[NatGeo] Bethlehem today
R.V. Gronoff
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djm
>
> http://magma.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/2007-12/bethlehem/finkel-text.html
>
>
http://magma.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/2007-12/bethlehem/finkel-text-p10.html
"The Christians themselves are not immune to infighting. Literally every square foot of the Church of the Nativity is battled over by the three sects that share
use of the church: Greek Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Armenian Orthodox. The holy men of the three denominations bicker over who gets to clean which
sacred wall, who can walk in which aisle. The guards in the church, it sometimes seems, are not there to protect tourists but to keep priests from attacking
each other. "Apart from Christ," says Father Ibrahim Faltas, a Franciscan friar who served in the Church of the Nativity for 12 years, "there have been few
here who would turn the other cheek." "
the author is probably from the protestant sect, that satanic stuff born in 16th c, to be unable to know the difference between the Church of Christ and
the satanic falsifications called "roman-catholicism" and so on...
Dan
<regis.gron...@ahmadinejadifrance.com> wrote:
> http://magma.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/2007-12/bethlehem/finkel-text...
>
> --
> This troll is backed by a 100% satisfaction guarantee.
For whatever it's worth, I never accept anything reported in or by
Nat. Geographic (ultra-liberal "humanist" rag that it is) without
independent confirmation.
++
Dan wrote:
I don't see the Geographic Society as humanist in a bad way or its
publications as rags. I'm not sure you mean what I mean by humanism,
i.e. caring about other people. I certainly don't see it as a negative.
The Geographic is an old and venerable institution that only has bit too
much of the awe of something different to it.
Dan
> Dan wrote:
> >On Dec 4, 8:53 pm, "R.V. Gronoff"
> ><regis.gron...@ahmadinejadifrance.com> wrote:
>
> >>http://magma.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/2007-12/bethlehem/finkel-text...
>
> >>--
> >>This troll is backed by a 100% satisfaction guarantee.
>
> >For whatever it's worth, I never accept anything reported in or by
> >Nat. Geographic (ultra-liberal "humanist" rag that it is) without
> >independent confirmation.
>
> I don't see the Geographic Society as humanist in a bad way or its
> publications as rags. I'm not sure you mean what I mean by humanism,
> i.e. caring about other people.
No I don't. I am talking about humanism as a form of materialism which
rejects the dualism of mind and body and affirms that the human
species is solely the product of random events. This is the
inspiration for a lot of their "humans are just another type of animal
and life is just an accident anyway" content.
> I certainly don't see it as a negative.
> The Geographic is an old and venerable institution that only has bit too
> much of the awe of something different to it.- Hide quoted text -
>
> - Show quoted text -
++
Dan wrote:
>On Dec 5, 10:22 am, ++ <sp...@erols.com> wrote:
>
>
>>Dan wrote:
>>
>>
>>>On Dec 4, 8:53 pm, "R.V. Gronoff"
>>><regis.gron...@ahmadinejadifrance.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>>http://magma.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/2007-12/bethlehem/finkel-text...
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>--
>>>>This troll is backed by a 100% satisfaction guarantee.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>For whatever it's worth, I never accept anything reported in or by
>>>Nat. Geographic (ultra-liberal "humanist" rag that it is) without
>>>independent confirmation.
>>>
>>>
>>I don't see the Geographic Society as humanist in a bad way or its
>>publications as rags. I'm not sure you mean what I mean by humanism,
>>i.e. caring about other people.
>>
>>
>
>No I don't. I am talking about humanism as a form of materialism which
>rejects the dualism of mind and body and affirms that the human
>species is solely the product of random events. This is the
>inspiration for a lot of their "humans are just another type of animal
>and life is just an accident anyway" content.
>
>
I don't see the Geographic as promoting the philosophy as you state.
nick cobb
04-Dec-07
National Geographic
Bethlehem 2007
This is not how Mary and Joseph came into Bethlehem, but this is how you
enter now. You wait at the wall. It's a daunting concrete barricade,
three stories high, thorned with razor wire. Standing beside it, you
feel as if you're at the base of a dam. Israeli soldiers armed with
assault rifles examine your papers. They search your vehicle. No Israeli
civilian, by military order, is allowed in. And few Bethlehem residents
are permitted out—the reason the wall exists here, according to the
Israeli government, is to keep terrorists away from Jerusalem.
Bethlehem and Jerusalem are only six miles apart (ten kilometers),
though in the compressed and fractious geography of the region, this
places them in different realms. It can take a month for a postcard to
go from one city to the other. Bethlehem is in the West Bank, on land
taken by Israel during the Six Day War of 1967. It's a Palestinian city;
the majority of its 35,000 residents are Muslim. In 1900, more than 90
percent of the city was Christian. Today Bethlehem is only about
one-third Christian, and this proportion is steadily shrinking as
Christians leave for Europe or the Americas. At least a dozen suicide
bombers have come from the city and surrounding district. The truth is
that Bethlehem, the "little town" venerated during Christmas, is one of
the most contentious places on Earth.
If you're cleared to enter, a sliding steel door, like that on a boxcar,
grinds open. The soldiers step aside, and you drive through the
temporary gap in the wall. Then the door slides back, squealing on its
track, booming shut. You're in Bethlehem.
The city, at the scrabbly hem of the Judaean desert, is built over
several broad, flat-topped hills, stingy with vegetation. The older
homes are made of pale yellow stone, wedged along steep, narrow streets.
