It was twelve or thirteen years ago in Montreal when a Jewish friend of mine asked me to clarify something for him. I liked it when this friend in particular asked me for a favor, and I liked it even more when the favor had to do with the languages I spoke and he did not.
He was a lawyer and we were close enough to address each other by our first names. He knew the French words and expressions he needed to know to carry on with his job as a lawyer in the French province of Quebec but he conducted the trials in English which is allowed in the bilingual provinces of Canada including Quebec.
Most of the time when my friend asked me to translate something it would be a complicated passage written in French. This time, however, what puzzled him was one word and it was not French. He was not certain if the word was Arabic, Persian or Urdu because the French article in which the word appeared was about Afghanistan where all those languages are interwoven into the culture. The word was "HARAM".
If my memory serves me correctly, the publication was a magazine called l' Actualité which is affiliated with the Ontario media company that owns Maclean’s Magazine. The article described an encounter that took place between a Western journalist and a Taliban commander when the Talibans were in power in Afghanistan. The journalist wanted to take the picture of a woman but the commander refused to let him because he said it was haram.
The article railed against the commander explaining that haram means dirty. On the surface it appeared that the railing was directed against the Taliban but the insinuation was that Islam was calling women a dirty thing, something my Jewish friend knew was a lie. He knew it because he and his wife were friends with several Muslim and Christian Arab families as well as people of other nationalities from the Middle East and the Far East. And my friend clearly saw that all these cultures treated women with utmost respect.
Confused about the whole thing he turned to me for clarification. Without showing me the article, he asked if the word haram meant something to me. I said yes but I learned to be cautious with this man because the Arabs he knew were of many dialects. And sometimes a word in one dialect does not mean the exact same thing in another dialect, so I asked for a context.
My friend was intrigued enough to excuse himself, go to the lobby of a travel agency situated on another floor in the building, grab the magazine in question and come back with it. I read the article and saw in it an elaborate scheme of deception deliberately cooked up by a mischievous writer or a devilish translator or both.
I explained to my friend that the word haram is the antonym of HALAL. And halal was a word he knew well because he saw signs in the marketplaces of Montreal that said "Halal meat sold here." He knew that halal was the Arabic equivalent of the Jewish word kosher. But instead of clarifying things, my explanation confused him even more because he could not understand why the Taliban commander wanted women to be koshered … or what it meant for a woman to be kosher in the first place.
I decided to quiz my friend by asking him to explain the origin of the word kosher. He said he did not know because he spoke neither Yiddish nor Hebrew. Well, I said, the word halal means permitted in Arabic, and the word haram means forbidden. For example, it is halal (permitted) to consume the meat of an animal that has been killed humanely and whose carcass was handled in a prescribed manner. By contrast, some things in life are haram (forbidden) because they are precious and it would be sacrilegious to violate them. Women fall into this category.
Speaking as a Christian Arab who has some knowledge of Islam and the various cultures in the Middle and Far East, I ventured to explain further that women are so special in those cultures, some men become overprotective of them. Such men feel obligated to protect the women to the point where they render them untouchable even unseen. For better or for worse, these men consider the women to be so precious as to believe it is haram to do as much as photograph them.
Then I enjoyed explaining something to my friend whose hobby I knew was to watch the girls go by, something he did in the presence of his wife who did not mind her aging man do some "window shopping". And the livelier the girls were, the more the man liked them. I said to him that the Arabic word haram has entered the European languages and is frequently used in English. I elaborated saying that a derivative of the word haram is the word HAREEM which in the European languages, including English, came to be pronounced harem. And I still remember the delighted astonishment on my friend’s face as I talked about the subject.
However, I said, the difference between the two uses of the word is that in Arabic hareem refers to all the women in a clan or a tribe. It happened that in antiquity the women of the losing side in a war or a skirmish were so badly treated by the victorious armies, it was decided to make them a protected class and to forbid violating or harming them in any way. Thus, they became the hareem. And this is in contrast to the European usage of the word harem which refers to the wives, concubines and playmates of a wealthy ruler.
At this point my friend mulled over the explanation for a short moment then said: "I don’t think a wealthy ruler would consider his harem to be a dirty thing, do you?" And I replied: "No, I don’t think so." And my friend who would have liked a harem of his own looked relieved.
We both got curious by now and wanted to know where the confusion originated. I did some research of my own as did he and we compared notes. We discovered that kosher is a Hebrew word which means food permitted to eat. Such food is so designated when the animal is said to be clean and is killed according to a prescribed ritual. In this sense kosher would be the exact Hebrew translation of the Arabic word halal.
The Hebrew antonym of kosher is the word NEVELA which means unclean or dirty. This designation is utilized to refer to meat, such as pork, which is forbidden to consume in Judaism as well as in Islam because pigs eat everything and are thus considered to be unclean animals.
TREFF is the Yiddish equivalent but not an exact translation of the Hebrew nevela. It refers to an animal that has not been killed properly even though it might be a kosher animal in the first place. But the fact that the killing was not handled according to the proper ritual renders the meat unclean or dirty to consume. Thus, the Hebrew nevela and the Yiddish treff can be considered rough translations of the Arabic haram. The trouble is that unlike the Arabic word which is commonly used, the two Jewish words are almost never used. Instead, Jews refer to the forbidden foods as non-kosher.
This brings us back to the magazine article and the saying of the Taliban commander. There is no doubt that a transposition of meanings was done here using the word haram as a false nexus. The notion that some meat is haram to consume because it is unclean was falsely associated with women who are haram to violate because they are protected. Thus, it was made to sound that the Taliban commander was saying women are not worthy of being photographed because they are a dirty thing. And then the whole fabrication was attributed to Islam.
This fabrication is so ingenious and so elaborate, it could not have been an honest mistake. Those who translate from one language to another understand the meaning and the uses of the words they translate. They know enough to avoid making a mistake of this kind or to commit a fraud if and when it suits them. And the sad part is that most of the time they get away with committing a deliberate mistake because nobody checks after them. It happened in this case because someone decided to be more than mischievous and be outright fraudulent.
Saturday, August 30, 2008
Saturday, August 23, 2008
From Richard Malone To Giuliano Zaccardelli
One fateful day in the mid to late 1970’s while living in Toronto I picked up the telephone in fear and trepidation and called the Globe and Mail to speak to Richard S. Malone who was then editor-in-chief of that newspaper. I knew what a gamble it was to call the man on the telephone and so did he. In fact, neither of us wanted to stay too long in conversation so he gave me an appointment to go see him in his office a few days hence and we hung up in a hurry.
I never got to see Mr. Malone because what he and I sensed was a gamble took the worst of possible turns when the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) who were listening to the conversation got into action and charged his son who was a prominent member of the Winnipeg community hundred of miles away, with a serious offence.
The Canadian secret police did not have to warn Malone they will do this to him if he tried to help me; he knew they will want to punish him. But neither he nor I expected the response to be as savage and cowardly as this or to come so swiftly. Mr. Malone who was a disciplined person and proud of his military upbringing never went back to the office after that day, and he died shortly thereafter from grief and shame.
