Islamophobia appears to have become the religion of British Home Secretary Theresa May, who follows the US’ racist lead in its war on Islam, referred to in the invented vernacular as the “war on terror.” Mrs. May is obsessed with Mr. Abu Qatada principally because he worships at a mosque instead of an Anglican Church, yet the religion she claims to practice is Christianity, which teaches, among other virtues: love, forgiveness and reform.

Consider the following two “criminals”:

Abu Qatada

Let us assume for a moment that Abu Qatada has committed crimes in Jordan, though much evidence suggests otherwise. Mr. Qatada has committed no crime in the United Kingdom. So, even if he was a criminal abroad, he fits the Christian example of a reformed character and, providing he continues to live lawfully, should be forgiven. What appears to irritate Mrs. May as much as anything is that Mr. Qatada has called for the release of Muslims held in United States prisons and Guantanamo Bay, which gets him labeled a preacher of hatred. Most of the prisoners for whom he advocates have been held for 11 years without charge, never mind without trial. I too, together with many others in the UK, have called for the release of these prisoners. So why have I not been arrested? I would suggest that what makes my case different is that I am a white Christian and consequently fall outside of Mrs. May’s racist profile.

Abu Qatada is a family man. His family has been subjected to racist abuse from right-wing extremists, but his children are model pupils, and his family is respected elsewhere. When they were abused, due largely to a media campaign against Qatada, no authorities intervened to protect them. The family suffered silently for a long time before getting an injunction to stop the abuse. All this has resulted from slanderous accusations made in support of the war on Islam by previous governments and, more recently and fervently, by Theresa May in pushing forward her fixation to send Abu Qatada to Jordan to face trial. Jordan is reputed for torture, and Mr. Qatada belonged to an opposition party before the present dictatorship; he also has no great excess of money.

Now if Qatada were as wealthy as a United Arab Emirates’ oil-sheikh, the racism against him would probably be kept in check. The nipple through which money flows is the one at which the authorities suck, and while the cash keeps flowing in, it matters little whether the breast is black, brown or white. Thus criminal oligarchs from Russia, former Soviet states and elsewhere, may bring their filthy lucre to the UK and get it washed free from stains at the laundry of the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street. The world’s mafia can afford to buy off accusations of wrongdoing, and Mrs. May, being married to a banker, can only empathize. The divide is not about rich and poor, so much as the gaping crevice between a white alleged criminal settler such as Shaun Patrick Breach and a Palestinian like Abu Qatada — who is derogatorily called a radical Islamic cleric. It is also about how differently the Home Secretary and her authorities treat each man.

Shaun Patrick Breach

It is hard not to go looking in the Dictionary of Abusive Slang to find a fitting epithet to describe Shaun Patrick Breach with any degree of accuracy. Before coming to the UK from South Africa, Breach had allegedly been a mercenary for the notorious Executive Outcomes, though this is denied by the former controllers of this corporation. Before its demise, Executive Outcomes had at its helm right-wing fixers like Tony Buckingham, Simon Mann and Tim Spicer, whose former antics in Africa and, in the case of Buckingham and Spicer, current ones in oil-rich countries destabilized by NATO, were sketched in a recent article. Breach is different altogether. While most of the top men have kept their nefarious activities under cover, Breach seems to wallow in his crimes, and he appears to be, or thinks himself as being, untouchable.

Shaun Patrick Breach is an alleged serial wife-beater. He has been accused of trying to knife journalist Simon Tomlin, who was and might still be investigating his activities. Despite repeated requests, and despite the attack on Tomlin being monitored by CCTV cameras, the Nottinghamshire police has refused to stop and search Breach for weapons. He appears to be able to commit crimes with impunity, provoking the question: why? What information does Breach hold to render him above the law? He lives in Nottingham, a place that some might describe as England’s equivalent to the Chicago of the 1930s. Nottingham is reputed to be a gangster-ridden, drug-running, gun-toting place, with some of the police allegedly being in cahoots with the gangsters. What is even more astounding is that many of the locals seem to know who the bent coppers are.

Despite being arrested in the UK more than 40 times for crimes ranging from witness intimidation to death-threats — including racist attacks — Breach has usually been released without charge and never been imprisoned. Simon Tomlin believes that Breach has been protected by the police and security services as a useful asset. This could be right, since no mainstream journalist has covered this story of police cover up, and if Shaun Patrick Breach is an asset, the mainstream media would not be allowed to go public with this information. Thus Simon Tomlin seems to be taking on Nottinghamshire police almost single handedly, and recordings suggest that Tomlin’s account of Breach’s psychotic knife attack is correct. So what is an alleged South African criminal with British Nationalist Party leanings doing in the UK, given Theresa May’s policy of returning suspected criminals to their homelands, or to countries where they are wanted for allegedly breaking the law?

