Faith Hijacked - Zionism, Islamism, Hindutva and 9/11

While spirituality is quite naturally human, and potentially a powerful force for good, it is also humanity's Achilles heel.  As a short cut to a person's most profound thoughts, feelings, and needs it is a natural target for would-be mass manipulators of people.  None should be surprised that such a weakness has always been and continues today to be exploited successfully.

This is not to say that religion or ideology are necessarily *the* driving forces in the world--in fact we are of the mind that "money makes the world go 'round" and most fundamentalisms are ultimately manipulated by a tiny strata of the super-wealthy who feel no special affinity for anyone or anything but their power and prestige. Their victims throughout history have included people of all backgrounds, who for the most part remain in the dark as to their real oppressors and are instead trapped in a cycle of mutual suspicion and violence. This must end, and for that we must all be ready to be open to ideas that may well seem wrong and/or repellent at first.

"When I despair, I remember that all through history the ways of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants, and murderers, and for a time they can seem invincible, but in the end they always fall. Think of it--always."
Mahatma Gandhi

"I've seen too much hate to want to hate, myself, and every time I see it, I say to myself, hate is too great a burden to bear. Somehow we must be able to stand up against our most bitter opponents and say: We shall match your capacity to inflict suffering by our capacity to endure suffering. We will meet your physical force with soul force. Do to us what you will and we will still love you.... But be assured that we'll wear you down by our capacity to suffer, and one day we will win our freedom. We will not only win freedom for ourselves; we will appeal to your heart and conscience that we will win you in the process, and our victory will be a double victory."
Martin Luther King, Jr.

"He who joyfully marches to rank and file, has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would surely suffice. This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism on command, how violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble war is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be a part of so a base of action. It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder."
Albert Einstein

"The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe."
Friedrich Nietzsche

The Power of Nightmares

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Power of Nightmares, subtitled The Rise of the Politics of Fear, is a BBC documentary film series, written and produced by Adam Curtis. Its three one-hour parts consist mostly of a montage of archive footage with Curtis's narration. The series was first broadcast in the United Kingdom in late 2004 and has subsequently been broadcast in multiple countries and shown in several film festivals, including the 2005 Cannes Film Festival.

The films compare the rise of the Neo-Conservative movement in the United States and the radical Islamist movement, making comparisons on their origins and claiming similarities between the two. More controversially, it argues that the threat of radical Islamism as a massive, sinister organised force of destruction, specifically in the form of al-Qaeda, is a myth perpetrated by politicians in many countries—and particularly American Neo-Conservatives—in an attempt to unite and inspire their people following the failure of earlier, more utopian ideologies.

Protocols of Zion

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Protocols of Zion is a 2005 documentary film by Jewish filmmaker Marc Levin about a resurgence of antisemitism in the United States in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks. Armed with his camera and appearing on screen along with his subjects, Levin engages in a free-for-all dialogue with Arab Americans, Black nationalists, evangelists, White nationalists, Kabbalist rabbis, Holocaust survivors, and Frank Weltner, the founder of Jew Watch web site.

Levin's film draws its inspiration from an encounter he had in a New York taxi not long after 9/11, in which his driver, an Egyptian immigrant, made the claim that the Jews had been warned not to go to work at the World Trade Center on the day of the attack. He then said that "it's all written in the book," referring to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a 1903 book purporting to disclose the Jews' master plan to rule the world. Discredited as a hoax by The Times of London in 1921,[1] The Protocols provided a crucial influence on Hitler's world views, and had fuelled hatred, violence, and ultimately genocide attempts through the first half of the twentieth century. Ads for the film show two stacks of books, visibly entitled Protocols of Zion, with smoke billowing out of the top portion of the left-hand stack. This looks much like actual pictures of the World Trade Center as the fire raged through it.