” desire for land, security, control, guilt about letting down ancestors and all those kinds of things. Some religious people search for historical justifications for those things ‘that defy [their] own basic moral instincts‘. The fact that they do this betrays an insecurity about what they’re doing, a need for permission.”

So the theological references ( interpretations) enable, justify, and are NOT a sideshow- but very important. They are the source of power for religious authorities.

There are religious fundamentalists who are militant and there are those who are not militant. As well there are militants who are not religious fundamentalists. What strikes me about religious militants is that they are willing outlaws; they don’t recognize or abide by secular law if they conflict with their strict or literal interpretation religious law.

There is a stunning picture today in Haaretz of a screaming ultra orthodox man being detained by police as he protests the arrest of a Haredi woman accused of starving her child. This is religious fundamentalism.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1100391.html

Now each side can argue that those are (1) wrong or (2)subject to change or (3) both of the above based on theology, but that won’t get you very far in law.

“Palestine belongs to the Palestinians.” Yes, we know that. The rub is trying to decide where Palestine is now. Unless you are taking the extremist position that all of Jordan, all of Israel, AND the West Bank and Gaza constitute Palestine….in which case be prepared to argue with Damascus about why they don’t all belong to Greater Syria, a platform still alive and well in Baathist Party politics.

“You cannot buy it for 30 pieces of silver.” Nonsense. The Arabs, especially the Lebanese and Syrian landowners of large tracts, have beenselling land for decades. Only Arafat and the PLO stopped it, and event then, not entirely. Stop using religious imagery to evoke emotion and try being rational.

” If you want peace, leave-nothing is stopping you.” On the contrary, the whole world is stopping us. Can you suggest any nation in the world which is prepared to absorb 5 million Jews? Hell, they wouldn’t take several hundred thousand at the Evian Conference. Yes, we want peace but we’re prepared to endure war since the alternative (as proved so many times in the past) in annihilation. The difference now is that we have the ability to defend ourselves.

“If you have no historic claim to Palestine, how can pre 1967 be kosher while post 1967 be unkosher?” Actually, we have a ‘historic claim’ to the whole thing. The rub is that so do the Palestinians. That’s why we’ve been trying to sort this out since the British promised the whole neighborhood to three different groups. Are you British, perchance? If so, don’t be so hoity-toity because YOU all created this mess. We’re just picking up the pieces.

It goes to prove how religion is intertwined with politics and how extremist interpretations of religious texts have gone on for some time. Those are the words of a man in pursuit of ideological hegemony and political control. He wants people to go to his church where he’s the guru to cement his social status. He then derives an interpretation from the Bible to suit his agenda. Jesus may well have said “Ask for my enemies, who did not want me to reign over them, bring them here and slay them before me“, but they are the words of the king in the parable of the ten minas. Most hippy Christians interpret that to be a metaphor for the paradox of a loving but ‘intolerant’ God, after all the parable uses money as a metaphor for God’s love. There are many interpretations, John Chrysostom chose the one that suited him. Another interpretation of the words of Jesus comes from St Peter when he was presumably in a good mood “Truly I perceive that God shows no partiality, but in every nation any one who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him“.

The point is that these theological discussions are to some extent a sideshow, although its valid to point out inconsistencies and assert your own beliefs of course. Jewish fundamentalism rises out desire for land, security, control, guilt about letting down ancestors and all those kinds of things. Some religious people search for historical justifications for those things ‘that defy [their] own basic moral instincts‘. The fact that they do this betrays an insecurity about what they’re doing, a need for permission.

Just to expand the point about explicit and implicit dimensions of ideology look at Saudi Arabia. A fundamentalist state if ever there was one and yet the rulers embrace modernity with all its flashy cars and other luxuries. Outside the Saudi Embassy in Mayfair when I was in London, were brothels and casinos. In the BAE scandal allegations were made about prostitutes being provided for members of the Saudi royal family. Fundamentalism is a facade.

It is because you killed Christ. It is became you stretched out your hand against the Lord. It is because you shed the precious blood, that there is now no restoration, no mercy anymore and no defense. Long ago your audacity was directed against servants, against Moses, Isaiah and Jeremiah. If there was wickedness then, as yet the wont of all crimes had not been dared. But now you have eclipsed everything in the past and through your madness against Christ, you have committed the ultimate transgression. This is why you are being punished worse now than in the past. . . . If this were not the case God would not have turned his back on you so completely. . . But if it appears that He has utterly abandoned you; it is evident from this anger and abandonment that He is showing even to the most shameless that the One who was murdered was not a common lawbreaker, but was the very Lawgiver Himself, and the Cause, present among us, of innumerable blessings. Thus you who sinned against Him are in a state of dishonor and disgrace, while we who worship Him, though we once were less honored than any of you [i.e., as gentile pagans), are now established through the grace of God in a more respected position than any of you and in greater honor. [Chry. Or. C. Jud. VI, 2-3)

John Chrysostum c. 390 CE

Debauched, Animal Jews

I know that many people hold a high regard for the Jews and consider their way of life worthy of respect at the present time. This is why I am hurrying to pull up this fatal notion by the roots. . . . A place where a whore stands on display is a whorehouse. What is more, the synagogue is not only a whorehouse and a theater; it is also a den of thieves and a haunt of wild ....... not the cave of a wild animal merely, but of an unclean wild animals . . . . The Jews have no conception of [spiritual] things at all, but living for the lower nature, all agog for the here and now, no better disposed than pigs or goats, they live by the rule of debauchery and inordinate gluttony. Only one thing they understand: to gorge themselves and to get drunk. [Chry. Or. C. Jud. I, 3,4; PG 48, 847, 848]

