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?”

To MBS: Do not Normalize Before Palestine is a Free State

Faced with the dismantling of the construct of a "democratic" Israel, the hypocritical American poodles of the Zionist lobby are licking the feet of every ruler in the Mideast to "normalize" with Israel before it is too late.

At a time when Israel is ruled like Iran by a horde of ultra-religious extremist terrorists, it is a slap in the face of those in the region who sympathize with the plight of the Palestinian people. 

The decadent Gulf emirates have abandoned Palestine by normalizing with Israel. They themselves emerged from under British colonial boots not that long ago, having remained British colonies as late as the 1960s. Those emirates are all artifical creations of British colonialism, having been outposts for British trade and domination of the Indian Ocean. Saddam Hussein was not that wrong in believing that Kuwait was sliced off Iraq for the sole purpose of keeping a British colonial foothold at the nexus of the Arab oil fields and the trade routes to India. They still behave like former colonized peoples.When asked, they obey their masters: They establish naval bases for the British and the Americans. They are themselves occupied nations. And when the dumb jackass Donald Trump blackmailed them, they complied and normalized with Israel, against the wishes of their own peoples. 

Next target is Saudi Arabia and the timing is of the essence. The Americans are visiting Riyadh as we speak to demand, to insist, that Mohamed Bin Salman (MBS) normalize with Israel, without any consideration for the increasing Israeli repression and land theft in a fast disappearing Palestine. The Americans are offering MBS many enticements in military guarantees, arms purchases, trade, and even uranium enrichment assistance, as always for "peaceful" purposes to begin with, but only a pathetic "facilitation" of visits with the West Bank of Palestine. No mention whatsoever of any pressure on Fascist Israel to guarantee a Free Palestinian State.

If MBS is a fair ruler, he will not normalize with Israel. If his objective is to lead the Arab region to greater openness and liberalization, to development and progress, he cannot erase the crime perpetrated by the West against Palestine by the establishment of the colony of Israel. Any normalization with the Jewish theocracy should be accompanied by the establishment of a genuinely free Palestinian State inside coherent borders and without any Israeli control. Oslo and Madrid have died because they were terrible agreements that fractured Palestine into Bantustans, and because the Israeli outlaws lie and continue to flaunt international law by occupying, terrorizing and dehumanizing the Palestinian people, making them live like caged animals, stealing their lands, assassinating them, all the while accusing them of being the perpetrators. How can anyone believe the criminal who presents himself as the victim while accusing his victim of being the perpetrator. We stopped doing it with rape victims, why do we continue doing it with Palestine and its Jewish rapists?

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?]

-----------------

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.

------------------

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.

 

In Jenin, Palestinians refuse to go gentle into that good night

Opinion

Robert Azzi

Portsmouth Herald

July 27, 2023

"And you, my father, there on the sad height," wrote Dylan Thomas, "Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray. Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light."

There are no good nights in Jenin. There are nights when Israel bombs Jenin with American-made fighter jets, and other nights when one stays up worrying about when bombs might again fall on their families.

Let there be rage.

On July 3, 2023, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu approved an extensive military campaign against Palestinians living in the Jenin refugee camp on the Israeli-occupied West Bank, stating as a pretense for the assault that Israel was attacking “the most legitimate target on the planet - people who would annihilate our country.”

The Jenin camp is a squalid city of poverty, high unemployment, and raging resentments against their Israeli occupiers. Built in 1953, it is one of dozens of refugee camps designed to house most of the 750,000 Palestinians displaced from their homes during the Arab-Israeli War of 1948, which Israelis call their War of Independence and which Palestinians call Al Nakba - The Catastrophe.

The Palestinians Netanyahu claimed Israel was targeting were not resistance fighters "who would annihilate [Israel]." No, it appears he was targeting Palestinian groups like Islamic Jihad and the Jenin-based Lion’s Den, resistance fighters whose targets include illegal Israeli squatters and occupiers of Palestinian territory on the West Bank; fighters resisting home demolitions, land expropriation, and expansion of illegal settlements.

