Saturday, January 30, 2010

Pearl Harbour, 9/11, and Craig Murray's Mental Horse

Poor old Craig Murray. It seems his mental horse still shies at the 911 hurdle. Says he, there would have been too many people involved and someone would have objected. The following is the comment I would have posted there if it wasn't for the fact that, a) it's too long and, b) I was too late to the party, and c) his comments section is now perfectly infested with sundry full-time professional shills who, as Craig himself recently said, spend more time at his blog than he does.

Hullo Craig,

How dreary this discussion is - all bogged down in its various (and alleged) building and demolition experts. "It'd take months and dozens of men. Either that or one good bang and a kerosene fire." God spare me. May I just step back and go big picture? Or 'big documentary' perhaps. Have you seen the BBC documentary Sacrifice At Pearl Harbour? You really must - it's at googlevideo.


In it, by way of testimonies from various participants (English, Dutch, Australian, American: signals corp, foreign service etc) it's made unarguably clear that there was pretty much nothing about the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbour that the Americans weren't fully aware of. The closer the Japanese came, the more precise the details, until eventually Roosevelt would have been impatiently looking at his watch. The only two people not in the loop were Short and Kimmel, the respective army and navy commanders of Pearl Harbour, and upon whom the whole thing was blamed.


It's a cold hard truth that Roosevelt wanted the US in the war and Pearl Harbour was the means he used to achieve this. And sure, he sacrificed a couple thousand of his own people. No big deal - I doubt anyone in Washington would have batted an eyelid. They wanted a war, and in a war sacrificing people - in large numbers - is just part of the game. It's done all the time. Mind you, what you don't do is sacrifice expensive hardware. That's why Pearl Harbour was full of WWI vintage ships and all the shiny new vessels were out to sea.


Okay, so what's that you say about 911? ...too many people involved and someone would have objected? Can I put it to you that it doesn't make any difference? In Sacrifice At Pearl Harbour the too-many-people who were involved are interviewed one after the other. And? And nothing. Hell, do an ask-around at the office and see if anyone is aware that Pearl Harbour was bullshit. Never mind that, the conversation in your comments here is proof in itself. It's yet another tiresome to-and-fro that refuses to acknowledge that the US government has previously used a fake event involving the sacrifice of thousands of its own citizens to gin up a war. And lots of people were involved, they did tell their story, and nothing happened.


Since the media has, to a man, chosen to ignore this fact (much like they chose to ignore the most famous weapons inspector in the world, Scott Ritter, when he declared that there were no WMD's in Iraq) we end up in a nonsensical conversation with its foundation consisting of 'that could never happen and they could never do it'. But it did happen. They have done it. And not in isolation neither. Fast forward to the Lavon Affair of 1954, the Gulf of Tonkin 1964, the USS Liberty 1967, and lo-and-behold 'it could never happen' starts to look, I don't know... perverse? Jump then to the year 2000 and we have the super-heavy neocon PNAC mob banging the table demanding war in the Middle East and dreamily hoping for "some catastrophic and catalyzing event - like a new Pearl Harbor". And their wish came true! "Gosh, I'm the luckiest girl in the world!" says they, with a glycerine tear in their eye.


And here we are nine years later Craig, with absolutely overwhelming evidence from thousands of sources and you still can't get your head around the thought that 911 might have been faked. Here's a question for you - What would it take? What would it take to get you there? It seems vaporised steel and molten concrete won't do it. Certainly not traces of thermate. Nor will: the whisking away of evidential rubble; the failure/disappearance of security footage; the fact that the Muslim extremist pilots ate pork, drank alcohol, and cavorted with hookers, (and they couldn't fly); the hundreds of witnesses who testified to multiple/sequential explosions "boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, all the way down like a controlled demolition!"; the fact that Bush mis-remembered his 911 moment and reminisced about watching the first plane crash on live TV (three times! in public!) - none of this will get you to even consider that anyone other than a bunch of Muslims might have been interested in making 911 happen.


