Category Archives: Religion

Christmas, Culture, Economics, Jesus, Jews, MAGA, Religion

Jesus Comes to America: On Christmas and the Economic Miracle of MAGA…….

December 22, 2017 Mohammed Haider Ghuloum

MAGA Economics: “Rich people elected mainly by poor people taking money from the poor and giving it to the very rich, in the hope of somehow making the poor richer“

I once responded to a poll posted on social media about whether Jesus would be allowed into America. That was a couple of years ago. Here is my modified updated version for this unusual year of 2017:

He, Jesus Son of Maryam as we call him, wants to come to America. He has heard that this new land is the last bastion of his true followers, those who truly adhere to his sect of Judaism, or so he thinks. He knows they call themselves Christians. He wants to come visit his true believers in what was and is called the Old Confederacy and the Bible Belt West, once called fly-over land. As well as some inland pockets of the two coasts.
He, Jesus Christ, would probably not be allowed on a connecting flight from Europe (back in the Middle East there are many who look like him). Eventually, After some agitation, he might be put on a no-fly list.
If not, or if he manages to sneak through the controls, he will face the next obstacle. Some other passenger (almost certainly an American) would complain that he feels uncomfortable with someone dressed in a robe, a hairy man mumbling some strange language, on the same airplane. So, Jesus would likely be bounced off the flight anyway (maybe he’ll be handed a check for $200 as compensation).
Let’s assume that he manages to make it after all, perhaps walking across from Mexico or Canada. He will not be allowed into any church because his attire (robe & sandals) is deemed un-Christian. The first Mega-Buck Church would throw him out because he does not fit the image of a member.
Besides, he wouldn’t know what a church is. Jesus would look for a synagogue upon arrival. Lucky for him, like I did in my teens, he’d most likely land in New York City.
He wouldn’t be any more welcome in a synagogue than in a church. Memories of the Diaspora and pogroms and massacres and the Holocaust perpetrated by his alleged followers do not fade easily. Besides he has no money to pay the very high New York annual fees.
He, as Son of Maryam and fruit of Immaculate Conception, might be allowed into a mosque (no fees usually needed there), but only with the hope of converting him to the teachings of the Arab shepherd who came after him. But it wouldn’t last long.
He would also wonder who this blue-eyed blond namesake of his was, whose alleged birthday is celebrated by corporate America so eagerly every year. From September to January of each year. And he would wonder what he has to do with a fat jolly Germanic man who likes to wear red and white tights, and jingle his bells.
Once enlightened he would wonder what do Amazon and Apple and Macy’s and gas prices and NASDAQ have to do with him.
Most of all, he is intrigued about this new noisy Roman governor of America who is pushing a vague new creed that he calls MAGA. He knows it involves some kind of new miracle: “Rich people elected mainly by poor people taking money from the poor and giving it to the very rich, in the hope of somehow making the poor richer“. Makes sense?

Cheers & Have a Merry One……
Mohammed Haider Ghuloum

Bible, Donald Trump, ISIS, MAGA, Religion, U.S. Politics

The New American Caliphate: the Swamp, the Cesspool, and Trump’s Armageddon………

December 13, 2017 Mohammed Haider Ghuloum

Tweet to https://twitter.com/

One Tweet: “Florida rally cheers when Republican predicts Trump’s Jerusalem embassy decision may usher in Armageddon…..”
Another Tweet: “Trump came to my hometown last night and promised “borders on top of borders.” My state senator said Trump’s bringing Jesus back to life. And my Congressman wants to abolish the EPA. Now you understand why I always seem angry……”

Armageddon – coin-op machines in public toilets dispensing IRA-certified “protection” in the form of Trojan guns – underage sexual abuse (Biblical-style) for the public good – corporations as our (not their) new Jesus of this age – greed and smoke as the new salvation of humanity – corporate fundamentalist-political bullshit as the new gospel.

