Magnificat, Sister Marie Keyrouz

 

I Am Asked What I Think Of The Cenk, TYT - Sam Seder Blow Up

HAVEN'T MUCH LISTENED to TYT for years, don't much listen to Sam Seder but I looked into it for about twenty minutes after you asked.  I've seen these battles over largely imaginary lefty turf since the teensy-weensy never elected a single dog-catcher in NYC or Madison, Wis. commie and Marxist parties duked it out with their teensy-weensy hands to their teensy-weensy audiences from the early 1960s onward. 

NONE OF THEM ARE WORTH A TENTH OF A GILL OF PISS  or to bother to have an opinion on.  Their petty wars and limp wristed slapping fights should get them ignored into oblivion. 

I looked in my archive, here's just one of the things I posted five years ago.  Note the prediction of where Cenk was headed even then.

I wouldn't even bother with this if it wasn't typical of that kind of play-lefty idiocy.  I increasingly find I don't bother with them anymore.  I don't think I'll bother listening to Sam Seder or his buddies on this hearing, I certainly won't be listening to Cenk (once and future Republican) on it.  I wouldn't be surprised if by the time he's 60 Duncan is voting Republican.  

I titled that post "Brought Up Like The Dog Ate Trash" which is pretty good for anything to do with the play-left and future Republicans.  

Hey, Simps - Hate Mail

I'M NOT SURPRISED you didn't dare touch my post the other day that refuted the nonsense that states have "a right to exist"  proving that thinking they do is exactly what I've refused to do, thinking like a Nazi.   We've been through this before any number of times.

Other than that, you're never going to learn to read for comprehension like they tried to teach us in second grade, are you.   Even a middle-brow mind is a terrible thing to waste.   A number of years ago I suggested you find one of those old SRA reading kits but it's too late for that now.  From adolescence to senescence with no adulthood in between, your nine word biography. 

Update:  I glanced over there,  a bunch of geezers repeating retreaded praise for a record album almost old enough to retire. as John Oliver might put it, . .  wow.

Questions For Those Who Are Posturing Over The Public Reaction To The Suspect

WHEN MURDER BY INSURANCE EXECUTIVES is legal what do you expect the reaction to be when one of them is murdered?     

If this guy who is suspected of murdering ONE man who likely killed many, many more had been killed by the police when he was being arrested would those who approved of him being killed be being condemned by you?   

I can answer the second question, of course they wouldn't be upset about that, they'd probably be holding up the cops as heroes.  

You let oligarchs murder People you are responsible for the reaction of their victims approving of them being killed.   EXACTLY LIKE THOSE WHO ARE CELEBRATING THE FALL OF ASSAD IN SYRIA. 

Night Thoughts - The Trumps Probabaly Have Had Them For Four Years And More

LAST NIGHT as I was tossing and turning over the world situation,  the continuing fake scrupulosity of the media and political chumps over the pardon was part of it and I wondered if President Biden has been issuing those "pocket pardons" that some of the MSNBC pundit lawyer types were talking about a while back.   I'd never heard of "pocket pardons" before the early days of the Biden administration when we were wondering why the Department of Justice hadn't started cases against the likes of Ivanka Trump and her husband, the obviously corrupt and very likely seller of his father-in-law's presidency, Jared Kushner.   That they assumed that Trump had issued pardons to them in secret was one of the speculations.  I'd been naive enough to have assumed that pardons had to have been made public but, apparently, that's not the case.   If they had brought one of the Trump-Kushner's to trial it was guessed that they'd whip that old pardon out of their pocket to get the case thrown out.   It's not unlike what the Roberts Court did, being a law unto itself, they gave him a post-facto pardon by transforming any future Republican-fascist president into a king with unlimited power to break the law - I did point out we now have legalized government corruption on the installment plan, the Roberts Court having delivered its corruption after Trump gifted them a six to three majority on the court. 

If that kind of pardon is real I am certain that Trump has already issued them to his brats and inlaws such as we know he did to Jared's criminal daddy just as I'm certain that if Trump lives long enough to become a former president, he'll get paid for that extended vacation in France he gave Charles Kushner.   That made legal by the Roberts Court. 

I hope that Joe Biden is issuing such secret pardons all over the place though I have the feeling if he is he's going to make them public as he did for his son, which he should have.   Though if he is I have no doubt the Roberts Court may well declare them invalid,  they can make up anything they want to and now that they've exposed themselves as the most blatantly partisan court in the history of the corrupt branch of government,  they'll figure any combination of words posing as justification of it will suffice.   The stupid founders really screwed up when they did the Court, which rather immediately proved that when it grabbed the kind of power that the Roberts Court has used to destroy so much of the rest of the Constitution.   They really were not that wise or honest. 

Populism Is A Double Edged Sword And It's Got Two Pointed Ends

I DON'T READ DIGBY'S HULLABALLOO nearly as often as I use to so it wasn't until after I listened to Keith Olbermann this morning, listening to his disquiet about the assassination of the insurance gangster in NYC near where he lives.   Listening to him on the possibility that it was a murder committed in revenge for the many deaths that that filthy, gangster industry commits every day and get away with it, I made the comment:

Maybe when the legal system won't imprison the insurance mass murderers ad hoc justice will come into play.   With all the dangers of that our legal system is as dangerous.

After that I read Tom Sullivan at Hullaballoo and his horror at the hooded jacket the presumed shooter wore becoming a viral sales item online and his disquiet at the assassin being considered a hero to those victimized and exploited by the stinking, criminal health-insurance racket even under the ACA - which I wouldn't bet on surviving.   This passage is getting sort of close to something I've been thinking of writing on the subject of populism as an extremely dangerous sword to yield.

The celebration of a health insurance company CEO’s murder, even if a fringe phenomenon, lifts the lid on a submerged mood in the country that Hanauer saw ten years ago. It’s not unrelated to the racial and xenophobic animus that peeked out from under the sheets with the T-party after the election of Barack Obama. Donald Trump identified that mood and exploited it to get himself elected in 2016. Then after losing reelection in 2020 he threw accelerant onto it and loosed a MAGA mob against the seat of government in Washington, D.C. I’m still traumatized by that.

I’m as big a critic of the modern corporation as anyone. We make Douglas Adams-inspired jokes about corporate bozos being “the first against the wall when the revolution comes.” But calling forth a real revolution with guns or guillotines and targeted murder against elites is a path this country should try to avoid.

It is as chilling as pitifully ironic to see blood lust for corporate moguls bubbling up on the website of Macy’s.  

Being a member of a minority group that has been the victim of informal gang violence, I get that entirely.   I look at the history of populism in the United States and for every instance of positive, idealistic and responsible populism, there is the populism of white supremacists - what today's college-credentialed hand-ringers about Democrats losing the election by less than 2% is encouraging us to placate and make common cause with.   And I doubt there has been anyone on the left who has been more encouraging of the snob-"left" getting off its high horse and not insulting the plebs but I draw the line at making common cause with white supremacy.   

I remember when the great,  really great not 2024 style great, Shirley Chisholm was slammed for going to the racist, white-supremacist George Wallace to get him to support her bill to get domestic workers covered by minimum wage laws,  I wrote a letter to the editor defending her when some white college-credentialed scribbler slammed her for that in some lefty publication or other.   I don't think they published the letter.  That was the brilliant Shirley Chisholm practicing politics, which is necessary, it was to get equal justice for specific members of the underclass of all races.   It's not what has been being said for the past month.  I would go so far as to say that George Wallace was nowhere near as immoral, amoral, really, as every Republican-fascist who remains in that party, today.   Even Wallace had some humanity to him that today's populists don't have.  And I have no particular regard for Wallace. 

Populism will be made of what the pople are and you can't avoid the fact that a lot of it is white supremacist.  That's the reason that majoritiarian government without an iron-clad gurantee of equality will devolve into fascism.  There's nothing about anger at being screwed to death by insurance companies that will cure racism and misogyny (why Harris really lost) and other widespread bigotries.  Being romantic about that based on what some eminent and eloquent late 19th century rural politician said is stupid.   Our scribbling class is that stupid.

In so far as the many Americans murdered last week go, I'm not especially disturbed about the insurance gangster but I'm not going to be romantic about any murder. 