A couple of battered taxis ply the roads, drivers heavy on the horns. At
an outdoor stall, lamb meat rotates on a spit, dripping fat. Men sit on
plastic chairs and sip from small glasses of thick Arabic coffee.
There's an odor of uncollected garbage. As you work your way up the
hill, you can see the scope of the wall and chart its ongoing
expansion—a gray snake, segmented by cylindrical guard towers,
methodically constricting the city.
Inside the wall, along Bethlehem's borders, are three Palestinian
refugee camps, boxy apartments heaped atop one another in haphazard
piles. Every breeze through the camps' alleys ruffles the corners of
hundreds of martyrs' posters—young men, staring impassively, some
gripping M-16s. Many are victims of the Israel Defense Forces. Others
have blown themselves up in an Israeli mall or restaurant or bus. Arabic
text on the posters extols the greatness of these deeds.
Just outside the wall, dominating the surrounding high points and
ridges, are sprawling Jewish settlements, skewered with construction
cranes, feverishly growing. Late in the afternoon the sun glints off the
settlement buildings and Bethlehem seems circled by fire.
At the summit of Bethlehem's central hill is Manger Square, a
cobblestoned plaza fronting the Church of the Nativity. The tallest and
most prominent structure here is a mosque. Many of the gift shops are
shuttered, relics of a more peaceful time. Tourism is low; religious
pilgrims are shuttled in and out by guides—a quick stop at Manger
Square, then a speedy departure down the hill and back out through the
wall, returning to Jerusalem. Hotels are mostly empty. Few visitors
spend the night. Unemployment in Bethlehem, by the mayor's estimate, is
50 percent, and many families are living from meal to meal.
The Church of the Nativity is almost hidden. It looks like a stone
fortress, walls several feet thick, with a facade devoid of
ornamentation. Perhaps this is why it has survived 14 centuries:
Bethlehem is no place for delicate architecture. A spot at the
crossroads of the world—the busy intersection of Europe, Asia, and
Africa—means a perpetual rush hour of invading armies. The church has
endured conquests by Persian, Byzantine, Muslim, Crusader, Mamluk,
Ottoman, Jordanian, British, and Israeli forces. The entrance, reduced
in size over the centuries, perhaps to prevent access by travelers'
horses and camels, has shrunk to a miniature hole. You nearly have to
fold yourself in half to get through.
The interior of the church, cool and dark, is as spare as the outside;
four rows of columns in an open nave lead to the main altar. There are
no pews, just a collection of cheap folding chairs. But beneath the
altar, down a set of worn limestone steps, is a small cave. In the rural
areas of Bethlehem, today as it was 2,000 years ago, grottoes are used
as livestock pens. Mangers are carved out of rock. Here, in the
bull's-eye of this volatile place, ringed by Jewish settlements,
imprisoned within a wall, encircled by refugee camps, hidden amid a
forest of minarets, tucked below the floor of an ancient church, is a
silver star. This, it's believed, is where Jesus was born.
Some of the people you meet around Bethlehem quote from the Bible, some
recite from the Koran, some chant from the Torah. Some show you their
fields, some point to their olive groves; some invoke history, some
envision the future. Some pray with knees on the ground, some with
foreheads on the ground, some with feet firmly planted but with torsos
turning and swaying. Some throw stones and some drive tanks and some
wrap themselves with explosives. But when you get right down to it, when
you boil away the hatred and the politics and the wars that have shaken
the planet, the one thing most people are talking about, when it comes
to Bethlehem, is land. A tiny scrap of land. A wind-scoured,
water-starved, rock-strewn bit of ground.
The Jews got here first. That's what the rabbi says. Rabbi Menachem
Froman lives in the Jewish settlement of Tekoa, perched on a mesa, a
clean collection of bleached stone houses capped with red-tiled roofs,
double strollers parked on several porches. Fifteen hundred people live
here. From the north side of Tekoa, Froman can view all of Bethlehem;
the Muslim call to prayer drifts over the settlement five times a day,
steady as a train schedule. To the south are the bald brown knolls of
the Judaean wilderness, where Jesus is thought to have fasted for 40
days, and the deep ravines that tumble down, down, down, falling below
sea level—even the terrain here seems to defy reason—and then plunging
still, to Earth's lowest point, the Dead Sea.
"This is not just land," says Froman, his long white beard spilling from
his chin, unruly as a river rapid. "This is the Holy Land. There's no
oil, no gold, no diamonds. It's a desert! But this is God's palace."
Froman is 62 years old; he can count back 17 generations of rabbis in
his family. He's the 18th. His son is also a rabbi.
He was born in what is now Israel but was then, during World War II,
known as the British Mandate for Palestine (the British began governing
the region in 1922, following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire). After
World War II, in the wake of the Holocaust, the United Nations voted to
partition the region into two states—one Jewish, one Arab. Jews accepted
the plan, Arabs did not. Fighting between Arabs and Jews began even
before Israel declared independence, in 1948, and the ensuing war
resulted in about 750,000 Palestinians fleeing their native villages,
many of them forced to do so by the Israeli army. Many relocated to the
West Bank of the Jordan River, administered by Jordan, or the Gaza
Strip, governed by Egypt. These were the first Palestinian refugees.
Then, in 1967, Israel defeated the military forces of Egypt, Jordan,
Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon in six chaotic days and occupied, among other
lands, the West Bank, a place many Israelis refer to by its biblical
name, Judaea and Samaria. This initiated the settlement movement—Jews
establishing homesites throughout the newly won territory.
