Peace and hope for a better future

In the 1930s the Nazis created a demonic image of the Jew. Their intention was to eradicate Jews, whom they considered evil and the cause of the ills that beset Germany. The Palestinian funded DBS Movement (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) is creating a demonic image of Israel, the root of all the problems of the world, or at least of the Middle East. Neither the Nazi image, nor the DBS image has any semblance to reality, but for the purposes of viscous propaganda this does not matter, as long as people buy into it. There were many very smart people who swallowed the Nazi propaganda. Now learned academics subscribe to the BDS message. The Association of Anthropologists, Historians, and for all I know, many other academic associations thought that by boycotting Israeli scholars and scholarship, they increase the credibility of their discipline. Their misguided views also infect their students, the scholars and intellectual leaders of the future. David Sedley, formerly of Wellington, New Zealand, is the Producer of a film production company in Israel, Full Frame Media  http://fullframemedia.org/, the object of which is to combat the misrepresentation of the DBS movement, with short film clips that present an image of Israelis and Palestinians, Jews, Muslims and Christians, living together, and attempting to resolve differences through dialogue, not violent confrontation.  

Binge drinking – what’s wrong with us?

The Sunday Star Times said that 40 per cent of all alcohol sold in New Zealand is consumed in a “heavy drinking” session, where men drink at least eight and women six full strength drinks. The liquor industry describes such people as super customers, and indeed, they keep the booze business as profitable as it is. This, however, makes me, whose total booze consumption would hardly register in any statistics, wonder what's wrong with people, who can only be happy when they are blotto, whose preferred form of social interaction is getting sloshed with others. At the root of this culture is alienation, the nature of a colonial society, in which everyone is rootless. Friends, family, are left behind in the old country, or for that matter on the Marae far away, there is no circle of people who you grew up with, whom you knew all your life, with whom you can have a few drinks to celebrate an occasion, or with whom you can drown your sorrows. You don't have a few drinks to free you up to sing songs that well up from your childhood, to dance, to relate to people whom you knew all your life. You live among strangers, and all that you know is that if you drink together you are mates for life for the evening. This must delight the Japanese brewing barons who own most of our large breweries and liquor outlets. As long as their super customers are “happy “ they are even happier.

The Great War Exhibition – Wellington

Four of us, educators from the Holocaust Centre, visited the Great War Exhibition this week. A group of educators from the War Museum visited us recently, and they invited us come and see their displays. Peter Jackson and the Weta workshop were behind creating amazing replicas of war scenes. I came away with my head full of thoughts about warfare. Three cousins, all grandsons of Queen Victoria, King George V, Tsar Nicholas II, and Kaiser Wilhelm II, fought among themselves and were responsible for the deaths of millions. Young New Zealanders signed up for a short overseas adventure and were sucked into a murderous campaign that lasted four years and changed their lives if they were lucky enough to survive. I came away with all sorts of other thoughts too. The war was fought to execute the strategic plan of Alfred von Schlieffen, chief of the German General Staff from 1891 to 1906, a plan of action should Germany face war on both its Eastern and Western borders. By the time the war broke out in 1914 von Schlieffen was dead. The strategy was obsolete. The British tried to fight the war in Europe with strategies learned in the Boer War and other colonial wars. Both sides had to improvise responses to unimagined circumstances, and invent equipment that would give them strategic advantage and resolve the deadlock of trench warfare without precedent on such a scale. One of the impressive exhibits at the War Museum is a full size replica of a British Mark 1 tank, its side door open, with seemingly sweltering figures inside its furnace like cabin. The tank is a huge monster. It was developed in 1916 and was first used in the Battle of the Somme, to go over trenches and demolish barbed wire fences and everything else in its way. After that tanks have been used extensively in some of the great decisive battles of the Second World War, at El Alamein, at Kursk on the Eastern front, in the Yom Kippur War in 1973, in the Iraq war in 1991, and Indo-Pakistani war of 1965. Today, however, in the age of drones and rockets precisely aimed form high-flying aircraft’s, tanks seem as obsolete as medieval armour. Wars in the past were so lethal, partly, because the generals, the strategists, were fighting wars in their time with strategies based on experience from past wars. The challenge now is to respond to wars fought by children with knives, young women with explosive belts, ideologically motivated fanatics with home made explosives. Perhaps it is not the battles of the Second World War, or or wars since then that military strategists should look to but to older successful ways of combating challenges like those of the present, the 11^th century war against the Assassins, the Nizari Ismaili sect of Persia.