I'll read your mind Craig - I'll tell you what would get you there: If the whole thing was on the telly and was given the imprimatur of talking heads. I'll bet money that that would make a believer of you. Unless the media says it's so it may as well have never happened. This is in spite of the fact that the media has shown over and over again how perfectly crooked it is. Not a single soul was allowed to contradict the WMD's in Iraq story - everyone sang from the same songbook, all in perfect harmony. Impossibly, the media's first and only name in their WMD rolodex, Scott Ritter, was nowhere to be seen. I'll say it again - Ritter's global media absence in 2003 could not possibly have been an accident. He was off-message and so he was off-media: the entire media, all of it.


And travelling back now - the USS Liberty, the Gulf of Tonkin, the Lavon Affair, Pearl Harbour, none of them ever happened in the media, not beyond their sing-from-the-same-songsheet bullshit spin. But they did happen. Ask the crew of the Liberty: threatened with death, ignored by history, and now they're furious beyond all consolation. Pinchas Lavon is dead, but the Egyptian Jews who set the bombs are still alive and were all given medals recently. What's Hebrew for hip hip hooray? Kimmel and Short went to their graves with neither of them earning a rehabilitation, but never mind, shit happens.


Except ...in the media. There, shit does not happen. There, when faced with the media's unasked question 'Who are you going to believe? Me? Or your lying eyes?' we all slide out of our seats, kiss the screen, and declare our fealty. Yeah, well fuck that. I refuse, and I'm only one of thousands upon thousands who've done the same. We know you're capable of better things Craig: you do know better. You know that they lie. En bloc! And they do it Big-Lie-style about the biggest story there is: the Bringing of War. They've done it before and they'll do it again. And again. And again. They'll keep doing it until the balance shifts and 75,000-hits-a-month heavies like yourself stand up and call it for what it is.

The media has even more invested in 911 than they do in global warming but as with global warming they can be shifted. Their hand can be forced. But it'll never happen if guys like you sit there telling yourself (and all to the applause of your barking seal full-timers) that 'it could never happen... they would never do it...'

Pearl Harbour was a lie and 911 was no different. Our rulers lie and they lie big, as big as Hitler. If you ain't prepared to say so, then you ain't good for much Craig. Whatever it is you're on about - torture, and memos thereof - you're just snipping around the edges.

Thursday, January 28, 2010

Australia - Love It or Fuck Off!

Back in the early seventies, what with the old man being on a military exchange thingy, my family spent a Northern Summer in the USA. This consisted of a trek up the East Coast with us staying in a string of motels and military bases. To be honest my main memory was of heat and glare, ha ha, but I recall us being struck by, and remarking upon, certain things that we, provincial though we were, had never seen anywhere else. As a young kid, I understood these to be American things.


Whilst my parents were amazed that everyone had a new car (all bought with 'credit', an alien concept for Australians then), I was distracted by other more colourful things: the American flags that seemed to fly on so many houses. After a while I'd stop pointing them out because there were just too many. For anyone thinking, 'Yes, but weren't you on army bases? Of course they have flags', remember: We were army people, back home we'd lived on army bases. In Australia, there was no such thing as a house with a flag out the front, army base or no. Or if there had been, whomever it was would have been viewed as eccentric, or odd, or something.
"You know he has a flagpole at his house and he hangs a flag from it?"
"Does he? What kind of flag is it?"
"An Australian one."
"Really? He actually has an Australian flag at his house? Geez, what a dickhead."


Overt patriotism was something Americans did. We were simply Australian and that's all there was to it. No one was confused - we knew who to cheer for at the cricket, and since when did being Australian have anything to do with anything else? Anything beyond that was a piece of wank, a contrivance of some sort. Australia was just a place and we lived there and we liked it. We weren't loudmouths, we weren't braggarts, we didn't thump our chests and behave like arseholes. The low-key punchline to this joke says it all I think -
A Texan is bragging to an Australian about how big his ranch is: "I could get on my horse and ride for two days and still not get to the Western boundary."
"Yeah," said the Australian, "I used to have a horse like that."


