Explosions, Theology, Hatred and Druggies on U.S. Payroll – Our Middle East Policy

Today’s New York Times, like so often before, offers a microcosmic view of U.S. policy in the Middle East and around the world like nothing else seems to be able to do. Lets start with the headlines, shall we?  They are not pretty today.

In this story, Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of the President of Afghanistan and a major opium dealer in that country has just been revealed as an alleged reciepient of U.S. intelligence payments.  He is on the CIA payroll.  Great! Who else is on that payroll, Beelzebub?

Lets move on.  There is plenty of terror and death to read about.

In another story involving our ever -evolving policy for Afghanistan, it seems that Obama’s White House is now trying to gin up a strategy where American troops protect about ten Afghan population centers from violent overthrew by the Taliban – Al Qaeda – ‘Arab-bad guy-whatever’ network that keeps killing people over there.  The story is here.

This is incredibly naive and backward on the part of us Americans.

Let me clue everybody into a little secret.  This is called blackmail by violence.  The entire Mediterranean area is rife with this and has been since long before Jesus of Nazareth walked through Palestine. This is a way of life.

We just do not seem to get this over on this side of the ocean.

It is the way a violent minority exercises its power in the Middle East and in the greater Mediterranean area.  The Romans learned it from the Greeks who learned from the Macedonians. The Macedonians learned it from the Babylonians and the Assyrians before them.  The Assyrians and Babylonians learned it from the Sumerians before them….before that…we do not know.  There was no written record.

The Jews of Jesus’ time used it on all of their five occupiers over their nations’ biblical history and the modern day Zionists used it on the British when Palestine was a British protectorate before Israel was born.  The Palestinians used it on the British also.  They are not free from murder either. It is a way of life over there. 

We need to start developing a deep understanding of the Mediterranean cultural mindset.  It ain’t pretty.

Group murder in a horrible fashion is an ancient negotiation technique used all over the ancient world. If you do not like what is going on, you get a bunch of guns, marshall your thugs together and kill some people. Even Jesus dealt with this.

Do you remember from Bible class the name of Judas Iscariot, the Apostle of Jesus who betrayed him in the Garden of Gethsemane?  (That would be Religion Class if you went to Catholic school). Do you know what "Judas Iscariot" means? 

"Iscarii" means loosely "men of the dagger" or in modern terms "assassins".  Judas was an assassin and a member of the secret sect called the Iscarii.  They snuck up quietly on Roman soldiers in a Jerusalem crowd and killed them with a dagger, then ran off hiding in the crowd for protection.

Judas Iscariot literally means, "Judas the dagger man". 

Now do you realize how old this technique of intimidation by group murder is?  All of these spectacular murders in the Middle East are just modern versions of Iscarii killing Roman soldiers in a crowd.  It is how they do things over there.  They have done this sort of negotiaton by murder this way for thousands of years. 

We are not going to stop it now by sacrificing nineteen year old kids from Dana, Indiana and Toledo, Ohio and Glenside, Pennsylvania. It is a waste of American lives to think that we can hold back ten thousand years of violent, Middle Eastern culture by sacrificing our own young people to ancient Middle Eastern tribal hatreds.

My mother’s family was from Sicily.  The Siciliani have been using kidnapping and mass murder in the mountains of Sicily for thousands of years.  All of North Africa has this problem of blackmail by violence and group murder.  The French troopers had to deal with this in Algeria during the 1960s when that country’s Arab population rebelled from the French. They left with their tails between their legs.

It is a cultural phenomenon that predates written history.  We just don’t get this.  We are in the dark here.  We have brought a knife to a gun fight.

So let me clue everybody into the reality of the situation.  American troops are not going to stop this group murder, even if they stay there for ten thousand years.  Bring them home now.  We could use the money here. 

And we do not need to sacrifice young soldiers from a democratic republic while they are trying to "protect" Middle Easterners from their own ancient and violent culture.  It ain’t going to happen.  Bring them home!  Their presence will not stop the group murders that are growing every day.  This kind of Middle Eastern tribal violent protest by the aggrieved minority predates Moses.

In this story, "terrorists" attack a U.N. guest house in Kabul and kill more people.  Are you starting to understand now? Virtually everybody over there is a terrorist if you count the people who will stoop to violence to achieve political ends.  It is how the Middle East works.  We are naive to think differently.

In this story, Muslim extremism is spreading across the Indonesian penal code.  They are now going to stone adulterers to death.  And Indonesia up until recently was a modern Islamic state.  Are you starting to understand the fundamentalist and reformist undertone to what is happening in the Muslim world?  Are you starting to realize that troops and bullets are not going to stop this insanity? 

Only a modern, and much more humane version of a Muslim G*d is going to stop this.  We are going to have to create it for them.  They are incapable of creating it themselves apparently.  We are going to have to fight this ancient-based insanity with a new G*d that is acceptable to Muslims. 

We must teach them the more humane parts of their own scripture.  Our survival may depend upon it.

These people are insane but they think they are godly.  We need to teach them otherwise.  They are simply finding a Koranic way to be hateful and base and vengeful against anyone who does not agree with them and their view of ultra-orthodox, super-conservative Wahabist-inspired Islamist insanity and they are growing stronger every day. 

This is why the "letter of the law" is so dangerous when people completely forget the "spirit of G*d" in their lives.  This is the triumph of the Muslim letter of the law over Allah.

Soldiers cannot stop this.  Only theology can.  We are going to have to invent a milder and more loving Muslim G*d and then transplant it into their culture. is there a precedent for this plan? 

Has this ever been done before?  Has a foreign power ever transplanted a more loving G*d into the Middle East in order to stop a world war?

Yes. 

