This is the beginning of what will be a series of explorations of anti-Semitism.
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"Routine circumcision as a preventative or cure for masturbation was proposed in Victorian times in America. Masturbation was thought to be the cause of a number of diseases. The procedure of routine circumcision became commonplace between 1870 and 1920, and it consequently spread to all the English-speaking countries (England, Canada, Australia and New Zealand). None of these countries now circumcise the majority of their male children, a distinction reserved today for the United States (in the UK, in fact, nonreligious circumcision has virtually ceased). Yet, there are still those who promote this social surgery, long after the masturbation hysteria of the past century has subsided.

'To obtain the best results one must cut away enough skin and mucous membrane to rather put it on the stretch when erections come later. There must be no play in the skin after the wound has thoroughly healed, but it must fit tightly over the penis, for should there be any play the patient will be found to readily resume his practice not begrudging the time and extra energy required to produce the orgasm... We may not be sure that we have done away with the possibility of masturbation, but we may feel confident that we have limited it to within the danger lines.'

E.J. Spratling, M.D. 1895
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In America, foreskins were not rare at the time circumcision was introduced into widespread practice. Paradoxically, then, the understanding of the intact male organ at that time was somewhat greater than it is today. (In particular, it never would have been possible to promote circumcision on the basis that it was "necessary for hygienic reasons"---this came later, when doctors themselves were mostly circumcised men.)
Further, in proposing circumcision as a preventative against self-abuse, physicians of the day understood very well that male masturbation involves stimulation of the foreskin. However they were incorrect in assuming that, by reducing the pleasure, masturbation itself could be reduced or eliminated."

What were the original motivations behind
routine infant circumcision in the West?
CIRP

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"Similarly with regard to circumcision, one of the reasons for it is, in my opinion, the wish to bring about a decrease in sexual intercourse and a weakening of the organ in question, so that this activity be diminished and the organ be in as quiet a state as possible. It has been thought that circumcision perfects what is defective congenitally. This gave the possibility to everyone to raise an objection and to say: How can natural things be defective so that they need to be perfected from outside, all the more because we know how useful the foreskin is for that member? In fact this commandment has not been prescribed with a view to perfecting what is defective congenitally, but to perfecting what is defective morally. The bodily pain caused to that member is the real purpose of circumcision. None of the activities necessary for the preservation of the individual is harmed thereby, nor is procreation rendered impossible, but violent concupiscence and lust that goes beyond what is needed are diminished. The fact that circumcision weakens the faculty of sexual excitement and sometimes perhaps diminishes the pleasure is indubitable. For if at birth this member has been made to bleed and has had its covering taken away from it, it must indubitably be weakened. The Sages, may their memory be blessed, have explicitly stated: It is hard for a woman with whom an uncircumcised man has had sexual intercourse to separate from him. In my opinion this is the strongest of the reasons for circumcision."
Moses Maimonides (1135-1204), translated by Shlomo Pines

