The N. T. Wrong Blog

This video is from Christians For The Praise And Worshipping Of The God Of The Bible Or Else (aka Edward Current):

On May 5, 2008, Khaled Abou El Fadl examined how preconceptions of the ‘oriental’ Islamic have determined the way in which invading American soldiers have abused, tortured and raped Iraqi civilians. He delivers the 2008 Burke Lecture, provided here on YouTube by the video’s rightful owners, University of California Television (58:30):

Happy 4th of July! Remember, do what we say, or we’ll bring democracy to your country.

There’s some interesting reviews in the latest Review of Biblical Literature:

Gregory W. Dawes, Introduction to the Bible, New Collegeville Bible Commentary (2007)

Do you ever get asked, by a general non-specialist reader of the Bible, for an introduction to the Bible that you would recommend to them? Faced with a choice of thrusting a lengthy JJ Collins Intro on them, or the like (which would be too long, and will drown their enthusiasm), or some shorter work (which they will read, but which you cringe about), the question can be a problem. But now Gregory Dawes’ 80-page introduction to the Bible provides a robust and thoroughly readable book that will stimulate beginners while not shirking the deeper issues involved. This book is perfect for its target audience! From the book’s own blurb: “To rescue Bible readers and students from turning their initial enthusiasm into boredom, Gregory Dawes gives us this Introduction to the Bible, the indispensable prologue to the entire series of the New Collegeville Bible Commentary. Dividing the contents into two parts, the author first describes how the Old and New Testaments came to be put together, and then explores how their stories have been interpreted over the centuries.”

Maria Gorea, Job: ses précurseurs et ses épigones ou comment faire du nouveau avec de l’ancien
(2007)

Gorea explores the complex relationship between other ancient Near Eastern traditions about the just sufferer and the book of Job. Crenshaw likes it very much, considering it does a fine job of setting out the issues, engaging mainly with the primary texts rather than the secondary literature: “For me, this book was a pleasure to read. Every student of the biblical Job should keep it close at hand, for it beautifully traces a compelling philosophical theme through three millennia.”

Cheng, Jack and Marian Feldman, editors, Ancient Near Eastern Art in Context: Studies in Honor of Irene J. Winter by Her Students. Culture and History of the Ancient Near East, 26 (2007)

Contains 21 essays from 20 authors, in honour of Irene Winter.
- Cheng and Feldman provide 3 introductory chapters
- I Ziffer on crowns from Nahal Mishmar
- Ö Harmansah on orthostats in MB, LB, IA
- S Reed on the depiction of enemies in Assyrian art, esp Ashurbanipal’s relief
- A Shaffer on the ideology of Assyrian royal monuments at the periphery
- T Ornan on the increasingly godlike imagery for Sennacherib
- E Denel on how IA Charchemesh reliefs reinforced the status of rulers
- T Tanyeri-Erdemir on the relation between Uraritian temple architecture and royal ideology
- J Aker on hierarchical portrayal of workers in Ashurbanipal’s lion hunt relief
- M Feldman on the Mesopotamian roots of Darius I’s ‘heroizing’ style
- M Atac on Akkadian ‘divine radiance’ (mellamu), with parallels from Greece
- C Suter on how to detect high priestesses in Mesopotamia
- T Sharlach on how to identify an archive of texts as belonging to a woman
- J Assante on Middle Assyrian pornographic depictions of foreigners
- A Cohen on barley in Mesopotamia
- A Winitzer on melilot (Deut 23.26) as “eating one’s fill”, not the usual “grain of wheat”
- J Cheng on objects (vases, etc) which depict themselves
- A Gansell on bridal adornments in ancient Mesopotamia and modern Syria
- B Studevent-Hickman on the 90-degree rotation of the cuneiform script

Maeir considers, all up, their quality is such that they provide a fitting tribute to Winter.

