Public Forum
I’m dismayed.
I’ve seen so much lately about what the religious zealots can do. Not many of my friends and neighbors know firsthand what the motivation and reason for so much deep hatred is. Why do people hate before they think? Yes, the teachers and the clergy want the flock to follow blindly, because they know what’s good for us. They say love, and we love. They say “it’s the other guys fault” and we do what any good lover of God would do and go after the offender with all of our heart.
So, with the arrest of Mr. Gibson the other day for allegedly driving too fast while intoxicated, and spewing his hate, apparently handed down from his family, I’m further dismayed.
This is a man with iconic standing. A man people who need a hero look up to, even if it’s fiction, and hold as a hero and idol. Why would he not exercise his mind to educate himself better in other religions and history, so that maybe the contents of his mind grow like his stature?
I know the answer. Here it is in a paragraph or two.
When I used to ask my father, now 76, to tell me about his childhood in Iran as a Jewish boy, he would just mumble and not speak too much. I think he didn’t want to tell me everything, so I would not develop the kind of prejudice and hate ricocheting inside Mel’s head. But a couple of months ago, he opened up to me. Maybe because he feels he’s getting up there in age and needs to say something soon.
He told me of how, when he walked to school, especially alone, he would be taunted by the other kids. He would run and be followed by the usual crowd of the Muslim God-loving children, and ultimately, stoned. He recalled on more than one occasion, ending up in a fetal position, getting kicked by the kids. But even a stronger memory in his mind was a jolt to me. One time, the kicking ceased all of a sudden. A clergyman, a Mullah as they’re called, stopped the kids and pushed back an opening so that he could see my dad lying on the ground. He looked at the kids and asked why they were doing this. One said “Jehud,” “Jehud.” The Mullah then proceeded to land a kick or two of his own, and then walked away, as the kids, with the approval of God through the conduit of God, the Mullah, preceded to pummel him further. Only my Dad’s brother, who just passed away in Tel Aviv last week, intervening with all his might, stopped them.
There is much to learn from my father’s experiences, of which I have only shared one here. Religious riotousness is the reason you see the world on fire right now. The people like Mr. Gibson-with small minds, and with an uneducated and ill guided love for icons, figures, prophets and God are compelled to religious crusades in order to avenge their loved prophets from stories written thousands of years ago, in an attempt to atone for their own doings and in a path straight to the heaven that excludes the generations of children of the bad doers-are the true cause of wars.
Just watching what is happening in the Middle East, I’m sure makes one think that this is a fight about territory. It’s not. It’s a fight to end the existence of the infidel on the pure and holy dirt the other has decided must be cleansed of the unclean.
If Mr. Gibson would only pay attention to his own family and children, which have had issues of their own, and maybe use some of his wealth and success to educate himself in the fact that Jesus lived and died as a Jew, and that the core and foundation of his Christian faith is what he calls the Old Testament, that most wars are caused by religion, but never started by Jews (at least in the past thousand years), that the non-Jewish Germans with the two world wars under their belt have killed millions of Jewish and non-Jewish people (even if his revisionist thinking denies the Holocaust, he cannot deny that millions of humans were killed), and that the Muslims and Christians have been killing each other in Africa and even the former Soviet, that Muslims are and have been killing each other over their version of Islam all over the Middle East, he would have an epiphany and feel foolish for using his power to make hate/love movies and perpetuating what he points to in others as evil. Maybe he would also be less dismayed.
-Shary Nassimi