Young American evangelicals are dropping the faith

Terry Shoemaker
Sat, July 29, 2023
Abridged and modified from: The Conversation

Young evangelical Christians are facing a dilemma whether to follow in the footsteps of their parents or pursue other choices.

In the Public Religion Research Institute’s 2020 Census on American Religion, only 14% of Americans identified as white evangelical in 2020, compared with 23% in 2006.

The data also indicates a stable increase in the number of those who no longer identify as religious at all and who make up about a quarter of the American population. These statistics are even more drastic when considering age. In short, older Americans are more religious than younger Americans, while millennials do not practice or identify with any religion. With these trends, it seems that America is finally catching up with Europe.

This data is significant because although white evangelicals tend to be politically vocal, influential, and contributive to the dumbing of America, several are known to be leaving the faith.

Research continues to track the rising numbers of those defecting from religion. In Elizabeth Drescher’s 2016 book, “Choosing Our Religion,” she notes that people leaving evangelicalism “express anger and frustration with both the teachings and practices of their childhood church.” The younger evangelicals are disenchanted with their faith traditions’ staunch and divisive political positions and how theology has been used to prop up these positions.

The interviewees, all white, were typically in their late 20s to early 40s and highly critical of the Christian faith of their youth. Some completely leave their faith while others try to reform their faith from within. For the majority, church was a major part of their social life, and they described rigid expectations to defend their theology, politics and spiritual communities to outsiders. Several of them mentioned how politics had influenced the theology of white evangelicalism in the United States. One Florida evangelical who spent the majority of his early adult life as a musician in a white evangelical megachurch, said that his church preached “God, country and the Republican Party.” He was even taught as a teenager that “Jesus was definitely a Republican,” and he characterized God as “quite angry, a cosmic referee” seeking to regulate the lives of the faithful.

It thus appears that younger evangelicals are fatigued with white evangelicalism’s allegiance to the Republican Party and to specific stances on racism and sexuality. White evangelicals categorize these issues as a “culture war” for the soul of America – an internal struggle for who will define and decide the future of America. 

In short: These are, for the most part, the American southern white barbarian losers who reject the evolving demographics of the land of immigrants that the US is, and they hate everyone who is not white Anglo-Saxon protestant: Jews, Catholics, Muslims, African-Americans, native Amerindians, etc., and anyone who favors a scientific approach to living in this world: liberals, scientists, humanists, secularists and atheists.

Sarah grew up in Kentucky, spending much of her childhood in church services, Bible studies and Christian camps within a Baptist denomination. “Part of me likes the idea of church,” she says, “but I think I like the idea of just helping people more. That’s my idea of what a Christian is, someone who helps others.” Her involvement in poverty alleviation in Kentucky influenced her attitudes on how she sees white evangelicals today: “The way that the church operates in Kentucky is so backwards. It’s all about the self. About pleasing yourself. It’s all white, middle- to upper-class people watching a big screen with a full band. I think that’s probably the opposite of what Jesus wanted.”

Brandy was raised a Baptist in Tennessee. She recounts how her family actually held a religious intervention on her, with a screen, PowerPoint and projector, after she stopped attending her family’s church. She was ostracized, “I felt rejected, overlooked, looked down upon,” she says. “I felt apart from the community.”

The staunch resistance to civil unions, transgender rights and women’s equality, along with the inability of white evangelicalism to grapple with its racialized and patriarchal structures, is misaligned with some of these younger perspectives today. Replace the words “white evangelicalism” with “Iranian Islam”, and nothing would change in the preceding sentence.

Christianity and Islam Meet at the Extremes: Christians Who Want to Stone Adulterers

Abridged from:
Tim Dickinson
Sat, July 29, 2023
Rolling Stone Magazine

[Note from Lebanon Iznogood: Christian barbarians do exist. They are many and live hypocritical lives in the recesses of modern society. Like the psychotic Evangelicals of the American Bible Belt and their newly converted idiots of Latin America and Asia, they believe in Hollywoodian end of times and Armageddon, which they use to scare off other idiots into converting in order to escape the wrath of a non-existent God. They get their inspiration from the fictional trash of the Old Testament or Torah. So to those Christians who elevate themselves by simply comparing themselves to what they consider barbaric Islam and Judaism: You just got out of the cesspool thanks to the revolutions of Reason and Enlightenment. Now you want to go back to ignorance and barbarity?]

The podcast setup at first appears familiar: a pair of white dudes, mic’d up at a table, wrestling out loud with big ideas. But the conversation between the two men veers, without guardrails, into a dystopian vision of a Christian nationalist America, in which the laws of the Old Testament have been substituted for the constitution and the community is responsible for executing people who cheat on their spouses. Those executions, the men propose, should be done by stoning, the public act of hurling rocks at a condemned person until they are bludgeoned to death. Just like the Taliban of Afghanistan, of whom these Christian numskulls are apparently jealous.

“Stoning is appropriately barbaric,” argues Luke Saint [no pun intended], the author of the Sound Doctrine of Theocracy and a recent guest on the podcast of the Lancaster Patriot, a far-right publication based in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, an hour-and-a-half drive west of Philadelphia.

With stoning, Saint advocates, “Everyone knows who the accuser is. And everybody knows who the victim is. Everyone knows who the perpetrator is. Everything’s out in the open.”

As this podcast illuminates, there are factions of Christian nationalists who not only want to take America back to its supposed Christian origins, but they also seek to jettison its constitutional system of checks and balances in favor of a government based on biblical law, including reviving punishments that clash violently with modern notions of human rights.

Saint is an extremist, but he’s not alone. His interviewer is the Patriot’s managing editor, Chris Hume, who has written that America’s path forward must be “blazed by setting a clear course towards a Christian society, based on the Bible and biblical law.” Hume also believes that the GOP’s current crop of far-right candidates are far too squishy: “Until politicians like Doug Mastriano and Ron DeSantis begin operating on a platform of biblical law, they will only propagate the problems.”

Saint’s book purports to answer the question: “If Christians were to be presented with an opportunity to create a new government, what would we create?” He is also the chairman of the Mid-Atlantic Reformation Society (MARS), which touts that the Bible provides “all necessary directions and instructions for a just, happy, and productive society.”

“Biblically,” Hume says, “you have a system where the citizenry is responsible for seeing that justice is done, right?” He adds: “Society itself has to be the one to purge the evil.”

For Saint, a key part of this revived biblical justice, is recognizing what trespasses truly merit this death penalty. “First off,” he says, “we need to realize that whatever sin requires stoning is more barbaric than the act of stoning itself. Christians have lost that idea,” he argues. “We’re like, ‘Oh, stoning is worse than adultery.’ No, no, no! Adultery is worse than stoning.”

Hume answered questions from Rolling Stone via email. Asked to explain his biblical worldview, he insisted: “The Bible not only offers a better path to a just society than our current American system does, but it offers the only path to a just society.”