Under such a pretense the apartheid state of Israel in July attacked the refugee camp of 17,000 residents packed into a quarter of a square mile with aircraft, drones, military forces and bulldozers. It sealed off the camp, attacked it, and destroyed roads and buildings and crucial infrastructure for water and electricity as collective punishment.

Netanyahu's invasion - which killed 12 Palestinians, wounded hundreds, and displaced thousands while causing wanton damage to residences and public infrastructure, came just two weeks after Israeli national security minister, Itamar Ben Gvir, said: “There needs to be a full settlement here. We have to settle the land of Israel and at the same time need to launch a military campaign, blow up buildings, assassinate terrorists. Not one, or two, but dozens, hundreds, or if needed, thousands.”

Let there be rage.

“I heard you in the other room asking your mother, 'Mama, am I a Palestinian?' Ghassan Kanafani wrote in "Men in the Sun and Other Palestinian Stories." "When she answered 'Yes' a heavy silence fell on the whole house... I knew, however, that a distant homeland was being born again: hills, olive groves, dead people, torn banners and folded ones, all cutting their way into a future of flesh and blood and being born in the heart of another child ...”

Let there be rage.

The truth is that the battle is not just about Jenin, just as it wasn't just about South Africa or about Ukraine.

As Prime Minister Netanyahu has said: “Israel is not a state of all its citizens … Israel is the nation state of the Jewish people – and them alone,” and the truth is that today his government is trying to annihilate Palestinian resistance [against] occupation, on behalf of settler colonialists who daily build illegal settlements, destroy Palestinian crops and deny the Palestinian people the right to dignity and respect.

“For a colonized people the most essential value, because the most concrete, is first and foremost the land: the land which will bring them bread and, above all, dignity.” Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth.

Let's be clear: Under international law, the Palestinian West Bank, along with East Jerusalem, is all occupied territory, in spite of the fact that Israel has built illegal colonies across the land with the intention of annexing them to Israel.

Today, protected by United States policy and 3.9 billions of dollars annually, Netanyahu's government represents a nation which, according to international and Israeli human rights organizations, including B’Tselem, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International, is practicing apartheid against the Palestinian people.

As former Israeli Environment Minister Yossi Sarid once pulished in an OpEd in an the Israeli newspaper: “What acts like apartheid, is run like apartheid and harasses like apartheid, is not a duck — it is apartheid.”

And as former Israeli Education Minister Shulamit Aloni published in the Israeli website Ynet in 2006. “The state of Israel practices its own, quite violent, form of apartheid with the native Palestinian population.”

It's a loser's game: What Israel, as the last settler colony of the 20th century, refuses to recognize is that resistance to colonial repression and systems of oppression and humiliation grow so desperate and intense that the state is unable to control the outcome, as in Algeria where, in 1962 after 132 years of occupation, the French were driven from power.

“Do you know, Mother, that Haj Salem was buried alive in his home? Does he tell you stories in heaven now? I wish I had had a chance to meet him," Susan Abulhawa wrote in "Mornings in Jenin." "To see his toothless grin and touch his leathery skin. To beg him, as you did in your youth, for a story from our Palestine. He was over one hundred years old, Mother. To have lived so long, only to be crushed to death by a bulldozer. Is this what it means to be Palestinian?”

I am a supporter of BDS, a movement formed by Palestinian civil society organizations that calls for boycotts, divestment and sanctions (BDS) as a form of non-violent pressure on Israel. It's a movement that worked against South African apartheid and it will, over time, work against Israel.

I am not drawn to Palestine by ethnicity or faith, by love of falafel and musakhan. I am drawn by a sense of justice, by a refusal to remain silent in the face of injustice, by my understanding that Palestinians as as worthy of respect, dignity and liberation as Ukrainians and South Africans.

I cannot go on living my privileged life - enriched by the laments and cautions of Franz Fanon, Ghassan Kanafani, Susan Abulhawar, Dylan Thomas and so many others - without acting on my beliefs - and protected by my First Amendment rights.

"Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light."

Let there be rage.

Robert Azzi, a photographer and writer who lives in Exeter, New Hampshire, can be reached at theother.azzi@gmail.com. His columns are archived at theotherazzi.wordpress.com.

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.