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Caroline Glick:

Today’s principal form of Jew-hatred is anti- Zionism. Anti-Zionism is similar to previous dominant forms of Jew hatred such as Christian anti-Judaism, xenophobic and racist anti- Semitism, and Communist anti-Jewish cosmopolitanism in the sense that it takes dominant, popular social trends and turns them against the Jews. Anti-Zionism’s current predominance owes to the convergence of several popular social trends which include Western post-nationalism, and anti-colonialism.

Worth reading in full.

UPDATE: David Foster provides a link to a well written blog post about a BDS conference at U. Penn.

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A friend on facebook posted the video below and asked for comments:

I sent my friend the following email (proper names redacted):

Hey xxx,
You solicited comments on the video of the guy who loves Jesus but not religion. This is a fairly lengthy reply, and I didn’t feel it appropriate to put in your facebook comments to clog them up. First a little background on my life.

My parents raised me in a Baptist church. I am sure you are familiar with Baptists being in xxx and all, but to say the least it was a very strict, but loving environment at that church. I also went to the Baptist school that was attached to the church until 9th grade.

There was a falling out with the Baptist church when I was a freshman in high school. I transferred to an Assembly of God school. We never returned to any church.

The crux of the falling out was twofold. First, my dad was putting in excruciating hours at work to get the xxx store moving (sound familiar? haha!). He simply didn’t have the energy to attend the Baptist church anymore and we didn’t have the money to give as we had previously. My parents started feeling heat from the elders at the Baptist church for this and couldn’t believe what was happening. My father thought that it was more important to take care of and feed his family than not get any sleep on his one day off so my parents told the Baptist church to “pound sand”.

During summers when I was little, I spent a lot of time with my grandparents, who were Lutherans from the old country (Germany). I attended the Lutheran services with them.

I am prefacing my reactions to the video with this background to show that I know my Bible a bit, and also have some experience with organized religion. Most of the experiences were good. Some were not so good.

In general, I think the video is interesting and I see his point. But he paints with too broad of a brush in some spots.

You really cannot worship a man like Jesus without being in a religion yourself. The man in the video claims to despise religion, but if he is worshipping Jesus, well, hate to break it to you, you are participating in a religion, and it is called Christianity. Christianity takes many forms – Lutheran, Baptist, Catholicism, and scads of others. You can call it anything you want. Heck, you can call it “Dave’s religion”, I don’t care. If you worship Jesus as the man in the video says he does, you are participating in an act that requires a leap of faith. There is no scientific way to explain miracles that Jesus supposedly performed while on earth, or to prove (or disprove) things like the resurrection.

I did not like the way the man in the video broad brushed all churches. Yes, bad things happen in churches. They are run by men and women and there will always be politics. Throwing out an accusation like he said in the video of “why are there poor/hungry people when we have churches” (I paraphrase, of course) is just not fair. Some people don’t want help. Some people, help cannot be had (iron regimes, or whatever – are you going to start smuggling guns into Tibet to fight the Chinese? I’m not). In many places I will admit, religion and superstition are the causes of poverty and social stratification (typically not in the United States). However, so many churches do so many good things I thought it was disingenuous at best for him not to say that. The Lutheran church I attended with my grandparents did absolutely everything they could all the time for disadvantaged people here and abroad. The Catholic Church is the single largest charitable organization in the world. There are many more examples, but all churches aren’t all bad. Period. Are some churches bad? Perhaps. I would rather hear the guy say that certain individuals in certain places are bad, such as the Catholic priests who molested the children. This doesn’t make all Catholics or the church itself any more guilty than if someone who worked for me robbed a bank and then all of a sudden people began saying that xxx folks were all bank robbers.

As for the point he makes that Jesus says there doesn’t need to be a church, it isn’t as simple as that either. There is debate on both sides as to what exactly Jesus said and wanted and a lot of it comes down to translations of different versions of the Bible. This is why we have so many different sects of Christianity – different people translate things differently. I don’t need to bore you with that but again, I think it is disingenuous for the guy in the video to make that blanket statement.

Why did he bring politics into the video? I don’t understand why the line “what if I told you voting Republican wasn’t his mission/voting Republican doesn’t = Christian” was WAY out of place in a theological discussion and gives me a hint as to exactly where he is coming from (more on this in a bit). Why did he single out Republican voters? Does he not think that there are no people that vote Republican that aren’t Buddhists or Jews? Does he also not think that there are no Christians that vote Democrat?

Also of note is that Christianity is the only religion he takes a swipe at. Does he not think that Islam or Judaism or Buddhism have issues? I understand that his points need to be compacted into a short video but again, why the hate for Christianity alone?

As for me, today, I have been an agnostic at best for quite some time. My feelings are the same that my father had when I was a boy. My family is the most important thing to me. It is my responsibility FIRST to take care of my wife and kids. If that means that I can’t go to church, so be it. And that is what that means. I work usually 60-70 hours a week and by god, if I want to ride my bike on Sunday morning to relax or workout instead of sitting in the pews, that is what I will do. And that is what I do. In the end, I believe if you live a good life and there is something or someone to atone to when it is all over, I will be fine. Jesus would think so, I believe.

My children go to a Catholic school, and they and my wife will likely be turning Catholic very soon. I refuse to do it and not only is my family OK with this, the Catholic church is absolutely supportive of my decision. I just have too many things I don’t accept about Catholicism to convert to that religion (or any religion for that matter). The congregation at that church and the attached school is made up of fantastic and wonderfully supportive people.

As for the guy in the video, I think he is full of crap. The bashing of Republicans and singling out Christianity for his anti religion screed smell to high heaven to me. But that is of course just a guess. Your mileage may vary.

It was an interesting piece and I understand where he comes from, since I have been there, done that, got the t-shirt.

I know this was long and that is why I didn’t want to put it in facebook – these issues take a lot of thought and are much more complex than a short comment can allow.

Looking forward to seeing you (and xxx?) in San Diego!

Best Regards, Dan.

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[ corss-posted from Zenpundit -- archaeology, Biblical scholarship, eschatology, digital literacy ]

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Both the Dead Sea scrolls from Qumran and the Gnostic and associated codices from Nag Hammadi are now available for study online:

The Nag Hammadi Archive can be explored via the Claremont Colleges Digital Library, and the Digital Dead Sea Scrolls via the Israel Museum, Jerusalem.

Here’s a description of the War Scroll from Qumran, which “is dated to the late first century BCE or early first century CE”:

Against the backdrop of a long biblical tradition concerning a final war at the End of Days (Ezekiel 38-39; Daniel 7-12), this scroll describes a seven stage, dualistic confrontation between the “Sons of Light” (the term used by Community members to refer to themselves), under the leadership of the “Prince of Light” (also called Michael, the Archangel) – and the “Sons of Darkness” (a nickname for the enemies of the Community, Jews and non-Jews alike), aided by a nation called the Kittim (Romans?), headed by Belial. The confrontation would last 49 years, terminating in the victory of the “Sons of Light” and the restoration of the Temple service and sacrifices. The War Scroll describes battle arrays, weaponry, the ages of the participants, and military maneuvers, recalling Hellenistic and Roman military manuals.

You can see why I’m interested.

The Nag Hammadi texts are a little less well known but include — along with a variety of other texts, some of them self-described as “apocalypses” — the now celebrated Gospel of Thomas, which Bart Erhman reads as continuing a “de-apocalypticizing” of Jesus’ message which he finds beginning in Luke and continuing in John:

In the Gospel of Thomas, for example, written somewhat later than John, there is a clear attack on anyone who believes in a future Kingdom here on earth. In some sayings, for example, Jesus denies that the Kingdom involves an actual place but “is within you and outside you” (saying 3); he castigates the disciples for being concerned about the end (saying 18); and he spurns their question about when the Kingdom will come, since “the Kingdom of the Father is spread out on the earth and people do not see it” (saying 113).

Again, you can see why I am delighted that these texts are becoming available to a wider scholarly audience…

In both the Nag Hammadi codices and Qumran scrolls, we have texts that were lost for almost two thousand years and discovered, somewhat haphazardly, in 1945 and 1947 respectively, providing us with rich insights into the religious ferment around a time and place that have been pivotal for western civilization.

Now, more than half a century later, the web — as it becomes our global museum and our in-house library — brings us closer to both…

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Warning: spoilers, I guess, though with a film like this it’s hard to give anything away so as to really detract from the experience. Maybe a few autobiographical spoilers of my own.

Having only seen it once so far, I am aware of having gotten at most glimpses of its full intent. I cannot easily describe Terrence Malick’s oeuvre except in superficial ways: mostly out-of-doors, with nature as a significant element; spectacular cinematography; more or less nonlinear storyline; voice-over narrations. I have not seen Badlands but have seen everything from Days of Heaven on.

The Tree of Life is, I suppose, most like The Thin Red Line, if only because it seems to me to be much more of a setting than an actual story, and because of the (to me) endearing depiction in TTRL of the Edenic existence of the Solomon Island natives, evangelized in the 19th century and thereby singing spirituals and carrying Bibles translated into their language even as Guadalcanal was occupied by the Japanese and slowly, painfully liberated by the Americans. The Tree of Life opens with an onscreen quote from Job 38 and is largely a long, difficult conversation with God.

