Israel in Need of an Internal Revolution

 

There are some who believe that Israel should form a committee to draft a Constitution which then should be voted upon by the citizenry. There are those who call for a simple change in how appointments are made to positions such as Judges, Attorney General, Police Commanders, Military Commanders and other political and justice and enforcement positions. There are many who are calling for Israel to annex all or parts of Judea and Samaria. Some are demanding that the Palestinian Authority be dissolved and its leadership and most of the security forces be deported. There are some calling for the office of Prime Minister to be determined by direct elections instead of by whichever political party receives the most number of seats and forms the coalition as they claim this results in granting excessive power to the Prime Minister as his party also controls the parliament and can prevent legislation from being considered at his whim. There are those demanding that the IDF (Israel Defense Forces) be more religious soldier friendly touting the infractions being imposed upon far too many religious soldiers which force them to choose between a good performance review and their religious ethics as often their training or activities present conditions which break Halachic Laws, and the military command is fully aware of these difficulties and are using them to drive religious soldiers from the ranks of the military and particularly from the officer corps. When religious officers reach the rank of Major they often face opposition and malice intended to drive them from the service and they face selected distrust which robs them of any possibility for further promotions as the Central Command seeks to retain their secular purity. All of these disparate forms of revolutions are simply pieces of the problems which could all be remedied through the efforts of one group of people from within the Israeli population; the Rabbinate.

 

The first step needed would be the unification of the position of Chief Rabbi. I am far from the sole Israeli Jew who has one parent who is Ashkenazi and the other who is Sephardi. With such a divide, while leaving the rule that my Father automatically is used as the determinative factor, despite in my case that my Mother was more involved in my religious education; such individuals will often have a clash if they marry opposite their father, be he Ashkenazi or Sephardi, with a wife knowledgeable of the opposite set of rules. An example comes next week during Pesach concerning whether or not one may have rice, for example. Still, with the number of intermarriage between Ashkenazi and Sephardi youth, the number of Jews who will not look at Judaism as much as being bipolar as Ashkenazi and Sephardi. Making such an alteration will require unifying Judaism such that there is a single prayerbook, a single set service, a single Kashrut standard which is accepted by all the now disparate Rabbinate factions. This will require many of our leading and most respected Rabbis to come together and reach an agreement which will make all of them relatively and equally uncomfortable with the final set of rules, prayers, prayer services, Hebrew language and a merging of Jewish history such that the story of all the branches are interwoven into a single story. This will leave everybody upset with the results and pointing to some fact here or there bemoaning that such an important event which occurred in Kutná Hora in what is now the Czech Republic or el Kharga Oasis in Ancient Egypt has been omitted from the combined histories. Yes, we picked these locations completely at random and any similarities to events or descriptions are purely coincidental. If the numbers of complaints are relatively equal from all angles, then the stories and other merging events are likely being performed correctly and with careful considerations. These are events which will be happening behind the scenes except for the merging of the positions of Chief Rabbinates into one office covering every Jew making a giant step towards the unification of Judaism at least within Israel.

 

Kutná Hora in the Czech Republic
or el Kharga Oasis in Ancient Egypt

 

All of these steps are in preparation for making a change in Israel which will take a great effort from the entire Rabbinate, each and every member from every faction working often in conjunction with one another for a maximum effect. Israel is in need of a spiritual awakening. She has been becoming a more religious nation with a greater percentage of the population attending daily services and living Torah observant lives. There are those who are returning into the Torah observance whose lives sometimes slip but are making strides. Meanwhile others are becoming Torah observant for the first time in their lives or the first time in years after leaving such a lifestyle either while in the military, university, workforce or simply having left their parents’ house. The challenge for such individuals vary with some facing having to learn for the first time a wholly new way of living and sometimes struggling in the process. These people and the secular Jewish population require more assistance than most with encouragements and gentle assistances. They will require education and reinforcement until the religious life becomes almost, if not completely natural. The greatest challenge will be introducing the secular Jewish population to a religious life in a natural and unthreatening way. What such efforts would require, you ask. It would need for the Rabbinate, every Rabbi, to spend time being more public in their lives and leading a life which invites people to follow their examples and piques their interests. They also will be required to be approachable and open to people and affable such that people will feel comfortable seeking them out for information and guidance. This will also require Torah observant practices to be instituted as to what would be considered appropriate and inappropriate activities, actions, practices and situations for members of the general Rabbinate to engage in. Many in the Rabbinate will require further education on the acceptable and preferred means for approaching people and guiding them back to their faith. Some in the Rabbinate may be found inarticulate or otherwise unable to perform adequately and will need assignments in other areas perhaps teaching or administrative. The entire Rabbinate will need be brought under a single administrative effort.

