I found the following maps quite fascinating.

“Imperial History of the Middle East
“Who has conquered the Middle East over the course of world events? See 5,000 years of history in 90 seconds”:

“History of Religion: The geography of faith and its wars across history. See 5,000 years of religion in 90 seconds”:

The above two are from the Maps of War site. They have some more maps here.

“Animation of the spread of religions across Afro-Eurasia over centuries.”
This one covers the last 2,000 years:

You can also see a more detailed map of the current geographical spread of the world’s religions (not just the 5 above) on Spiegel Online.

The following article is from the LA Times, 26 May 1968

Israel’s Peculiar Position
ISRAEL – Held to Different Standards

By Eric Hoffer

The Jews are a peculiar people: things permitted to other nations are forbidden to the Jews. Other nations drive out thousands, even millions of people and there is no refugee problem. Russia did it, Poland and Czechoslovakia did it, Turkey threw out a million Greeks, and Algeria a million Frenchman. Indonesia threw out heaven knows how many Chinese-and no one says a word about refugees.

But in the case of Israel the displaced Arabs have become eternal refugees. Everyone insists that Israel must take back every single Arab.

Arnold Toynbee calls the displacement of the Arabs an atrocity greater than any committed by the Nazis. Other nations when victorious on the battlefield dictate peace terms. But when Israel is victorious it must sue for peace.

Everyone expects the Jews to be the only real Christians in this world. Other nations when they are defeated survive and recover but should Israel be defeated it would be destroyed. Had Nasser triumphed last June he would have wiped Israel off the map, and no one would have lifted a finger to save the Jews. No commitment to the Jews by any government, including our own, is worth the paper it is written on.

There is a cry of outrage all over the world when people die in Vietnam or when two Negroes are executed in Rhodesia. But when Hitler slaughtered Jews no one remonstrated with him. The Swedes, who are ready to break off diplomatic relations with America because of what we do in Vietnam, did not let out a peep when Hitler was slaughtering Jews.

They sent Hitler choice iron ore, and ball bearings, and serviced his troop trains to Norway.

The Jews are alone in the world. If Israel survives, it will be solely because of Jewish efforts. And Jewish resources.

Yet at this moment Israel is our only reliable and unconditional ally. We can rely more on Israel than Israel can rely on us. And one has only to imagine what would have happened last summer had the Arabs and their Russian backers won the war to realize how vital the survival of Israel is to America and the West in general.

I have a premonition that will not leave me; as it goes with Israel so will it go with all of us. Should Israel perish the holocaust will be upon us.

Eric Hoffer was a Non-Jewish American longshoreman turned into a social philosopher. He was born in 1902 and died in 1983, after writing columns for newspapers, nine books and winning the Presidential Medal of Freedom. His first book, The True Believer, published in 1951, was widely recognized as a classic.

The more things change…

Have a read of these great quotes from this remarkable man. Further quotes from some of his books here.

Here’s a few of my selections:

“Both the revolutionary and the creative individual are perpetual juveniles. The revolutionary does not grow up because he cannot grow, while the creative individual cannot grow up because he keeps growing.”

“How much easier is self-sacrifice than self-realization.” [TOD: One for the budding martyrs in the audience]

“Unless a man has talents to make something of himself, freedom is an irksome burden. Of what avail is freedom to choose if the self be ineffectual? We join a mass movement to escape individual responsibility, or, in the words of the ardent young Nazi, “to be free from freedom.”“

“Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil.“

“Self-righteousness is a loud din raised to drown the voice of guilt within us.”

“It is doubtful if the oppressed ever fight for freedom. They fight for pride and power—power to oppress others. The oppressed want above all to imitate their oppressors; they want to retaliate.”

“There is no doubt that in exchanging a self-centered for a selfless life we gain enormously in self-esteem. The vanity of the selfless, even those who practice utmost humility, is boundless. When hopes and dreams are loose on the streets, it is well for the timid to lock doors, shutter windows, and lie low until the wrath has passed. For there is often a monstrous incongruity between the hopes, however noble and tender, and the action which follows them. Though ours is a Godless age, it is the very opposite of irreligious. The true believer is everywhere on the march, and both by converting and antagonizing he is shaping the world in his own image. Whether we line up with him or against him, it is well we should know all we can concerning his nature and potentialities.”

