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c2dc379
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Give me a man or woman who has read a thousand books and you give me an interesting companion. Give me a man or woman who has read perhaps three and you give me a very dangerous enemy indeed.
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bibliophiles
book-lovers
willful-ignorance
zealotry
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Anne Rice |
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d6f62b6
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From the beginning men used God to justify the unjustifiable.
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religion
god
inhumanity
extremism
justification
fanaticism
zealotry
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Salman Rushdie |
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a0ea6d2
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Anyone who says he knows God's intention is showing a lot of very human ego.
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religion
zealotry
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Michael Crichton |
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50dac2f
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The only thing more dangerous than an idea is a belief.
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zealotry
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Sarah Vowell |
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bb57dc7
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Long before it was known to me as a place where my ancestry was even remotely involved, the idea of a state for Jews (or a Jewish state; not quite the same thing, as I failed at first to see) had been 'sold' to me as an essentially secular and democratic one. The idea was a haven for the persecuted and the survivors, a democracy in a region where the idea was poorly understood, and a place where--as Philip Roth had put it in a one-handed novel that I read when I was about nineteen--even the traffic cops and soldiers were Jews. This, like the other emphases of that novel, I could grasp. Indeed, my first visit was sponsored by a group in London called the Friends of Israel. They offered to pay my expenses, that is, if on my return I would come and speak to one of their meetings. I still haven't submitted that expenses claim. The misgivings I had were of two types, both of them ineradicable. The first and the simplest was the encounter with everyday injustice: by all means the traffic cops were Jews but so, it turned out, were the colonists and ethnic cleansers and even the torturers. It was Jewish leftist friends who insisted that I go and see towns and villages under occupation, and sit down with Palestinian Arabs who were living under house arrest--if they were lucky--or who were squatting in the ruins of their demolished homes if they were less fortunate. In Ramallah I spent the day with the beguiling Raimonda Tawil, confined to her home for committing no known crime save that of expressing her opinions. (For some reason, what I most remember is a sudden exclamation from her very restrained and respectable husband, a manager of the local bank: 'I would prefer living under a Bedouin to another day of Israeli rule!' He had obviously spent some time thinking about the most revolting possible Arab alternative.) In Jerusalem I visited the Tutungi family, who could produce title deeds going back generations but who were being evicted from their apartment in the old city to make way for an expansion of the Jewish quarter. Jerusalem: that place of blood since remote antiquity. Jerusalem, over which the British and French and Russians had fought a foul war in the Crimea, , on the matter of which Christian Church could command the keys to some 'holy sepulcher.' Jerusalem, where the anti-Semite Balfour had tried to bribe the Jews with the territory of another people in order to seduce them from Bolshevism and continue the diplomacy of the Great War. Jerusalem: that pest-house in whose environs all zealots hope that an even greater and final war can be provoked. It certainly made a warped appeal to my sense of history.
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war
history
christianity
ancestry
antisemitism
arabs
armageddon
arthur-balfour
bedouin
bolshevism
britain
colonialism
crimea
crimean-war
democracy
diplomacy
ethnic-cleansing
fanaticism
france
free-speech
house-arrest
israel
jerusalem
jews
leftism
london
palestine
palestinians
persecution
raimonda-tawil
ramallah
religious-extremism
russia
territory
world-war-i
zealotry
philip-roth
secularism
oppression
torture
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Christopher Hitchens |
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f4cd23c
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Moderation is a wiser policy than zealotry
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moderation
way-of-life
zealotry
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Christopher Paolini |
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2f255f7
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Conversion and zealotry, just like revelation and apostasy, are flip sides of the same coin, the currency of a political culture having more in common with religion than rational discourse.
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politics
reason
religion
christopher-hitchens
conversion
united-states
rationality
revelation
zealotry
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Norman G. Finkelstein |
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6efbbea
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During the Bosnian war in the late 1990s, I spent several days traveling around the country with Susan Sontag and her son, my dear friend David Rieff. On one occasion, we made a special detour to the town of Zenica, where there was reported to be a serious infiltration of outside Muslim extremists: a charge that was often used to slander the Bosnian government of the time. We found very little evidence of that, but the community itself was much riven as between Muslim, Croat, and Serb. No faction was strong enough to predominate, each was strong enough to veto the other's candidate for the chairmanship of the city council. Eventually, and in a way that was characteristically Bosnian, all three parties called on one of the town's few Jews and asked him to assume the job. We called on him, and found that he was also the resident intellectual, with a natural gift for synthesizing matters. After we left him, Susan began to chortle in the car. 'What do you think?' she asked. 'Do you think that the only dentist and the only shrink in Zenica are Jewish also?' It would be dense to have pretended not to see her joke.
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humour
religion
city-councils
croats
david-rieff
islamic-extremism
serbs
sontag
zenica
extremism
bosnia
bosnian-war
muslims
intellectuals
jews
religious-extremism
zealotry
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Christopher Hitchens |