[ by Charles Cameron — Facebook diplomacy between Israeli and Iranian individuals, atheist proselytizing in the US, popular media uses in a “monitory” world ]
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I have long been intrigued by some of the unofficial ways in which we communicate with one another — some of you may recall an earlier post of mine on a spate of religious arguments carried out on “duelling buses“, while another more recent post noted some of the stencilled graffiti and at times quite sophisticated artwork featured on the walls around Tahrir Square during the demonstrations there…
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In much the same spirit, I’d like to offer here for your consideration four thumbnails of images recently posted on Facebook by individual citizens in Israel and Iran, in response to a posting (above) by two Israeli graphic artists, Ronnie Edri and Michal Tamir, which seems to have triggered quite a response in both countries.
The two Israeli posters appear to have posted images of individuals, perhaps themselves. The Iranian posters, interestingly, used images of Abdol-Hossein Sardari, the “Iranian Schindler” (upper image), with a caption that reads in part:
Abdol Hossain Sardari, a junior Iranian diplomat, found himself almost by accident in charge of Iran’s mission in Paris in 1940 and went on to help up to 2,000 Iranian Jews flee France…
and an image of the tomb of Esther and Mordecai — the tomb in Hamadan, Iran, of the same Jewish heroine recently celebrated at Purim, and pointedly referenced by Netanyahu in his gift of a Megillah to Obama — and a popular site of pilgrimage for Iran’s present day Jewish population.
Apparently there has been quite an exchange of these graphics, although some have been on the more caustic side, expressing what I can only call .. strangelove…
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My other graphic examples are of a pair of billboards recently put up by American Atheists:
As we might expect, these were to be displayed (respectively) in or near Jewish (above) and Muslim (below) communities — the Jewish-oriented billboard in the Williamsburg area of Brooklyn, New York, and the Islamic-oriented billboard in Paterson, New Jersey.
According to the MSNBC report where I first ran across these billboards a couple of weeks ago, a Williamsburg rabbi said the sign in his district was “a disgrace. .. The name of God is very holy to us and to the whole world” — while the American Atheists’ president David Silverman reported he had not received “any blowback” from the Muslim Community in Patterson.
One imagines that some in each community would have had hurt feelings, while some in each community clearly had the good sense to show tolerance.
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These images tie in, I believe, with John Keane‘s notion of “monitory democracy” [link is to .pdf] that our blog-friend David Ronfeldt discussed in his post today… with our discussions here [1, 2] of the wicked complexity of many of the problems that face us… and also perhaps of the Slaughter doctrine [1, 2, 3]of the responsibility to protect…
Discussing strategy, the very canny LTG (USMC, Ret’d.) Paul Van Riper had this to say:
What we tend to do is look toward the enemy. We’re only looking one way: from us to them. But the good commanders take two other views. They mentally move forward and look back to themselves. They look from the enemy back to the friendly, and they try to imagine how the enemy might attack them. The third is to get a bird’s-eye view, a top-down view, where you take the whole scene in. The amateur looks one way; the professional looks at least three different ways.
A bird’s-eye view, a hawk’s eye view, a top-down view, an overview, a view from 30,000 feet, a God’s eye view, a view from above, a zoom…
If move 18 and its cadenza gave us a view of the depth of vision or insight that is necessary for a full and rich understanding of the world we live in — its qualitative or spiritual scope, if you like — this next move, with its picnic and drone-sight, addresses its breadth in space and time — materially and quantitatively speaking.
The classic expression of the sheer material scope of the universe was put together by Charles and Ray Eames in their justly celebrated film, Powers of Ten, from which the lower of these two images is drawn:
Here are some other relevant scans of the scope of things, in terms of time and space:
These are impressive videos to be sure, but as an aside I’ll invite you to ask yourselves how well they compare with this zoom in words, a poem by the zennist, ecologist, essayist and poet Gary Snyder, from his book, Axe Handles: Poems:
Such breadth of vision, such craft.