Not to overlook the obvious, this sort of thing is not for everyone, and unsurprisingly the general viewership is rating it quite a bit lower than are the critics. I have said elsewhere that if you don’t want to spend a couple of hours listening to classical music and watching jaw-dropping visuals of everything from galaxies condensing out of the void to letter-perfect depictions of small-town Texas in the 1950s, you probably shouldn’t try to sit through this film. TToL clocks in around 2:20 and you’re going to feel every minute of it. Hit the restroom before you go in.

Synopsis: book of Job meets 2001: A Space Odyssey meets Waco in the ’50s. The narrator is the eldest of three baby-boomer boys. The middle child dies at 19 of an unspecified cause, though I’m sure most of the audience is thinking Vietnam. The narrator is seen at various ages, primarily in late childhood and secondarily in the present day, where he is played by Sean Penn. His mother is kind and optimistic, his father driven and cynical. They are devoutly Catholic and the father’s hobby is classical music, which makes for one unbelievably phenomenal soundtrack. I’d love to have all that material in my audio library.

Whether out of shallowness, or simple contentedness, or even some kind of grace, I don’t wrestle with Job-like questions much. I am aware of having a cultural and spiritual inheritance that, to put it politely, is not always especially profound. I do hope to avoid obvious stupidity (rejection of the historical sciences) and desperately hope to avoid being uncharitable, in several senses of the term. I have a kind of tribal loyalty that responds positively to almost any Biblical reference unless I feel that the quote is grossly out of context or being used for crassly political purposes, neither of which is remotely the case here. My pastor flattered me extravagantly by telling me he thought of me when he saw this film; I evidently have some kind of reputation …

… something to do with being an amateur astronomer and a 2001 fan since the first time (of 25+) I saw it, awed but largely uncomprehending, sitting with my father in the Ward Parkway Cinema – historical tidbit, the first mall cinema anywhere, opened 1964 – in sixth grade, meaning late ’70/early ’71. A ridiculously tiny theater, therefore not much like the intended Super Panavision 70 experience, but it, as we would say a few years later, knocked me on my ass. I read the Clarke novelization a year or so later in order to find out what was really going on, and ate it up, to the point of buying various additional books about the movie in high school, besides seeing it at every opportunity. As I did not know then, my father would pass away in the eponymous year.

Well, Douglas Trumbull, who did the FX for 2001, has reprised that performance for TToL. It delights me no end that what may be the most profoundly religious movie in a generation includes supercomputer-generated and other imagery from some of the best facilities in the United States. After a bit of initial abstraction, a wonderfully, beautifully recognizable galaxy swims into view. Then there are various depictions of protostellar and protoplanetary formation, including what I presume are live-action shots of Hawaiian seaside vulcanism, followed by early life, interspersed with more astronomical imagery, including a transit of Mercury across the Sun. As you may have heard, there are dinosaurs in this movie, and Jurassic Park it ain’t; a friend has joked that the dinosaurs have more screen presence than Sean Penn. We see what seems intended to be the K-T impact, but no disaster-movie mass die-off, only underwater shots of breaking waves.

Malick was born in ’43, which makes him, per Strauss & Howe, a member of the cultural (slightly preceding the demographic) Boomer generation. He would have been fourteen at Sputnik, eighteen at Gagarin and Shepard, nineteen at Glenn, in his early twenties during Gemini and the Mariner 4 flyby of Mars, and twenty-six for Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins. Four times more people went to see the Apollo 11 launch than went to Woodstock a month later. We were the moon shot generation.

I am nearly at the other end of that cultural cohort, born in ’59, but being a few months short of my tenth birthday on 7/20/1969 was no less conducive to a sense that the Universe was opening up around us, a sense that continued right through the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s with Viking, Pioneer, Magellan, Voyager, and Hubble. I became fascinated with astronomy and space exploration around age seven and, somewhat to my mother’s frustration, would check out nothing from the local public library but books on those subjects for the next several years. In the books I was reading in, say, ’67, even the nearer planets were elusive, and anything in the outer Solar System was simply awash in speculation. Moons were points of light, nothing more. A decade or two later, all were revealed as worlds, mapped to resolutions of kilometers or less. No other generation in all of human history has had this experience; and this is of course only the immediate foreground of discovery that extends, now, nearly to the event horizon beyond which insufficient time has elapsed since the Big Bang for any information to become available to our instruments. It has been said that the IRAS satellite alone, in 1983, nearly doubled the sum total of astronomical knowledge, and the Spitzer is far superior to it.

2001 was almost completely impersonal – its best-rounded character was HAL 9000 – and grew out of Clarke’s resolution to the Fermi Paradox as first presented in his short story The Sentinel. The aliens are exceedingly unobtrusive in character and leave “burglar alarms” in the (astronomically speaking) neighborhood of incipient intelligent species, who duly find and set them off. In both the short story and the book, our burglar alarm is an artifact on the Moon that can be activated only by gaining physical access to it. The short story ends with the protagonist deducing that extraterrestrials have somehow been notified, and apprehensive about what will happen next. In both the book and the movie, a human expedition ensues, though to different destinations. TToL is instead a personal struggle with scientific revelation as a backdrop. Given the geographical setting, I am tempted to suggest a connection to Glen Rose or JSC or even McDonald Observatory, but none of these appear in the film and its nominal Texan location is not especially significant.

I did not grow up in Texas, though I did spend my 7th grade year in Fort Worth. By then the D/FW metroplex was already the largest inland concentration of population in the US, that is, near neither an ocean nor one of the Great Lakes. My earlier, and later, pre-adult years were spent in somewhat-to-much-smaller communities in Missouri and Wisconsin, so my experience that most resembles that depicted in the movie was in Beloit, ’66-’68. Notwithstanding significant differences between what Joel Garreau later named “the Foundry” and “the Breadbasket” – or “Dixie,” depending on just where in central Texas this is – and nontrivial changes in American society as a whole in the mid-’60s, and of course the sheer physical disparities between the upper Midwest and central Texas, the images, activities, and technologies on display in the movie are entirely familiar. We all lived in a thoroughly industrialized but as-yet analog world, so the artifacts of our daily lives were strikingly similar, but also the entire atmosphere of playing outside in the streets and yards (in the warmer months), as shown in the movie, just felt, as stated above, letter-perfect. My parents were nothing like the parents in TToL, and I was the younger of two siblings, with a sister not quite five years older. It doesn’t matter. The interactions have a huge (though much less than total, to be sure) overlap with what I experienced in the last half of my childhood.

TToL culminates in a spiritual reunion complete with Sean Penn stepping through a door frame in a desert wilderness (shot in, I think, Utah) and encountering his family of origin and large numbers of townspeople at a seashore. His character has reconciled with events and with the Divine, though not via any explicit, describable process. The visual tropes here are pretty well-worn; I like galaxies and dinosaurs better, but I suppose it’s nice that the movie has a happy ending. The music remains gorgeous.

And speaking of production values in general: the casting is excellent (the kids look like the parents, and the young protagonist resembles Sean Penn), the décor, clothing, automobiles, tools, etc are dead-on accurate, and the cinematography is breathtaking. There is one scene in an industrial plant where I suspect some of the fixtures aren’t “period,” and since the great bulk of the on-location filming took place in Smithville, a 2½-hour drive south of Waco, there is Spanish moss on the trees, which does not occur nearly as far north as McLennan County (nice shot of the ALICO building in Waco, though). The middle-aged, present-day protagonist supposedly lives in NYC, but nearly every external shot that I recognized, except for one of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge and one of (possibly) the Williams/Transco Tower in Houston, was of downtown Dallas. Subject-matter experts are invited to correct me on this.

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Following on David Foster’s Yom Hashoa post, the following extended excerpts from this brilliant column by Caroline Glick frame the issues well in modern political context:

AFTER THE war, world Jewry adopted “Never Again,” as our rallying cry. But “Never Again,” is just a slogan. It fell to the leaders of the Jewish people to conceive the means to prevent a recurrence of the Holocaust.
 
These leaders came up with two very different strategies for protecting Jews from genocide, and their followers formed separate camps. Whereas in the early years, the separate positions appeared to complement each other, since the 1970s the gulf between them has grown ever wider. Indeed, many of the divisions in world Jewry today originate in this post-Holocaust policy divide.
 
The first strategy was based on international law and human rights. Its champions argued that the reason the Allies didn’t save the Jews was because the laws enjoining the Allies to rescue us on the one hand, and prohibiting the Nazis from killing us on the other were insufficiently strong. If they could promulgate a new global regime of international humanitarian law, they believed they could force governments to rise above their hatreds and the shackles of their narrow-minded national interests to save innocents from slaughter. Not only would their vision protect the Jews, it would protect everyone.
 
The Jews who subscribed to the human-rights strategy for preventing another Holocaust were the architects of the United Nations, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the 1949 Geneva Conventions and the Genocide Convention. They were the founders of the international human rights regime that now dominates so much of Western discourse on war and peace.
 
