The Jew calling the kettle black

May 28th 2008 – Hundreds of New Testaments have been set alight in a massive bond fire yesterday in Tel Aviv, Israel. The Deputy Mayor of the City, Uzi Aharon, admitted to orchestrating the gathering of as much ‘messianic propaganda’ as possible throughout the city yet denies he organized the burning of the Holy Books. Judaism does not, of course, follow the New Testament nor do they believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ. They believe he was a prophet among others. Mr. Aharon stipulates that the ‘pile’ of propaganda he gathered was accidentally set on fire by a group of rebellious students; it was not planned. Needless to say, millions are outraged at this display of hatred and intolerance.

Firstly, the shock and outrage of Christians, evangelists and messianic Jews seems justified in a conservative and closed way where freedom of expression means staying at home and whispering things to yourself while listening to Fox News. Funny enough, my definition of freedom of expression obliges me to respect the closed-mindedness of these people and their vocal outrage. I will certainly not hatch the freedom of expression debate here therefore I will focus on the actions themselves. Furthermore, perhaps their shock comes from the fact that Jewish people seem as religiously, ethnically and ideologically prejudiced as any other nation. Israel is no longer (and has technically never been) a paragon of virtuous acceptance of all walks of life. They, also, have a radical fringe of society (which incidentally includes the Deputy Mayor of Tel Aviv) which will not accept anyone else’s beliefs or differences and will intimidate them through violent expression.

I would need countless pages to demonstrate the thousands of examples, in Space and Time, of cultural intolerance so I will focus on the religious parallel of Martin Luther’s heretic Bible in the early XVIth century.

Following Luther’s publication and propagation of a written, German bible, the lay person who was not verses in Latin could now read the Scriptures. Furthermore, his Protestant interpretation of the Bible rejected the corrupt papal order, including the Vatican and thus the Book angered many Catholic monarchs of Europe as well as the web-like network of Catholicism present at the time. Notoriously in England, Thomas More organized public burnings of this Bible to warn heretics in a graphic manner of the consequences against believing in the wrong set of values. In a further twist of Irony, Martin Luther (the philanthropist and populist) did publish angry hate speeches against the European Jewry. He especially encouraged the burning of Synagogues and of all Jewish homes as well as the confiscation of their money and investments. Thankfully, it was the last example of hateful words and actions perpetrated against Jewish people by a German.

The original piece of topical news and the above historical parallel in Renaissance Europe interestingly boast the same hypocrisy. The Israeli national and local gouvernments have insisted on the difficult History their people have endured and the current prejudices exercised against them throughout the world. On the other hand, one of their elected officials organized a seizure and a possible burning of New Testaments (reminiscent of the novel Fahrenheit 451). 500 years ago, Martin Luther railed against the elitist and unfair papist monarchies who did not convey God’s message of love and guilt for all, equally. On the other hand, he encouraged the singling out and maiming of a particular religious group.

Oh well, most people will never do anything noteworthy with their life, we can hardly blame certain illustrious people for not practicing what they preach. At least they tried something and affected change; as long as they are not upheld as spotless epitomes of tolerance and acceptance, they simply remain people of interest and not people of veneration.

(Pictured: A seemingly smug Martin Luther - a Bible, burning)

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No oil for you!

May 16th 2008 – United States president George W. Bush asked Saudi oil minister, Ali Al-Nuaimi, and Saudi King Abdullah to increase their country’s oil production as a stop-gap measure, countering the skyrocketing prices of the barrel of oil (127$) and of gas at the pump in North America. Al-Nuaimi tacitly stated that he saw no reason to increase production since their current supply is adequate for the market demand. Furthermore, he explained that, in his opinion, oil and gas prices are soaring due to speculation and regional conflicts much more than Middle-Eastern production. Therefore, one or two hours after most North American news services announced the meeting of Bush and Abdullah to speak of oil, we were treated to a shrugging American president who seemed to say ‘they don’t want to come out and play’, and that was that.