When pressed on the horrific nature of stoning, he conceded: “I also find the notion of taking up stones in the form of capital punishment against duly convicted criminals to be a shock to my modern sensibilities.” But he insisted, “it is not unjust,” and added: “The requirement that those bringing the charge must be first to put the convicted criminal to death serves as a safeguard against baseless accusations.”

The podcast aired several weeks ago, but has not been previously reported. This week the Lancaster Patriot has a new story promoting Saint and an upcoming Future of Christendom Conference sponsored by MARS. That conference will feature a public debate: “Is ‘Gay Christian’ a Biblically Acceptable Identity for a Member of Christ’s Church?”

Israel as a Right-Wing Ethnic Cleansing Project: The Plan all Along

[The facts and events described below focus on a recent period in the history of the British-American colony of Israel. But those facts and events are the exact same ones that forced the establishment of the colony of Israel one hundred years ago. The difference is that back then the Zionists had monopoly over the narrative and the information, and it was easy for them to brainwash entire generations of westerners into approving the monumental crime of the Nakba - the dispossession of the native indigenous Palestinian population of every attribute of humanity, identity, sovereignty, self-determination, and land. Nowadays, however, with the free dissemination of information thanks to the modern media, the truth is out, the veil has been lifted, and the lies exposed: Israel is a British-American colony of settlers that are foreign to the region. Their objective is to provoke a second ethnic cleansing of what remains of historic Palestine in order to establish a repressive supremacist ultra-religious Jewish theocracy, not unlike that of their declared enemy, the ultra-religious Muslim theocracy of Iran. When will the international community see Israel for what it is: a Jewish mirror image of Muslim Iran?]

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Anna Lippman, York University, Canada

Fri, July 28, 2023

We saw it in the United States on Jan. 6, 2021. We witnessed it during Canada's so-called Freedom Convoy. The evidence is clear -- fascism is on the rise in North America.

But ethno-nationalist fascism is growing even faster in the remote areas of occupied Palestine amid widespread protests in Israel about a contentious law that limits the Supreme Court's ability to check governmental power.

How do these right-wing adherents become seduced by its messaging? For many, the answer lies in an Israeli movement that actively radicalizes boys and young men in its fight for an ethno-nationalist state of Israel. This practice is inspired and associated with the Kahanist movement and the Kach party, both banned at various points by Israel and the United States for being terrorist groups.

Originally created by the late American-Israeli rabbi Meir Kahane (also the founder of the U.S. Jewish Defense League), this fundamentalist and extremist Jewish supremacy group calls for a full Jewish state in Israel and the expulsion and death of Arabs in the region.

Claiming Jewish teachings as justification, Kahanism fuels hate under a guise of piety.

Street kids

Often recruited from unstable homes and off the streets of Jerusalem, these boys -- known as "hilltop youth" -- typically range in age from their teens to 20s. Many of them have experienced traumatic home lives prior to joining these radical youth groups. Deeply religious and spurred by a literal interpretation of the Torah, they have taken it upon themselves to create West Bank outposts that are deemed illegal by international law.

While the Israeli government has made promises to remove illegal outposts in these areas for over a decade, and even occasionally clears out the youth in the area, most illegal outposts carry on and eventually become settlements, complete with tacit government approval in the form of water, electricity and other utilities.

Beyond simply settling the West Bank, these young men frequently attack Palestinians and their villages, coined "pricetag attacks" that refer to the price they will make others pay for lost outposts. These attacks, ranging from destroying buildings to murder, are seen as a commandment for these Jewish settlers to rid the land of anyone but Jewish inhabitants.

While these youth are most notorious for the 2015 murder of an 18-month-old baby in Duma and a subsequent celebration of the death, their presence has not abated. Rather, the government has further legitimized their presence in the West Bank by setting up "rehabilitation" programs and homes.

Youth brought to West Bank

In addition to offering the young people in this area more infrastructure and supervision from adult settlers, the government also provides schooling. These schools serve the youth illegally occupying these areas, but other young people from other areas are brought to the West Bank to live and attend school in these outposts.

The "rehabilitation centers" therefore not only legitimize the presence of these outposts in the West Bank, but also allow them to proliferate through their success. Yeshivas, schools for religious Jewish studies and the equivalent of the Muslim fundamentalist Madrassas, are also present in these outposts. Most of these yeshivas are run by extremist rabbis who meld Jewish studies with hatred for Palestinians and encourage violence in the name of an all-Jewish state.

While the official policy of the Israel Defense Forces is to dispel these youth and their outposts, in practice these groups have a much cozier relationship. They are working particularly closely with the officials in the new far-right government, several of whom have personal relationships with settlements in the West Bank, to retain the illegal occupation of the West Bank.

Most recently, these youth have been recruited for a special branch of the Israel Defense Forces called Desert Frontier, which patrols the West Bank and directly interacts with Palestinians living in the area.

Channeling hatred

This unit is also considered an opportunity for "rehabilitation" for these youth to channel their hatred and violence toward Palestinians in the area into military power and intelligence. The unit also works in the Jordan Valley, helping other youth co-opt Palestinian pastureland for their own use. Though officials often publicly blame these young people for violence in the West Bank, in private they fund and encourage their presence in this area.

That means the Israeli government can blame settler violence on these young extremists and publicly condemn them, but it also benefits from their continued theft of Palestinian land and life. Inspired by settlers and right-wing extremists before them, and seeking to find acceptance and community after harsh conditions in their home lives, the hilltop youth are using their right-wing ideology as a tool that allows them to harm Palestinians and their villages with no remorse.

While officially held up as a fringe extremist group, these youth are both funded and tacitly encouraged by a right-wing government seeking to expel all Palestinians from the land. [Hanibaal: Same tactics that led to the establishment of the State of Israel: Terrorism. Hypocrisy. Lies. Crimes. Propaganda. Ethnic Cleansing. Pure Race Theories. Religious Supremacy. And every idiot out there has been convinced that Israel is a democracy and a haven for human rights].

Larger strategy?

The national security minister himself -- Itamar Ben-Gvir -- is a [terrorist] settler with ties to youth in the West Bank, indicating the presence and radicalization of these young men is part of a larger strategy to conquer the land while feigning diplomacy. As more and more young men are brought to the region to attend these "rehabilitation centers" and then drafted into the army, Israel is preying on these traumatized youth to maintain strongholds in the West Bank.

Rather than receiving counselling and home placements, these boys are encouraged to use their fundamentalist teachings to support the army and government's goal, no matter the personal toll.

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Anna Lippman is a sociology instructor at York University, Canada.

Lebanon and Palestine

Many readers wonder why I defend the Palestinian cause after all that the Palestinians did to Lebanon between the late 1960s and early 1980s.