Unfortunately, the institutions these idealistic Jews designed have been corrupted by political forces they had hoped to defeat.
 
Consequently, the international human-rights regime they created has failed completely to accomplish what they hoped it would accomplish. Instead, the regime they created to protect the Jews is now a key weapon in the political war being waged against them.
 
[. . .]
 
A secondary casualty of the failure of the human rights paradigm has been intra- Jewish relations. Faced with their preferred paradigm’s failure and corruption at the hands of anti-Semites, many Jewish human-rights activists have opted to abandon their fellow Jews and Israel in order to maintain their allegiance to the corrupt, anti-Semitic human-rights model.
 
PARTICULARLY ANNOYING to these human-rights followers is the stunning success of the other post-Holocaust Jewish strategy for giving meaning to the slogan “Never Again.”
 
That policy is Zionism.
 

 
Zionism doesn’t concern itself with how people ought to behave, but with what they are capable of doing. Zionists understand that people are an amalgamation of passions and interests. The Holocaust was able to occur because the only people with a permanent passion and interest in defending the Jews are the Jews. And when the Nazis rose to power, the Jews were homeless and powerless.
 
Jews who embrace the human-rights approach criticize Zionism’s vision as lonely and militaristic. What they fail to recognize is that every successful nation depends on itself, and lives by the sword.
 
Only those who deter aggressors are capable of attracting allies. No one will stand with a nation that will not stand up for itself.
 
Holocaust Remembrance Day, which we marked on Monday, is nestled between Pessah and Independence Day for a reason. In both ancient and modern times, the only way for Jews – or anyone else – to protect their freedom and their lives is by being capable of defending them, in their own land.
 
The pseudo human-rights campaign against Israel being carried out in the name of fashionable anti-Zionist anti-Semitism represents a complete vindication of the Zionist model. Zionism is the only way to ensure Jewish survival. It is the only way to ensure that in the face of growing threats, “Never Again” will mean never again.

The column is worth reading in full.

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Tomorrow, May 2, is Holocaust Remembrance and Heroism Day, Yom Hashoah Ve Hagevurah. The date for this observance was chosen in part because of its calendrical proximity to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising; more here.

In this video, Jay Black (born David Blatt–singer for the 1960s group Jay and the Americans) sings “Where is the little street?” (“Vi iz dus geseleh?”) accompanied by images from Marc Chagall paintings.

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I had occasion today to give myself a quick refresher course on honor killings, one form of which is already present in the Torah as of Leviticus 21.9:

And the daughter of any priest, if she profane herself by playing the whore, she profaneth her father: she shall be burnt with fire.

and found myself once again noting that there is a substantial swathe of regions of the world where honor killings are found, and that where it is found (including in immigrant communities from those parts of the world) the practice is not confined to any one religious group.

Hence this DoubleQuote:

I think it is appropriate to consider honor killing a form of religious violence when the claim is made by those who do the killing that they are acting in the name of their religion — but that it is also important to distinguish such acts committed in a cultural context in which they are practiced across religions from acts that are the exclusive province of one religious tradition.

There are examples of honor killings which are performed in the name of Islam, and/or advocated by Islamic scholars — and the same could no doubt be said of other religious traditions — but honor killing as a genre is fundamentally more cultural than religious.

Sources: Brandeis study — BBC — Sydney Morning Herald

The analytic point:

From my point of view as an analyst, it is important to note and compare both religious and cultural drivers — neither avoiding mention of the one out of “correctness” — nor overlooking the other for lack of comparative data.

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[ cross-posted from Zenpundit ]

Martyr and messiah are two of the more intense “roles” in the religious vocabulary, and unlike mystics and saints, both martyrs and messiahs tend to have an impact, not just within their own religious circles but in the wider context of the times.

Martyr and messiah are also words that can be bandied about fairly loosely — so a simple word-search on “messiah” will reveal references to a third-person platform game with some gunplay and the white messiah fable in Avatar, while a search on “martyr” might tell you how to become a martyr for affiliate networks, just as a search on “crusade” will turn up crusades for justice or mental health – my search today even pointed me to a crusade for cloth diapers.

1. Martyrdom and messianism in WikiLeaks

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, both terms crop up occasionally in WikiLeaks, with the Government of Iraq, for instance, banning use of the word “martyr” for soldiers who died in the war with Iran, and US diplomats wiring home a report by an opposition psychiatrist to the effect that “Morally, Chavez [of Venezuela] combines a sense of tragedy and romanticism (a desire for an idyllic world) to project a messianic image.” Indeed, the whole paragraph is choc-a-bloc with that kind of imagery, and worth quoting in full:

Ideologically, Chavez wants to project an image of a “utopian socialist,” which de Vries described as someone who is revolutionary, collectivist, and dogmatic. In reality, de Vries argues, Chavez is an absolute pragmatist when it comes to maintaining power, which makes him a conservative. Coupled with Chavez’ self-love (narcissism), sense of destiny, and obsession with Venezuelan symbolism, this pragmatism makes Chavez look more like fascist, however, rather than a socialist. Morally, Chavez combines a sense of tragedy and romanticism (a desire for an idyllic world) to project a messianic image. De Vries, however, said Chavez is a realist who uses morals and ethics to fit the situation.

PM Netanyahu of Israel was using the term “messianic” with a little more precision when he described the Iranian regime as “crazy, retrograde, and fanatical, with a Messianic desire to speed up a violent ‘end of days.’”

2. Julian Assange in the role of martyr

The words martyr and messiah, then, carry a symbolic freight that is at the very least comparable to that of flags and scriptures – so it is interesting that both terms crop up in the recent BBC interview with Julian Assange.

My reading of the interview suggests that it is Assange himself who introduces the meme of martyrdom, though not the word itself, when he answers a question about the impact of the sexual accusations against him, “What impact do you think that will have on your organisation and what sort of figure do you think you, Julian Assange, cut in the face of all this. How will you be regarded? What will it do to you?” with the response, “I think it will be quite helpful for our organisation.”

In the follow up, interviewer John Humphrys twice uses the word “martyr” explicitly:

Q: Really? You see yourself as a martyr then?
 
JA: I think it will focus an incredible attention on the details of this case and then when the details of this case come out and people look to see what the actions are compared to the reality of the facts, other than that, it will expose a tremendous abuse of power. And that will, in fact, be helpful to this organisation. And, in fact, the extra focus that has occurred over the last two weeks has been very helpful to this organisation.

and:

Q: Just to answer that question then. You think this will be good for you and good for Wikileaks?
 
JA: I’ve had to suffer and we’ve had incredible disruptions.
 
Q: You do see yourself as a martyr here.
 
JA: Well, you know, in a very beneficial position, if you can be martyred without dying. And we’ve had a little bit of that over the past ten days. And if this case goes on, we will have more.

3. Julian Assange in the role of messiah

If the role of martyr implies, at minimum, that one suffers for a cause, that of messiah implies that one leads it in a profound transformation of the world. Both terms are now found in association with the word “complex” – which applies whenever a individual views himself or herself as a martyr or messiah – but a “messianic complex” is presumably more worrisome than a “martyr complex” if only for the reason that there are many more martyrs than messiahs, many more willing to suffer for a cause than to lead it.

It is accordingly worth noting that it is the interviewer, John Humphrys, who introduces both the word “messianic” and the concept of a “messianic figure” into the interview, although Assange makes no effort to wave it away…

Q: Just a final thought. Do you see yourself… as some sort of messianic figure?
 
JA: Everyone would like to be a messianic figure without dying. We bringing some important change about what is perceived to be rights of people who expose abuses by powerful corporations and then to resist censorship attacks after the event. We are also changing the perception of the west.
 
Q: I’m talking about you personally.
 
JA: I’m always so focussed on my work, I don’t have time to think about how I perceive myself… I had time to perceive myself a bit more in solitary confinement. I was perfectly happy with myself. I wondered what that process would do. Would I think “my goodness, how have I got into this mess, is it all just too hard?”
 
The world is a very ungrateful place, why should I continue to suffer simply to try and do some good in the world. If the world is so viciously against it ,why don’t I just go off and do some mathematics or write some books? But no, actually, I felt quite at peace.
 
Q: You want to change the world?
 
JA: Absolutely. The world has a lot of problems and they need to be reformed. And we only live once. Every person who has some ability to do something about it, if they are a person of good character, has the duty to try and fix the problems in the environment which they’re in.
 
That is a value, that, yes, comes partly from my temperament. There is also a value that comes from my father, which is that capable, generous men don’t create victims, they try and save people from becoming victims. That is what they are tasked to do. If they do not do that they are not worthy of respect or they are not capable.

4. Julian Assange, martyr and messiah?

I think it is clear that both Assange and his interviewer are in effect reframing the religious terms “martyr” and “messiah” in non-religious, basically psychological senses — although I don’t suppose Assange is exactly claiming to have the two “complexes” I mentioned above.

Here’s what’s curious about this reframing, from a religious studies point of view:

Assange’s implicit acceptance of a “messianic” role undercuts the specific force of the role of “martyr” – one who gives his life for the cause. “Everyone” he says, “would like to be a messianic figure without dying.” Assange wouldn’t exactly object to being a martyr without dying, too.

