Neo-Retrovision

Or why the Heavens are weeping.

Most alarmingly, the world is now into the third week of mutually escalated and uniformly deplorable genocide in the Gaza strip (or what is left of it). This deadly and insidious game of, “I’ll see your two rockets and raise you a 100 tons of TNT” has reached, exceeded and then exceeded again, all humanely unimaginable levels of wonton death and destruction. The pundits, the correspondents (who can maybe get in and maybe back out), the politicians, the war strategists and the “world leaders” argue, debate, disdain and abstain when it comes to making or offering as any lasting solutions, fruitful ideas or enduring truce proposals. Many on both sides of the conflict are hardened and re-hardened to obdurate positions on the death of the other, and just as many throw up their hands in an act of exasperation and a mental resoluteness about the needless carnage, claiming “historical” precedent, and therefore hopelessness. . I have not heard so many lame-brained excuses for disgusting behavior in my adult life.

Although I referred to this situation “neo” in the title, there is nothing neo about how the world is viewing this hideous conflagration. And “retro” is only a wishful way in which to dismiss the problem and I double-dare you to find anything visionary about any of it.

I just finished watching Bill Moyers (You-Tube, on Salon) speak eloquently (as he always does) about the historical and biblical underpinnings of the conflict between the Arabs and the Jews. He quoted the Old Testament, and remarked that the words of Moses, which once stressed, “Thou shalt not kill” had been replaced by the use of phrases designed and selected to create an unseemly enmity between Jews and Caananites. And with all due respect to Mr. Moyers, he has missed a few historical and cultural links, and so have the rest of us. In our Neo-Retrovision of today, we have taken convenient, easy and gap-laden thought paths to understanding the causes beneath what has been taking place.

I have come to this conclusion only after being recently re-educated and also being inadvertently alerted to a revised viewpoint by an unlikely informant. If I had not just been to a lecture that refreshed my memory about early Islamic behavior and then seen Newt Gingrich on “Meet the Press”, I wouldn’t be writing this now. Please do not ask me how I got from early Mohammed to Gingrich. Beats me.


During the middle portion of the first millennium A.D., during the rise and growth of Islam, there was considerable dialogue between Muslims and non-Muslims. They were (and prompted as much by the Islamists as anyone), to be respectful to and knowledgeable about one another’s respective religious beliefs. According to the history I know, there was at least as much reverence for the “prophet” Jesus as there was for Mohammed and a good deal of Muslim respect (ala Mohammed and his followers) for the history and traditions of Judaism. There was some degree of peace and fraternalism (harmony) during this time, but not many people seem to know this (I went to a “Christian” theological seminary, and most, if not all, of these details were glossed over). Then, on the morning of 9/11 (the ’09 one, not THAT one) I heard Mr. Gingrich sum up the general attitude about the Arab-Israeli conflict by stating, repeatedly, that after nearly every contemporary discussion of the quandary, the uniform response by the Arab world is . “Fine, Let’s just wipe Israel off the map.” Somehow, none of the “conventional wisdom” elements fit together any more. Alas, the mid-east conflict and America’s “war on terror” are close ideological cousins, both afflicted by and with a lack of information and historical perspective. This gives most of us a myopic lens through which to view the world as we think we know it today.

Sometime between the time the Roman Emperor declared Christianity the religion of the realm (the world), the time of the crusades and prior to the 20th century, the Hebrew religion had become eclipsed by Christianity and largely unknown and misunderstood Islamic culture of the middle east. The Catholic Church (I’ll make some people angry, here) came to dominate Europe (n both beneficial and despicable ways), through its’ deft manipulation of money and power, and was then pushed further along after the Protestant reformation. Christianity of course spread to the New World, where “freedom of religion” became an abused freedom to create and propagate right-wing, sectarianism. Morally obtuse groups who have managed to insert God in to the pledge of allegiance and conveniently and almost completely obliterate the original intentions of the founding fathers (that being to keep this from being Christian nation, at all costs). Apparently the costs were ultimately too much for anyone to bear and today Pat Robertson has his own TV show and Bill Graham has been the unofficial protestant pope of the United States for most of the last century. Judaism, on the other hand, settled into a small minority position amongst the religions of the world and existed largely unnoticed, un-nurtured and not of much concern to the world population, in general.