Circumcision Information and Resource Pages
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The dominance expressed in the act of circumcision is near total, and the depth of its entry into the person, into the sexual identity of the circumcised, is near total as well. All you have to do is imagine the effect on an unwilling adult male, and lose the bogus idea that infants because they can't communicate linguistically - and when they can, later, are rarely able to articulate remembered events - are incapable of such basic emotions as rage and grief and the complex of coping reactions that allow the defeated to go on with their lives.
The benefits of that dominance when it's asserted on an infant will go to whoever can convince the circumcised they're responsible for having done it to them. Keeping that responsibility vague and indistinct is even more effective as social control, because it doesn't get tied to any particular individual, but the whole pre-existing social order.
In ritual circumcision of pre-pubescent males, such as the traditional Jewish Brit Milah this is straightforward, the dominant force is recognized and limited, the line of submission is visible, and accepted.
To the infant being circumcised unwillingly there is only the unrememberable horror. Like many other structured disintegration/reintegration practices - the boot camp, hazing rituals etc - there's a tendency toward acceptance of the new identity as appropriate, inevitable; most circumcised men probably don't think much about it, and when they do see themselves as belonging, not wounded.
It takes momentous change to gain a perspective of what's happened, and an acceptance of irrecoverable loss, woundedness, incompletion.
This is one of the barriers the traumatized always have, the struggle against the need to not see, the healing of covering up - to testify to the wound is to proclaim your own brokenness to the world; that brings with it a dangerous vulnerability. In a culture where the priesthood of medicine was capable of Spratling's madness this would be counter to survival.
Things change. But it's important to place this in a larger, still less comfortable context.
A ritual of violent intimacy integral to the practice of Jewish religious law was performed almost universally on male children who were not Jews, and the reasons given were at best grotesque nonsense.
Why?
Setting aside the bizarre hatred of sexual desire and expression the 19th century West was pandemic with - it's safe to assume that men like Spratling were at least as mistaken in their self-knowledge and views of their own motives as they were about the "hygienic" effect of their mutilating surgeries - we can see that it could be a means of establishing dominance, with a minimal expenditure of energy on the part of the dominating power.
Social dominance is absolutely central to the creation and preservation of systems of control - the whipping of slaves, the punitive enforcement of rules, yelling at insubordinates, these things are obvious enough.
I can remember vividly the first time someone told me that circumcision wasn't necessary, I was maybe 12, a friend of mine whose father hadn't let them cut him said it. It was shocking and I went through all the learned responses I had; which were few, because there hadn't been much questioning of it in my experience.
The question now is whether or not to view it as a mistake, made for generations on millions of infant boys; or as something more sinister. If it was only a mistake it's a regrettable thing, but something we can move on from and resolve to prevent. First, though, we need to dispense with the possibility of its being intentional.
In order to do that we'll need to place the intent somewhere more accurately than in the hands of Spratling and his ilk, who I think can be dismissed as pathological and confused, projecting their own received and internalized conflicts onto the tabula rasa of the young.
What I'm going to try to describe here is the locus of that intent as something that hasn't got its own term in the equation, that doesn't have a recognizable name or identity. The theme of dominance and control by almost invisible techniques and by the consistent use of patterns of camouflage that place the innocent between the attacking righteous and the real perpetrator.
This is what I believe is driving the evident rise of anti-Semitism in many parts of the world now, and it's also what makes most of that unfocused prejudice inaccurate and ineffectual.

an infant analog to post-traumatic stress disorder:

In a statement, the Doctors Opposing Circumcision said the judge's ruling protected "the boy's legal right to bodily integrity."
"Male circumcision in an irreversible amputation of functional tissue," it added.
"The ruling opens a very interesting question," said the group's John Geisheker. "If the benefits of circumcision are not available to a 9-year-old, what does that say about infants?"
At least one study has shown infants that have been circumcised later show a greater sensitivity to pain, "an infant analog to post-traumatic stress disorder," Geisheker said.
On the opposing side, one study suggested an uncircumcised penis may be more prone to becoming infected with HIV.
The practice of circumcising infant males is rare in Europe, while it is declining but remains common in the United States.

Reuters 024.10.06
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The Ashley Montagu Campaign Against the Torture and Mutilation of Children
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An unbiased clip:
John Geisheker, a Seattle attorney who specializes in botched circumcision cases, is hoping for a new wave of cases based on the success of the New York case.
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A biased clip:
"Everyone I hear are waving their arms and saying we don't have a stick big enough to hit back at this issue," Tinari announces. "I've come to the conclusion, after years of studying, that no appeal to morality will ever end circumcision. You have to make it so financially painful that it ends by punishing practitioners. How do you do that? I may have the tool that we've been looking for."
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One scientific study:
These men were living in Orange Farm, a neighborhood near Johannesburg, South Africa, with high rates of HIV transmission and an existing male circumcision rate of approximately 20%. Prior to this study, the researchers had conducted a feasibility pilot study that found that 70% of men would consider circumcision if it were beneficial and safe.
Subjects willing to be circumcised were then randomized to receive immediate circumcision or to wait 20 months for the procedure. In the intervention group, medical physicians removed the penile foreskin after administering local anesthetic and using sterile surgical procedures.
At 21 months, the researchers diagnosed 69 new HIV cases, 51 in the control group that had yet to be circumcised, and 18 in the group that had been circumcised, Dr. Auvert said. This translates into a 65% protective effect (with a 95% confidence interval of 40% to 80%).
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A serendipitous appointment:
The research, presented at the International AIDS Conference here, builds on last year's finding that circumcised heterosexual men are at least 60% less likely to contract HIV than their uncircumcised counterparts.
Kevin De Cock, MD, director of the World Health Organization's HIV/AIDS program, says that if the findings hold up, the global agency will issue guidelines backing the procedure for HIV prevention.
[...]
No one's really sure how circumcision might prevent infection with HIV, but De Cock offers several possibilities.
The foreskin is covered with a much thinner layer of cells than the penis, which could facilitate invasion by the virus, he says. Also, the foreskin has more cells that have targets for the virus, De Cock says.
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Sobering numbers:
Overall, 26% of individuals in Kisumu and 28% in Ndola were HIV-positive. In both sites, HIV prevalence in women was six times that in men among sexually active 15-19 year olds, three times that in men among 20-24 year olds, and equal to that in men among 25-49 year olds.