I had written Malone a few weeks earlier to say it was not enough for the Globe and Mail to advise some of the 180,000 Canadians who were spied upon by the RCMP that their private lives were recorded and given to journalists in an effort to discredit them. Most of these people - I among them - did not know why the RCMP wanted to discredit us, and many did not even know they were spied upon in the first place.
I learned later on that there was a spy scandal in Canada in the Nineteen Fifties, before I came to this country, and the RCMP responded to the humiliation of being made to look like amateurs by putting under surveillance anyone they feared might have leftist sympathies or might develop them. My sin was that I enrolled in a social science course taught by a member of the New Democratic Party of Canada not knowing who the course director was or that his party had a socialist agenda. It would not have made an iota of difference anyway if I had all this information because I would still have taken the course.
Except for the fact that the Canadian Jewish Congress had taken an interest in me earlier, I might have been treated like everyone else which is to say, I would have been ignored after a while and left alone. But I had written a letter to the editor which was published in the Toronto Star under the title: "Don’t listen to Propaganda, Egypt is a civilized Country," and this triggered a chain of events that changed the course of my life.
The consequence of the letter was that the Jewish Congress sent an envoy to tell me in the presence of my parish priest I was now on their watch list. The envoy warned that saying good things about Egypt - something he called controversial - will get me into trouble which is the thing they tell every journalist in North America even now. But what the envoy did not say then was that the list of the Jewish Congress and that of the Canadian secret police were going to merge and become one. And this is what happened shortly thereafter when the RCMP became a wholly owned subsidiary of the Likud Party of Israel.
Thus, between the cowardice of the RCMP, the savagery of the Jewish Congress and the mental retardation of the editors who succeeded Richard Malone in the editorial room of the Globe and Mail, my personal holocaust, already a decade old, was to become entrenched, institutionalized and more complicated with each passing day.
I fought back every which way I could and a federal cabinet minister who was in charge of the RCMP at the time tried to help me but was exposed by that same Police for secretly fathering a child with a woman that was not his wife. The minister was publicly humiliated and discredited because the Police had the dirt with which to punish him. But they did more than that; they warned everyone else they will destroy the life of anyone who will try to help me.
I concluded that no one will ever be in a position to put an end to my holocaust given that the RCMP had the dirt on almost everyone in this country or they had it on a member of their family. I thought that if there was such a thing as a perfect crime committed by a nation, the situation with the Canadian secret police was that thing because it made Canada the most accomplished police state ever to exist. Canada was and still is a place where the RCMP Ebola comes wrapped in a glossy package adorned with a tag that boasts: Health Food of the highest quality. And most of the World is swallowing the stuff because they don’t know.
It dawned on me early on that I was never going to have a normal life unless I left the country and went to live somewhere else. After a moment of soul searching I vowed not to do this but to do everything I can to stay alive until such time I can tell the world what authentic evil looks like, how to recognize it and how to avoid it.
In the meantime, I tried to fashion for myself a life that mimicked normalcy as much as possible. However, given enough time, the RCMP now allied with the Canadian Jewish Congress and the Globe and Mail were able to vandalize every effort I made in that regard, and they set me back to square one a thousand times during the past four decades.
But I kept on chugging along while in Toronto and before I moved to Montreal later in the decade. In Toronto, I kept in touch with people who were in a position to alleviate my pain but were not prepared to take the risk doing so openly. In fact, a few of these people volunteered to supply me with information without revealing themselves even to me. Others, who were harassed by the RCMP for talking to me took unlisted telephone numbers to look like they ditched me and thus got the police off their backs. But then they met me in places where the RCMP never guessed we would meet.
Two of these people were well known. One was Pierre Burton but he was not much of a help because he was too self-centered, self-absorbed and forever self-promoting. If he did not see an angle that would lead to a benefit returning to him, he would not get involved. The other was Charles Templeton who helped me in his funny way although I doubt he realized he was helping me in any meaningful way.
What puzzled me most and I was desperate to get clarification for was the reason why my personal life, simple, banal and mundane as it was, became of such interest to the people among whom the RCMP distributed information about me. "You’re not in print, on radio or on television," said Templeton "therefore you are a fictional character that is fashioned by everyone the way they want to imagine you. Everything you say and everything you do is interpreted in a way that suits the imagination and feeds the hunger of each individual."
And so I asked if these individuals will ever get tired of the fictional character that I represent. "Are you kidding?" said Templeton "Every tidbit of information we receive about you, no matter how trivial or banal, is a reason to get orgasmic. Reading the stuff or hearing about it is like having sex with a creature from Heaven. The pleasure is infinite and it will never diminish."
There was also the fact that in the eyes of these people I was a writers’ writer. I was a gold mine of fresh, sometimes exotic and always grabbing ideas. This prompted the editorial writers, columnists, speechwriters, advertisers and what have you to "mine" my work and make themselves sound better than they were. They became wealthy at my expense because they got paid for stealing and I got nothing for creating. No wander they wanted the mine that was I to remain hidden underground and never take credit for my own work. Oh yes, they fought for the freedom of every writer in Eastern Europe, Asia, Latin America, Africa and everywhere you can think of but not for my freedom. How else would they convince the World they were not the filth they really were?
And so the insanity never ended as they sabotaged every opportunity that came my way to launch a career in journalism or in the fine arts. To make sure nobody violated the blacklisting of me, the RCMP tracked me everywhere I went, recorded everything I said, and they shared the information not only with the sickos who got orgasmic but also the sadists who turned the information into hurtful gossip they spread among the people with whom I worked, with whom I socialized and with whom I could have forged a professional relationship.
Now, let me show you how much fun this was to one character. I must, however, begin by explaining that when someone chokes as he speaks, it means he is suppressing a cry. In fact, the choking happens because the cry is sent inward to hide it from the World. Thus the choking should be interpreted as the expression of an internal cry. And crying on the inside is usually done by those who feel they just lost something valuable.
Giuliano Zaccardelli choked while protesting his firing because, as he tried to explain, he did not discipline a subordinate for committing an error. This was a multi-layered falsehood. The truth is that Zaccardelli was fired because he was told he will not get orgasmic anymore playing the game that he and the force have played for forty years. When he choked as he did in full view of the television cameras, Zaccardelli demonstrated how much he pitied himself for losing a privilege he used to have but will have no more.
The events that led to the firing of Giuliano Zaccardelli began when the RCMP intercepted and misused a letter I faxed to my lawyer. This reality was not allowed to be recorded in the history books because it is the Canadian imperative to falsify history with layers on top of layers on top of layers of misinformation, disinformation and garbage information. And so I have resolved to write that piece of history as correctly as I possibly can, not as the charlatans wish it had unfolded. Stay tuned.
I never got to see Mr. Malone because what he and I sensed was a gamble took the worst of possible turns when the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) who were listening to the conversation got into action and charged his son who was a prominent member of the Winnipeg community hundred of miles away, with a serious offence.
The Canadian secret police did not have to warn Malone they will do this to him if he tried to help me; he knew they will want to punish him. But neither he nor I expected the response to be as savage and cowardly as this or to come so swiftly. Mr. Malone who was a disciplined person and proud of his military upbringing never went back to the office after that day, and he died shortly thereafter from grief and shame.