My answer is: Humanistic integrity and intellectual honesty. The Palestinian tragedy and the creation of Israel are the single worst calamity of the 20th century. Yes, the Germans committed the Holocaust (maybe 15 years of suffering, from 1930-1945), and yes, the Turks committed the genocide of the Armenians (also another 10-20 years between 1905 and 1925; correct me if I am wrong). And yes, the Kurds were denied their country in 1920, and yes, so much inhumanity has been visited by humans upon other humans .... But the Palestinian suffering - the Nakba - is beyond imagination, for it has been going on for 100 years in plain sight of the international community which did - and still does - nothing to stop the unfolding genocide and catastrophe. Mistakes were committed by everyone, and the mistakes of the Palestinians cannot be used as a pretext to deny them their humanity and their country.

What the American colony of Israel is doing is not novel. White English America did it with the native Amerindians, and now English America is doing it again with the Palestinians: Instead of one wholesale instantaneous genocide that history might remember for centuries, they are slowly, very slowly, one Palestinian at a time, one home demolition at a time, one assassination at a time, one teenager at a time, one confiscated hill at a time, one denied construction permit at a time, one olive orchard at a time ...  slowly eroding the links between a people and its land... with the illusion that the world will not notice. Of course, labeling the Palestinians as terrorists helps because in our subconscious, fed as it is by the dominant media, the word terrorist has come to mean disposable, worthy of killing.

It is unbearable for me to imagine what it is like to see your own country invaded by foreigners from 5,000 miles away, who proceed to chase you out of your homes, villages and cities, herd you into refugee camps, massacre tens of thousands of your people with weapons and know-how imported from Nazi Germany, erase 500 of your villages and towns from the map and replace them with foreign-sounding names. 

And to add insult to injury, they continue to deny your history and your humanity by falsfying it and propagating the Zionist lies that you were never in Palestine, that Palestine was an empty wildnerness when the invaders arrived, that you are squatters from other Arab countries when the fact is that the Israeli invaders are themselves the foreign squatters, that the invaders were poor wretched refugees from Nazi Europe, and that your efforts at fighting back are acts of terrorism when a Jewish-Nazi regime controls every minute detail of your life in order to draw every last breath of resistance remaining in you and force you to abandon the fight and leave the country to them. AND, the world believes their lies and treats you like vermin because you are fighting back.

There is nothing sacrosanct about any specific group of humans. We are either all sacrosanct or no one is. Anyone can make claims of superiority over others, on fucked-up grounds fantasized during the Bronze Age: Chosen people (Jews), last prophecy on earth (Islam), Son of God, the true message, the true religion, messiahs, mehdis, prophets... but that does not make any of this religious bullshit true, this fiction written by ignorant nomadic tribes in the Arabian desert some thousands of years ago, nor does it give any group license to mistreat and abuse another group. The Palestinians hold the exact same human dignity and are capabe of the same suffering as any other group of humans, including fanatic American Jewish settlers, and given the miserable conditions under which the Israelis make them live, the Palestinians deserve the support of anyone with an ounce of decency, integrity and intellectual honesty.

The cowardly Jews of Europe were led to the slaughter like cattle. They did not fight back. That is why they were never accused of being terrorists. And now they have the luxury of accusing the Palestinians of being terrorists because they never stopped fighting back for the past 100 years.

If the native indigenous Palestinians are terrorists because they are fighting foreign colonizers,

then,

The native indigenous Lebanese were terrorists for fighting 30 years of Palestinian-Syrian occupation. 

The not-so-native American colonists were terrorists for fighting the English.

The native indigenous South African blacks of the African National Congress (ANC) were terrorists .

The native indigenous Algerians of the Front de Libération Nationale were terrorists.

The native indigenous French Résistance were a bunch of terrorists fighting the German occupation.

The native indigenous Amerindians in north America were terrorists and savages.

The native indigenous Amerindians across Latin and South America who are still fighting white Spanish rule today are terrorists.  

The exception to all the above being the wimpy native indigenous Jews of Germany and Europe who did not fight their extermination. Instead, they migrated their incompetence, alienation and hatred from their own native Europe to a less sophisticated Palestine where they implemented the same extermination methods used against them by overpowering European armies. The Jews of Europe and America, with their wealth and knowhow, took advantage of a peaceful, mostly rural, unsophisticated Palestinian population and raped it and plundered it to establish a Western (British-American) colony near the nascent oil fields of the Arabian desert. This is in line with what the British did across the globe: They raped India, they raped China, they raped Palestine, they raped every country and continent they set their feet on, and left behind them torn nations in constant turmoil. Why would the British do differently in Palestine what they did elsewhere? Then the dumb Americans took over.

The story of Anne Frank, the young German girl who spent 2 years holed up in an attic in Amsterdam out of fear of the Germans, is very sad especially that she was eventually deported and killed in a concentration camp. But her ordeal has been elevated by propaganda to the summum of suffering, an exclusive suffering, such that the millions of people who heard her story think that nothing of the sort can happen to other young girls. Yet, her ordeal is nowhere near the suffering of millions of young girls her age in our time. Yes right now, there are literally millions of Anne Franks living horrendous lives across the world. In Palestine itself, imagine the thousands of refugee girls holed up for generations in miserable refugee camps in their own country of Palestine dying every day by hypermilitarized Israeli criminal butchers disguised as a legitimate army fighting terrorists. Anne Frank's ordeal pales in comparison.

In the early 1900s, Lebanon and Palestine were sister nations slowly emerging from under Turkish Ottoman occupation. In many ways the two countries were similar: Cities and towns with all the accoutrements of urban life (banks, hotels, courts of justice, newspapers, museums, an urban elite, etc.), and villages with olive groves, grape vines, and mediterranean climate and traditions. Many Lebanese went to work in Palestine and many Palestinians came to work in Lebanon. Under the Ottomans, there were no borders: It was all part of one huge empire. When WWI ended, nations became countries with borders. The French and the English obtained a mandate from the League of Nations (forerunner of the UN) to lead these new countries into creating institutions.

In Lebanon, the French succeeded in establishing a functioning country between 1920 and 1943, then after the French left, until the late 1960s when the heartache created by the British crooks in Palestine overwhelmed the Lebanese state which welcomed hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees fleeing British-enabled Jewish barbarity and atrocities in Palestine.

In Palestine, the British crooks promised a state to the native Palestinians WHILE at the same time giving the same Palestinian land to European Jewish colonizers (this was thirty years before the Holocaust, so no poor victims escaping Nazi Germany yet) as payback for Jewish bankers funding the British war effort. British deception and imposture are at the heart of the tragedy of Palestine and its repercussions on Lebanon.

 

Individual Freedom and the Sanctity of Religions

From an organizational point of view, organized religions are like any other human association. They have their founding texts (Torah, Koran, Gospels), commentators and influencers (preachers), adherents (the faithful), their rites of passage, their hierarchies, etc. There is really no difference betwen an organized religion and a political party for example. 