Foreskins and smegma years ago:

JOSEPH J. SCHATZ, AP writer:

A southern African radio correspondent has been receiving a flood of text messages and cell phone calls — some from offended listeners and readers.
All because Kennedy Gondwe chose to get circumcised to protect himself from AIDS, and took the British Broadcasting Corp.'s radio and Web audience through the procedure with him Friday.

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Oddly, foreskins have been popping up right and left these last few days.
ex. 1; ex.2;
and bears, as well. Sometimes together.
This may be one of those swellings-toward-fruition that afterwards look so obvious but at the time seem at most obscurely and mysteriously connected.
For instance, who would have thought after all these years of dark and grotesque cruelty directed at young male penises by threatened but still powerful male elders and their acquiescent co-dependents, the very act of circumcision itself would be revealed as all along an example of divine mercy, at least in some cases, statistically, possibly, or recently anyway, at least in Africa, or Zambia anyway, or in some parts of it, evidently, according to some sporadically collated and unprofessionally conducted informal polls funded by theocratic delusionals.
Also David and Saul, those wild and crazy Biblical In-laws of great historical repute, temporarily somewhat out of whack with each other as well as in and out of sync with the plans of the Great, uh, You Know:

And it came to pass as they came, when David was returned from the slaughter of the Philistine, that the women came out of all cities of Israel, singing and dancing, to meet king Saul, with tabrets, with joy, and with instruments of music.
And the women answered one another as they played, and said,
Saul hath slain his thousands,
and David his ten thousands.
And Saul was very wroth, and the saying displeased him; and he said, They have ascribed unto David ten thousands, and to me they have ascribed but thousands: and what can he have more but the kingdom?
And Saul eyed David from that day and forward.
And it came to pass on the morrow,
that the evil spirit from God came upon Saul, and he prophesied in the midst of the house: and David played with his hand, as at other times: and there was a javelin in Saul's hand.
And Saul cast the javelin; for he said, I will smite David even to the wall with it. And David avoided out of his presence twice.

The slaughter David's just then getting back from being his main pre-nup princely task - set by old King Saul in order to intrigue him on out of town, hopefully for keeps - of gathering up the foreskins of the sundry dead Philistines he's gone out there and recently killed. Probably he had some lesser individuals - slaves, immigrants, you know, to do the actual foreskin removalling - grab it, stretch it out, slice it off, pop it in the bag, hand in the bag to Prince for counting - David heads home, delivers the bags, gets the girl. Good old days.
These circumcison-as-prophylaxis-against-AIDS-(in Africa) stories seem to be on a kind of time-release lately. Every few weeks the timid journalistic cry emerges. "But it's good for you!" "Circumcision prevents AIDS!"
Never mind that a bizarre and sub-humanly cruel religious superstition/mind-control technique was officially adopted as standard modern medical practice for well over two hundred and fifty years in the erstwhile Enlightened West- with no scientific justification behind it whatsoever, none, zero.
But that's the magic! See, it was in anticipation! Just getting ready for now and stuff! End Times! What's that? Look! Over there! Terrorists!
Ah, sorry, wrong narrative.
Read the early rationalizations about anti-masturbatory effects, anti-epileptic effects, anti-disease effects - all nice projects, but none of it holds any water at all.
Stories made up by men who were already committed to cutting off the tips of young boys dicks and sucking away the blood.
It's about the psychological intimidation, hey? And it was always about that - grown men once made crazy by the acts of their elders making the young go crazy in turn, because that's how it is in the world. That's just how it is, and that's just how God wants it. Crazy, violent, cruel, and disgusting.
You don't think snipping off the end of a kid's dick when he's too young to understand any of your Godly horseshit might be actually more than a little traumatic do you?
Intimidating, humiliating - an expression of irrefutable sadistic power, out of a dynamic in which the victim holds no power at all, except the ability to scream in helpless outrage with all his being.
Another victory for the Great I Am.
And the screams of outraged infants are meaningless noise to men who are themselves borderline or full-tilt sociopathic already.
This subject has come up before - ex.1; ex.2; ex.3.
In other tangential cutting-off-your-dick news notes, the man Wolbarst quoted herein:

In 1914, erroneous medical beliefs about smegma were compounded by influential American urologist and eugenicist Abraham Wolbarst (1872–1952), who updated the demonization of the foreskin and promulgated the idea that it harboured ‘carcinogenic secretions’. Wolbarst’s lifelong crusade to promote circumcision was initially provoked as a means of countering contemporary medical concerns over the unsanitary and occasionally deadly aspects of ritual Jewish circumcision, specifically the prescribed sucking of blood from the wound. Rather than being unsanitary, Wolbarst countered that circumcision was, in fact, so sanitary that it should be imposed on all males. Wolbarst’s definition of ‘sanitation’, however, was more heavily suffused with the antimasturbation hysteria concept of ‘moral sanitation’ than concern for physical cleanliness. Referring to smegma, Wolbarst made the bigoted characterization of ‘gentiles’ of even middle-class standing as being unable to ‘pay proper attention to the cleansing of their genitals’. Wolbarst thundered in JAMA: ‘Times innumerable, in my experience, the stench arising from the confined and retained balanic secretions has been almost unbearable’, and thus ‘the argument for circumcision as a measure of hygiene must be apparent to any but a man deprived of his olfactory sense’.

was also involved in the following whatever it may have been at its clearest and most fundamental hinky-ass weirdness:

DECLARES SUICIDE LETTER ONLY A JOKE Dr. Wolbarst Says He and Wife Each Wrote One to See Who Could Do It the Better. SENT TO TIMES BY ERROR Wife's Letter Found and Mailed by a Servant -- Statement on Arrival in England. Special Cable to THE NEW YORK TIMES. LONDON, Sept. 5 -- The liner Kronprinz "Wilhelm arrived at Plymouth this morning having on board Dr. and Mrs. Abraham L. Wolbarst, from the latter of whom THE NEW YORK TIMES recently published a letter announcing her intention to commit suicide. To a NEW YORK TIMES correspondent, who boarded the' liner. Dr. Wolbarst related the folio-wing curious story: His wife, he said, wrote the letter printed in THB NEW YORK TIMES after having read a sensational novel In which a wife Indited a missive to her husband Uireatenlng to commit suicide. Mrs. "Wolbarst. according to the doctor, suggested that each should -write a letter to see which could pen the more startling effusion. They did so. and his wife addressed hers to THE NEW YORK TIMES. Dr. Wolbarst repeatedly Impressed upon the correspondent that all this was done as a Joke, and happened some ten or twelve weeks ago. He destroyed his own letter, he said, but his wife s letter, jokingly Intended for him, was addressed to THE TIMES, and somehow or other got put away In a drawer.

Abraham Wolbarst, son of David - enemy of smegma.

Newborn babies can remember melodies played to them while they were in the womb
_

Myth:  Everyone is circumcised.
Reality check:  Actually, world-wide, only 30% of men are circumcised, and most of these men are Muslim (WHO 2007).   Most modern, Westernized countries have rates well below 20%.  In the United States about 25 years ago, around 85% of babies were circumcised. The rates have dropped substantially to 32% in 2009, according to a report by the Centers for Disease Control (El Becheraoui 2010).

Myth:  Circumcision is an important tradition that has been going on forever.

Reality check:  In the United States, circumcision wasn't popularized until Victorian times, when a few doctors began to recommend it to prevent children from masturbating.  Dr. Kellogg (of Corn Flakes fame) advocated circumcision for pubescent boys and girls to stop masturbation:  "A remedy which is almost always successful in small boys is circumcision, especially when there is any degree of phimosis. The operation should be performed by a surgeon without administering an anæsthetic, as the brief pain attending the operation will have a salutary effect upon the mind, especially if it be connected with the idea of punishment... In females, the author has found the application of pure carbolic acid to the clitoris an excellent means of allaying the abnormal excitement" (Kellogg 1877).  Circumcision caught on among the sex-negative Victorians, but only wealthy parents could afford it.  In 1932, only 31% of men were circumcised; this peaked around 85% in 1980, and has been dropping ever since (Laumann 1997, Wallerstein 1980).  Far from an ancient tradition, it was only popular in post-war America; think of it as "your parent's body mod."