I had written Malone a few weeks earlier to say it was not enough for the Globe and Mail to advise some of the 180,000 Canadians who were spied upon by the RCMP that their private lives were recorded and given to journalists in an effort to discredit them. Most of these people - I among them - did not know why the RCMP wanted to discredit us, and many did not even know they were spied upon in the first place.
I learned later on that there was a spy scandal in Canada in the Nineteen Fifties, before I came to this country, and the RCMP responded to the humiliation of being made to look like amateurs by putting under surveillance anyone they feared might have leftist sympathies or might develop them. My sin was that I enrolled in a social science course taught by a member of the New Democratic Party of Canada not knowing who the course director was or that his party had a socialist agenda. It would not have made an iota of difference anyway if I had all this information because I would still have taken the course.
Except for the fact that the Canadian Jewish Congress had taken an interest in me earlier, I might have been treated like everyone else which is to say, I would have been ignored after a while and left alone. But I had written a letter to the editor which was published in the Toronto Star under the title: "Don’t listen to Propaganda, Egypt is a civilized Country," and this triggered a chain of events that changed the course of my life.
The consequence of the letter was that the Jewish Congress sent an envoy to tell me in the presence of my parish priest I was now on their watch list. The envoy warned that saying good things about Egypt - something he called controversial - will get me into trouble which is the thing they tell every journalist in North America even now. But what the envoy did not say then was that the list of the Jewish Congress and that of the Canadian secret police were going to merge and become one. And this is what happened shortly thereafter when the RCMP became a wholly owned subsidiary of the Likud Party of Israel.
Thus, between the cowardice of the RCMP, the savagery of the Jewish Congress and the mental retardation of the editors who succeeded Richard Malone in the editorial room of the Globe and Mail, my personal holocaust, already a decade old, was to become entrenched, institutionalized and more complicated with each passing day.
I fought back every which way I could and a federal cabinet minister who was in charge of the RCMP at the time tried to help me but was exposed by that same Police for secretly fathering a child with a woman that was not his wife. The minister was publicly humiliated and discredited because the Police had the dirt with which to punish him. But they did more than that; they warned everyone else they will destroy the life of anyone who will try to help me.
I concluded that no one will ever be in a position to put an end to my holocaust given that the RCMP had the dirt on almost everyone in this country or they had it on a member of their family. I thought that if there was such a thing as a perfect crime committed by a nation, the situation with the Canadian secret police was that thing because it made Canada the most accomplished police state ever to exist. Canada was and still is a place where the RCMP Ebola comes wrapped in a glossy package adorned with a tag that boasts: Health Food of the highest quality. And most of the World is swallowing the stuff because they don’t know.
It dawned on me early on that I was never going to have a normal life unless I left the country and went to live somewhere else. After a moment of soul searching I vowed not to do this but to do everything I can to stay alive until such time I can tell the world what authentic evil looks like, how to recognize it and how to avoid it.
In the meantime, I tried to fashion for myself a life that mimicked normalcy as much as possible. However, given enough time, the RCMP now allied with the Canadian Jewish Congress and the Globe and Mail were able to vandalize every effort I made in that regard, and they set me back to square one a thousand times during the past four decades.
But I kept on chugging along while in Toronto and before I moved to Montreal later in the decade. In Toronto, I kept in touch with people who were in a position to alleviate my pain but were not prepared to take the risk doing so openly. In fact, a few of these people volunteered to supply me with information without revealing themselves even to me. Others, who were harassed by the RCMP for talking to me took unlisted telephone numbers to look like they ditched me and thus got the police off their backs. But then they met me in places where the RCMP never guessed we would meet.
Two of these people were well known. One was Pierre Burton but he was not much of a help because he was too self-centered, self-absorbed and forever self-promoting. If he did not see an angle that would lead to a benefit returning to him, he would not get involved. The other was Charles Templeton who helped me in his funny way although I doubt he realized he was helping me in any meaningful way.
What puzzled me most and I was desperate to get clarification for was the reason why my personal life, simple, banal and mundane as it was, became of such interest to the people among whom the RCMP distributed information about me. "You’re not in print, on radio or on television," said Templeton "therefore you are a fictional character that is fashioned by everyone the way they want to imagine you. Everything you say and everything you do is interpreted in a way that suits the imagination and feeds the hunger of each individual."
And so I asked if these individuals will ever get tired of the fictional character that I represent. "Are you kidding?" said Templeton "Every tidbit of information we receive about you, no matter how trivial or banal, is a reason to get orgasmic. Reading the stuff or hearing about it is like having sex with a creature from Heaven. The pleasure is infinite and it will never diminish."
There was also the fact that in the eyes of these people I was a writers’ writer. I was a gold mine of fresh, sometimes exotic and always grabbing ideas. This prompted the editorial writers, columnists, speechwriters, advertisers and what have you to "mine" my work and make themselves sound better than they were. They became wealthy at my expense because they got paid for stealing and I got nothing for creating. No wander they wanted the mine that was I to remain hidden underground and never take credit for my own work. Oh yes, they fought for the freedom of every writer in Eastern Europe, Asia, Latin America, Africa and everywhere you can think of but not for my freedom. How else would they convince the World they were not the filth they really were?
And so the insanity never ended as they sabotaged every opportunity that came my way to launch a career in journalism or in the fine arts. To make sure nobody violated the blacklisting of me, the RCMP tracked me everywhere I went, recorded everything I said, and they shared the information not only with the sickos who got orgasmic but also the sadists who turned the information into hurtful gossip they spread among the people with whom I worked, with whom I socialized and with whom I could have forged a professional relationship.
Now, let me show you how much fun this was to one character. I must, however, begin by explaining that when someone chokes as he speaks, it means he is suppressing a cry. In fact, the choking happens because the cry is sent inward to hide it from the World. Thus the choking should be interpreted as the expression of an internal cry. And crying on the inside is usually done by those who feel they just lost something valuable.
Giuliano Zaccardelli choked while protesting his firing because, as he tried to explain, he did not discipline a subordinate for committing an error. This was a multi-layered falsehood. The truth is that Zaccardelli was fired because he was told he will not get orgasmic anymore playing the game that he and the force have played for forty years. When he choked as he did in full view of the television cameras, Zaccardelli demonstrated how much he pitied himself for losing a privilege he used to have but will have no more.
The events that led to the firing of Giuliano Zaccardelli began when the RCMP intercepted and misused a letter I faxed to my lawyer. This reality was not allowed to be recorded in the history books because it is the Canadian imperative to falsify history with layers on top of layers on top of layers of misinformation, disinformation and garbage information. And so I have resolved to write that piece of history as correctly as I possibly can, not as the charlatans wish it had unfolded. Stay tuned.
Sunday, August 17, 2008
They Were Before The Big Bang
When in science you face new evidence you discard or revise your old theories no matter how much you have grown to love and cherish them. This is what happened to me lately, but first let me to tell you about my theory and how I came to love and cherish it for many years but must discard it now.
It all began one day when I threw my hands up in the air and asked in despair: "But why does God need someone like you to tell me about Him?" I was yelling at a Jehovah Witness who aggressively proselytized where I worked and got under my skin and the skin of everyone else.
It also happened that this was a time when I was beginning to formulate a theory about existence, and the experience with the overzealous Jehovah Witness served to speed up my thought processes and to move them along.