Meanwhile, Islam flourished in the middle-eastern portion of the world, despite the bloody and futile efforts during the Crusades to stamp it out. The Christians regarded the Muslim worshippers as “infidels”, and the Muslims thought likewise of those “Jesus people”. For some period after the end of the crusades, Christianity and Islam settled into a peaceful co-existence, but one nonetheless tainted by mutual suspicion.

Here is what I think happened, and why “neo-retrovision” might be one stilted way in which to look at the mess we have today.

First of all, over some period of time, and I think in large part due to both Catholic and Protestant Christian arrogance, the western world assumed an undeserved and unwarranted superiority in their vision over the other religions of the world, and not just to the exclusiveness of Islam. Why else would Christian churches (and especially those from the US) spend as much energy and money to send missionaries around the world to make converts? (Have you ever read about the Spaniards and the Aztecs, the Spaniards and the Mayans? The Spaniards and the native peoples of the American southwest and California? The priest has long been seen as the soldier of pacification. And for George W, Bush and most Republicans, at least in this century, the terms “Democracy” and “Christianity” have been inter-changeable.). The Crusades set a precedent for all of this. The rapid simultaneous spread of self-granted piety, mixed with financial gain and political power, caused Christianity to rampage it’s way through the Western world and believe itself to be a supreme way of life and thought. It is odd how Christians morphed from turning the other cheek to “My God is better than your God”.

Let me back up and remind you that during this time, while Christians were wont to ignore Muslims, Judaism grew less influential, less noticeable, less visible and easy to ignore.

But also during the years following the crusades, Muslims were having an understandably difficult time forgetting that they had been regarded as savages and infidels, that their one true prophet had been repeatedly maligned, and their homelands ravaged, raped and robbed of the their treasures and their history. An enmity against the western, “Christian” world was apparent, inevitable and growing. Both of these great world forces of faith had become irreversibly hostile and bigoted toward one another…and almost without any significant input from the Jews themselves. The two most optimistic and formerly peace-imbued faiths of the known world had come to hate and despise one another.

The two large sacks, each containing one of the two largest sets of religious tenets in the world, had been picked up and shaken violently, then dumped out on the plane of human existence. In so doing, the essential messages of harmony had been exchanged for violent discord.

Then along came (not necessarily in order of appearance): U.S. Manifest Destiny(Imperialism), oil, Hitler, oil, The Holocaust, oil, WWII, oil, 1948 and the Exodus, The United Nations, oil, Aramco, Israel, modern politics, world-wide monetary expansionism, oil, modern warfare technology, oil and post-war, oil-burdened guilt. And of course, the re-emergence of Judaism as a focal point for world views and fundamental religious intolerance. It seems that everyone needs some one or some thing to dislike. Intensely.

Yes. I know this is humongously overly simplistic: so is right-wing, findamentalist Christian thought and sectarian Islamic hate rhetoric. Get over it.

Once the United States got the complete hang of the notion that it (mysteriously) had the God-given, politically democratic and financial might and right to rule the world, it almost simultaneously realized that this dominance was not possible without oil. Then it was realized that the world’s greatest reserves of oil were in places like Saudi Arabia. Nothing so geographically inconvenient like that had ever stopped the U.S. before, and would not have, either, except that centuries of abject treatment of Muslims had made them suspicious and wary, and Hitler had declared that all Jews (no matter how inconsequential) were the scourge of the earth. While that psychopathic ideologic perversion gripped much of Europe, the U.S identified two apparent realities: First, the U.S. could not (if it were indeed as sanctimonious as it claimed) let the Jews of the world be exterminated, and second, the U.S. could never lay claim to all of that oil in Saudi Arabia if Hitler got control of the world, with or without Jews. Clearly this could not be allowed to go on.