From an ideological point of view, one can draw similarities between any given religion and a political or economic ideology. For example, between Christianity and Communism. Going back to the early years of Christianity, Christians in the Roman Empire were like Communists in the 20th century West: underground, persecuted, assassinated, banned and placed on black lists, etc. The early Christians were still not Christians by today's definition, they were a rebellious Jewish sect trying to subvert the institutions of the Roman Empire, just like Communists were trying to do during the Cold War. Digging deeper into that early Christian psyche, the Christians aimed to share everything, dispossess themselves of earthly possessions, etc. all ideas reminiscent of socialist or communist principles. Then again, when the Christians became the rulers of the Roman Empire with Emperor Constantine (circa 340 AD), they and their Church (equivalent of a Revolutionary Central Committee or Politburo) turned into abject dictators and repressive rulers, like Communist regimes of our time: assassinate pagans, destroy their temples, ban their rituals, etc.

Yet, in our world today, religions continue to claim a form of sacrosanctity that, in the opinion of their adherents, shields them from criticism and mockery, supposedly because they invoke a role of a supreme being or God in their ideologies. Even as they are pathetic fabrications and myths imagined by human cultures to explain a world they did not understand, they become inviolable by attaching themselves to God. But anyone with reason can understand that religions ought to be treated like any other human-designed ideology. No one would complain if I criticize or mock Communism or Capitalism or Absolutism or Impressionsim, or any of the thousands of intellectual movements and ideologies whose names end in "...ism". But dare mock or criticize a religion and everyone is offended, even atheists.

We fear religions probably because they have been with us longer than any other byproduct of human culture, but also because religions are grounded in non-falsifiable stories that hold no place for rational arguments. Instead of appealing to our intellect (which would make them falsifiable and subject to discussion), they appeal to our emotions. Like language, religion was born with the human species. Every human culture that ever evolved on earth had a language and a religion. As the twin of language, religion became engrained in our DNA such that we are struck with deep fear at the thought of criticizing any given religion. Now, religions themselves are free to criticize one another, albeit in secret, behind closed doors, and in cryptic academic texts that no one in the street ever sees. As Pope, Benedict XVI did spark controversy when, speaking before a university audience in his native Germany, he cited the words of a Byzantine emperor who characterized some of the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad, Islam’s founder, as “evil and inhuman.” Apologies notwithstanding, his speech wouldn't have been noticed if it was held during a synod or a conclave or other secret meeting that the Church is very fond of. It is only because the criticism was public that it sparked controversy. Same thing with cartoons and Koran and Torah burnings: Muslims, Jews and Christians around the world know what their opponents think of them, but they don't get offended every minute of every hour of every day... They get offended only when the criticism is made public. Which means that they know how vulnerable and flimsy is their "faith", and this cryptic sense of inferiority turns into rage when others say publicly what they themselves know and feel.

Which brings me to the case of the Koran burning in Sweden. The religious dinosaurs and their sycophant politicians, all religions confounded, have rallied together and are up in arms against the country of Sweden. The fact that other Swedes offered to burn the New Testament and the Torah with the objective of treating all three religions equally did not help. 

The case of Sweden is really a conflict between, on one hand, "individual freedom" (inluding the freedom of speech, conscience, and expression) that is a pillar of western democracy, and "community freedom" which had been abandoned by the West after the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason. We have learned not to generalize from the acts of an individual to blame an entire community. "Individual" freedom is not community freedom, nor is it tribal freedom, sectarian freedom, national freedom, nor any other form of freedom that one can imagine. 

For example, in Lebanon there are no individual freedoms as understood in the West. The Lebanese confuse their community freedom for individual freedom. When a Lebanese Christian claims to be free, it is only in opposition to the threat he feels coming from the Muslims, as when he brags that he can toll the church bell on Sunday in spite of the Muslims. He is "free" of Muslim oppression, but in reality he is not free because, as an individual, he remains subject to the taboos and constraints imposed by his own society and church on his own individual freedoms. In many ways, the Christian community in Lebanon is itself a gulag of suspended reason, backward beliefs, superstitions, and an intellectually repressive environment, just as much as the Muslim community is. A Christian in Lebanon who might burn the Gospels is assured of quick death at the hands of Christians, just as would a Muslim who would burn the Koran be killed by his own Muslim community. 

The Lebanese constitution clearly states that the "divine persona" (الذات الإلهية) is untouchable and should never be challenged. The Lebanese like to refer to their rotten democracy as "consensual", I like to refer to it as a "polytheocracy" since it enshrines significant power in the hands of many theocrats (Imams, patriarchs, muftis, bishops, etc...) over their "flocks". Religion in Lebanon is the real seat of dysfunctional governance hidden behind a veneer of a modern civil state. Ignorant people assume that holding elections is the only criterion for which the qualifier of "democracy" is attributed to  a country. Lebanon does hold elections, but they are sectarian in nature and corruption is endemic. "Consensual" democracy essentially means: the results of elections in Lebanon are immediately subverted by the religious and political Mafia bosses who meet and make decisions that have nothing to do with the will of the voters. Similarly, all personal and civil status processes are handled by the religious establishments; civil marriage is prohibited in Lebanon. The country is far, very far, from the model of democracy where the individual, and not the communities, sects or political parties, is the object of democracy.

In the case of Sweden, it is not the government of Sweden which is burning the Koran. It is an individual whose freedoms are constitutionally protected, including his public burning of any book, whether a religious text or otherwise. In fact, the latest Koran burner is a Muslim individual who has the freedom to criticize his own religion, something he can do in Sweden, but not in Lebanon or any of the backward religious so-called democracies. Muslims around the world should take a deep breath and not jump to grandiose conclusions. Around the world and throughout history, people and governments have burned books they didn't like. As we speak, in many Muslim countries, the attacks on non-Muslim religions are daily occurrences on talk shows, radio shows, and preachings. The first page of the first verse of the Koran, the FatiHa, is itself an insult to Jews (المغضوب عليهم; those who incurred God's wrath), and Christians (الضالين; those who went astray by deviating from the strict Jewish monotheism practiced by the pre-Islamic Arab tribes).

Restricting criticism or mockery is a slippery slope. In many backward countries, a joke about a president or speaker of parliament or any public figure is increasingly becoming grounds for prosecution and punishment. Which goes to show that public figures in these backward countries are elevated to near divine status, whereas it is a nearly compulsory duty in Western countries to mock and criticize public figures, at the very least to keep them nervous and deter them of any inclination to abuse their power. Public officials in western countries know from the start of their careers that they will live with jokes, mockery, debasement, etc. They are after all "servants" of the people. But not in places like Lebanon where politicians and public figures are treated like biblical prophets and saints with public worship and untouchable aura. Is there anything more pagan when Muslims shout at their political leader, "With our soul, with our blood, we sacrifice for you"? 