One cannot help but conclude that Theresa May is racist. She has targeted Abu Qatada, who has committed no crime in the UK, but not Shaun Patrick Breach, who has probably committed many. Breach was protected by the law and police, whereas Qatada and his family were not. There is no evidence that Qatada has been anything but a good family man; by contrast, Breach has been accused of beating all three wives he has had, and other women too. Why doesn’t the Home Secretary do Breach’s current wife a favor and send the self-acclaimed mercenary back to South Africa, and stop picking on Qatada? Of course the above interpretation of what has been seen and read could be wrong. If so, perhaps Mrs. May could explain how these allegations are false.

Editor’s Note: All photographs by UK Home Office.

Theresa May’s father was the Reverend Hugh Brasier, an Oxfordshire vicar who died in a car-crash shortly after his daughter graduated. Mrs. May claims to be an Anglican herself, and this should also make her a Christian, but her political actions and aspirations call into question the type of Christianity that might be being taught and practiced in Oxfordshire. Certainly in the broader sense of loving one’s neighbor, the Christianity she claims to espouse would be extended to countries within the European community and, more importantly, to countries outside of Europe. Laying aside a chosen few rich states like the US, Israel and former commonwealth countries, May’s actions show absolutely no love for any country or anybody unless they are rich and powerful. This includes rich and powerful Muslims.

“Blessed are the poor!” Theresa May is calling for the UK no longer to accede to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR).[2] If this notion comes to law, it would be analogous to the US not recognizing the International Criminal Court (ICC). Her policies match those of Enoch Powell, though there are big differences. Powell’s actions did not result in discrimination based on race and religious grounds but, rather, attacks on all poor non-whites. What is more, he could string sentences together in a coherent and dramatic manner, as in his so-called “rivers of blood” speech. The venom he spat out, though almost as despicable and almost as Tory as the current home secretary’s, was streaked with figurative oratory and articulated with a certain degree of parliamentary rhetoric which May lacks in abundance. Without a script or auto-cue, she would be lost. Her policies against Muslims are without parallel in their racism. Although she is careful not to target Muslims directly in her speech, those she particularly wants to deport are Muslims. Her record speaks for itself.

Theresa May at the despatch box is odium at the podium. At the Conservative Party Conference in 2011 the home secretary said “the ille – the illegal immigrant . . . who cannot be deported, because – and I am not making this up – because he had a pet cat… and that is why I am of the view the Human Rights’ Act has to go.” She was making it up, as Andrew Neil got her to confirm.[3] Conservative head office has groomed May and other spokespeople never to mention that Islam is the target. Thus the terminology is “illegal immigrants”, “foreigners”, “foreign criminals”, “asylum-seekers” and such general terms. The anti-Islamic message is banged home, however, by accompanying images usually of Muslims. This is an attempt to create an enemy that did not exist before NATO’s illegal wars to steal natural resources from defeated countries. “Thou shalt not steal.”

Even worse was May’s extradition of five Muslims to US Supermax prisons last year. She showed no compassion for the poet Talha Ahsan, an Asberger sufferer and one of the five sent to the US in an agreement done behind the scenes with officials of the European Court of Human Rights. Before Talha Ahsan’s extradition to the US, he had already spent six years in prison in the UK without being charged with a crime. In Ahsan’s case, like that of Babar Ahmad, habeas corpus was ignored. Instead of focusing on this blatant contravention of one of the pillars of the English judicial system, the media concentrated on Muslim cleric Abu Hamza (the man with the hook), who is alleged to be a preacher of hatred.[4]

The slur on Islam has gone on for more than a decade. It is a miracle and a great credit to Muslim communities that there have not been countless acts of retaliation against NATO aggression abroad and anti-Islamic rhetoric at home. In a further attempt to denigrate Muslims and perpetuate the war on Islam, UK police have issued a radio advertisement that is so often repeated, one cannot switch on the radio without hearing it. The advertisement warns people to be watchful against terrorism and tells them that if they “notice something suspicious … chances are, it is probably nothing…” But what if it is? It then gives a hotline number and concludes with the message: “Your call could save lives”. A similar campaign was run during the Second World War, when German infiltrators were called “the enemy within” and were supposed to be ubiquitous. Slogans like “walls have ears” and “careless words cost lives” were bandied about all over the country. Today, it is not just “probably nothing”, it is certainly nothing.

What causes most people to think of Muslims whenever this advertisement runs? At the start of the advertising campaign three men from Small Heath, Birmingham, had just been found guilty of planning terrorist activities. Mr Justice Henriques told the men “It’s clear that you were planning a terrorist outrage in Birmingham.”[5] Tom Whitehead, Security Editor of the Telegraph, put out the headline that three Muslims had been found guilty of plotting the “worst ever terrorist attack in Britain.”[6] This was supported by other reporting which followed the guilty verdict. Undoubtedly these men fantasized about a terror plot, but they appear to have just had big mouths, since nobody really planning an attack would be bragging about it beforehand like they did.  The headline was in quotation marks. So who actually said that these men were planning “the worst ever terrorist attack”? Within the same article Whitehead claimed “Police believe had they been successful it would have been the largest terrorist atrocity on home soil.”[7] What police? The local bobby at Whitehead’s pub? Thus, as far as it is possible to ascertain, the Telegraph’s anti-Muslim hype in quotation marks was generated by Whitehead himself and picked up by bloggers by mistake and the disreputable press. “Thou shalt not bear false witness.”