Jeremiah For Advent

AS I ALWAYS say, RMJ does the best Advent posts around.   Today's is especially good.

I have been encouraging People to read Jeremiah in the wake of Trump finally winning an election because there is nothing I know of that better says how we got to this nearly as well or now we might get out of it.   I'll make it easy for you, here's that favorite narrator of the later 20th century,  the actor Alexander Scourby reading Jeremiah from one of the King James Versions.  I'd have preferred a more modern translation but, as the late Ned Rorem pointed out when asked why he always used the KJV for his bible settings, it's in the public domain.   

Still, as a performance - AND ALL OF SCRIPTURE WAS ALWAYS MOSTLY READ AS A PERFORMANCE, it is very good.  I'd suggest taking it one chapter at a time, it's pretty hard going to do all at once.   Jeremiah didn't write all of it at once, after all.  As Walter Breuggemann has pointed out,  Jeremiah was essentially a protest poet, he may well have sung it like Bob Dylan would.

White Men Wanted The Style Of Democracy So Long As That Included Their Privleges - Hate Mail

THAT IS THE rich white men who framed the Constitution and staffed the government in the early years before, first, the "Jeffersonian Revolution" swept the Federalists aside in 1800 and then the "Jacksonian Revolution" did even more so which brought less rich and even poor white men into the realm of power.  And in doing so in many cases they disenfranchised such Black Men as who had the vote in several of the several states.  

I remember the day about eighteen years ago while thinking through some issue to write a piece to post at Echidne's blog it came to me that the biggest fault in American democracy, what had doomed it from the start was the fetishization of "freedom" under inequality when equality was, actually, the genuine foundation of decent government.  

I've noticed in the same period after me noticing that that a number of others in my reading and hearing, Marilynne Robinson, David Bentley Hart, etc. have also noticed that there is a basic problem with the widespread notion under liberal democracy of libertarian freedom, the kind of "freedom" which so many idiots of my generation fetishized under the sway of the "civil liberties" industry and infantile libertarian scribblers, directors and producers in the post-literate lore of entertainment and the media.   Flower-child freedom, a largely upper-middle-class and elite class fad was just a continuation of that fetishization relieved of even the minimal requirements to uphold what was taken to be affluent respectability.   That's not something that was unknown among the truly affluent, especially for white males who have always enjoyed the exploitative pleasures of the demimonde while enjoying the trappings of respectable propriety - which included them exploiting, cheating, robbing, maiming and killing Poor People, the Destitute and members of minorities.   I never had much use for the hippies who, in so, so many cases went right from that fad to becoming the most bloodthirsty capitalists as it gave way to Nixonian greed and the mounted for distraction nostalgia marketing of the 1970s. 

It is really stunning how the use of a word to mean quite different things can blind even and, perhaps especially, those with college-credentials to even the most glaring differences.  I would propose that few other areas of language hold more of those terms than the American style discourse surrounding alleged virtues such as "freedom" and, now, "rights".   Our Constitutional system is built on the exploitation of such differences of, by and for the privileged, the affluent, those whose skin color and gender and last names give them an automatic advantage over those who they can freely exploit, rob and destroy.   I think that if I looked hard at the career of Little Bobby Kennedy I'd see that in all of his "lefty" lawyerly activity that was the end result of it many more times than not.   I recall that about the same time as that revelation of the difference for democracy between "freedom" centered thinking and non-thinking and equality,  I outraged a number of so-called liberals and maybe even some lefties on the blog comment threads by calling Alan Dershowitz an advocate of torture who plays a civil libertarian on TV.   I think that in many cases, certainly among those who staff the "civil liberties" industry, that that is the case in more instances than not.  

It isn't to be marveled at that such a slippage in the connotation and denotation of the ideas surrounding "freedom" and "rights" is of little concern to those in the scribbling-producing-directing-acting classes, both writers and the stupider professions among those.   Freedom without responsibility to even distinguish between the truth and the most flagrant of lies has been a professional boon to all of those.  Even among those whose public persona and, perhaps even actual part-time commitment, the stuff of their PR operation there are many like that, those who would never entertain the idea of making the media liable for even life destroying lies because it might lead to Hollywood making married make-believe couples sleep in twin beds again or some George Carlin from saying seven words on stage. 

It is stunning how even those who have understood the past two decades enough to understand the role that lying in the media has played in destroying even the flawed "liberal democracy" that Americans have had instead of real, egalitarian democracy, will not take that step into admitting that that lying in the media is going to destroy it all.   Around the world liberal democracy is under attack and, in more cases than not, billionaire cleptocrats targeting the equivalent of our indigenous fascists, the white supremacists, are winning.  And lies in the mass media are what is doing it for them, lies about money, lies about race, ethnicity, religion, GENDER, especially gender and race is what is doing it.   But I have yet to hear a single media figure or alleged defender of democracy among those hand-wringing bemoaners of the death of truth admitting that the vague 18th century poetry of our First Amendment is the problem here.  Elsewhere such notions exist in other words, though in many places they never much went for such poses.

The American Constitution with such privilege and inequality embedded into it and the legal apparatus that grew under it is a guarantee of the eventual destruction of "liberal democracy" here.   The rich-white-guys who had a hippy style fashion for notions of democracy and republican governance sort-of, for a time, wanted to have that so long as they could retain their privilges.  They knew they'd have to install the privileges of those of their class in other towns, counties and states to be able to pull that off, so, they installed those for their fellow rich-white men.  The Southern states, especially Georgia and South Carolina, blackmailed them into privilege slave-holders and they and those in the lower population states among them insisted on instilling other corruptions of inequality into the thing, the Electoral College and the anti-democratic Senate.  Even when they had gotten that ratified, they weren't done with the rigging of things, there is no accident that the infamous gerrymander which gave Republican-fascists the House was an innovation of such as the framer Elbridge Gerry who John Adams eulogized as a good, moral and upright man.  

In the United States we are seeing what I think was an inevitable consequence of the corruption baked into our Constitutional system, corruption that has only increased under the Supreme Court distortion of meaning with it and, not infrequently, especially now, in direct violation of the words contained in the Constitution out of legal habit and outright lying from the bench.  

In my less optimistic periods, I doubt that anything like a real democracy will survive because getting over the lapse in meaning of the words used to think about these things will prove impossible..  Certainly the media will do everything it can to make sure equality and so any real democracy never happens.  It can count on the petty levels of privilege allowed to poor-whites, working class and lower men and the women associated with them and its protection against those who are no danger to it will keep the billionaires and their hirelings in power.  That is what the FOX Lies-Joe Rogan phenomenon is all about.   Keeping the oligarchs and aristocrats, the billionaire plutocrats in power is aided in nothing so much as the basic cowardice of those in the majority-ethnicity working class and the working poor who know it is dangerous for them to attack their real oppressors, the rich, opting, instead to kick down instead of up.  That has been in place since the first aristocrats encouraged the racism of the underclass almost as soon as they got here and started rigging things for themselves.   The myth of the reliable revolutionary underclass is an absurd fantasy dreamed up by affluent, college-credentialed lefties.   Revolutions have such a way of keeping things exactly as they were at best and generally worse off than before.  I have little faith in such story-telling, anymore.

But the stakes are so high that it is a self-indulgent and corrupt privilege to give up the fight.  I'd rather get killed by the white supremacist-Republican-fascists than give up.  I'd rather die fighting than in front of a trench I'd been made to dig or against a wall.   I'm certainly not going to go for that greatest indulgence of the college-credentialed class make me surrender,  calling me names.  Our untellectual class are such a bunch of incel like boy and-gal cowards.  

George Dyson - Magnificat in c minor

 

Treble Choir St. Paul's United Methodist Church, 

Houston, Texas

Something For People To Remember As The Republican-fascists Go After Trans People

AN ESTIMATED 1.7 percent of the population is born with biologically indeterminate sex,  that's almost five million, seven hundred thousand Americans.   And those are only the ones that show up in biological examinations.   They're not going after a tiny percentage of Americans to target them for the same kind of discrimination and control that they want of other American minorities, whipping up the widespread, violent and homicidal hatred of Trans People.   Trans Women, especially Trans Women of Color have one of the highest murder rates of any identified group from even before the Republican-fascist use of them in their hate campaigns. 