U2 lead singer and anti-poverty activist, Bono received the NAACP Chairman’s Award on March 2, 2007. The pesentation by Tyra Banks and Julian Bond (0:00ff) and Bono’s speech ( 4:40ff ) were broadcast at the 38th NAACP Image Awards.

It’s available, appropriately, on GodTube - and Bono’s speech is well worth a watch if you haven’t seen it before.

There is half a bible verse that is widely quoted against atheists by some (foolish) Christians. It’s very popular amongst American evangelicals:

“The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no god.’ “
- Psalm 14.1

Of course, there were no atheists in the ancient Levant. There were none who had no belief in one god or the other. Every man and woman said ‘There is a god’. So what did the verse mean? Well, you only have to read to the end of the verse: “They are corrupt, they do abominable deeds; there is no one who does good.” The fool is the one who (even though they may confess belief in God) ignores or abuses the poor. The fool is the one who acts as if (in their own hearts) there is no “god”, that is, who acts as if it doesn’t matter what happens to the poor.

“The fool” of Psalm 14 is not the atheist. “The fool” is the American evangelical who is happy to live in a system which systematically rapes the poor.

In the context of Psalm 14, America is full of atheists.

“During the Seventh Crusade, led by St. Louis, Yves le Breton reported how he once encountered an old woman who wandered down the street with a dish full of fire in her right hand and a bowl full of water in her left hand. Asked why she carried the two bowls, she answered that with the fire she would burn up Paradise until nothing remained of it, and with the water she would put out the fires of Hell until nothing remained of them: “Because I want no one to do good in order to receive the reward of Paradise, or from fear of Hell; but solely out of love for God.” Today, this properly Christian ethical stance survives mostly in atheism.”
- Slavoj Žižek, ‘Defenders of the Faith’, New York Times Op-Ed, March 12, 2006

In Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (London: Profile Books, 2008), Slavoj Žižek’s engages in a series of discussions on violence. Of particular interest is his engagement with the concept of “divine violence” and the book of Job.

Žižek makes a central distinction throughout his book between the highly visible individual instances of “subjective” violence and the symbolic and systemic forms of “objective violence”:

“At the forefront of our minds, the obvious signals of violence are acts of crime and terror, civil unrest, international conflict. But we should learn to step back, to disentangle ourselves from the fascinating lure of this directly visible ‘subjective’ violence, violence performed by a clearly identifiable agent. We need to perceive the contours of the background which generates such outbursts” (p. 1).

In addition to visible, subjective violence are the other invisible forms that violence takes:

(2) symbolic violence, the result of the imposition of a universe of meaning by language; and

(3) systemic violence, “the often catastrophic consequences of the smooth functioning of our economic and political systems” (p. 1).

For Žižek, subjective and objective forms of violence cannot be viewed from the same angle or standpoint, but require a sort of parallax view - a view from two quite incommensurable standpoints. While subjective violence appears as a disruption of the ‘normal’, peaceful state of things, objective violence “is precisely the violence inherent to this ‘normal’ state of things”. But if we fail to take this invisible objective violence of the system into account, we cannot make sense of what otherwise would appear as “irrational” explosions of subjective violence.

Žižek demonstrates that any understanding of subjective violence is inherently political by adducing some horrific examples (that fail to sufficiently horrify, due to one’s political standpoint). As one example, Žižek observes the lack of humanitarian uproar at Time Magazine’s documentation of the death of 4 million people in the Congo. This contrasts with the considerable humanitarian uproar at the plight of Muslim women. And again:

“The death of a West Bank Palestinian child, not to mention an Israeli or an American, is mediatically worth thousands of times more than the death of a nameless Congolese” (p. 3).

Žižek notes that there is something “inherently mystifying about the confrontation with violence”, the horror of the event overpowering our thinking, making cold analysis of violence somehow complicit in the violence itself - aiding and abetting after the fact. Adorno famously wrote, “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric”. But Žižek would reverse Adorno’s formulation:

“Realistic prose fails, where the poetic evocation of the unbearable atmosphere of a camp succeeds … poetry is always, by definition, ‘about’ something that cannot be addressed directly, only alluded to” (p. 4).