“It has often been said that power corrupts. But it is perhaps equally important to realize that weakness, too, corrupts. Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many. Hatred, malice, rudeness, intolerance, and suspicion are the faults of weakness. The resentment of the weak does not spring from any injustice done to them but from the sense of inadequacy and impotence. We cannot win the weak by sharing our wealth with them. They feel our generosity as oppression. St. Vincent De Paul cautioned his disciples to deport themselves so that the poor “will forgive them the bread you give them.”"

“He would rather “work, fight, talk, for liberty than have it.” * The fact is that up to now the free society has not been good for the intellectual. It has neither accorded him a superior status to sustain his confidence nor made it easy for him to acquire an unquestioned sense of social usefulness. For he derives his sense of usefulness mainly from directing, instructing, and planning-from minding other people’s business-and is bound to feel superfluous and neglected where people believe themselves competent to manage individual and communal affairs, and are impatient of supervision and regulation. A free society is as much a threat to the intellectual’s sense of worth as an automated economy is to the workingman’s sense of worth. Any social order that can function with a minimum of leadership will be anathema to the intellectual.”

“The remarkable thing is that we really love our neighbor as ourselves: we do unto others as we do unto ourselves. We hate others when we hate ourselves. We are tolerant toward others when we tolerate ourselves. We forgive others when we forgive ourselves. We are prone to sacrifice others when we are ready to sacrifice ourselves.
It is not love of self but hatred of self which is at the root of the troubles that afflict our world”.

” All the ‘true believers’ of our time-whether Communist, Nazi, Fascist, Japanese or Catholic-declaimed volubly[..] on the decadence of the Western democracies. The burden of their talk is that in the democracies people are too soft, too pleasure-loving and too selfish to die for a nation, a God or a holy cause.This lack of a readiness to die, we are told, is indicative of an inner rot – a moral and biological decay. The democracies are old, corrupt and decadent. They are no match for the virile congregations of the faithful who are about to inherit the Earth.”

“Absolute power corrupts even when exercised for humane purposes. The benevolent despot who sees himself as a shepherd of the people still demands from others the submissiveness of sheep.”

On a related note John Howard said the following at the Quadrant dinner last night:

Today, free and open societies face a new tyranny: the tyranny of Islamist terrorism, one with at least a family resemblance to the great struggles against forces of totalitarianism in the past. A Czech writer once wrote with great prescience: You can’t build utopia without terror and before long terror is all that’s left.

Terrorism is but a symptom of the problem. The problem is the “mass movement”, as referred to by Eric Hoffer above, of Islamism, or Islamo-Fascism, if you will. It is the same old tyranny.

update: I meant to note that the “Czech writer” John Howard is referring to is in fact Eric Hoffer, according to at least one source, and he is of course not Czech at all. I can’t find further confirmation of this, but it certainly very much sounds like something he would say.

Amil Imani, an Iranian pro democracy activist, currently living in the US, brutally dismembers Islam’s Useful Idiots:

Islam enjoys a large and influential ally among the non-Muslims: A new generation of “Useful Idiots,” the sort of people Lenin identified living in liberal democracies who furthered the work of communism. This new generation of Useful Idiots also lives in liberal democracies, but serves the cause of Islamofascism—another virulent form of totalitarian ideology.

Useful Idiots are naïve, foolish, ignorant of facts, unrealistically idealistic, dreamers, willfully in denial or deceptive. They hail from the ranks of the chronically unhappy, the anarchists, the aspiring revolutionaries, the neurotics who are at war with life, the disaffected alienated from government, corporations, and just about any and all institutions of society.
The Useful Idiot can be a billionaire, a movie star, an academe of renown, a politician, or from any other segment of the population. Arguably, the most dangerous variant of the Useful Idiot is the “Politically Correct.” He is the master practitioner of euphemism, hedging, doubletalk, and outright deception.

The Useful Idiot derives satisfaction from being anti-establishment. He finds perverse gratification in aiding the forces that aim to dismantle an existing order, whatever it may be: an order he neither approves of nor he feels he belongs to.

