CGNorena Weekly

The Dawn of a New Age: Jewish/Islamic Reconciliation in Palestine

In the elections of 2008 our country faces a historical dilemma: to pursue the global war on terror against radical Islamists or to seek a gradual but firm reconciliation with the Islamic world. Most Americans, I think, are convinced that the first policy would eventually lead to regional wars at first and eventually to a tragic nuclear holocaust. The Bush/Cheney rhetoric that our Republican presidential candidates (for the most part) faithfully echo, seems to point in that direction: their aggressiveness is directly aimed at securing their neocon base, including the militant fervor of the Christian Right. The Democratic presidential candidates – particularly Senator Obama, John Edwards, and Governor Richardson- sound more cautious and conciliatory.

I have no doubt that the Democratic posture is more congenial to the philosophical insights of the founding fathers, most of whom were, as Franklin called himself, “thorough” deists. To our founders, deism was the enlightened and reasonable attitude of human beings with respect to the plurality and diversity of religious belief, an attitude they hoped would inspire the daily life of Americans professing more than three hundred different religious denominations in our land. The basic assumption of deism is that those religious tenets on which all religious denominations (the founders called them “sects”) coincide, mark a common denominator that must be accessible to all by the proper use of their mental powers, by reason alone. What makes sects differ is not their reasonable component, but rather the idiosyncratic revelation of each. Reason brings people together; revelation reinforces to some extent their common beliefs, but mostly their ethnic and cultural differences. Revelation gives religious belief its anthropomorphic coloration, its local context, its own language.

The Enlightened deists of the l8th century took two different attitudes toward the very concept of “divine revelation.” Continental European deism in the age of reason revolted against institutionalized religions based on private revelations. Voltaire was a deist, but he hated the Catholic Church. British and American deism, on the steps of Locke, Jeffferson, Madison and Franklin (to name a few) was much more tolerant and respectful, although some of its rare anti-popery outbursts still made difficult for JFK to run for President in 1960. Today many Americans are deists, even if they do not know the name.

It is this deep, subconscious deism of Americans of any kind (Agnostic, Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, and even Muslim) that keeps alive the hope of some eventual reconciliation of the three religions of the Book (the Torah, the New Testament, and the Quran). Two contemporary events or “situations” stand mostly in the way to such understanding: the Israeli/Palestinian conflict and the war in Iraq. Today we shall deal with the first.

American policy in the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians is perceived by most Muslims in the world as flagrantly one-sided and partial. Such judgment, whether is totally justified or not, seriously handicaps American power to mediate in the dispute, as President Carter has candidly proclaimed. Iranians, for instance, can easily be manipulated to think that Americans and Israelis are forever partners in the struggle against the impoverished and harshly abused Palestinians. Radical Islamists all over the world hate the USA mostly for that reason. London has been severely punished by terrorists because of Blair’s subservient attitude toward Bush. The best thing that America could do for Israel and for itself would be to adopt a more impartial and less unconditional support for Israel. Mr Ahmadinejad, on the other hand, has to understand that Israelis belong in Palestine for exactly the same reason Iranians belong in the old Persian lands: historical destiny. The most stable and durable states in the Middle East today (Egypt, Iran, Syria, among others) are those whose boundaries were settled thousands of years ago in the era of massive migrations. By that token both Palestinian and Jews belong equally in the old territory of Canaan.

The Jewish settlement in Palestine happened more than three thousand years ago, almost eight hundred years before the Persians were defeated by the Greek city-states at Marathon. The Balfour Declaration that guaranteed British support for a Jewish national home in Palestine was signed in 1917, twenty six years before western powers recognized the territorial integrity of modern Iran. Mister Ahmadinejad, it helps to read some history in the time left between your fiery speeches.

The reconciliation and firm solution to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, is the key test of our times. Let us hope that some day, Jerusalem, like Toledo and Cordoba in the Spanish middle ages (see the Appendix to my book The Christian Right Enters Politics, on line in the same web page as this blog) will become, once again, the world capital of the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim communities living together in creative harmony. It will be difficult, but it is possible. It happened before. It has to happen again.

Islam and the Global War on Terror

The western media in collusion with the distorted views of the Bush administration, have concocted and spread two interrelated myths that do intense damage to our lives as individuals, to our domestic policies, and, most of all, to American foreign policy. According to the first myth, the west (led, of course, by its unilateral hegemonic power, the United States) is inexorably doomed to a global clash with Muslim civilization, a violent hostile force that does not hesitate to send suicidal bombers into the streets. According to the second myth, western nations are under the constant threat of global terrorists, most of whom are Muslims from the Middle East or thugs under their influence. The demands of this “civilization clash” dictate all the American policies on torture, incarceration without trial, electronic surveillance, executive supremacy. preemptive war, nuclear non-proliferation, etc, that have made our nation almost universally odious to former friends and foes alike.