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[ cross-posted from Zenpundit ]

If it were me, I’d pray for rain.

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A great many people will have seen (or designed) some variant of the “coexist” bumper-sticker / tee-shirt design:

– the first of which can be found on acsapple‘s photobucket — and hey, the “aum” sign for “oe” is a brilliant bit of graphic substitution! – while I nabbed the second here.

What with a thousand flowers blooming, the importance of preserving memetic variations, peaceful coexistence and all, it’s only natural that some will have different takes on the matter –

– the first of these comes from the blog of a gun-toting political refugee from the People’s Progressive Republic of Massachusetts, while the second is a tee-shirt design by Matt Lussier, and you can get your tee-shirt here…

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As for myself, I have fond memories of India, and was accordingly heartened to see this on an Indian Muslim site…

which is what set me thinking about “coexistence” graphics in the first place.

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Did I ever tell you about the sign I saw over a shop in Delhi, advertising the sale of mythelated spirits?

I frequently feel just a tad mythelated myself.

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[ cross-posted from Zenpundit ]

A quick search for “Mahdi” and “Mehdi” and “Twelfth Imam” in the 294 messages so far published in diplomatic Wikileaks reveals some references to individuals with those names, and a couple to Moqtada al-Sadr’s Jaysh al-Mahdi (spelled “Jaysh al-Madhi” in one cable by someone who is perhaps confused by the similarity of the name to that of Mahatma Gandhi), along with three cables in which Mahdism is touched upon.

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09ASHGABAT1182 of September 16, 2009 reports a comment by an undisclosed source who is “adamant” that the US should not enter into direct talks with Iran’s leadership:

Not only, he insisted, is the Iranian leadership “untrustworthy,” and dominated by a group of “messianics,” who base crucial decisions about domestic and foreign policy on a belief in the imminent return of the “Missing” (Twelfth) Imam.

From my point of view, any foreign policy based on or strongly influenced by belief in the imminent return of a prophesied figure of good or evil, whether that figure be Moshiach or Christ or Mahdi, Antichrist or Dajjal, should be cause for concern: from a religious perspective, because messianic expectations are precisely what Matthew is talking about when he writes that “false Christs and false prophets will rise and show great signs and wonders to deceive, if possible, even the elect” (Matt 24.24) – and from a secular perspective because such identifications have been made again and again across history, often with disastrous results (think Waco, think the 1979 siege of Mecca, think the Taiping Rebellion).

That’s why I’m interested in monitoring the various strands of apocalyptic thinking out and about in the world today.

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A little over a month earlier, on August 3, 2009, 09RPODUBAI316 under the sub-head “A Benevolent Dictator’s Fall from Grace” discussed the idea that the “Arab street” (both Sunni and Shi’a are mentioned) initially saw some Mahdist qualities in Ahmadinejad:

A Syrian journalist and blogger, who owns a media consultancy firm in Dubai, believes that many in the Arab street initially viewed Ahmadinejad when he came to power in 2005 as a “benevolent dictator.” Citing the tradition of the Mahdi, the media consultant argued that both Shi’a and Sunni Arabs are taught from early childhood to await the arrival of a strong and unimpeachable figure who will lead the Muslim world. The media consultant maintained that even secular Arabs view the world, albeit unintentionally, with this ingrained mindset. Our contact argued that Ahmadinejad played in to this narrative, and when Ahmadinejad arrived on the international stage many Arabs saw him, in contrast to their own flawed leaders, as a humble and pious man who was brave enough to stand up for his people and the greater Muslim world by confronting Israel and the West head on. However, both the intensely competitive campaign period and the forceful reaction by the Iranian people to the official election results have led some moderate Arabs to rethink Ahmadinejad’s true disposition. The election, the media consultant said, led some Arabs to understand that despite his astutely crafted and well-marketed image in the Arab world, Ahmadinejad is resented by many Iranians for domestic mismanagement, incompetence, and corruption. Because of this public fall from grace, so the media consultant told us, Ahmadinejad is no longer the “untouchable, holy figure” in the Arab world he once was — his flaws have brought him down to the level of the Arab world’s own imperfect leaders.

I’m reminded of the way that Steve Davis of Charleston, SC, among others, projected messianic qualities onto then-candidate Obama, when he wrote:

Barack’s appeal is actually messianic, it’s something about his aura, his spirit, his soul, that exudes enlightenment in the making.

I interpret Obama’s Lebanon, NH remarks as making light of that sort of projection (McCain’s video makes light of it, too), whereas Ahmadinejad appears to take his own status within the aura of the Mahdi all too seriously.

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The last reference allows me to end on a happier note.

The French diplo Jean-Christophe Paucelle is quoted in 09PARIS1046 of July 31, 2009 on the topic of Ahmadinejad’s inauguration.

First he mentions that since non-Muslims had not been invited to previous inaugurations, European members of the diplomatic corps might not know which door to take if they wished to walk out on the ceremony, should such an action be called for… and then he discusses an additional reason why the French would attend the ceremony, despite the contested nature of the election:

Paucelle said that the case of detained French citizen Clothilde Reiss has also influenced the EU decision to attend the inauguration ceremonies. “We think she may be released soon, and we don’t want to create another irritant,” Paucelle said. “There are enough already.” He reported that the French have reason to believe Reiss may form part of a group of detainees likely to be released on the August 7 anniversary of Imam Mahdi. Paucelle noted that a letter released July 29 by Ahmadinejad supported the idea of granting clemency to post-election protesters during Mahdi celebrations. “The Iranians will need to take face-saving measures, and so she will likely transfer to house arrest or some other status,” Paucelle said. He added that, of course, she may not be released at all next week, but the French remain optimistic that she will soon be out of prison.

Clotilde Reiss was indeed not released on that occasion — but she was in fact freed somewhat later, on Sunday, May 16th, 2010.

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Here’s a meme worth noting when it crops up in the advocacy of religious violence:

You don’t need permission from a religious authority…

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This particular idea came up in the video of Anwar al-Awlaki that was released yesterday, Nov. 8th.

Flashpoint Partners translated the comment in question, “do not consult anyone in killing the Americans. Fighting Satan does not require a jurisprudence. It does not require consulting. It does not need a prayer for the cause. They are the party of Satan … It is the battle between truth and falsehood.”

The AFP translation of the key phrase here reads, “Killing the devil does not need any fatwa (legal ruling).”

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My interest was piqued because of the correspondence between this comment from al-Awlaki, and the case of Phineas in the biblical Book of Numbers, chapter 25.

Phineas is “the son of Eleazar, the son of Aaron the priest” – but when he recognizes that the Lord would be infuriated by the interracial and interreligious copulation of Zimri, “a prince of a chief house” in Israel, with Cozbi, the daughter of the “head over a people, and of a chief house in Midian”, he does not go to the priest his grandfather seeking permission to kill them – he knows it is his Lord’s wish that they should die, and so he takes the responsibility for his action entirely upon himself, and kills them.

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As I shall recount in greater detail in two future posts on the topic of Phineas, it is the fact that Phineas acts without first requesting permission that pleases his Lord so much that He grants to Phineas and his seed “the covenant of an everlasting priesthood”.

It is precisely this acting without requesting permission that is emphasized in modern Christian Identity writings on the topic of “Phineas Priests”:

So a Phinehas priest is a MAN who acts on personal initiative to execute Yah’s judgment on violations of Yah’s laws which are adversely affecting His people.

And according to Ehud Sprinzak, the eminent scholar of modern Jewish terrorism, it was reading the “Balak portion” of the book of Numbers, in which the story of Phineas is recounted, that convinced Yigal Amir that he could legitimately assassinate Yitzhak Rabin without first obtaining rabbinic approval (which would have put the rabbi who granted him permission at risk).

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So. We have one more piece of the puzzle by which a mind with its own interpretation of God’s will can come to the conclusion that some specific act or acts of violence – accurately termed “terrorism” by others – are not only divinely sanctioned, and indeed mandatory, but can be undertaken without the requirement of prior verification from an appropriate religious authority.

And in this case — the religious authority, such as it is, of Sheikh al-Awlaki proposes this.

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Aaron Zelin‘s post on the Qur’anic text invoked by al-Awlaki’s title and the commentaries on that verse by ibn Kathir and others, is well worth your time, if you have not already seen it.

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Israpundit has done a useful analysis of the votes of individual Congressmen on issues affecting Israel–it seems to have been distributed only via e-mail, and not available on their site. The format of the data is pretty unwieldy, so instead of posting the whole thing I’ve done a bit of analysis. If this issue matters to you, then you might want to check and see if your current Congressman is on the list below. In any event, I think the data is pretty revealing.