 

Temple Institute concept for what building the Third Temple in modern day Jerusalem would appear like from a distance with modern buildings of Jerusalem in the background. May their vision and this concept figure become fact and fulfill our desires for unity and a single Temple and House for Hashem in our midst. May this dream be fulfilled before the next Ninth of Av so our lament will be lessened.

 

There will also be a need that the Oral Law be reinstituted as an Oral Code which will be written but also updated, altered and mediated periodically with the Rabbinate choosing from amongst their ranks those they consider best suited to make wise and meaningful changes at set intervals, perhaps every three of five years. Once all these programs are in place and everything arranged neatly and actually functioning, then the people of Israel can consider returning to life as intended by Torah with the adjustments and changes initiated under the new Oral Law. There are things which will require large alterations such as the sacrifices as Israel is no longer a sleepy little agrarian society as it was three millennia ago. Instead of a King we will likely maintain an elected democratic and possibly even Parliamentary form of governance but with the single alteration that there will be a higher office than Prime Minister or President, that of the Cohen Gadol (Heb.כהן גדול), the head priest. Once these changes have been accomplished there will be one last item which will have become unavoidable by this point, the rebuilding of the Temple, the Beit HaMikdash (Hebrew: בֵּית־הַמִּקְדָּשׁ‎) in Jerusalem. Long before we complete these changes the annexation of all of Judea and Samaria will have long been settled and completed and the world will have come to accept it as fait accompli. Should this transformation take place and Israel return to being the central home of the Israelite Jewish People living a Torah observant lifestyle, by and large, this will solve many of the problems currently faced by Israel and odd as it may at first appear, it will also make the world a better place with time.

 

Beyond the Cusp

 

Can We All Have One Tradition?

 

There is a wonderful side of Judaism which will tear it apart. The advantages of these wondrous diversifications, the ever greater variants of the traditions and prayers within Judaism, is that you can seek your own niche where you are most comfortable and everything tends to reflect your concepts and ideals you expect from Judaism. This means that almost any Jew seeking a comfortable place within their religion, Judaism, that somewhere, should you seek long enough or be fortunate and find your home quickly, there is a congregation which practices the Jewish faith exactly as you picture such in your own concepts, points of importance and traditions you remember from your childhood mixed with other items which simply serve to interest and soothe you. This is both an advantage to Judaism and a future anathema for Judaism. Let us explain. We just hope that we upset as few people as possible but we will still tell what we fear and believe.

 

Judaism is a unique religion in that it has remained largely in limbo where the main efforts for over two and a half to a little over three millennia has been to retain everything exactly as they were when the Temple was corrupted by the Greeks and then the Romans with one brief period after the Maccabean revolt when the Temple was rededicated and consecrated for Hashem. Judaism was frozen at a period soon after their return from the Babylonian exile, the second of the three exiles (Egypt was the first) when the Persians permitted them to return and rebuild the Temple and return to their dedication worshiping and serving Hashem. This era came to a crashing halt with the arrival of the Greeks who replaced the Persians and were on their path to conquering Egypt and the Judeans, the remaining Jews residing in Judea and Samaria largely were but a minor conquest. The Greeks did all in their power to pressure the Judeans (Jews) into Greeks by impressing Greek ethics on the Judeans. First was their introduction of the Greek sexual revolution where orgies, homosexuality and pedophilia were introduced and they brought bath houses plus the worship of the perfect, unaltered human form. This led to the Greeks making circumcision against the law and any circumcised males were executed which meant that any Judean following their religion was fearful of being inspected for having been circumcised as that meant certain death. The Greeks were all but immediately replaced by the equally distasteful Romans who were slightly more crafty than were the Greeks. The Romans corrupted the Sanhedrin placing Roman approved and compromised Jews in place and in the main cities the Rabbis were mostly Roman approved. Religious and traditional Judeans retreated to the countryside and the Judean Hills and caves eking out a living subsisting on whatever they could find growing wild or raised in small farming plots. Everything was done to minimize their coming to the Roman’s attention. This led to a strict, traditional and unchanging interpretation of Torah and the practice of their religion and the keeping of their simply life style.