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If this “material scope of things” too has a cadenza, it would be that all of this is shot through with some primary oppositions, dappled as the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins would have it, with swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim — as indicated in the drone-sight and picnic double image at the head of this move.
This dappling, this constant flux of opposites, takes many forms — day and night lead to the more abstract light and dark, which can then be interpreted morally as good and evil, to which we respond with repulsion and attraction as the case may be, building our worldviews from love or fear…
At different scales the opposites that matter most to us may have different names and shadings, but here I’d just like to draw attention to the dappling of our world with:
competition and cooperation Darwin‘s natural selection and Kropotkin‘s mutual aid
duel and duet (ah! — a favorite phrasing of mine)
war and peace
Provocatively, we find this dappling in scriptures, too, wherein the ripples of such verses as “The LORD is a man of war: the LORD is his name” (Exodus 15.3) dropped like a stone into the pond of the human mind, meet with the ripples of other verses such as “God is love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him” (I John 4.16).
There are times when we take such oppositions literally, perhaps too literally, and times when we begin to see oppositions as abstract and theoretical end-points to what is in fact a yin-yang process continually unfolding…
Which brings me by a commodius vicus of recirculation to this image of the great opposition between war and peace, its dappling, its unfolding:
Links claimed:
To the Lamb, move 18: this move presents the material scope of the universe in counterpoint to its visionary scope as laid out in move 18 with its cadenza.
To Revelation, move 17 — the word revelation means unveiling, as we have seen, and our sciences and technologies, with their spectra of telescopes, microscopes, cameras and zooms, are unveiling and revealing to us much about the physicality of the world we live in — much that was accounted for in other times and places through intuition, vision and poetry.
This scientific and technical revelation of material existence, for many of us moderns, has largely eclipsed the mode of visionary revelation of move 17 — yet it cannot eradicate it. Implicit in this move, then, is the sense that we carry with us both subjective and objective, inner and outer, qualitative and quantitative understandings — though the data that “sight” and “insight” provide us with may be different in kind, and resolving them may be something of a koan to us, the deep problem in consciousness as philosophers of science have named it — and that we can discount neither one if we are to have and maintain a rich sense of our situation.
Comment:
If the two previous moves have shown us the scope of the universe we co-inhabit, perhaps we should now make our own zoom in, much as James Joyce did when he had the schoolboy Stephen inscribe his name and address in his geography book as Stephen Dedalus, Class of Elements, Clongowes Wood College, Sallins, County Kildare, Ireland, Europe, The World, Universe – an address that Stephen then read both forwards and backwards, finding himself in one direction, and finding in the other that he had no means of knowing what might lie beyond the universe…
Imagine then, skipping rapidly from (unimaginable) cosmos via such things as the intriguingly named End of Greatness to galaxy or nebula…
…solar system and planet — whence we can slow down and zero gently in on the Middle (or as my friend Ralph Birnbaum would call it, the Muddle) East, Israel / Palestine, Jerusalem / Al Quds / the Temple Mount / Noble Sanctuary – and to such matters of contemplative vision and tribal passion as the first, second and projected third Temples, the al-Aqsa mosque.
Our increasing focus will bring us, then, to that the rock which Jews believe marks the place where Abraham bound his son Isaac (the Akedah), and which Muslims believe to be the place of ascent of the Prophet to the celestial realms (the Mi’raj) on his Night Journey (Qur’an, Al-Isra).
Here again myth and history collide, and both visionary and material considerations merge in the heart of the what my friend the Israeli journalist Gershom Gorenberg has justly called “the most contested piece of real estate on earth”.
[ by Charles Cameron — Purim, the gift of a scroll ]
Today is the Festival of Purim in the year 5772 of the Jewish calendar, and in preparation for the event and in light of current geopolitics, PM Benjamin Netanyahu presented Pres. Barack Obama with a Megillah — a scroll containing the biblical Book of Esther, which it is a mitzvah for Jews to listen to on Purim — only last week.