Like everyone else, I began my spiritual, philosophical and scientific journey with the view that because there is a Universe, there must be a Creator who put it all together. But concurrent with this view, I was aware of the fact that men who said they were in charge of telling humanity about God were characters that did not display saintly qualities. This situation, together with the activities of the religious co-worker prompted me to discard the spiritual approach and to concentrate more on the philosophical and scientific ones.
To formulate a coherent view of existence I had to answer two important questions: First, how can there be a creation without a creator? Second, what was there before the Universe began – that is, before the Big Bang? Eventually, I managed to construct a model that answered both questions, and here is how my thinking evolved.
A child discovers the law of conservation of matter at an early age. It realizes that a toy does not appear out of nowhere and so if there is a toy, it must be that mom or dad brought it from somewhere. The child also realizes that a toy does not disappear into thin air by itself. Therefore if the toy is not seen, it must be that it is hidden somewhere.
When older, the child goes on to generalize that if something exists, someone must have made it. As adults, such notions become so ingrained in us we end up believing that nothingness is the normal state of things. It follows that because the Universe exists, there must be a God to have created it.
Extending this line of thinking further, some people then ask: but where did God come from? At this point the few who anoint themselves experts on religion step forward and respond that God is eternal; He has always been and He will always be. Because God has these attributes, His powers are absolute and they are boundless.
But then comes the admission that despite all of that, God needs intermediaries like themselves to tell the rest of us about Him and to do His work. And while the self anointed characters do the work, God stays hidden from humanity for no reason that can be explained or made to look and sound reasonable. What is going on?
In the face of this apparent absurdity, I was left with only the philosophical and scientific options as the means to answer all questions relating to the origin of the Universe. I began with a notion that was advanced by scientists decades ago, one that said a single particle or a bundle of energy having the right characteristics could have been responsible for all that exists.
The thing exploded in a Big Bang and evolved into the Universe we observe today. After much elaboration by physicists and by mathematicians, the notion became a full blown theory and was formulated under a myriad of names such as Unified Field Theory, Super Symmetry, String Theory, Theory of Everything, et cetera.
To express these formulations, the scientists worked backward in time with equations that eventually broke down as they approached the moment of the Big Bang. Thus, the scientists never said what was before the Bang or where the initial particle/energy came from. And to this day, these questions stand as two puzzles that beg to be resolved by science or by something else.
For a time I thought I had solved the puzzles because one day, I was hit with an idea that seemed to answer both questions. I thought that mathematical probability must have been here before the Big Bang, and the probability was fifty/fifty that either something existed before the famous Bang or nothing existed.
However, since time stops when there is nothing, the nothing never really existed for any length of time because the time it took for the nothing to exist would have been measured as zero. Therefore something must have always existed and, contrary to the instinct we grow up with, existence and not nothingness must be the normal state of things.
And then I went on to theorize that something could have existed for less than a nanosecond and disappeared to be replaced by something that existed for more than a hundred trillion years and disappeared to be replaced by something that existed for any length of time and disappeared, and so on for ever and ever.
Each of those things may or may not have had the required characteristics to evolve into a universe such as the one we inhabit today but at some point a particle/energy possessing the right characteristics came into being and exploded in a Big Bang to evolve into the Universe we have today – which is what the scientists theorized long before me.
Thus, to my way of thinking such as it was at the time, we had a Universe that created itself by probability alone, a Universe of which we, humans were but a small part. And this was enough to make us both the creator and the creation rolled into one.
The consequence of this theory was that we were suddenly free of the notion that God needs intermediaries to stand between Himself and the rest of us, intermediaries like the much despised characters who reap heavenly rewards as they live in luxury here on Earth.
Furthermore, no longer was God delegating power and authority to mortals, or handing out perks to those who are more likely to turn devilish than turn saintly. In fact we, humans, had it within us to rise to the level of the divine by being ourselves, or sink to the level of the devil by pretending to speak for a God that insists on being hidden from us come hell or high water.
Thus you can see, dear reader, why I cherished this theory and loved it for a long time. Alas, I must discard it now because new evidence has come to light which indicates that there was something before the Big Bang and before probability.
I don’t know what to make of the observation or how it may fit into the scheme of things, but what I see and cannot ignore is that Bill and Hillary Clinton were here before the Big Bang and before probability.
Thus, what these two need to do now is develop and radiate the sort of grace which will lift them to the level of the divine. This act will prompt the faithful to worship them in the manner they always wanted to be worshiped.
It all began one day when I threw my hands up in the air and asked in despair: "But why does God need someone like you to tell me about Him?" I was yelling at a Jehovah Witness who aggressively proselytized where I worked and got under my skin and the skin of everyone else.
It also happened that this was a time when I was beginning to formulate a theory about existence, and the experience with the overzealous Jehovah Witness served to speed up my thought processes and to move them along.
Like everyone else, I began my spiritual, philosophical and scientific journey with the view that because there is a Universe, there must be a Creator who put it all together. But concurrent with this view, I was aware of the fact that men who said they were in charge of telling humanity about God were characters that did not display saintly qualities. This situation, together with the activities of the religious co-worker prompted me to discard the spiritual approach and to concentrate more on the philosophical and scientific ones.
To formulate a coherent view of existence I had to answer two important questions: First, how can there be a creation without a creator? Second, what was there before the Universe began – that is, before the Big Bang? Eventually, I managed to construct a model that answered both questions, and here is how my thinking evolved.
A child discovers the law of conservation of matter at an early age. It realizes that a toy does not appear out of nowhere and so if there is a toy, it must be that mom or dad brought it from somewhere. The child also realizes that a toy does not disappear into thin air by itself. Therefore if the toy is not seen, it must be that it is hidden somewhere.
When older, the child goes on to generalize that if something exists, someone must have made it. As adults, such notions become so ingrained in us we end up believing that nothingness is the normal state of things. It follows that because the Universe exists, there must be a God to have created it.
Extending this line of thinking further, some people then ask: but where did God come from? At this point the few who anoint themselves experts on religion step forward and respond that God is eternal; He has always been and He will always be. Because God has these attributes, His powers are absolute and they are boundless.
But then comes the admission that despite all of that, God needs intermediaries like themselves to tell the rest of us about Him and to do His work. And while the self anointed characters do the work, God stays hidden from humanity for no reason that can be explained or made to look and sound reasonable. What is going on?
In the face of this apparent absurdity, I was left with only the philosophical and scientific options as the means to answer all questions relating to the origin of the Universe. I began with a notion that was advanced by scientists decades ago, one that said a single particle or a bundle of energy having the right characteristics could have been responsible for all that exists.
The thing exploded in a Big Bang and evolved into the Universe we observe today. After much elaboration by physicists and by mathematicians, the notion became a full blown theory and was formulated under a myriad of names such as Unified Field Theory, Super Symmetry, String Theory, Theory of Everything, et cetera.
To express these formulations, the scientists worked backward in time with equations that eventually broke down as they approached the moment of the Big Bang. Thus, the scientists never said what was before the Bang or where the initial particle/energy came from. And to this day, these questions stand as two puzzles that beg to be resolved by science or by something else.
For a time I thought I had solved the puzzles because one day, I was hit with an idea that seemed to answer both questions. I thought that mathematical probability must have been here before the Big Bang, and the probability was fifty/fifty that either something existed before the famous Bang or nothing existed.