 

The Roman occupation in many ways did not actually begin to come to a conclusion until the decade of the 1950’s and the return of the Jews to their ancient homelands of Eretz Yisroel. The scars and deprivations of the Roman occupation remained even after the fall of Rome as before Rome had even really started their serious decline, they reacted to a Judean uprising by dispersing the Judeans to the farthest corners and throughout their empire just as they had other enemies in order to bury them from the pages of history. Every group that the Romans had used this form of punishment, disappeared from the pages of history just as the Romans had intended. The Carthaginians who were the final political form of the Phoenicians were dispersed thusly with the Capital City of Carthage having the lands surrounding it salted such that it became barren for the next few centuries. The Phoenicians or the Carthaginians, whichever name one wishes to utilize, are gone and no longer consist as a peoples. The others who the Romans thusly treated are equally erased from any following history and to the point that we do not even recognize any names which we could use to display the effectiveness of this punishment. The Judeans proved to be the exception because they had one thing which was different, their definition as a people was transportable and could be applied anywhere and though it was deigned to work best in the Promised Land, in Israel geographically, they had the ruleset and defined history contained in Torah which was established and had an agreed and exact form and wording which was never to be altered making it an anchor.

 

Five beautiful, glorious and holy Torah Scrolls which carry near infinite wisdom and are the foundation of all Judaism and their culture and the Jewish civilization is built around the Torah and the teaching of Torah

 

The other half of their religion and life definition were contained in the Oral Law, their Oral Code which was designed to be flexible and change with time as they proceeded through life together in Israel, but now they were not in Israel or together, thus the Oral Code could be altered in different means for different areas. Thus the Rabbis over the next few centuries wrote and discussed the different ideas and ideals of the Oral Code and codified them into writing such that it would no longer be altered and everybody could remain on the same pages. This became the writings which today make up the Talmud. The most interesting of the concepts in Talmud is that only the final agreed definitions apply as the law, the discussions are included for future reference when new ideas or changes in societies take place. The greatest change has recently occurred, the return and start of the Ingathering of all Jewish Peoples back to their ancient homeland in Israel. But there was and still remains a division in Judaism which derives from whether they were from the Islamic world, including Spain when it was called Andalusia by its Islamic conquerors who were removed finally around 1492 which also included the voyage by Columbus to the New World and the Inquisition in which all non-Christians were brutally converted or killed in a purification of Spain by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella which targeted mostly Muslims and Jews. This forced the majority of the Jewish population to escape with their Muslim neighbors over to North Africa. These Jews mixed with the Jews already living throughout the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Meanwhile there remained a sizeable number of Jews who were spread throughout Europe. There became some not necessarily insignificant differences between these two families of the Jewish Peoples.

 

There are also other groups of Jews with some dating back to the times of King Solomon and others to the full loss of ten Tribes which made up the nation of Israel (the northern kingdom which included the tribes of Dan, Ephraim, Reuben, Gad, Manasseh, Asher, Naphtali, Zebulun, Issachar and Simeon) who had separated from Jerusalem and Judea (the southern kingdom which included the tribe of Benjamin) and became known as the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel. Some tribes of Jews in disparate regions have made claims as to being descendants from these lost tribes of which two of the most well-known are the Ethiopian Jews and the Menashe from India. The claims of these people are traced and certain realities which would survive in any actual tribes from the Israelites which are commanded in Torah. Should these tribes continue to hold these commandments and practice a Torah dictated lifestyle, then their claim is far more believable and they are invited to return home. The many different peoples is truly amazing and what is even more fascinating is that most of the people from these tribes tested had a particular gene which has been determined as being present in Jews showing the same ancestral maternal origin and also a gene which traces to the Middle Eastern peoples.