The Useful Idiot is conflicted and dishonest. He fails to look inside himself and discover the causes of his own problems and unhappiness while he readily enlists himself in causes that validate his distorted perception.

..

Islam, by its very nature and according to its charter—the Quran—is a radical political movement. It is the Useful Idiot who sanitizes Islam and misguides the populace by saying that the “real Islam” constitutes the main body of the religion; and, that this main body is non-political and moderate.

Regrettably, a large segment of the population goes along with these nonsensical euphemisms depicting Islam because it prefers to believe them. It is less threatening to believe that only a hijacked small segment of Islam is radical or politically driven and that the main body of Islam is indeed moderate and non-political.

But Islam is political to the core. In Islam the mosque and state are one and the same—the mosque is the state. This arrangement goes back to the days of Muhammad himself. Islam is also radical in the extreme. Even the “moderate” Islam is radical in its beliefs as well as its deeds. Muslims believe that all non-Muslims, bar none, are hellfire bound and well-deserve being maltreated compared to believers.

Read the whole thing here.

Brian Wimborne on the perversity of the Left’s knee-jerk anti-Israeli screeching:

Left in perversity
For leftists, Israel is the aggressor and terrorists are the victims, argues Brian Wimborne

Designated a victim-state by the Left, Israel did not live up to expectations. To begin with (and despite being under constant Arab attacks from the day of its foundation in 1948), Israel has been internally stable and politically mature. Unlike most post-war emerging states that followed decolonisation, it did not experience widespread corruption, dictatorship or military takeover. From the beginning it was the only democracy in the Middle East, and through hard work, planning and foreign aid its people built a thriving economy. Worse still, the Left’s stereotype of Jews was proved wrong. Jews were prepared to fight back and defend their lives and homes.

Paradoxically, the state’s success has been the reason the Left turned against Israel. Within a few years of its foundation, Israel had broken the first commandment of the Left’s ideology: “Thou shalt not succeed.” Success is anathema to the Left because it puts an end to victimhood; without victims the Left has no reason to exist. In the eyes of the Left’s supporters, Israel’s great accomplishments meant that the country no longer qualified as a victim. Israel, through being successful, effectively turned its back on the role chosen for it by the Left.

From the Left’s rigidly dialectical viewpoint, the world is made up solely of victims and oppressors, and if Israel is no longer a victim it has to be an oppressor. The consequence is that the mantle of victimhood once thrust on Israel now cloaks the Palestinians; it is a cloak they may come to regret.

..

In addition to Israel’s failure to play the role of victim-state, there is another reason for the Left’s about-face in respect of Israel. The Left has long been permeated with anti-Semitism. It should not be forgotten that the Nazis (an acronym for National Socialist German Workers Party) had strong left-wing antecedents. The Nazis’ doppelganger, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, not only supported traditional Russian anti-Jewish movements but organised pogroms for its own political purposes.

Socialist parties in Britain, France, Australia and many other countries, despite having Jewish adherents, had a strong anti-Semitic thread running through them. It is not surprising that as the Left’s support for Israel faded, a latent anti-Semitic ideology replaced it, with the result that the centre of world anti-Semitism is now firmly rooted in the Left.

If there is a lesson to be learned from this, it is that where morality is concerned, the Left is value free. It draws no distinction between good and evil, right and wrong, justice and injustice. Hence, in the minds of leftists, the terrorist becomes a freedom fighter and murderers are transformed into heroes. This should surprise no one. In the past century the Left gave rise to national socialism and international socialism; today it continues to function without a semblance of moral rectitude, offering support of any group it designates as victims.

Whole thing here.

Harold Evans on on depravity of the Western pro-Hezbollah marchers:

“We are all Hizbullah now,” proclaimed one of the banners at the Stop the War coalition’s London march. Really? Is it possible that more than one person has taken leave of their senses?

It was a sign either of profound ignorance or a depraved indifference to human life. Either way, the moral idiocy of the sentiment betrayed the higher purpose of the march.

If we are all Hizbullah now, who are we?

Are we the violent hijackers of the state of Lebanon who started this war without provocation and without reference to the elected government? Are we the “democrats” who hold hostages for years and murder political opponents?