The good oil

Last week I watched Half a Yellow Sun a fairly recent film based on the book of this title by Chimanda Ngozi Adichie. It is a story set against the background of the Biafran civil war in Nigeria. Also last week, Iran, the Americans and the Europeans confirmed that Iran abided by the agreement on Iran's nuclear program, the Americans and the Europeans freed Iran's frozen assets, assets that belonged to Iran, so freezing them was a dubious move in the first place. There was jubilation all round. The Biafran war and Iran's alienation from the rest of the world had common roots, namely oil. Two million people died between 1967 and 1970, must of them of starvation during the Biafran – Nigerian civil war, a war fought to ensure the uninterrupted flow of Shell oil. The fact that the British bequeathed a constitutional system to Nigeria that made the northern Feudal Islamic entities dominate over the more populous, largely Christian southern tribes was the cause of the war, but it was oil that prompted the British to step in and help to suppress the revolt. In Iran in 1951, the popular, educated Iranian politician Mohammad Mosaddegh was elected Prime Minister. His administration introduced a range of progressive social and political reforms such as social security, rent control, and land reforms. But most notably, he nationalised the oil industry to rectify the exploitation of Iraninan workers and Iran's natural resources by the oil giant BP. The British government found this intolerable, persuaded the American administration to commit the CIA to destabilizing the democratically elected Iranian regime while strengthening the autocratic ruthless regime of Reza Pahlavi, the Shah. Not surprisingly, the overthrow of Mosaddegh rankled for generations of Iranians, colouring the Iranian perception of the Western powers, a resentment that ultimately lead to the 1979 Iranian revolution and overthrow of the Shah by the religious fundamentalist Ayatollah Khomeini. Oil and the exploitation by rich countries and business interests of poorer countries lead to a lot of bloodshed. It is wonderful that there is a glut of oil around, the price of oil plummeted, and in the future it may not be worth the while of Western countries to overthrow the governments of other countries to safeguard their interests in oil. 

The harbinger of the Messiah

Empires and kingdoms come and go and some probably never existed. The great Babylonian Empire that flourished for for well over a thousand years is only remembered in the ruins of devastated Iraq. The Persian Empire founded by Cyrus the Great in 550 BC lasted for over a millennium and was destroyed by the Islamic conquest in 651 AD and later the Mongol conquest. The Greek Empire of Alexander the Great didn't last anywhere near that long. The Roman Empire disintegrated in the face of the onslaught of barbarian tribes form the East and the North. The short-lived Muslim kingdom’s of Spain and North Africa disintegrated and were ultimately defeated because of internal strife and bigotry. But they live, survive, in their reflections in Jewish culture. The great debates of the rabbis are largely about how to live a Jewish life among these dominant cultures. My son, Rabbi David Sedley, mentioned the bizarre story of Shlomo Molcho, a 16^th century Jewish mystic, a cabalist, who met Pope Clement VII and the Emperor Charles , carrying the flag of a non-existent Jewish kingdom. The man, with incredible chutzpah, claimed to be the precursor of the Messiah. His story didn't end well, he suffered a martyr's death. But the fact that the Pope and the Emperor were prepared to receive him shows that they thought that Jews knew something useful that they didn't know. The Jewish people survived generation after generation, despite constant persecution, when mighty empires crumbled. Perhaps the Jews held the secret of the Messiah.