McCann: In A Muddle Over The Middle East

Jonathan Kellerman is a very successful author and an academic at the University of Southern California. His 40 books, crime novels and studies in psychopathology, have sold tens of millions. He has just sent me a message: “What a racist, anti-Semitic swine you are. Shame on you.”

This brings me back to an observation made here a few weeks ago - that the main strategy of defenders of the role of Israel in the middle east is relentless denunciation of those who take the Palestinian side as anti-semites.
I suppose in a twisted sort of way I might feel honoured that Kellerman took the trouble to respond to my article in a Belfast ‘paper. How he came upon the piece I wouldn’t know. But it can hardly have been by chance. Neither, I imagine, did Abraham Levy casually stumble on the same article and think to write from his address in Gibraltar: “You Irish bastard we have our eyes on you you bloody Nazi.”
There’s organisation involved there.
If the lies and libels are coming in greater profusion and expressed in ever more extreme language - J. Simon: “Your (sic.) cheering murderers of Jewish children” - it’s because they are losing the argument. (If you want to check out the piece which triggered these outbursts, google “McCann Belfast Telegraph Israel”.)
Last month, the Presbyterian Church in the US voted to divest itself of stock in Caterpillar, Hewlett-Packard and Motorola Solutions - companies which supply services to settlements on the West Bank. The Presbyterians were following the lead of the Quakers, the Mennonites and the United Methodists.
The Israeli embassy in Washington characterised the Presbyterian initiative as “driven by hatred of Israel”.
 The Rabbinical Council of Jewish Voice for Peace had supported the divestment proposal and led inter-faith prayers for its success on the evening before the vote. The rabbis and cantors who make up the council were described by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee as “self-hating Jews”.
The best book I know of about the ideology of Israel is “The Myths Of Zionism” by Jewish socialist John Rose, a friend of many years. I once mentioned his book to a person who had spoken up for Israel at a meeting in London. “A Nazi sympathiser,” she told me.
It is important to factor this in when assessing media debates on Israel/Palestine. Newspapers know that any letter or article which suggests that the Palestinians have right on their side will result in a bombardment of bile. This has an effect. In the main, it isn’t that publications run scared and censor copy.  It’s just that, well, who needs the hassle, especially when you know that nothing you can do or say is going to assuage the fury of the fanatics?
My own response to Kellerman, Levy, Simon and the rest of the ever-ready ranters can be contained in the old Yiddish word schmuck - literally, the piece of penis skin snipped off in circumcision.
Schmucks, the lot of them.
I see the pope is at it again. He issued a decree on July formally recognising 250 priests in 30 countries as authorised exorcists.
This confirms that Francis, more than any pontiff in recent times, believes that Satan is personally, so to speak, stalking the earth, intent on dragging souls down to his dark netherworld of pain and despair. Butting heads with Beelzebub is his top priority. Last year, on one of his regular perambulations around Rome, Francis placed his hands on the head of a possessed man and drove out no fewer than four demons.
Few exorcists can manage no more than one at a time. But then, Francis has a hot-line to the Heavenly Father. 
This is the guy who was welcomed by millions last year as a breath of fresh air into a stuffy world of weird irrationality. Obviously, none of these folk had been paying attention in religious knowledge class when it was explained that, although the outer aspects of the Church may have changed and changed again down through the ages, its core, its essence, its fundamental nature, remains as ever in all essentials and will until the end of time. The Church transcends the temporal. The idea of it matching the ethos of the age makes no sense.
If Francis were a harbinger of change, he’d never have been elected in the first place.

There are seeds being scattered here which could grow into something extraordinary”, said presenter Stephen McCauley, closing a two-hour live broadcast from the Playhouse of Radio Ulster’s “Electric Mainline”. 
I caught two of Derry’s three Glastonbury debutants, SOAK and the Wood Burning Savages (Rainy Boy Sleep being somewhere else) as they reenacted stormer sets which, if they didn’t shake the world - that will come later - set Worthy Farm atremble. “Mark that name. Remember it,” counselled Tom Robinson as Bridie floated off stage.
The Savages are a true phenomenon, super-adrenalised, sound tightly intermeshed, well-capable of battering an audience into submission. Check both performances out on YouTube. Rainy Boy Sleep, too.
It’s hard to know and impossible to predict what all this portends. Medical authorities say that parochial patriotism can damage your hearing, and I am sure it’s true. But something is happening, we don’t yet know what it is, but it could be the terror of the earth. (That’s from King Lear. Just popped into my mind. That happens too.)