And with this lack of a vocabulary for self-congratulation, we used to celebrate our low-key love of Australia with an appropriately low-key national holiday, Australia Day (January 26), during which no one did anything and nothing happened. It was just another day-off, an excuse to go to the beach. But somewhere in the last 10-15 years with that shit Howard leading the way, Australia came adrift. Bamboozled by the media, we forgot who we were and became something else. Now, collectively, we are precisely that variety of jingoistic, chest-thumping arsehole with Australia Day as some kind of Arsehole-Xmas. And just like Christmas, it seems the decorations go up earlier and earlier, and get ever more elaborate. It's been flag week all week - cars, apartments, and human billboards - ever growing numbers of people keen to declare themselves as scoundrels getting in early for their refuge.


Lacking all sense of irony, now that we're unafraid to declare Australia the greatest place in the world and Australians the greatest people (John Howard's precise words in his farewell speech), what could be more correct and proper than gangs of youths who've tattooed themselves with the flag (literally) getting as pissed as newts and screaming abuse at anyone who doesn't reply Oi Oi Oi when they yell Aussie Aussie Aussie at them. Ten short years ago no one had ever heard of Aussie Aussie Aussie - Oi Oi Oi. Now it's a belligerent variety of national motto cum public pop quiz, with a torrent of abuse for whomever fails to answer. Sure enough, Australia Day is down in the police calendar as All Leave Cancelled, as bad as New Year's Eve. On the news round-up of Australia Day, the police will either be 'pleased at the level of violence' or 'appalled at the level of violence'.


No one will say, 'Violence? What?!' Since when did Australia Day involve drunken mob violence? Perhaps it's since crypto-gay, crypto-fascist radio broadcaster Alan Jones encouraged the good people of Cronulla to spend Australia Day beating up Muslims? "Come to Cronulla this weekend to take revenge... get down to North Cronulla to support the Leb and wog bashing day." Lebs? Wogs? Gosh, who can tell the difference? Sure enough, Jones' listeners unable to differentiate just beat up whomever. Jones still rules the airwaves and an endless litany of crimes and misdemeanours seem to have had no effect, certainly not on any of the politicians who have to crawl up his arse if they want to win the demographic. Frankly I have him pegged as a deadset certainty for the satanist/mind-control arm of the death cult. And his very good friend David Flint, head of the Australian Broadcasting Authority. Scumbags.


But fuck the both of them, they're just two old misanthropist fags with a predilection for rugby players. In the glossy cardboard cut-out army leading us to nowhere good they ain't nothing special. The task of this autocue-reading horde is to ensure the absence of the question, "Well, how did we get here?" God forbid. Best we all pat ourselves on the back and say, "This is my beautiful house. This is my large automobile." And gee whiz, don't we as the greatest people in the world deserve every bit of it? Who could possibly speak against it?


What a wanker! That's just how it is. It's the... what do you call it? The Zeitgeist! - the 'spirit of the times'. Yeah? Says I - Fuck the Zeitgeist. It might have meant something once, but no longer. Now the zeitgeist is just another thing the media manufactures. And here we are - a nation full of media-manufactured self-impressed, self-absorbed intolerant arseholes: good to go for war, torture, you name it. And all made to order.

'Australia - Love It or Fuck Off' can fuck off.

Tuesday, January 5, 2010

Jubus - eating their cake and having it too


Is everyone familiar with that phrase that denotes the doing of two mutually exclusive things 'To have one's cake and eat it too'? I don't know about anyone else but this phrase always bugged me - what was mutually exclusive about it? There is nothing in the expression to prevent and from functioning in terms of sequentiality, as in 'Go down the shop and get me a packet of Rothmans'. Surely one could have one's cake, and then one could eat it. Curious, I asked my English teacher. "Aha!", she said, "Everyone gets that wrong. The correct phrase is actually to eat one's cake and have it too." Lightbulb goes bink! Thanks Mrs. Smith, you're brilliant!