 

Eight Hundred Year Old Yemeni Torah Scroll
Rescued with the Congregation’s Rabbi and
Seventeen Desperate Jewish Refugees Accepted
and Taken in by Israel Granting Them Citizenship

 

Where this has led is that even amongst Jews with similar backgrounds, due to the fracturing of the different Jewish communities, there started to form cracks in their practices as each Rabbi came up with something slightly different. Now the struggle is reunifying a religion which though having the identical central basics has also picked up particular practices and traditions which differ each following from a particular Rabbi. This led to some occasions where one Jew would claim, “My Rabbi taught,” while the next Jew countered, “Well, my Rabbi teaches,” and the arguments have led to some less than admirable situations. Judaism and Torah are supposed to unite all Jews to a common heritage through shared history but the histories were fractured by Roman decree and the ravages of time and separation. The Oral history being codified minimized the differences but sometimes the smallest differences are the most difficult to rectify and harmonize. Recently we read an article by Rabbi Melamed who sees the need to rewrite a new oral code which can be utilized as the basis for law in the lands of Israel. These laws would serve as had the original Oral Law and would be adaptable to change, not written in stone. These codes would cover both the secular world and the religious world. They would be a careful blending of Torah teachings and wisdom with the needs of a modern society. This would be worked through using a conclave of leading Rabbis from every discipline in Judaism with all the disparate schools represented from Ashkenazim, Sephardi, Mizraim, Chasidim, Traditional, Orthodox, Zionist, and as many others as can be represented giving the widest view and closest to totality such that what is produced while not granting any one groups complete satisfaction would find the path acceptable to as many Jews as are willing to forge a new unity and new beginning.

 

The horrors of the past will be the flames for the forge with which Israel will become one and our laws will once again be one uniting every Jew and Israelite to the other. The beginning is in sight if we take the opportunity to enlist the many flowers from the far corners of the globe and enlist every Jewish soul, our pluralistic yet harmonious neshama, and once we have merged our futures and woven our pasts into an embroidered and gorgeous prayer shawl with Tzitzit being the only strings attached, we can allow this to cover us all as a single people in our own nation home at last.

 

Beyond the Cusp

 

The Palestinians are the Poison in the Well

The latest conviction from the Western world which has blamed Israel lack of peace with the Palestinians as the cause of the ever increasing threat of Islamic extremism and its latest manifestation, ISIS, has identified the symptom but misdiagnosed the disease. Even were Israel permitted a free hand to address the now rabid hatred planted by the Oslo Accords and nurtured on European and other Western money and endless facilitating, it would take at least sixty years of completely controlling the media, schools and other facets of Palestinian society to undo all of the damage wrought in just the past twenty years. One part of the problem is the enrichment of the top leaders who found that simply by fomenting anti-Israel and anti-Semitic hatred and violence they would be rewarded with such largess of Western funding that they were made into millionaires, and then billionaires, and now who knows the limit as Europe, despite facing a financial meltdown, still manages to reward Palestinian terror with now trillions of dollars in reward for their last war on Israel in the name of rebuilding Gaza. The lovefest which took place in Cairo under the name of rebuilding Gaza from the damage brought down on it by the Hamas war against Israel and the facilitation of the damage by Hamas using the dense cities from which to fire their rockets and place their fortifications while leaving tracts of farmland completely vacant and free from the ravages of the conflict was just the latest symptom of a world gone mad feeding the monster they have nurtured in order to destroy Israel. This combined with the sins of departing their responsibilities to bring forth a viable society into the areas which were left behind during the industrial revolution as they simply departed the colonies from which that revolution had been fed and maliciously configured the remains of the Ottoman Empire after World War I so as to impede any possibility for natural growth and peace by placing warring parties within the same type of false borders as the colonialist boundaries had sewn across much of Africa. This was the poison which forced each of these unnatural new nations to fall into the hands of strong dictators who were virtually forced to choose one tribe and strengthen that tribe into their police state enforcers which simply built the desire for revenge until that rage has finally broken loose and now leaves large areas of the world looking for a leader to lead their revenge against a world they see as having cheated them of their futures. Their enemy is the Western colonizers but in a brazen move to funnel the hatreds they so engendered made the claim that the reason behind their treachery was Israel placing the title of chief colonizer upon Israel despite Israel also having been formed from the same Western reconfiguring of the Ottoman Empire that brought much of the Middle East and North African nations (MENA) into being.