-Darcia Narvaez/PsychToday

"Fucking" is also taboo:

A top UK Foreign Office official has been arrested on suspicion of an anti-Semitic outburst at a gym, the Daily Mail reported Monday.
Rowan Laxton, who is head of the South Asia Group at the Foreign Office, was watching TV reports of the IDF offensive in Gaza while on an exercise bike at a gym when he was allegedly heard shouting, "F***ing Israelis, f***ing Jews," and saying that IDF soldiers should be wiped off the face of the earth, the British newspaper reported.

JPost 09.feb.09
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via xymphora
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Not to pile on or anything, but the fact that even at this late date it's impossible for publicly responsible journals and institutions to do anything with the word but the cutesy-wootsy "F***ing" is directly related and originating from the same sick mindset that has people writing online and spelling "G-d", because as you know, or should know, the magic of God is easily turned to angry magic if you spell his/its name in full, without those cutesy-wootsy little blanks to make it safe and acceptable.
And that horseshit mumbo-jumbo is directly connected to "F***ing" and, wait for it kids, male circumcision.
Which for a lot of us gringo male gentiles has no magical religious connections, but is something supposedly medical - though it's as medically defensible as female circumcision - that was done to us when we were too young to know what it was about. Whereas for some religious Jews it's done with heavy ritual and conscious teenaged participation. It's also an extremely bizarre ceremony, which I'm coming to think may explain a lot of Jewish insanity and belligerent immaturity - beginning in the wounded male psyche and spreading outward from there - that's f***ing up, which is to say fucking up, the world right now.
Maybe the passing on of a virus, a conscious parasite, a parasite of consciousness, "as above so below" kind of thing. This could be why that ant/grasshopper brain thingie was so chilling at first, so chilling and so fascinating at the same time.
Because of course.
I haven't done any reading about male circumcision lately, so the discussion may have advanced since the last time, when it was still all about "disease prevention" versus WTF***!

This was known as Metzitzeh. In this step the mohel would suck the blood from the circumcision wound with his mouth. Although initially thought to reduce the infections by sucking out any bacteria, it was actually found to introduce infection such as tuberculosis and venereal diseases. More modern day mohels use a glass tube placed over the infant's penis for suction of the blood

wikipedia

Something that never seems to get mentioned is the wonderful psychological weapon that circumcision of the young provides the older males in a society. Them cutting off the tip of your dick being a pretty decisive expression of their dominance. And getting you to participate in that cut as though it's a good thing is truly astounding, and way, way dominant. Whereas setting things up so it happens when you're a baby is just sort of cold and insectile.

United Nations' Day of Zero Tolerance to FGM:

British girl leads Guardian campaign to end female genital mutilation

Female genital mutilation: A family speaks out against the abuse

“I ended up alone for refusing to be mutilated”

Fighting female genital mutilation

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Due to the obvious crossover we're not going to be calling it "female circumcision" anymore.
Because then the kids would be all, "So how come it's okay to do that to boys?"
And then everything would get messy.
And we can't have any more messes now.
Pretty deep sorrow that this subject, the mutilation of female genitalia, is even a topic for discussion.

Like, okay, whether or not you should slowly torture people to death before you eat them, because the adrenaline makes the meat tangier, or if you should give them all kinds of relaxing and euphoric stuff over a couple days so when you kill them the meat is saturated in feel-good pheromones, and more relaxing to the consumer. Diff'rent strokes y'all.