Israpundit rates the Congresspeople on four votes:

–proposition 867, calling on the President to oppose the Goldstone report (nay=negative)

–letter to President to force Israel to end blockade of Gaza (yea=negative)

–Hoyer/Cantor bipartisan letter in support of Israel (nay=negative)

–the 2009 resolution recognizing Israel’s right to defend herself (nay=negative)

(The Israpundit data also considered support to the organization called J Street as a negative; I did not use this factor in my analysis)

Based on the above factors, the most consistently anti-Israel Congresspeople, scoring a “perfect” negative on all 4 factors, were:

Donna Edwards, Democrat, Ft Washington, MD
John Dingell, Democrat, Dearborn, MI
Maurice Hinchey, Democrat, Saugerties, NY
John Olver, Democrat, Amherst, MA
Raul Grijalva,Democrat, Tucson AZ
Barbara Lee,Democrat, Oakland,CA
George Miller,Democrat,Martinez,CA

Congresspeople with negative votes of 3 of the 4 factors were:

Peter DeFazio,D, Springfield, OR
Lois Capps,D,Santa Barbara,CA
Sam Farr,D,Carmel,CA
Andre Carson,D,Indianapolis,IN
John Oliver,D,Amherst,MA
Nick Rahall,D,Beckley, WV
Lynn Wolsey,D,Petaluna,CA
Maxine Waters,D,Los Angeles,CA
Betty McCollum,D,St Paul,MN
Dennis Kucinich,D,Cleveland,OH
Ron Paul,R,Lake Johnson,TX
James Moran,D,Arlington,VA
Jim McDermott,D,Seattle,WA
Gwen Moore,Milwaukee,WI

Note that every single one of the “4″s, and all of the “3″s with the single exception of Ron Paul, are Democrats.

These Democratic voting patterns appear to reflect the values of their core supporters–Daniel Pipes notes that at the level of the individual voter, polls show a much higher level of support for Israel among Republicans than among Democrats:

An April 2009 poll by Zogby International asked about U.S. policy: Ten percent of Obama voters and 60 percent of voters for Republican John McCain wanted the president to support Israel. Get tough with Israel? Eighty percent of Obama voters said yes and 73 percent of McCain voters said no. Conversely, 67 percent of Obama voters said yes and 79 percent of McCain voters said no to Washington engaging with Hamas. And 61 percent of Obama voters endorsed a Palestinian “right of return,” while only 21 percent of McCain voters concurred.

Almost a year later, the same pollster asked American adults how best to deal with the Arab-Israeli conflict and found “a strong divide” on this question. Seventy-three percent of Democrats wanted the president to end the historic bond with Israel but treat Arabs and Israelis alike; only 24 percent of Republicans endorsed this shift.

and

A consensus exists that the two parties are growing further apart over time. Pro-Israel, conservative Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe finds that “the old political consensus that brought Republicans and Democrats together in support of the Middle East’s only flourishing democracy is breaking down.”…Thanks to changes in the Democratic party, Israel has become a partisan issue in American politics, an unwelcome development for it.

In late March 2010, during a nadir of U.S.-Israel relations, Janine Zacharia wrote in the Washington Post that some Israelis expect their prime minister to “search for ways to buy time until the midterm U.S. elections [of November 2010] in hopes that Obama would lose support and that more pro-Israel Republicans would be elected.” That an Israeli leader is thought to stall for fewer Congressional Democrats confirms the changes outlined here. It also provides guidance for voters.

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Ross, Michael with Jonathan Kay, The Volunteer: A Canadian’s Secret Life in the Mossad, McClelland & Stewart, Toronto, 2007. 278 pp.

Recommended by Ishmael Jones, author of The Human Factor: Inside the CIA’s Dysfunctional Culture, reviewed here on chicagoboyz.

In late 1982, 21 year-old Michael Ross arrived in Israel to escape cold weather. After a three year hitch in the Canadian Army, tackled right out of high school, he was on vacation. Backpackers visiting Europe on a budget often traded their wintertime labour at Israeli kibbutzim for free room and board. Michael was soon headed for one in the Beit Shean valley.

Hailing from Victoria, British Columbia and a mildly Anglican religious background, even being in Israel was a stretch. Far more likely that he’d be kayaking, or mountain-biking, or growing dope up in the Rockies. Short of the North Island of New Zealand, or perhaps Marin County, California, there’s hardly a more heavenly place in the English-speaking world than the Gulf Islands between the city of Vancouver and Vancouver Island. It’s “Lotus-land” to eastern Canadians. A young man just out of an army should have found all the pleasure and excitement he could want in the Pacific Coast lifestyle.

Michael’s background certainly didn’t suggest a future in one of the most respected, yet constantly imperiled, clandestine services in the world — the Mossad. Nor could it predict that he would take a side in one of the nastiest confrontations between the modern industrialized world and its neighbours. Yet for almost two decades “Michael Ross” was to serve in a variety of military and intelligence roles for his adopted home under conditions of unimaginable danger. How he came to do so is both fascinating and rather unsettling.

It all started, as much of life does, with a girl. By marrying an Israeli girl, having a child, working on a kibbutz, learning Hebrew, and converting to Judaism, Michael Ross also took on the obligation of service in the Israeli reserves. In this book, he contrasts his basic training in the Israeli Defense Forces with what he received in the Canadian military. While the Canadian army is professional force with a noticeable distance between officers and men, the reserve forces in the IDF are known by name to their commanders and the men themselves form life-long bonds in the small country. Unbeknownst to most of his Israeli compatriots, however, Michael Ross had already served in Canada’s 2nd Special Service Force … a unit (since disbanded) which provided the bulk of commandos for the Canadian military. While maligned on occasion by Canadian newsmagazines as “lethal Boy Scouts” in comparison to the UK’s SAS , membership in the SSF nonetheless marked Ross as much more than an ordinary young soldier. His strength and exceptional marksmanship soon put him in charge of his platoon’s machine gun, one of three in his 150-man reserve company. With completion of his active service, he was transferred from a “regular combat engineering post” to a demolitions platoon in a reserve unit of the Golani Brigade. Again, this isn’t the mark of a JAG — just another guy. By 1985, he was deployed into south Lebanon for operations to ambush Hezbollah fighters.

Active service in IDF over, he was able to return to his young family and the kibbutz and spend time amongst the orchards and fields tended by his community. It was then he received a nondescript letter from the Israeli government inviting him to interviews for a government job. The interviews were unusual and the questions he was asked appeared aimless at times. His own imminent plans were to head back to British Columbia with his family. He was given a card with a number to call if he was still interested in a job when he returned to Israel.

A two-year stint in Vancouver with his family eventually left them homesick for Israel and when Ross returned to the country in the summer of 1988, he called the phone number on the card. He was 27.

He was invited to begin training with “The Office” as those in Mossad refer to the organization. The chapters that follow in The Volunteer describe his initial training in creating “covers” … being dropped in the midst of a group of people and making up plausible identities and experiences which seemed consistent but which couldn’t be casually validated. Sustaining such covers on the streets of Israel, while performing simple intelligence work such as information-gathering and surveillance, was no mean feat. Because of a long and deadly domestic bombing risk, ordinary Israelis are naturally suspicious and quite willing to quiz strangers on their business. For a novice clandestine intelligence agent, the streets of any Israeli city were as fine a training ground as any in the world.

Within months, Ross was ready for a second phase of training which involved specific fake missions, still within Israel. In some cases, his own superiors would surreptitiously use officers from the Israeli internal security service, Shin Bet, to arrest Ross and aggressively interrogate him to see whether he could maintain his cover during unexpected disruptions to his make-believe intelligence activities. Ross was being groomed for one of the most dangerous assignments in the Mossad, active duty in “The Unit” — cryptonym “Caesarea” — which is the foreign clandestine group tasked with working undercover in other countries. Caesarea was compartmentalized even from the rest of Mossad. Agent identities were scrupulously hidden from everyone but the Unit’s managers.

The chapters in Ross’s book which describe his training are in marked contrast to Ishmael Jones’ descriptions of his preparations for the CIA’s clandestine service in The Human Factor: Inside the CIA’s Dysfunctional Intelligence Culture. While Jones was always being trained in classes of trainees, and regaled with tales of CIA derring-do from the Cold War, the Mossad trained Ross in very small groups with a shifting array of specialist teachers … almost a “bespoke” method of creating an intelligence agent, one person at a time. The two books turn out to be complementary to each other. The Mossad is portrayed as small, intense, parsimonious, and very concerned with quality. They would appear not to have the resources or time to be sloppy in training.

By the summer of 1989, Ross had met with the head of Caesarea and was assigned to become a businessman based in Europe. A crash course in economics and business prepared him for an entirely new existence. Soon after the birth of his second son in Israel, “Michael Ross” (codename: Ridley) was leaving his family behind to create a new persona, living, working and spying in the cities of Europe. Before he left, he swapped all his identification (and any indication that he’d ever visited Israel) for his assumed identity. Once abroad, he set about filling out the details of his identity with an office space, secretary, and casual acquaintances near his residence. And he began to learn the subtleties of meeting with embassy staff and other Mossad agents in circumstances that wouldn’t attract attention. To all intents and purposes, he was an up-and-coming Yuppie, keen to create international business opportunities wherever he could find them.

