Call it another skirmish in the war on terror, which is
translating these days as more or less anything deemed unpalatable to social
harmony. Los Angeles school officials are pulling an edition of the Koran
from the district's libraries because of complaints that the footnotes are
anti-Semitic. This particular edition of Islam's Good Book dates from 1934.
An example of one such offending footnote: "The Jews in their
arrogance claimed that all wisdom and all knowledge of Allah was enclosed in
their hearts. But there were more things in heaven and earth than were
dreamt of in their philosophy. Their claim was not only arrogance but
blasphemy."
This doesn't seem so bad, but I suppose you can never be too
careful. A story in the Los Angeles Times reports that copies of "The
Meaning of the Holy Quran" were donated in December to the Los Angeles
Unified School District by a local Muslim foundation. A school district
official told the Times that the books, a goodwill gesture in response to
the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, were distributed to the schools last week
"without the usual content review."
It surely won't be long before the Bible is pulled from school
library shelves as well, since the Old Testament is rough on the
Palestinians, and the New Testament is rough on the Jews. Try the Book of
Numbers, chapter 25, which has sentiments on racial harmony I assume to be
different from those of the Los Angeles School District. God is furious
about sexual intermingling between the children of Israel and the hosts of
Midian. Phineas, son of Eleazar, having risen up with a javelin, "went after
the man of Israel into the tent and thrust them both through, the man of
Israel and the woman through her belly." God is well pleased and signifies
his approval by visiting a pestilence on the Midianites: "So the plague was
stayed from the children of Israel. And those that died in the plague were
twenty and four thousand."
Also joining the anti-Bible coalition will presumably be the
National Organization of Women, unless its officials are swayed by the fact,
apparent in the passage just quoted, that Phineas was pro-choice, albeit in
a somewhat drastic manner. Here's St. Paul on the status of women: "The head
of every man is Christ, and the head of the woman is man, and the head of
Christ is God."
Though my basic view is that any childish mind not inoculated by
compulsory religion is open to any infection, by all means, let us sweep the
Jewish Bible, the Christian Bible and the Koran off every bookshelf whither
might stray the hand of impressionable youth. Such a cleansing act would
return us to the very roots of the European enlightenment.
An interesting review by Jonathan Ree appears in a recent
edition of the London Review of Books, discussing the origins of the
European enlightenment, specifically a pamphlet originating in the
Netherlands and circulating in manuscript form around Europe in the 1680s.
It was called the Traite des Trois Imposteurs (Treatise on Three Impostors),
arguing that all the above-mentioned Holy Scriptures were, as Ree puts it,
"fabricated by conspiracies of priests who somehow managed to pass them off
as the word of God."
The first impostor was Moses, educated by Egyptians, who pulled
the wool over the eyes of the credulous children of Israel; the second was
Jesus, who learned Moses' political astuteness, picked up some mangled ideas
from Plato and other Greek philosophers and in Ree's words, "surrounded
himself with a troupe of voluble imbeciles who were prepared to believe
everything he said, even when he claimed his mother was a virgin and his
father a holy ghost." The third impostor was Mohammed, who learned
everything he needed to know from the other two charlatans.
The authors of the pamphlet have never been identified, but
according to Margaret Jacob in her very influential 1981 study, The Radical
Enlightenment, if they had a philosophical tutor, it would have been
Spinoza, a Dutch Jew. The way things are headed, even that identification
will probably be construed as being anti-Semitic, prompting worried
school-board officials in sensitive school districts to ban the London
Review and Spinoza and the Enlightenment, along with the Talmud, the Holy
Bible and the Koran. Hell, the kids can get probably get by without them.
Let them read Martha Stewart and learn something useful about material
things.
Alexander Cockburn is coeditor with Jeffrey St Clair of the
muckraking
newsletter CounterPunch. To find out more about Alexander Cockburn and read
features by other columnists and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate
Web page at
www.creators.com.
COPYRIGHT 2002 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