States Don't Have Rights, States Don't Have A Right To Exist

 

You can compare that elucidation of a state's not having "right to exist" to the Nazi's campaign to establish the Third Reich's "right to exist."   From The Guardian November 13, 1933 especially note the passage I've highlighted in blue.

Second world war
This article is more than 91 years old
All Germans rounded up to vote
This article is more than 91 years old
Yesterday's referendum and elections
Mon 13 Nov 1933 18.56 EST
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The results of the German referendum and elections to the Reichstag yesterday show, as was expected, an overwhelming majority for Herr Hitler.

A less expected result of the elections is the number of Germans who have dared to vote against Herr Hitler's policy.

The electors were asked to say in the referendum whether they approved of Herr Hitler's decision that Germany should leave the League of Nations and the Disarmament Conference. In the elections to the Reichstag they were simply asked to vote for the Nazi list. There were no candidates to vote for but Nazis.

Provisional final figures issued early this morning gave the following results:-

ELECTION

Nazis..................39,655,288... 93.4%
Invalid votes..........3,352,289 ... 7.8%
Total votes...........43,007,577

REFERENDUM

"Yes"................... 40,618,147 ... 93.4%
"No" .................... 2,055,363 ..... 4.7%
Invalid votes ......... 790,910 ........ 1.9%
Total votes ........... 43,464,420

Chancellor Hitler spent the evening listening to the radio for the election results. President von Hindenburg, instead of retiring early as usual, stayed up with members of his family.

Nazis' house-to-house calls

One of the new methods used by the Nazis in the elections was a rigorous house-to-house call during the day to ascertain whether the occupants had voted. The same reason was given throughout Germany: "We do this because Germany's right to exist is now a question of to be or not to be."

In the Stuhm district of East Prussia, where the inhabitants are mostly of Polish extraction, the referendum vote was nearly 100 per cent against the Government's policy, whilst the votes in the election were all invalid.

Hospital patients' "no"

At a Jewish hospital in Berlin, 120 Reichstag votes were cast. Seventy of them were for the Nazi list, while 50 were invalid. In the referendum 122 votes were cast, of which 101 were "Yes," 12 "No," and 9 invalid.

The first official result from a town came from Neuss, where 36,256 votes were cast in the Reichstag election - that is, 98 per cent. Of these 35,583 went to the Nazi party. This would indicate that as compared with the last election nearly 20,000 supporters of the other parties had gone Nazi.

Concentration camps' vote

At the concentration camp of Osthofen, near Frankfort, of the 88 inmates entitled to vote 79 voted "Yes" on the referendum question and endorsed the Reichstag list.

At the Brandenburg concentration camp out of 1,137 votes in the election 1,006 were for the Nazi party. In the referendum 1,024 inmates voted "Yes" and twelve "No." In the Oranienburg camp 301 prisoners out of 377 voted for the Nazi party, while 330 said "Yes" to the referendum and 33 "No."

An amnesty for political prisoners is regarded as probable in view of the "splendid demonstration of faith in Hitler."

The voting was especially brisk in the Rhenish-Westphalian industrial districts, formerly a Communist stronghold. By noon 90 per cent of the electorate had been to the poll.

Last election's figures

The figures in the lst election, on March 5, for the Reichstag which is now dissolved - i.e., the Reichstag elected almost immediately after the advent of the Nazi party to power - were as follows:-

Total votes cast ........... 39,655,029
Valid votes .................. 39,343,331

These votes were apportioned as follows:-

For the Nazis .............. 17,277,180
For other parties .......... 22,068,151

Votes for other parties included: 7,181,629 for the Social Democrats, 4,848,058 for the Communists, 4,424,905 for the Centre Catholic party, 3,136,760 for the German Nationalists, and 1,073,552 for the Bavarian people's (Bavarian Catholic) party. The number of citizens entitled to vote was 44,685,764.
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It's clear that the Nazi's campaign to get this vote was part of their party seizure of power that the Nazis always wanted to impose, using the illegitimate concept of a states "right to exist" to do that.  "Rights" being an unexamined idea to which modern People attribute a vague sense of virtue.  I think that the slogan is used today for the same kind of purpose for exactly similar reasons.   Exactly for the same kinds of dishonest purposes. 

I've Answered That Question A Number Of Times - Stupid, Ineducable Hate Mail

 Answer me this, did the Third Reich have a right to exist?   

 

The Entirely Real Reality Of Flesh And Blood As Opposed To Academic, Legalistic, Media Love Of Abstraction And the People Who Care About The Latter More Than The Former

I WAS AWARE that Susan Abulhawa has expressed anger at someone else on the antizionist side I've cited in the past month,  the American scholar Norman Finkelstein over the context of the Oxford Union debate where she delivered the speech I posted the other day.    I read her speech and listened to what of the other things that were said in it, especially the speech delivered by her colleague Muhammed el-Kurd which is well worth hearing.   I also read her angry comments about Finkelstein, I understand them even if I think they were unfair in one regard and probably not that helpful.  Also, I'd never criticize her for saying what she did on any basis but the very last point.

I can understand Palestinians being upset about how the media seems to have reacted to the presence of Norman Finkelstein who, apparently, instead of appearing at the debate which Susan Abulhawa suggested he be invited to participate in, wanted a solo speaking occasion, instead.   Her angry comment that he considered himself the "savoir" of Palestinians, the white-savior, at that, is something I can understand even if I think it was too harsh.  But I'll start by saying I have no standing to accuse her of being too harsh, it was her opinion which I get, just as I have none to criticize Muhammad el-Kurd saying he didn't care what those of us in the white-unattacked, not under active genocide west thought of his thoughts on the attempts to destroy his People, the expulsion of his family from Jerusalem, the theft of their property by the apartheid-genocide state of Israel.   I hope to find a text of what Muhamed el-Kurd said because his point about the tactic of talking about this an abstract terms instead of the actual facts written in the blood and bodies of those who are being slaughtered is brutally right.   His and Susan Abulhawa's angry impatience with such focus on abstractions is right, it is more than simply justifiable and it is entirely understandable.  Such abstractions can easily turn into a major tactic of distraction in order to facilitate the very real mass murder that is ongoing,  such has been the tactical use of the UN, international courts, even the ICC which FINALLY issued warrants for the arrest of Benjamin Netenyahu and only one of the others is engaged in the continuing genocide - though that gesture is, itself, hardly effective for reasons I won't go into now, even as western governments rail against the injustice of issuing such a warrant against another white-western genocidalist.  My eyes have been opened as to the reality of judicial processes in the past four years in a way it never was before,  I can understand how People of Color and others on the lower end of inequality can be less than impressed with those now. 

This issue of blood and flesh reality as opposed the the abstractions that academics and lawyers and judges and media enablers of genocide deal in is always important to keep in mind. 

I can understand Norman Finkelstein, someone close to my age, who has been one of the few western academics who has been exposing the crimes of Israel against the Palestinians for the past forty years and who has taken a lot of hits for it his entire adult life.  Though by "hits" I would never want anyone to believe I in any way equate what he's had aimed at him with what both Susan Abulhawa and Muhammed el-Kurd have experienced for both themselves and their families and fellow Palestinians have experienced.   I don't know if Norman Finkelstein has addressed the dispute but I can both respect and cite what he says and respect Palestinians who demand the right to be considered the primary deliverers of testimony in the case against Israel in regard to the genocide against their own People.  I don't have to take a side and wouldn't because I think both sides are valid in what they say.  Finelstein is an academic, though one who has cared about the flesh and blood reality more than the greatest majority of them, I can understand his role in this even as I can understand the impatience or anger at it by those whose lives are what his academic activity is made of.  

I can understand both, I know that the lives, the flesh and blood and minds and souls and conscious experience of Palestinians and the victims of violence are what is primary and must always come first.  Though all of it is important, some of it is more important than some other. 