It looks like parts of the United States are ready to replace the terrorist Caliphate of ISIS with their own. Perhaps a milder gentler more Christian version of DAESH. Jesus and Christianity, just like Islam, have been hijacked again. It also looks like this has extended now to the nation’s capital of Washington DC.

It has miraculously transformed the Old Swap into a more pungent Cesspool. The old hashtag of #DrainTheSwamp is now passe, welcome to #TheCesspool….

Welcome to the new American Caliphate, its ideology a new Cargo Cult…..

And a Merry Christmas to you too…..

M. H. Ghuloum

Islamic History, Marx, Middle East, Muslim Wars, Religion, U.S. Foreign Policy

Marx, Bonaparte, and the New American Opiate of the Masses: Foreign Wars, Muslim Wars………

April 25, 2017 Mohammed Haider Ghuloum

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More than a hundred and fifty years ago, a very hairy European, a German Jew-ish man, opined succinctly that “Religion……. is the Opiate of the People (Masses)“

No, Marx was not thinking of ISIS or the Arab Wahhabi version of Islam. They say he was critiquing some thoughts of Hegel. He was not even a Zionist. Hardly anybody thought of our native Middle East region in those days, although Napoleon Bonaparte paid a very long visit and the crafty British trolled him across the Mediterranean, just to make sure he wasn’t having too much fun. He wasn’t, knowing that Josephine was otherwise occupied in Paris.

In those days, nobody from outside even wanted Holy Jerusalem anymore, except maybe some insecure Jews huddled in their Russian or Polish shtetls.

Now, with religion waning everywhere except in the Middle East and in the Red Flyover States of the United States, we can ask: “What is the new opiate of the people?“

Are foreign wars the new opiate of the masses now? I mean officially and with widespread general acceptance? I mean as a political tool of any administration that fails to achieve progress in its domestic agenda? I mean in the United States over the past few years and especially from this year on? I mean especially for this new Trump administration that seems lost in the translation between conflicting domestic economic promises and the availability and expediency of foreign adventurism?

Are Arab and Muslim lands now the silent unspoken scapegoat and the excuse for domestic economic and other failures of any American administration?
You betcha…..

At least this seems to be the case…..

Cheers
Mohammed Haider Ghuloum

America, Culture, Donald Trump, Mike Pence, Religion, Women

Not Coming to Dinner: Mike Pence, a Woman, and the Devil……

March 31, 2017 Mohammed Haider Ghuloum

“After this week’s revelation that Vice President Mike Pence prefers not to dine alone with women who are not his wife—or at least didn’t as of a 2002 article in the Hill—many members of both the entire sex he has snubbed and the sex that is still afforded the privilege of sitting across from Pence at a Chili’s have expressed their dismay on social media. How could the second most powerful man in our government treat men and women so differently? But not everyone is outraged, or all that surprised, to find out Pence never eats in the solitary presence of a woman…….”

Mr. Pence has suddenly excited the “socially liberal” half of America with the recent disclosure that he will not dine alone with a woman that is not his wife. I don’t understand all the fuss: many men would do (or not do) the same. Certainly the same applies to many, perhaps most, women. Probably there is some hypocrisy there.

There is an old Middle East saying: “whenever a man and a woman get together alone, the Devil is always present with them.” A threesome. Or something to that effect, allowing for linguistic preferences and differences.

You‘ve guessed by now that the idea is that it means there is no innocent get-together of a man and a woman (unless she is a sister, mother, aunt, etc). Right?

One of my language/religion teachers first told us that saying with suspicious relish in Middle School (Junior High). I rarely believed my teachers in matters of religion, but on that one I did at that time, given my critical age and natural obsession.

It is amazing how Christian fundamentalism is so much like Islamic fundamentalism. And how much they both resemble Jewish fundamentalism (apparently if you take a mixed-gender bus often in certain parts of Jerusalem you’d know what I mean). I suspect that they both got much of their uptightness from ancient Jewish writings. People from arid lands tend to be more uptight than others, I should know. Unless we’re talking about Arizona or Palm Springs. But Indiana? The Hoosier State doesn’t resemble our faraway places that have created Muslim and Jewish jihadis in recent decades…….

