To James Baker and Lee Hamilton, borders and discrimination based upon the geography of a man's birthplace appears to be the most irrational of ratiocinations possible.
It is appropriate to applaud the Baker-Hamilton Report issued by the Iraq Study Group. What I refer to here is the quite noteworthy item that Mr. Baker had successfully inserted (some claimed: “snuck in”) the idea of a Palestinian Right of Return. Heretofore, this “right” was proclaimed vociferously by Palestinians yet mouthed by other Arabs with little conviction. In the past, the US and Israel have refused to give it credence. Baker has pulled off quite a little coup here. As reported in the story linked to at Breitbart.com, this is a noteworthy news item for the following reason:
The 1993 Oslo peace accords between Israel and the Palestinians calls for a resolution of the issue of Israeli and Palestinian "refugees" as part of a final status agreement that would include the creation of a Palestinian state.
But they do not use the term "right of return," which is a long-standing Palestinian demand — rejected by Israel — that Palestinians who fled or were driven out of what was to become the Jewish state in 1948, as well as their descendants, be allowed to return home.
. . .
"'Right of return' is not in Oslo I or Oslo II, it's not in the Bush Rose Garden speech, it's not even in UN 181, the original partition resolution — it's part of the Palestinian discourse," said the US analyst.
So it is I applaud the report for its introduction of the Palestinian Right of Return into the formal US foreign policy discussion. Nothing else about the report matters. Let us explain.
It should not be a surprise to anyone, and I and others have long ago predicted that given President Bush’s embrace of Democracy for the World, including the Muslims, as the panacea for all that ails us, defeat in Iraq and in any other battlefront in this war (a war we blindly refuse to recognize as a war against Islam) is doomed. Period. There is literally nothing left to discuss on this matter. What is characterized as discourse is gum flapping to put it mildly.
This means that the Iraq Study Group’s report was predictable, as was the outcome of the election, and its impact on our failed war in Iraq. You can read about this predictability here. But I don’t claim any special prescience here. Everyone knew what the Baker-Hamilton Report would say, more or less. No, the predictability available uniquely to me today is based upon an analysis and observation I have acquired from a careful study of Professor Robert Loewenberg’s almost decade-long work on the founder of both modern science and its philosophic (i.e., anti-philosophic) predicate, Rene Descartes. In short, the observation I rely upon is that modern western democracies have now fully embraced their scientific underpinning. Once that occurred, there could no longer be a war which ends in victory for the Virtuous and in defeat for the Vanquished. And the reason for this is what the SANE Works for US web journal was founded to articulate: The Science-Democracy reciprocal (or obversion).
The Science-Democracy reciprocal denies human existence as such and reduces it to symbol or indistinguishable matter. That is why the greatest sin in a democracy is to discriminate against Others. Discrimination between things is not only a denial of this new truth of existence – what we term the Redirection — it is a threat to the absolute Certainty of Science. To discriminate against an Other based upon some uncertain belief is Racist because it is not rational. It denies the fundament of science and its certainty: that all of human existence can be reduced to symbol and indistinguishable matter. It is no accident that the current hip cosmology is that everything in the world everywhere that has ever existed, and this includes all of man, came from the same matter that will one day be reduced to a quite fantastic mathematical formula written with symbols.
The reciprocal or obversion of the certainty of mathematical physics and the replacement of being and actual bodies in existence with symbols follows quite naturally. Any thing that cannot be so reduced to symbol, because it is not reducible to quantification, must be uncertain. Ergo, the Science = Certainty/Democracy = Uncertainty relationship. And if you struggle with this, ask how in a modern democracy you might say otherwise?
In the modern Open Society, one may believe in whatever “subjective certainties” one wishes; but they must remain objectively uncertain and mere belief. That is why we must vote. That is also why so many resist the NuVo Initiative’s call not to vote or to cast a Null Vote. The enlightened truth of existence demands that these beliefs and opinions be determined by method, by democracy, because if it cannot be quantified by science, it can never be experienced as true or certain, except within the context of the next vote. But we should all know or at least understand intuitively — even in the face of the Redirection — when faith, political order, and national existence are reduced to uncertainty, the result is the denial of Being and as such the destruction of Political Order or national existence. Put simply, if you cannot know your national existence, your People are superior because they are yours, how can you possibly fight a war to defend them? How can you kill other innocent civilians to save your own? Because you and not the Others with whom you war voted for such wanton destruction? How did you deny them access to your vote? On what grounds?
