Sweetheart, They Like Hating

These guys will hate you even if you’re the bestest good Jew on the planet, and those guys will hate you even if you’re the bestest good Muslim on the earthly plane.

Sure—they’ll use you any which way they can.  Trot you out to prove “even Jews/Muslims agree with our position.  Even they know you’re wrong.”

And then sooner or later they’ll eat you all up.

Those awful things you find in Hamas-sponsored kindergartens, written out in that pretty Arabic script?  Mirrored exactly in the more extremist yeshiva kindergartens in that pretty related script.

It’s just a miracle.  All the schmatteh-covered mothers have little snakes in their bellies, as each side will tell you with venom.

Because all cults are bad, and enlightenments happen for a reason.  People love their cultures, they don’t want to lose the food and the music and literature and in-jokes; they want to keep that connection to their ancestors but some of them want to free themselves from the garbage.  We Jews had our enlightenment, and then the Christians said we can still smell your blood underneath all that liberated thinking, and the Muslims had their enlightenment and then their brethren screamed heretics! and they still keep blowing up the shrines of the Sufi saints and no, children, Sufism universalized for a Western palate ain’t Sufism no more if it ain’t specific to Islam.

There aren’t any holy lands, or sacred spaces.  You really believe in God?  Then why would you even imagine that the entire cosmos itself isn’t the holy space?

That’s an easy question to answer of course.