Are we the suicide bombers, Hizbullah’s contribution to civilization, randomly murdering innocents in the thousands – Muslims, Jews, Christians, Buddhists, for this cause or that, it makes no difference?

Are we Hassan Nasrullah, the latest pin up boy of terrorism, who competes with Iran’s mad Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the most dedicated to kill Jews? He makes no secret of Hizbullah’s genocidal ambitions. “If they [the Jews] all gather in Israel,” he says, “it will save us the trouble of going after them on a world wide basis.” Big joke.
Are we the puppets of our paymasters in Iran?

Are we the cowards condemned as such by the UN humanitarian chief, Jan Egeland, for hiding our fighters and rocket launchers among women and children?

Are we not the cleverest of tacticians? If the human shield works, we are free to attack, and if it fails, Israel will bear the odium. What does it matter that our cruel deceit violates Article 58 of the Geneva Convention?

Are we the renegades who have for six years shown what we think of the Geneva Convention, international law (and UN resolution 1559) by regularly launching rockets across the border into Israel loaded with ball-bearings to shred human flesh. Yes, people died, six in a school bus, but they were only Jews and did you see the world take any notice? Nobody marched in London.

Are we the fiends who over two decades of Islamic terrorism have kidnapped, tortured and killed numerous peacekeepers?

..

Whole thing in the Guardian’s Comment is Free section.

And finally Mark Steyn on the Left’s (well, of course not just the Lefts) reborn Anti-Semitism:

..

For centuries, the rap against the Yids was that they were sinister rootless cosmopolitan types unbound by allegiance to whichever polity they happened to be residing in. So, after the Second World War, the ones who were left became a more or less conventional nation state, and now they’re hated for that. But all the hoo-ha about Holocaust denial (and granted, from President Ahmadinejad to Mel Gibson’s dad, there’s a lot of it about) has obscured the fact that the world has re-embraced, with little objection, an older form of anti-Semitism. Israel is, in effect, subject to a geopolitical version of the same conditions endured by Lazarus the Jew in Anthony Hope’s Strelsau. The Zionist Entity is for the moment permitted to remain in business but, like Aaron Lazarus, it’s not entitled to the enforceable property rights of every other nation state. No other country — not Canada, not Slovenia, not Thailand — would be expected to forego the traditional rights of nations subjected to kidnappings of its citizens, random rocket attacks into residential areas, and other infringements of its sovereignty.

..

These are dark times for the world: we are on the brink of the nuclearization of ancient pathologies. It’s a very strange feeling to read 19th-century novels and travelogues and recognize the old psychoses currently re-emerging in even more preposterous forms. I’m a bit behind in responding to the gazillion Jews-are-to-blame-for-everything emails, but when I do I usually say I take a relaxed view of hatred but take my advice and don’t get over-invested in it. There’s a very sharp short book by Andrew Roberts called Hitler And Churchill: Secrets of Leadership and, as you go through it, you realize that the key difference between the two is that the prime minister had a very shrewd understanding of what the Führer was like and the Führer had absolutely no clue about the prime minister. To Hitler, Churchill was “that puppet of Jewry”: he didn’t offer that as a bit of rhetorical red meat for the Saturday-night Nuremberg crowd, but as a serious analysis in the privacy of his study. That’s the problem with full-blown Jew-hatred: it’s not just a toxic frosting on what may otherwise be a perfectly agreeable cake, so much as a reliable indicator that your entire worldview has been infected. Which is why it doesn’t usually work out so well for the Jew-haters. “I have a premonition that will not leave me,” wrote Eric Hoffer, America’s great longshoreman philosopher, after the ‘67 war. “As it goes with Israel so will it go with all of us. Should Israel perish the holocaust will be upon us.”

Read the whole thing on Macleans.ca.

US, Australia, UK, Canada… I think I feel a Coalition coming on!

UPDATE (11/8/06): One more great piece on Useful Idiots, by Jonah Goldberg: Only ‘useful idiots’ are blaming Israel”

..