My motive in what I've been presenting is to cut through the weaponization of the accusation of "antisemitism" which is pervasive in the West, especially intensified in the past five years through that "official" definition produced by IHRA which, as I noted, even one of those who came up with it criticized its weaponization to protect Israel from criticism, but which has become a legal weapon to use against even the most justifiable criticism of the war crimes and genocide and apartheid of Israel.   As I've noted, that use of the word went way past the absurd stage as it has regularly been used against Jewish critics of Israel and zionism from well before IHRA decided to use its former credibility to protect Israel in that way.   I don't consider it a credible entity due to that dishonest and cynical act.  

Cutting apart that use of the accusation of "antisemitism" is as important to cutting off the zionist war machine as any of it. 

I think we have to cut through that word in order to tell the truth about what Israel does and what it is.  I think we have to cut through a lot of words to tell that truth because Israel and zionists have weaponized language, calling the engines of genocide and zionist-Lebensraum,  a "defense force" and "settlers."   It wasn't before the past decade that I started understanding that has been a tactic of zionist nationalism just as it has been in most nationalist movements which involved the theft of land and territories around the world.   I don't feel qualified to tell some of that truth such as Norman Finkelstein can when he talks about the American billionaire "Jewish supremacists" who, as he says, are largely ignorant of what they fund but who have the chauvinistic attitude that "Jews can do no wrong."   That is a major force behind what distorts American politics, why Democrats know it would be political suicide to practice consistency when it comes to the arming and support of the fascist Israeli government which is and has been committing genocide and practicing Lebensraum since before 1948.  

American Democrats, a party which has the support of a very large majority of Jewish, AS WELL AS MUSLIM VOTERS, whose party is under active attack by Israeli zionists AS THEY SUPPORTED DONALD TRUMP,  knows it must support Israel as it commits war crimes and crimes against humanity, because of the Israel lobby funded by American billionaires who supported Donald Trump.  That is how seriously fucked up this whole situation is.   I can understand that because I've watched American politics for my entire life,  I can understand young People who have not done that being furious with Joe Biden and Kamala Harris though I can't understand how they could not know that by not voting for them they were handing power to far worse, a man whose family is, I am sure, looking to be rewarded by the Israeli fascist government with major real-estate deals in what used to be Gaza - PROBABLY AFTER THEY SEND OUR TAX DOLLARS TO CLEAR THE RUBBLE AND BODIES IN THE TERRITORY THE ISRAELI FASCIST GOVERNMENT IS STEALING RIGHT NOW. 

I have been trying to expose the danger of the Supreme Court - ACLU created "right to lie,"  the Supreme Court -ACLU maintenance and extension of the basic corruption in our elections and politics, from well before there was an internet.  This situation is a creation of the Courts and the lawyers and, ultimately, the very badly written Constitution, written by slave-holders, genocidal land stealers and financiers for whom a "right to lie" was very servicable.   The lamented truth, which it has been noticed is dying if not dead in the ambient conditions that gave us Trump, has never been much valued in our putrid, secular, civic religion and nationalism.  I think that's something that always comes with nationalism, chauvinism, the various supremacies.  Perhaps it always comes whenever an anti-egalitarian political system is in place or fallen into.  

All of these reach its fullest expression in the area of Palestine under zionist occupation and fascist expansion and the impossibility to cut through the lies that support that.  Money and the lying mass media has everything to do with that.  Norman Finkelstein has been trying to cut through that for more than forty years, now, he admits that he was pretty naive about much of what was already in place when he started this with his exposure of the zionist lies in the bestselling book by Joan Peters, From Time Immemorial.   He said that the older and already well-seasoned critic of zionism, Noam Chomsky told him that his academic career would be ruined by his exposure of a large swath of his fellow academics as supporters of that fraud - indeed, when it became an issue with Finkelstein's later debunking of Alan Dershowitz's copying of Peters' book,  Dershowitz successfully sank Finkelstein's bid to get tenure at the university he was working for.  That is a minor, white-American detail as compared to the real goal of the lies told in the west, the destruction of the Palestinian People and the theft of their property, something that has been going on since the first zionist attacks and atrocities which the zionist campaign explicitly stated was part of their program from well back into the 20th if not the late 19th century.   Zionism is just another Western imperialist, colonialist campagin of the kind that succeeded best in the Western hemisphere but which have been ongoing throughout the long, violent, criminal history of humanity.   It is in no way morally superior to any of them, it is, if anything, as ruthless as the worst of them, in the way of such amoral individuals and movements, limited only by what they calculate they can get away with at any given time.  It has been the goal of American and other supporters of zionism - AND MOST OF THOSE HAVE NOT BEEN JEWS - and the media they buy off or intimidate to let Israel get away with mass murder and theft from the start of it.    That effort has used American elections and our political calendar in their planning and tactics,  I think the explainations of that as given by Norman Finkelstein are some of the most insightful I've ever heard.  He pointed out that when Harry Truman supported the illegal self-declaration of Israel as a state in 1948, and immediately recognized Israel, it was an American election year in which Truman expected to lose the election.  If he had been attacked by the Israel lobby then, he would almost certainly have lost the campaign.  Something which certainly was relevant to the election this year.  

I would never hold that last thing, what Muhammed el-Kurd would call a abstraction or a distraction beneath the primary reality of the slaughter, the genocide, the apartheid, the Lebensraum policy of Israel, both the official government, their storm troopers and the unofficial gangs and criminals who spearhead that in the "settlers" but as American and Western support for that fascist government is created by the manipulation of American and western political life, it is as important to the ability of the Israeli government to commit its crimes against humanity, its war crimes and its apartheid. 

Someone asks why I am using the Common English Bible - An Uncredentialed Lay Perspective

I WAS given a used copy of the Common English Study Bible and am going through it, reading the very interesting commentary.  I've been doing that with the Christian Community Bible which has a commentary that is from a decidedly liberation theological orientation, specifically a Catholic one so I wanted to get other opinions on what the text means.   I find that reading third-world, especially community specific liberation theology to be enormously persuasive in a way that abstract, academic commentary can't really compete with.   I read liberation theologies from a number of communities and orientations and have yet to find one that doesn't teach me something I didn't know.

I've checked several of the gotcha texts on several topics that interest me and the CEB doesn't feel quite as likely to have a strong a priori theological bent to it which some of the others, on occasion, definitely seems to.  And it's a translation done in language that isn't supposed to tax the reading ability of a 7th grader and I know some atheists read my blog to say "gotcha" and I don't want to tax them any more than I do, anyway.   It was a shock to me to find out how many college-credentialed among the English speaking People can't seem to even read at a 7th grade level. 

And I actually like the CEB.  I like several of the modern English translations quite a lot, though none of them have yet to reach the poetical levels of some of the old translations that are done in English that sounds nice but is a serious impediment to understanding it.   

My preferred translation of the New Testament right now is one which isn't poetical, the one by David Bentley Hart which benefits from his extensive knowledge of Greek, both the Christian and pagan literatures and his extensive reading of the earliest available understandings of it among the Christian writers who had the closest available knowledge of the world and milieu into which the writers of the texts had to say about its meaning.   I like how he made a jarring, startling translation one which Rowan Williams said reminds us of the dangerousness of the texts.  He reproduces into English the crudeness of the writing of some of the books.  One of those which I find most jarring and appealing is the use of the "historical present,"  using a present tense verb to talk about something that happened in the past, which is both more colloquial, something that we were taught wasn't quite proper, but which makes you feel the intensity and need of the author to say what they're saying to an an audience (many of whom would have heard instead of read the text) so as to make it relevant to their own experience.   

The meaning of Scripture is too important to let sounding pretty get in the way.  A lot of it should jar and force attention and thought and confront.  

I did use the 1928 Book of Common Prayer text of Psalm 51 the other day because that's what was being sung.  I generally think that most translations, for the most part, tried to stay faithful to the original used, whether that be the Hebrew of the Hebrew Scriptures OR the Greek translation of those texts (which were made by Jewish scholars, NOT Christians) or the Greek "original" of the New Testament, or the Aramaic for the few texts that were written in that language.  

It being the Christmas season in which such stuff comes up, I think the theological and doctrinal fudging of "original" texts probably occur in every edition of those that comes down to us.  We don't have "original" texts for the New Testament, we have manuscript copies of those.  Manuscripts, themselves, can often be better considered to be "editions."   Some of that is built right into the foundation of Scripture.  The Hebrew Scriptures contain, I believe very strongly, actual passages of "original" text, some of that very likely written down from oral transmission,  but every book among that is a product of long and extensive editing, commentary, theological and doctrinal insertion, etc.  I don't have any problem with that.  The idea that any of it can be said to be an "original" text in the way that that phrase is used for a modern author is nonsense, though by that I don't mean in any way that what comes down to us is unworthy of consideration.  