To get five Muslims, including Talha Ahsan and Babar Ahmad, to the United States it appears that two of the judges, Lech Garlicki and Nicolas Bratza, who sat in judgment at Strasbourg had been to a closed-door meeting in Washington at a conference on judicial process a month before judgment was passed. To extradite the “Strasbourg five” was an act of defiance that goes against the exceedingly good reputation Strasbourg had previously built up in protecting the rights of nationals when faced with dubious renditions, extraditions and incarcerations abroad.[8]  What also points to a done deal before the court even sat is the fact that the same day the verdict was announced the five Muslims, who have already faced many years in UK prisons without charge, were on planes to the US. Such things take time to arrange.

The Home Secretary’s ongoing battle to get Abu Qatada extradited to Jordan, where he may face torture, is the latest manifestation of her hatred of impoverished Muslims.[9] Theresa May is married to a banker. What if Abu Qatada had been wealthy? Ahmed Chalabi, for example, is wanted in Jordan for robbing the poor investors of the Petra Bank he set up. A 22-year prison sentence awaits him, which was awarded in absentia. Worse still, he supplied false information to George W. Bush and Tony Blair to justify the war in Iraq. He is now an enemy to most people in the west, to hear them speak, but he spent most of his life in the US and UK, before re-establishing himself in Iraq. Now, here is a criminal of the most despicable kind. Where were the previous home secretaries when Chalabi fled Jordan and was living in Mayfair? Who was shouting for extradition then?

There has been a blatant, sinister and creeping tirade on impoverished Muslims from successive UK governments, but Theresa May’s current personal “war on Islam” has hit rock bottom. Two men were divested of their English identities by Home Secretary Theresa May while out of the country and subsequently killed by US drone strikes. One of the men phoned his wife to learn that he had just become a father. Shortly afterwards, thanks to the cowards who remotely operate drone killings, his wife became a widow and his newborn child an orphan. Theresa May’s version of Christianity in practice is not what is taught in most Anglican or other Christian churches. That message is: “thou shalt not kill.” Unfortunately some messages fall on stony ground.

Editor’s Note: Photographs from two to eight by UK Home Office.

References

[1] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/british-terror-suspects-quietly-stripped-of-citizenship-then-killed-by-drones-8513858.html

[2] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2287183/A-great-day-British-justice-Theresa-May-vows-UK-European-Court-Human-Rights.html

[3] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXM7DzeMLe4

[4] http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2013/02/impossible-injustice-talha-ahsan%E2%80%99s-extradition-and-detention

[5] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/terrorism-in-the-uk/9877193/Suicide-bomb-gang-guilty-of-plotting-worst-ever-terror-attack-in-Britain.html

[6] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/terrorism-in-the-uk/9877193/Suicide-bomb-gang-guilty-of-plotting-worst-ever-terror-attack-in-Britain.html

[7] ibid.

[8] http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2013/02/impossible-injustice-talha-ahsan%E2%80%99s-extradition-and-detention

[9] http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/mar/11/abu-qatada-deprtation-theresa-may-appeal

Groups of people, either nations or cultures, just like individuals have a consciousness. And like individuals, a civilization collective consciousness records and  reacts to historical traumas. History leaves scars on people’s collective consciousness. If some individuals tend to bury personal traumatic experiences under the false assumption that ignoring the pain will heal it, some cultures tend to do the same. Bringing up the collective crimes of Germans and Japanese during World War II is a taboo subject in both Germany and Japan, as if both cultures are suffering from a collective amnesia. If you bring up in a conversation the atrocities committed by Japanese troops in Manchuria, Korea, the Philippines or Vietnam between 1936 and 1945, the standard answer from amnesic contemporary Japanese will likely be either “We didn’t know” or “It was a long time ago”. This applies to Germany as well, even though it is a crime in this country to deny the existence of the holocaust. Regardless, both cultures, as a defense mechanism, suffer from historic amnesia.

From persecuted Jews to Zionists: Why do abused become abusers?

If Sigmund Freud was alive today, and could put Israel or more practically either PM Netanyahu or his sidekick Lieberman on his couch for a few psychoanalytical sessions, one wonders what he would find out. Most psychological studies of abusive personalities point in the same direction. It seems to be a paradox, but as individuals, most people who display abusive behaviors in relationships were abused as children.

On first thought, one would think that people who had been abused would be more sensitive, not less, to the pain inflicted on others. That they would, as individuals or a collective, show a greater sense of empathy. But more often than not, in the case of children who were abused, they grow up to be abusers. It is as if the psychological damage and trauma from early childhood turns our natural and normal sense of compassion and empathy towards each other into a vicious cycle of  borderline sociopathic behaviors, where inflicting pain become a source of pleasure. For individuals, this cycle of pain get passed on endlessly from one generation to the next. What applies to individuals is a good analysis model to a culture collective’s psyche.