This strategy depends on the willing support of what Lenin called “useful idiots.” These are the accommodating Westerners — many of them intellectuals — all too willing to take the word of totalitarians and even more eager to believe that the champions of democracy are in the wrong. Some social scientists call these people “French,” but that is too limiting. There are plenty of them in America, too.

All they require is a steady stream of useful “facts.” For example, in 2002, a Palestinian camera crew was videotaping a staged funeral at which the “corpse” accidentally spilled out of the stretcher and was miraculously reborn.

Sometimes the facts don’t require such sorcery; they just need to be gussied up a bit. In June, a Palestinian family was tragically killed by artillery while visiting a beach in Gaza. At first it seemed plausible that Israel was responsible. Which is why Hamas immediately swept the beach for evidence and collected all the shrapnel from the bodies to prevent that impression from changing. The Israelis initially apologized for the deaths — that’s what Israelis do when they kill civilians — and only later revised their apology when an investigation revealed that the deaths were probably caused by ordnance buried under the beach.

That didn’t stop the usual chorus from calling the deaths a deliberate “massacre.” Indeed, every unintentional civilian death caused by Israel is a “massacre” while every intentional slaughter of Israeli civilians is “self-defense.”

..

On July 30, Israeli jets bombed a building in the Lebanese village of Qana — a building Israelis believed to be evacuated — and it later collapsed. Twenty-eight people, many of them children, were pulled from the wreckage, dead. Newspapers, politicians and a host of useful idiots condemned another Israeli massacre. Images of dead children saturated the airwaves. Israel immediately apologized.

The script is even more familiar. The Qana “massacre” was very convenient for Hezbollah politically. It stymied Condoleezza Rice’s visit to Beirut, forestalled talk of disarming Hezbollah, and rallied international opinion around the terrorist group.

Aspects of the Qana story don’t jibe, starting with the timeline. The building collapsed seven hours after the bombing. Some of the victims didn’t look like they were killed in a building collapse, and refrigerated trucks were reportedly brought in before the media could visit the site, perhaps delivering corpses. An elaborate 30-foot banner condemning a bloody-lipped Rice for the attack was improbably at the ready for a protest that morning. Bloggers around the globe are steadily picking apart other details, to the dismay of many who like their anti-Israel storylines tidy (see confederateyankee.mu.nu for a summary).

..

Read the whole thing on the Union Leader site.

Tonight is census night, and the hottest question on the paper for Australia as always is going to be the one about religion.

Will Jedi finally be recognised as an official faith (70,000 registered Jedi in 2001)? And who will win the race for the fastest growing religion (last time it was Buddhism with a growth from 200,000 to 360,000 in 5 years)? Danna Vale will no doubt be anxiously awaiting confirmation that “Australia is going to be a Muslim nation in 50 years’ time”. As will the Muslims.

Meanwhile, it appears that our younger generation is turning away from organised religion, according to a three-year national study, jointly done by Monash University, the Australian Catholic University and the Christian Research Association:

Researchers conducted the random survey with 1619 people. Of those, 1272 were aged 13 to 24 and the rest were aged 25 to 59.

University of NSW Emeritus Professor of sociology and anthropology Clive Kessler said the results reflected the secular and sceptical nature of Australian society.

A QUESTION OF SPIRIT

• 48 per cent of Generation Y believe in a god.
• 20 per cent do not believe in a god.
• 32 per cent are unsure.
• 19 per cent of Generation Y are actively involved in a church.
• 17 per cent have an eclectic spirituality, believing in two or more “New Age”, esoteric or eastern beliefs, including reincarnation, psychics and astrology.
• 31 per cent can be classified as humanists, rejecting the idea of a god, although a few believe in a “higher being”.

(EDIT: html error was cutting out a paragraph or two here…)

The process is not going fast enough for some people:

Greens call for secular alternative to religion classes

The New South Wales Greens are calling on the State Government to offer students a non-religious alternative to school scripture classes.

Greens education spokesman John Kaye says the deal between the Government and churches to have one hour of religious instruction in public schools needs to be re-examined.

Mr Kaye says it is time that school students were offered a secular alternative to the one-hour scripture class.

“The deal dates back 126 years to 1880 and for all that time the churches have had a monopoly on religious instruction in public schools,” he said.

