Robbing Jihadists of their Agency, denying them their shadow

Theories of causation and causality are everywhere, and no model of the universe is complex enough to describe ever fluid and ever changing reality. Most things have multiple causes, and its very hard to untangle them, as everything is causing and being caused simultaneously. The many attempts to link expressions of a carefully nurtured Islamic resentment* to Western violence in Islamic countries (for eg. the coalition's invasion of Iraq) may be part of the picture, but at the heart of this linkage is the "principle of false causation" - the false assumption that anyone can create hatred or love in the heart of another human being. Eleanor Roosevelt said it this way: "no one can humiliate you without your permission."

Large swathers of the Islamic world are characterised by a collective sense of inferiority re "the West", and a sense of resentment which is rarely challenged or called into question. Like "the West", the "Islamic world" is not so keen on owning its own shadow, its murderous underbelly, its aggression, its self justification. It prefers to see the evil in some other, rather than emenating from its own lack of integration and inherent contradictions.

While I personally lean towards the understanding that ultimately there is only One doer, and human beings do not have agency, in the maya of this world if we attribute agency to some human beings we "must" attribute agency to all of them. So paternalistic reverse prejudice attempts to deny the terrorists agency and explain that their resentment was 'caused" by some actor who does have agency - "the naughty West" - are discrimatory, infantilising, and do not allow people to take ownership of how they are thinking, and what they are creating or destroying. (You do acknowledge that "the system" seems to have a life of its own which makes us all victims of the momentum of the way things are).

Faisal al Mutar says it better - and more humerously - below:"
https://www.facebook.com/faisalsalmutar/posts/906729506085781?fref=nf&pnref=story

* Examples: Palestinians running over 75 year old school principles, or detonating bombs packed with nails and bolts in packed eateries in Israel, or Islamic supremacists mowing down randomly selected people in Kenya or Nigeria or Iraq or Paris or Lebanon. 

Resentment

To what extent does a culture sanctify resentment? Much of the Islamic world, and particularly the Arab and Iranian Islamic world, revolves around an unstated sense of inferiority re 'the West." It is this sense of inferiority which fuels the resentment which manifests as acts of terror all over the world.

This ugly, aggressive sense of agrievement - of disowned psychic stuff - is palpable: just take a walk through the Arab section of the Old City of Jerusalem, with young men standing around in patriarchal clumps cursing passers by under their breath in Arabic, or making predatory comments about tourist women whom they consider "fair game"

Of course Moslems do not have a monopoly on terror...young white males - domestic terrorists like Timothy McVie - have killed more people in Australia and the US than Islamists, and we Jews are pretty good at resentment too...I don't think we have fully owned our own emotional pain and stuckness since the Holocaust, which can be seen manifesting in our knee-jerk reactions to even friendly and constructive criticism, or in the murder of Yitzchak Rabin z"l, or in the most uncivil discourse in Israel between different world views.

However re a collective sense of inferiority which permeates large swathes of the Islamic world...no one is responsible for this except, perhaps, Moslems themselves, for believing untrue thoughts. They are as inescapably worthy as anyone else, but often don't seem to believe this. Eleanor Roosevelt observed " no one can humiliate you without your permission." I belive that Islamists characteristic inability to laugh at themselves or be self-reflective in any way and the "respect us or we'll kill you" approach stems from this internal suspicion that somehow they are not respected, and perhaps are not even worthy of respect? And hence the elaborate acting out - "take us seriously or else." (and this is just as true of Jewish, Hindu, Christian or Bhuddist fundamentalists, but they are perhaps - hopefully - a little more marginalised in their broader faith communities),

Certainly we Jews also struggle with a collective sense of inferiority - not surprising given our history and our focus on the'pain body" - the persecutions culminating in the Shoah, and the stuff that is often projected onto us. That's maybe why so many Jews name drop famous Jews....to assert that we too are valuable, worthwhile, strong, contribute and have our part to play. Its a way of resisting the strong (often unconscious) thrust to devalue us which seems to be so often present in the majority cultures that surround us. Whether this tactic - of claiming our Mark Spitz's and Nobel Prize winners - really stops the gnawing self doubt is anoither question. What do you think?

Reporting on Terror in Australia and Israel

I don't look at "the news" too much on television, but when my baser instincts seduce me and I do watch, I often get left feeling hurt, baffled and powerless by the way the terrorism against Israelis is covered. Air time is invariably given to Palestinians about their losses, even when those losses are a Palestinian who has blown him/herself up while trying to murder Israelis, or a Palestinian who has been shot after a 'successful" or unsuccessful knifing attack. The faces of israeli victims are rarely shown. Thir families and friends are rarely interviewed. Ordinary Israelis talking about the fear and trauma generated by tha attacks are not featured. Its not that I'd like ONLY Israeli points of view to be featured (and there are many) but that they ALSO be featured, alongside Palestinian ones. 

Last night, (15/102015) for example, on ABC the Australian Broadcasting Corporation), the focus was on Palestinian losses, and all the interviews were with Palestinians. There were no pictures of any of the Israeli victims, or any video of the stabbings, shootings and car rammings. There was some footage of MDA (Israeli Ambulances) and of Israeli soldiers. There was an English soundbite from an Israeli woman - a member of shalom achshav (Peace Now) saying that the security measures Israel has put in place amount to "collective punishment". This is in keeping with the general approach that the only Israeli voices featured are ones that reinforce the narrative of Palestinian victimhood and non-accountability.