To begin, I have to give three well-earned points to Mr. Al-Nuaimi. Firstly, he easily and nonchalantly stood up to George W. Bush and the most powerful nation on earth. Secondly, he knew that his personal interests, as well as the interests of Saudi Arabia’s economy (over 40% of which relies on oil production) lie in the efficient administration of the oil business; no amount of American whining will change that. And thirdly, he brought up a valid point about speculation since there is as much world demand and conflict now as there was in may of 2007 yet the price of the barrel has doubled (68$ - 127$). The only down point to his intervention, one that Al-Nuaimi obviously knows, is that a dramatic increase in Saudi production would flood the market, rapidly overtaking any form of demand and all other considerations thus the barrel’s price would plummet. The Saudis have no interests in losing profits or in administering oil as if it were Wal-Mart (sell 1 million items for very little instead of a 100 items for a lot more).

Now comes my gold star for participation. President Bush summarily and promptly announced the meeting, asked for something, got turned down, came back out and said ‘better luck next time folks’. This seems very odd from an administration that has been looking for Osama Bin-Laden for a decade, has been looking for Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq for 5 years and fought for months to even legitimize their electoral victory in 2000. This time, a positive outcome in this demand would benefit hundreds of millions of Americans and Canadians yet the president swiftly gave up within an hour, foregoing even a summary consultation with any of his chiefs of staff. I know, I know, it is naïve of me to think he seriously believed the King and Minister were going to accept. He simply told Western media what they wanted to hear (a sincere-looking ‘I tried’) since he was visiting the region anyway. In a classic catch-22, the president’s options were to attempt a half-hearted demand to the Saudis which would be automatically rejected, effectively making the USA appear weak OR, visiting the King of Saudi Arabia and not discussing oil whilst the barrel gains 10$ every month, effectively showing that these rich bureaucrats couldn’t care less about the working classes. I certainly sympathize with Mr. Bush; he chose the option with the least amount of consequences.

This minor example of a major nation making a half-hearted attempt at showing their teeth, subtly and secretly trying to preserve the status-quo, is a scheme that appears much too often in Western history.

I give to you the League of Nations. Founded in 1919 at the End of WW1 and the peace negotiations of Versailles, it was to be an international organization to preserve peace and multilateral communication where there used to be only secret alliances and military build-ups. It was a theory built in the 1920s where colonial empires were beginning to fade, European Empires were dismantled, ideological and political revolutions spanned the globe and the recognition of all individuals (in a class, religious order, gender, profession) was finally prioritized above the soap opera that was Royal Europe. Unfortunately, this was a very first try in permanent international diplomacy and many cracks were apparent from the beginning. Notably, it had no muscle. The United States and The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics refused to join, the League had no armed force of its own and its mission statement strictly prohibited any kind of serious sanction in the case of belligerence.

Thus, when Mussolini’s Italy was warned not to invade Abyssinia (Modern-day Ethiopia) in late 1935, he did it anyway. He then poisoned water supplies, armed his half-a-million soldiers with chemical weapons and unleashed them on the sword wielding Ethiopians. Needless to say the League of Nations was not happy of the ensuing massacre and subjugation of Abyssinia as an Italian colony (until then, it was the only African region that had resisted European colonization for over 450 years). Instead of imposing noteworthy sanctions such as the restriction of the Suez Canal through which the Italians were reaching Abyssinia or by restricting oil sales to Italy, some members (not all) of the League simply issued an official condemnation and applied economic sanctions on certain textiles towards Italy. In no way did this stop Mussolini and I like to think it made him laugh until he peed a little.

Similarly, the League could do very little but wag their finger when Germany started rearming in 1933, retook the Rhineland in 1936, reformed the Anschluss (literally ‘connection’) in 1938 with Austria and invaded Czechoslovakia in 1939. It even tried its maniacal textile approach towards Japan when it invaded China in the early 1937. Each one of these lightly shunned countries simply left the League of Nations and jointly marched into the Second World War.