“This is not appropriate, it doesn’t match the needs of our community.

“It doesn’t match the diversity of world views held by the people in Australia.”

At the other end of the spectrum the Family First party is gaining in popularity and a coalition of Christian MPs is fighting back against the ultra-secularists:

CHRISTIANITY has been under “consistent attack” and should be re-established as the dominant belief system in Australia.

This argument was mounted yesterday by more than a dozen politicians of all hues at a Christian conference in Canberra.

Former Nationals leader John Anderson, president of the Parliamentary Christian Fellowship, opened the 300-strong Christian forum at Parliament House last night, saying secularism had gone too far.

“I think we confuse in the public mind very much what we really are, and certainly our government is secular,” he said. “It’s actually a Christian concept that you should separate church and state — it’s one of the great differences between us and Muslim societies.

‘What is a secular value system? I could argue the extreme case, that a secular value system gave us World WarII via Nazism.”

One reason for the decline of Christianity in Australia may be all the bad press its been getting for… well, for as long as anyone can remember really. And one approach for getting bums back onto pews that is currently being tried in the UK is apparently to “take ‘religion’ out of church”:

For those who are curious about Christianity but disillusioned by the institutional Church, there is a novel solution – drop the religion.

The Rev Ian Gregory, a cleric well known to readers of The Daily Telegraph for launching the Campaign for Courtesy in an attempt to improve manners, has embarked on a new project which he calls “Christianity without religion”.

Out goes the “archaic mumbo-jumbo” of church services and the “silly arguments about things that don’t and shouldn’t matter”; in come chats about anything that makes you feel good and the world’s first dedicated “laughter room” because “laughter is as important as prayer”.

..

“People are fed up with religion. The bar-room talk is that it causes too much trouble in the world. But people are intrigued by spirituality and by figures such as Jesus and Buddha.”, [thats the Rev speaking]

..

Not laughing is man of the moment and dedicated Catholic, Mel Gibson, an expert in “anything that makes you feel good”:

In a compelling interview on US television two years ago, Gibson admitted that he has many times thought of ending his suffering. Asked if he had thought of jumping out of a window, he replied: “I really did, yeah. I was looking down thinking, man, this is just easier this way. You have to be mad, you have to be insane to despair in that way. But that is the height of spiritual bankruptcy. There’s nothing left.” For someone punching the time clock for a few shekels a week, it seems rather ridiculous that a man with an estimated wealth of more than $1 billion would feel this way.

“Let’s face it, I’ve been to the pinnacle of what secular utopia has to offer,” Gibson told ABC TV in the US. “It’s just this kind of everything. I’ve got money, fame, this, that and the other, you know, and it’s all been like, whoosh here, here you go, like that. And it’s like, OK. And when I was younger, I got my proboscis out and I dipped it into the font and sucked it up, all right. It didn’t matter, there wasn’t enough, it wasn’t good enough. It’s not good enough. It leaves you empty. The more you eat the emptier you get.

“I think everybody in their life gets to a point where that happens. Where they get to the moment of truth and they go, ‘Well, what is this all about? Am I going to jump? Am I going to go on? I don’t want to do either. I don’t want to live. I don’t want to die.’ You ask yourself all those Hamlet questions.”

Another interesting tidbit I dug up about Australia is that in a recent study some social scientists looking at actual governmental practices in regards to various religious groups gave Australia a government favouritism index of 0 out 10 towards the “official or preferred religion”. Ie, no favouritism at all. Taiwan was the only other country that scored 0. In comparison Afghanistan, Iceland, Belgium, Greece and Spain all somehow scored 7.8, Denmark got 6.7 and Finland 6. The average score for Western nation was in fact higher than the score for Syria.

I shall seek to maintain our glorious null favouritism index and wish all of the above interest groups the best of luck in tonights race. May the force be with you!

UPDATE: Saint at Dogfight In Bankstown alerted me to one lot I missed. The Assemblies of God are also in the running with a campaign to get their own checkbox on the form, instead of just being lumped into the “Other – please specify” basket. Good luck with that one also. Its between you and the Jedi, I reckon.

It was definitely a quantity not quality day when I wrote this post.