Maybe that is not it, maybe Mr. Pence knows himself as well as, say, Mr. Trump knows himself. The latter explained it all to the world in Billy Bush’s tapes. Live and learn….

(Remember: everybody’s house is at least partly made of glass. At least the windows tend to be so…..)

P.S.: I just remembered a novel I read many years ago, Rain by one of the greatest writers of the 20th century, Somerset Maugham.

Cheers
Mohammed Haider Ghuloum

Bigotry, Jesus, Jews, Muslims, Racism, Religion, U.S. Senate, US Congress, Xenophobia

New Trendy Bigotry: Rent a Jew, Rent a Muslim, Rent a Bigot (or Elect One)………

March 29, 2017 Mohammed Haider Ghuloum

“Do Jews get a discount when they buy a car? Do they own McDonald’s? Do Jews control the media and international banking? Do any of them live here anymore? These are among the questions German school children ask Jews who volunteer in a new outreach program with the provocative name, “Rent A Jew.” The Jews in question are not actually “rented” since they volunteer their time. But they do present themselves as living exhibits of something young Germans hear about constantly, thanks to their curricula on Germany and the Holocaust but rarely see: living, talking, walking Jews as they live their lives today. The program – launched in 2015 by the Munich-based Janusz Korczak Academy in collaboration with the Jewish Agency for Israel – is beginning to catch on. The Jewish Agency provides funding for the program, which mixes education with humor. “Rent a Jew,” the group’s tagline urges. “You will never forget your first.”

What next? Rent-a-Muslim for the Trump and Bannon and Gaffney kids to learn from?
Some say Muslims may be the “new” Jews in Europe and the United States. The next target for frustrated underemployed Christians and Evangelicals who can’t wait for “The Day” when all Jews are expected to convert to their peculiar old sect started by Jesus of Nazareth.

I don’t believe it, this thing about Rent-a-Muslim. It takes a long history, many centuries of suspicion, discrimination, abuse, and massacres to get to where the Jews are. And requires us to have a lot of talent that makes others realize their own shortcomings, which we don’t have yet. Besides, Muslims are nowhere near being group targets of life-and-death situations: there just are too many of us, and we are not one race or one nation. We come from all over.
Even the New Neo-Republican Party can’t build that kind of a wall. I believe that in this Congress and at the New White House they are realizing that and focusing on their real long-term enemy: a well-educated and healthy American people.

Besides, Muslims don’t make good scapegoats. We make better goats than scapegoats, given how our native countries are managed.

Maybe Rent-a-Bigot can become a viable business in some coastal states. A quaint conversation piece on one of the two coasts. Unless you elect a whole passel of them and let them loose on a country.

FYI: unlike the myth being encouraged in extreme right wing media, not many Muslims prefer slitting throats. Many prefer AK-15 (but that would be a Russian connection no?). One other thing is worrisome, tough: many of us like our food, especially our meat, Kosher (except we called it Halal after we copied it from the Jews about fifteen centuries ago).
More on this later, possibly, stay tuned…….

Cheers
M. Haider Ghuloum

Al-Azhar, Europe, Fatwa, Islam, Religion

Sheikh of Azhar After Brexit: All Europe Will Go To Heaven…….

June 30, 2016 Mohammed Haider Ghuloum

Remember that old film “All Dogs Go to Heaven“?

It seems now that all Europeans also go to heaven, or they will soon. Even those who may not want to.

Thus a new fatwa by the Sheikh Ahmed Al Tayeb , chief of the once-revered-but-no-more Al Azhar in Cairo.

Fresh from a visit to Rome, the former Mubarak crony fatwad that Europeans are not Muslims only because they have not been exposed to the true Islam. Ergo: it is not their fault that they are not Muslims and don’t believe in the ‘message’. Heathens by default. Which is not a bad argument, although quite self-serving. As well as a back-handed compliment to Europeans, possibly a clever one but most likely accidental and narrow-minded.

