The Pope seems in more danger in Israel than he was in Lebanon

[Originally posted at NOW]

Around three years ago, while doing some desktop research on religious extremism, I signed up for the mailing list of the Christians United for Israel (CUFI) organization, an influential American fundamentalist outfit (boasting over a million members) that advocates the total colonization of historic Palestine by Jewish settlers, to whom God eternally granted the land in the Book of Genesis.

It’s been an invaluable window into the underworld of Christian Zionism ever since, regularly dispatching Christmas greetings from Benjamin Netanyahu; invitations to conference calls with Glenn Beck and Michele Bachmann and; above all else, reminders of the multiple options available to me for making tax-deductible cash donations.

What it takes great care not to disclose, however, are the actual realities of the Christian situation on the ground in the Holy Land today. There is curious silence, for instance, on the fact that Israeli troops occupy the land of the world’s oldest Christian community – the Palestinian one – whose access to religious sites in Bethlehem and, particularly, Jerusalem is subject to the whim of a foreign military authority. Nor is there mention of the steady rise of Jewish fundamentalist bigotry against Christians, which sees churches regularly defaced by fanatics (“Jesus is garbage” read a slogan sprayed on a Jerusalem church last week) and is officially represented in parliament: sent a copy of the New Testament by Christian well-wishers in 2012, MK Michael Ben Ari tore the thing up and threw it in the bin, calling it an “abominable book” that belonged “in the garbage can of history.”

These omissions of detail can often occur with unfortunate timing. Thus, my latest receipt from CUFI, sent six days ago, tells me that:

“The freest Christians and Muslims in the Middle East are the Christian and Muslim citizens of the Jewish state of Israel […] While Christians throughout the Arab world are being bombed, shot and decapitated, the Christian population of Israel can worship in complete safety.”

Which is rather odd, because the Israeli Haaretz newspaper reported last week that anti-Christian hate in Israel has grown so toxic that police fear a “massive hate crime” is being planned by Jewish fundamentalists to coincide with Pope Francis’ visit to Jerusalem later this month; something Christian patriarchates in the city say authorities are doing almost nothing to forestall. Indeed, the only discernible action taken by police so far has been the removal of a sign welcoming Francis to the Old City – lest the fanatics deem it a provocation!

Incidentally, this makes for an interesting contrast to Lebanon, where the Vatican flags erected all over the damn place in anticipation of Pope Benedict XVI’s 2012 visit still haven’t been taken down in some neighborhoods, and where – however contrived it might all have been – every one of the country’s twelve non-Catholic sects wore a smile and professed joy at His Holiness’ arrival (in a vulpine gesture, Hezbollah even sent its Mahdi Scouts to receive him at the airport). Is the Pope, then – and are Christians in general – at greater risk in Israel than in Lebanon?

There was nothing "spiritual" about Ovadia Yosef's bigotry

[Originally posted at NOW]

Of the innumerable euphemisms adopted in polite journalism to make the nasty business of theocracy sound respectable, few are as irritating as the “spiritual leader” designation. What the writer plainly means (and what the reader ought to see from a mile away), when he debases himself with that sickly platitude, is “authoritarian religious extremist.” Try it out; it works in every instance. The Dalai Lama? A Buddhist fundamentalist who suppresses rival sects and tolerates no democracy within his Indian fiefdom. The Pope? An absolute monarch who professes divine “infallibility” and uses the privilege to sustain a multi-billion dollar enterprise of reactionary propaganda (the very word derives from Catholic doctrine). Gandhi may have led an unimpeachably courageous national liberation struggle, but that doesn’t undo his notorious outbursts of crackpottery, such as his suggestion that the best course of action for Jews in Nazi concentration camps would be to commit mass suicide.

And so it is too with the now-deceased Ovadia Yosef, the former Sephardic Chief Rabbi of Israel who was universally described in yesterday’s obituaries as the “spiritual leader” of the ultra-Orthodox Shas Party. Just in case anyone out there is picturing a meek and humble champion of humanity and peace, here (in no particular order) are five of Yosef’s most memorable insights:

• “Goyim [non-Jews] were born only to serve us. Without that, they have no place in the world; only to serve the People of Israel.” (Source)
• “It is forbidden to be merciful to [Arabs]. You must send missiles to them and annihilate them. They are evil and damnable.” (Source)
• “It is no wonder that [Israeli] soldiers are killed in war; they don’t observe Shabbat, don’t observe the Torah, don’t pray every day, don’t lay phylacteries on a daily basis – so is it any wonder that they are killed? No, it’s not.” (Source)
• “Abu Mazen [Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas] and all these evil people should perish from this world. God should strike them with a plague, them and these Palestinians.” (Source)
• “[Holocaust victims] were reincarnations of the souls of sinners, people who transgressed and did all sorts of things which should not be done. They had been reincarnated in order to atone.” (Source)

Actually, secularism might be against Islam

[Originally posted at NOW]

In 1925, a distinguished Egyptian religious scholar named Ali Abd al-Raziq produced a highly unusual book, titled Islam and the Origins of Governance, in which he made the unprecedented argument that the caliphate, or state ruled by Islamic law, was not in fact a requirement of the Muslim faith.