However, since time stops when there is nothing, the nothing never really existed for any length of time because the time it took for the nothing to exist would have been measured as zero. Therefore something must have always existed and, contrary to the instinct we grow up with, existence and not nothingness must be the normal state of things.
And then I went on to theorize that something could have existed for less than a nanosecond and disappeared to be replaced by something that existed for more than a hundred trillion years and disappeared to be replaced by something that existed for any length of time and disappeared, and so on for ever and ever.
Each of those things may or may not have had the required characteristics to evolve into a universe such as the one we inhabit today but at some point a particle/energy possessing the right characteristics came into being and exploded in a Big Bang to evolve into the Universe we have today – which is what the scientists theorized long before me.
Thus, to my way of thinking such as it was at the time, we had a Universe that created itself by probability alone, a Universe of which we, humans were but a small part. And this was enough to make us both the creator and the creation rolled into one.
The consequence of this theory was that we were suddenly free of the notion that God needs intermediaries to stand between Himself and the rest of us, intermediaries like the much despised characters who reap heavenly rewards as they live in luxury here on Earth.
Furthermore, no longer was God delegating power and authority to mortals, or handing out perks to those who are more likely to turn devilish than turn saintly. In fact we, humans, had it within us to rise to the level of the divine by being ourselves, or sink to the level of the devil by pretending to speak for a God that insists on being hidden from us come hell or high water.
Thus you can see, dear reader, why I cherished this theory and loved it for a long time. Alas, I must discard it now because new evidence has come to light which indicates that there was something before the Big Bang and before probability.
I don’t know what to make of the observation or how it may fit into the scheme of things, but what I see and cannot ignore is that Bill and Hillary Clinton were here before the Big Bang and before probability.
Thus, what these two need to do now is develop and radiate the sort of grace which will lift them to the level of the divine. This act will prompt the faithful to worship them in the manner they always wanted to be worshiped.
Sunday, August 10, 2008
Meal In The Eye Of The Scorpion
First, I wish to congratulate the Chinese people and their leaders for the opening ceremony of the 29th. Olympiad; it was a performance that stunned the world by its power and beauty. Second, I wish to register my sadness at the fact that President George W. Bush of the United States of America used the occasion to make the remarks that he did in Thailand on his way to China with regard to freedom of religion in that country. Sad also was the spectacle of the American religious individuals who created a scene in Beijing by dropping to their knees and shouting slogans of the same phony cause.
I thought it would ease the pain that the Chinese leaders must have felt and ease the bewilderment that the Chinese public must have experienced because of those incidents if the leaders and the public were given an explanation as to why some individuals from this continent go to Asia, more specifically to China, and do what they do. Here is my explanation as concisely as I can make it.
Apparently there are scorpions in nature that would kill and eat a suitor whose manner of courtship they do not appreciate. First, the partners engage in a mating dance but if one of them does not perform properly, the disaffected partner stings it to death and eats it. The aggressor does so not to appease its hunger but out of frustration.
This metaphor more than anything else represents what is currently taking place between two groups in America, each of which has assumed the mantle of an existing religion but not its principles or tenets. One group says it represents Evangelical Christianity and the other says it represents Rabbinical Judaism.
What must be said about these two made-up religions is that they call themselves religions of the Book. And what is remarkable about them is that they are based on absolutes. Unlike the dozens of existing religions where the Gods resemble human beings to a great extent, the God of the Book is one that is spoken of only in superlative terms. For example, it is said that He always was and will always be. He is all knowing and powerful without bounds. He is infinitely perfect and good without limits - and so on and so forth.
Thus when you worship this God, you allow no room for compromise and you do not tolerate half-way measures. Everything you do in His name, you take it to extreme and defend it with fanatical zeal. You do so knowing that He approves of your actions and that He will protect you in this world then reward you in the next.
While the two fake religious groups in America are engaged in a metaphorical mating dance, the Christians believe that when the day of the Rapture comes, the Jews will see the light and convert to Christianity. As for the Jews, they believe that on the day the Messiah will reveal himself, the Christians will realize that the Jews are the chosen children of God, preordained to rule over humanity and thus let them rule.
In the meantime, knowing what the phony Jews fantasize about, the phony Christians call them the apple of God’s eye to stroke their vanity. But this is an apple they would love to devour because they believe the Jews crucified Jesus who was a Messiah that has come and gone.
On the other hand, knowing what the Christians fantasize about, the Jews call them the children of the new promised land to pump them with fake pride but these are children they would love to devour because they believe that the Christians persecuted them throughout history based on the belief that the Jews crucified a Messiah that is yet to come and go.
True, false or exaggerated, those historical situations have taught the Jewish leaders known as the rabbis that to keep control over their flock, they must create a constant climate of fear to the effect that, as a people, they are about to be annihilated. This in turn created the hate which is the other ingredient needed to make the glue by which to keep the flock together.
What the rabbis have learned over time did eventually transform into the valuable skills they incorporated into a book they call the Talmud. This is where parts of the old religion are constantly being mixed with the new realities for the purpose of creating new tools to deceive, to con and to make believe without appearing to be unbelievable. And the whole became a new religion that is constantly changing its face.
The rabbis called this new religion Rabbinical Judaism and they brought it to America along with their skills, wasting no time to make that country live in fear and hate as they still do with their flock. Of course, the goal of the rabbis has always been to make America susceptible to fall under their control as if the whole country was but a small part of the flock.
This done, the plan is to use America as a stepping stone to go after the rest of the world given the power and prestige that have concentrated in that country since it was founded a few centuries ago. And the diligent work of the rabbis is beginning to pay off as can be seen by America’s submission to every wish that is labeled Jewish or Israeli.
To wit, try to do something for America or the American people and you see the Administration, the Congress and the Press split half for the thing and half against it. But try to do something for Israel or the Jews and you get 100% approval from all sides. America is democratic when it comes to American needs but authoritarian when it comes to Israeli and Jewish needs.
When you have a situation as demonic as this, you need a powerful tonic to keep it going, and there is no tonic more powerful than perpetual demagoguery. Therefore, the two religious groups have cooperated to create the perfect nemesis to fear and to hate, a nemesis which may surprise some people to know are not the Arabs or the Muslims but all of humanity.
In fact, the phony Christians and the phony Jews have declared war against the entire human race. Asia being home to a large portion of this humanity, the two religions have targeted the continent for their demagogic activities. This is why Bush was made to do what he did which is demagoguery on a presidential scale.
In the final analysis it can be seen that what the two religious groups want is absolute dominion over the planet. Given this mindset, they must be regarded and treated not as religions but as political movements that have managed to harness the force of religion to advance their agenda with the fanatic devotion that is due to an absolute God.
And to advance that agenda, they are now at a stage where they routinely use the President of the United States of America as megaphone to threaten anyone who would dare to challenge them or stand in their way. The first President to be fully mobilized for this purpose was Bill Clinton whom some people have called Netanyahu’s mouth-farting instrument because he had a large capacity to blow off the gas that Netanyahu of Israel was formulating all the time.