The sheikh apparently does not understand that not all Europeans are good Christians or even bad Christians (in fact hardly any are in an American sense) or good Jews. He apparently thinks they are all good Christians (or Jews), just as all Muslims are very good pious Muslims indeed. Which means the majority of Europeans who are either agnostic or atheist are in trouble, screwed, (or maybe not, depending on what they think of this sheikh’s heavenly connections).

I have one problem with this Azhar sheikh issuing such broad “certificates of Indulgence“, broader than were issued by the Catholic Church in Europe centuries ago. Who the hell authorized him to issue these mass Indulgences? I need to see a copy of this Godly Power of Attorney, notarized and witnessed.

(And what about South Americans and East Asians and Africans?)
Cheers

Mohammed Haider Ghuloum

Culture, Donkeys and Asses, Health, Lebanon, Religion, religious police

Valentine in the Middle East: Swine Flu, Stag Kissing, and Excommunicating Barbie…….

February 11, 2016 Mohammed Haider Ghuloum

They report that a Lebanese minister has advised the people of his country this week to reduce the amount of kissing on Valentine’s Day this year. Which makes me wonder what type of neighbors does he have: I mean hygiene and not just looks. But he is worried about the spread of “Swine Flu” aka H1N1.
Yet we kiss a lot in the Middle East, in Arab and Muslim countries, much more than they do in the West. And almost always it is kissing in public rather than in private. We probably do more public kissing than the French do French-ing in Paris. Everybody does it, even the Salafis, Wahhabis, Shi’as, Sufis, Sunnis, Haredim, Vegans, Christians, Evangelicals, and possibly Jews (oddly I haven’t seen many native Jews on the Gulf in recent years for some reason). But the difference is that it is not heterosexual kissing, it is same-sex kissing, at least the public part is.

In Iran, there are reports that the police have warned against spreading Valentine’s Day culture in shops. Yes, shops. A warning which a lot of people and most shop owners will typically ignore, as they do every year.

In Saudi Arabia, red color on February 14 can send you straight to hell, even if you are not Shi’a- Safavi- Rafidhi-Jew-Christian-Animist. The Vice Squad (religious cops) are also cracking down on dolls (Barbie, etc) that expose too much plastic than is considered decent by the clerics. Barbie, of course, was famously excommunicated (by Fatwa) by a religious sheikh and professor (or Dean) of Sharia in my own hometown some years ago.

A few years ago in Gaza some vendor painted an ass red (no, I mean a jackass, donkey) on Valentine’s to promote his business. This year Egypt’s Al Sisi wants the Gazans to have a bit more red in their Valentine: he is opening the Rafah pass to the ‘qualified’ Gazans. But only for February 13 and 14, only for Valentine’s. He will close it back shut right after that, but still it is sweet of the Generalissimo.

Cheers
Mohammed Haider Ghuloum

Bible, Christmas, Jesus, Jews, Religion

Jesus Economics: He Comes to America at Christmas, Walks Into a……………..

December 24, 2015 Mohammed Haider Ghuloum

Someone posted a poll on social media early today about whether Jesus would be allowed into America. Here was my response:

He, Jesus Christ, would probably be put on a no-fly list.
If not, some other passenger (almost certainly an American) would complain that he feels uncomfortable with someone dressed in a robe, a hairy raghead mumbling some strange language, on the same airplane. So, Jesus would be bounced off the flight.
Let‘s assume that he manages to make it, perhaps walking across from Mexico or Canada. He will not be allowed into any church because his attire (robe and sandals) is deemed un-Christian.
Besides he wouldn’t know what a church is. Jesus would look for a synagogue upon arrival. Lucky for him, like me in my teens, he’d most likely land in New York City.
He wouldn’t be any more welcome in a synagogue than in a church. Memories of the Diaspora and pogroms and massacres and the Holocaust do not fade easily. He might be allowed in a mosque but only with the hope of converting him, and not for long.
He would also wonder who this namesake of his was, whose alleged birthday is celebrated by corporate America so eagerly. From September to January every year.
Once enlightened he would wonder what did Amazon and Apple and gas prices and NASDAQ have to do with him……

Cheers & Have a Merry One……
Mohammed Haider Ghuloum

Culture, History, Iran, Islamic History, Religion

Historical Hints of the Magi: Was Zarathustra Sagte……….