Froman was one of the first to go. He believes, as do many settlers,
that the Jews' deed to Judaea and Samaria is spelled out in the Old
Testament. They are the landlords. Froman therefore feels he has the
right, granted from God, to live here. In the district of Bethlehem,
which includes the city and neighboring villages, there are about
180,000 Palestinians, of whom 25,000 or so are Christian (virtually all
living in urban Bethlehem and two satellite towns, Beit Jala and Beit
Sahur). Woven into this map are 22 Jewish settlements, with a population
approaching 80,000, and at least a dozen more frontier-style squatter
encampments known as outposts, often no more than a ring of dilapidated
mobile homes, like Conestoga wagons around a campfire.
Just looking out his window in Tekoa, Froman sees why everyone craves a
piece of this land. For Jews still awaiting their Messiah, Froman says
it's possible that he will arrive right here, in the eroded backcountry
of Bethlehem, the presence of God palpable in the desert's sandpaper
wind. For Christians anticipating their Messiah's return, why shouldn't
he come back to the spot he was born? Muslims do not believe in a
messiah—there is only Allah, only God—but Palestinian Muslims also
revere this land as sacred, since Jesus is one of their prophets. Also
Bethlehem and the surrounding West Bank, as well as the Gaza Strip and
Jerusalem, are where they hope to establish a viable homeland.
The United Nations, the European Union, and the International Court of
Justice have declared the Israeli settlements illegal, a violation of
the Geneva Convention that prohibits occupying powers from allowing its
citizens to populate the territory it occupies. The Israeli government,
though, provides easy loans to those seeking houses in West Bank
settlements. One of the largest in the Bethlehem area is called Har
Homa. Its gleaming high-rises stand so close to Bethlehem—just across
the wall—that it seems as if you could hold your arm out on a
Palestinian street corner and hail a cab in Har Homa. It has become a
full-fledged suburb, with 2,000 Israelis. About half of all settlers
consider themselves nonreligious, and real estate ads in Har Homa,
plastered on numerous billboards, stress the town's secular advantages.
Reasonable prices; great location; such an easy commute to Jerusalem!
Har Homa exemplifies an Israeli strategy known as "facts on the ground":
The more Jews who live in a concentrated area on the east side of the
so-called Green Line—the armistice line established in 1949 following
Israel's war of independence—the more likely the area will become part
of Israel if the region is divided into two countries. Palestinians
still refer to Har Homa by its original name, Jabal Abu Ghuneim—in
Arabic, "mountain of the shepherd." It used to be one of the last open
spaces in Bethlehem, a pine-shaded hillside where shepherds tended their
flocks, and had done so since biblical times. Construction began in
1997; the land was shaved flat and stacked with apartment towers. Not
one Palestinian who owned acreage was compensated. Its new name means
"walled mountain" in Hebrew.
The settlements are designed to feel like safe, suburban oases, but they
are not. The presence of settlers, so close to Palestinian towns, makes
them a target of particularly fierce enmity. Stones once shattered car
windshields so often that many settlers replaced the glass in their
vehicles with rock-resistant plastic. Before the wall was built, stray
bullets, fired from below, sometimes burst into homes. In the settlement
of Efrat, a few hills over from Tekoa, one suicide bomber detonated his
bomb inside the medical center. Another was shot to death as he was
about to blow himself up in the settlement's supermarket. He was killed
not by a soldier but by a settler.
"Our children have been to more funerals than most people have been to
in their whole lives," says Sara Bedein, a mother of six who lives in
Efrat. "All my kids have friends, neighbors, classmates who have been
killed." Bedein wears a bright scarf on her head—Orthodox Jewish women,
like traditional Muslims, do not display their hair in public. She says
that, after one school-bus bombing tore off the legs of three young
students and killed two teachers, her daughter and schoolmates began
sitting cross-legged on the bus, believing it would reduce the chance of
losing limbs in an attack. And yet, if you ask Bedein why her family
doesn't move out of the occupied territory, she answers immediately and
unequivocally: "We love it here." She loves the views, the mountain air,
the settlers' tight sense of community.
Many settlers keep sidearms strapped to their waists, sheriffs in their
own Wild West. Some even carry weapons to synagogue, and while praying,
while raising their arms, beseeching God, it's clear that any protection
they seek is not solely divine: There is the unmistakable glint of a
handgun snapped into a holster.
When Seth Mandell takes a short walk in the wilderness, he carries his
nine-millimeter Glock in a fanny pack. Mandell lives in Tekoa, a couple
of streets away from Rabbi Froman. His hike has become a ritual of
grief. He works his way down a steep, slippery trail, speckled with
scarlet wildflowers, bursts of color in the dun desertscape. A few doves
circle above. Doves in the sky; olive branches beneath.
Mandell is heading toward a small grotto, a tranquil spot where, he
says, monks have come to meditate since the fifth century. No surprise
that a 13-year-old boy was inspired to explore. The boy was Koby
Mandell, Seth's son. He cut school one day, in May 2001, with his
14-year-old friend Yosef Ishran, also from Tekoa. They hung out in this
low-ceilinged cave. Perhaps they sat in the cool shade and looked out
the entrance: a spectacular view of a rocky canyon, the walls dropping
sere and still into a dry riverbed below.
