What's going on in Gaza?

Have you heard this one?

A religious denomination built a hospital in a foreign country where it was having considerable success converting people to its brand of the Christian faith. It was a small hospital, but the need for medical care was enormous and so the beds filled very quickly. A policy was enacted that since the hospital couldn’t hope to deal with all the medical requirements of the area, preference would be given to converts.

Shortly thereafter, the hospital director was leaving the building after a particularly strenuous day when his attention was arrested by a commotion at the admitting counter. A woman was begging loudly and with many tears that her child be admitted. The director immediately identified her as an adherent of a rival mission, one he considered to be teaching questionable—if not false—doctrine.

“Ma’am,” he said to her, “we can’t help you. I want you to leave the building quietly.”

“But my child is really sick” she protested, “and I know you could help her!
Would you please, at least, look at her?”

“Ma’am,” the director said, “it’s not right to take the children’s food and toss it to the dogs.”

The woman was desperate. “But sir, the dogs still wander around the table, snatching up the scraps that fall!”

The director was moved by her persistence, and flattered by the confidence she had in his hospital’s ability to help her. He thought for a moment, and then directed the nurse at the counter to have a bed placed in the hallway for the child, and to tell the resident doctor to examine and treat the child.

“Excuse me for my impertinence,” said the nurse, “but you know that this will open the floodgates. What will we do then?”

The director turned back to the woman. “We’ll treat your child, but only on the condition that you tell no one about it, understand?”

The first time I heard this exact story was just now, as I wrote it.

But I have heard a version of it before, in Matthew 15: 21-28 and Mark 7: 24-30, to be specific. There, the director is Jesus—a Jew—and the supplicant is a Canaanite woman. I had occasion to revisit the story just a few days ago because it was the text for an adult Sunday school lesson and I had a contract to write teachers’ guide notes for it. At the same time, the state of Israel was bombing Hamas targets in Gaza and Palestinian militants were continuing to fire rockets into Israel. It’s no surprise that the story and the news would come to be related in my thoughts.

On its face, Jesus’ metaphor (if he, in fact, said it) is racist, and that’s troubling to anyone who has built his image of Jesus around, say, the Sermon on the Mount. As we end up doing so often, the Oxford Study Bible excuses it by attributing the words to Matthew’s pen, and saying that “The story revolves around a non-Jewish woman and the question of Jesus’ mission. Matthew thinks of a mission limited to Israel during Jesus’ human career but ultimately intended to reach out to all (p. 1285).” True, Jesus appears to say that his mission is to his people—the Jews—and then seems to “change his mind” for the sake of this one extraordinary Canaanite woman.

The Jew/Gentile consciousness haunts the world today like a canker that grows and wanes, then grows again. (It has its equivalent, of course, in North American black/white, Indian/white and in Germany—when I worked there in the ‘80s— German/Turk distinctions) Matthew’s story may have been intended to tell the people of the temple and the synagogue that the incarnation was for them—the fulfillment of their messianic hope. Unfortunately, most readers of the story are obliged to see themselves in the roles of the dogs—not the children.

That, at least, is one interpretation, and it’s troublesome.

There are plenty of references in Paul’s writing that hint at the end of these distinctions. Unfortunately, some of the Christian world has chosen a far-too legalistic approach to faith and has never fully embraced Paul’s admonition in Romans 10:12: “For there is no difference between Jew and Gentile—the same Lord is Lord of all and richly blesses all who call on him. . . .” In fairness to them, it has to be said that Paul himself was unable to free himself completely from the notion that there is a difference. In Romans 1:16, he uses the terms Jew and Gentile racially: “I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes: first for the Jew, then for the Gentile.”

I suppose that when a group of people live in proximity to each other for generations, the development of a unique outlook, unique cultural markers, and a unique religious worldview is inevitable. The rest of the world will apply a name to them; that name will eventually become part of the world vocabulary, and even group members will begin to think of themselves as defined-by-their-label. And as all we recyclers know, it’s a lot easier to stick a label on a bottle than to soak/scrape it off.

Is the conflict in Gaza Jew-versus-Gentile? Is it Palestinians against Israelis? How shall we understand it? The word “Palestine” has its roots in “Philistine.” “Palestine” came to refer to the area of the world known variously as the “Levant,” or the “Holy Land,” etc. People of the area were called “Palestinians” for centuries, whether they were of Arab or Jewish descent. Are we seeing a reverse of the David and Goliath story where David is the giant (with jets and tanks) and tiny Goliath is slinging stones (rockets) into his territory with a sling, hoping he’ll eventually hit a vital organ? Or is it better described as a multi-generational feud like the Hadfields and McCoys, or the Star-bellied Sneetches?

There’s hardly any doubt about the conflict in Gaza being territorial, on top of anything else. Its rhetoric is most often about borders and land access, homelands and hinterlands and to whom this field rightfully belongs and who can say where a person can and can’t go, or work, or grow figs. It certainly hasn’t helped that the West has declared one side (on the basis of race, ethnicity) in the dispute to have a right to a certain territory and then poured in money and resources to back it up. I can’t think of a better way to create resentment, to start a feud.

