It was with interest that I listened last night to a FoxNews commentator describing with a breathless awe and undisguised admiration and glee, a weapon designed to “clear the area of all living things” that had been provided to Israel by the US, now currently being deployed against the people (and animals, and plants) of Lebanon.
How did it get to this low point in human history?
Who started this “Middle East Conflict” that now hurtles along a long-carved path inexorably toward its long-planned (but possibly, hopefully, with some wild cards and surprises) end?
In recent days, I have seen a lot of comments about this, and almost all of them go back to this or that phony “agreement” or other, based on some premise made up by people who do not live in refugee camps in Lebanon or the huddled warrens of Gaza. I have commented on the perfidy of Arafat, whose near genius as a warrior was trumped only by his subsequent love affair with swimmin’ pools and movie stars, and for which love he forsook and forgot his erstwhile love of his people.
Thus, I, too have been guilty over the years of getting caught up in discussions of accords and borders, when all this is irrelevant, and I knew it even as I got caught up in it.
But eventually, it is a function of ancient-ness, I think, that one tends to cut backward to the chase, so to speak, no longer being fooled by those tempting mirages of “well here is what happened in MY lifetime, or the lifetime of my father or my grandfather, who talked about it all the time, so clearly everything began at that point.”
Just as the current discussions on the subject of “immigration” in the US are nothing but the inevitable and predictable consequence of Europeans having invaded such a large and populous land mass that even the most assiduous and continuing attempts at genocide of the indigenous population have been unsuccessful, and never really had a chance, coupled with the different methods employed by the English and Spanish.
The former went for a more straightforward “kill em all” model, and in fact did achieve a greater degree of success with the tribes in the northern areas than the Spanish, who actually received a letter from the Pope in that time encouraging them to rape Indian women, and thereby create a holy race, and it is that holy race, steeped for centuries in a religion which forbids contraception, which is now predictably and inevitably reclaiming the continent, much to the disgruntlement of the descendants of the invaders, who had supposed that their ancestors had thoughtfully reduced the primitive natives to a handful of alcoholics languishing in the squalor of their “reservations” waiting for cirrhosis and malnutrition to do the work of the smallpox blankets of yesteryear.
So it is with the Middle East. One cannot talk about anything that has happened there since the days of Lawrence and Gertrude without the finger pointing back to Lawrence and Gertrude 🙂
One cannot talk about 1948, and the UN resolution that “created Israel” without both pointing out that the UN is an organization that was created by the US for the purposes of acting as a sort of international public relations office for US neo-colonialism, or without going back to Sykes-Picot, and thus, back to Lawrence and Gertrude, back to the US-UK colonialist adventurism that set in motion events in the region for decades to come, events that would impact the lives of people in countries far away, people whose grandfathers were not yet born.
And the same is true with “Iraq.” One cannot discuss that without pointing out that Iraq, like many “countries” in the region, are the result of western map-carving to suit neo-colonialist business interests. Rich men, then as now, wanted more money.
It is kind of like the absurdity of the TV reports giving the opinion of this or that Middle Eastern nation, when what they are giving is the press release of the native overseer of one of these western-created territories, which has nothing to do with what the people who live there think, those people who suppposedly hate freedom, but who have been so carefully kept from the tiniest crumb of it for generations now.
Thus when people in the east say that they wish to get rid of “Israel,” they are not saying they wish to get rid of a peaceful little country where Judaism is the state religion and a lot of people who live there are Jews, they are saying they wish to get rid of a glorified US weapons dump populated by a large number of US proxy gunmen who regularly engage in committing crimes against humanity on the neighbors, and even some of its own population (over 25% of Israeli children go to bed hungry every night), and kept stuffed with dollars to maintain it as the fat little guard dog of what the US considers its oil in the region, essentially just another client state, not unlike the one the speaker or writer saying he wishes to get rid of Israel lives in, just with more weapons and more dollars, and the permission to commit atrocities on more people, whereas in his own land, the gunmen are allowed to commit the atrocities only on people who oppose the US-installed emir or prince or sultan.
Indeed, one can even find people whose idea of “Jews” is as warped as some westerners ideas are of “Arabs” or “Muslims,” the former defining “Jews” not as people who worship God according to Version 1 of the Abrahamic OS, or even an ethnic group, but people who subscribe to a particular ideology which like “American” means someone whose beliefs include the extermination of the speaker, where his western counterpart is likely to view “Arabs”/”Muslims” as evildoers who hate freedom and therefore want to kill Americans because they worship an idol called Mecca who wrote a book telling them to do so.
Of course both are the product of policies and propaganda carefully crafted over the generations by rich men who want more money, and have been quite successful in pre-empting any danger that any democracy might accidentally break out among the people of either west or east, therefore thwarting the generation of revenue.
We sometimes tend to forget, in all the discussions of this and that, that every time one human being fails to shoot another, whether with a pistol, a rifle, helicopter gunship or bomb, revenue for a rich man decreases.
Thus, that peaceful little country, that homeland for Jews, never had a chance, it was never intended by the west that such a thing should exist, and ironically, it would have been the people of the east who would not really have minded having it, and once the US is removed, assuming enough humans survive to make such a thing still a question, it is my most fervent prayer, and my dearest belief, that at last there will be a homeland for Jews in Palestine, and that whether we kneel toward Mecca, fold hands and call the name of Mary, mother of Jesus, or davin toward the Wailing Wall, we will all pray together in Jerusalem.