To make a long story short, the U.S. rallied and won the world war, Hitler ( and Mussolini and the those unscrupulous Japanese) were defeated (until we needed Italian silk suits and Toyotas), the war was ended, the United Nations was formed and the Jews who had escaped the Nazis and the camps were given the state of Israel. Israel was seen as the West’s foot in the door to middle east oil, Aramco was formed to blend the English language and farsi and progress was on the march. Somehow, however, everyone missed the inevitable trouble that would be caused by arbitrarily placing the State of Israel smack in the middle of Palestine. Oops.

I know I am leaving out the intermediate and ongoing wars between Israel and it’s neighbors, the Shaw of Iran and his overthrow, the wars in Lebanon, Ronald Reagan and SDI and Osama Bin Laden and the Bushes and the Saudis and 9/11, but there is only so much I can write about in one article.

The State of Israel, however, by default, and as a result of all of this, became the step-child and surrogate bully (adopted their own version of Imperialism) for the U.S. in the middle east. In subsequent years, the Israelis have benefitted (?), year after year, from generous monetary support and a steady supply of the best armaments and weaponry the west could ill-afford to give it. As a consequence, virtually all of the enmity between Christians and Muslims was transferred to an enmity between Jews and Muslims, which was all complicated and exacerbated by plunking the Jews down in land appropriated from the Palestinians without so much as a “Thank you very much”. Sadly, the arrogance of eminent domain and entitlement (an American tradition:Imperialism) has been completely absorbed and put into play by the Jewish state. When those counterproductive ideologies from the Muslims and now the comtemporary Jewish state are combined, you have the Gaza strip. Viola’! Meanwhile. Americans really, really wish that gasoline would stay at around $1.50/gal and there is a new kid of the block named “Opec”. Oh boy.

So I think we have this largely wrong. The Muslims are justifiable angry (to a certain extent) because the Christians have been trying to shoot their camels, urinate in their couscous, appropriate their land and swipe their olive oil and oil for as far back as anyone can remember, and their extremist elements have taken up the arms available to them from the modern world, in protest. The Israelis have been given (and happily, it seems, taken up) the mantle of non-Christian, un-Christ-like, Christian omnipresence and chosen to impose themselves on the Palestinians, using western firepower. In their extremism, they are acting like southern Baptists with shotguns. And almost everyone (including the right reverend Bill Moyers) and chosen to blame it all on Deuteronomy. Hogwash.

This Neo-Retrovision is wrong in its perception and reasoning. When I was a trainer/teacher, I used to talk to my students about the meaning of the word “rapport”. It comes from a Greek word meaning to “re-establish harmony”. Not in a very long while have I felt the need to communicate this message so clearly as I do right now. Our glimpse back at history, circa 350—500 A.D., tell us that there was sufficiently amicable relations between two major groups of monotheists for peaceful coexistence (harmony), and war and oil, oil and war, racism, bigotry an shallow thinking have disrupted it and transferred the animosity from culture to culture with deleterious results. The world is doing a poor job, just now of “re-establishing harmony”.

The Muslims need to reign in their extremists and go back and re-read the portions of the Koran that instruct them to be merciful, peaceful understanding and (pardon the expression)’ Christlike”. The Israelis need to stop acting like Missouri Synod Lutherans with a Torah chip on their shoulders and stop being the de- facto surrogate bullies for the unfounded hatred of Islam borne by Americans. And the Americans need to stop putting them in that position and giving them F-16 fighter-bombers. In what other country I the world could you have a lobbying group like AIPAC? In the end, I think we must fault, at least in part, ferocious, pious American Christian anti-Muslim sentiments for fostering Israeli aggression.

I have concluded (you can think as you want to) that this no longer has so much to do with biblical wars and rumors of wars (I used to think that), but rather much more with modern idolatries, a lust for oil and absurdly inappropriate moral high grounds which have, in turn, been also inappropriately purloined by Arabs, Christians and Jews alike. Allah, God and Yahweh must all be chagrined.