For thousands of years, between the Middle East and Europe, the Jewish people have been persecuted, abused and forced to move constantly around. In Europe, Jews were not allowed to own land and could not have roots as they were fleeing bigotry — such as the Inquisition in Spain — slavery, pogroms and the despotic powers of the kingdoms of Europe and the Tzars in Russia. When tolerated, they had to live in ghettos such as the one in Warsaw. This precarious existence for Jewish communities in Europe, with the constant thread of having to leave, brought crafts, knowledge and money at an essential premium for Jewish survival. Books and money are portable, and the constant persecutions against them very likely made Jews develop special skills in both areas of knowledge and finance. Jews became “the people of the book,” and to them knowledge, not material things, was the most precious possession.

Israel: “He who struggles with God”

“He who struggles with God” is the Hebrew meaning of the word Israel. But the Jewish state, as defined by Zionist principles, is not only fighting with recognition of Palestine as a nation, but also with Judaism’s  humanist traditions. Judaism is viewed by many Jewish scholars as a civilization, not just a religion. Part of this rich Judaic cultural heritage was passed on into more recent monotheist religions such as Christianity and Islam.

This view of defining Judaism more as a civilization than just a religion is one of the main points made by Amos Oz and his daughter Fania Oz-Salzberger in their new book “Jews and Words.” For Oz, a professor of literature at Ben-Gurion University and Oz-Salzberger, a writer and historian at the University of Haifa, “Judaism is not a bloodline but a text line.”

“For thousands of years, we Jews had nothing but books. We had no land, we had no holy sites, we had no magnificent architecture, we had no heroes: we had books. We had texts, and those texts were always discussed around the family table. I would add that you can never get two Jews to agree with each other on anything. It’s difficult to find one Jew who agrees with himself or herself on something, because everyone has a divided mind and soul, everyone is ambivalent. So our civilization is a civilization of dispute, of disagreement and of argument,” said Amos Oz in an interview with NPR’s Scott Simon.

Gaza: A modern-day version of the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw

After the horrendous crimes committed against them during World War II by Nazi Germany, Jews rightly decided that it would never happen to them again. They will not be the sacrificial lamb of human history, and no longer be victimized. But 64 years after its creation in 1948, the Jewish state is now the one doing the victimizing: evolving from oppressed to oppressor. If Jews were treated like second-class citizens and were denied land ownership for centuries, they have now turned the table of history, and Palestinians are on the receiving end of the wrath of the abused turned abuser. Palestinians are denied land while Israeli settlers keep expanding in East Jerusalem and the West Bank. Just like their ancestors in Eastern Europe, Palestinians are treated by settlers and the Jewish state as second-class citizens living in an open-sky jail surrounded by thick concrete walls. Palestinians, just like Jews during World War II in the Warsaw ghetto have become the victims, the collateral damage of history.

In the fog of civil war enveloping Syria, all communities are suffering while regional powers such as Saudi Arabia and Iran are fighting a proxy war, on Syrian soi, reviving a thousand-year-old conflict between Sunnis and Alawites. Meanwhile, the United States and Western Europe have either failed to take this sectarian war in the making into consideration or are again, more likely and cynically, using and fueling sectarian conflicts in the Muslim world to fulfill their geopolitical agenda.

In the aftermath of the defeat of the Ottoman empire — an ally of Germany — during World War I, the two main colonial powers of the time, Britain and France, seized this opportunity to “redesign” the map of the Middle-East and to play king makers. In doing so they largely ignored to take sectarian issues into consideration. In Iraq, the United Kingdom put a Sunni minority in charge instead of the Shiite majority. By doing so, the UK  reignited and fueled a 600-year-old fire. Ever since the US invasion of Iraq nine years ago, sectarian killings have been going on with no end in sight.

In Syria, an Alawite minority — the Assad family is Alawite — is ruling over a Sunni majority. The Alawite sect represents about 13 percent of Syria’s population. The Alawites control the power in Syria. They do so, not only in the military, the key positions of the government, but also at the top level of business. Since the al-Assad clan took power in the early 1960s, the Alawites have become Syria’s ruling class. Having been in power for five decades, the Alawites are completely entrenched in this situation.

By supporting the Sunnis in the Syrian civil war, the Obama administration and, more surprisingly, governments in Western Europe, are failing to take in to consideration a potential genocide or at least a massive exodus scenario of the 1.2 million Syrian Alawites, who are unlikely to be welcomed anywhere in the Middle East, with perhaps the exception of Lebanon. If, or more likely when, the Assad regime is toppled — with the blessings and help from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and also indirectly from NATO — Alawites remaining in Syria will immediately become targets of Sunni militias seeking revenge. It is likely to be even worse than when Iraqi cleric al-Sadr’s militia men were going on killing rampages in Sunni areas of Baghdad.