Žižek’s final chapter addresses the subject of “divine violence”. On the one hand, Žižek believes that divine violence reveals the breaking point of objective violence. The phenomenon of “divine justice” consists of “brutal intrusions of justice beyond law” (p. 151). So in Walter Benjamin’s description of Klee’s painting Angelus Novus, while “we perceive a chain of events”, Benjamin observes that the angel “sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.” For Žižek, divine violence is precisely the wild intervention of this angel to stop the systemic violence which the piling wreckage of the past represents - a wreckage which is invisible to us mortals participating in the midst of the game:

“And what if divine violence is the wild intervention of this angel? Seeing the pile of debris which grows skyward, this wreckage of injustices, from time to time he strikes back to restore the balance, to enact a revenge for the destructive impact of ‘progress’. Couldn’t the entire history of humanity be seen as a growing normalisation of injustice, entailing the nameless and faceless suffering of millions? Somewhere, in the sphere of the ‘divine’, perhaps these injustices are not forgotten. They are accumulated, the wrongs are registered, the tension grows more and more unbearable, till divine violence explodes in a retaliatory destructive rage” (p. 152).

Yet, this sudden reversal of the wreckage is entirely meaningless, ungrounded. It serves no ‘underlying justice’; it restores no hidden equilibrium. All that the occurrence of divine justice signals is the inevitable injustice of a world which is “out of joint” (p. 169). It is merely an outburst, and furthermore “there is no big Other guaranteeing its divine nature”.

The other form of divine violence is divine caprice. This caprice is typified by the God of Job:

“Opposite such a violent enforcement of justice stands the figure of divine violence as unjust, as an explosion of divine caprice whose exemplary case is, of course, that of Job. After Job is hit by calamities, his theological friends come, offering interpretations which render these calamities meaningful. The greatness of Job is not so much to protest his innocence as to insist on the meaninglessness of his calamities. When God finally appears, he affirms Job’s position against the theological defenders of the faith” (p. 152).

While God does defend Job against his friends who want to apply their systematic theology to Job, there is a complexity to God’s response which Žižek does not adequately exploit. For while God condemns Job’s friends for their false proclamations about the ‘meaning’ of Job’s suffering (the suffering is meaningless, and so the friends blaspheme God by attributing the divine with meaning-making), God also faults Job for enquiring whether there is any fault in God. The book of Job denies that any mortal has the capacity to engage with God, on his level. The protest tradition elsewhere in the Hebrew scriptures is undermined in the book of Job. The book of Job denies the ability of a righteous Abraham or a righteous Moses (Genesis 18, Numbers 14) to bargain with God as would an advocate in the divine court. God has become completely transcendent of humanity in the book of Job. The protest of a righteous man has been reduced to “Why?” and the divine reply has been reduced to “Because!” Anything more which is said by either man or God would deny the utter freedom (arbitrariness) of divine justice that the book of Job wishes to defend. Unlike the God of “divine violence” who puts a stop to the invisible piling wreckage of the system of law, the God of “divine caprice” can point to anything in the world as being in accordance with the purposes of God. The example of God’s capricious purpose in the book of Job is of course a wager that Job will curse him when his family, property and body are destroyed. The caprice lies in God’s use of a particular injustice (against Job, his family) in the service of a universal idea of God’s justice. Such a God can only be the exemplar of the unjust totalitarian system itself, not the irruption of justice into the system of violence.

Žižek’s comments are on the mark concerning Job’s own (despairing, ignorant) poetic speeches, but not concerning the (masterful, all-knowing) poetry of God’s own speeches. Both allude to something that cannot be uttered (Job 9.14-15; 40.4-5), but only God’s speech claims that somewhere, in the divine sphere, meaning can be uttered (by God, and only for God). The speech of God is a false sublime, and faux poetry, wherein God’s theophanic appeal to ‘the indescribable’ employs the universal as an instrument to defend the specific injustice of the event which is represented by the divine wager.