I see no reason to believe that the commentators, editors, etc. who produced the "original" of Isaiah or Jeremiah or the other books were not as inspired as the original authors whose texts form the seed from which the books as we have them grew.   I will say that as I have been studying the Bible, among the things I've come to understand is that most of those who comment on it and edit it and translate it fall into two categories, those who really and sincerely want to understand what it means and those who want to persuade other People that their a priori ideological and doctrinal claims are supported by what they produce.   I don't think there is any way to know when what we read is the product of one or the other.  I can say that a lot of the nonsense that is common received "wisdom" about the Septuagint as opposed to the Masoretic text of the Hebrew Scriptures is nonsense.  The Septuagint was a translation made by Jewish Scholars MUCH OF IT BEFORE THE BIRTH OF JESUS so it isn't a "Christian forgery."   I think that where it differs from the Masoretic text as defined by later Rabbis and scholars it is a sincere expression of their understanding of what the manuscripts they were working from meant.   I think if their motives can be questioned, those who produced the Masoretic Text in the period after Jesus and while there was active and often severe reason for a text that differed from what Christianity said could have had a motive to fudge that the original translators of the Septuagint didn't have because such an ideological struggle didn't exist then.  That's not to say that there is any one place where such a disputed text or interpretation can be safely attributed to such a dishonest motive,  I'm sure that in a lot of places, what comes down to us now is a product of differences in available manuscripts which can be counted on to have been different, back then.  So I'm not attributing such motives only fair-mindedness and even-handedness in making such accusations.   I have no problem for those who reject a Christian understanding of Scripture on the basis of sincere belief, I have no problem with even significant diversity so long as everyone treats everyone fairly and with respect.   

Let me be entirely clear,  I THINK THAT EVERY READING, EVERY HEARING OF SCRIPTURE OR ANY OTHER TEXT IN ANY SUBJECT MATTER PRODUCES AN INTERPRETATION OF WHAT WAS SAID.   That is intrinsic to how thinking as a human, and I assume other organisms, happens.   Every hearing of the "original" every reading of the "original" would have produced variant understandings of it.  Every transmission of even an attempted verbatim "text" or the original would have been open to changes made from the minds of even those whose determination was to transmit exactly what they'd heard or read.  That is just how it is to be a human being doing such things.   It is remarkable to me that the Christians most wedded to "the text" the evangelicals and fundamentalists are those denominations most prone to radical division on the basis of different understandings of exactly the same words.  Those who make an idol of the King James Version as the "literal truth" from God don't ever seem to agree on what those texts mean.  The same is true of Rabbis whose Masoretic texts of Scripture are as exactly uniform as it is probably possible for humans to produce, one of the glories of that tradition is the practice of intense and precise dispute over texts.   I think that's extremely healthy and honest.   Far better than the Catholic assertions of the authoritative magisterium. 

I should say that I am also far more likely to believe some of the earliest commentators on these things.  I have come to really believe that Papias was probably telling the truth from his direct knowledge that there was a Hebrew (or, I'd guess more probably Aramaic) text of the sayings of Jesus which may well have come directly from Matthew, the Apostle of Jesus for reasons I stated before.  I think it's entirely probable that a tax collector for Rome was literate and in the habit of writing so if one of them had become a member of the inner circle of Jesus, it's entirely natural that such a person would have put his memory of what he said into writing and that that document would have been widely copied and distributed, within the limits of the early Christian world of the time.  I think that whoever complied the first edition of the Gospel of Matthew very likely was someone who was familiar with a Greek translation (such as Papius said were made) of that text and who was clearly familiar with an early copy of Mark's Gospel and so combined them.  I think it's very likely that the author of Luke had access to Matthew's Gospel as well as a manuscript of Mark and not improbably a Greek or  translation or the original Aramaic sayings by Matthew among those sources he claimed he consulted to come up with his Luke-Acts.  It's clear he would have compiled a lot of information about the earliest Churches as well as the life of Jesus to write those books.  

The "historical-critical" practices of the late 20th and early 21st centuries have reached a point well past diminishing returns.  The practice of condescending rejection of what those we have who were closest in time and place to the beginning of Christianity, the writing of the Scriptures is entirely out of hand.  As I've said that is done to the extent it is in regard to no other genre of ancient literature.  It is done to debunk, not to produce honest scholarship.   When John says that Jesus was writing in the dirt, when Mark says that Jesus read from the Scroll of Isaiah, they were in a lot better position to have known or heard Jesus or those who knew him than any late 20th or early 21st century "Jesus" recreator."  Their "Jesus" as an illiterate, based on what they take to have been your "typical" Jewish peasant of the time is as phony as anything found in some fundamentalist theme-park or Hollywood would-be presentation of him.   I say that as someone who has said that if Jesus and Paul were illiterate, their intellectual accomplishments would be far more and in no way less impressive.    I'm willing to read some of the conclusions of modern scholarship - the commentary of the CEB Study Bible and virtually all other modern commentaries are the product of that - but I reserve the right to practice rigorous criticism of that scholarship, too.

P.S. I was also asked why I start my posts with bold capital letters.  I started doing that after reading Ogilvy On Advertising in which he said it made reading text easier to start paragraphs with a bold letter. I liked the way it looked when I started the post that way.  After I changed to a san-serif font, because I found it easier to read than a serif-font,  I dropped the practice for every paragraph because that looked better to me and I started using a larger font for those initial bold capitals.   

And, years ago, Simps made it clear he didn't like it so I didn't want to drop it, entirely.   To be entirely honest.

It Occured To Me While Accidentally Listening To Too Many Clips From The Cabloids Yesterday

We're living in the mind of Max Headroom with corrupted software.  It sounds like Trump would if he had some computer assistance.  I mean late 80s computer assistance, which would make him more comprehensible. 

The Group Most In Need Of Evangelization Includes The White Evangelicals

 I LIKE the Reverend Ed Tevors, an Anglican minister in the maritimes of Canada.

This one is about a "Christian nationalist" preacher, preaching the order to those who take such a huckster seriously that they are to have more babies.  

"Christian nationalism" is a terrible heresy.   It's been present in nominal Christianity ever since it started becoming an official religion tied to kings and nationalities, so a heresy that started fairly early, the official churches selling their souls to secular power for a relatively peaceful life.  The problem is that they might gain that world but in the process they have tied Christianity to everything from relatively good, though inevitably illegitimate governments to the worst monarchs and some of the worst dictators who have ever lived.   The current Patriarch of Moscow, Kiril, is as good an example of the worst of that,   I'll let the eminent Orthodox commentator on religion, David Bentley Hart state that as a good example of what such "Christian nationalism" does to Christianity, not to mention the disrepute such "Christians" earn for Christianity.

I am willing to be corrected if this is an unfair characterization, but in general the statements of “alarm” or “sadness” emanating from Orthodoxy’s ecclesial chairs and offices have been little more than the sort of vague mewlings one can generally expect from those shapeless invertebrates. And then, of course, there is that cringing, odious state functionary, Patriarch of Moscow Kirill, who has long abetted Putin’s regime in whatever way his master has demanded, and for whom a place in Hell has long been prepared. Somehow, he defies invective and indignation and disgust simply by reliably exceeding even the worst expectations one might have of him. Why, just yesterday he blamed the Russian war in Ukraine on gay pride parades (if I could explain the connection, I would). Oh well, that’s the great church of “Holy Russia” for you: ever ready to canonize those heroic figures who lost their lives for defying the cruelty of despots, whether in the Czarist or Soviet periods, but never, ever tempted to emulate them.

In the United States he has bemoaned the large numbers of converts to Orthodoxy from "evangelical Christianity" saying that American Orthdoxy was turning into Southern Baptist religion with incense added.  