But Clinton has now been outdone by Bush who is beginning to look like an orchestra of wind instruments forever playing the Netanyahu symphony of farts. Slated to go down in history as the mouth-farting president of America, Bush got there by surrounding himself with the speechwriters that put into his mouth an ample supply of Netanyahu’s gas. And the man still has some of that gas in reserve.
In fact, if the world is beginning to stink, it is because America is being emptied of its gas supply by the phony Christian and the phony Jewish elements that rule it. And what the rest of us can do now is hold our noses and wait for the assault on our nostrils to pass which will happen when America will have run out of gas and Netanyahu of Israel will have run out of farts and will fart no more.
I thought it would ease the pain that the Chinese leaders must have felt and ease the bewilderment that the Chinese public must have experienced because of those incidents if the leaders and the public were given an explanation as to why some individuals from this continent go to Asia, more specifically to China, and do what they do. Here is my explanation as concisely as I can make it.
Apparently there are scorpions in nature that would kill and eat a suitor whose manner of courtship they do not appreciate. First, the partners engage in a mating dance but if one of them does not perform properly, the disaffected partner stings it to death and eats it. The aggressor does so not to appease its hunger but out of frustration.
This metaphor more than anything else represents what is currently taking place between two groups in America, each of which has assumed the mantle of an existing religion but not its principles or tenets. One group says it represents Evangelical Christianity and the other says it represents Rabbinical Judaism.
What must be said about these two made-up religions is that they call themselves religions of the Book. And what is remarkable about them is that they are based on absolutes. Unlike the dozens of existing religions where the Gods resemble human beings to a great extent, the God of the Book is one that is spoken of only in superlative terms. For example, it is said that He always was and will always be. He is all knowing and powerful without bounds. He is infinitely perfect and good without limits - and so on and so forth.
Thus when you worship this God, you allow no room for compromise and you do not tolerate half-way measures. Everything you do in His name, you take it to extreme and defend it with fanatical zeal. You do so knowing that He approves of your actions and that He will protect you in this world then reward you in the next.
While the two fake religious groups in America are engaged in a metaphorical mating dance, the Christians believe that when the day of the Rapture comes, the Jews will see the light and convert to Christianity. As for the Jews, they believe that on the day the Messiah will reveal himself, the Christians will realize that the Jews are the chosen children of God, preordained to rule over humanity and thus let them rule.
In the meantime, knowing what the phony Jews fantasize about, the phony Christians call them the apple of God’s eye to stroke their vanity. But this is an apple they would love to devour because they believe the Jews crucified Jesus who was a Messiah that has come and gone.
On the other hand, knowing what the Christians fantasize about, the Jews call them the children of the new promised land to pump them with fake pride but these are children they would love to devour because they believe that the Christians persecuted them throughout history based on the belief that the Jews crucified a Messiah that is yet to come and go.
True, false or exaggerated, those historical situations have taught the Jewish leaders known as the rabbis that to keep control over their flock, they must create a constant climate of fear to the effect that, as a people, they are about to be annihilated. This in turn created the hate which is the other ingredient needed to make the glue by which to keep the flock together.
What the rabbis have learned over time did eventually transform into the valuable skills they incorporated into a book they call the Talmud. This is where parts of the old religion are constantly being mixed with the new realities for the purpose of creating new tools to deceive, to con and to make believe without appearing to be unbelievable. And the whole became a new religion that is constantly changing its face.
The rabbis called this new religion Rabbinical Judaism and they brought it to America along with their skills, wasting no time to make that country live in fear and hate as they still do with their flock. Of course, the goal of the rabbis has always been to make America susceptible to fall under their control as if the whole country was but a small part of the flock.
This done, the plan is to use America as a stepping stone to go after the rest of the world given the power and prestige that have concentrated in that country since it was founded a few centuries ago. And the diligent work of the rabbis is beginning to pay off as can be seen by America’s submission to every wish that is labeled Jewish or Israeli.
To wit, try to do something for America or the American people and you see the Administration, the Congress and the Press split half for the thing and half against it. But try to do something for Israel or the Jews and you get 100% approval from all sides. America is democratic when it comes to American needs but authoritarian when it comes to Israeli and Jewish needs.
When you have a situation as demonic as this, you need a powerful tonic to keep it going, and there is no tonic more powerful than perpetual demagoguery. Therefore, the two religious groups have cooperated to create the perfect nemesis to fear and to hate, a nemesis which may surprise some people to know are not the Arabs or the Muslims but all of humanity.
In fact, the phony Christians and the phony Jews have declared war against the entire human race. Asia being home to a large portion of this humanity, the two religions have targeted the continent for their demagogic activities. This is why Bush was made to do what he did which is demagoguery on a presidential scale.
In the final analysis it can be seen that what the two religious groups want is absolute dominion over the planet. Given this mindset, they must be regarded and treated not as religions but as political movements that have managed to harness the force of religion to advance their agenda with the fanatic devotion that is due to an absolute God.
And to advance that agenda, they are now at a stage where they routinely use the President of the United States of America as megaphone to threaten anyone who would dare to challenge them or stand in their way. The first President to be fully mobilized for this purpose was Bill Clinton whom some people have called Netanyahu’s mouth-farting instrument because he had a large capacity to blow off the gas that Netanyahu of Israel was formulating all the time.
But Clinton has now been outdone by Bush who is beginning to look like an orchestra of wind instruments forever playing the Netanyahu symphony of farts. Slated to go down in history as the mouth-farting president of America, Bush got there by surrounding himself with the speechwriters that put into his mouth an ample supply of Netanyahu’s gas. And the man still has some of that gas in reserve.
In fact, if the world is beginning to stink, it is because America is being emptied of its gas supply by the phony Christian and the phony Jewish elements that rule it. And what the rest of us can do now is hold our noses and wait for the assault on our nostrils to pass which will happen when America will have run out of gas and Netanyahu of Israel will have run out of farts and will fart no more.
Tuesday, August 5, 2008
When Journalists Peddle Fraud
Taking part in a conspiracy is one thing and peddling a fraud that was already plagiarized is another thing. Catch several journalists echo each other as they repeat the same falsehood over and over again, bring the thing to their attention and watch them lament they are being accused of conspiracy. When this happens, look them in the eye and say: Don’t flatter yourselves; conspiracy implies you have brains to think and to coordinate with but you don’t have that much of a brain.
What these guys have is an animal instinct which is sometimes referred to as pack mentality. And if you want to know what this is wait a little while because something terrible happened in Canada which will undoubtedly be taken up by a copycat. It happened that a sicko on a bus stabbed a fellow passenger, cut-off his head and tried to eat him. A copycat should now surface and try to duplicate the horror. But this is something that the so-called journalists do all the time except that in addition to being sick they do what they do with an intent that borders on the criminal.
If you want to see a manifestation of this intent take a look at the following statement:
[Farag grew up in the religiously conservative Egyptian city of Alexandria…she recently told the monthly magazine Egypt Today.]