In tandem with a partner, “Charles,” he began a six year assignment deep undercover which took him around Europe and the Mediterranean, gathering intelligence and performing dangerous missions which included attaching explosive devices to ships and vehicles, and conducting preliminary reconnaissance for insertion of Israeli special forces. In August 1990, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, and Ross’s introduction to the world of intelligence included trips to Tunisia, Morocco, Iran, and Sudan. His cover as a Western businessman was the foundation of his continued survival. Discovery as an agent, let alone an Israeli agent, would lead to torture and death.

The handful of assignments which Ross describes are hair-raising when the reader imagines the risks, but the author relates his tale in a straightforward manner that belies the exceptional personal qualities that Mossad must have spotted years earlier. His life required extended absences from his family (unlike the overseas family life that Ishmael Jones maintained with his wife and family while undertaking clandestine work for the CIA). At one point, Ross was permitted to move his family to France but couldn’t live in the same city as them.

Mossad’s small size seems to also carry the risk of interpersonal friction and incompatibilities. Ross’ partner was something of a “golden boy” in the organization and Ross found it increasingly difficult to deal with him personally. After six years in the field (unusually long by Mossad standards), Ross asked for a transfer from “Caesarea.”

Back in Israel, back to a normal salary (instead of the triple salary of a foreign clandestine posting), Ross was to join “Tevel” — the department of Mossad that deals with other intelligence agencies around the world. Being Canadian, Ross was a natural fit for the North American department and liaison with the CIA and FBI (both in Tel Aviv and in Washington DC). Through 1997 and 1998 he was to work closely with the Americans on counter-intelligence in the US (Hezbollah procurement agents living and working in America) and on providing background information during Dennis Ross’ negotiations on behalf of Bill Clinton between the Israelis and Palestinians. The bombings of African embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam occured while he was in Tevel, as did the abortive assassination attempt in Jordan on Khaled Mashaal by the Kidon branch of Mossad. Canadian passports were used by Israeli agents at the time. Ross also tries to resolve the “Mega” Israeli agent story generated by the Washington Post in 1997 — it turns out “Megazoid” was the Mossad cryptonym used for the D.C. CIA liaison officer and the communication was entirely aboveboard. Michael was also instrumental in allowing the CIA to nab significant Al Qaeda agents in Baku, Azerbaijan and forestall a meeting they were scheduled to have with Iranian intelligence agents.

As a side-note, Ross indicates that the entire Mossad Washington DC bureau at the time was two people, while the CIA alone had 30 in Tel Aviv. It’s a reflection of the relative scale of the bureaucracies used by the two countries to fight their intelligence battles.

In late 1998, Ross transferred from Tevel back to undercover counter-terrorism in southeast Asia and Africa. He joined a department known as “Bitsur” which had responsibility for developing local intelligence assets in foreign countries. It also has responsibility for helping persecuted Jews around the world. From 1998-2001, Ross was the only Mossad agent in sub-Saharan Africa apart from liaison staff in Nairobi and Pretoria. He was able to arrange a small exodus of Jews from Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe that were being lined up for extortion and abuse. As a “jumper,” someone in Mossad who worked in foreign countries but staged his activities out of Israel, he was also involved in a number of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) counter-proliferation activities … passing along information to media and government departments on scientists or military people in Russia and India … under the guise of working on a documentary.

Finally, Ross discusses a harrowing trip to South Africa to intimidate Iranians agents, pretending to be a South African intelligence service member. The action involved Ross directly in “rough stuff” and it would seem that it turned his thoughts to retirement. He’d come to the end of his emotional rope in the work that he did. Over the course of a few months in early 2001 and mid-2001, he began breaking in his replacement for his work in southeast Asia and Africa. 9/11 found both he and his partner in Asia, making a rapid trip to the Australian embassy to make secure contact with Israel and get instructions on what to do next. Despite an intensive round of interviews with the local Asian intelligence assets, nothing of significance was discovered.

Ross was ready for retirement. In the midst of a divorce and a mid-life crisis, he found himself missing Canada. His estranged father was experiencing poor health and Ross saw a final opportunity to form an adult relationship with him. And Ross began to see the stresses of Israeli life in a different light … the terrorist explosions, the traffic, the taxes, etc. The mental burden of living in the country finally caught up with him after almost twenty years.

He retired on October 1, 2001 … just weeks after 9/11. By his own account, he had no more to give. Returning to Canada, he’s had a chance to watch the coverage of events in the Middle East from the outside. Not surprisingly, it differs dramatically from what he knew of the attitudes to civilian casualties amongst the different parties in the region. Ross concludes his book with comments about jihad and Islam as experienced by those who are its daily victims.

And he continues to comment on world events in the National Post, a Canada-wide newspaper, sometimes as a co-author with Ishmael Jones.

Conclusion

The final chapter of the book broaches the question that repeatedly occurred to me while reading through the book “why did he write it?”

He’s not boastful about his actions, despite plenty of evidence of his intelligence and courage throughout. While perhaps due to using a co-author, surely the writing style was partly by the author’s intent. Ross is quite revealing when he describes training and assignments as a “combatant” (as Mossad clandestine agents are known) but he clearly didn’t intend to write a “tell-all” book. Like Jones’ The Human Factor, The Volunteer is (for me) a disturbingly useful sociological document on how the Mossad operates. And as mentioned earlier, it’s a vivid contrast with the often self-serving bureaucratic behemoth that’s the CIA.

So if the book wasn’t about self-aggrandizement, or about scandal-mongering and money-making, why do it?

As Ross tells it, his desire to write the book was first driven by an appetite to get his experience on paper. He also believes the world will be a safer place if people more widely understand Israel’s experiences dealing with terrorism. Though he feels he owes the Mossad much, he doesn’t feel the book will hinder the organization. Fair enough. But he returns to his home country which has a post-WW2 tradition of valuing nothing more highly than “a quiet life.” As a result, it’s become a global magnet for organized crime and international terrorists … who have a hankering for the “quiet life” as well.

I think back to Michael Totten’s recent interview on Pajamas Media with an Israeli who talks about “wanting to be where the action is.” I can get that completely. Israelis are personally appealing because they are wide awake. You can see 100% of their intelligence at work, moment by moment. They don’t have time for BS, and they’re perfectly willing to look at life “with the bark on” in ways that North Americans (and North American Jews) can barely fathom. So I can imagine why Ross chose Israel when he did and how he did. But I wonder, as he lives out his life on the west coast of Canada, whether he’s picked a place to live that’s also decided on “retirement.” No one seems wide-awake in British Columbia except the business people in downtown Vancouver and the Asian gang-bangers in the suburbs. And they’re mostly doing their business elsewhere.

The other people who are wide awake are the alphabet soup of jihadists in Canada who surely would love to bag an ex-Mossad agent who writes letters to the Editor. The details that the author gives about his operations in North Africa and the Middle East in The Volunteer seem entirely sufficient to track him down in Victoria, BC. Unless he’s changed his appearance dramatically or taken unusual precautions in his daily life and telecommunications, I think his book has placed him at some continuing risk.

Mind you, if his intent was to wake Canadians to the dangers of the wider world, he can rest easy. Canadian businessmen, at least, around the world will be living closer to the edge. Canadian passports are already well-established as the document of choice for the nefarious (on both sides of the law). Ross’ account now gives every Muslim intelligence agency license to grill Canadians without regard to whether they “look Jewish.” Cultural mannerisms that were entirely protective for Ross (as a Mossad agent) in the past are no longer protection at all for hapless civilians. Canadian consular services will be getting a regular work-out, one assumes, in the future.

Final Comments

For me personally, reading The Volunteer was all rather unsettling. Ross’ biography overlaps my own at several spots. I’ve worked and studied where he grew up. I was raised in a Canadian military family which had ongoing friendships with active-duty IDF members. I wrote essays on the Six Day War in school as a kid. As an adult, I’ve worked closely with Israelis and with North American Jews from a wide range of family backgrounds. He and I are roughly contemporaries … but I can’t say there was ever a time in my own life when I even imagined stepping into the Middle East and its conflicts. A wife and kids is an obvious motivation but clearly Michael Ross had a rare constitution for adventure, risk, and disciplined study. He doesn’t toot his own horn, but his biography (read carefully) speaks very loudly indeed. Why did he take such astonishing risks? Why did he return to sleepy, oblivious, ignorant Canada … and not become disenchanted? There are plenty of mysteries to mull over when the reading is done.

Inadvertently, I’ve found myself writing mini-book reviews by a bunch of risk-takers over the last six months. The youthful drama of Michael Yon’s training in the US Special Forces. The “slumming with the troops” hair-raising account of one year at war in the Korengal Valley with Sebastian Junger. The bureaucratic rat’s nest of the CIA’s clandestine service by Ishmael Jones. And now, the matter-of-fact derring-do of a Canadian in the sharpest end of the espionage business.

What have I learned? Mostly gratitude, I think. It’s our good fortune to have individuals who will take on these tasks, by circumstance or by nature. But I came to these books with one personal understanding … “you may love the job but the job doesn’t love you.”