The Catholic and many Protestant Churches have many figures of whom such things can be said with complete accuracy.  I'd say that the branch that has been least true of is probably the Anabaptists, though I'd limit that to the Peace Churches,  the Mennonites, the Amish, the Brethren and the Quakers,  despots have no use for Churches that preach and practice pacifism.   It's not nearly as true of Baptists and don't get me started on the many varieties of Pentecostalism.

There is no greater need in religion than for Christians who take the Gospels and Epistles, the Law and the Prophets seriously to convert the Christians who don't have any use for Christ and only use for any of the rest of it when they turn it into a weapon of their hatred and greed, the kind who could have voted for Trump. 

I still haven't gotten around to dealing with that second installment of Sean Michael Winter's really, really bad ideas about "what Democrats got wrong."  But I hope to later today or tomorrow.

She Doesn't Need Me To Add Anything

My remarks at the Oxford Union debate

by Susan Abulhawa

I will not take questions until I’m finished speaking; so please refrain from interrupting me.

Addressing the challenge of what to do about the indigenous inhabitants of the land Chaim Weizman, a Russian Jew, said to the World Zionist Congress in 1921 that Palestinians were akin to “the rocks of Judea, obstacles that had to be cleared on a difficult path.”

David Gruen, a Polish Jew, who changed his name to David Ben Gurion to sound relevant to the region, said. “We must expel Arabs and take their places.”

There are thousands of such conversations among the early zionists who plotted and implemented the violent colonization of Palestine and the annihilation of her native people.

But they were only partially successful, murdering or ethnically cleansing 80% of Palestinians, which meant that 20% of us remained, an enduring obstacle to their colonial fantasies, which became the subject of their obsessions in the decades that followed, especially after conquering what remained of Palestine in 1967.

Zionists lamented our presence and they debated publicly in all circles—political, academic, social, cultural circles—regarding what do with us; what to do about the Palestinian birthrate, about our babies, which they dub a demographic threat.

Benny Morris, who was originally meant to be here, once expressed regret that Ben Gurion “did not finish the job” of getting rid of us all, which would have obviated what they refer to as the “Arab problem.”

Benjamin Netanyahu, a Polish Jew whose real name is Benjamin Mileikowsky, once bemoaned a missed opportunity during the 1989 Tiananmen Square uprising to expel large swaths of the Palestinian population “while world attention was focused on China.”

Some of their articulated solutions to the nuisance of our existence include a “break their bones” policy in the 80s and 90s, ordered by Yitzhak Rubitzov, Ukrainian Jew who changed his name to Yitzhak Rabin (for the same reasons).

That horrific policy that crippled generations of Palestinians did not succeed in making us leave. And frustrated by Palestinian resilience, a new discourse arose, especially after a massive natural gas field was discovered off the coast of Northern Gaza worth trillions of dollars.

This new discourse is echoed in the words of Colonel Efraim Eitan, who said in 2004, “we have to kill them all.”

Aaron Sofer, an Israeli so-called intellectual and political advisor, insisted in 2018 that “we have to kill and kill and kill. All day, every day.”

When I was in Gaza, I saw a little boy no more than 9 years whose hands and part of his face, had been blown off from a booby trapped can of food that soldiers had left behind for Gaza’s starving children. I later learned that they had also left poisoned food for people in Shujaiyya, and in the 1980s and 90s, Israeli soldiers had left booby trapped toys in southern Lebanon that exploded when excited children picked them up.

The harm they do is diabolical, and yet, they expect you to believe they are the victims. Invoking Europe’s holocaust and screaming antisemitism, they expect you to suspend fundamental human reason to believe that the daily sniping of children with so called “kill shots” and the bombing of entire neighborhoods that bury families alive and wipe out whole bloodlines is self-defense.

They want you to believe that a man who had not eaten a thing in over 72 hours, who kept fighting even when all he had was one functioning arm, that this man was motivated by some innate savagery and irrational hatred or jealousy of Jews, rather than the indominable yearning to see his people free in their own homeland.

It’s clear to me that we’re not here to debate whether Israel is an apartheid or genocidal state. This debate is ultimately about the worth of Palestinian lives; about the worth of our schools, research centers, books, art, and dreams; about the worth of the homes we worked all our lives to build and which contain the memories of generations; about the worth of our humanity and our agency; the worth of bodies and ambitions.

If the roles were reversed…

Because if the roles were reversed—if Palestinians had spent the last eight decade stealing Jewish homes, expelling, oppressing, imprisoning, poisoning, torturing, raping and killing them; if Palestinians had killed an estimated 300,000 Jews in one year, targeted their journalists, their thinkers, their healthcare workers, their athletes, their artists, bombed every Israeli hospital, university, library, museum, cultural center, synagogue, and simultaneously set up an observation platform where people came watch their slaughter as if a tourist attraction;

if Palestinians had corralled them by the hundreds of thousands into flimsy tents, bombed them in so called safe zones, burned them alive, cut off their food, water, and medicine;

if Palestinians made Jewish children wander barefoot with empty pots; made them gather the flesh of their parents into plastic bags; made them bury their siblings, cousins and friends; made them sneak out from their tents in the middle of the night to sleep on their parents’ graves; made them pray for death just to join their families and not be alone in this terrible world anymore, and terrorized them so utterly that their children lose their hair, lose their memory, lose their minds, and made those as young as 4 and 5 year old were die of heart attacks;

if we mercilessly forced their NICU babies to die, alone in hospital beds, crying until they could cry no more, died and decomposed in the same spot;

if Palestinians used wheat flour aid trucks to lure starving jews, then opened fire on them when they gathered to collect a day’s bread; if Palestinians finally allowed a food delivery into a shelter with hungry Jews, then set fire to the entire shelter and aid truck before anyone could taste the food;

if a Palestinian sniper bragged about blowing out 42 Jewish kneecaps in one day as one Israeli soldier did in 2019; if a Palestinian admitted to CNN that he ran over hundreds of Jews with his tank, their squished flesh lingering in the tank treads;

if Palestinians were systematically raping Jewish doctors, patients, and other captives with hot metal rods, jagged and electrified sticks, and fire extinguishers, sometimes raping to death, as happened with Dr Adnan alBursh and others;

if Jewish women were forced to give birth in filth, get C-sections or leg amputations without anesthesia; if we destroyed their children then decorated our tanks with their toys; if we killed or displaced their women then posed with their lingerie…

if the world were watching the livestreamed systematic annihilation of Jews in real time, there would be no debating whether that constituted terrorism or genocide.
And yet two Palestinians—myself and Mohammad el-Kurd— showed up here to do just that, enduring the indignity of debating those who think our only life choices should be to leave our homeland, submit to their supremacy, or die politely and quietly.

But you would be wrong to think that I came to convince you of anything. The house resolution, though well-meaning and appreciated, is of little consequence in the midst of this holocaust of our time.

For the sake of history

I came in the spirit of Malcolm X and Jimmy Baldwin, both of whom stood here and in Cambridge before I was born, facing finely dressed well-spoken monsters who harbored the same supremacist ideologies as Zionism—these notions of entitlement and privilege, of being divinely favored, blessed, or chosen.

I’m here for the sake of history. To speak to generations not yet born and for the chronicles of this extraordinary time where the carpet bombing of defenseless indigenous societies is legitimized.

I’m here for my grandmothers, both of whom died as penniless refugees while foreign Jews lived in their stolen homes.

And I also came to speak directly to zionists here and everywhere.

We let you into our homes when your own countries tried to murder you and everyone else turned you away. We fed, clothed, gave you shelter, and we shared the bounty of our land with you, and when the time was ripe, you kicked us out of our own homes and homeland, then you killed and robbed and burned and looted our lives.

You carved out our hearts because it is clear you do not know how to live in the world without dominating others.

You have crossed all lines and nurtured the most vile of human impulses, but the world is finally glimpsing the terror we have endured at your hands for so long, and they are seeing the reality of who you are, who you’ve always been. They watch in utter astonishment the sadism, the glee, the joy, and pleasure with which you conduct, watch, and cheer the daily details of breaking our bodies, our minds, our future, our past.