This statement came in the Washington Post on July 27, 2008 in an article written by Ellen Knickmeyer under the title Hayat Farag, Egypt, Wrestler. The journalist says the quote was given to the magazine Egypt Today. Well, this magazine happens to come online as well as in print form. When you check the July edition you find this passage:
[Farag grew up in a conservative neighborhood in Alexandria…]
A neighborhood in Alexandria is not all of Alexandria, Ellen! The fraud committed by the Washington Post so-called journalist is glaring in that she picked on the wrong city to commit her cardinal sin and to show the color of her glorious ignorance. Alexandria has been the most cosmopolitan city on the planet ever since it was founded by Alexander the Great nearly 2,500 years ago. This is a span of time that is ten times longer than America has lived as a nation thus far. And because Alexandria is cosmopolitan, it tolerates having all kinds of neighborhoods, including one that is conservative.
The idea Knickmeyer is copycating in her article is that Egypt is a conservative country; worse, a religiously conservative country; worse, a religiously Muslim conservative country. The so-called journalist altered the words of Hayat Farag to help spread the lie that the Christians in Egypt need the protection of America. And this comes at a time when the emotionally unstable in the US Congress are being conditioned and duly mobilized to do to Egypt what they are doing to other countries where religious and ethnic wars were started and the flames of hatred are fanned.
The article published in the magazine Egypt Today is a long one and the quote that was forged by Knickmeyer is only a small part of it. But what is remarkable about the article is that it falls in line with other articles published in the same magazine and in the sister magazine Business Today, all of which dispel the image of the Egyptian woman as she has been painted by the mischief makers in the American media. Look up those two publications online and see the accomplishments that women are scoring in Egypt day in and day out.
And since what happens in America is copycated in Canada, I had the occasion to write about the copycat phenomenon except that the champions of free speech in the notorious Jewish Establishment blocked the publication of the book in which the passage was to appear. And so, here is the passage, reprinted in the following 6 paragraphs. The topic I was discussing then was the tsunami of Boxing Day, 2004.
[What happened was that Israel sent relief supplies to Indonesia on an El Al plane, Israel’s national airline and they flashed around the world the image of the plane standing on Indonesian soil. Had the Jewish leaders stopped here, people would have viewed the episode as a display of pride in their humanity and moved on.]
[But that was only the beginning. What followed sickened even the most ardent supporters of the Jewish causes. An example of this happened on January 5, 2005 when Steve Paikin said on his show that "some" have described the Arab aid to the tsunami victims as pathetic. He did not say who that some was or where and when they said it. But Richard Gwyn spoke of the Arab journalists who protested against their government’s inaction without saying if they were the ones who described the Arab aid as pathetic.]
[Neither Paikin nor Gwyn said if they knew what any of the Arab countries had pledged or done up to that time, leaving the audience with the impression that the Arabs did nothing. Now, what happens inside the Jewish Lobby and among their supporters is that despite the yelling and the tearing of the hair they do in public to complain about the lack of freedom of expression in the Arab World, these guys follow the internal debates that take place inside the Arab countries. They lift the criticism that is done by the opposition down there and repeat it up here without saying from where they got such criticism.]
[The criticism down there is made by columnists and commentators who work for the opposition parties, write for the opposition newspapers or have an axe of their own to grind, and they are no better at being objective than their counterparts up here. The difference is that the people down there are so vibrant they make Question Period in Parliament look like monks preparing for the silent prayer of the evening. In fact, you don’t have to speak Arabic to get a taste of this. You can watch a discussion on the Al Jezirah satellite channel, see the body language and hear the sounds. But if you want to know what is being said, get yourself a more honest translator than those who work for the Jewish Lobby.]
[What happens after someone like Paikin or Gwyn are told what the Arab opposition has said is that they choose an outrageous opinion or a play on words expressed by the opposition down there and they present it here as fact.]
[So you think this ought to have settled the argument with Gwyn and Paikin, right? Think again. A few days after that pathetic show of ignorance was beamed over the antennas of TVO, Gwyn had forgotten all about the earlier discussion he had with Paikin and tried to make himself sound interesting one more time at the expense of the Arabs. And he did it for no reason except that he thought he could get away with it. He came out of the blue while discussing something else and accused the Arabs of being pathetic about their relief effort for the tsunami victims. Well, you see, dear reader, the word pathetic was the word that Paikin had used on the previous occasion and Paikin immediately understood the implication of what had happened. He thought to himself that if someone like yours truly was watching, he would catch this journalistic fraud and perhaps write about it someday which is exactly what yours truly is now doing.]
At least Ellen Knickmeyer mentioned the article in Egypt Today when most everyone else never mention the source they steal from or the people whose statements they forge. And if you want to see examples of this outrage, look for an article that Knickmeyer wrote about the Christians in Egypt sometime ago and compare it with an article written on the same subject in the New York Times on Saturday August 2, 2008. You will not escape the conclusion that the NY Times article is a fake in that most of it was plagiarized from Knickmeyer’s article.
And that is not the only piece of quackery to appear in the NY Times lately. When the Egyptian film director Youssef Chahine died, a piece written by A.O. Scott appeared on July 29, 2008 in that paper discussing the director’s life and his views concerning contemporary Egyptian society. Always a rebel, Chahine’s beef has been the tendency that ancient civilizations have to resist change, something the filmmaker called a rejection of modernity. This was duly reported in Scott’s article but then the notorious Tom Friedman got into the act the next day, plagiarized that part of the article and made a spectacle of himself and his editors.
Under the title: Drilling in Afghanistan, Friedman wrote a rambling article that was totally out of focus. Unable to make himself sound interesting, the so-called journalist came out of the blue and lashed out at the Arabs and, using Chahine’s words without giving him or Scott due credit, he accused all the Arabs of rejecting modernity.
And of all the ironies you can think of there is one that stands out as notable. It is that all of these events have unfolded during one and the same week. If there is one person who is a symbol of the cosmopolitan nature of Alexandria, it is Youssef Chahine. He was a Roman Catholic born to Egyptian parents of different ethnic backgrounds and was the Alexandrian who never shied from displaying in his work the love that he had for his hometown. And this is not being religiously conservative anymore than I am a religiously conservative as a Cairo-born Roman Catholic, whether Ellen Knickmeyer likes it or not, whether the Washington Post likes it or not, whether the emotionally rattled characters in the US Congress and their Jewish trainers like it or not.
Over and over, we the Christians of Egypt told the Americans to keep out of our business and out of our faces. For centuries we have lived in harmony with our Muslim compatriots and we need a bunch of little-civilized nouveau-cultured morons to force their brand of help on us like we need a hole in the head. I know from experience that the freedom of religion they want for Christians in Egypt is of the same brand as the freedom of speech they have wanted for me for the last 40 years. It is a freedom that is as filthy as filth itself.
A useful advice I can give the folks in the US Congress is that they must refrain from meddling in the affairs of other people at least until they have figured out the difference between religious harmony and that other hole in their anatomy, not the hole they want to put in someone else’s head. Keep obeying the commands of your Jewish trainers, folks, and America will end up in the hole of the damned to which it has been walking slowly but surely.
What these guys have is an animal instinct which is sometimes referred to as pack mentality. And if you want to know what this is wait a little while because something terrible happened in Canada which will undoubtedly be taken up by a copycat. It happened that a sicko on a bus stabbed a fellow passenger, cut-off his head and tried to eat him. A copycat should now surface and try to duplicate the horror. But this is something that the so-called journalists do all the time except that in addition to being sick they do what they do with an intent that borders on the criminal.