So it is I applaud the report for its introduction of the Palestinian Right of Return into the formal US foreign policy discussion. Nothing else about the report matters. By introducing this new “right” into the democratic discourse, by breaching the diplomacy bubble and putting the Palestinian Right of Return on the table, what is there left to do but vote on the question? And, now that it will be coming up for a vote sooner or later in a forum near you, Americans and Europeans have the opportunity to begin to seriously consider this question and not just the Palestinians. But in a democracy, what might be "serious" about such a "debate" when we know at the start that it can only be a shouting match between various uncertain "viewpoints?" That is, of course, unless science trumps the whole affair.
Yes, one would have to conclude that this is a wonderful breakthrough. I once wrote a rather tongue-in-cheek essay on a One State Solution for Israel and the Palestinians that many readers actually took seriously and questioned whether it could work. Now, we have the opportunity to go beyond a literary device and deal with the question as a “political matter” and as a fundamental “right.” If only we can continue to force the issue, with Jim Baker’s help of course, maybe the Jews in Israel and possibly the Christians in America will begin to examine this question seriously given its consequences. To do so, would necessarily demand an examination of the underlying issue of discrimination. Granted, it is not likely the Jews of Israel will do any such thing. But nonetheless, given the issue is on the table, we will ask the obvious question:
Does the modern state of Israel, created as it was in modern times by the UN as a "Jewish Homeland," have the option to be a Jewish nation state?
If the answer to this query is yes, it would per force demand a discrimination for a Jewish national existence deemed unconstitutional were it to take place in America but even illegal in Israel today. Imagine that. Illegal. And what is more, those of us in the West praise Israel for prohibiting discrimination against non-Jews and proclaim proudly that the Jewish State “is the only democracy in the Middle East.”
If Israel has no such option, the Jews in Israel better begin applying for travel visas to somewhere outside of Dar al-Islam or learn to swim and tread water amongst the sharks.
But as intimated immediately above, the same question of course should be asked of America. But in this way, America is even a harder case. While the US began in a better way — it was far more Christian at the founding than Israel was Jewish (you'll recall there was a fairly large minority of Muslims at Israel’s establishment, many of whom remained during Israel’s War of Independence and became Israeli citizens, to Israel's detriment of course) – something was amiss even then. Arguably the problem in this country was inherent in the founding itself. But it remained dormant until America made a conscious decision to rectify an earlier tragedy. That tragedy of course was slavery. And with slavery there could be ultimately only one end: the end of slavery. But instead of repatriation, there was adoption. White Christian America had now fully endorsed an idea that from the Colonial, pre-Revolution times, through the Declaration of Independence, the Constitutional Convention and until the Civil War, was unthinkable still to the majority of Americans.
But with the first set of post-war Civil Rights Acts a new notion of this nation was put into play that arrived to full blossom by the time of the enactment of the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s. That notion stated without apology: America is no longer a nation of a distinct People.
Today, it is unconstitutional and illegal to behave in ways that would suggest otherwise. Indiscriminancy. But what does Indiscriminancy really mean for a nation and a people? It means in practical terms that America is Israel and Israel is Canada and Canada is France and France is all of Europe. Indeed, borders and discrimination based upon the geography of a man's birthplace appears to any lover of democracy to be the most irrational of ratiocinations possible. Such a state of affairs must be intolerable. The clarion call is upon us: we must demand the right of return of all peoples to all places anywhere anytime.
But alas, our call for emancipation from discrimination confronts the Convergence. Not all peoples turn to democracy to solve the uncertainties left man from the Certainties of Science. Some resolve this radical uncertainty with a certainty born of Tyranny and murder. Putin’s Russia comes to mind. China and North Korea. And, of course our dear friends, the majority of the 1.3+ billion Muslims around the world who embrace the hegemonic and murderous Islamic law as interpreted by their Putinesque Mullahs.
The “Right of Return.” Let us vote on it. And, by the way, we understand the Mexicans and the American Indians have already cast their ballots in a separate vote.
dyerushalmi@saneworks.us
http://www.saneworks.us
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