Now that we've sorted that out, and since we're on the subject of mutually exclusive things, how about them Jewish Buddhists? They're called 'Jubus' and allegedly they comprise twenty percent of American Buddhists. Who knew? Not me. Perhaps I should get out more. Or perhaps not. And for those who want to know what someone eating their cake and having it too looks like, it doesn't get any better than Jubus. If you look up oxymoron in the dictionary sure enough there's a picture of a Jubu.


For mine it is perfectly unsurprising that great swathes of the Jewish people are disenchanted with their religion. Well of course! The monstrous falsity of the idea that a perverse bloodline-obsessed God would play favourites (once removed, ha!) (And yes Ashkenazis, I'm talking to you) is just so obvious that any dimwit could figure it out. Sure enough, insane amounts of time and energy are spent turning Jews into self-obsessed gits whose genius can't travel beyond their own greatness. And following this travel analogy, part of the duty of those who herd the Jews is to perpetually scrawl the words 'Here be Monsters' on every uncharted bit of the map to make sure that no one strays.

But sure enough, Jews do stray. Perhaps they discover that the monsters are self-created chimeras and are unhappy with the Craig Murray-esque response, 'Yes, but that doesn't mean that real monsters don't exist'. Or perhaps they have trouble reconciling the blood-spattered irony of Jews as vicious inhuman exterminators running rampant on a turkey-shoot genocide in the world's largest ghetto? Or... perhaps they just want an experience that's more all about me than traditional Judaism is, ha ha ha. Who knows? Perhaps they're not unhappy at all. Perhaps they just function like the Borg from Star Trek so that everything not-them must be destroyed, owned, or subverted. That's been the lot of Christianity - why not Buddhism too?


What the fuck is this guy's problem? Why shouldn't Jews be Buddhists? Isn't that a good thing? Thank you Mr Google Drop-in, that was just the question I was hoping someone would ask. The thing is you see, is that Buddhists and Jews are polar opposites. Selflessness versus selfishness. One-with-the-universe versus us-and-them. The only certainty is change versus the only certainty is God and his special love of the Jews. Anyone who imagines that they can somehow embrace both of these propositions is a fool, or a hypocrite, or both. Never mind me, let's hear from the fools and hypocrites -
Some observers also note that Judaism and Buddhism share an understanding of the nature of suffering. For Jews, suffering has been an unfortunate constant throughout their history, culminating in the Holocaust and infusing contemporary Jewish culture with a theology of suffering to the extent that even alienated Jews have imbibed it... The Jerusalem Report quoted one Israeli living in Dharamsala... as saying: "It's so Jewish, you see, to always talk about suffering as Buddhists do."
Are Jewish people able to look at anything without tripping over themselves? What Buddhists posit as the single most fundamental and universal truth for all, Jews look at and declare, 'That's so Jewish!'. God spare me. And again -
In The Jew in the Lotus, Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi says he would like to request the Dalai Lama: "Give me a dharma talk addressed to Jews."
What? Like they're not regular people? And what the fuck does this Rabbi want to hear? That there is no self unless it's Jewish? That all is delusion but some delusions are better than others? Or perhaps all is delusion except for the voice of your grandmother -
Lew soon found himself surrounded by fellow Jews who had also sought enlightenment through Buddhism but who could not deny their Jewishness... both authors heard an inner voice of their grandmothers which returned them to their birth faiths
This from Alan Lew who spent ten years in Zen meditation only to fall at the hurdle of his grandmother. All that time and he couldn't wrap his brain around the fact that whatever his grandmother wanted to tell him was bullshit, another delusion amongst an uncountable many, simply one more thing to be dispassionately observed and let go of like a handful of smoke. His book by the way, he rather unsubtly titled One God Clapping which is a bit of pissweak, sub-editor wordplay attempting to disguise the otherwise unambiguous image of God applauding Lew. (Presumably for having quit the monastery and become a rabbi). And don't think that that image didn't occur to him. It did and that's why he went with the title.