All these individuals have paid a price for their exceptional physical and mental gifts. Society found ways to use these young men and reward them (at least temporarily) for that use. A faceless, less-adventurous reader can only hope that they find peace and happiness, either in the midst of the fray when the adrenaline is running high. Or at the end of the day, when there’s nothing left to give.

Of all the fiction authors who’ve addressed these issues, the one I’ve found most insightful in recent years is science fiction author Iain M. Banks, whose Culture novels set in the distant future are filled with protagonists who are trained for “special circumstances” and cast amidst pre-modern or quasi-modern societies to try to make things better. The endings aren’t always happy. We can only hope our societies can continue to raise kids with the appetite and dedication for international service in an affluent society that won’t ever value their efforts enough.

The Volunteer is highly recommended for those interested in the Mossad.

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Originally posted at zenpundit.com:

Charles Cameron is the regular guest-blogger at Zenpundit, and has also posted at Small Wars Journal, All Things Counterterrorism, for the Chicago Boyz Afghanistan 2050 roundtable and elsewhere. Charles read Theology at Christ Church, Oxford, under AE Harvey, and was at one time a Principal Researcher with Boston University’s Center for Millennial Studies and the Senior Analyst with the Arlington Institute:

In a Time of Religious Arousal

by Charles Cameron

We live in times of considerable religious arousal – witness the Manhattan mosque and cultural center controversy, the on-again, off-again Florida Quran burning, last week’s Glenn Beck rally at the Lincoln Memorial, Hindutva violence against Muslims in India, Muslim violence against Christians, the wars ongoing or drawing to an end in Afghanistan and Iraq, the threat of an Israeli or American attack on Iran, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and peace process… In each of these instances, religious arousal has a role to play.

It would require considerable care, research, and craftsmanship to produce a nuanced and appropriately balanced view of human nature, the current state of the world, American, European and Islamic popular, polite and political opinions, the global admixture of peoples and approaches that characterize Islam, the history of violence, religious and otherwise, the braiding in different times and places of religion with politics, the roots of violence, the roots of peace and its meanings both as a state of cessation of conflict and as a state of contemplative calm…

Such a presentation would require at least a book-length treatment, and cannot be trotted out every time some new spark emerges from the ancient fires… but perhaps I can lay out some of my own considerations about the topic here, in somewhat condensed form.

The teachings of Jesus appear to have been directed towards an audience that included regular folk: fishermen, members of an occupying military force, radical zealots, a tax-collector, a physician, a prostitute, religious scholars… a fair cross-section of human kind…

Every religion of any real “size” will have followers who are intellectuals, fearful followers, angry and reactive followers, contemplative followers – followers who are skilled in the various businesses of crime prevention, defense, contemplation, literature, the sex trade, theft, medicine, art, bargaining, diplomacy, music, architecture, investigative journalism, yellow journalism, inspirational writing, poetry…

It will of necessity address, and over time retain traces, of all their concerns.

Every religion of any real “size” will also have begun in a particular time, place and cultural setting, and will carry considerable parts of that setting with it, although it may also contain elements of a more profound or elevated spirit…

Every religion and scripture will, I suggest, promise a garden / paradise / city which is both attainable “outside” life, in a “there” which is hard to put into words, and “within” us, a similarly difficult concept to verbalize, in the moment, here. It will also contain what I call “landmines in the garden” – verses or narratives that offer sanction to what we today might regard as abhorrent violence against the innocent “other”.

Thus in Numbers 25 in the Jewish Tanakh and Christian Bible, the Lord offers to Phineas / Pinchas a “covenant of priesthood”, because he recognized that his Lord did not appreciate an Israelite and a woman of the Midianites copulating, and skewered the pair of them in flagrante through their conjoined parts with his spear — without first seeking the approval of the High Priest.

This story gave rise to the notion of the “Phineas Priest” action, in which a “lone wolf” kills on behalf of [a version of the Christian] God.

One of the most radical Christian Identity theorists is Richard Kelly Hoskins, who in 1990 invented the notion of the “Phineas Priest,” built around the concept of the biblical Phinehas, who used a spear to slay an Israelite and a Midianite who had lain together. Phineas Priests believe themselves modern day Phinehases, with a self-appointed mission to strike out in the most violent and ruthless way against race mixers, abortionists, homosexuals, Jews, and other perceived enemies.

Hoskins expounded the idea in his 1990 book, Vigilantes of Christendom: The Story of the Phineas Priesthood, citing both Robin Hood (!) and John Wilkes Booth as examples…

It seems highly probable that Byron de la Beckwith, killer of civil rights leader Medgar Evers, considered himself a Phineas Priest, see Reed Massengill, Portrait of a Racist: The Man who Killed Medgar Evers, pp 303-305. Similarly, it appears that Rev. Paul Hill, convicted of abortion clinic murders, was considered by his friends, and may have considered himself, a Phineas Priest. Likewise Yigal Amir, assassin of Yitzak Rabin, seems to have had the Phineas story in mind when deciding, without rabbinic support, to go ahead and kill the Israeli PM.

For an example of a recent meeting of rabbis — in Jerusalem’s Ramada Renaissance hotel– to promote the permissibility under halachic law of the killing of goyim / gentiles, see this article by Max Blumenthal and the accompanying video:
 

Individuals, small sects or powerful movements will on occasion seize on these “landmine” texts within a religious tradition, and use them to justify acts of violence, large and small.

The Crusades, for instance, did this on behalf of Christianity and against Islam, notwithstanding which St Francis was able to approach Saladdin’s nephew, the Sultan Malik al-Kamil, across the battle lines, coming in peace, discussing matters of devotion, and departing in peace. The Islam of al-Andalus was for centuries, in comparison to the Christendom of its time, a model of scholarship and tolerance – though not without aspects of the pre-eminence of Islam, dhimmi status for People of the Book, the jizya, etc.

Mark Juergensmeyer, author of Terror in the Mind of God and currently our finest analyst of religious terrorism, recently co-edited a book on Buddhist Warfare (obligatory, cautionary note: Juergensmeyer and I are both contributors to Michael W Wilson and Natalie Zimmerman’s book, A Kingdom at Any Cost: Right-wing Visions of Apocalypse in America). The world of Zen has been rattled by controversy regarding the support of leading roshis for the Japanese imperial war effort — and there are apocalyptic references to a future war between Buddhists and the mleccha (presumably Islam) in the text ofwhat the Dalai Lama has termed an “initiation for world peace” — the Kalachakra tantra.

Alexander Berzin, who has translated for the Dalai Lama on numerous occasions when this teaching was given, comments:

A careful examination of the Buddhist texts, however, particularly The Kalachakra Tantraliterature, reveals both external and internal levels of battle that could easily be called “holy wars.” An unbiased study of Islam reveals the same. In both religions, leaders may exploit the external dimensions of holy war for political, economic, or personal gain, by using it to rouse their troops to battle. Historical examples regarding Islam are well known; but one must not be rosy-eyed about Buddhism and think that it has been immune to this phenomenon. Nevertheless, in both religions, the main emphasis is on the internal spiritual battle against one’s own ignorance and destructive ways.

Any and all religions can be used to justify internal struggle, external violence, external peace-making and inner peace: the question is how these various threads are interwoven in individual cultures and histories, and in our own times.

That is, I’d suggest, a matter for legitimate dispute – but not one with an easy one sentence or even single paragraph answer.

In my view, the most powerful response to the current global “jihadist” movement will come not from advocates of democracy (whether backed up or not by military force or threat of force) who will naturally appear to be interfering in affairs between the soul and its God that do not concern them – but from people within the jihadists’ own religious tradition.

Noman Benotman, one-time leader of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group and colleague of bin Laden and Zawahiri, wrote an open letter to bin Laden dated 10 September 2010 / 1 Shawwal 1431 AH, which the Quilliam Foundation just released under the title “Al-Qaeda: Your Armed Struggle is Over“.

Benotman’s letter opens with an invocationfrom Qur’an57:16:

Is it not time for believers to humble their hearts to the remembrance of God and the Truth that has been revealed.

The text of Benotman’s message is only four pages long, and I recommend reading the whole of it – but have selected this single passage as representative of his critique:

What has the 11th September brought to the world except mass killings, occupations, destruction, hatred of Muslims, humiliation of Islam, and a tighter grip on the lives of ordinary Muslims by the authoritarian regimes that control Arab and Muslim states? I warned you then, in summer 2000, of how your actions would bring US forces into the Middle East and into Afghanistan, leading to mass unrest and loss of life. You believed I was wrong. Time has proved me right

Benotman closes:

In urging you to halt your violence and re-consider your aims and strategy, I believe I am merely expressing the views of the vast majority of Muslims who wish to see their religion regain the respect it has lost and who long to carry the name of “Muslim” with pride.