The metaphorical gift of circumcising children of either gender is one that just keeps on giving.
Fucking up kids when they're too young and/or too brainwashed to understand and resist what you're doing, breaking their spirits, means as a member of the grownup community you get to have some of the power that's made available by what is essentially the psychological enslavement of the young.
And nothing says personal enrichment like slavery.
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Russel Brand was talking about the death of PSHoffman and what the drug hypocrisy syndrome had to do with that. And I just get so weary. So very weary.
We don't need a calm rational conversation about drugs, use and abuse.
There's no one to talk to.
Drugs are illegal because the people who sell them make a lot more money that way than they would if the drugs were legal. Not the guy on the street, the guy in the suite.
Read it again: Drugs are illegal because...
 Phasing in legality like the US is doing w/weed is acceptable because the price will stay "high".
It's the money.
You would be taking money away from some very rich very powerful men if you decriminalized addiction and recreational use. And they don't like it when someone tries to take their money.
In the case of female genital mutilation, it was clearly decided somewhere to avoid the use of "circumcision" to describe a practice that decent people everywhere find disgusting and barbaric, senselessly cruel, and pointless.
As opposed to male circumcision, which is perfectly sensible and a positive addition to any young boy's life experiences.
Plus a religious tradition millenia old. That God said. So it's different.

in the wake of recent moves in various European countries to ban ritual circumcision:

The hold of the religious authorities over Israelis' private lives has been thrust into the spotlight after a rabbinical court ruled that a Jewish woman, identified only as Elinor, must circumcise her son against her wishes. She has been ordered by the rabbis to pay a fine of $140 a day until the procedure is carried out. Following public disquiet, the judgment was frozen, pending a hearing before the country's supreme court.
There is no law requiring circumcision, but the overwhelming majority of Israeli Jewish parents follow the traditional practice of inviting a mohel, or circumcisor, to remove the foreskin of a newborn son. Rabbis regard the procedure as a commandment from God.

Jonathan Cook/Al Jazeera English
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Being pretty interested in the state of circumcisional affairs generally, I'm somewhat taken aback to have seen nothing corresponding to the headline there. Europe, really? Why, I had no idea!
It bears repeating that one of the mohel's ritual duties is to suck the wounded penis at the severed vestige of foreskin, and ritually spit that sucked blood into a ritual basin. Possibly a gold basin, unclear on that. Maybe depends on the wealth of the participants or something. Although, my sense is no baby boy in the world, no matter how financially secure, if asked, would consent to have his dick whacked at by someone he didn't know, gold or no gold.
Mom! Mom! Mommaaaaa!
They don't feel pain like we do.
Plus there's the abiding covenant betwixt God and His people.

NCIC records are used every day by law enforcement agencies all over the nation. The accuracy requirement was established under the 1974 Privacy Act, one purpose of which was to ensure that federal records, which could have enormous impact on people's lives if misused, don't contain erroneous information. For more information, as well as an online petition asking for a reversal of this misguided shift, visit the Electronic Privacy Information Center Web site (www.epic.org/actions/ncic/).

The Bush administration's attitude, assisted by a Congress that long since abandoned any commitment to liberty, is that government has the right to know absolutely everything about you and that government can violate your fundamental rights with impunity as long as the cause is deemed worthy.

You, on the other hand, have absolutely no right to know what the government is doing in your name and with your money, unless the information is deemed harmless by people who have every motive to cover up misdeeds.

Dan Gillmor SJ Mercury News Apr. 06, 2003

___________________________________

{I'm getting a little obsessive about this I'm afraid, but circumstances do seem a little pressing.
the morality of the main actors in this episode of the ongoing drama we're all cast in, that of Bush and them, is 'intentionality' based. it matters 'why' things are done. mostly that matters more than what. this is a subversion of the natural order, in which 'why' means nothing, and 'what' means all. it seems at times as though we've entered a cul-de-sac, a corner, a place under the stairs some sick child crawls into, with its delusions and fantasies and an insistence on the 'truth' of what are so clearly untrue things.
I believe more and more every day that these delusions and the insistence on an 'intentionality'-based moral system, are caused by two things:

traumatic childhood discipline

male circumcision

I know it seems bizarre on the surface, these things are so common, but think of this:
in the embrace of the family a young child experiments, and sometimes those experiments have unintended consequences, sometimes negative ones. judgement is made by authority, based on more than outcome, based also on motive and consciousness. intention. and 'punishment' is rendered accordingly, as guidance. in that sense the society can be seen as a larger family. intention matters there also. and in the religions we inherit. but in the natural, the 'real' world, all that matters is what works and what doesn't. consideration of intent is part of the nurturing of children. it has nothing to do with biology, except tangentially, because our social living, our society, is a means of survival.
biology is what all this is, no matter how loudly the priests and rabbis and imams scream their accusations and denials. all these men are following the demands of biology, cunningly, selflessly at times, but never anything more or less.
so a child is spanked and grows up to expect, to demand, 'punishment' for other malefactors because in a fundamental way, this is how the world is structured. and over time they create a punishing God in that same image, who cares nothing for the world of living things, and only for the spark of will inside the body, inside the mind, somewhere.