Following the conflict, the League was abolished and a new union was formed, the United Nations. With much more teeth and an omnipresent feeling of dread towards an inevitable Capitalist/Communist Third World War involving nuclear weapons, all countries were convinced to participate in active international diplomacy instead of creating back-door alliances as in an endless game of Risk.

Then, as today, we are privy to the gouvernments’ sloppy attempts at diplomacy whilst secretly conducting a personal and less populist agenda. Fortunately, we have greatly toned down the importance of these back-door dealings. Nevertheless, the working man suffered the brunt of the consequences in 1939 and continues to do so in 2008.

(Pictured: Mussolini's troops in Abyssinia - World map of League members (Light blue, dark blue and black) - President Bush meets King Abdullah)

(Thank you for reading – I have enjoyed writing every single one of the past 50 blog entries and look forward to many more.)

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Pickers CAN be choosers

May 9th 2008 – Myanmar, or Burma, has refused the financial and logistic assistance from the United States whilst coping with the aftermath of devastating cyclone Nargis. Whereas preliminary reports gave us grizzly figures of 1, 2 and 4 thousand casualties, today, we have been made aware of the official, conservative number of 23,000 fatalities and 1.5 million inhabitants affected by the cataclysm. Furthermore, the United Nations has advanced the more plausible (according to them) number of 100,000 casualties. President Than Shwe’s gouvernment has refused American help and is apparently indifferent to the difficulties his country is having with Western aid in general. Instead, Shwe is focusing on a referendum for a new constitution. A referendum in a military dictatorship is surely more important than feeding children and housing families. There probably was no way to doctor the results a few weeks later rather than now.

Weather, Customs and general tensions have prevented most, if not all international aid (from countries and NGOs) from reaching anyone in Burma. For example, The United Nations Food Programme has been able to provide a full three planes of food to the Burmese people in the past seven days (.5% down, 99.5% to go). Unfortunately, these people seem to want to eat EVERY day; they should go vote instead. Political tensions between Burma and the US have made it so that they refused the logistics and material help of the wealthiest and most organised nation on the planet. Instead, they are accepting supplies from Vietnam and China, without necessarily having any way to distribute the relief effort once they have it.

It is quite simple; I understand the Burmese gouvernment’s reluctance to accept American and European administrators within their borders. You have to realise most of these helping nations have never recognised the current government of that country, in place since the early 1990s and thus President Than Shwe has been extremely reluctant to appear in public or negotiate internationally. On the other side, all that is left is for the afflicted Burmese people to die. The Red Cross and Red Crescent organisations have already reported massive outbreaks of diseases in the new refugee ghettos.

It is quite unfortunate yet not very original for a country with socialist/communist tendencies.

Needless to say, World War II was the most destructive and traumatising conflict in recent history and the scars that it left in Europe were greatly crippling in the late 1940s. Germany, France and the United-Kingdom, the three financial motors of Europe were economically, militarily and politically devastated. To the rescue comes the United-States and the Golden ‘Marshall Plan’. Beginning in July of 1947, President Truman offered financial assistance, not loans, to all allied countries, the Soviet Union and all its communist friends. Whereas Western Europe received over 13 Billion US dollars in reconstruction help, the USSR and the Soviet states refused the help for reasons of pride and for vague principles such as ‘avoiding the United States’ Dollar imperialism’. In all fairness, Stalin didn’t need the help since he found a handy third solution past accepting or refusing international help. He simply exterminated the poor strata of his society (who were deviants by definition) and by nationalising all industries and farms without compensating the former owner. It was the perfect plan except the Soviets spent the following 40 years monopolising up to 40% of their annual income on thermonuclear devices, ICBMs and Ghetto Space shuttles (i.e. the 1961 makeshift lemon in which Yuri Gagarin went to space in).

Starting this Monday, all Non-Gouvernmental Organisations that wish to help have vowed to try and get their relief to the population despite Burmese bureaucracy. As long as President Bush can refrain from saying the exact same thing, we should be able to avoid a second Iraq War and a third Vietnam War.

Good night and good luck to the Burmese people, don’t forget to go vote.