Today is also International Women’s Day in the year 2012 of the Common Era.
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Purim is a festive celebration, and while I hope to post follow ups on the tangled topics of scriptural interpretation and prophetic politics in the coming days, I thought it appropriate to open this series of posts with an image of an early Megillah from the Library of Congress (see above), to raise a glass of virtual wine in honor of the dual event, and to wish all ZP readers Chag Purim Sameach.
[ by Charles Cameron — thinking inside and outside the pack, Robert Wright, John Robb, Iran, outliers ]
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Robert Wright just closed his Atlantic piece on Why Bombing Iran Would Mean Invading Iran with an exchange from a couple of years back between Gen. James Cartwright, then Vice-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and Sen. Jack Reed:
Senator Reed: I presume that [a bombing campaign] would not be 100 percent effective in terms of knocking them out. It would probably delay them, but that if they’re persistent enough they could at some point succeed. Is that a fair judgment from your position?
General Cartwright: That’s a fair judgment.
Senator Reed: So that the only absolutely dispositive way to end any potential would be to physically occupy their country and to disestablish their nuclear facilities. Is that a fair, logical conclusion?
General Cartwright: Absent some other unknown calculus that would go on, it’s a fair conclusion.
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Look, I’m way outside my zone of focus here, but that phrase “some unknown calculus” intrigues me.
One of the Stratfor research “findings” (culled from the Wikileaks stockpile) is that Israel claimed its upcoming strike on Iran would be “catastrophic enough” to cause a regime change. This claim was made both to dissuade Iran from going forward with its program, physically eliminating their ability to move forward with the program, and persuade the US to act instead of Israel.
Running through all of the potential scenarios, only one emerges that makes sense.
A strike on Iranian oil facilities. A strike so devastating that it disrupts all of its oil production, currently at 4 million barrels a day.
How to do that? Drones.
Look, Robb’s piece came out yesterday, Wright’s piece came out today — and who knows how long the editorial process might have taken. So I don’t blame Wright.
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The point is, Robb doesn’t think with the pack. And that means he comes up with ideas the pack is blind to.
[ by Charles Cameron — fictitious peoples (Israelis, Palestinians), approved and disapproved scriptures (Hindu, Falun Gong), religious violence (Afghanistan, Nigeria, Bethlehem) ]
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So, is there some sort of contest going on between Iranian and American ex-Speakers? Perhaps Elliott Abrams‘s response to Gingrich, quoted in the Washington Post piece, applies equally well to Haddad-Adel?
There was no Jordan or Syria or Iraq, either, so perhaps he would say they are all invented people as well and also have no right to statehood.
Next up…
And okay, what’s the point here? Is it that the Russians want to please both the Chinese and Indian governments — or that they don’t like new scriptures but are okay with old ones? Or is the problem that they haven’t decided yet on a “one size fits all” approach to unOrthodox religions?
Sigh. Next…
This is brutal — and apparently intercontinental.
You might think it’s obvious what the wrong answer is, and who’s doing the killing, in Nigeria. But these things can cut both ways:
Even here, it’s not clear who threw the bomb into the madrasa, although one could hazard a guess…
And even the site of the Nativity is infected. The Guardian’s account of events there this Christmas season is harsh in tone — but consider whose Nativity is supposedly being celebrated…
I’d say the Qur’an offers a better image of Christian monks than that experienced by those Palestinian riot police… who, in the event, although they themselves were also assailed with broom-sticks, declined to arrest anyone because, as Palestinian police lieutenant-colonel Khaled al-Tamimi put it:
Everything is all right and things have returned to normal. No one was arrested because all those involved were men of God.
Zenpundit is a blog dedicated to exploring the intersections of foreign policy, history, military theory, national security,strategic thinking, futurism, cognition and a number of other esoteric pursuits.