The dominance of the Alawites is recent in terms of Syria’s history. As a matter of fact, for centuries the Alawites were the poorest and most rural people in Syria. They were also oppressed and despised by the Sunni majority. Today Alawites number about 1.5 million, of which 1.2 million live in Syria. Three-quarters of the Alawites live in Latakia, a province in the northwest of Syria, where they constitute two thirds of the population. There is a very long history of brutal conflict between Sunnis and Alawis in Syria. The conflict is about a thousand years old. Mainstream Muslims, Sunnis and Shiites alike have viewed Alawites as heretics for centuries. Ahmad Ibn Taymiya (1268-1328), a highly influential Syrian Sunni, wrote in a fatwa — religious decision or edict — that Alawites shouldn’t even be considered Muslims.

“The Nusayris (older term for Alawis) are more infidel than Jews and Christians, even more infidel than many polytheists. They have done greater harm to real Muslims than have the warring infidels such as the Franks, the Turks and others. To ignorant Muslims they pretend to be Shi’a, though in reality they do not believe in God, his prophet and his book. Nusayris are always the worst enemies of Muslims,” wrote Ibn Taymiya about 700 years ago. From the fourteenth century on, to express their incredible contempt for the Alawite sect, Syrian Sunnis used the word Nusayri — ancient word for Alawite — as a synonym for pariah.

The full support that the Obama administration, Western Europe and implicitly Israel are giving to Sunnis in Syria and in the Middle-East at large, could be a gross miscalculation at best, but it is more likely to fall into the category of  Machiavellian geopolitics. It is indeed seeding crisis and potential sectarian wars in the Muslim world. It is inspiring an even greater Sunni anger towards the Shiites in Iran. It seems that Washington is following the old adage “divide and conquer” to establish policies in the Middle East. Apparently, some of this manipulation of Arab public opinion is working. Jordanian Salafi leader Abou Mohamad Tahawi recently stated that “The Alawi and Shiite coalition is currently the biggest threat to Sunnis, even more than Israel.”

But Sunnis should be aware — just like what happened to America’s former good friend Saddam Hussein — that the United States and Western Europe could switch alliances on a dime, especially when the oil supplies run out. Sunnis are only the West’s best friends in the region because of Saudi Arabia’s oil and money. US diplomacy is also following the old adage “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Today, UN peace talks took place in Geneva concerning the Syrian crisis. The United States did not want either side of the Syrian civil war to be represented. The US did not want the two proxy regional powers Iran and Saudi Arabia to be present either. The five permanent members of the security council are discussing Kofi Annan’s plan.

Annan’s plan would set up a transitional unity government, but would exclude “elements which would undermine it.” This, of course, entails excluding Bashar al-Assad from any unity government. Russia and China both want the crisis in Syria to be solved by Syrians, without foreign interference, but they also want al-Assad and Alawites to be represented in such a unity government. Today, Mr. Annan gave a stern warning to the international community saying that “No one should be in any doubt as to the extreme dangers posed by the conflict — to Syrians, to the region, and to the world.” Indeed an all-out sectarian war could tear apart the Muslim world. But the main question for Syria is if Sunnis and Alawites can tolerate each other. When al-Assad falls, will Alawites face a genocide or a mass exodus? A solution which has not been put yet on the table could be a partition of Syria, following the model of Yugoslavia in the 90s. Latakia, would become strictly Alawite and autonomous from the rest of a Sunni controlled Syria.

Editor’s Note: Photograph one by Jean-Marc Ferre. All other photographs by Douma Revolution.

IF I WAS GOD

After a lifetime of studying and practicing religion, I decided I just couldn’t take it anymore. If anyone just stopped and applied any kind of logic to how religion operates, they would have to come to the conclusion that no god would be as petty, cruel and/or illogical as the ones religions across the world depict.

Still, just because I have come to despise religion and the limits it places on mankind, does not mean I have dismissed god from my life. On the contrary…, I still very much believe in a just and sensible god. But to imagine what this god is like, I would have to do the most unspeakable thing imaginable. I would actually have to pretend I was god. I would put myself in his shoes and evaluate everything he has to put with. It didn’t take long to realize how religion has taken everything good about god, and made it bad.

So let me present to you my version of:

“IF I WAS GOD…,”