The initial poisoning was manifest with the nurturing of Arab Jewish hatreds by the manipulation designed by the British with the support of the rest of the Western world and was designed to prevent the necessity of fulfilling their promise which was made after World War I as set out initially in the Balfour Declaration and then adopted by the victorious powers from World War I with the San Remo Conference to restore a Jewish State in their ancestral homelands. The formation of Israel in 1948 initially saw a large influx of European Jews, the remnants of the Holocaust though that was not the initial impetus for the founding of Israel, simply the conflagration which provided a large influx of Jews who had nowhere else to go after they had been removed from their homes and many of those very same towns no longer desired their return as it meant also living with those they had so mercilessly betrayed often turning them over to the Nazi murder machine willingly and enthusiastically. This was soon followed over the first dozen years of Israeli existence of an equally large influx of Jews who were driven from their homes across the Arab and Muslim world from Iran to Morocco. This led to modern day Israel which is on the cusp of erasing the difference between the two main sectors of her population, the European Ashkenazy Jews and the MENA Sephardic Jews, as well as welcoming home the Aliyah of other fragments of tribes of Jews from the two main and other diaspora refugees. These include the Ethiopian Jews, the Menashe Jews of India and other tribes either from the Babylonian exile or the Roman dispersal or from other periods where tribes of Jews ended up separated from the main body of Judaism. The canard that Israel is a purely European nation is false as her populations comes from the far corners of the globe and have reemerged to forge a nation where all have been incorporated and now make up a single nation of people where such differences are being erased from the society. Nothing depicts this merging more obviously than the intent to merge the current Chief Rabbinates from its two separate positions into a single position marking the end of the final vestige of their previous separate roots. Unfortunately, as this unification is taking place the same did not occur across the rest of the Middle East and this led to the inevitable explosions witnessed since the beginning of the so-called Arab Spring which has become a tense Arab Winter with warfare now spreading further across from the endless carnage in Syria into Iraq and threatening to enflame the rest of the nations across the width and breadth of MENA.

One of the main manifestations of this roiling trouble is ISIS which has taken on a life of its own and presents a unique dimension of the problems plaguing the Islamic world. The initial threat of ISIS is not Europe, Israel or the United States but the Muslim people and societies it threatens with its own kind of remaking of the lives of those who are falling unwilling victims of their barbarity. ISIS was formed from the most radical elements of the Syrian Civil War which has made refugees of millions of Syrians and caused the death of approaching, if not surpassing, two-hundred-thousand Arabs of Muslim, Christian and other origins. The nation of Syria will not be capable of normalcy nor will it function as a normal nation for the foreseeable future even were the violence there to be resolved immediately, and that in and of itself is an impossibility. The poverty and inequities manifest throughout MENA with the small cadres of rulers living lavishly while their people are barely able to make sufficient living to survive, let alone thrive. These people see a Western world which they have been told in the propaganda by their leaders is the source of their poverty and misery so as to direct the wrath of a people cheated of a decent way of life at a foreign source thus taking the bullseye off of their backs. This, in turn, has been redirected by many in the Western world onto Israel who they point to as those in their immediate neighborhood who have a successful nation presumably built on the poverty of their Arab and Muslim neighbors, even to the distant nations of Iran at one end to Morocco at the other end. This hatred has been enthusiastically used by those who are currently impoverishing their societies as all that matters is that there is some ‘other’ who is to blame for the people’s misery and their leaders who are actually stealing from their people continue to take the wealth of their nation leaving the people suffering and being fed the tropes of traditional anti-Semitism such as the infamous forgery “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” and other writings from both the Nazi and Soviet propaganda as well as even older propaganda from the Catholic Church, the Protestant Reformation, the Spanish Inquisition and even older vestiges from the Crusades all of which persecuted the Jews. These explanations are fed to a people hungry and demanding to know why they suffer such misery and poverty while they are witness to such apparent signs of great wealth throughout the world beyond their area and apparently enjoyed by some unexplained miracle by the leadership of their country. The excuses finally wore thin and the resultant explosions are evidenced across MENA and may spread even further southward into the body of Africa.