Unfortunately, the worst part of this situation is the alleged linkage of the civilization clash between two world religions (that together include more than half of humanity) and the political concoction of the “war on terror.” By implication, anybody who forcefully disagrees with the foreign policy of the United States, is a terrorist. Any Sunni Iraqi who kills a Shiite Iraqi for purely sectarian reasons is a member of a world class of anti-American terrorists, even if he or she is not completely sure where Chicago or Atlanta are. The idea that in Iraq our soldiers are fighting to save the United States from a global terrorist threat is certainly good enough to make Americans apprehensive riding the New York subway or stepping into any airport, even if the idea is a simple device to keep us dutifully terrorized and, by the way, a bad dream of a bad politician named George W. Bush. The man is convinced that if we withdraw from Iraq, a mob of al’Qaeda terrorists will catch the next American Airlines plane and land fully armed at the Oakland airport, with a guide to the Golden Gate Bridge. The greatest achievement of the Iraq war, according to the president, is the fact that thousands of people have been slaughtered in Baghdad rather than in the streets of Baltimore. As long as we can outsource the tears and the devastation, this country is safe, thanks to the enlightened leaders of the Republican party.

I am convinced, however, that reconciliation between the West and Islam is not only possible, but the top political and humane imperative of this moment in history. Disagreement on this can only be explained by bigoted ignorance or obstinate prejudice. There are more than one billion Muslims in the world. Eight million of them live peacefully with us here in the United States. By far the largest majority of them are not less pacific in temper than the followers of the Dalai Lama. To even think that one billion Muslims are clone replicas of the troglodite Osama Bin Laden or an imitation of a Taliban jihadist, is, to put it mildly, simply ridiculous.

The perceived incompatibility between Islam and its Jewish-Christian counterpart is historically rooted in some atavistic stereotypes or in just plain ignorance. The disarming truth is that Islam can be defined as an uncompromising monotheism and the total human submission of humans to Allah, a religion of sublime simplicity and alluring attraction. In a way, Islam is a return of sorts to the Abrahamic tradition of the desert and the tribe from which Judaism sprang, but also a sharp and welcome deviation from the Hellenistic high-flown ornaments of Christian theology: no incarnation, no Trinity, no redemption, no original sin, no priesthood, no church, no Pope, no “Mother of God pray for us sinners.” The Muslim community of Madina and the Prophet himself were on good terms with both the Jewish and the local Christian community, the three religions of the book that worship the same god and saw themselves as three branches of the same tree. Jews and Christians were never treated as “infidels’’ by Muhammad. Their revelations were only early and incomplete versions of the definitive revelation of Allah in the Quran. People whose native tongue was not Arabic were nevertheless for ever deprived of relishing the transcendent beauty of the Quran, the most convincing proof of its divine origin for Arabic-speaking people.

When it comes to moral prescriptions, on the other hand, the story is radically different and more complicated. Christian morality after the Reformation – a morality not only without Indulgences (that nobody ever fully understood) but also without priestly celibacy, without Mass, without bloody self-flagellations, etc- is practically limited to Jesus’ Sermon on the Mountain, perhaps, as Jefferson believed, the highest moral code ever heard by human beings. The divine law of Islam, the sharia, is a relapse into the tribal injunctions of the Pentateuch, and as such it does not show much progress beyond the Law of Talion (an eye for an eye) or the Code of Hammurabi. Some of the Sharia’s precepts are old- fashioned rules on usury and inheritance: they have some antiquarian interest but are never going to mold the behavior of people today; some make up a penal code regarding theft and sexual behavior that match the severity of Leviticus and the Deuteronomy: the hands of robbers are amputated and women caught in adultery must be stoned. The intelligent attitude toward them is not to reenact those sadistic rituals in soccer stadiums (as the Taliban has done), but to try to mimic the internalized flow of emotions an enlightened rabbi would experience when reading the Scriptures in preparation for the Sabbath services. My ideal of reconciliation with Islam does not entail the support of public stonings nor demands that my wife wears the burqa when in the presence of other men. The burqa in fact became popular only in the later years of the past century and can signify many different attitudes, social and religious (“I am not sexually available”) or plain political (“I am an Islamist”). When it comes to punishments I think Jesus’s words (“Those who are without sin can throw the first stone”) are both admirable and final.