(Oddly appropriate 1948 poster for the Marshall plan - The before and after satellite images of ravaged Burma)

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Angry Lesbians

May 1st 2008 – Inhabitants of the Greek isle ‘Lesbos’ are going to court to petition for the outlawing of the term ‘Lesbian’ used by gay activists and communities. If successful, the Greek ‘Lesbians’ (as in inhabitants of Lesbos) will pursue the enactment of an international ban. They claim that the use of the term by gay communities is disgraceful, creates social problems and ‘violates their human rights’ (BBC News Service). Needless to say, whereas the inhabitants of Lesbos take this dead seriously, the gay community has responded with much levity and triviality.

On the one side, up to 350,000 people call home the legendary island of Lesbos. Their ancestral roots reach back past the modern era, survived the Hellenistic civil wars (323-30 BC), the classical and archaic Greek periods dominated by Sparta, Athens and Thebes (600-323 BC) and could even originate from autochthonous inhabitants from the 7-8th millennium BC. It has an illustrious history connecting ancient Greek wars to Turkish invasions, to a current frontier land between the Greeks and their timeless nemesis, Turkey (Asia Minor/Anatolia/Persia/Ottoman Empire/Byzantine Empire depending on the era). Thus, we may well understand and even empathize with the cause of these Lesbians who have a timeless claim to their civic/national designation that even predates the liberal homosexuality of ancient Athens. Furthermore, today, homosexuality has definitely lost its once accepted aspect in the eastern Mediterranean and carries a heavy social stigma. To conclude, the embarrassment of the inhabitants of Lesbos as well as the Greek government and people may soon lead to the renaming of the island after its capital city, Mytilene.

On the opposing side, gay rights movements, the international gay community and the rest of contemporary civilization have used the term ‘Lesbian’ since it was defined as feminine homosexual relations in the 1870 edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. I might add that there is a direct connection between the term and the island in ancient Greek mythology/lore. The Poetess Sappho was, it is generally believed, from Mytilene on Lesbos in the 7th-6th century BC. She wrote of love and infatuation between women (also between women and men) although very rarely wrote of intercourse (if at all). Having very little written records of women before the Renaissance, never mind women writing about homosexuality, she was chosen to represent the gay female community and thus ‘Lesbian’ (as well as ‘Sapphic’) has since passed into the gay ethos. From where I stand, this seems to be a legitimate and respectful appropriation of ancient history/mythology to represent a certain concept/identity. Today, the gay community probably does not have in mind the tarnishing of the national identity of the Lesbian people; I doubt most of them knows it exists. It can easily be interpreted as a subtle tribute rather than a direct affront.

I know what you are thinking: the people of Lesbos have a legitimate right not to be humiliated and have a traditional claim to the term meanwhile Lesbians now use the word proudly to represent themselves and their sexual identity, PICK ONE! All right, here goes. I find it highly doubtful the inhabitants of Lesbos will be able to patent their regional nationalism and sue every gay woman on earth; Albania could then sue everyone who uses the term Pyrrhic victory, Belgium, whomever uses Waterloo and Israel, could simply sue everyone. Furthermore, the root of the problem seems to be that they are disgraced, ashamed and socially penalized because of their association to homosexuality. Maybe their energies should be refocused on the real source of this problem: the Greek mentality that associates homosexuality with disgrace, shame and social deviance. We have to be honest here, most people in California can’t point to their own country on a map; they certainly don’t harbour nefarious designs for the people of Lesbos. In that same vein, ignorance is not a valid excuse for the lightness with which the gay communities are treating the preoccupations of the Lesbian people. They are displaying their belief that gay rights are extremely important in all facets of society yet people that want to preserve national dignity are seemingly a big joke.

All in all, Lesbos is in an impossible situation because mental structures in the near-East will not change soon and gay females will be termed ‘Lesbians’ for at least a few more centuries. Also, gay communities need to seriously revamp their Public Relations office and stop staring exclusively at their penultimately important, gay belly-buttons.

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(Pictured: Sappho, as painted by Gustav Klimt - Lesbos, this is where you would point on a map)

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