Blasphemy and Misinformation at the National Prayer Breakfast

Just went to Sultan Knish’s page, and he is busy raking Barack Obama for some comments he made yesterday at the National Prayer Breakfast. There, the president apparently attempted to alleviate some of the ill-will that inevitably floats between followers of the Abrahamic faiths, Islamic, Christianity and Judaism.

Along the way, he decided it was time to quote a hadith of Muhammad ibn Abdullah to show himself as a man of open mind. Never mind that Barack Obama is straight up hosting cocktail parties.

Barack Obama was trying to allude to what seems to me to be the pretty obvious point that people don’t like having things they hate done to them. This “golden rule” has famously been attributed to any number of historical figures, ranging from Confucius to Ram Dass, and was a truism by the time people put it in the canonical gospels. The point is the same. Obama alluded to some speaker in the Torah, of course Muhammed, and some supposed brutalized first-century carpenter whose life story somehow got mixed up with Mithra, Oedipus, etc. Don’t misunderstand me. There are excellent reasons to doubt the historicity of a single figure called Jesus.

In any case, all of this really comes down to one of Michelle Malkin’s fanboys who wallow in picking out the stupidities of Islamic Fundamentalism (Note the capital “I,” capital “F”). These are the same jabbering idiots who will spend a week pointing out to you the idiocy of the idea of Muhammad flying up on a horse to the meet the ultimate being, but who would never break a sweat mocking the idea of a man walking on a liquid. Or a stick turning into a snake. You get the picture.

Dig: more than a month later, and all throughout Facebook, the American Israeli supporters line up to post how many Qassam rockets have smacked into the area surrounding the Gaza strip, an area roughly four times the size of my own neighborhood, the District of Columbia. Clearly, they mean well, but, given that hundreds of Gazan children lay dead in the shadow of 14 Israeli casualities (most of which were not civilian), I can’t help but feel that my countrymen are losing perspective. As the human rights groups (Amnesty, HRC) reiterate, all people deserve peace and safety. It is for this reason that the cruel, vicious racists that inhabit both sides are to be despised; verily, they endanger the lives of all involved.

Anyway, Sultan Knish, an award-winning blogger, imagines himself clever for pulling up another source of the hadith and pointing out that the passage in context only seeks to legislate how Muslims are to treat other Muslims, not “infidels.” Well – ha, ha—that sucks, but what’s the big deal? Is this supposed to be revelatory? Can we even assume that most self-identified Muslims can even pretend to want to live in the seventh century? All of that seems atrociously irrelevant.

I mean, when I get down to it, loads of people I know are just as bent on defending the reputations of people who look like them as people who act like them. I got into an argument with a good friend of mine, who is Jewish and “culturally Zionist” regarding this point in Israel. In total disclosure, I have never visited that narrow branch of Southwest Asia joins Africa to the world’s largest continent. I have never met this shelf, but from all I can understand this is an argument regarding the wake and legitimacy of colonization to one extent or another. Relative to the conflict that left the Hutu and the Tutsi in bitter violence, there is perhaps here a legitimate point of comparison.

Today, I finally got a glimpse at Hamas’s webpage. If you’d care (to be careless) and exercise brutal prejudice regarding any individual’s opinion about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, just pay attention to the first date they mention in their supposed historical justification for their homicidal views. Reading the Google translation of Hamas’s adult page (their kid’s page was far easier to understand – in content, not principles) it immediately occurred to me that the beginning of the social conflict was for them at the end of the 19^th century. Clearly, when the longest term reconciliations are to be reached, it will be in light of resolving these “ancient hatreds” of which Barack Obama spoke yesterday.

My biggest worry for the Israeli population, aside from their shutting out an entire ethnic group from their legislative process last month, is the historical pride that wanders aimlessly. Truth be told, loads of people worldwide who look like everything from a vending machine to a violet can trace back ancestry to the people who inhabited our contemporary, contested land in question.

I’d like to talk about the Holocaust for a second. Yes, I know. It’s brought up too often. It should be irrelevant, right? Well, the reason it isn’t is because the lessons that it taught us are staring us right in the face. Yes, I know the body count isn’t the same – heck, even from Hamas, right? But the lessons about ethnic pride and hate can teach us something today. The greatest shame, after having to watch the photos of those individuals in mass graves, would be to not adopt some serious lessons from the moment.

It seems pretty obvious to me that following World War II, many Jews worldwide figured that if they didn’t have a place where they could claim the majority, the brutalities of the German National Socialists and previous centuries of cruelty would inevitably revisit their children, who shared the same values. And, hell, if those values were antonymous with the Nazis, they had to be pretty good, right? Well, in any case, as much as we’d like to think the world worked that way, it doesn’t. The victim, yes, can become the abuser. And thus perhaps it’s not ironic whatsoever that the Israeli Defense Forces began initiating checkpoints on the West Bank. One time, I watched a Disney anti-Nazi propaganda film (Walt Disney being a notable anti-semite by all accounts noted), and in it one of the chief annoyances by the writers was the fixation the Nazis had with determining one’s ancestry and lineage. In another case of lack of irony, I feel it’s necessary to point out that in order to attain Israeli citizenship, it is sometimes necessary to prove to the state a heritage and lineage with Judaism that may go back several decades. Indeed, it might seem that in some respects, the Nazis and Zionists have shared similar cultural practices.

This point is not lost on many leftist Israeli activists, some of whom early this year were photographed by major American newspaper marching with signs comparing the Warsaw (Poland) ghettos to Gaza itself. I ask people to set down their hatred of Nazis and Zionists for a second and simply think about how the lineage obsession phenomenon (that is to say, how it supposedly justifies privilege amongst our contemporaries) is counterproductive. More than ever, I can’t emphasize enough the importance of the right of people to travel as they will. So many people have become engaged with the Israeli Defense Forces that it’s insane to collectively blame, but corruption from a defense force of such magnitude are so obvious in potential.

Hamas is a brutally racist organization whose very charter emphasizes the importance of hating Jews. To some, Judaism is an ideology. To others, it is an ethnic description into which they were born without volition. It is between these lines of definition, when left untread, that all social negotiation faces the potential of falling into shambles. I dislike it that Sultan Knish picks apart Barack Obama’s words, intended to be unifying, so as to seek the reestablishment of grudges long buried. Indeed, the inequity of our fathers and mothers may never justifiably be revisited upon us; at the same time, we can only be fair.

A month later and so much death. And for what? Belief in the supernatural? Ethnic pride? Racism is rooted in vanity, love of the self for the most superficial of reasons.

Human behavior at its worst.