• I would want you to look to me for what you can do…, not for what you can’t.
• I would want you to think for yourself and stop bothering me about every little damn thing.
• I’d tell you enough with the Hail Marys already! Enough is enough!
• I wouldn’t want poor people pressured into giving what little money they have to build crystal cathedrals.
• I would not want you killing in my name.
• I wouldn’t give a damn about the words you spoke. I’d only care about the hate behind those words.
• I wouldn’t want you worrying about what your neighbor is doing as long as he/she isn’t hurting anyone.
• I don’t want you telling people I’m going to send them to hell.
• I’d want you to stop depending on the manual. (Bible) When it comes time to deciding what is right or wrong…, use your brain. You know damn well what is right & wrong.
• I’d tell you to stop hiding behind the Bible. Stop using it to justify what you want to be right or wrong.
• Actually…, I’d tell you to throw the Bible away. It’s been twisted so much through the years that even I don’t recognize it anymore.
• I’d tell you the same thing Jesus said: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” That explains everything and anything.
• I wouldn’t want you getting pregnant and having a baby if you are not prepared or willing to take responsibility for him/her.
• I would say the best way to stop abortion is not get pregnant in the first place. Use birth control.
• I would ask you to have more faith in yourself.
• I would be glad that you believed in me, but we’d have to have a talk about this religion crap. It’s totally missing the point.
• I’d ask you WTF is a Pope?
• I wouldn’t want your belief in me, to limit you.
• I wouldn’t want guilt to be your guide.
• I’d want you to stop worrying about pleasing me all the time.
• I’d want you to be what you are. Be good…, but be what you are.
• I would tell you I don’t give a damn about the robes and special clothing.
• I wouldn’t care what foods you did or didn’t eat…, especially on Fridays.
• I wouldn’t care about these locations you feel a need to travel to because you think you will get closer to me.
• I wouldn’t care if you danced
• I wouldn’t care if you played cards
• I wouldn’t care if you went to the movies
• I wouldn’t care if you drank. Excess is what is harmful. Not the substance
• I’d laugh at those burka things. Like WTF are you even thinking?
• I wouldn’t want you punishing people for breaking these frivolous rules you keep making up
• I’d demand that you stop using me as an excuse for your wars, your bigotry and your obsessions.
• I’d be pissed that you use me to control people.
• I’d tell you to quit your silly rituals and superstitions. I mean what a joke!
• I’d want you to do things because they’re right. Not because you fear being sent to hell.
• I wouldn’t care less if you masturbated. In fact I’d recommend it.
• I would tell you arranged and forced marriages are ludicrous.
• I would say that you are in no position to judge others. How dare you?
• I would not care if you wanted to mangle your penis. But don’t do it for me.
• I’d tell you the only person you need to confess your sins to is yourself.
• I’d tell you stop repeating and chanting the same damn prayers over and over.
• I’d tell you stop sending your money to those idiots on TV who say I talk to them. If I talked to anyone, it wouldn’t be the. And I wouldn’t tell them to send have you send money.
• I’d tell a lot of you to just mellow out!
• I’d tell you to stop worrying what goes on in other people’s bedrooms.
• I’d tell you very loudly; “STOP USING ME AS YOUR CRUTCH!!! Stand up for goodness sake!”

Atheists are coming out of the closet – and coming together. At a press conference held yesterday, March 22, at the National Press Club, Reason Rally organizers and speakers  hailed the upcoming event as an unprecedented display of numbers and unity.

The Reason Rally, a national gathering of nonreligious Americans to celebrate secular  values, will take place from 10AM-6PM on March 24th and is estimated to draw thousands. It is being sponsored by all the major organizations in the Secular movement.

“The Reason Rally proves to all of us that we can unite, cooperate and succeed to achieve our common goals of advancing secularism in America,” said David Silverman, chair of the Reason Rally and President of American Atheists. “This unity is a major victory in and of itself, and will prove to be the first step toward a long-term, movement-wide effort to raise the profile of the atheist.”

Journalist Jamila Bey, one of the Reason Rally speakers, said the event would be a “wake up call” to the nation. “The country is evolving. We are women, we are men, we are children  and we are parents. We live here, we vote, we buy things. We matter.”

Politicians in particular will need to take notice of the growing unity of the secular movement, said speaker Sean Faircloth, representative from the Richard Dawkins Foundtion.  “There needs to be a place in politics for voices like famous conservative Barry Goldwater, who had no respect for the Religious Right,” said Faircloth, who served 10 years in the Maine state government. “But the reality is that right now, the Religious Right has veto power over one of the two major political parties.”

The Reason Rally will help change that, said comedian Paul Provenza, who will emcee the event. “Part of what this rally is about is to show that there is an audience, and a base, for those willing to stand up against the Religious Right forcing their beliefs on everyone.”

The Rally, a free event on the National Mall, features prominent nonreligious speakers and entertainers including scientist and author Richard Dawkins, comedian Eddie Izzard, “Mythbusters” co-star Adam Savage, comedian and musician Tim Minchin and the band Bad Religion.

The Reason Rally is sponsored by American Atheists, American Humanist Association, Atheist Alliance of America, The Brights, Camp Quest, Center for Inquiry, Freethought Society, The James Randi Educational Foundation, Military Atheists and Freethinkers, The Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science, Secular Student Alliance, Secular Coalition for America, Society for Humanistic Judaism, Stiefel Freethought Foundation, United Coalition of Reason and Washington Area Secular Humanists.

More information about the Reason Raly can be found at the Reason Rally Website.