The borderline between human and divine is very thin and almost non-existent in backward countries where leaders are elevated to the ranks of prophets and saints. Which is indeed the foundational difference between western forms and eastern forms of the same religion. Didn't the nature of Christ - was he a human who become God? or was he a God who became human? - establish the chasm that divided eastern and western christianity? In the East, anyone can become a hero, a prophet, a saint, and even a god. Just as in the ancient Greek pantheon. But not in the West where in recent centuries, regardless of how much wealth or power you have or how much you starve yourself, you will never become a god or a saint. European monarchs never claimed divine descent, though they still claim their rule is by divine mandate. Here in Lebanon, political figures and warlords who met their demise on the battlefield or by assassination become mythical figures. But isn't this how early Christian zealots became martyrs? Just because they were mauled by a beast in a Roman arena?

Given all the preceding, if I, a Lebanese-American, decided one day to stand on the sidewalk in New York's Wall Street and burn a copy of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (1776) or David Hume's Of the Balance of Trade (1752), would the New York Stock Exchange be so offended as to dispatch thousands of stock brokers to demonstrate in front of the Lebanese Consulate? The answer can be found in comparing the role played by economics and finance in the development of the human species with the role of religion. Despite the fact that economics and finance have also caused disasters in human history, the vast majority of humans still subscribes to them. The Bronze Age bullshitness of religions, however, is increasingly seen as deeply divisive and harmful to humans, though many numskulls still allow themselves to be convinced of the value of the illusions and fake promises of religions.

Why Israel is a Racist State

Modified from "https://www.yahoo.com/news/why-pramila-jayapal-call-israel-083139885.html"

Fri, July 21, 2023

Last Saturday, in what was widely referred to as a “gaffe,” Congressional Progressive Caucus chair Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash) referred to Israel as a “racist state.” She was responding to pro-Palestinian protesters disrupting a Netroots Nation panel and trying to reassure them that she shared their concerns about Israel’s many violations of the human, civil, and democratic rights of its Palestinian population.

Jayapal was immediately rebuked by all of the top-ranking Democrats in the House—Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries, Democratic Whip Katherine Clark, Democratic Caucus Chair Pete Aguilar and Vice Chair Ted Lieu. On Sunday, she issued a groveling apology to those who had been “hurt” by her words—but by then it was too late. On Tuesday, the House voted by a crushing bipartisan majority of 412 to 9 for a resolution affirming America’s continuing alliance with Israel and declaring that Israel is “not a racist or apartheid state.”

That would be news to Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and even Israeli human rights groups like B’Tselem—all of which have used the word “apartheid” to describe Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. Things have gotten so bad in recent decades that more than a third of American Jews under the age of 40 tell pollsters they agree with the statement, “Israel is an apartheid state.”

None of that matters to either Republicans or centrist Democrats. Outside of the House’s tiny “Squad” of Bernie Sanders-aligned leftists, Democratic support for the resolution was all but unanimous. It was a depressing outcome for anyone who might have held out hope that the taboo against recognition of the Palestinian plight had been lifted in mainstream American politics. On this subject, for all Republican and most Democratic lawmakers, 2023 might as well be 1967.

The Merriam-Webster definition of a “gaffe” is a “social or diplomatic blunder” or a “noticeable mistake.” But almost forty years ago the political journalist Michael Kinsley offered a definition that captures cases like the Jayapal Incident perfectly. “A gaffe,” Kinsley wrote in the June 18, 1984, edition of the New Republic, “is when a politician tells the truth.”

Jayapal might not have said that Israel is a “racist state” if not for her politician’s instinct to talk down protesters by presenting herself as being on their side. But what serious argument can be made that Israel isn’t an exclusionary ethnostate?

Several hundred thousand Palestinians were driven out of the country during Israel’s 1948 War of Independence—a process that it’s hard to coherently describe without using terms like “ethnic cleansing.” The children and grandchildren of those 1948 refugees are still denied the right to return to Israel while American Jews are free to immigrate to Israel and become full citizens under the country’s Law of Return.

Most Palestinians who lived within Israel’s post-1948 borders were given Israeli citizenship, although these citizens—unlike Israeli Jews—were kept under martial law from 1949 to 1966. During the Six-Day War in 1967, Israel seized control of the West Bank and Gaza. Palestinians who live in these territories have never been granted citizenship. A Palestinian child on the West Bank born the day after that war ended would be a senior citizen today—except that they wouldn’t actually be a “citizen” of the country in which they’ve lived their entire life.

In 1993, Bill Clinton became the first American president to implicitly recognize the legitimacy of at least some Palestinian complaints by hosting Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat at the White House to sign the Oslo Peace Accords.

Those accords were supposed to start a process that would lead to the creation of an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. That never happened and the current Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has explicitly stated many times over the course of the last several years that there will never be an independent Palestinian state. And of course he doesn’t want to destroy the “Jewish character” of Israel by giving citizenship to Palestinians on the West Bank.

The plan—officially, according to the prime minister—is for these people to continue to be subject to military rather than civilian law, continue to be denied the right to vote in Israeli elections, and never get a state of their own. What else could you call that but apartheid?

Some supporters of the congressional resolution emphasized that Palestinians who live within Israel’s pre-1967 borders have voting rights, and that there are Palestinian citizens of Israel who serve in the country’s parliament—the Knesset. But I seriously doubt that you could find one of these Palestinian Knesset members who would be willing to affirm that Israel is anything but an apartheid state.

In fact, the Nation-State Law he championed in 2018, which was upheld by the country’s high court in 2021, lays out with no ifs, ands, or buts that “the right of national self-determination in Israel is unique to the Jewish people.” Netanyahu himself explained what meant in 2019. “Israel is not a state of all its citizens,” the prime minister wrote. “According to the basic nationality law we passed, Israel is the nation state of the Jewish people—and only it.”

Again: What else could you call that but apartheid? Imagine an American or Canadian politician saying that the U.S. or Canada should be a state of only white Christians rather than all of its citizens. Even Donald Trump would call that politician a fascist. But for every Republican and nearly every non-“Squad” Democrat in the House, these realities don’t exist. The decades-long bad joke of a “peace process” and its absolute, official abandonment by the Israeli government might as well not have happened. Four hundred and twelve of the 421 members of Congress who voted on the resolution essentially jammed their fingers in their collective ears and said, “La la la la! I’m not listening!”

Seven of the nine “no” votes were provided by Squad members—Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), Ilhan Omar (D-MN), Ayanna Pressley (D-MA), Jamaal Bowman (D-NY), Cori Bush (D-MO), and Summer Lee (D-PA). An eighth came from ideologically adjacent Delia Ramirez (D-IL) and the final vote came from André Carson (D-IN)—perhaps not coincidentally, one of only three Muslims—along with Tlaib and Omar—currently serving in the House.

