I’ve been reading the news about the increasing violence in Jerusalem this week, and it seems to be surpassing much of what’s been happening for years. The wave of horrific daily stabbings is far more brutal than ever seen before, and the number of people being killed at bus stops by crazed car drivers far outstrips the former randomness of such crimes. Why the sudden escalation?
It’s almost as if the activities of the IS in Syria and Iraq, made well known by their warped publicity department, has made other Islamists in the region much more brutal. And Mahmoud Abbas raising the Palestinian flag in a garden near the UN, and his constant inflammatory rhetoric, no doubt fanned the flames.
It’s not my business to comment on politics, especially of those countries I’ve never visited. But it is my business – at least I make it my business – to comment on religion-related issues. The Middle East is a political phenomenon disguised as a religious issue. As in most cases of this kind, it is not that the most pious and religious people are involved in making the political decisions. More often, it is the angriest politicians that cloak themselves in religious rhetoric that rise to the top of the social heap.
The so-called religious flashpoint is the Temple Mount / Al Aqsa Mosque, supposedly the ‘third holiest place for Muslims.’ Even though the location of Mohammed’s ‘night journey’ is nowhere mentioned in the Koran, and even though it was probably an invention of Saladdin to bolster his reasons for invading Jerusalem; and even though it is most surely a legacy of the historical Islamic preference to build mosques over the most sacred places of other people’s religions (please see Bethlehem, Ayodhya, Mathura, and numerous other sites in India).
The Bhagavad-gita is a conversation about religion that was recorded before the beginning of Islam. It therefore has absolutely nothing to say about Islam. But it does have an interesting take on how a mental state can spread among people, inducing the masses to share an emotion that by themselves they may never have experienced. Socialised emotion, you might call it. The Gita explains that the enemy of all of us is lust, the intense desire to reach out with one of the senses and control a material object (or a person who has been objectified) and enjoy it. The concomitant emotions are greed and anger. Indeed, says the speaker of the Gita, Sri Krishna, those three emotions, lust greed and anger, are ‘the gates leading to hell.’
Anything that inflames lust, greed and anger is the antithesis of religion and the enemy of spiritual progress. Anger-inducing religion is thus the very opposite of factual religion – a wolf in lamb’s clothing – and is the enemy of spiritual progress.
I also read this and thought I’d share it you: http://www.wsj.com/articles/palestine-the-psychotic-stage-1444692875
The Vaishnava Voice 
If the end game is the Greater Israel project and thats an if most certain IMHO . Then and only then can you have a more accurate perception of the distractions and bilge re IS , presented as fact on the likes of BBC and other discredited zio controlled news outlets , there again !
Many thanks , a very concerned reader , very .
Ps loving the Fabian inspired imagery , wolf in sheep clothing indeed , indeed !
HARE KRISHNA
Thanks Andrew D. I don’t know about a Greater Israel project. For Israel to simply preserve itself, very small country as it is, it requires an enormous amount of security. Some of this is provided by a geographical buffer zone. History has shown that successive acts of aggression from surrounding countries absolutely requires this. If Palestine was committed to a ‘two-state solution’ then progress might be made, but with Hamas in charge no such progress can be made. Their declared vision is of a ‘one state solution,’ a Palestine from the Mediterranean to the Jordan.
As a former Israeli and as a conscientious objector, I would wish that we all stopped seeing this conflict as “religiously inspired”. It is not. Also, the myth of “self-preservation” on Israel’s side is what it is: a self-justificatory myth. There is a glaring asymmetry here, that almost everyone outside Israel chooses to ignore, seduced by Israel’s supposed victimhood. Regrettably, your “Their declared vision is of a ‘one state solution,’ a Palestine from the Mediterranean to the Jordan.” is not true of the Palestinians, but of successive Israeli governments, from Ben Gurion onwards. Israel’s founding story has always been one of ethnic cleansing.
I appreciate your thoughts, Ananta Gauranga prabhu, and as an ex-Israeli you are far better placed than myself to have an informed opinion. But from London, I must say that the world is not being seduced by Israel’s ‘supposed victimhood,’ far from it. The reality of western Europe is that anti-Jewish feeling, thinly masked as ‘anti-zionism,’ is quite rampant; the BDS movement has gained ground, and Jews are being selectively persecuted while their troubles in Jerusalem are being de-selected by many media outlets.
And the political rhetoric from Hamas, plus the education of an entire generation of children and young people in Gaza and West Bank, is very much focused on a ‘one state solution.’