one-hundred camels and gave Uyaina the same, and also gave other people (of Quraish). A man said, "Allah's Pleasure was not the aim, in this distribution." I said, "I will inform the Prophet (about your statement)." The Prophet (ﷺ) said, "May Allah bestow Mercy on Moses, for he was troubled more this but he remained patient."

Anyway, the Muslim army fought a battle located a few days away from Mecca for vague reasons, the battle was a bit of a mess but they won and took lots of war spoils and captives, is the point. Hunayn is mostly notable because it was the first large battle after Mecca was conquered and it was Mohammed’s first chance to show off his huge-ass army and use it to crush the remaining non-Muslim holdouts in the area.

The Banu Hawazin surrendered and “embraced Islam” after losing the battle. Mohammed gave them the choice between getting their women and children back and getting their property back; they chose the women and children, and so their stolen property remained with the soldiers whom Mohammed had distributed it to.

After their victory at Hunayn, the Muslim army marched to Taif and began besieging the Banu Thaqif within the city. The siege lasted about three weeks, but it didn’t work. Those within Taif did not want to go down so easily. Mohammed stopped the siege, but promised that he’d be back to destroy the place. The Thaqif sent emissaries to negotiate terms of surrender that would allow them to retain their temple to the goddess Allat, but Mohammed said he would not rest until the city was made Muslim and its temple was destroyed. Following the conquests of northern Arabia (more on that in a moment), the Thaqif were forced to give in. The temple was destroyed and they “embraced Islam”. By this point nearly every polytheistic city in the region had fallen to the Spreaders of the True Faith.

We’re done with that subject for the time being. Back to the Quran. 9:27 is one of those vague “Allah will forgive those he will” verses, which... okay? Neutral. 9:28 calls the polytheists unclean and bars them from the mosque at Mecca again. Rude and bad.

Now I need you to forget everything we were just talking about because the next section is a completely different topic. Remember the other battle (well... “battle”, more like straight-up conquest) I talked about? Where Mohammed said “aight fam gather round, we’re gonna go fight the Byzantines now”, then they got to the spot where the Byzantines were supposed to be, and there... weren’t any Byzantines (are you noticing a trend with Mohammed claiming his followers need to fight because there’s an imminent attack that never materializes yet?), but there were some peaceful Jewish and Christian towns that he proceeded to conquer? Yeah, that one. The expedition to Tabouk. We’re talking about that now.

The following ayah explicitly commands Muslims to attack Christians and Jews until they pay Muslims money, a move meant to humble or humiliate them.

Fight against such of those who have been given the Scripture as believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, and forbid not that which Allah hath forbidden by His messenger, and follow not the Religion of Truth, until they pay the tribute readily, being brought low.

So. Pretty bad, huh? This verse was a justification for everything Muslims did after this point (which included, you know, conquering almost the entire Middle East and most of North Africa). Remember that ayah from surah 2, “no compulsion in religion”, and how the tafsir said that it was later abrogated? Surprise!, Allah says, there is compulsion in religion. You either convert to Islam or you pay Muslims money, if you’re one of the “people of the book”. Or you die. Those are your options. The people around Tabouk mostly chose the middle option, as they were not prepared to fight Mohammed’s large army nor were they interested in dying (though some were murdered for no apparent reason).

This was the first case of the jizya tax being extracted from a conquered people. The jizya, unlike the zakat (obligatory tax for Muslims, 2.5% of wealth), has no set rate in either the Quran or the ahadith. In general it has been used to financially pressure non-Muslims, from the early Arab conquests to the Mughal conquest of India straight through the Ottoman era. Mohammed told people that Jesus would abolish the jizya at the end of the world, and not before that. Despite many apologists claiming otherwise, the ayah above and the early history of Islam itself show that the jizya was meant to be a punitive measure designed to show non-Muslims their place.

Note here that Mohammed’s earlier excuses for conquering disbelievers (they persecute Muslims!!!) are gone. The disbelievers must be brought low for no reason other than the fact that they are disbelievers.

Mohammed has some other thoughts about the people of the Tabouk region in 9:30.

And the Jews say: Ezra is the son of Allah, and the Christians say: The Messiah is the son of Allah. That is their saying with their mouths. They imitate the saying of those who disbelieved of old. Allah (Himself) fighteth against them. How perverse are they!

Remember how I said that Mohammed had no earthy clue who Ezra was, possibly because of all those old fake “Ezra” Christian texts floating around at the time? Yeah, here’s another example of that. There are zero recorded instances of a single Jew believing that Ezra is Allah’s son, despite many centuries of Muslim scholars desperately trying to find one. Mohammed was just an idiot, a bad intolerant idiot who thinks Allah fights against people minding their own business.