So while Žižek’s comments about resistance to meaning-making are certainly correct in respect of Job’s own speeches, the book of Job also provides the highest defence of meaning-making. While Job himself concludes from all appearances that injustice reigns, the God of Job attempts to defend a justice that goes beyond any appearance humankind can behold. But the reality is in the appearances:

“This resistance to meaning is crucial when we are confronting potential or actual catastrophes, from AIDS and ecological disaster to the Holocaust: they refuse ‘deeper meaning’. This legacy of Job prevents us from taking refuge in the standard transcendent figure of God as a secret Master who knows the meaning of what appears to us as meaningless catastrophe, the God who sees the entire picture in which what we perceive as a stain contributes to global harmony … Is there a whole which can teleologically justify and thus redeem or sublate an event such as the Holocaust? Christ’s death on the cross surely means one should unreservedly drop the notion of God as a transcendent caretaker who guarantees the happy outcome of our acts, i.e., who enforces historical teleology. Christ’s death on the cross is in itself the death of this protecting God. It is a repetition of Job’s stance: it refuses any ‘deeper meaning’ that might cover up the brutal reality of historical catastrophes” (p. 153).

The meaninglessness can be contrasted with the reaction of right-wing Christians Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson to the 9/11 bombings. These right-wing Christians viewed the events of 9/11 as a sign that “God had lifted his protection from the United States because of the sinful lives of Americans. They blamed hedonist materialism, liberalism and rampant sexuality, and claimed that America had got what it deserved” (p. 155).

“The fact that the very same condemnation of liberal America voiced by the Muslim Other also came from the heart of l’Amérique profonde should give us pause for reflection” (p. 155).

The Hollywood productions released for the fifth anniversary of 9/11, United 93 and World Trade Center, also attempt the same quest for meaning where there is none. They “want to read the 9/11 catastrophe as a blessing in disguise, as a divine intervention which has served to waken America from its moral slumber and to bring out the best in its people.”

“WTC ends with the offscreen words which spell out its message: terrible events, like the destruction of the Twin Towers, bring out the worst AND the best in people – courage, solidarity, sacrifice for the community. People are shown able to do things they never imagined” (p. 155).

The book of Job denies that there can be any umpire between a human and God, any intermediary able to bridge the unbridgeable gap between the human and divine. It denies that there can be any Christ - both man and God. The book of Job is the quintessentially anti-Christian work of the Old Testament. Against the Christian claim, it asserts the transcendent, apophatic reality of God, a God who does not have reasons to act for humankind, who does not oppose chaos, but instead includes the forces of chaos within himself. While the climax to the book of Job insinuates that this transcendence hides some secret purpose-for-humankind as part of creation, does not such a God exclude the possibility of meaning, of some definable ultimate principle of justice?

“When people imagine all kinds of deeper meanings … what really frightens them is that they will lose their transcendent God. This is the God who guarantees the meaning of the universe, the God who is a hidden master pulling all strings” (pp. 156-157).

Žižek, developing a point made by G. K. Chesterton, offers the Incarnation as the death of the concept of a transcendent God who hides cosmic meaning within himself. But the book of Job had already put an end to cosmic meaning, by heightening God’s very transcendence. The God of Job entertains only one horn of Euthyphro’s dilemma, freedom. And so God becomes pure arbitrariness, pure caprice, and so complete and radical absence of meaning and justice.

There’s some interesting reviews in the latest Review of Biblical Literature:

Carleen R. Mandolfo, Daughter Zion Talks Back to the Prophets: A Dialogic Theology of the Book of Lamentations (2007)

Uses Buber, Bakhtin, feminist, postcolonial theories to address Lamentations. Who says Theory is dead? The blurb says that the book “offers a new theological reading of the book of Lamentations by putting the female voice of chapters 1–2 into dialogue with the divine voice of prophetic texts in which God represents the people Israel as his wife and indicts them/her for being unfaithful to him. In Lamentations 1–2 we hear the “wife” talk back, and from her words we get an entirely different picture of the conflict showcased through this marriage metaphor.”