That religion is called Christianity today.  It is a Roman invention, completely and uttlerly in every respect, and it was imposed upon a rebellious and ultra-religionist Hebrew people in the Palestine of Jesus’ day.  They were a threat to Rome because in the time of Jesus, one out of every ten subjects under Roman rule was a Diaspora Jew in farflung reaches of the Empire or a Palestinian Jew. And they hated Rome.  Something had to be done if the rule of reason, the rule of law, was to survive.

Within seventy years of that Roman citizen, Saul of Tarsus (the Apostle Paul) introducing this new version of Judaism to Palestine and the Diaspora Jews in Asia Minor and in Rome itself, Christianity completely undermined a worldwide Jewish rebellion from Roman rule. 

It literally took the fight out of worldwide Jewry and stopped its threatened overthrow of Roman rule in that part of the world.

If you have ever read the Gospels (Palestinian Jews) and Acts (Diaspora Jews) you will notice that Paul of Tarsus makes a big deal of his Roman citizenship every time he is arrested. He is arrested a lot for causing trouble among the Jews of the Diaspora where ever he goes. Why?

He was Saul of Tarsus when he was persecuting members of The Way… as the early Christians were known before the term "Christian" became popular..he became Paul, which means ‘little’ after his ‘conversion’ on the road to Damascus to see the Diaspora Jews there. 

He was required to be brought before a Roman procurator if he had Roman citizenship for his crimes…so he always fell back on that.  Why?

Because he was in the employ of the most popular and powerful Roman Senator of his time, Gauis Calpurnius Piso. ( http://encyclopedia.jrank.org/PIG_POL/PISO.html ).  Piso led the unsuccesful coup against Nero in A.D. 65. Piso was from an old and distinguished Roman family that had been patricians for hundreds of years.  He was the power behind the power.  

Piso came up with the idea of supplanting traditional Temple Judaism with a new Judaism based on Greco-Roman ideas of cosmology, law and order. It was essential that this be done if the Roman system of law was to survive the fundamentalist Jewish threat to their rule. 

The Jews of Jesus time were in open rebellion for over a 150 years by the time Piso was elected to the Roman Senate.  One out of every ten Roman citizens was a Jew throughout the Empire.  They were a threat to world order from the Roman point of view.

Why?

Because most importantly of all, Jews of Jesus time had repudiated Caeser worship and slavery.  They would not participate in either.  They considered Emporer worship and slavery to be demonic. These two things were the very cornerstones of Roman rule. The Jews of the Empire and the Roman Senate were on a collision course that could undo the Empire in violent cultural civil war. It was building to a head.

That unwillingness of the Jews to offer sacrifice to Caeser or participate in slavery directly challenged the ability of Rome to rule where ever there were Jews.  Their religion was interfering with the rule of law, from the Roman point of view.  This had to change if Rome was to survive this onslaught of fundamentalist religion.  From their point of view, Palestinian Jews were the Taliban of their day.  They were a direct threat to Roman rule throughout the entire known world.

The only way to win this struggle was to undermine the Jewish hold on the Faith of the Roman Empire’s Diaspora Jews scattered throughout every corner of the Empire.  That was about one tenth of the population of the empire. So Piso, along with several other highly important Roman scholars, invented what today we call Christianity. 

Paul of Tarsus, a Roman citizen and a Diaspora Torah scholar, spread it throughout the Roman World.  Paul was about as much a holy man, a believing Christian or a Jew as I am a Martian.  Paul was a intelligence operative on a mission to convolute world Judaism into something much more manageable and tame.  That was to become known as Christianity and it was born in the Roman Senate and evolved on the spot where ever Paul preached among Diaspora Jews.

Christianity openly accepted slavery as normal.  It also allowed Jews to "render unto Caesar that which is Caeser’s and unto G*d that which is G*d’s".  Once Diaspora Jews accepted this as theologically okay, and they did just that under Christianity, the Jerusalam fundamentalists that were such a threat to Rome could be isolated.  They were.  By 72 A.D. Jerusalem was sacked and destroyed and Roman rule throughout the Mediterranean was saved.

Paul had done his job, he had introduced the much more compliant and government friendly Christianity to the Jewish population of Rome.  Even Greeks and Gentiles were interested in the religion.  Things turned out very nicely.  The ruse worked.  The Empire was saved for another several hundred years.

It was done once before, it can be done again.  Trust me.  All the ancient culture scholars of the world know this.  This is not new information.  Christianity was deliberately introduced into the rebellious Jewish subjects of Rome scattered throughout the Empire in order to gut their growing rebellion against the rule of Roman law.  It worked. 

We need to do this again.  We need to head off fundamentalist Islam from successfully challenging world order with extreme fundamentalist views of a Deity.  We need to reconstruct Islam the way that Rome reconstructed Judaism.

Think about it.

In this story Secretary of State Clinton is meeting stiff resistance to American ideas in Pakistan.  She is there now and operating under incredible security.  Imagine that.

In this Op Ed piece by Thomas Friedman, he argues for a much more sensible and reasonable approach to Afghanistan.  We are in too deep he says.  He is correct.

In this Op Ed piece by Peter Galbraith, we learn that the makings of fraud in the upcoming Afghani runoff election are still present and can present us with great problems without direct U.N. oversight of each polling place.

And finally here is the quote from the section entitled On This Day:

"On Oct. 28, 1886, the Statue of Liberty, a gift from the people of France, was dedicated in New York Harbor by President Grover Cleveland."

Let freedom ring – but only for those who are willing to work for it.  Freedom is not free.  Patriots must be homegrown. (hint to our allies in the Middle East).

 CWO3 Tom Barnes, USCG (Ret.)