If you want to see a manifestation of this intent take a look at the following statement:
[Farag grew up in the religiously conservative Egyptian city of Alexandria…she recently told the monthly magazine Egypt Today.]
This statement came in the Washington Post on July 27, 2008 in an article written by Ellen Knickmeyer under the title Hayat Farag, Egypt, Wrestler. The journalist says the quote was given to the magazine Egypt Today. Well, this magazine happens to come online as well as in print form. When you check the July edition you find this passage:
[Farag grew up in a conservative neighborhood in Alexandria…]
A neighborhood in Alexandria is not all of Alexandria, Ellen! The fraud committed by the Washington Post so-called journalist is glaring in that she picked on the wrong city to commit her cardinal sin and to show the color of her glorious ignorance. Alexandria has been the most cosmopolitan city on the planet ever since it was founded by Alexander the Great nearly 2,500 years ago. This is a span of time that is ten times longer than America has lived as a nation thus far. And because Alexandria is cosmopolitan, it tolerates having all kinds of neighborhoods, including one that is conservative.
The idea Knickmeyer is copycating in her article is that Egypt is a conservative country; worse, a religiously conservative country; worse, a religiously Muslim conservative country. The so-called journalist altered the words of Hayat Farag to help spread the lie that the Christians in Egypt need the protection of America. And this comes at a time when the emotionally unstable in the US Congress are being conditioned and duly mobilized to do to Egypt what they are doing to other countries where religious and ethnic wars were started and the flames of hatred are fanned.
The article published in the magazine Egypt Today is a long one and the quote that was forged by Knickmeyer is only a small part of it. But what is remarkable about the article is that it falls in line with other articles published in the same magazine and in the sister magazine Business Today, all of which dispel the image of the Egyptian woman as she has been painted by the mischief makers in the American media. Look up those two publications online and see the accomplishments that women are scoring in Egypt day in and day out.
And since what happens in America is copycated in Canada, I had the occasion to write about the copycat phenomenon except that the champions of free speech in the notorious Jewish Establishment blocked the publication of the book in which the passage was to appear. And so, here is the passage, reprinted in the following 6 paragraphs. The topic I was discussing then was the tsunami of Boxing Day, 2004.
[What happened was that Israel sent relief supplies to Indonesia on an El Al plane, Israel’s national airline and they flashed around the world the image of the plane standing on Indonesian soil. Had the Jewish leaders stopped here, people would have viewed the episode as a display of pride in their humanity and moved on.]
[But that was only the beginning. What followed sickened even the most ardent supporters of the Jewish causes. An example of this happened on January 5, 2005 when Steve Paikin said on his show that "some" have described the Arab aid to the tsunami victims as pathetic. He did not say who that some was or where and when they said it. But Richard Gwyn spoke of the Arab journalists who protested against their government’s inaction without saying if they were the ones who described the Arab aid as pathetic.]
[Neither Paikin nor Gwyn said if they knew what any of the Arab countries had pledged or done up to that time, leaving the audience with the impression that the Arabs did nothing. Now, what happens inside the Jewish Lobby and among their supporters is that despite the yelling and the tearing of the hair they do in public to complain about the lack of freedom of expression in the Arab World, these guys follow the internal debates that take place inside the Arab countries. They lift the criticism that is done by the opposition down there and repeat it up here without saying from where they got such criticism.]
[The criticism down there is made by columnists and commentators who work for the opposition parties, write for the opposition newspapers or have an axe of their own to grind, and they are no better at being objective than their counterparts up here. The difference is that the people down there are so vibrant they make Question Period in Parliament look like monks preparing for the silent prayer of the evening. In fact, you don’t have to speak Arabic to get a taste of this. You can watch a discussion on the Al Jezirah satellite channel, see the body language and hear the sounds. But if you want to know what is being said, get yourself a more honest translator than those who work for the Jewish Lobby.]
[What happens after someone like Paikin or Gwyn are told what the Arab opposition has said is that they choose an outrageous opinion or a play on words expressed by the opposition down there and they present it here as fact.]
[So you think this ought to have settled the argument with Gwyn and Paikin, right? Think again. A few days after that pathetic show of ignorance was beamed over the antennas of TVO, Gwyn had forgotten all about the earlier discussion he had with Paikin and tried to make himself sound interesting one more time at the expense of the Arabs. And he did it for no reason except that he thought he could get away with it. He came out of the blue while discussing something else and accused the Arabs of being pathetic about their relief effort for the tsunami victims. Well, you see, dear reader, the word pathetic was the word that Paikin had used on the previous occasion and Paikin immediately understood the implication of what had happened. He thought to himself that if someone like yours truly was watching, he would catch this journalistic fraud and perhaps write about it someday which is exactly what yours truly is now doing.]
At least Ellen Knickmeyer mentioned the article in Egypt Today when most everyone else never mention the source they steal from or the people whose statements they forge. And if you want to see examples of this outrage, look for an article that Knickmeyer wrote about the Christians in Egypt sometime ago and compare it with an article written on the same subject in the New York Times on Saturday August 2, 2008. You will not escape the conclusion that the NY Times article is a fake in that most of it was plagiarized from Knickmeyer’s article.
And that is not the only piece of quackery to appear in the NY Times lately. When the Egyptian film director Youssef Chahine died, a piece written by A.O. Scott appeared on July 29, 2008 in that paper discussing the director’s life and his views concerning contemporary Egyptian society. Always a rebel, Chahine’s beef has been the tendency that ancient civilizations have to resist change, something the filmmaker called a rejection of modernity. This was duly reported in Scott’s article but then the notorious Tom Friedman got into the act the next day, plagiarized that part of the article and made a spectacle of himself and his editors.
Under the title: Drilling in Afghanistan, Friedman wrote a rambling article that was totally out of focus. Unable to make himself sound interesting, the so-called journalist came out of the blue and lashed out at the Arabs and, using Chahine’s words without giving him or Scott due credit, he accused all the Arabs of rejecting modernity.
And of all the ironies you can think of there is one that stands out as notable. It is that all of these events have unfolded during one and the same week. If there is one person who is a symbol of the cosmopolitan nature of Alexandria, it is Youssef Chahine. He was a Roman Catholic born to Egyptian parents of different ethnic backgrounds and was the Alexandrian who never shied from displaying in his work the love that he had for his hometown. And this is not being religiously conservative anymore than I am a religiously conservative as a Cairo-born Roman Catholic, whether Ellen Knickmeyer likes it or not, whether the Washington Post likes it or not, whether the emotionally rattled characters in the US Congress and their Jewish trainers like it or not.
Over and over, we the Christians of Egypt told the Americans to keep out of our business and out of our faces. For centuries we have lived in harmony with our Muslim compatriots and we need a bunch of little-civilized nouveau-cultured morons to force their brand of help on us like we need a hole in the head. I know from experience that the freedom of religion they want for Christians in Egypt is of the same brand as the freedom of speech they have wanted for me for the last 40 years. It is a freedom that is as filthy as filth itself.
A useful advice I can give the folks in the US Congress is that they must refrain from meddling in the affairs of other people at least until they have figured out the difference between religious harmony and that other hole in their anatomy, not the hole they want to put in someone else’s head. Keep obeying the commands of your Jewish trainers, folks, and America will end up in the hole of the damned to which it has been walking slowly but surely.
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