A crazy week

What a week!

First there was the Rapture. Unless you have been living under the proverbial rock of ages you know that according to indisputable biblical prophesy, on May 21 all true Christians will have been wafted up to Heaven for all eternity whilst the rest of us would be subject to agonizing torments of biblical proportions until October 21 when the world itself would come to an end. I’m not sure if at that point we go to Hell or simply cease to exist, but in any case we give up our chance to sing psalms and strum harps and praising Jesus for the next 20 quadrillion years. If you are reading this without suffering the torments of Hell on earth the prophesy proved false. But millions were taken in by it and some of those millions, desirous of having their pets looked after, after they are in the hereafter paid enterprising atheists to look after their dogs and cats while they were gone. I don’t know how much cash changed hands but the whole story is proof to me that the sprit of Elmer Gantry is alive and well and living in the mouth of a false prophet somewhere beyond the New England/New York region.

Then there was the Dominique Strauss-Kahn affair. Maybe “affair” is the wrong word in this context. After all, when people have affairs there’s presumably a degree of mutual consent involved. But M. Strauss-Kahn, the Socialist head of the International Monetary Fund (and how that happened is beyond me if the word “socialist” still has any meaning. The IMF, that pillar of support of the capitalist system is the last place you’d expect to find a socialist in charge. Or maybe that would be in a $3000.00 a night hotel room.) In any case Mr. Strauss-Kahn allegedly raped a cleaning lady, this with the impunity and insouciance you might expect from one of his international standing, and was on a plane waiting to fly home to France when New York City policemen came aboard, cuffed him and escorted him via a perp-walk to Rikers Island where as of this writing he is ensconced wondering, no doubt, how he of all people could end up in such a predicament. American journalists have been congratulating the United States for not turning a blind-eye, as Europeans, especially French or Italian Europeans might. Of course American (and European) members of the Roman Catholic hierarchy have been turning a blind eye to the activities of pedophile priests for decades and as part of the weird week I might mention that after an exhaustive investigation a commission has concluded that priests trained before the 1960s were not properly prepared for the social upheaval of the ’60s and ’70s, so they made passes at little boys who wore glasses (and those who didn’t as well). Makes sense.

Then Mahmoud Abbas published in the New York Times a statement justifying the Palestinian Authority’s decision to approach the UN to ask for recognition of Palestine as a sovereign state. According to his view of history “the last time the question of Palestinian statehood took center stage at the General Assembly, the question posed to the international community was whether our homeland should be partitioned into two states.” By “our homeland” he means all Palestine west of the Jordan River. (If he still thinks of all Palestine as west of the river than Israel has troubles. So does J Street.) Then, according to his distorted perspective, “Zionist forces expelled Palestinian Arabs to ensure a decisive Jewish majority in the future state of Israel, and Arab armies intervened.” I guess it was a lucky coincidence that fully mobilized Arab brigades were at the border ready to invade.

The week continued with a counter blast from Danny Danon, deputy speaker of the Knesset. In his op ed piece he says if the West Bank/Gaza Palestinians declare themselves an independent nation, Israel will (or should) declare all Jewish settlements in the West Bank part of Greater Israel, and deny Arabs living in those zones Israeli citizenship. While Danon concedes that there would be international uproar over this he feels it will soon pass. I am not a believer in the two-state solution for reasons enunciated from time to time. But this is crazy. Danon and Abbas deserve each other, the one with no sense of the past, the other with no sense of the future. But if they deserve each other, why should we suffer?

As I’ve said, it was a crazy week.