The reconciliation of Islam and the Jewish-Christian world is not only possible but was held for almost four hundred years during the caliphate of Cordoba, in the Spanish el-Andalus. (See The Maimonides Project, Appendix to my book The Christian Right Enters Politics, pp.212-216 on this website). Small but promising signs of its resilience in our own country and in our own days give hope of the coming of a new age. But more about that in next week’s blog.

A Storm Gathering?

On September 6, 2007 , a squadron of (American made) Israeli F-151s proceeded to bomb a Syrian “nuclear facility” by the Euphrates River, smack on the border with Turkey. The alleged target was some nuclear equipment bought by the Syrian President Al-Assad from his good friend, the North Korean President Kim Jong-ll, who had recently agreed to dismantle his nuclear facilities in exchange for badly needed economic aid from the western powers. The news about the bombing was followed by the ominous silence of the parties involved (Israel, Syria, North Korea). World opinion, as always, turned mostly against the United States for failing to condemn what was obviously a violation of international law by the Israelis, an act of war closely mimicking the unnecessary and criminal invasion of Iraq by American soldiers in 2002. The Korean nuclear equipment by the Euphrates was compared to the “weapons of mass destruction” supposedly but falsely (as we and even Hilary Clinton known by now) in the hands of Saddam Hussein. President Bush’ gigantic miscalculation in Iraq could be followed by a war between Israel and Syria, a war that would be almost impossible to contain in the windy and turbulent political landscape of the Middle East since republicans and neo-con Christians took over the reins of power in the elections of 2000.

Fortunately, a closer scrutiny of the story, makes it almost ridiculous and impossible to believe, no matter what the American Jewish lobby, Vice President Cheney or the members of the Knesset would have to say about it. First, it is almost impossible for a North Korean vessel traveling from the Sea of Japan to the Syrian port of Tartus (north of Tripoli) and carrying “nuclear equipment” no less, to reach its destination without being detected by Israeli or American intelligence, either passing through the Panama Canal and Gibraltar or through the Suez Canal (an alternative route). Second, it is very difficult to imagine what kind of Korean “nuclear equipment” might represent an immediate threat to Israel in the hands of Syrian “experts.” Uranium centrifuges are far too heavy to be attached to Scud missiles, which Syrians possess, 40 or 120 of them. The Israeli destruction of North Korean ”nuclear equipment” would be as beneficial to humanity as the destruction of an aspirin factory in Sudan (“associated with Bin Laden’s network”) by President Clinton in 1998. Apparently, the “Syrian nuclear facility” bombed by the excellent Israeli pilots was nothing but a modest agricultural research center of the Al-furatu university!
American and Israeli silence on the matter suggests that whatever happened can be feared as the early pre-planned attack of the Israeli air force against Syria. If that is the case the apparently insignificant news could be the early a sign of a big storm gathering over the explosive Middle East. Let us keep tuned to further news.

The war in Iraq calls for a national debate about the future of American foreign policy far beyond the partisan disputes about the pace and size of our military withdrawal from the region. There are many poorly-concealed signs that the present administration – not known for its transparence in its relations with the American people– has planned the continued occupation of Iraq for an indefinite time. Even the most vocal democratic candidates to the presidency, those who call for an accelerated withdrawal from Iraq –Hillary Clinton, Senators Obama and Biden — say now they cannot promise a full withdrawal of American troops at any given date in the foreseeable future. Only Governor Richardson and Senator Dodd, two unlikely nominees, promise a total withdrawal by the end of 2009.

Bush has recently insisted that our national security demands a “long and continuous relationship” between America and Iraq. Secretary of Defense Gates has candidly admitted that the US is planning “a long term presence in Iraq,” The Iraqi Foreign ministry is seeking “long term bilateral agreements with the USA,” similar to those America already has with Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt. The United States is planning an American embassy in Baghdad, that would be the largest foreign embassy in the world, the fortified capital of the American Empire in the Middle East where our soldiers and the executives of our oil companies can find a safe and pleasant shelter, with pools, gyms, and modern shopping centers. The Pentagon has asked for 11 billion dollars to build 15, 000 heavily armored vehicles that can stand up o the Iranian roadside bombs already in Iraq. The size, armor and quality of those huge war SUVs – set to arrive in January 2008–are tangible evidence of the policy they are to execute. In this case, foreign policy both dictates and is dictated by the weight of the trucks.