When night fell and the boys had not returned home, searches were
initiated. Soldiers arrived. The next morning, Koby and Yosef were found
in the cave. They had been bludgeoned to death with stones. The walls of
the cave were smeared with their blood. Next to the bodies lay their
lunch bags, with uneaten sandwiches and bottles of water. The killers
were never caught. The pain Seth Mandell feels when he walks down here
seems to emanate from him like heat waves off a sidewalk. But Mandell
says that he and his family—his wife and their three other children—have
no plans to leave. He says what Rabbi Froman says. He says what many
settlers say. His connection to this land is spiritually, emotionally,
and culturally profound. "Leaving," he says, "would be leaving a part of
myself behind."
One thousand years before Christ was born, Bethlehem was known as the
City of David. It was the birthplace of King David, a Jewish leader who
earned his esteem through a famous fight: He defeated Goliath, striking
him dead with a stone flung from his sling. The giant, whose height,
according to the Old Testament, "was six cubits and a span"—about ten
feet (3 meters)—was a member of the Philistine people, ancient enemy of
the Jews. From the word "Philistine" has derived the current
Palestinian, though the two are linked only etymologically, not by blood.
Though rarely in power, the Jews were the most populous group in the
region for centuries. But by the first century A.D., following a series
of ineffective rulers and defeats by the Roman army, they were cast out
of the Holy Land. For the next 2,000 years, the Jews scattered
throughout the world—the Diaspora—but they never stopped praying for a
return to their native soil.
In the meantime, Christianity rose to prominence. It seems a fluke that
Jesus was born in Bethlehem—after all, he's Jesus of Nazareth, a town 90
miles (140 kilometers) to the north. Some archaeologists and theological
historians have their doubts about many of the details of the Christmas
story, including that Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judaea. There is a
small village, also called Bethlehem, located closer to Nazareth, where
some believe Jesus was actually born. (In Hebrew, the name Bethlehem
means "house of bread," and could refer to almost any place with a flour
mill.)
But according to the New Testament, in the Book of Luke, the Roman
emperor at the time, Caesar Augustus, was conducting a census that
required all people to return to their hometowns to register. Joseph was
a descendant of King David, and even though his wife was nearing the end
of her pregnancy, they completed the journey to Bethlehem. Famously, the
Book of Luke relates, "there was no room for them in the Inn," so Jesus
was born amid the livestock, perhaps in the grotto over which the Church
of the Nativity was eventually built.
Judaea's ruler, King Herod, was so disturbed by reports that a new king
and potential rival had been born that, according to the Book of
Matthew, he sent troops to kill all boys under age two. Mary and Joseph
escaped with Jesus to Egypt, but thousands of children were reported to
have been slaughtered. By the fourth century, Christianity was the
official religion of the Roman Empire, and Bethlehem swiftly became one
of its holiest sites. In 326, Helena, the mother of the first Christian
emperor, Constantine, traveled to Bethlehem and shortly thereafter her
son commissioned the construction of the original Church of the
Nativity. (It was destroyed during a riot 200 years later, but was
promptly rebuilt. The second version, finished in the mid-sixth century,
still stands.)
Helena's visit and a flow of imperial money sparked an influx of
pilgrims, and soon there were dozens of monasteries in the nearby
desert. Then the Muslims arrived. Early in the seventh century, a
merchant named Muhammad, living in Mecca in what is now Saudi Arabia,
heard a voice he believed to be that of the angel Gabriel tell him,
"Recite." Muhammad com- mitted to memory the words that followed, and
these revelations became the Koran, the Arabic word for "recitation."
Within a century of Muhammad's death in 632, the religion he
founded—Islam—had spread throughout the Middle East.
For centuries Bethlehem remained a Christian island in a steadily
expanding Muslim sea. Palestinian refugees from the 1948 war brought
even more Muslims to the area, but Bethlehem remained a majority
Christian town. Then, in 1967, Israel's victory once again altered the
city's complexion. Jewish settlers began moving into the occupied West
Bank; Christians, who'd started fleeing to safer lands during World War
II, accelerated their exodus; and Palestinian militants initiated
attacks on military and civilian targets. In the same region where Jews
once battled Philistines, it was now Israelis against Palestinians. In
3,000 years, the only change, it appears, is a couple of syllables.
Before all semblance of normalcy was erased, the Al-Amal restaurant,
just off Manger Square, was often filled with Jewish diners. They came
for the falafel, seasoned with tahini and parsley, and the fresh
shawarma sandwiches, the lamb meat tucked into a hot pita. Jews also
came to shop in Bethlehem, known for producing the area's finest vegetables.
But the Israeli occupation felt, to Palestinians, like a series of
humiliations—a proud people reduced to dependency on their hated foe, at
the mercy of Israel's military law, denied an airport, and forced to pay
taxes to the occupation authority. In 1987, after two decades of such
treatment, an intifada, or uprising, was launched (the word literally
translates as "shaking off"). Young Palestinians hurled stones at
Israeli tanks, a modern version of David and Goliath, with the roles
reversed.
The intifada pushed the two sides to the bargaining table, and the Oslo
Accords were signed in 1993. But both Israelis and Palestinians felt the
provisions were not honored by the other side. In 2000, a second
Palestinian uprising began, this one more brutal. Settlers were
repeatedly targeted; suicide bombers struck with increasing frequency.
Israeli forces shelled Palestinian towns, and settlers attacked
Palestinian villagers and farmers. Two years later, the Israelis began
building the barrier. Now, the only Jews who regularly enter Bethlehem
are soldiers, in armored vehicles, weapons at the ready.