The sacredness of the olives trees

But no matter what happens from here, no matter what fairytales you tell yourself and tell the world, you will never truly belong to that land. You will never understand the sacredness of the olives trees, which you’ve been cutting down and burning for decades just to spite us and to break our hearts a little more. No one native to that land would dare do such a thing to the olives. No one who belongs to that region would ever bomb or destroy such ancient heritage as Baalbak or Bittir, or destroy ancient cemeteries as you destroy ours, like the Anglican cemetery in Jerusalem or the resting place of ancient Muslim scholars and warriors in Maamanillah. Those who come from that land do not desecrate the dead; that’s why my family for centuries were the caretakers of the Jewish cemetery in the mount of olives, as labors of faith and care for what we know is part of our ancestry and story.

Your ancestors will always be buried in your actual homelands of Poland, Ukraine, and elsewhere around the world from whence you came. The mythos and folklore of the land will always be alien to you.

You will never be literate in the sartorial language of the thobes we wear, that sprang from the land through our foremothers over centuries—every motif, design, and pattern speaking to the secrets of local lore, flora, birds, rivers, and wildlife.

What your real estate agents call in their high-priced listings “old Arab home” will always hold in their stones the stories and memories of our ancestors who built them. The ancient photos and paintings of the land will never contain you.

You will never know how it feels to be loved and supported by those who have nothing to gain from you, and in fact, everything to lose. You will never know the feeling of masses all over the world pouring into the streets and stadiums to chant and sing for your freedom; and it is not because you are Jewish, as you try to make the world believe, but because you are depraved violent colonizers who think your Jewishness entitles you to the home my grandfather and his brothers built with their own hands on lands that had been in our family for centuries. It is because Zionism is a blight onto Judaism and indeed onto humanity.

You can change your names to sound more relevant to the region and you can pretend falafel and hummus and zaatar are your ancient cuisines, but in the recesses of your being, you will always feel the sting of this epic forgery and theft, that’s why even the drawings of our children pasted hung on walls at the UN or in a hospital ward send your leaders and lawyers into hysteric meltdowns.
You will not erase us

You will not erase us, no matter how many of us you kill and kill and kill, all day every day. We are not the rocks Chaim Weizmann thought you could clear from the land. We are its very soil. We are her rivers and her trees and her stories, because all of that was nurtured by our bodies and our lives over millennia of continuous, uninterrupted habitation of that patch of earth between the Jordan and Mediterranean waters, from our Canaanite, our Hebrew, our Philistine, and our Phoenician ancestors, to every conqueror or pilgrim who came and went, who married or raped, loved, enslaved, converted between religions, settled or prayed in our land, leaving pieces of themselves in our bodies and our heritage.

The fabled, tumultuous stories of that land are quite literally in our DNA. You cannot kill or propagandize that away, no matter what death technology you use or what Hollywood and corporate media arsenals you deploy.

Someday, your impunity and arrogance will end. Palestine will be free; she will be restored to her multi-religious, multi-ethnic pluralistic glory; we will restore and expand the trains that run from Cairo to Gaza to Jerusalem, Haifa, Tripoli, Beirut, Damascus, Amman, Kuwait, Sanaa, and so on; we will put an end to the zionist American war machine of domination, expansion, extraction, pollution, and looting.

..and you will either leave, or you will finally learn to live with others as equals.

The Coventry Carol - The Young Tradition - With an updated repost from 2022

 

The Coventry Carol is the opposite of Silent Night in that it is all about the first account of danger to Jesus from worldly power when he was a baby. 

Lully, lullay, thou little tiny child,
Bye bye, lully, lullay.
Thou little tiny child,
Bye bye, lully, lullay.

O sisters too, how may we do
For to preserve this day
This poor youngling for whom we sing,
“Bye bye, lully, lullay?”

Herod the king, in his raging,
Chargèd he hath this day
His men of might in his own sight
All young children to slay.

That woe is me, poor child, for thee
And ever mourn and may
For thy parting neither say nor sing,
“Bye bye, lully, lullay.”
Posted by The Thought Criminal at 3:18 PM No comments:
Wednesday, December 28, 2022
Coventry Carol 2 - Truth That's Deeper Than The Mere Facts

RMJ has written a very fine post on this.  

AN INTELLECTUAL RUCKUS IS MADE every year about the birth narratives of Jesus in Luke and Matthew being so different and pointing out that none of what is said in them can be confirmed to have happened. The census, the slaughter of the children, etc.  Though it's become so rote a ruckus that it should be considered untellectual by now.

Even those who are supposed to be academics don't much fact check themselves on the neo-pseudo-pagan anti-Christian liturgies these days. It's not as if there's any professional price to pay if they get that wrong.  I will mention in passing that most of the history of that period, earlier and later is similarly undocumented but no one will seriously question it.

While it might be reasonable to figure that something so profitable to rulers as a census for purposes of taxation as in Luke's narrative might have left evidence which survived, anyone who thinks something as routine as the Matthew Gospel's ordered massacre of a bunch of babies of poor people would survive in historical records has an extremely naive view of how power is still routinely wielded by the rich and so powerful and what they figure is worth keeping records of. Routine murder of poor children is still too routine to matter much.  The recording of history and what gets paid attention to is a question of what those in a position to do that really value and it's still mostly money.  The United States can't even manage to change the damned Constitution to prevent even the murder of middle-class children in their schools and it's become so routine as to have no effect, whatsoever.  And we're supposed to be a republic.

I think, though, the assertion that the slaughter of the innocents is undocumented so is merely a myth gets it wrong in what is the most important way.   I think that of all of the birth narratives, the slaughter of the innocents and the family fleeing into Egypt, the El Norte of that time and place, is absolutely documented and it isn't because we can be any more certain that the actual family of Jesus experienced it.  But, I will speak up for an even standard in academic proclamations and note that even the single attestation in the Gospel of Matthew lends weight to something like that having happened even if you don't believe in astrology or significant, prophetic dreaming.  There is certainly nothing unbelievable in the general outline of the story.  A known to be murderous king coming to believe an unspecified new born baby in a specific town is a danger to his rule and his dynasty ordering his thugs to kill all the babies in that district, a parent finding out the danger and fleeing with their children. The modern fashion in historical speculation says that the actual number of such babies in such a town wouldn't be the numbers imagined by renaissance and baroque painters, more like what the peasants of 1970s Nicaragua discussed  in The Gospel At Solentiame, as they could understand the Gospel on this better than almost any American or Brit academic expert could.*  As could those in Palestine, especially those under the Israeli genocide, right now.   There is strong evidence that the Israeli terrorists are targeting young children.   Netanyahu is Herod, Putin is Herod. 

Despite the vulgar significance at the heart of that academically trivial and pointless responsible, modern obsession, that exercise in scholarly responsibility doesn't get near the heart  of the two birth narratives.  As that sermon by Bishop Gene Robinson noted, not everything has to have happened for it to be true, that is if by "truth" you mean having a coherent and important  true meaning instead of being an objective report on something that had happened in pedestrian, abstract clerical reporting.

As I've said last week, my preferences tend to be with Luke's interpretation with frightening angels telling very low status shepherds about the most significant event in human history, the birth of the Son of God, of God choosing to become incarnated as a human being - no one understands the Incarnation - and them having the faith to go look for him in an animals shed, sleeping in the feed trough. I contrasted that to the wise men with their three Christmas presents, though Matthew doesn't specify that the child was a baby and may well have been more of a toddler by the time they caught up with what their astrology told them was going on with the Jews.  Too bad their astrology didn't tell them Herod was a complete rotter.

But there is an aspect of Matthew's account we can be certain was absolutely true in the Gene Robinson way, the attempt of Herod to kill him, showing that from the start the baby who was to have the future of Jesus would be a danger to earthly power and would be the object of their murderous violence as soon as they found out about him.  He could well have been the victim of their uninformed, routine violence, anyway.  The Crucifixion of Jesus under the Romans is the final proof of the truth of Matthew's perhaps symbolic nativity story of the three astrologers and their symbolically portentous gifts. The accounts in Matthew are true in the most important way.  Certainly it's more important for human experience.  That event has been  repeatedly reenacted and expanded on. How much truth would there have been in an accurate live-birth record as found all round the United State these days as compared to the perennial truth of Matthew's scary Christmas stories?   How much would the record of a live birth be an important truth as opposed to the life of the child that followed that birth?  Just what is truth supposed to be good for, in the end?