Rivka Ulmer and Lieve M. Teugels, editors,
Midrash and Context: Proceedings of the 2004 and 2005 SBL Consultation on Midrash (2007)

You get seven papers for your bucks here, by Jason Kalmon, Matthew Kraus, Joshua L. Moss, Annette Yoshika Reed, Elke Tönges, W. David Nelson, Rivka Ulmer. A number of the papers draw comparisons between Rabbinic and Patristic exegesis. There’s one on orality and one on magic.

Klaus-Peter Adam, Saul und David in der judäischen Geschichtsschreibung: Studien zu 1 Samuel 16-2 Samuel 5 (2007)

The author thinks that the traditions in Samuel were not written before the seventh century, and continued to be written and developed until the Hellenistic era. The reviewer, Walter Dietrich, is dismayed at such a verdict. Dietrich thinks it must be some of that postmodernist gobbledegook. According to Dietrich, Adam must have missed “the obvious possibility that the figure of Saul is anchored in the genuine northern Israelite tradition”. Adam shows how events in Samuel were written so as to anticipate the traditions in the book of Kings. It’s all a bit speculative for Dietrich’s taste. Adam’s literary analysis is rather lost on a reviewer who probably would have preferred to see endless divisions of individual verses into speculative stages of redaction and even more speculative historical reconstructions based on those speculative stages of redaction. Adam’s book looks most worthwhile.

Ellens, J. Harold, editor,
The Destructive Power of Religion: Violence in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (2007)

J. Harold Ellens and friends (including Jack Miles and Walter Wink) provide a series of pieces dealing with the violence in the Bible and other Abrahamic religions.

Leo G. Perdue, Wisdom Literature: A Theological History (2007)

Leo Perdue presents an overview of the history of wisdom as a theological category by examining texts from the Hebrew Bible.

I spotted this on Jim West’s blog.

“Two Christian preachers were stopped from handing out Bible extracts by police because they were in a Muslim area, it was claimed yesterday. They say they were told by a Muslim police community support officer that they could not preach there and that attempting to convert Muslims to Christianity was a hate crime. The community officer is also said to have told the two men: ‘You have been warned. If you come back here and get beat up, well, you have been warned.’”
- thisislondon.co.uk

The right to free speech has been under attack since September 2001, with an increasing amount of ‘anti-terrorist’, ’state secrecy’, ‘defamation’, and ‘media censorship’ laws. The police will, on top of this, frequently overstep the power given to them. And this is what occurred here. 

If there are Muslims in the United Kingdom who cannot deal with an American Christian missionary giving out bible tracts on an open street corner, I say send them even more Christian missionaries! Keep sending them until they can recite the Four Spiritual Laws by memory!! The thing about free speech is that, given enough of it, you will find you can just ignore the dumb stuff that you’re not interested in. Easy, huh?

Rebecca Lesses has been right to call for the continued freedom of expression and operation of the Israeli Academy. Her call is in opposition to the recent totalitarian action of the University and College Union’s Congress, which recently passed the motion to boycott Israeli academics. Such a boycott is a stupid and misguided confusion of the people who live in this part of the Levant (and are furthering academic knowledge) with the political hegemony of the modern nationalist State. While I am not so naive as to imagine the Academy is fully independent of the State, I am also firmly against such a blunt instrument as the boycott which has naively equated the two. In a terrible and totalising irony, the University and College Union’s Congress has simply accepted the hegemony of the modern nation-state, rather than recognising the forces which always challenge that hegemony (including, especially, voices within the Academy itself). As such, the actions of the University and College Union’s Congress is nothing less than the method of terrorism and totalitarianism.