The owner of Al-Amal restaurant is a 53-year-old Muslim named Omar
Shawrieh, a short man with a trimmed beard and eyes weighed down by
heavy bags. The most prominent decoration in his restaurant is a
martyr's poster: a curly-haired young boy in a light-blue polo shirt.
"He's wearing his school uniform," says Shawrieh. It's his son.
Last fall, the Israeli army entered Manger Square on a mission to
apprehend a wanted militant. The soldiers traveled in a large convoy—a
dozen armored jeeps and a platoon of troops. It was early afternoon.
Mohammed Shawrieh, 13 years old, stopped by his father's restaurant to
get money for a haircut. The soldiers' presence sparked the usual
commotion; several people began throwing rocks at them, then the
violence escalated and shots were fired.
Mohammed was curious, and he wandered across Manger Square. As soon as
he noticed him missing, Omar panicked. "I ran to find my son," he says.
"But they got to him before I got to him." Mohammed was shot in the
side, a bullet piercing his liver. By the time he arrived at the
hospital, he had bled to death.
The Israel Defense Forces acknowledge the boy was shot. "We were in the
midst of a pinpoint operation, to arrest a most-wanted terrorist," says
Aviv Feigel, a lieutenant colonel with the IDF. "It was very intense."
Molotov cocktails and grenades, says Feigel, were launched at the
soldiers. A few were injured. So they fired back. "Maybe that boy was
just watching," says Feigel. "Or maybe he was participating. We didn't
investigate. It's a complicated situation; it's not a classic
battlefield. With them, everyone is in civilian clothes." Mohammed
Shawrieh was buried the next day in a cemetery outside Bethlehem, in the
shadow of an almond tree. This was followed by a demonstration and the
wide distribution of his martyr's poster. Later, a plaque was placed at
the spot he was shot, near the Church of the Nativity, just outside the
crypts where bones of the children killed by King Herod, some 2,000
years ago, are believed to be kept. The blame game is cyclical. Omar
Shawrieh, of course, faults the heavy-handed tactics of the Israeli
army; their quickness to shoot, their disregard for Palestinian lives.
The Israeli army says that if terrorists weren't trying to kill them,
then soldiers would not have entered Manger Square in the first place.
Since the start of the first intifada, more than 5,600 Palestinians and
1,200 Israelis have been killed.
Moderates do exist in the region, thousands of Jews, Muslims, and
Christians who wish to forge bonds and work for peace. But the
circumstances in Bethlehem are so fraught that even the most minor
efforts—an Arab village attempting to sell produce to an Israeli town;
the local Palestinian university trying to host a Jewish lecturer—are
stymied by the ugly realities. Interactions between Palestinians and
Israelis have mainly been reduced to brief exchanges at fortified
checkpoints; often the Israeli soldiers are sealed inside bulletproof
booths, the glass so thick the soldiers appear blurred.
No place harbors more frustration than the refugee camps, where families
who were uprooted from their homes when Israel became a nation still
live—generation after generation stuck in a stateless limbo. Ask where
they're from, and they'll tell you the name of a town that's likely been
erased from Israel's map, and speak in elegiac tones of its crystalline
waters and verdant fields. Some display sets of rusty keys that once
unlocked houses their parents or grandparents lived in before Israel
existed.
"Everybody in camp hates the Jews," says 28-year-old Adel Faraj, the
owner of a tiny shop in the Duheisha Camp, at the base of the Bethlehem
hills. More than 10,000 people live in the camp's half-square-mile
block. The camp's alleys, tight as slot canyons, are a collage of
militant graffiti. Children run amid shattered glass. Sewage trickles
down open gutters. At least two suicide bombers have come from Duheisha,
one of them a young woman.
Faraj sells toiletries and lamps and compact discs. He has a narrow face
and curly hair, which he likes to gel, and expressive eyes canopied with
dark brows. He keeps a water pipe, called a narghile, in his shop and
smokes apple-flavored tobacco throughout the day. "If a Jew came walking
into this camp, he'd be killed. With a rock. Or a knife. Or a gun. It
doesn't matter who he was. A Jew is a Jew," says Faraj.
"My friend was a suicide bomber," he continues, exhaling, filling his
store with smoke. Faraj's friend was Mohammad Daraghmeh, 18 years old,
who blew himself up in March 2002 next to a synagogue in Jerusalem,
killing 11, including two infants and a toddler in a stroller. As Faraj
speaks, he puts a CD in his boom- box. It's Bob Marley. The first track
plays: "Is This Love?"
"I'm proud of him," says Faraj of his suicide bomber friend. "He did
something great. The Israelis have forced us into this situation. They
have left us with nothing. And when you have nothing, you have nothing
to lose."
At two o'clock in the morning most weekdays, several hundred men who do
have something to lose—wives, children—begin lining up on the Bethlehem
side of the wall. They're seeking work in Israel proper. They stand
inside a long steel cage, like a cattle chute, waiting to be searched
and prodded and fingerprinted and metal-detected. Some are told to
strip. The process can take more than two hours. To be allowed through
the checkpoint, you must be married and have one or more children. This,
the Israeli army hopes, will ensure the laborers' return.
Many of the men are construction workers—often in the settlements. They
wait in line for hours to build houses for their enemies on land that
used to belong to them. They're paid $35 a day. Then they return home
through the wall.
"Do you think we want to do this?" says one of the men, 35-year-old
Sufian Sabateen. He holds a paper bag containing hummus and bread. He's
smoking an L&M cigarette. His face, lit harshly by the klieg lights of
the wall, is stoic. It's an hour before dawn. Sabateen insists he'd
gladly work in Bethlehem for half the salary, but there are no jobs.
