Watching Beirut Die

Watching Beirut Die by Anthony Bourdain

http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2006/07/28/bourdain_beirut/print.html is a very nice piece. It captures the surreal quality of being an observer in someone else’s war. Let us add two and two together though, so that the tragedy doesn’t become just another voice in the desert calling out the name of BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOSH.

1. Hezbollah started this nonsense by firing rockets into Israel. If they hadn’t done this THERE WOULD BE NO WAR and no “tragedy”
2. The Moslem claim to Jerusalem and the Holy Land is somewhat irrational and confused with the Palestinian situation. They are two different things—the claim to the Holy Land and the theft of Palestinian land. The Jews were in the Holy Land before Islam existed and Jerusalem was Christian before it was Moslem. The Islamo-fascists’ claim puts them third in line. The claim that ancient Palestinians were ousted by the Jews is about as relevant as the American Indians’ claim to the Americas only three or four thousand years older. Only the modern day Palestinians have a reasonable claim to the land but they have made their own lives infinitely worse by embracing the Jihadists who are really irhabists (terrorists). If they had any brains, they would have waited quietly, made lots of money and out-bred the Jews and swallowed them whole in a few generations.
3. Mohammed was an uneducated religious fanatic with probably no greater level of elementary spirituality than Henry the VIII or Joseph Smith. The fact that millions of Moslems worldwide think he was some kind of super prophet (seal of the prophets) is the root of a fundamental irrationality that will most likely result in future war in the Middle East and the annihilation of Mecca and Medina. But this is, I suppose, no stranger than millions of Anglicans following in the footsteps of a man who just wanted to have a bit more sex and off-ed his wives.
4. Millions of the lunatic followers of Joseph Smith (Mormonism) believe that when they die, they will inherit their own planet. They are wrong. They will die just like everyone else and go where everyone else goes (wherever that is). Tens of thousands of Moslems believe that if they die as Jihadists/irhabists that they will be greeted by 72 Virgins. They are wrong; they will more likely be greeted by Satan. Millions of Communists, evolutionists and atheists of all stripes believe that when they die, there will be nothing. They are wrong. There will be something but what that is none of us can really know.
5. Why would anyone (and I lump Jews and all other unbelievers in the same category) believe in any prophet, or man of God, or messenger, or holy man when the Son of God has already claimed to have walked the earth is quite beyond me.

Wars such as this one are a result of the dynamics of unbelief, representing spiritual devolution or as Chesterton once said: “When men cease to believe in the truth, they will believe in anything.”