Thursday, May 02, 2002
[posted by jaed at 9:32 PM]One of these is not like the others, one of this isn't quite the same...
MEMRI again delivers the Latest in Lunacy, Hot Off the Presses (and I swear their stuff is so crazy-sounding that I'd conclude MEMRI was a front designed to try to make the Arabs look bad were it not for the fact that a) I've never seen anyone question their translations and b) when I've been able to check, their material has always proven out)
... where was I... yes, MEMRI delivers us this time the words of one Father Manuel Musalam, a Palestinian Christian clergyman, on the message of Jesus:
You are loathsome! You are contemptible! You are cowards! � because you cannot carry the message of Jesus in your hearts. The message of Jesus is one of love, sacrifice, mercy, life, and manhood, and these Christians of the world have no mercy, no compassion, no manliness, no sacrifice.
(He's complaining here that the Christians of the West haven't forcibly prevented Israel from trying to end the Palestinian occupation and hostage-taking in the Church of the Nativity.) Now, the message of Jesus...
- Love, check.
- Sacrifice, gotcha.
- Mercy, all clear here.
- Life, OK.
- Manliness... full stop.
Manliness? Me-heap-big-man-you-do-what-I-say-ness? The importance of virility? Honor above all? Somehow I missed that.
But at the very least this is more evidence in support of the idea that the honor/shame culture of the Arabs is at the root of this mess - more specifically, of why the Arabs cannot get out of it, since all the available avenues are either impossible (actually defeating Israel militarily and killing them all) or too humiliating for the product of an honor culture to contemplate (making peace, after all this time of the rhetoric of genocide, when it will be obvious to all that peace is sought out of weakness). And further evidence - remember, this is a Christian clergyman identifying "manliness" as a core principle of Christianity - that it's a manifestation of Arab culture, not of Islam as such.
Bonus quote: Bishop Alex, head of the Roman Orthodox Bishopric of Gaza, said, "Real Christianity means love and harmony, and it exists only in Palestine and the Holy Land." Love and harmony. Only in Palestine. Hmmm. Is it something in the water that drives the people there to say things like this? The air? A heretofore-unknown psychotomimetic agent? Maybe the UN should make itself useful and send WHO officials instead of a UNHRC team.
Just a wealth of quotes here:
Perhaps the Church of the Nativity will be destroyed and turn into rubble. Bush, the head of the Christian rulers, will be responsible for what happens to it.
...not, of course, the people who actually destroy it and turn it into rubble. The disclaimer of responsibility sounds a familiar note.
There's much more, not excluding the Christ-killer libel, references to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the existence - the existence! - of Israel as an "unforgiveable sin", sympathy for poor Pope Pius XII, traduced just because he was complicit in the Holocaust...