This is how he describes his week: "From the mattress to work, from work
to the mattress. My life is no life."
The wall, Palestinians say, suffocates an entire population for the
actions of a small minority. They believe it is an Israeli attempt to
establish a new national border, sealing onto the Israeli side all the
choicest cuts from the land they occupied in 1967—the settlement areas,
the scarce water sources, the fertile fields. The city of Bethlehem is
being pinched into a seven-square-mile box, surrounded by a barrier on
three sides.
As the wall continues to grow, giant digging machines, protected by
armed guards, claw into the earth day and night. When completed, it will
extend 450 miles (720 kilometers), sometimes dipping as far as 15 miles
(24 kilometers) into West Bank territory, claiming 10 percent of
Palestinian land for Israeli settlers. The Israeli government says its
goal is only to protect Israeli lives, not to redraw the border, and as
soon as there's a sweeping shift in Palestinian policy toward Israel,
the wall will be destroyed and the confiscated land returned. The
Israeli government doesn't even call it a wall. It prefers the term
"security fence," and in most places in the West Bank it is indeed a
network of electrified chain-link fences and coils of barbed wire. But
not in Bethlehem. The wall around much of Bethlehem is taller than the
barriers used in Israeli prisons.
The Israeli government says the wall is working. The second intifada
brought wave after wave of suicide bombings, striking throughout Israel,
killing scores of civilians and soldiers. Starting in 2003, with
construction of the wall proceeding at top speed, and with intensified
military checkpoints, patrols, and intelligence, the number of attacks
drastically declined. "Our life was hell," says Ronnie Shaked, an
Israeli journalist. "Cafés were blowing up; buses were blowing up. But
no longer. The wall is very important—it's protecting us. Thank God
there is a wall."
But Palestinian leaders argue the wall has little to do with the
reduction in suicide attacks. The bombings have stopped, they say,
because the major militant groups, including Hamas, proclaimed a ban on
them, in the hope of restarting peace talks. A concrete wall can't stop
someone who's willing to die, many Palestinians say, and if militant
groups wanted, they could send a suicide bomber into Jerusalem every
hour of the day.
The most powerful politician in Bethlehem sees it another way. Salah
Al-Tamari, the governor of the Bethlehem district, views the wall as a
psychological ploy. "The Israelis want to provoke us; they want us to
lose our minds," he says. "They want us to leave." The governor believes
that the Israelis have purposely created such unlivable conditions in
hopes that everyone will flee. Then they can have the land to themselves.
"Well, they can't have it," says Al-Tamari. He predicts the opposite
will occur: The Israelis will eventually lose. The governor claims that
simple demographics strongly favor the Palestinians. Muslim Palestinians
on average have more children per family than Israeli Jews. "Their
nuclear weapon," as one Israeli soldier puts it, "is the womb." By 2010
the number of Jews and Palestinians in Israel and the occupied
territories will be about equal. After that, the Palestinians will have
the majority.
"I will stay here, and my children will stay here," says Al-Tamari. "I'm
a believer in the future. The wall will fall and the occupation will
end—maybe in 10 years, maybe 50. We don't know when, but we do know one
thing: We are staying here, on our land. No matter what." Bethlehem may
be where Christianity began, but today its Christian residents are in a
precarious spot. Israelis see them as Palestinian. Muslims see them as
Christian. They see themselves, alternately, as lifesaving buffers or
double-sided punching bags. Bernard Sabella, a Christian sociologist
Alexander Arnakis
>
>I don't see the Geographic Society as humanist in a bad way or its
>publications as rags. I'm not sure you mean what I mean by humanism,
>i.e. caring about other people. I certainly don't see it as a negative.
>The Geographic is an old and venerable institution that only has bit too
>much of the awe of something different to it.
I agree that the National Geographic Society is a venerable
institution, and as such, its publications carry a certain amount of
credence and gravitas. It's as establishmentarian as, say, the
Washington Post or the New York Times. A valid criticism of the
Geographic is that it's elitist, having been controlled by the
old-money Grosvenor family, just as the Times has been controlled by
the Ochs/Sulzberger family and the Post by the Graham family.
I have all the Geographic Magazine back issues going back continuously
to 1951, which shows what a fan of it I am. (And I have *all* the
issues, from the beginning, on CD-ROM.)
As for "humanism," in a religious sense, it's a system that's
human-centered rather than God-centered. In effect, this is a polite
term for atheism or agnosticism (with ethical overtones). It's a
denial of theism or even deism. Nothing necessarily wrong with that --
whatever floats your boat.
But it's inappropriate to call the National Geographic "humanist" in a
religious sense. To my knowledge, the Geographic doesn't take religous
positions. What it *does* do is take scientific positions. For
example, it's often presented evidence of biological evolution. This
may bother some Biblical literalists. It shouldn't bother the Orthodox
(or the Roman Catholics), however, who recognize evolution as a
modality that could be mandated by God. In any case, science and
religion are separate spheres, the former mediated by evidence and the
latter by faith.
Dan
> Dan wrote:
> >On Dec 5, 10:22 am, ++ <sp...@erols.com> wrote:
>
> >>Dan wrote:
>
> >>>On Dec 4, 8:53 pm, "R.V. Gronoff"
> >>><regis.gron...@ahmadinejadifrance.com> wrote:
>
> >>>>http://magma.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/2007-12/bethlehem/finkel-text...