Steeped in the most rigorous theological training as he was – being a graduate of and jurist appointed by al-Azhar, then the preeminent institution of Islamic learning worldwide – al-Raziq built his case entirely on religious grounds, marshaling to his side an ostensibly impressive set of observations. For one, neither the Quran nor the Hadith actually makes any mention of a caliphate, he noted. For another, there is no evidence that the Prophet Muhammad presided over any kind of institutionalized Islamic state, nor did he leave instructions for his followers to do so, he argued. Instead, the caliphate was an innovation devised by venal, self-serving tyrants who distorted the Prophet’s essentially apolitical message, with the result that by the 20th century the caliphate had become “a plague for Islam and the Muslims, a source of evils and corruption.”

The reader can probably guess how this thoughtful suggestion was received by the gatekeepers of the faith at the time. The al-Azhar clerics issued a formal condemnation of the book, enumerating with exhaustive quotations from Quran and Hadith exactly how very gravely it was mistaken, and then fired al-Raziq from his post. Muhammad Rashid Rida, probably the single most influential Islamic thinker of his generation, called the book the work of the “enemies of Islam,” while other notables such as Muhammad Bakhit argued at painstaking length that the Prophet did in fact govern a caliphate-like entity in Medina. Central to all these rebuttals was the fundamental conviction that, in Islam, religion and politics could not be separated. As Bakhit put it: “The Islamic religion is based on the pursuit of domination and power […] and the refusal of any law which is contrary to its sharia and its divine law, and the rejection of any authority the wielder of which is not charged with the execution of its edicts.”

This episode came to mind when on Sunday I had the privilege of attending a talk given by Ahmed Benchemsi and Karl Sharro in which they argued, among other things, that “secularism is not against Islam.” Of course, things have moved on a bit in the last nine decades – only a crackpot fringe minority of Muslims seriously calls for a revived caliphate, and many are those who would call themselves both Muslims and secularists – but the idea that Islam must have some kind of role in politics remains very much the official view of the clerics today. Indeed, state theologians continue to wield legislative power in every country in the Arab world, including supposedly ‘secular’ Syria and ‘liberal’ Lebanon (where they recently decreed civil marriage “apostasy” and blocked a draft law against domestic violence on the grounds that it “[violated] the Islamic law”).

Is secularism, then, compatible with Islam? Or, to put it another way, can Islam be separated from the clerical apparatus – the ulama – that converts its teachings into legislation in the real world? It’s a question that ultimately only Muslims can decide (and part of the problem to begin with, of course, is there is no single “Islam”), but the prevailing scholarly view for now seems to be that it can not. To claim otherwise is to make the rather large claim that one knows Islam better than its own clergy.

Which is obviously not to say there aren’t muftis and mullahs out there who would disagree vehemently. The point is rather that so long as such dissidents are firmly in the minority – so long as the great mass of their peers continue to dismiss and discredit them – then it cannot be accurate to say that “Islam,” as it is generally practiced around the world today, is a secular phenomenon.

Not that Islam is alone, of course. Every religion has a theocracy problem. Catholicism, as practiced in the Vatican, is not compatible with secularism. Judaism, as practiced in Israel, is not compatible with secularism. Even the quaint variety of Protestantism in my native UK is, in fact, a state religion, “defended” by a priestess-queen and granted 26 unelected and unaccountable seats in parliament. These are all by necessity the foes of any secularist worth the name, and I don’t think we should be embarrassed to say so forthrightly.

NB: All quotes and information on Ali Abd al-Raziq come from Albert Hourani’s indispensable Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age: 1798-1939.

Video: Israeli police beat Palestinian teen

[Originally posted at NOW Lebanon]

A disturbing video surfaced over the weekend showing Israeli policemen inside the Dome of the Rock compound pinning a 17-year-old Palestinian boy to the ground by the neck and punching him on the side of the head.