For the same reasons, Norman Finkelstein’s detainment, interrogation, and 10-year banning from Palestine (not only Israel) should be loudly opposed. It is another act of totalitarianism by a country which–and it bears repeating–should know better. There is no justification to silence the voices of dissent, whether one agrees with them or not.

US academic Norman Finkelstein denied entry to Israel
By Jean Shaoul
31 May 2008

Professor Norman Finkelstein, an American Jewish scholar known for his trenchant criticism of Israeli policy, was detained and interrogated by Israel’s security forces, Shin Bet, for 24 hours at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion airport on May 23, denied entry into Israel and deported back to Amsterdam where he had been lecturing.

Finkelstein had been en route to visit a friend in Hebron in the occupied West Bank. His deportation, and a 10-year ban on entering Israel for “security reasons,” is a major attack on the freedom of expression, the right of Israeli citizens to hear alternative viewpoints, and an attempt to intimidate and silence international opposition to Israel’s brutal treatment of the Palestinians.

It also exposes the fraud of any putative Palestinian state where Israel controls the Palestinian borders and thus who may or may not enter.

Finkelstein, a son of Holocaust survivors, is one of a growing number of Jewish scholars who have made valuable contributions to the study of Israeli history and have become known as the “new” or “revisionist” historians. He has consequently been the focus of constant opposition from right-wing professors and the pro-Israeli media for years. He has been targeted in particular for his opposition to the charge of anti-Semitism being employed as a means of suppressing criticism of Israel’s violations of human rights and international law.

The 55-year-old political science professor is best known for his 2000 book, The Holocaust Industry, which argues that the Holocaust has been exploited for ends—support for Israel and calls for reparations—that have nothing to do with historical truth or the victims of the Nazi genocide. Finkelstein has also written critical studies of Daniel Goldhagen’s book, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, which argues that the cause of the Holocaust can be located in the inherent anti-Semitism of the German people as a whole.

His most recent book, Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History, continues on these themes, as well as documenting in detail the human rights violations of the state of Israel. Among the targets of the book, published by the University of California Press, are Harvard law Professor Alan Dershowitz and others who have used the charge of anti-Semitism to suppress criticism of Israeli policies.

Last year, Finkelstein was denied tenure at Chicago’s DePaul University where he had been lecturing for six years, despite support from his department, his students, and the faculty of the university, following pressure from opponents of his views, including Dershowitz. His classes for his final year in 2007-08 were cancelled and he was denied access to his office, leading him to resign under duress.

After landing in Tel Aviv last Friday, Shin Bet held Finkelstein in an airport cell and interrogated him about contacts with Hezbollah—against whom Israel fought a massive 33-day aerial bombardment in 2006—whether Hezbollah had sent him to Israel, any contacts he had with Al Qaeda and how he intended to finance his stay in Israel.

Earlier this year, Finkelstein had visited Lebanon, where he had been invited to speak at a conference at the American University in Beirut. He also undertook a tour in order to promote his book, accompanied by his Arab publisher and representatives of Hezbollah in the south of Lebanon. He has subsequently published articles about his trip.

Finkelstein’s web site posts excerpts from an interview he gave in January to Lebanese TV, in which he said he was “happy to meet the Hizbollah people because it is a point of view rarely heard in the US.”

Shin Bet’s line of questioning insinuates that Finkelstein is a supporter of Hezbollah, if not in their employ. Moreover to imply he is also connected to Al Qaeda is yet more absurd, particularly since Hezbollah is a a Shiite party while Al-Qaeda is a Sunni Muslim grouping.

The Shin Bet said Finkelstein “is not permitted to enter Israel because of suspicions involving hostile elements in Lebanon” and because he “did not give a full accounting to interrogators with regard to these suspicions.”