The full enormity of the House’s rejection of Palestinian humanity is underscored by the fact that the dissent wasn’t even unanimous within the Squad—Greg Casar (D-TX) was conspicuously missing from this very short list. And of course Jayapal herself, who started it all, joined almost all of the rest of her colleagues—too spineless even to vote against a resolution implicitly rebuking her.

The Oslo Accords were signed on the White House lawn in September 1993—almost exactly thirty years ago. Netanyahu started openly saying that there would never under any circumstances be an independent Palestinian state and Palestinians would just have to resign themselves to live and die as non-citizen Israeli subjects eight years ago. One after another of the human rights organizations that are treated as authoritative within American discourse when they condemn abuses by countries like Russia and China have lined up in recent years to call Israel an apartheid state. Somehow, though, the stance on Israel of nearly all Democrats, never mind Republicans, is frozen in amber like the fly in Jurassic Park.

Israel’s system of ethnoreligious apartheid, like all systems of oppression, will fall sooner or later. But America’s political parties seem hell-bent on delaying justice for as long as possible. 

[Hanibaal adds]: The Reason? In a twisted circular form of thinking, Americans have been indoctrinated by the malevolent and ignorant US media and Hollywood to fear the label "anti-semitic" they would impose on them, just as they were conditioned to demonize the socialism that every single European and non-European ally of the US practice every day in their political lives. US society is, intellectually speaking, one huge totalitarian concentration camp that is on the leash of the Zionist and capitalist lobbies, one in which intellectual elites are despised while brainless athletism is elevated above divinity status. Zionists and capitalist corporations want the American public to be stupid so they can manipulate them at will. Imagine that Americans are brainwashed into thinking that consuming and accumulating debt is a patriotic act. 

Totalitarian systems do not allow middle ground; they allow only one line of thought: You either subscribe to it and like a slave live the American dream, or you turn violent, radical and extremist as is abundantly evident nowadays in every facet of American society.

 

How Lebanese Civil Wars Start: Druze Wahhab vs. Christian Abi-Fadel

A punching match erupted yesterday on live Lebanese television (MTV's "It's About Time" program). A heated argument between Christian political analyst Simon Abi Fadel and pro-Syrian Druze politician Wiam Wahhab, turned into a fight. 

Wahhab is already under US sanctions, and the show was centred around the seemingly imminent threat of imposing western (US and EU) sanctions on Lebanese politicians accused of obstructing the presidential election process in Parliament, most notably the pro-Syrian Shiite dinosaur Speaker of Parliament and warlord leader of the pro-Syrian Amal movement, Nabih Berri.

When Abi-Fadel reminded him that he - Wahhab - is already under US sanctions, the latter replied that "the sanctions are beneath my shoe" (متل سرمايتي). Simon Abi-Fadel then retorted that "your shoe is your problem", which inflamed Wahhab who proceeded to launch the first blow by throwing a glass of water at Abi Fadel, igniting a full-blown fistfight within the studio. The chaos prompted the audience to intervene, leading the show’s host to halt the live broadcast for safety reasons.

The fight resumed outside the studio, prompting the Lebanese Army to intervene. In Lebanon, the police is essentially non-existent. There are four or five security apparatuses, each affiliated with a sectarian political movement, which makes the use of these security forces potentially dangerous if they have to separate rivals from two different sects. So, the army, which cannot defend the country's borders against Israeli harassment in the south and Syrian refugee lawlessness and smuggling of goods, arms and mercenaries along the Syrian border (east and north of the country), the army serves as a domestic police force.

This fight is a symptom of the cancers that ravage the Lebanese body politic, and it is incidents like this one, in addition to the lawlessness and inapplicability of the laws for fear of triggering a civil war, that end up raising the chances of an actual civil war. 

For example, I imagine the Druze "men" of Wahhab cooking up a scheme to "eliminate" Abi-Fadel. It's happened before. So many people - politicians, dissidents, journalists, academicians, finance experts, etc..- have been killed, murdered, assassinated... for having expressed displeasing opinions about Syria, Iran, Hezbollah, etc. And no one has ever been found guilty or prosecuted. Only two such crimes have ever been exposed: The assassination of President-elect Bashir Gemayel in 1982 by a pro-Syrian member of the Syrian Socialist Nationalist Party (SSNP) still hiding in Syria, and the assassination of then Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in 2005 which the Special Tribunal for Lebanon concluded was perpetrated by pro-Syrian members of the Iranian militia of Hezbollah, also hiding in Hezbollah-controlled territory inside Lebanon.

Just google a list of assassinations in Lebanon since the late 1960s and early 1970s to date, and you'll see the monumental terror that Syria has inflicted on Lebanon during those decades. This is the same Syria - under the vulgar and criminal Assad regime - that the West admired as "cunning" and "keeping his word", with which the American war criminal Secretary of State Henry Kissinger made a deal in 1974 to let Syria occupy Lebanon in exchange for leaving Israel alone on the Golan, with which the other war criminal George HW Bush and his lackey James Baker made a deal to crush the last free Lebanese government in the late 1980s and seize all of Lebanon, the same Assad regime that operated the western hostage taking during the 1980s in Lebanon to extract every possible concession from a cowardly West.... Too much to list exhaustively here. But this is the same regime which, after having murdered half a million of its own people and destroyed nearly all Syrian cities with the help of Vladimir Putin, has been recently rehabilitated and forgiven by the filthy Arabs and probably soon by an obsequious and deferential West.

The crescendo of assassinations and incidents is ongoing, and given the virtual collapse of the Lebanese state and its institutions, we might be witnessing the disappearance of Lebanon as we know it, thanks primarily to the collusion between the West (fearful to displease the Muslim Arabs) and regimes like Assads. 

I applaud Lebanon's Christians who, despite their own backwardness, are standing firm this time. No more compromises as they did over the past five decades, indeed over the past century. No more sacrificing the rule of law, no more back payments and shady deals, to avoid civil strife and evade pressures. The Christians continue to call for a neutral Lebanon, a decent normal country that harbors no harm to anyone, but the Muslims continue to drift and drag everyone into every fucking Arab or Muslim cause that raises its head around the world. Not because the Lebanese Muslims genuinely believe in these causes, but only to harass the Christians and keep them subdued into a Dhimmi community. "Dhimmi" is the Arabic term ذمّي for those non-Muslims whom Muslim rulers deem worthy of being tolerated - instead of being killed - as second degree citizens of the Muslim State. Lebanon's Christians do not want to become Dhimmis like Egypt's or Iraq's Christians, always living on the edge of disaster at the mercy of the Muslims. Lebanon's Christians want to remain free. 

The summer season is in full swing. The mercantile-minded Lebanese keep things quiet when tourists and expatriates come to spend a few dollars in this miserable place on earth. But when the tourists and expatriates go back home, when there are no more dollars to be made, then all hell might break loose. 