According to the Palestinian WAFA news agency, they continued to beat the boy, Hasan al-Afifi, until he bled on the ground, while also pepper-spraying his mother until she fainted.

The attack took place during a demonstration inside the compound, known in Judaism as the Temple Mount, in which Palestinians threw stones in protest against an earlier attempt by what Ma’an called “Israeli ultranationalists” to hold Jewish prayers inside it. The label is misleading – the ideology of these fanatics is in fact a fusion of territorial expansionism with heterodox Jewish fundamentalism.

It is, in other words, merely one more trophy in the cabinet of Israel’s ascendant extreme right wing. For decades, Israel’s chief rabbis have forbidden Jews from entering the compound on theological grounds (how, for example, are Jews to perform the mandatory cleansing ritual for entry into the Temple in the absence of the famous red heifer?). Today’s hot-headed settlers and other supremacists have no time for such craven defeatism, and are finding a growing number of rabbis only too happy to sign off on their more muscular approach (as history teaches us well, there is no political movement too sinister for the approval of the men of God).

To see how acutely dangerous this all is, one need only recall that it was Ariel Sharon’s visit to the same site in 2000 that sparked the Second Intifada. Meanwhile, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Israeli Air Force are trading blows in Gaza. Time for a large whisky, I think.

Israel okays book licensing murder of non-Jews

[Originally posted at NOW Lebanon]

And for today’s sermon, let’s take a dip into the collected wisdom of West Bank Rabbis Yitzhak Shapira and Yosef Elitzur, as published in their 2009 opus, Torat Hamelech (“The King’s Torah”):

“Anywhere where the influence of gentiles [non-Jews] constitutes a threat to the life of Israel, it is permissible to kill them.”

“When we approach a gentile who has violated the seven laws of Noah and kill him out of devotion to the upholding of these Noahide laws, this is not forbidden.”

“You can kill those [gentiles] who are not supporting or encouraging murder in order to save the lives of Jews.”

According to the BBC, this inspired piece of exegesis even “suggests that babies can justifiably be killed if it is clear they will grow up to pose a threat.”

For some reason, the book – which was endorsed by relatively mainstream rabbis including Dov Lior and Yaakov Yosef – raised objections when it was published, prompting the Israeli attorney general to investigate whether it constituted incitement to racism and/or violence. Protests erupted in Orthodox circles last year when Lior and Yosef were taken into custody. In a statement yesterday, the attorney concluded that there was “insufficient evidence” for a prosecution.

Being a free speech absolutist, in one sense I applaud the decision. The pseudo-liberal concepts of “hate speech” and “abuse of free expression” don’t sit well with my enthusiastic blasphemy, and I believe we surrender dearly-bought terrain to fascism when we make it a crime to write words.

But ask yourself this: would the attorney general have ruled the same way had the book been written by Islamic fundamentalists, calling for the murder of Jewish babies? To ask the question is to answer it. So far from being a victory for liberal democracy, therefore, the decision is merely yet another example of the Judeochauvinist bigotry that poisons even (or especially) the highest echelons of the Israeli establishment.

Interfaith dialogue at its ugliest

[Originally posted at NOW Lebanon]

At first glance, it looks like a gesture of positively saintly compassion and humanity: a Jew - indeed, a rabbi no less - travels all the way from America to visit a neglected synagogue in south Lebanon, to stand shoulder to shoulder with the country's destitute Palestinian refugees, and to proclaim their cause as his own. What, you may ask, could conceivably be more honourable?

Quite a lot, as it happens. For Rabbi Dovid Weiss, like the rest of his Neturei Karta devotees, comes from an ancient, albeit nowadays marginal, school of Judaism that proclaims it an abominable sin to establish a Jewish state in the biblical Eretz Yisrael - until, that is, the advent of the Messiah.

I hope it goes without saying that, as an ideology, this is not exactly Palestinian nationalism. Upon the Messiah's arrival, Weiss and his friends will assist in the utter and total Judaisation of the Levant, involving the submission of Jews on the one hand to fascistic halakha law, and Gentiles on the other to a choice between death and permanent subjugation.

It's an almost-exact mirror image, incidentally, of the vile alliance between Zionists and evangelical Christians, a prominent group of whom Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu met just last month. As far as the latter are concerned, the mass immigration of Jews to the Holy Land is to be encouraged insofar as it accelerates the Second Coming of Christ, at which point non-Christians will face the similar dilemma of conversion or extermination.

Moral of the story: if you're cynical enough to conscript religious fanatics to your political cause today, don't be surprised if they try to kill you tomorrow.