The efforts to deflect all responsibility for the situations in MENA and the main body of Africa away from the colonizers and onto one of the successful colonies that managed to build a prosperous nation after finally receiving their independence from the same Europeans as did their neighboring nations but who fortunately though having a similar problem of two very disparate tribes within their borders, the European and MENA Jewish refugees, they managed to mostly work to erase any vestiges of those differences and work past stigmas and other root differences and merge to form a complete whole and one nation rather than two warring tribes within a single border. Would some of the other Middle Eastern nations have had the advantage of only two disparate people, a solution or reaching a balance might have been possible. A perfect example is Iraq which has three major groups; the Sunni, the Shiite and the Kurdish, as well as other minor groups which mostly must seek refuge with one of these three main bodies. The current conflict in Iraq has exemplified this division of the nation with the Sunni and Shiite at war with each other and the Kurdish attempting to defend their semiautonomous region from their Sunni neighbors to the south currently being coopted by ISIS and from the Shiite government in Baghdad.

How all this is traceable back to the Palestinians and their conflict with Israel and why this is not actually caused by the Israeli inability to reach a peace with their Palestinian neighbors is actually simple on the surface but gets very confusing at ground level. The broader truth is that the Europeans needed to place the blame for the backwardness and poverty in the Middle East somewhere other than on themselves. As they had already fomented a hatred and burning conflict in the British Mandate areas pitting the Arabs against their Jewish neighbors and having fed that conflict with an aim to prevent there ever being a Jewish state founded and surviving, it was the easiest place to rekindle old hatreds, the same hatreds they bred half a century earlier across the 1920s and 1930s. They had some active support, though not actually cooperating as far as could be seen, from the Soviets who had their own problem of a Jewish minority which desired to leave the Soviet Union, who didn’t, and make Aliyah and return home to Israel, the phrase Jews worldwide have sworn for two millennia and stated at the end of every Seder at Passover every year with the phrase, “Next Year in Jerusalem.” When threats started to emanate from the rest of the Middle East the Europeans again pointed the finger of blame at Israel.

When the World Trade Center terror attack struck the United States and the United States attacked Afghanistan and then Iraq, then the blame really aimed at the Western nations, particularly those who allied with the United States in Iraq and eventually also in Afghanistan. This led to the target being replanted once again on Europe except this time the target was placed primarily on the United States and then Britain and Europe. The Europeans initially ducked under the protection of the United States and from that seemingly safe perch blamed their old nemesis, Israel. They used the exact same canards that had worked so well decades earlier. When the United States then withdrew from the Middle East that left Europe somewhat exposed so they increased their funding of the Palestinian terrorist culture and stoked the hatreds within the Palestinian society with an emphasis on the youth. The Europeans paid handsomely for textbooks which painted the Jews and Israel with the old canard that they stole their wealth from the less well-off neighbors, in this case the Palestinians.

Earlier in the Middle Ages it was the serfs and peasants who were vassals of a lord who also was in need of an easy target to blame for his vassals’ poverty stricken situation. The Jews made for a ready target as they were forbidden from owning or even working the land so had set up as tradesmen and merchants in the towns and cities. This initially made them the other for the peasants working the lands of their feudal lord. Later, when the feudal system began to disintegrate and many peasants and serfs sought their wealth in the cities they ran into the situation where the Jews owned the businesses and were more adept at running businesses as they had been doing so for the last two or more centuries and the Christians were just learning trades and being merchants. Again, the wealthy landowners had invested and were also part owners of many of the exclusive places in the towns as these towns and cities originated on their lands. Again the Jews made the perfect target for deflecting the hatreds by the gentry and aristocracy. This use of Jews as a target for the people’s hatred often went all the way to the top and was utilized by Kings and Queens when the economy hit bad times. This led to the Jews being chased from one place to the next always being the outsider, the other. Now Europe is using Israel, the Jew among nations, as the outsider, the other, the ones who are to blame and who have stolen the wealth of their neighbors. The difference this time is the Jews have nowhere to run to and have their own military with which to defend themselves, something that the Europeans have potentially tragically decided was no longer a necessity as they could depend on the United States to protect them. Now even their protector, the United States, has joined in the hatefest and are attempting to lay the blame for the problems in the Middle East and beyond on Israel.