The West remains wavering and hesitant. It always says it is against Iran, its nuclear ambitions, against its theocracy and repression of the Iranian people. It is even working with the Saudis to resolve the Yemen war which Iran started. But for some reason (Israel maybe?) it remains subservient to Syria and its proxies in Lebanon - the Shiites of Syrian-paid Nabih Berri (Amal Movement), and the Shiites of Iranian-paid Hassan Nasrallah (Hezbollah). Why not deal a blow to Iran in Lebanon? It will weaken both the Iranians and the Syrians. But dirty Israel might need those presumed threats to keep milking every ounce of sympathy from a guilt-inflicted West. Palestine paid. Time to make Lebanon pay.

 

Israeli raid on Jenin: Continued aggression on Palestinian refugee camp

Modified from a guest opinion appearing July 16, 2023 in the Asheville Citizen Times, North Carolina. It shows that average Americans with little knowledge of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict but brainwashed by the Zionist-submissive American media, are finally understanding what the conflict is about.

Haunted by images of July 3 Israeli attack on Palestinian Jenin refugee camp

Where were you on July 3 when Israel raided the Jenin refugee camp? I know where I was ― on the West Bank in Bethlehem, 60 miles south of Jenin, which is at the northern tip of the West Bank. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the area, the West Bank is a Palestinian Arab section walled off by the Israeli government. When I say walled off, I mean there is a wall several stories high built by Israel with the intent of keeping the Palestinians on the other side. It is a harsh looking, intimidating wall with barbed wire and entry points staffed by armed Israeli military personnel.

On the Palestinian side of the wall, there is painted artistic graffiti asking for peace and reconciliation. Israel has nuclear capacity and an extremely well equipped army. This is an army that defeated a half dozen neighboring Arab countries in six days in 1967. At that time Israel took the Golan Heights from Syria, the West Bank from Jordan, and the Gaza Strip and the Sinai from Egypt. The Palestinians do not have a standing army, navy or air force. The Palestinians have no heavy weaponry. It is unclear why Israel finds it necessary to invade a refugee camp. It is true that the Jenin refugee camp is known for its militancy but militancy in the face of occupation is not uncommon. The Hebrew people had a similar reaction to the Roman occupation some 2,000 years ago.

We were in a restaurant in Bethlehem when the news of the invasion broke. A Palestinian news network provided the coverage on TV. They did not shy away from showing the carnage. I will be haunted for a long time by a picture of a woman lying face down between two parked cars. I assume she was dead. So why must we ponder a conflict between people that results in death?

This can be traced back to the Zionist movement that began in Europe as a colonial enterprise based on Jewish nationalism that was trying to imitate the other European colonial nationalisms and their empires during the 19th century. The Zionists first considered Uganda and Argentina as places where the Jewish people could establish a colonial empire. Then by the time of World War I when the Ottoman Empire collapsed, Britain had borrowed lots of money from Jewish bankers to fund its war effort. So when Britain was given a mandate by the League of Nations to help the Palestinians build a state over their land (just like the French were given a mandate over neighboring Lebanon), Britain violated the mandate and betrayed the indigenous Palestinians. It awarded the European Zionists a license (Balfour Declaration) to build a colonial empire in Palestine, on the same land where the Palestinians were supposed to build their state with help from Britain. Granted that the ancestors of the Jews, the Hebrews, once existed in Palestine, but that was 2,000 years earlier. The Zionists had no fundamental rights to Palestine which was therefore sold by Britain to wealthy European Jews who wanted an empire.

Hitler’s persecution of the Jews during World War II transformed the Zionist colonial enterprise into a desire for a Jewish homeland to accommodate the Jewish survivors of the Holocaust whom neither Britain nor the United States wanted. So the European Jews took it upon themselves to displace the Palestinian people and steal their land. Let’s be clear, Judaism defines a religion. It does not define a nation. There are Arab Jews, Persian Jews, Indian Jews, African Jews, American Jews, and European Jews. All these people share a religion, but they have very different cultures. There is no such thing as a Jewish people, just as there is no such thing as a Christian people, a Hindu people, or a Muslim people.

We need to abandon the idea that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a Muslim-Jewish conflict, for it is not. It is not a Jewish-Arab conflict as many indigenous people who embrace Judaism as a religion and/or culture, will also embrace their Arabic ancestry. These perceptions cloud what is really taking place ― an indigenous population is resistant to being controlled by people who are not indigenous to the area. The situation is not too different from what the Native Americans faced when Europeans decided to settle the Western Hemisphere. With the exception of a few indigenous Palestinians who accepted occupation by the invading foreign Jewish population in 1948, the indigenous people of Palestine do not have citizenship. They have no voter rights. While the Jewish settlements on the West Bank, populated by Jews from foreign countries, primarily the United States, have a voice in the affairs of the Israeli government, the surrounding indigenous Palestinian population does not. The indigenous Palestinians are an occupied population. When an indigenous population is occupied by a non-indigenous population, resistance and radicalization become a natural occurrence. That same condition existed in the pre-Constitution days of the United States, which resulted in our founding fathers declaring independence from British rule. That intent was made clear in the Declaration of Independence.

The present day conflict between the Israeli government and the Palestinian people is not a religious conflict nor is it a conflict in culture. It is a conflict that arises from the occupation of an indigenous population by an non-indigenous population. The Hebrew people resisted Rome and the Palestinians are resisting a government of non-indigenous people. It is that simple.

 

 

Zionist and Islamist Theocracies: No to "Holy Book" Burning

Having sowed murder, hatred, and mayhem for millennia, the religious dinosaurs now in power in many theocracies - Islamist in Iran, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere; Jewish in the British-American colony of Israel; Christian in Russia and some western countries; Hindu in India; etc. - finally agree on one thing, namely to circle the wagons and come together in defense of their archaic beliefs that have plagued and continue to plague humanity. In Lebanon, Muslim and Christian religious neanderthals slaughter one another every other generation, but rally together against proposals for civil laws of the personal status (marriage, divorce, inheritance, etc.), to preserve their abusive control and financial gains.

I have been wondering, after the Koran burning in Stockholm by a Christian Iraqi, whether someone will deploy equal opportunity "Holy Book" burning to other religions rooted in the ignorance and abject primitivity of humanity's Bronze Age. Now someone seems to have seized the idea, and the Stockholm police has taken the decision to allow the burning of the Judeo-Christian Bible and the Jewish Torah in front of the Israeli Embassy.  

Just as the religious dinosaur dictators of the Islamic world protested, it is now the turn of the Zionists to protest the decision, likely to be followed by the Church's leading homo imbecilis. When the Koran was burned, the Zionist colonizers of Palestine marveled at the event since they love to amalgamate Palestinian national liberation movements with Islamist ideologies as a way to discredit the legitimate aspirations of the native indigenous Palestinian people. Thanks to Zionist and Jewish propaganda, all Palestinians are portrayed as Muslim terrorists regardless of whether they are Islamists or secular freedom fighters.