Oh, and birth faith? We all roll our eyes. There is no such thing as a 'birth faith'. Right there in that pat two word expression (say it three times quickly - it even sounds stupid) is precisely the kind of complete nonsense required to explain the rightness of a God re-imagined as a father who madly singles out one of his children and awards them a privileged status.
Ultimately, any Buddhist Jew who is true to his Buddhism must engage his Judaism, for the simple reason that Buddhism subscribes to the Law of Karma... Ram Das replied that he had to face the karmic reality that he had been born as a Jew.
There's no end to the bullshit non-logic is there? Once more - no one is born a Jew and certainly not any as-caucasian-as-I-am Ashkenazi Johnny-come-lately. Whilst it's true that some genetics are inescapable and one need only look in the mirror to be reminded of them, when an Ashkenazi Jew looks in the mirror there's only one stark message they should be paying attention to, and that is - Stay Out Of The Sun. With white skin like that you're on a hiding to nothing for skin cancer. Everything else is bullshit. The above-quoted Mr Das (otherwise known as Dick Alpert) was not born a Jew.
That he was born is most certainly true
and of course he was told, 'You're a Jew'
But instead of great reverence
he should've met it with severence
by way of a loud 'Whoopty Doo!'
Is that poor of me? To deal with a fellow's oh-so-important self identification with a limerick? I don't see why. A tuppence for the limerick and a tuppence for any 'Buddhist' who can't let go of some story their parents told them. That story, earnestness in the telling or otherwise, is just a string of words - a contrivance, a construction, a clever meme. The fact that a meme has overcome environmental depredations and successfully replicated itself for a thousand years doesn't mean it's true. Nor that it's laudible. Do we laud lichen? It's been around for ages.


Not that I'm big on Karma (one can be a Buddhist without it you know) but let's concede that it exists. That being the case, Das's 'karmic reality' was to be told he was a Jew by his parents who were told the same thing by theirs. Let's imagine a fellow is told he is a thief - his father was a thief and his father before him, a long line of thieves going back a thousand generations. The whole point of karma is that such a thing should not be embraced. To embrace it is to invite more bad karma.

'Jews aren't thieves!' says our thin-skinned drop-in tripping over himself and missing the point as usual. Mind you they ain't no pumpkin pie neither but the purpose of the analogy was to knock down the idea that one must adopt the identity one is given by one's parents. But forget karma, all a Jubu needs to know is that all is delusion. And 'all' here includes any cherished self-definition. Hell, especially that. If an individual can't deal with a self-definition then everything that follows must and will be corrupt and no truth can be arrived at.

Taking another tack now, perhaps the Jubus might like to look to the fellow they profess to revere and whose name they cut in half to make their catchy moniker, ha ha. (Psst, Jubus, stop scratching your heads, I'm talking about the Buddha). The Buddha was Kshatriya, the highest level caste within a vicious Brahminist system. Did he ever embrace or otherwise espouse the rightness of Brahminism? Where was his so-called karmic reality? And what did his grandmother have to say on the subject? But then, Buddha's gran is one thing and whether he would have listened is another. I've never heard of Granny Ghautama but I do know that the Buddha left his palace, his father, and his wife and child. All of it - he left it all behind. According to legend when he returned to Kapilavastu after his enlightenment, his wife and child followed him in abandoning all that they had been before too. And not as some half-baked 'Brahbus' neither.


