[Nigel Mace]

Your humanity, Charlie, was not in question - though Trump's certainly is. It was the character and reality of your fears that were at issue. I'm not sure what your restaurant encounter has to do with my point, but, for the record, I do know of the subjects of whom we speak. I've worked with and for asylum seekers and personally pledged myself for one, a neighbour in an English city. He was a Muslim, law abiding, sincere and utterly without anything - except good intentions - and would have been an ideal victim in Trumpist sights. He was a victim, first, of islamisist terror - to the loss of his wife and children - and then, shamefully, of the xenophobic paramoia of the British state and of the reactions of a poisoned British public. Exactly the polity that exults in the isolationist insanity of Brexit and sounds all too familiar in the ranks of Trump's followers.

I'll say it again - 1984, The Plot Against America and Quake, Quake, Quake - we read it there, there and there first.

[Andrew Frisardi]

The poem below is longish, but I felt it was more than worthwhile to type it up. It was published in Muir’s The Narrow Place, during WWII, in 1943. He was there, one of the great witnesses to that time.

The Refugees
by Edwin Muir

A crack ran through our hearthstone long ago,
And from the fissure we watched gently grow
The tame domesticated danger,
Yet lived in comfort in our haunted rooms.
Till came the Stranger
And the great and the little dooms.

We saw the homeless waiting in the street
Year after year,
The always homeless,
Nationless and nameless,
To whose bare roof-trees never come
Peace and the house martin to make a home.
We did not fear
A wrong so dull and old,
So patiently told and patiently retold,
While we sat by the fire or in the window-seat.
Oh what these suffered in dumb animal patience,
That we now suffer,
While the world’s brow grows darker and the world’s hand rougher.
We hear the lot of nations,
Of times and races,
Because we watched the wrong
Last too long
With non-committal faces.
Until from Europe’s sunset hill
We saw our houses falling
Wall after wall behind us.
What could blind us
To such self-evident ill
And all the sorrows from their caverns calling?

This is our punishment. We came
Here without blame, yet with blame,
Dark blame of others, but our blame also.
This stroke was bound to fall,
Though not to fall so.
A few years did not waste
The heaped up world. The central pillar fell
Moved by no living hand. The good fields sickened
By long infection. Oh this is the taste
Of evil done long since and always, quickened
No one knows how
While the red fruit hung ripe upon the bough
And fell at last and rotted where it fell.

For such things homelessness is ours
And shall be others’. Tenement roofs and towers
Will fall upon the kind and the unkind
Without election,
For deaf and blind
Is rejection bred by rejection
Breeding rejection,
And where no counsel is what will be will be.
We must shape here a new philosophy.

[Andrew Mandelbaum]

Originally Posted by Charlie Southerland

Is it not also true that most of 1930's Arabia were Nazi sympathizers at the least and combatants against the allies during WWII? And that the children and grandchildren of the Arab Semitic tribes are leading the caliphate against the Israelis, not to mention the West? Why would any sane person take their children in only to have them blow up Americans or Brits when they are old enough to do so? I'm sure there would be an outcry if we wished to convert these kids to Christianity. I'm just as sure they'd be raised with their religion of peace inside the mosques of America and England. It's the natural thing for snowflakes to see to it. Jihadis in training. Great.

It is bits like this Charlie that give the lie to your pretense of reasoned decency on here. You dismiss whole people groupings within early 20th century Palestine, the entire experience of the secular Arabs of the region as well as the Sufis and the other Islams. All Palestinians were not clones of the Mufti Of Jerusalem anymore than all Jewish settlers were supportive of Deir Yassin or the bombing of the King David Hotel. You haven't even come clean with the genocidal colonial enterprise your own states are built upon, maybe stay out of the pain of peoples you don't seem to have any comprehension of. Or at least read some actual poets and thinkers on the situation. Arendt's The Jew as Pariah has some essays by an early Zionist that have proved some clear sighted that her predictions on 1948 could have been written today. Really. That was a serious vile bit about the refugee children. You should be ashamed to write those words.

[Charlie Southerland]

Yeah, I know, Andrew. It's not like home grown terrorists have ever attacked and killed innocent Americans in America before. I am ashamed.

[Andrew Mandelbaum]

Originally Posted by Julie Steiner

Andrew M., I don't consider critiques of religious beliefs themselves (rather than critiques of the people who hold them) to be pot shots--particularly when some participants in a discussion are voluntarily bringing their personal religious views into that discussion.

If people don't want their religious views to get paintballed, they shouldn't wave them about while playing paintball.