For those who are concerned at the influence of Anwar al-Awlaki on English-speaking youth, there’s a detailed 130-page critique of his approach to global jihad from a strict Salafist perspective available on the web:

On the topic of suicide bombing / martyrdom operations viewed from an Islamic perspective, I’d suggest reading the Ihsanic Intelligence “Hijacked Caravan“:

And for a glimpse of the wider possibilities offered within the Islamic world, Bassam Tibi’s brief summary in his book, The Challenge of Fundamentalism: Political Islam and the New World Disorder is worth considering:

To me religious belief in Islam is, as Sufi Muslims put it, “love of God,” not a political ideology of hatred. … In my heart, therefore, I am a Sufi, but in my mind I subscribe to ‘aql/”reason”, and in this I follow the Islamic rationalism of Ibn Rushd/Averroes. Moreover, I read Islamic scripture, as any other, in the light of history, a practice I learned from the work of the great Islamic philosopher of history IbnKhaldun. The Islamic source most pertinent to the intellectual framework of this book is the ideal of al-madina al-fadila/”the perfect state”, as outlined in the great thought of the Islamic political philosopher al-Farabi.

Irani and Funk’s “Rituals of Reconciliation: Arab-Islamic Perspectives” indicates something of what an Islamic approach to truth and reconciliation might look like:

No doubt there’s a great deal more that one might say, but that must suffice for now.

Charles Cameron.

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The Historic District Commission of Litchfield, CT has–on grounds that many consider as pretty questionable–rejected the application of the Chabad Lubovitch group to renovate a historic house and turn it into a synagogue. The remodeled building was also to have included an apartment for the rabbi, and a swimming pool for the Chabad-sponsored summer camp. Story here.

I don’t know if the denial of this application is or is not consistent with the rules under with the Historic District Commission is supposed to be operating, but I do think that some of the comments reported to have been made during the discussions were pretty inappropriate and pretty disturbing.

Now, maybe I missed it, but I haven’t seen the speech in which President Obama defends the Litchfield synagogue in the same way that he defended the Ground Zero mosque. Nor have I seen Nancy Pelosi demanding an investigation of synagogue opponents in the same way that she demanded an investigation of GZ mosque opponents. And will the “human rights activists” and liberal clergymen who have been so fervent in their defense of the mosque project also step up to defend the Litchfield synagogue project? I think we all know the answer.

There are two principal reasons for the phenomenon that is on view here:

1)Neither Jews in general nor Chabadniks in particular are known for killing people and blowing things up. Hence, they can be offended or even disrespected with relative impunity.

2)More subtly: to many “progressives,” Chabadniks may perhaps be “other” enough to arouse a sense of dislike and unease–but are clearly not “other” enough to fall under the protective umbrella of multicultural exoticism.

Roger Scruton’s concept of Oikophobia, explicated at the link by James Taranto, helps in understanding many aspects of “progressive” belief and behavior.

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Best wishes for a sweet and healthy year to my friends, colleagues and readers.
 

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Things are spinning out of control

Robert Avrech has a story about blatant anti-Semitism in Holland, the land of Anne Frank:

Anti-Semitism has gotten so ugly in The Netherlands that Jews walking along Amsterdam’s street are being harassed by young Muslims who yell insults or give Nazi salutes…A TV programme broadcast on Sunday by the Jewish Broadcasting Organisation showed rabbi Lody van de Kamp confronted by Moroccan youths giving the Hitler salute.

and

“Jews are deserting Antwerp,” headlines De Standaard. The Belgian newspaper predicts that in fifty years there will be no more Jews living in the city. Due to an increase of Anti-Semitism, many young Jews are leaving the city to study in London, New York or Israel, where “working with a skullcap (kippah) isn’t a problem”, and they never return.

The sharp increase in anti-Semitism is only one among many indicators of social disintegration and dysfunction throughout the Western world. It is increasingly clear that (although there are individual honorable exceptions) our political elites lack the wisdom and courage to deal effectively with the problems confronting our societies. The ongoing appeasement of jihadism is one primary example; the orgy of financial irresponsibility is another.

Reading Robert’s post, I was reminded of a passage from Sebastian Haffner’s memoir. Haffner, as you may recall from my review here, grew up in Germany between the wars and wrote an indispensable book about his experiences and observations.

In the spring of 1933, right after the official Nazi takeover of Germany, Haffner attended Berlin’s Carnival, hoping to find a girlfriend for the night or maybe something longer term. But:

All at once I had a strange, dizzy feeling. I felt as though I was inescapably imprisoned with all these young people in a giant ship that was rolling and pitching. We were dancing on its lowest, narrowest deck, while on the bridge it was being decided to flood that deck and drown every last one of us.

The flooding of the lower decks in our time has more of incompetence and less of sheer malevolence to it than did the flooding to which Haffner referred, although malevolence is by no means absent. It is more a matter of arrogant fools on the bridge ordering the turning of valves and the throwing of switches of whose functions they have no understanding. But drown we will, nonetheless, unless trends are reversed.

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Today, Helen Thomas’s racist comments forced her retirement. This is not a victory. It is a harbinger.

Within five years at most, those very same comments will be accepted wisdom by the leftmost 1/3 of the American political spectrum and they will routinely voice such views in the public discourse without shame or remorse. No one will lose their job because they advocate the destruction of Israel.

The evolution has already begun. Scan the comments on the story at Huffington Post. Clearly many on the left already don’t find those sentiments shocking or beyond the pale.

We have seen this process before. In 1966, if had you told someone, say Robert Kennedy, that by 1971: (1) a Harvard educated, US Naval Reserve Officer would be lying under oath before Congress by claiming that American soldiers had become little better than the Waffen SS and (2) his accusations would be treated as gospel and applauded by one good third of the American polity, well, they would have laughed in your face and called you hysterical. If you had told that person in 1966 that by 1971, the majority of America’s public intellectuals would be producing long-winded justifications for why the people of Indochina would be better off under communist rule than otherwise, they would have committed you.

Yet, that evolution from merely viewing the war as poorly fought and of dubious practical value to evidence that America was little better than Nazi Germany took just a few brief years. Even today, the people who made such delusional statements are well regarded members of the American left.

Back in the ’60s, the left staked its reputation on the idea that America was to blame for all of the bloodshed in Indochina. They completely and utterly ignored anything the communists did no matter how vile. Today, they’ve staked their reputation on the assertion that Israel’s evil actions are the controlling factor in the conflict in the region. They ignore anything that the enemies of Israel do, no matter how vile.

By publicly proclaiming such a delusional outlook, they are forced to adopt ever increasingly radical assertions in order to justify their de facto alliance with evil. The only way they could justify carrying water for the communists in Indochina was to paint America as being even worse. Today, the only way they can justify carrying water for the racist, sexist, homophobic, brutal autocrats of the Middle East is to claim that Israel is even worse and/or that the actions of the autocrats are just reactions to whatever bad thing Israel has done.

Leftism is ultimately driven by the collective narcissism and hubris of individual leftists. They choose positions because those positions make them feel superior to everyone else. Leftists back autocrats because any idiot can back the liberal democracy but it takes a great genius to understand that it’s really the vicious thugs who are the good guys.

Their ego-driven analysis causes them to adopt the same basic arguments, in widely different circumstances, over and over again as deterministically as the orbits of planets. In any conflict between a liberal democracy and a non-democratic entity, they will inevitably side with the non-democratic entity because everyone else in society will back the liberal democracy. Even in conflicts between different levels of authoritarianism, they will select the most authoritarian.

As the regional enemies of Israel have grown more and more brutal to everyone, even their own people, the western left has grown more and more hostile to Israel. They have to justify their support of the autocrats by increasingly smearing Israel. They can’t help themselves, because they act from self-centered emotion instead of dispassionate reason.

The left has created a trajectory for themselves that will quickly but inevitably lead all of them to voice the same views that forced Helen Thomas from public life. Indeed, we can assume that Thomas felt comfortable making those comments on tape because such beliefs are already widely accepted by her political circle. She didn’t consider them beyond the pale because she hears them all the time.

Thomas, then, is but the tip of the iceberg or, more aptly, the tip of the shark’s dorsal fin just breaking the surface of the water. Whatever metaphor we choose, she is a harbinger of how ugly things are going to get. She is the dark edge of the gathering storm.

It’s 1938, not 1945.

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Does anyone else see the epically fearful irony of, a) Jews in German U-boats, b) Armed with nukes carrying American nuclear material, c) Whose bomb designs were tested in then-apartheid South Africa, stalking Iran’s jihadist Regime?

The Sunday Times of London reports just that in this crazier than Tom Clancy’s SUM OF ALL FEARS article titled:

Israel stations nuclear missile subs off Iran

Three German-built Israeli submarines equipped with nuclear cruise missiles are to be deployed in the Gulf near the Iranian coastline.
 
The first has been sent in response to Israeli fears that ballistic missiles developed by Iran, Syria and Hezbollah, a political and military organization in Lebanon, could hit sites in Israel, including air bases and missile launchers.
 
The submarines of Flotilla 7 — Dolphin, Tekuma and Leviathan — have visited the Gulf before. But the decision has now been taken to ensure a permanent presence of at least one of the vessels.
 
The flotilla’s commander, identified only as “Colonel O”, told an Israeli newspaper: “We are an underwater assault force. We’re operating deep and far, very far, from our borders.”

My irony meter has pegged out.

What’s next?

The Iranian Revolutionary Guard speed boats hunting those Israeli subs with Japanese commercial bass-finding sonar with made-in-China electronics?