To all those Jubu heavies who've clocked up time in temples and been told all sorts of nice things by Buddhist priests who know precisely as much about Jews as Jews have told them... a Jew should and must make a false oath when the goyim asks if our books contain anything against them... well, that ain't me. A fig for the big names you know and a tuppence for your wall of starfucker photos. I ain't here to pat you on the back when you pull out a faith-based plum and say, 'What a good boy am I!' What would that achieve apart from furthering you in your perverse delusion of chosen-by-God, us-and-them specialness? What if the best I could do for you was to throw a bucket of cold water in your face and try to awaken you to the hard ugly truth that your 'Jewishness' is a delusion and an ugly one at that?

Hey Jubu - you want to wake up in this world of delusion? Well that ain't ever going to happen unless you wake up to yourself first.

Wake the fuck up!




---

This is the first part of a meandering effort I broke into three. The other two parts follow below.

The Monster

"[We] are not servants of some God; we are our own gods." says Michael Aquino, Satanist, paedophile, and Oprah guest.

"The Jewish people as a whole will be its own Messiah." wrote Baruch Levy in response to Karl Marx's request that he write something that he could masturbate over.


And then there's Anthony Robbins. Robbins is a fellow who found a way to offer paying customers the closest thing to a religious experience imaginable without actually having a deity involved. Best I can make out Robbins replaced the deity with the self. Whether his devotees get it or not they have effectively posited themselves as gods and are praying at their own altar.

I know a fellow who met his wife at an Anthony Robbins meeting. They married and had a son, and whether it's Robbins' doctrine or not, they thought it would be a good idea to loudly and frequently tell this boy that he was a genius. I'd only see them a couple of times a year but each time, within the short space of a few hours, I'd hear half a dozen public declarations as to his genius.

I'll admit that it's possible he was a genius, really I have no idea. All I know is that I never saw anything that impressed. But what is certain is that he believed he was a genius. He was special and he knew it. And when his three brothers were born and inexplicably weren't told that they were geniuses and thus were fairly normal, he ruled them like a tyrant. He was never not pummelling them, stealing their shit, or being pissed off that someone other than himself might be the centre of attention. At one social gathering I asked him if he could do me a favour and not beat, knock down, or otherwise sit on any of his brothers for the next hour. He said okay and yet thirty pathological seconds later he had one of them in a headlock.

School was the same. There, he was precisely the bully from hell. By the time he'd been kicked out of two high schools it seems he'd wised up enough to be somewhat less obvious. As for the acid test of his genius by way of school marks, um... who knows? His mother who'd spent the first ten years of his life telling everyone who'd listen what a genius he was seemed to go uncharacteristically quiet on the subject.

He could come good this kid - it's not impossible. Anyone who's seen Michael Apted's 7Up series would know that anything can happen. But regardless I'm going to call it - if you want to make a monster, start with a regular human and tell them they're a genius. Tell them they're special. Tell them they're better~over~above everyone else. Hell, tell them they're chosen by God. That'll work just dandy.


And anyone rolling their eyes at the disorganised witlessness of the above parental flattery and who imagines that their heavily codified, honed-over-centuries version is vastly superior, well... you don't get it. The result is still a monster.

---

Part three below.

The Same Old Trick!

On the topics of Jubus, perhaps I've been hoodwinked again? It's not like it'd be the first time. Here's a thought - would it be beyond the realms of possibility for those who constitute sheepdogs amongst the Jewish flock, dismayed at the constant haemorrhaging of Jews to Buddhism, to do their usual trick and misrepresent things? After all, misrepresentation is their best and only weapon. So, perhaps there's tons of Buddhists who eschew the Jubu tag, who look back at their past Jewish identity of us-and-them / me-uber-alles with a kind of dull horror, and now strive only to ever more perfectly realise that there is no self, Jewish or otherwise.