Herod is Trump putting babies in concentration camps to keep his power through appealing to racism and hate and his media and the Republican-fascist party supporting him, many of them those "evangelicals" and "traditional Catholics."  He is Trump denying Covid-19, advocating Darwinist "herd immunity" sacrificing so many more babies and children than Herod had available to murder.  Herod is the entire Republican-fascist caucus of the Congress and the majority on the Supreme Court. And that's just here in one country.  Herod has led most of the world for most of history, including the so-called Christian world.  Imagine how different things would have been if people had taken him more seriously.  The secular world hankers for a time when even fewer people will take him seriously. Even the alleged left.

That other story in Matthew 25 in which Jesus, himself, identifies the least among us as being enough of a of God so that what we do for them we do to God and what we neglect to do, we neglect to do for God. Poor children aren't in that list as given in Matthew 25 but they would certainly have been the least of the least as they are now and for every age in the past and will be into the future as it looks now.  Children are marked out for murder by oppressive worldly power, they are certainly marked out for the violence of poverty, for neglect, they are the targets of official and unofficial violence, for both the violence of the state and the other worldly powers of organized crime, some of that organized crime conducted by other children.  And just as the parents of Jesus, Mary and Joseph are so terrified for the life of their child, they were forced to leave their homeland to save his life, just as so many are fleeing from the Herods of Central America and Eastern Africa and the Middle East and Ukraine and in so many places that none of us could come up with an adequate list.

All of those "white evangelicals" (we aren't supposed to notice the ones who aren't fascists) and in many cases their fellow "traditional Catholics" who participated in Trump's and earlier Republican-fascists use of those fleeing violence in Central America were reenacting Herod's side of the story, they still do and for exactly the same reasons.  

The blasphemy of those who mouth "Jesus Christ" or "The Bible" as they worship Mammon and take on the mark of the antichrist is unremarked in the nice, polite Christianity of the mainline churches and Catholicism, indeed, the majority of those incumbent in the U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops are fully in on the act as are those billionaires and millionaires who fund the "trad-catholic" corruption that is engaged in a hostile take-over of the Catholic Church.

And that doesn't get to the foremost murderers of Children, killers of their souls, their lives if they achieve adulthood, the specters terrorizing their parents, their physical and spiritual welfare, murderous, self-satisfied neglect, addiction, sex trafficking.  Poverty is its basis.

That truth is one that you won't read or hear any snark about but it is a far more important truth than whether or not Matthew would have gotten an A in a properly conducted history class while a critique of the historicity of the most pedestrian facts of his Gospel would get the top grade. We know it's accurate history of THIS child because what this child said about the Least among us and that what we do and neglect to do for it we do to God and the consequences of that action or inaction would be the gravest alternatives we will ever provoke in our lives.  But that is held to be less important than getting his hometown right and date of birth accurate.  The real truth is Jesus was born last week in the Congo, in North Korea, in El Salvador, in Ukraine, in Somalia.

If she were close enough, her or his single-mother will have to make the flight into America's Pharaonic regime maybe as soon as they can travel, maybe the baby's father will go with them but quite likely not.  Mary was lucky she had a husband who stuck by them and who could.  The Supreme Court and the Republican-fascists in Congress, FOX with its mythical war on Christmas are Herod.  So are the gangs they'll be fleeing. So is every member of the Republican-fascist party.  And what you can say about that incarnation of The Lord, you can also tell in stories of so many places it will make you weep. And you can even weep more for the children, infants, toddlers, older children and least among us adults who are the victims of the ever reincarnated Herod power among us.  It doesn't get any truer than the most significant of real history, a narrative that is continually re-happening right before our eyes and which is the only history that matters because we have some power to do something about it.

* I will point out how acceptable "ethics" talk about killing babies after birth is and generally has been since the second half of the 19th century.  I am unaware of any "ethics" professor, any biologist, any medical guy ever being fired for advocating the killing of babies.  In the ever widening game of "I can take an even more extreme stand," which is as much a part of competitive academics as it is in degenerate politics, there are perfectly respectable and respected "ethicists" who have toyed with the assertion that parents should get to have their children killed if they don't measure up to their standards.  I'm not aware of anyone ever getting canned for that.  I'll bet someone who asserted the accuracy of Matthew's accounts would be looked more askance at than even the most infanticidal "ethics" faculty would.  If I were online as much as I used to be I'd make up a faculty identity so I could access academic publications to see what the status of that issue is in academic scribblage is these days.

Compare:

In ghetto settings, Jewish children died from starvation, disease, and a lack of adequate clothing and shelter. The German authorities were indifferent to the high death rates. They considered most of the younger ghetto children to be unproductive and hence “useless eaters.” Because children were generally too young to be used for forced labor, German authorities often selected them, the elderly, ill, and disabled, for the first deportations to killing centers, or as the first victims led to mass graves to be shot.

I am, of course, obliged to point out that I'm talking about post-partum murder of children, not access to abortion which is an entirely different matter which I've dealt with, favoring legal, accessible, medically safe abortion and universal education and availability of effective, scientific contraception. That and education in how to avoid STDs belongs in every school from earlier than kids are going to be screwing around.  Anyone who claims to be against abortion who isn't for that is a liar. 

A Women's Strike For Equality In The Church Is A Great Idea But It Will Be Thwarted By The Big Money

I WAS GOING to write in response to Michael Sean Winter's second and, I'm sad to say, as bad column claiming to know what Democrats got wrong in their narrow loss earlier this month but that will have to wait.  

Instead I'll point to this much better idea from today's National Catholic Reporter, Women calling for Women to hold a strike against the Catholic hierarchy during Lent next year:

What would the Catholic Church do without women? If some activists have their way, we're about to find out.

A new project is urging women to strike by withholding time, labor and financial resources from the church during Lent, which begins March 5. The planned action is in response to the Vatican's synod on synodality, which concluded in October without action on women's leadership, including the opening of ordination to the diaconate or priesthood.

"The strike is for Catholics who are looking for a way to express their disappointment, frustration or anger at an institution that refuses to recognize the equal dignity of half of its members," said Kate McElwee, executive director of the Women's Ordination Conference, which is organizing the strike.

The project, called "Catholic Women Strike: Global Witness for Equality," calls on women to "make your presence in the church known by your absence." It was launched earlier this month.

It would be a good idea to ask men who support Women to do the same.  They will need it because I'm sure that like the aristocrats who sullied their pure, clean hands to break the General Strike in Britain, there will be many a quisling Woman who will do that, too.   The billionaire-millinaire catho-fascists will do their best to thwart this.

I am not an active Catholic, though I'm still considered one in good standing, one interested enough so I followed the Synod process only to be one of those who, at the end of it, was left to wonder is that all there is to it?   I acknowledge it was a radical step for Pope Francis to take to call it but I'm left disappointed by its results.  It was no Vatican II, it's more like Paul VI's timid post-Council response to the reforms that so many Catholic lay people and even many members of the religious and clergy desperately needed.   I think what should have been the high point of Francis's generally great papacy has been a huge let-down leaving Women, especially, but Catholics in general demoralized and discouraged.   It's clear that Francis will not do anything to fix one of the greatest crises in the Church, the reform and expansion of the priesthood either through letting married men be ordained or ordaining Women.   He will not even reopen the absolutely documented office of deacon to Women, something that is older than the office named "Pope," 

If this doesn't work, I'd suggest that Women should seriously consider giving their support to the Roman Catholic Women Priests and the Intentional Eucharistic Community movement instead of going back to the institutional church.   Why support them when they won't listen and they never, ever will practice the justice they preach. 

Hate Mail - I've answered that before

 not only would I rather tell the hard truth to one person than have a half a million idiots listening to me lying or posting feuilletonist crap.  

Hell, I'd rather tell the truth and have no one read it than do that.   I said in the first piece I ever posted that I wasn't a journalist.   I also said I would never be a chump for the Code of Liberal Ethics imposed by those asses.   I'd just listened to Scott Simon on Weekend Edition when I wrote that.   

I suppose I should say that yesterday, as I was out for a walk, I realized that I wasn't a liberal anymore,  I'm a radical egalitarian as the first piece I wrote today shows.