June 1, 2015 Mohammed Haider Ghuloum

“Zoroastrianism is one of the world’s oldest monotheistic religions. It was founded by the Prophet Zoroaster (or Zarathustra) in ancient Iran approximately 3500 years ago. For 1000 years Zoroastrianism was one of the most powerful religions in the world. It was the official religion of Persia (Iran) from 600 BCE to 650 CE. It is now one of the world’s smallest religions………… Zoroastrians believe there is one God called Ahura Mazda (Wise Lord) and He created the world. Zoroastrians are not fire-worshippers, as some Westerners wrongly believe. Zoroastrians believe that the elements are pure and that fire represents God’s light or wisdom. Ahura Mazda revealed the truth through the Prophet, Zoroaster. Zoroastrians traditionally pray several times a day. Zoroastrians worship communally in a Fire Temple or Agiary. The Zoroastrian book of Holy Scriptures is called The Avesta…………….”

Arabs traditionally called them Majous (as in the Westernized Magi), probably after their priests, especially in the early years of the Muslim conquest. The conversion to Islam started under the second Caliph Omar I whose dedicated free-spirited desert fighters defeated the Sassanid (or Sasanian) dynasty surprisingly easily.
Because of their traditional symbolic fire rituals, Arabs and others have simplistically held throughout history that Zoroastrians were “fire worshippers”. That is equivalent to claiming Catholics worship statues or gargoyles (as in Notre Dame de Paris and other places).

During periods of regional political tension some Arabs, usually Salafi extremists on the Gulf, still call all Iranians, even the Muslims among them, Majous. They are a recognized but historically discouraged religion in theocratic Iran, and like Jews they hold one seat in Parliament. Nowadays especially the term is used quite frequently politically in Salafi ethnic propaganda campaigns and in social media, sometimes referring also to Shi’as, including many Arab Shi’as who don’t even speak Persian. Overlooking the fact that pre-Islamic Peninsula Arabs were mostly free pagans who worshiped chosen idols, and that ancient Egyptians worshiped their incestuous kings (Pharaohs) who usually married their own sisters.

Some aspects of their ancient religion are intriguing:
It is monotheistic (one supreme God-creator; one symbolic evil) – they worship several times a day – they have a book of Holy Scriptures (Avesta) – their God conveyed the truth to an ethnic Prophet (Zoroaster or Zarathustra), who was Persian rather than the usual Semite (Jewish or Arab)……..
Hint, hint, hint…………

Cheers
Mohammed Haider Ghuloum
[email protected]

Culture, Education, Islam, Religion, Sex

Urban Legend of the Turkish Pregnant Hand…….

May 26, 2015 Mohammed Haider Ghuloum

“A Turkish televangelist has warned male Muslims away from masturbation – because it may leave their hands pregnant in the afterlife. Mücahid Cihad Han supposedly made the claim in response to a call from a man who “kept masturbating, although he was married, and even during the Umrah”, a pilgrimage similar to the Hajj. Hearing the man’s plight, Han stated that masturbation is forbidden in Islam and went on to say: “Moreover, one hadith states that those who have sexual intercourse with their hands will find their hands pregnant in the afterlife…………”

Nothing new here. Years ago when I was in Middle School (Junior High) back home on the shores of the Gulf a teacher of Islamic religion told our class the same thing. He claimed the “pregnant hand” would file a sexual assault complaint with God.
Scared the hell out of many students. Probably not me………..
Besides, my young skeptical mind suspected that he himself indulged…….

P.S.: It is not just in Islam. There are also the Christian ( and probably Jewish) equivalent of this Turkish cleric who spread similar nonsense.