Now that his trashy ficitional Torah is on the line, and hounded by his radical ultra-religious terrorist right-wing ministers, Benyamin Netanyahu came out yesterday speaking like an ecumenical prophet. "The sacred books of all religions must be respected," he said, adding, "I strongly condemn the decision of the authorities in Sweden to allow the burning of a Bible book in front of the Israeli embassy," he said in a tweet. "The State of Israel takes very seriously this shameful decision that damages the Holy of Holies of the Jewish people."

Israeli President Isaac Herzog doubled down on the only thing that unifies these religious cro-magnons: Protect their barbaric heritages of Bronze Age vintage. They have spent much of the past few thousand years hating one another, claiming that theirs is the real word of God, while others were blasphemous heretics, waging pogroms, wars and massacres.... "As the President of the State of Israel," Herzog said, "I condemned the burning of the Quran, sacred to the Muslim world over, and I am now heartbroken that the same fate awaits a Jewish Bible, the eternal book of the Jewish people." Too bad, Isaac. Does your bigotery extends to your "people" who murder Muslims every day in the Palestine you stole from them? The world has evolved, religious texts are not what they used to be and should no longer be taken literally or seriously. They are mere relics of our barbaric past. Grow up and come down from the trees.

"Permitting the defacement of sacred texts is not an exercise in freedom of expression; it is blatant incitement and an act of pure hate," Herzog added. "The whole world must join together in clearly condemning this repulsive act." I'm sorry, Isaac, but your own "holy men" spew venom and hatred against other religions every day, yet you protect them because of "freedom of expression".

Apparently, burning one pound of paper containing fictional garbage verbiage written by ignorant people in the Arabian desert thousands of years ago, is much more revolting than invading someone else's country, massacring its indigenous people and driving them into refugee camps, then demolishing the homes of those who protest and defend themselves against Zionist racism and barbarity. 

All three monotheistic cults claim to have the "true" word of God. 

The Jewish claim is that God made a mercantile deal with the Jewish people: I chose you as my favorite pet people in a grandiose racist act of discrimination against all other people, including my own other son Ismail's lineage, as long as you worship me rather than a golden statue of a calf. I promise you an unflagging libido with which to populate the earth. What an impressive deal by which said God split oceans, rained frogs, and ordered the Jews to massacre the Canaanite Palestinians - men, women and children - and take their land. It's all written in the fucking Torah that Herzog and Netanyahu are defending. How ethical of the Jewish God! 

The Christian claim is that God, now bored with his pet people incessantly unhappy and nagging at the Wall, came up with a fantastic Hollywoodian plot: Having failed at getting Abraham to kill his own son Isaac, God decided to take matters in his own hands. He subliminally impregnated a Jewish virgin woman who gave birth to God's own son Jesus - Got that? God's son had to be a Jew; how else could it be? God would not come down from his arrogant almightiness to choose an Arab or a Chinese or a Hindu or a Roman for a son! In fact, God's leading prophet Abraham shagged his Arab maid who gave him Ismail, but in his racist Jewish view, he chased the illegitimate bastard into the desert pending his belated impregnation of 99-years old Sarah who then gave him Isaac. Now the Jewish virgin impregnated by God magically remained a virgin after both impregnation and delivery. Then God, as if impervious to basic morality, had his Jewish son Jesus tortured and killed to redeem the sins of his favorite pet people, a guilt-inflicting burden later extended by the Romans to all of humanity. The imagination of early church "fathers" (whom I suspect bequeathed fornication with children to all the priestly generations ever since) was so fertilized by the wild stories and mythology of the Greek-Roman pantheon, that they added miracles, angels, resurrection from death, and vacuous promises of eternal life after death, all thanks to a few drops of water on one's head and drinking wine miraculously camouflaging blood. A great blood-curdling plot for a scary movie for Mel Gibson and Martin Scorcese to take up.

Finally, the third monotheistic Semitic club, Islam, claims that the Koran is the final prophecy. Mohammad saw the long list of prophets and messiahs and all the potential for this bloody Jewish saga to go on endlessly, so he decided that he himself is the "seal" (last) of the Jewish prophets, and that Islam would be the last of the monotheistic hallucinations of a few Jewish tribes of the Arabian desert. Now to make sure this masquerade ends, he ordered that anyone who did not subscribe to this most recent of desert hallucinations be put to death. He thus created another exclusive Semitic club of the divine message. According to Muslim theology, Islam is "the only true path", while its predecessor Christians were fooled into believing in resurrection, virgin birth, and the other Roman-pagan beliefs, and Jews have gone astray and God's wrath is in on them.

The Minister of Foreign Affairs of the British-American colony of Israel, Eli Cohen, a radical Jewish terrorist, also joined the chorus of religious barbarians: "Burning a Torah scroll is a crime of hate, provocation, and serious harm to the Jewish people and tradition," he said in a statement Friday. "I call on the authorities in Sweden to prevent this despicable event and not to allow the burning of a Torah scroll." He forgot to stick the generic barcode label of "anti-semitic" onto the presumptive author of the Torah burning. Opportunity lost for now, but there are so many opportunities to stick that run-of-the-mill label around. Even Zionists have been accused of antisemitism. What gives?

If humanity made any progress over these millennia, it is precisely that the intrinsic value of a human being and any life for that matter is much higher on the scale of morality than the fairy tales, violence and igorance spewed by God and his prophets in these "holy" texts. If these texts have any value, it is that they serve as a repository of our stupidity and ignorance when we, humans, imagined zombies and ghosts in the sky choosing us as their favorites over other people, watching us, judging us, and deciding our fate. We knew very little back then about the reality of matter and existence and our place in the universe. Now that we know a bit more, we should have the courage to accept that these religious texts are, one, nothing more than a miserable and lame attempt at understanding the world, and two, that they are intended to create exclusive clubs whose "holy texts" are better than those of other clubs, and as such have served as pretexts to wage wars and genocides. Of course, each of the religious clubs claim that they have God on their side. Their prophets, rabbis, imams, messiahs, popes... claim to know what's on God's mind, which is usually to comfort them into their own self-proclaimed superiority over the other club's "holy text". The abomination of these postures is that they relegate the value of a human being to that of a disposable item (sacrifice, martyrdom, etc.)

For now, we wait for the burning of the Torah and Bible in Stockholm. We also await the burning of the Vedas, Upanisads, and Puranas of the Hindu religion, which would be a very festive and colorful event. If the Torah burning does take place, the terrorist Jewish squatters who occupy Palestine might go on a rampage against a few Palestinian villages blinded by the belief they share with Recep Tayyip Erdogan, namely that Sweden is full of Palestinian terrorists. In that hateful religious dementia, the Jewish foreign terrorists are like their brethren, the radical terrorist Muslim hotheads and the dumb American evangelicals of the Southern United States.