>
> >>>>--
> >>>>This troll is backed by a 100% satisfaction guarantee.
>
> >>>For whatever it's worth, I never accept anything reported in or by
> >>>Nat. Geographic (ultra-liberal "humanist" rag that it is) without
> >>>independent confirmation.
---snip---
> I don't see the Geographic as promoting the philosophy as you state.
Here is a single example of the sort of thing I have in mind. There
are many more:
Comments:
1. "The only secret here is National Geographic's anti-Christian bias,
and let's hope that gets exposed sooner rather than later...."
Posted by Deal Hudson on December 14, 2006 at 12:01 PM | Permalink
Full Text: http://dealwhudson.typepad.com/deal_w_hudson/2006/12/national_geogra.htmlus
2. " This past Thursday, April 6th, the National Geographic Society
published an English translation of an ancient Gnostic text called The
Gospel of Judas, and then followed this up with a television special
that aired the following Sunday, April 9th.
A carefully planned marketing ploy, it was certainly no accident that
the National Geographic Society chose to air their television program
on Palm Sunday for Roman Catholic and Protestant Christians, one of
the most important of all Christian holidays, and leads up to the
events of Good Friday and Easter...."
Posted by Fr. Steven Tsichlis
Orthodox News
"Dan" <dan...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:7911c6c6-125e-43f3...@d61g2000hsa.googlegroups.com...
***thrice Holy Amen, Amen, Amen. As a long-time subscriber, I can attest to
the morph into a left-leaning rag.
++
Alexander Arnakis wrote:
>I agree that the National Geographic Society is a venerable
>institution, and as such, its publications carry a certain amount of
>credence and gravitas. It's as establishmentarian as, say, the
>Washington Post or the New York Times. A valid criticism of the
>Geographic is that it's elitist, having been controlled by the
>old-money Grosvenor family, just as the Times has been controlled by
>the Ochs/Sulzberger family and the Post by the Graham family.
>
>
well stated
>I have all the Geographic Magazine back issues going back continuously
>to 1951, which shows what a fan of it I am. (And I have *all* the
>issues, from the beginning, on CD-ROM.)
>
>
I've been thinking about hte CD ROM. How is it? When you see a page of
one of the old mags, for example, do you see it as if it is flat as if
it had been at least taken out of its bindings or does it look morphed
from being mashed inexpertly on a scanner? Glad to find someone who
bought one.
>As for "humanism," in a religious sense, it's a system that's
>human-centered rather than God-centered. In effect, this is a polite
>term for atheism or agnosticism (with ethical overtones). It's a
>denial of theism or even deism. Nothing necessarily wrong with that --
>whatever floats your boat.
>
>
Humanism is not a religion, nor is it a cloak for atheism or some kind
of deism, nor is it comparable in any way to a religion. It is a
philosophy which can be compatible with both religions and atheism, has
some relationship perhaps to ethics and morals, which themselves are
linked but not equivalent.
>But it's inappropriate to call the National Geographic "humanist" in a
>religious sense. To my knowledge, the Geographic doesn't take religous
>positions. What it *does* do is take scientific positions. For
>example, it's often presented evidence of biological evolution. This
>may bother some Biblical literalists. It shouldn't bother the Orthodox
>(or the Roman Catholics), however, who recognize evolution as a
>modality that could be mandated by God. In any case, science and
>religion are separate spheres, the former mediated by evidence and the
>latter by faith.
>
>
Florovsky and other theologians argue that Orthodoxy contains
evolutionary thought in a unique way. However, how this works and from
which theologians is a particular attention deficit. It was one of
those seminars in which I was day dreaming too much , not fully
understanding that every minute I could have paid attention was an
unique treasure. About all I can remember of it was that we can't
neessarily take time as linear, that indeed God's time might be more
like a moebus strip the site along which we are some place without
knowing precisely where we are, but that just as parts of a moebus strip
appear to be shadowed or in darkness, erally all of a moebus strip is in
light, only some parts are not readily apparent to us. How this related
to which early Church Fathers and how evolution fit into this scheme or
into those schemata....
>
>
>
++
Dan wrote:
>
>
>Here is a single example of the sort of thing I have in mind. There
>are many more:
>
>http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/channel/gospelofjudas/index.html?fs=www9.nationalgeographic.com
>
>
>Comments:
>
>1. "The only secret here is National Geographic's anti-Christian bias,
>and let's hope that gets exposed sooner rather than later...."
>
>Posted by Deal Hudson on December 14, 2006 at 12:01 PM | Permalink
>
>Full Text: http://dealwhudson.typepad.com/deal_w_hudson/2006/12/national_geogra.htmlus
>
>
Timely because of the best selling fictional book on the Gospel of Judas
- does not make this an anti-Christian bias. It doesn't even make it
anti-Christian bias when one turns on the PBS and gets a month of
Judaism or the catering to the Bush Administration that results in 8
years of WWII, the only valid war seemingly.
>
>2. " This past Thursday, April 6th, the National Geographic Society
>published an English translation of an ancient Gnostic text called The
>Gospel of Judas, and then followed this up with a television special
>that aired the following Sunday, April 9th.
>
>A carefully planned marketing ploy, it was certainly no accident that
>the National Geographic Society chose to air their television program
>on Palm Sunday for Roman Catholic and Protestant Christians, one of
>the most important of all Christian holidays, and leads up to the
>events of Good Friday and Easter...."