Finkelstein denied this in an emailed statement to Israel’s Ha’aretz newspaper from Amsterdam. He wrote, “I did my best to provide absolutely candid and comprehensive answers to all the questions put to me. I am confident that I have nothing to hide. Apart from my political views, and the supporting scholarship, there isn’t much more to say for myself: alas, no suicide missions or secret rendezvous with terrorist organizations.” He added, “I support the two-state solution based on the ’67 borders and I told my interrogators I’m not an enemy of Israel.”

He explained that he was “en route to Palestine to see one of my oldest and dearest friends, Musa Abu-Hashhash.”

Finkelstein said he had visited Israel every year for the last 15 years. He added that he was held in a cell and encountered “several unpleasant moments with the guards.” Eventually he used a mobile phone belonging to another detainee and called another friend he had arranged to meet in Israel, the journalist Allan Nairn, who called a lawyer, Michael Sfard. Sfard met with Finkelstein and told him he could appeal the ban. He said that banning Finkelstein from entering the country “recalls the behaviour of the Soviet bloc countries.”

However, Finkelstein said that it was not “his inclination to pursue the matter,” although lawyers in Israel were encouraging him to do so on political grounds.

According to the Jerusalem Post, Finkelstein said he is not “dogmatic or fanatic” and while he believes every country has the right to restrict entry, he does not agree with the criteria. “Just as I would oppose the US not allowing people to enter due to ideological beliefs, I would consistently oppose them in Israel,” he said.

He also denied that he poses any threat to Israel. “I couldn’t be [a risk] because of any security threat I pose,” said Finkelstein. “The US has as stringent anti-terrorism laws in the books as Israel, and Hamas and Hezbollah are on their terrorist list. If I posed a security threat I should be talking to you from jail. Because no authorities have contacted me there are no grounds for it.”

Finkelstein did not intend to visit Israel, but had to pass through Israeli customs “by force of circumstance,” to visit a friend in Hebron. “Israel has the right to restrict who enters its country, but the West Bank is not its country,” said Finkelstein. “One day the Palestinian Authority may restrict my rights, but that’s an issue for the Palestinian Authority,” he continued.

Israel’s Association for Civil Rights called the deportation of Finkelstein an assault on free speech. “The decision to prevent someone from voicing their opinions by arresting and deporting them is typical of a totalitarian regime. A democratic state, where freedom of expression is the highest principle, does not shut out criticism or ideas just because they are uncomfortable for its authorities to hear. It confronts those ideas in public debate,” said the association’s lawyer, Oded Peler.

The decision to deport Finkelstein stands in marked contrast to Israel’s willingness to permit the entry of right-wing fascistic and religious zealots from the US and Russia who have been involved in all manner of provocative, criminal and murderous attacks on Palestinians—into both Israel and the West Bank.

The refusal to allow Finkelstein to enter Israel is particularly telling since Israel legally permits every Jew to exercise his or her right to live in Israel as a citizen of the country, in contrast to the Palestinians who fled their homes in 1948 and 1967 who are refused entry or the right of return, in accordance with the Law of Return that is fundamental to the Zionist state. It demonstrates that the security force reserves to itself the right to interpret the law as it sees fit. Israel is a home to diaspora Jews only providing that they do not criticise its military expansionism and oppression of the Palestinian people.

The ban on an academic critical of Israeli policy is all the more noteworthy because Israel likes to portray itself as a beacon of democracy in the region. In reality Finkelstein is not the first to be barred from entering the country: Israel regularly stops pro-Palestinian academics and peace activists from entering Israel who go to show support for Palestinian activists.

It also demonstrates the degree to which Shin Bet’s operations and decisions are not subject to judicial oversight. Israeli lawyers say that the chances of overturning Shin Bet’s ban on Finkelstein are slim. According to Ha’aretz, the courts do not intervene when Shin Bet decides that someone constitutes a security risk. Immigration authorities can prevent tourists entering the country, without even having to provide an explanation.

A Ha’aretz editorial opined, “Considering his unusual and extremely critical views, one cannot avoid the suspicion that refusing to allow him to enter Israel was a punishment rather than a precaution.”

