That’s Got To Hurt
So this came up in the comments, but these photos are so gross I knew I had to run them here. I note that most religions feature fringe elements that delight in using bodily mortification or ritual mutilation to induce mental states of euphoria and grief that their adherents feel brings them closer to their gods. And soccer fans get tats. Human culture is so amazingly adaptive and yet normative that it astonishes me. Similar conditions of deprivation, political despair and oppression have throughout history provoked epidemics of pentitents, martyrs, and mass mutilation cults.
Please take them down? They make me get all sick-feeling. (or put a link to them for those of the faint of heart?)
“between 60-80% of arabs support suicide bombings of israel civilians, men, women”
Facts please, not racism.
The observance of “Ashoura” is a global “holiday” for all Shittes, not just in Southern Lebanon. In muslim countries it is an official 3 day holiday. Devotees beat themselves, sometimes drawing blood, while chanting devotional songs praising Hussein, the grandson of “Prophet” Mohmmad and the central figure in Shi’ite Islam. The death of Hussein was the beginning of the Sunni/Shia split, which persists in Islam to this day. Today many governments have tried to ban this practice, with varying degrees of success. In Lebanon, the practice is permitted, and a bloody commemoration of Ashoura takes place in every year.
“Serious Hewbrew Scholars” != Jewish Scholars. Archeology, not theology.
You are simply avoiding the issue and bringing up more irrelevant evidence (carp). The Jerusalem Media & Communication Center, “established in 1988 by a group of Palestinian journalists and researchers to provide information on events in the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and the Gaza Strip,” recently published its Public Opinion Poll 47, for the month of December 2002. 1200 adults throughout Judea, Samaria and Gaza were interviewed by JMCC pollsters in early December:
“As for suicide bombing operations against Israeli civilians, there is a slight trend of decreased support for them, since 62.7 percent of those interviewed supported them, dropping from 64.3 percent last September, 68.1 last June, 72 percent last March and 74 percent in December 2001. Of those surveyed, 29.8 percent opposed suicide bombings compared with 26 percent in December 2001.
This is a scientific poll of Arabs living in the territories, and it reflects their values. Over 62% support intentially murdering Israeli civilians. That’s a fact. Carp stories will not take that away.
Or should I judge instead from this fundamentalist wackjob?
Rav Kook, Chief Ashkenazic Rabbi from 1921 to 1935 – “the difference between the Israelite soul…and the soul of all non-Jews, at any level, is greater and deeper than the difference between the soul of a human and the soul of an animal, for between the latter [two categories] there is only a quantitative difference but between the former two there is a qualitative one.” – quoted by Eyal Kafkafi, Davar, Sept. 26, 1988.