BY CONTRAST, in the same newsbulletin there was long coverage of a terrorist shooting in Sydney which occurred two weeks ago. Then a 15 year old schoolboy "inspired" by Islamist thinking, shot a Chinese police accountant before being gunned down himself. Predictably the coverage focuses on the victim, on his funeral which will be with full police honours at one of Sydney's largest cathedrals. There is no attempt to humanise the perpetrator. His accomplices, who were arrested yesterday, are not interviewed. their grievances against The West or against Australia are not lovingly dwelt upon. The loss of the assailant's life is not mentiond before the loss of his victim's life, i.e the headlines do not read "15 year old boy gunned down by Australian police." But when the BBC reported on the stabbing of two men in Jerusalems old city, it reported the death of the Palestinian attackers first, and then as an afterthought, without causally linking the two, that two Israelis had been murdered.

And by the way, is not the stabbings of random Israelis a form of collective punishment? Are not the pronouncements about keeping "Jews with their dirty feet" away from the El Aksa mosque a form of Islamic supremacist apartheid? I hope those who care about either Israelis or Palestinians, or both (rather than those who care about conflict) will expose themselves to multiple and varied news sources in order to get a more 3 dimensional piture of what is going on.

Languaging and conflict

This piece could have had a longer heading: languaging and the role it plays in creating and maintaining inner and outer conflict.

For sure our language does not just reflect our reality -it also creates it.

We build our case for or against with the language we use. By relanguaging we release our own blockages.

Words that evoke the passions,desire for revenge etc etc
"unfair"
"abused"
"bullied"

Words that evoke guilt / anger
"betrayal"
"cheating"
"abandoned"
"rejected"

Words that evoke illness
"cancer"
 "illness"

Words that evoke dysfunction
"schizophrenia"
 "bipolar"


Words that evoke the sympathy/ saving reflex
Traumatised



"dirty"
"scum"
"needy"
"desperate"

post personal "therapy"

what is shame?

What do each of these three sentences focus on?

He was murdered
he was killed
he died

defending something doesn't mean you are for it

Two observations:

1) Verbal violence may be a substitute for physical violence, but often it is the precursor of it.

2) First comes the narrative then the selection of "facts":

Thus it is with everything from domestic violence to popular "causes"

PREPARING FOR THE LYNCH

Out of words like "occupation" "settlers" "ethnic cleansing" "apartheid" "racist" "murderers" etc
the passions are ignited
self avoidance sanctioned
a fashion forged
a mob coalesced
a noose knotted ...

labels for things I am saying "no" to:

left-wing
traitor
right wing
sexist
homophobe
mysoginist

fanatic
extremist
terrorist

A discourse analysis of the language employed by SBC and ABC in their coverage of the "Israel-Palestine" conflict.

The war on drugs
or on child pornography or domestic violence
is all very well
but what about the war on disconnection,
the war on poor parenting,
the war on meaningless,
the war on inauthenticity and the commodification of relationships
the war on isolation
the war on the vanished past and the imaginary future?

A middle way?

I am uncomfortable with arid secularism and life as production and consumption, but while the intensity and longing for the infinite which characterises the best of fundamentalism is attractive, its brittle and genrally ruthless exclusion of otherness and "deviance" is a price I am unwilling to pay. I long for a synthesis somwhere in the middle - a secularized tolerant spirituality, which acknowleges the divine hand in the affairs of men and women, and a spiritualised and arrational secularism which does not commodify Life and its bountiful gifts. Perhaps one of the closest aproximations I've encountered of this synthesis has been the More To Life programme.

I think this is true

My current theological understandings:

a) G-d cannot be bargained with or manipulated in any way
b) G-d cares nothing for the survival of the individual/personal body-mind
c) The personal body-mind and its story does not continue in any way after death, just as it has no ultimate existence after birth
d) b and c are not bad news because what we are ultimately is not the personal body-mind
e) Ultimate freedom - as in liberation from all that binds - is never of the person but FROM the notion of being a person
f) holding onto resentment increases suffering
g) forgiveness reduces suffering
h) exercise is generally good for "you"
i) contentment breeds more contentment
j) gratitude is easier to be with than feeling hard done by
k) it helps to be true to what you are wanting now in any given moment
l) the seeing is the doing
m) the linked notions of human agency and culpability are useful fictions, but upon investigation are revealed as false
n) pain and pleasue become each other in endless succession. Abiding joy and peace lie beyond.

(With thanks to Mooji, Nisargadhatta Maharaj, Krishnamurti, Byron Katie and all beacons of non-dualism)

Groupism vs 'racism'

Our languaging - both externally and internally - makes all the difference in the world. As I suggested in the 1997 book I edited "Cutting Through the Mountain" the misuse, abuse, and overuse of the word 'racism' has become uncreasingly unhelpful because
a) it paradoxically reinforces the highly dubious notion of race
b) it does not accurately describe the many varieties of prejudice which may be along faith, cultural,ethnic, class, age, gender, ability or sexual orientation lines, but is often used as a stand in for some of these.

I suggested then, and I suggest again now, that the word 'groupism' explains more of the dynamic where people have a strong need to group other people into a collective (of which the grouper may themselves be a part) and then ascribe all 'members' of this supposed 'collective' with a series of either positive or negative attributes...a process which anhilates the uniqueness and unrepeatability of each individual.
We can recognise this need without seing it as intrinsically good or bad, everything depends on the heart's intention and the context...but not to recognise it, to pretend it can be banished is not to acknowledge what William Faulkner called "the human heart in conflict with itself." When we own this tendency inside ourslves we make a little space to also own that, beyond the very 'real" cultural/national/ethnic/class/gender/faith conditioning and historical experiences which imprint us with a set of habitual predispositions and responses, is something in us and others which is untouched by this cultural conditioning and is reachable across any apparent divide, if Grace grants us the time and space and support to make real contact with ourselves and the "other"