generalspeaking

Faith In Facebook

The Palestinian Authority is anxious to have the United Nations recognize the Church of the Nativity in the town of Bethlehem as a World Heritage Site. Historically the birthplace of a Jewish rebbe, a man of wisdom whose disciples emulated him as he preached "do unto others". The town itself teeming with Jews who were Israelites. An ancient town, one whose mention in Christian literature is recalled with veneration.

Its reality now as an Arab town is that of a squalid, garbage-strewn cesspool whose residents seem oblivious to the unhygienic and most unattractive surroundings in which they live. Disinterested in organizing a civic order that would remove rotting garbage from the streets, but happy enough to sell tawdry replicas of Christian symbols of world renown.

In the world of the Palestinian Authority and renascent Islam, Christians are an endangered species, but the PA is desirous of having an important place-name in Christianity preserved as a heritage site because it is under Palestinian control. There lies the supreme irony; that which was originally Judaic is now extinct to the memory of the world, reborn under Islamic control.

Just as the ancient Second Temple of Solomon lies under the Al Aqsa Mosque and Jews are forbidden to ascend to the Temple Mount lest they earn the wrath of the Islamic clerics who claim it as theirs and theirs alone. Enlightened Muslims speak of the Abrahamic faiths and give honour to Judaism and Christianity from which Islam was born, but not Arab Muslims.

Christians of Lebanese, Syrian, Iraqi, Egyptian extraction are faithful to their concept of Christianity. Their branches of Christianity represent the most ancient in the world. The Middle East has long been a geography which accepted members of all the religious faiths that were born in its desert crucible, but now Islamism has embraced its commitment to cleanse the geography of Christians and Jews.

Despite which those practising the ancient faces of Christian belief blame the presence of Jews in their midst, and the State of Israel, for their fading numbers, reluctant to believe or finally admit that Arabs, those of their own tribes, would turn against them, even in the face of reality. It is far more palatable to give blame to the tribe that gave birth to their Saviour than to their own.

As though to mock a more modern, secular and technological world of instant communication, the political disruptions rocking the Arab and Muslim world of ruling tyrants, sheiks and monarchs by the young and the restless, the unemployed and the dissatisfied, are making good use of social networking tools to bring cohesion to their determined backlash against totalitarian authority.

The outstanding tool at their disposal, the one that the disenfranchised youth reflecting a culture that encourages women to remain veiled and fecund, raising children without end in societies that cannot give them as youth meaningful employment and aspirational futures, is one fashioned by a Jew, and their new religion has become Facebook.

Islam is no longer the 'final', the 'complete' and 'finished' religion.

Labels: Conflict, Middle East, Political Realities, Poverty

posted by Pieface @ Monday, February 07, 2011