“The Shin Bet argues that Finkelstein constitutes a security risk. But it is more reasonable to assume that Finkelstein is persona non grata and that the Shin Bet, whose influence has increased to frightening proportions, latched onto his meetings with Hezbollah operatives in order to punish him,” the editorial continued (emphasis added).

The attack on a liberal critic of Israel reflects a degree of desperation on the part of Israel. Faced with international opprobrium and internal dissent due to its brutal treatment of the Palestinians and bellicosity towards Iran, Israel is using its security forces to stifle opposition and to maintain the political hegemony of the financial and corporate elite in Tel Aviv and Washington.

If Israel’s liberal press was moved to express concern about the decision to deport Finkelstein, then that is more than can be said for the press in the West. His treatment went almost unreported in the United States. In particular the New York Times did not mention the exclusion of one of New York’s most well known residents.

In Britain, the Guardian reported it, but without an editorial or op-ed comment. It later published two letters. The first was from Dershowitz, which devoted more space to justifying the decision to deny tenure to Finkelstein because of his lack of scholarship and professionalism than to opposing Israel’s decision to ban him. The second was from the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre, which claimed that Israel’s decision was entirely legitimate.

The silence of the liberal press speaks volumes about their attitude to basic democratic rights and the freedom of expression. Silence denotes consent. They do not criticise Israel’s actions because they agree with them.

In the book of Job, God teamed up with Satan to deliberately bring evil to Job, his family and possessions.

The partnership worked surprisingly well. One might even say that it was a raging success. The defence of divine justice was taken to a whole new level. Does God do evil? No — we just can’t understand his mysterious ways. The more satanic the actions of God, the greater the mystery of His Transcendence. Brilliant.

And the God-Satan Accord provided a blueprint for God’s future involvement with the world (at least according to the Enochic and Christian accounts). After the success of the wager over Job, God and Satan entered into a long-term partnership. God has never looked back. And Satan’s importance in the cosmos was elevated to such an extent, that it was only right that he be given an upper-case ‘S’. So ‘the satan’ became Satan, Lord of Evil, Prince of Darkness. All this might seem like a slightly difficult move for a non-dualistic God to effect. Yet, despite the risk of some angel or mokiach protesting ‘what a facade!’, God has been inseparably (and somewhat unequally) yoked to Satan from this time forth.

Now, the Divine-Satanic Accord was originally only intended to last for a few generations. But, sure enough, 70 years soon becomes 490 years; a ‘generation’ soon becomes an aeon… I don’t blame God. Being able to blame evil on Satan is a great idea, even if it necessitates that we conveniently ‘forget’ about the obvious weakness (er … the whole shallow facade thing).

But God may have overplayed his hand with the Holocaust.

Yehuda Bauer thinks so:

“For me, the existence of God after the Holocaust is impossible from a moral point of view. It makes belief in God a vast problem, quantitatively and qualitatively. One and a half million children - of the Chosen People - under the age of thirteen were murdered! This is not a question of free choice because the children didn’t have any free choice. It is the Nazis who had the free choice, not the children. So if there is a God that in one way or another controls the destiny of the world - even if that God retires and does not wish to do it, he can and he knows; otherwise he’s not a God. He’s responsible for the murder - no way out. No answer, human or divine, is satisfactory for the murder of one and a half million children - and if there is an answer from high above, then it is the answer of Satan, and rather than believe in Satan, I will not believe.”
- Being a Secular/Humanistic Jew in Israel

Rebecca Lesses doesn’t think belief in God is “impossible”, but she agrees that God (if he really was in partnership with Satan over the Holocaust) has become a Satanic God.

“I don’t come to the same conclusion that Bauer does - that it is impossible to believe in God after the Holocaust - but I agree with him that if one believes that God permitted the Holocaust to occur, that one believes in a Satanic God.”
- McCain repudiates Hagee - when will Jewish leaders follow?

I think it’s time to call “facade!!” on God.