>
>Posted by Fr. Steven Tsichlis
>
>
They didn't air it on an Orthodox holiday.
>Full Text:
>http://www.stpaulsirvine.org/html/judas1.htm
>
>
>
>
>
>
R.V. Gronoff
> No I don't. I am talking about humanism as a form of materialism which
> rejects the dualism of mind and body
Well, dualism as you define it is certainly un-biblical and unorthodox.
It's more platonistic and gnostic.
The biblical thought, as well as the Orthodox patristic tradition,
distinguish between flesh and spirit. But flesh doesn't mean body: as in
the hebrew "basar", the biblical greek word "sarx" means the human
nature and nothing less.
So, when St John the Theologian tells us that the Word of God has come
into the flesh, he really means that God has become a man, fully.
Also the resurrection of the flesh is really the resurrection of the
human nature, most likely in an entirely new bodily nature that'll be
the same as Christ's after His Ascension, being made out of the Holy
Light (Aghio Fos) that Moses contemplated on Mount Sinai, that the
Theotokos received within her womb and that the Orthodox Patriarch of
Jerusalem receives every year on the Day of the Resurrection from the
Holy Sepulchre.
That's why orthodox Jews and Christians alike can accept evolutionism
without ontological problems. After all, in the Genesis, man is the
latest creature and is made out of clay (Adamah means "red clay" in
hebrew, like "humanus" in latin comes from "humus", "soil"). So yes, man
is by nature a living (zoon) like any other, only psychic (ie having a
soul that, given by God, can allow him to share God's energies through
grace) until he's deified by the grace given in the Orthodox Church (and
her only) through baptism, chrismation and communion that are the
visible seeds of the fruit every Christian must grow invisibly inside
his heart and mind until (s)he's made fully christlike.
Alexander Arnakis
>
>I've been thinking about the CD ROM. How is it? When you see a page of
>it had been at least taken out of its bindings or does it look morphed
>from being mashed inexpertly on a scanner? Glad to find someone who
>bought one.
>
number of CD's for the maps. It's really well done. It's sort of a
proprietary version of .pdf files, using Quick Time to display them.
Each page is flat, can be viewed full-screen, and can be printed at
will.
>
>Humanism is not a religion, nor is it a cloak for atheism or some kind
>of deism, nor is it comparable in any way to a religion. It is a
>philosophy which can be compatible with both religions and atheism, has
>some relationship perhaps to ethics and morals, which themselves are
>linked but not equivalent.
>
http://www.secularhumanism.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secular_humanism
http://www.beliefnet.com/story/80/story_8040_1.html
http://www.secular-humanism.com/
http://www.americanhumanist.org/about/manifesto1.html
http://www.ethicalsociety.org/
http://www.aeu.org/
Have fun!
Dan
> Dan wrote:
>
> >Here is a single example of the sort of thing I have in mind. There
> >are many more:
>
>
> >Comments:
>
> >1. "The only secret here is National Geographic's anti-Christian bias,
> >and let's hope that gets exposed sooner rather than later...."
>
> >Posted by Deal Hudson on December 14, 2006 at 12:01 PM | Permalink
>
>
> Timely because of the best selling fictional book on the Gospel of Judas
> - does not make this an anti-Christian bias.
Suit yourself.
---snip---
++
Alexander Arnakis wrote:
>On Wed, 05 Dec 2007 21:32:31 -0500, ++ <sp...@erols.com> wrote:
>
>
>>I've been thinking about the CD ROM. How is it? When you see a page of
>>one of the old mags, for example, do you see it as if it is flat as if
>>it had been at least taken out of its bindings or does it look morphed
>>
>>
>>from being mashed inexpertly on a scanner? Glad to find someone who
>
>
>>bought one.
>>
>>
>>
>I have the version that goes from 1888 to 1997, on 4 DVD's. Plus an
>number of CD's for the maps. It's really well done. It's sort of a
>proprietary version of .pdf files, using Quick Time to display them.
>Each page is flat, can be viewed full-screen, and can be printed at
>will.
>
>
I saw the advertisement but didn't remember the format. Thanks for the
info. I think we will all enjoy this for Christmas because it is
something we can all read and use.
>>Humanism is not a religion, nor is it a cloak for atheism or some kind
>>of deism, nor is it comparable in any way to a religion. It is a
>>philosophy which can be compatible with both religions and atheism, has
>>some relationship perhaps to ethics and morals, which themselves are
>>linked but not equivalent.
>>
>>
>>
>After reading the following, you may perhaps reconsider the above.
>
>
Note that you have appended the word, yourself, SECULAR to the word
humanism. Perhaps this is like the word gay. It used to have a light,
friendly connotation, now it is for a sexual preference and so one can't
use it in the old way anymore. When I was in high school, a "gay blade"
was still a guy or gal who had a positive outlook, a can do attitude and
a smile. Now it only refers to a guy and can be pejorative. Where once
language could be free of sex, it is now burdened with it. Humanism is
like that, too.
>http://www.secularhumanism.org/
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secular_humanism
>
>
Note the distinction between religious humanism in the article.
>http://www.beliefnet.com/story/80/story_8040_1.html
>http://www.secular-humanism.com/
>http://www.americanhumanist.org/about/manifesto1.html
>http://www.ethicalsociety.org/
>http://www.aeu.org/
>
>Have fun!
>
>
Politicized degeneration of our social fabric in order to minimize a
Christian loving outlook, a clse knit communal society and general
caring ethics.
>
>
>