The best way to describe such  a policy is to see it as the most recent phase of 19th century European-style colonialism. First, Africa was partitioned among Great Britain, Germany, Portugal, Belgium. France, Italy, and the rest. After World War I, colonies were replaced and disguised as “protectorates” or “mandates,” rich in oil or strategically close to oil. (Now, too late, Greenspan tells us that the Iraq war is “all about oil”). Protectorates were “invented” (as Iraq was by Churchill’s grandfather) by the League of Nations to place territories in Africa and the former lands of the Ottoman Empire under the “protection” of foreign powers, mostly European and not Muslim. After World War II, the USA has been maintaining military bases for more than fifty years in Germany, Japan, and South Korea at a terrible cost to American taxpayers. Those military bases are the contemporary counterpart to the garrisons of the Roman Empire in Scotland and along the Rhine. What Bush really intends, and gradually begins to hint at, is to maintain in Iraq for any foreseeable future the same “garrisons” as they are stationed now in Germany or Japan.

Unfortunately, the situation is not the same. The Tigris and the Euphrates are not the Rhine, and the Persian Gulf is not the Sea of Japan. Iraq is in the middle of a sectarian war that divides not only the country itself, but all the lands of the Muslim world. Iran is mostly Shiite, but Egypt and Saudi Arabia are mostly Sunni. By keeping American forces for an indefinite time in the very heart of a divided and constantly changing Muslim zone, America would perpetuate the increasingly violent feud between the so-called Christian nations in Europe and the USA against the whole Muslim world. Osama bin Laden, a caveman with global ambitions, and Al-Qaeda jihadists, would forever pose in the world scene as the warriors of God in the war between the Gospel and the Koran.

The only way to change the colors of this frightening landscape is for American GIs to come back home for good and join the new democrats in a global war against malaria, against AIDS, against poverty, against floods and droughts, against trafficking of women and children, against illiteracy and religious fanaticism. In January 2009 we will celebrate a non-violent but radical ”regime change” in America. A woman or a young black man (or both!) will begin to speak a new vocabulary, think in novel ways, and create a new America. As President Carter has claimed, the first fifteen minutes of the new President’s speech in Janiary 2009 can change the relations between a new Americaand the world, the dawn of a better future.

An Open Letter to General Petraeus

Sir:
Rest assured that every word of this letter is inspired by a deeply felt respect for you personally and for every man and woman under your command in Iraq.
During the congressional hearings last week, Senator Warner asked you a question that everybody thought was appropriate and fair. He asked whether you thought that your actions in Iraq serve American security in the world. Your immediate answer was stunning. You replied that such a question had never entered your mind. Your answer after a few seconds of reflection was ever more baffling. You simply said: ”I do not know, Senator.”
One thing for sure you must know. More than 60% of Americans believe that the war in Iraq far from defending our national security, represents a constantly increasing threat to it. Their reason seems to be obvious to most of them, even if it seems hidden from our president and from you: the longer a foreign, non-Islamic, and thoroughly aggressive army illegally occupies Iraq, the more virulent, lasting, and vindictive the Iraqis’ hatred for America grows. Millions of Islamic believers all over the world sympathize with them. In fact, almost everybody in the world that has a grudge against the global grab of corporate capitalism (much of which seems to irradiate from the so-called Christian nations), is more and more inclined to blame the war in Iraq for their planned terrorist attacks. One does not need to be a Machiavelli to understand that it is extremely dangerous to be hated by so many.
That hatred will become explosive when it becomes universally known (as it eventually will!) that our commander-in-chief does not plan any significant withdrawal of American troops from Iraq, but exactly the opposite: an indefinite presence of the American army in Iraq, as long as American soldiers are and have been in Germany, Japan, or South Korea (over sixty years!). The army of the American empire, Bush thinks, has to be close to Iran, to Syria, to Pakistan, to Israel, and to the oil. That is why we are right now in the process of building an American embassy in Baghdad that will be the largest foreign embassy in the world, to guarantee what the president calls an ”enduring” relationship with Iraq. The rest is typical Bush’s spinning and deception.
World-wide hatred of America will not begin to abate until Bush returns to Texas to cut firewood, and until the last American soldier in Iraq says good-bye to war, leaves behind all the widows and orphans of the land, and returns home to his wife or to her husband, to their children, to their job, to their friends, to us, to a new America.
The sooner the better, Sir.

Carlos G. Noreña
Santa Cruz, California

hello, this is a note from the author