Religion, and religious institutions, are not only granted undeserved credit for their role in social movements, but are also not afforded the responsibility they deserve for the damage they inflict to the movements they infect, and the communities represented by those movements.  Christians are all too ready to yell about the involvement of Islamic organizations in the Arab Spring, yet, as Occupy Churches spring up in American tent cities, and Occupy Faith groups begin to flourish, they turn a blind eye to the history of hierarchy, misogyny, and homophobia that has plagued revolutionary communities from the early European protestants, to the nationalist Irish under British rule, and the African-American community civil rights movement.

Religions are, by their nature, hierarchical.  They worship a godhead and follow the rules ordained purportedly by that godhead.  They do not arrive at decisions through consensus.  They cannot.  They must obey the rules and dictates of the godhead, and, at most, allow that a select group of god experts interpret those rules and dictates.  Believers, adherents, and followers, do not have a say in what the teachings of the godhead are.  The Occupy Movement is not only leaderless, but, by extension of that, be ‘followerless’ as well.

If any think that the Democratic Party, or MoveOn.org, or large corporate/political/bureaucratic unions are the biggest threats of co-option, they are completely missing what is being allowed to happen right under their nose.

Religion, and religious institutions, represent the greatest threat to the Occupy Movement.  Religious leaders, such as priests, ministers, clerics, clergy, and acolytes et al, exert their leadership by claiming to be fellow followers of an invisible, silent entity that speaks and communicates through them.   They refuse to admit that their godhead is nothing more than a construct of humans, that they exploit, and they fail to explain why their interpretations of the teachings of their supposed singular godhead has as many variations as their are religious leaders.

The advent of interfaith ceremonies and activities clearly demonstrates this hypocrisy.  The all knowing god, that has always been, and always shall be, has either been on a pretty steep learning curve for the past few hundred years or is a human construct that directly reflects the attitudes of the believers and the society they live in.  Supposed adherents to religions, whose holy scriptures claim that their god is the only true god, and that all other religions must be shunned, and whose followers must be either converted or killed, should not be praying together.  Not unless they have the authority to change what their godhead teaches, and demands, through the holy scriptures that claim this to be an offense punishable by death.

Religions are still denying equal rights to women, homosexuals, and any that do not adhere to their doctrines and dogmas.  Is this what the Occupy Movement stands for?  Why are religions being given a carte blanche where others are vigorously denied.  Why are sermons and teachings being allowed that tell Occupiers what they must do rather than make proposals to Occupiers, open those proposals up to critical, clarifying questions, allow themselves to accept friendly amendments, and then seek consensus or be blocked because they violate the fundamental values of the movement?

I was at a gathering of occupiers where speeches were being given by representatives from a variety of community groups.  A representative from a Native American group stood and explained that their community’s spiritual tradition demands a hierarchical structure because their prophecies claim that the four different colors of peoples on the planet would each find their own way, and, that for Native American people, people that share their color, a hierarchical structure was their way.  The group sat silent, most nodded approvingly and thanked the speaker for their wonderful offering.  No one challenged the assertion.

What?  Hierarchy,  segregation, division, and separation… all OK because it’s framed as spiritual, prophetic, and part of someone’s religious belief.  Our societal conditioning does not allow us to challenge even the most egregious violations of our values when they are framed in such terms, apparently.

Religions claim that many movements have come out of their institutions and congregations.  The truth is:  In Ireland, as in America from the time of restoration through the civil rights movement, churches and religious institutions were simply the only community spaces where activists could organize.  The movements occupied the churches out of necessity.  They didn’t see the danger, as we’ve all been programmed not to, with religion.  Now, they as communities, and their movements seeking emancipation, have suffered as a result.

Religions have a prolific history of being just chameleon-like enough to infiltrate entire communities and cultures, adopt their lingo, appropriate their practices and traditions, and then completely usurp and control them.  This cannot be allowed with the Occupy Movement.  This must be aggressively resisted.

Religion should not be Occupying the Occupy Movement.  Intolerance cannot be tolerated, regardless of how it is dressed up and justified.  The Occupy Movement should only be occupying religions as a means of dismantling their destructive and divisive influence over our society and politics, equal to, or greater than, any corporation or financial institution, and introducing the unconditionally equal, personal empowerment of direct democracy and consensus building.  Amen.

“The US takes pride in its separation of church and state, but the current political scene is “strangely” religious. Lately, there would seem to be a whole lot more people who have a direct channel to the Big Guy Upstairs than one could have humanly thought possible.”  – Cliff Schecter, Truthout

There does not exist one uniform, universally accepted and shared world view. There are numerous competing world views, some of which can stand opposite to each other and be mutually exclusive of each others’ methods. This also applies to the world views of religion.

August Thalheimer identifies two main sources of religious conceptions: (1) Relation of the individual to nature: human dependence upon nature and their desire to mater the forces of nature they cannot master in material reality. (2) Relation of the individual to society: religious conceptions and fantasies also arise from the relations of individuals to the totality of social relations primarily determined by the mode of production, or the social way in which individuals produce their material livelihood.