Or let's put it another way - if such an individual did exist would they get a shiny book-deal from Faber and Faber with endless cross promotion on the rounds of the talk shows? Cut to Oprah - "Next up on my Book of the Month we talk with an author who after spending ten years in a Zen monastery had what he calls an awakening. But part of this awakening was to the 'the delusional nature of Judaism', his previous religion. He says Jewish people should likewise wake up to the fundamental wrongness of their us-and-them identification and that Buddhism provides an ideal way to do that. The book is entitled There Is No Self, Jewish Or Otherwise, and its author John Smith joins us after the break. Oh, and wait till you hear what he has to say about the Talmud! Whoo-ee, strong stuff."

Ha ha ha ha, fat chance of that! Thinking about it, such a book, if it existed, would constitute an apostasy of the highest order and would make whatever Norman Finkelstein copped look like foreplay. Instead we get books like The Jew in the Lotus: A Poet's Re-Discovery of Jewish Identity in Buddhist India by Rodger Kamanetz. Says he, "Buddhism Shmudism. I tried it and it's okay, but really it just made me more Jewish than ever!" And so it goes, every Jubu book out there has the same message: never mind the middle way, the alpha and omega are Jewish. Or to put it another way - If you're pissed off with Judaism and are wondering if Buddhism might be an alternative, well... it ain't.


Okay, so that being the case, who's to say that this apparent triumph of Jewish-first-and-Buddhist-second over Buddhist-first-and-apostatic-daylight-second isn't bullshit? Even if a shocking number of Jews were taking up Buddhism and truly leaving their ugly chosen-by-God identification behind, the Jewish media would have to a) ignore it and hope no one noticed, and b) arrange for funds and book contracts to ensure that an opposite message predominated and that Buddhism would never be seen as a pair of scissors to cut the apron strings. Given that, what are we to make of the conversation about Jubu-dom being hogged by a tiny handful of commentators each of which sings from the same songsheet?

Ayah! In amongst this, what's a mad metaphor mangler to do? Um... choose! Choose between: Judaism as an impregnable us-and-them edifice against which Buddhism is less of an indictment/threat than it is a good housekeeping seal of approval, or; Judaism as the Amityville Hotel with the owners (in between hiding skeletons and mopping up blood etc) perpetually telling all the guests that they should pay no attention to any brochures they might find from the Buddha Guesthouse up the road: "Yes, we've had a few people who tried it but they came back saying it was much better here." Cue voiceover of Mandy Rice-Davies, 'Well they would, wouldn't they?'


Choose, don't choose - or just leave it as it stands and see if there aren't some clues in amongst it. In all my reading about Jubus it appeared that several themes predominated and several were left out altogether. Permissible and oft-repeated topics are meditation, suffering, karma, as well as the fuzzy buzzwords 'spirituality', 'ancient texts', 'esoterica', and 'mysticism'. Clearly these are innocuous and may be discussed. By keeping within these boundaries Judaism and Buddhism have a lot in common, so much so they can be best buds, each in the other's fan club. "You da bomb." "No, you da bomb."

Left out of the whole conversation are the otherwise crucial words 'self' and 'selflessness'. And 'compassion'? Nowhere to be seen. These aspects of Buddhism may not be broached because were that to happen suddenly we're no longer waltzing around the edges and instead have leapt right to heart of the matter where Judaism and Buddhism have nothing in common at all. Oh, and God forbid anyone should mention the Talmud. Mind you Buddhism isn't Judaism's only friend not to know about his predilection for secret black-hearted wickedness.


Fuck it, I'm going to declare that this noisy Jubu celebration of commonality is less a warm-hearted seeking of concord than it is a means of putting the kibosh on any discussion that might cast Judaism in an unflattering light and thus lead to its further dissolution. Hell, why don't I go balls out and ask the question - Has Judaism's entire involvement with Buddhism, right from the get-go, been one of threat identification with subsequent Jewish adoption as a means of evisceration / emasculation? It works for me.

And as ever, the very trumpeting of strength and inevitability signals the 180° truth of the matter. The strength is a weakness. The inevitability is no such thing. The only certainty is change. Everything else is delusion.