With the monies being invested in terrorism against Israel to such an extent that the lesson the Arab and Muslim world has taken from this duplicitous game played by Europe and the Western world is that terrorism pays and it pays well. They have further figured that the terrorist leaders can blame the Israelis and, by inference, the Jews as well as targeting the United States while threatening the Europeans. The oil rich oligarchs are now spending their treasure to feed those who are blaming the Europeans and the United States while washing their hands of any ties and going through the motions of supporting the war on the very terrorism they are financing. The monsters they created have taken a turn and are also coming for the oligarchs claiming that they are not practicing a sufficiently pure form of Islam and thus have brought all the woe and troubles onto the people. ISIS is the current head of the terror snake demanding a return to the purest form of Islam they understand, namely the Islam supposedly followed by Muhammad and which propelled the Islamic conquest of the first centuries when Islam enjoyed its golden age. Their aim is to return to that time and their route will be the same as were the first leaders of Islam, across the Middle East then across North Africa and then into Europe except this time they believe Europe to be conquerable due to what they regard as decadence and weakness. The initial push into Europe will likely be taken attempting to crush the modern form of the battle of Khaybar as depicted in their protest in Europe and the United States as well as elsewhere that they chant, “Khaybar Khaybar ya Yahud, Jaysh Muhammad sawfa Ya’ud” (Khaybar, Khaybar, O Jews, the army of Muhammad will return).”

Where this escalating conflagration and clash of civilizations, Western extravagance against Islamic extremism, will end is anybody’s’ guess. Those who claim that the current conflicts are the precursors which will inevitably lead to the next world war may be correct though such a result is neither unavoidable nor the most likely result. All could change and change drastically should two things occur, the first of which appears to be a done deal. Should Iran become a nuclear armed nation and then also manage to merge the Sunni terror elements with the Shiite terrorists controlled by Iran such as Hezballah, then there is a definite probability for a universal clash of civilizations. The result of such a nearly worldwide conflict would most likely see Russia and China sitting on the sidelines simply waiting for the end and then picking up the pieces. The most probable winner of a war between a united Islamic army and the Western nations will be those nations which manage to avoid being entangled in the all-encompassing warfare which will likely destroy all who are included. The difficulty will be the managing to unify Sunni and Shiite branches of Islam which have been at war with each other over the centuries almost as long as the Muslims have had disagreements and wars with the Jewish People. This time around there is a distinct probability that Israel will manage to remain outside of the field of battle should the two cultures collide until the very end battle which will take place over the same prize that the last great series of conflicts between the Christian world and the Islamic world fought, Jerusalem. This likelihood has fed a great number of people to claim that this final battle will occur in the Valley of Megiddo. I am not that drawn up into such symbolism but who knows, there just might be some validity to their claim though the chance it would signal the final battle between good and evil, not likely as both sides will be populated with sinners and saints.

The larger likelihood is that the terrorist period will culminate in a series of larger conflicts, none of which anywhere near the level of a world at war but more like civil wars or a war between two or three nations. Much of the current strife being caused by ISIS could be broken down into its basic components which depict tribal differences with Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish fighting for control over lands where these tribes border each other. The chances of ISIS growing to the point they could engage almost any European power are negligible. ISIS would never get past Turkey in order to reach Europe. ISIS is most probably going to be beaten into submission attempting to win the multi-front war they are already engaging with, let alone finding their way to uniting the Islamic world and taking on the European Union with or without United States direct backing. All of this would end within a couple of years if only the nations feeding the individual terror groups, including the Western investments in the Palestinian terror machines, would simply turn off the spigot. Thus far these nations have seen no individual gain calling for their disavowing themselves of the terrorists they are supporting despite the little problem that they are bankrupting themselves for little if any gain. Perhaps economic necessity will bring about the end of the financing of terror, especially Palestinian terror financed by Europe, the rest of the West and the rest of the World if we are to be accurate. And yes, in some very direct ways even Israel had financed Palestinian terrorist activities by providing them with free electricity, water, and other vital necessities and all free of charge, how weird is that?

Beyond the Cusp