How many religions are there in our world, each claiming a monopoly on truth? Religion can be argued as one the oldest world views containing fundamental conceptions from which all others emerged. Thus, scholars and academics agree that religion as a world view has developed alongside the development of society: “In most developed forms of religion there are not many spirits, gods, or demons, but only one god” – Thalheimer.

The analysis of the development of religion cannot be isolated from the analysis of how human beings organize their society: there is an “extremely close relation in ancient times between the development of ideas concerning gods and the development of social forms, social organizations.” Thalheimer, for instance, identifies the different stages of development from small feudal states to a centralized monarchy in China. These, according to the author, are marked by the simultaneous change in organization of religious hierarchy from spirits and ancestors to the eventual recognition of centralized gods.

Thus, religion should be contextualized within its own history. Religion as any other narrative, is and will always be a historical product, and as such its origin can be traced back to the individual.

In A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Marx argues that any given criticism of philosophy ultimately begins with the criticism of religion.

Marx states;

“The religious world is but the reflex of the real world. And for a society based upon the production of commodities, in which the producers in general enter into social relations with one another by treating their products as commodities and values, whereby they reduce their individual private labour to the standard of homogeneous human labour – for such a society, Christianity with its cultus of abstract man, more especially in its bourgeois developments, Protestantism, Deism, &c., is the most fitting form of religion. In the ancient Asiatic and other ancient modes of production, we find that the conversion of products into commodities, and therefore the conversion of men into producers of commodities, holds a subordinate place, which, however, increases in importance as the primitive communities approach nearer and nearer to their dissolution. Trading nations, properly so called, exist in the ancient world only in its interstices, like the gods of Epicurus in the Intermundia, or like Jews in the pores of Polish society. Those ancient social organisms of production are, as compared with bourgeois society, extremely simple and transparent. But they are founded either on the immature development of man individually, who has not yet severed the umbilical cord that unites him with his fellowmen in a primitive tribal community, or upon direct relations of subjection. They can arise and exist only when the development of the productive power of labour has not risen beyond a low stage, and when, therefore, the social relations within the sphere of material life, between man and man, and between man and Nature, are correspondingly narrow. This narrowness is reflected in the ancient worship of Nature, and in the other elements of the popular religions. The religious reflex of the real world can, in any case, only then finally vanish, when the practical relations of every-day life offer to man none but perfectly intelligible and reasonable relations with regard to his fellowmen and to Nature. 

Marx and Engles also proposed that originally, both Christianity and Islam were revolutionary movements of the poor: 2000 years ago the early Christians organized a mass movement of the poorest and most marginalized sections of society,

“The history of early Christianity has notable points of resemblance with the modern working class movement…Both are persecuted and baited, their adherents are despised and made the object of exclusive laws, the former as enemies of the human race, the latter as enemies of the state, enemies of religion, the family, social order. And in spite of all persecution, nay, even spurred on by it, they forge victoriously ahead.”

According to these authors, thus, the world of religion is a mystified world, a distorted impression of reality. However, like all ideas as produced by humans, these beliefs have their origin in the material world.

History of human and social development has proven the historical nature of religions.

Religion is an idea, product of the human imagination. It is based not on facts nor evidence of any sort. Religion is rooted in blind belief, faith, for it comes to be without prior experience. In the history of human kind, we have had societies that believed the world was flat or that the weather was manipulated by divine forces. Knowledge and science have proven otherwise.

From Religion to Politics

Marx argued that human beings created god and attributed to this creation all that was not possible to humankind. Humans then, allowed the creation of their mind to take moral control over their lives. Human beings bowed to their own creation. This, Marx refers to as fetishism.

The same fetishism can be examined in today’s politics. The very distinction between political right, centre, and left can be seen as ideas created by human societies seem to have acquired lives of their own. Conservatism, Liberalism, Labour, all have developed within the specific socio-politico-economic historical contexts unique to each political ideology.

Today, the right, center, and left have seem to have lost the historical contexts from which they emerged. Politicians today are hanging on to old ideas that are no longer relevant, no longer reflective our current world. We are allowing the creations of our ancestors determine our society, but we all understand that our present global society has surpassed the needs our forefathers have faced in their time. So why limit our choices to the same choices of our forefathers?

We need to move beyond  old fetishized ideas and begin creating new ideas that reflect the complex nature of our society within the context of globalization. In order to do so, we need to forget labels and traditions and honestly examine the real material conditions of our society.

Additional Reading

[i] Introduction to Dialectical Materialism - The author provides further in depth analysis of specific religions developing alongside particular social organizations

[ii] The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof

[iii] On Religion

[iv] Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy

Karl Marx image from MPHbooks.com

This article originally published at MinReyes.ca as ‘The Burden of Proof Lies on Religion.’

Editor’s Note: Min Reyes is a journalist and student of historical materialism and dialectics. Presently, Min is fully committed to the global movement of human dignity against neoliberalism. In addition to being a News Junkie Post contributor, Min can be found at her own blog, MinReyes.ca, and you can connect with her on Twitter @Min_Reyes