Jesus’ encounter with the Canaanite woman and the metaphor of the dogs vs the children occurred early in his ministry, according to the gospel records. From then on, we see in his parables and later, in the early church, a shifting away from ethnic consciousness to the point where Paul can write: “For there is no difference between Jew and Gentile—the same Lord is Lord of all and richly blesses all who call on him. . . .”

George Bush summed up the current US policy toward the conflict when he said, “Israel has a right to defend itself.” At about that time, the death toll on the Israeli side was 4, and on the Gaza side, 500+. Since then, both numbers have risen considerably, but the proportions have remained the same. Defend itself, yes, but what about the “defend itself, how?” question. Even an inkling that there might be a prophetic destiny playing out is tremendously harmful to our commitment to a solution, and we have to exorcise that demon in North America if we’re ever going to contribute to peace in the Middle East.

God is NOT territorial; if he is at all interested in defining homelands, he is as concerned about a homeland for his “Muslim” children as he is for his “Jewish” children. Get that through your heads, Christians. I think Obama’s got that. I hope.

Jesus healed the Canaanite woman’s daughter. Take it from there.

Please pass the butter - a reflection on revisionism and the holocaust

Don’t bother me with the facts, my mind’s already made up (popular saying).

In our age, seems to me, anti-Semitism stands as the universal icon of ethnic prejudice and the holocaust as the historical point of reference. So much so that one begins to feel that questioning the facts of the holocaust, contextualizing it historically, even criticizing the behaviour of the State of Israel in any way is somehow encroaching on holy ground. I’m not arguing for the holocaust revisionists here; I’m simply saying that there appears to be undue alarm raised by any historical research that tends to update details of the holocaust, as if such effort is necessarily an attempt to divert blame from the perpetrator to the victim.

And holocaust revisionists do the latter blatantly. Book titles and websites proclaiming that “gas chambers and extermination plans are myths” are easy to find. But what if it turned out to be true that a lot of the Jews we once believed were killed by NAZIs in Poland were actually killed by Poles? Would it make an appreciable difference? Holocaust-denial websites and historical revisionists imply that such information tends to absolve the NAZIs, and are hard at work pushing this faulty logic on the world.

Ah, logic. We don’t teach it well. A website lists the people in positions of authority in the American media who are also Jewish. That list runs to about a hundred names, and put down on paper that way, it implies a message that simply isn’t there. There are thousands upon thousands of people of non-Jewish origin who would be on this list if ethnicity were not its central criterion. It’s logical that a hundred or so would be Jewish in such a company.

It’s tantamount to listing the names of all the people in Southern Manitoba who own businesses and are Mennonite, then putting a huge exclamation mark after the list. It would imply conspiracy, i.e. that Mennonites are so highly represented in commerce in Southern Manitoba that there’s obviously a plan to exclude non-Mennonites.

People of Chinese origin are massively over-represented in the café business in rural Saskatchewan. Obviously only conspiracy could account for this, and who knows what sinister plot the whole of world-wide Chinasery has cooked up, of which their presence in such unexpected numbers in rural Saskatchewan is an obvious part? It makes every Chinese person suspect. It makes it easier to believe that they’re serving us alley cats as chicken and mice as shrimp.

A lot of people have no training in logic; they have a hard time seeing through such deceptions.

Below are three logical fallacies from the catalogue that are clearly evident in the arguments of the holocaust deniers and historical revisionists. They are blatant and should be recognizable to every educated person. Obviously, they’re not:

Argumentum ad logicam (argument to logic). This is the fallacy of assuming that something is false simply because a proof or argument that someone has offered for it is invalid; this reasoning is fallacious because there may be another proof or argument that successfully supports the proposition.[1]

Non Sequitur (“It does not follow”). This is the simple fallacy of stating, as a conclusion, something that does not strictly follow from the premises. For example, “Racism is wrong. Therefore, we need affirmative action.” Obviously, there is at least one missing step in this argument, because the wrongness of racism does not imply a need for affirmative action without some additional support. . . . [2]

The argument to logic is applied repeatedly by revisionists. They will attempt to show that the statistics on executions in Auschwitz, for instance, are inaccurate, and will use that as evidence that the holocaust never happened. (They will often follow this up with an Argumentum ad Hominem fallacy, namely, the argument that the researcher of the inaccurate statistics must have falsified the truth and is therefore an evil—or at least untrustworthy—person. This is proof, they say or imply, that the historical record in total and all those who are responsible for it must be dismissed.

The non sequitur fallacy should be recognizable to all of us, but we often fall prey to it. The entire argument that the high number of Jews in the banking business in Germany means that they were responsible for monetary failures in the period before 1933 is a non sequitur, it does not follow in logic, anymore than the argument that the high rate of incarceration of aboriginal people in Western Canada shows unequivocally that aboriginals have criminal tendencies. Much more needs to be shown as evidence for these two things to be logically connected.

There’s nothing wrong with researching matters like the holocaust, and no one should be dissuaded from this by those who might quickly jump to the conclusion that the effort is in support of revisionists and holocaust deniers. The truth is always the truth.

Educating ourselves and our children to recognize the difference between butter and bullshit, however, is essential.

828 words

---

[1] http://www.csun.edu/~dgw61315/fallacies.html#Argumentum%20ad%20logicam

[2] ibid