There’s a funny story in Ibn Ishaq’s sira in which Sallam ibn Mishkam, the deeply skeptical rabbi, kept trying to troll Mohammed by getting him to say things that were blatantly false. On one occasion he said to Mohammed, according to Ibn Ishaq’s biography, “you have abandoned our qibla and do not acknowledge Ezra as the son of God”, without explicitly saying that he (or Jews in general) believed that. “Allah” responded to this with the blatantly false ayah above, confirming Sallam’s belief that Mohammed was making shit up and also had no idea what he was talking about.

There is more theological confusion in 9:31:

They have taken as lords beside Allah their rabbis and their monks and the Messiah son of Mary, when they were bidden to worship only One God.

There are no Jewish or Christian sects that consider rabbis or monks or priests to be gods. Most tafsir collections say this is in reference to Jews and Christians turning to their religious leaders to tell them what is or is not permissible, which Muslims also do. What the hell did Mohammed think was occurring when people asked him what was permissible--were they treating him like a god? (While unmentioned by the tafsirs, I’ve seen some scholars suggest that Mohammed interpreted the Jewish use of the word rabbi as them calling the rabbis gods, since rabbi in Arabic is a way of referring to Allah--literally meaning “my lord”. I dunno if that’s true, but it does sound like Classic Mo tbh.)

Regardless, this blatant misconstruction of other religious groups’ beliefs is bad. 9:32 says that the Christians and Jews want to extinguish Allah’s light, which is likewise bad. Hmm. Sure is convenient how Mohammed is going hard against the Christians all of a sudden right around the time he wants to threaten them in order to steal their shit, huh.

The next ayah is neutral bragging, saying that Mohammed is a prophet and Islam will prevail even though the “idolators” don’t want it to.

9:34-35 complains about the greed of monks and rabbis (reminder: this whole section is structured around Mohammed demanding money from Christian and Jewish communities he’s threatening and harassing for no justifiable reason): they “devour the wealth of mankind” and are going to hell, where “their foreheads and their flanks and their backs will be branded”. Mohammed himself was a greedy asshole, but that doesn’t count, of course, because Allah told him to take all the money owed to him. I looked at some tafsir to see if any particular incident triggered this rant, but it appears that it did not; he was just ranting against Jews (and Christians) again. Ibn Kathir says:

For instance, the Jews were respected by the people of Jahiliyyah [pre-Islamic Arabia] and collected gifts, taxes and presents from them. When Allah sent His Messenger, the Jews persisted in their misguidance, disbelief and rebellion, hoping to keep their status and position. However, Allah extinguished all this and took it away from them with the light of Prophethood and instead gave them disgrace and degradation, and they incurred the anger of Allah, the Exalted

Well, fuck them for being respected and getting gifts, I guess. Bad.

The Islamic calendar is described in 9:36, 12 months with 4 “sacred”/truce months, a holdover from pre-Islamic times. The ayah concludes with “wage war on all of the idolaters as they are waging war on all of you”. By “all of” them, he means collectively--it’s an us vs them thing. Which is bad, and also as we’ve seen and will continue to see, the whole waging-war thing was started by ur fav prophet. Not Ze Idolators.

The next ayah complains about the disbelievers altering the calendar and its sacred months (which was evidently just done to keep the hajj in a suitable season). People who do this are “evil” and Allah doesn’t like them. Bad, but as a side note, isn’t it kind of weird how the idolatrous, 100% wrong polytheists somehow magically knew which months were sacred to Allah? Hmmmmm! Another holdover from Abraham’s days like the hajj, clearly.

Last ayat for the day.

Go forth in the way of Allah, ye are bowed down to the ground with heaviness. Take ye pleasure in the life of the world rather than in the Hereafter? The comfort of the life of the world is but little in the Hereafter. If ye go not forth He will afflict you with a painful doom, and will choose instead of you a folk other than you. 

The kuffar hell counter (1)!!! Well, it’s more a soldiers-who-don’t-fight hell counter, but they’re obviously implied to be disbelievers for their lack of enthusiasm. Mohammed’s been complaining so much about... everything, yet we haven’t pinged the counter in a while. Good to have you back, bud!

NEXT TIME: Lazy and unmotivated soldiers!!!!

The Quran Read-Along: Day 60

Ayat: 13

Good: 0

Neutral: 3 (9:25, 9:27, 9:33, 9:38)

Bad: 10 (9:26, 9:28-32, 9:34-37, 9:39)

Kuffar hell counter: 1 (9:39)

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#quranreadalong #surah 9 #at tawbah