John Chrysostum C. 390 CE

Fit for Slaughter

When animals have been fattened by having all they want to eat, they get stubborn and hard to manage. . . . Another prophet intimates the same thing when he says “Israel ran about madly like a heifer stung by a gadfly” and still another calls her “an untrained calf.” When animals are unfit for work, they ate marked for slaughter, and this is the very thing which the Jews have experienced. By making themselves unfit for work, they have become ready for slaughter. This is why Christ said, “Ask for my enemies, who did not want me to reign over them, bring them here and slay them before me.” [Chry. Or C. Jud. 1.2; PG 48, 846)

John Chrysostum C. 390 CE

Fundamentalists are frightened by the openness of the modern world, by the autonomy of the individual

I’d like to quote Slavoj Žižek, tidying it up and paraphrasing slightly. It’s from a talk called ‘Maybe We Just Need a Different Chicken’ which you can find on Google Video. This bit starts about 56 mins in.

We should be aware that living in a free, individualist society requires a complex cobweb or texture of implicit rules so that we can interact with each other as free individuals. Many rules have to be there so that we can be ‘free’. I got a lesson of a lifetime when more than ten years ago I visited Belgrade and by chance got into contact with some really hard nationalist guys in a local restaurant. They told me openly that it’s not that they are escaping freedom or that they want old values. On the contrary. Modern life was for them too well regulated with all its politically correct rules. As one of them brutally told me ‘my God if you want to live in a free western society I cannot even beat my wife I cannot rape a nice girl if I see her, I cannot beat a friend, I cannot swear’. For them liberal society was all too regulated and stifling and to recognise and identifying yourself as a nationalist fundamentalist meant a new freedom.

Islamic fundamentalism is not just what it appears to be on the surface. It has grown out of the disenfranchisement of colonialism. It’s a flag to rally around, a sense of identity in reaction to the erosion of identity and humiliation of occupation. A desire to return to certainty perhaps, but perhaps more like a certainty of being in control of one’s own destiny as opposed to having it controlled by others.

Take a look at the Glasgow airport attack of 2007. The two main protagonists were a doctor and a man studying for a PhD in computational fluid dynamics. These were not primitive men threatened by or rejecting modernity. I find it hard to believe they envisioned an Islamic world living in mud huts. In fact from what I can remember most of the British suicide bombers were motivated by the humiliation of other muslims, by political situations. Suicide bombing or marching on minefields is not a religious act, it’s an act of desperate pragmatism. It just has to be dressed up somehow.

Slavoj Žižek also talks about how ideology needs implicit and explicit dimensions. For example life in the army. On the one hand there is discipline and order and yet the other world of off-duty excess or the spoils of war is an essential component to make the whole thing work. Look at the Tehran police chief caught in a brothel. There’s a kind of suspension of disbelief going on. Believe in such-and-such and in the end be rewarded by power, prestige, wives, a different kind of freedom. Or perhaps not so different.

I don’t disagree with the whole article by any means. For example the idea fundamentalists “proudly derive from that text the willingness to believe and to do things that are scandalous in ethical terms. But like I said, the interpretation is fixed around the desire, however subconsciously. To quote the Bhagavad Gita “Most men worship God because they want success in their wordly undertakings“.

So I object slightly to the notion that fundamentalists are threatened by progress, that they are essentially primitive. What they are really reacting to perhaps is the ‘progress’ imposed by others that they perceive as humiliating. Do you think most of the US soldiers in Iraq really fully believe that they are fighting for an abstract kind of freedom? These selfless knight/monks of liberty? Some may believe it, others may believe it to an extent, but I’m willing to bet a significant number also recognise the economic and geopolitical factors that underpin their mission. I suspect a good many see it as just an extreme job with some rather extreme ‘perks’.

By defining fundamentalism as being purely a function of religion you run the risk of confusing the issue and degrading the worth of religion in general. You get rid of fundamentalism by removing the need for it, whether it be economic sanctions, injustice, insecurity and so on, not by attacking it’s theological foundation. To sign off because it’s pretty late, and slightly ironically perhaps, here’s a quote from the Srimad Bhagavatam.

Like the bee gathering honey from different flowers, the wise man accepts the essence of different Scriptures and sees only the good in all religions

true Christians can be of help in teaching love and acceptance.

I am glad you said it. I have been thinking this for a long time: that Jesus has the answer to this situation and that true Christians can be of and acceptance. But this idea can be found in Judaism’s old testament as well-
from Isaiah:

And He will judge between the nations, And will render decisions for many peoples; And they will hammer their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not lift up sword against nation, And never again will they learn war.

Depressing back and forth going on. I’m pretty much with Suzanne. I’m going to make what is probably an ignorant comment so feel free to tell me how idiotic I am, but with the amount Israel has spent on its military and with the resources of the diaspora couldn’t Israelis just have bought most of the land fair and square by now? The point is that two wrongs don’t make a right and an ancient piece of propaganda shouldn’t form the basis of 21st Century policy. So if you want a piece of land, buy it.

It’s ironic that those who cling to historical documents can’t seem to learn the lessons of history. Namely that occupying a piece of land by force doesn’t guarantee you’re going to hang on to it, in fact it often increases the chances that you won’t. If Israel wants to carry on existing it has to change the rules of the game and move beyond divisive theology and a sense of entitlement. I believe the muslim world can come to terms with Israel’s existence given Islamic lands extend from the Atlantic to China, it’s about justice for the Palestinians.

I’m tempted to say you all should have listened to Jesus but that would just be a wind-up. So I won’t say it.