To me, though, there's a significant difference between saying "Your belief system is flawed, because..." and "You are stupid, because..." The first is a discussion of an idea, and the second is an insult. The first has at least some--however slight--chance of convincing someone to concede a point or two. The second doesn't. No one has ever said, "Oh, yes, I see now--I really am stupid. Thanks for bringing it to my attention."

In all fairness Julie, I appreciate what you are saying. But what exactly is stupidness if it can't be applied to the willing embrace of alt facts to feed an ideological need for an exclusionary them? These are dangerously violent ideas that historically lead to bloodshed and misery of every kind. When, in fact, does anyone clinging against all odds to beliefs like these that they believe are God inspired and integrated into their identity. For years I have shared with groups large and small and almost never the choir. I have seen conversions but always from those with a desperate commitment to empathy above all else. They were the only ones with the courage to let go their theologies and dare to look at strangers and see them as fellow humans even at the cost of their own securities in State and Steeple. Once people have let the disease into their thoughts as fully as Charlie has in his Jihadi children post I have never seen dialogue of any kind get through. Face to face confrontation with a blood soaked body of their own makings? Then, a few times. I have given up screaming against the stupidity in order to change it years ago. I scream now to keep the stupidity from changing me.
With respect,
Andrew

[Andrew Mandelbaum]

Originally Posted by Charlie Southerland

Yeah, I know, Andrew. It's not like home grown terrorists have ever attacked and killed innocent Americans in America before. I am ashamed.

You are not even proficient enough in your own theology to get out half a post that doesn't violate the Gospel narratives on the Other or be so clearly at odds with your Calvinism that it is obvious you just can't manage self examination or a coherent argument, Charlie.

"Depart from me. I never knew you."

I wish you your own God and his judgments, from Amos to Mathew.

[Charlie Southerland]

That's not what you are looking for, Andrew. You want everyone to agree with your rants against Trump and if they don't, you wish Hell upon them. Your practice of supremist levitation is amazing. Not unique, but amazing. The fall to earth does hurt though. Experience, man, experience.

[Andrew Mandelbaum]

SHIBBOLETH


Together with my stones,
heavy with weeping
behind the bars,

they dragged me
to the very middle of the market,
the place
where the flag unfurls
to which I would swear no oath.

Flute,
double-flute of the night:
think back to the dark
twin redness
in Vienna and Madrid.

Set your flag at half-mast,
memory.
At half-mast
today and for ever.

Heart:
here too reveal yourself,
here in the midst of the market.
Call it out, the shibboleth,
into the foreignness of your homeland:
February. No pasarán.

Unicorn:
you know of the stones,
you know of the waters,
come,
let me lead you away
to the voices
of Extremadura.


Paul Celan

[Andrew Frisardi]

Andrew does have a point about the religious double-standard, Charlie. You yourself make much of your religious convictions in various threads on this site. So it is natural for the onlooker to ask, given your position on refugee children: What would Jesus say about the Trump refugee policy? Show me where in the Gospels it says to turn away people in desperate need.

In any case Trump’s refugee policy is hypocritical by any standard, religious or not. Syria has been devastated in large part through U.S. policy in the Middle East, under both Bush and Obama, and especially by Putin’s Russia in alliance with Assad, mercilessly bombing Aleppo. The very Putin with whom Trump is going to talk today; and hints have already been given that the sanctions against Russia may be lifted.

How is it possible to square these facts? Dropping sanctions against or at least befriending a country whose brutal and dictatorial policies have much to do with devastating a people’s homeland, which had been thrown into disarray by our invasion of Iraq and the subsequent fallout from that. And then refusing sanctuary to those people, even the children?

What a shameful, cowardly chapter in U.S. history. Do you think, Charlie, that Jesus would applaud Trump on this? Do you really believe that?

p.s. The Celan is powerful, Andrew.

[Charlie Southerland]

It's pretty difficult to bring in refugees, raise them up in mosques under Islam and radical clerics and then expect them to fall in love with American ideals which comes from Christianity, don't you think?

[Julie Steiner says: Sorry, Charlie and others, but I need to point out my first big mistake as moderator. I tried to quote a snippet of Charlie's rather long post #80 and respond to it, but I ended up clicking "Edit Post" rather than "Quote", and thus deleted most of Charlie's original post, except for the snippet I quoted in my response (to quibble with). I thus made my quibbling response (now deleted) look as if Charlie wrote it. My apologies to everyone, especially to Charlie.]