circumcision is so obviously a means of psychologically dominating a helpless child it would seem to need no debate.

and all that is in response to the idea that these men in 'charge' are more and more acting out the 'end justifies the means' trope. to debate them on moral grounds is a mistake, their morality is a mask for their biology. that is the conflict, as it always has been, the rest is camoflage.}

That's a medieval illustration of the circumcision of Jesus. That's the Jesus penis, stretched out and ready to be hacked upon.
Not much else in the story after that. He grows up some, at age twelve amazes the wise men in the temple, then pretty much disappears. For almost two decades.
Then He returns, rocks the boat, gets arrested, tortured, and executed as a criminal.
His mother didn't have sex, at least before he was born - the virgin birth being real significant to the tale - and of course the divine Father never, because why would He need to?
Add in the bizarre sexual taboos of the Old Testament, the dismedical fact of bloody mutilation of infant penii across the majority of West-Civ male infants, not to mention Muslims and Jews, and ...whoa. Or rather, woe.
That would be woe, if, like me, you think there's something awfully strange about all that hackery-whackery. Awfully strange, and bloody.

Psychological circumcision. The constant reinforcement of incompleteness. The steady reminders of inferiority. The way commercials, which are the atmospheric presence of our lives now, the glimpses of fashion and how other people live successfully, which is not a marginal thing, it's a central feedback mechanism, it's how we adjust, and what we are is an adjusting creature, adaptation is the primary human skill, and how we adapt socially is by watching each other, and how we watch each other now is bottlenecked in the tube, commercials are what we sound like, what we look like to each other, it's another illusion that commercials are just trivial things in between the stories on TV, the stories exist to bring us to the feet of the commercial messages, the real gods of this moment being the merchandizing agencies, the lie of it being the inverse weight of everything, like that stories are entertainment, like music is entertainment, the two main bonding strategies of human connection trivialized and commodified, and most importantly, owned.

Casteism



People ask, what is Lalon's caste?

Lalon says, my eyes fail to detect

The signs of caste. Don't you see that

Some wear garlands, some rosaries

Around the neck? But does it make any

Difference brother? O, tell me,

What mark does one carry when

One is born, or when one dies?

A muslim is marked by the sign

Of circumcision; but how should

You mark a woman? If a Brahmin male

Is known by the thread he wears,

How is a woman known? People of the world,

O brother, talk of marks and signs,

But Lalon says: I have only dissolved

The raft of signs, the marks of caste

In the deluge of the One!



Lalon

Translated by Azfar Hussain

link from the undeniable plep

In the past there were schools for youths corresponding to the girls' vhusha and tshikanda initiation schools, but by 1956 these had been superseded by mission and state school education and by the imported circumcision school, murundu. Domba was still officially a school for youths and girls, but few youths danced at the schools I attended because they were working on white-owned farms and in cities, or studying at state schools.

redolent of the Nazi era

Judaism began with a people, and then became a congregation, and eventually a religion, Rosenzweig argues. Christianity began with a congregation into which it then selected its people, the "new Israel". Islam, he avers, was concocted as an institutionalized religion to begin with, as a parody of Judaism and Christianity. This, however, had dreadful consequences. "Mohammed took over the notion of Revelation from the outside, which left him stuck with the pagan idea of creation as a matter of course," Rosenzweig wrote. Allah merely is the apotheosized image of an Oriental despot, emphatically not the Judeo-Christian God of love. Rosenzweig altogether repudiates the notion of Islamic culture. As a caricature, Islam is entirely sterile: "Islam never created an Islamic art, but rather took into its service pre-Islamic art ... The pre-Islamic state, namely the Oriental state in its Byzantine form, made Islam into its state religion; the pre-Islamic spirit of the Koran adopted either pre-Islamic rationalism or mysticism and orthodoxy. In Europe, by contrast, in Christian Europe, there arose something new: Christian art, and a Christian state."

Marc Erikson/Asia Times Dec 2, 2003

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Here's a page of quotes from Erikson's journalism over the last 4 years, at Asia Times. There's a consistent tone that's present in a lot of Zionist writing that carries an assumed commonality that's deceptive, inasmuch as the commonality is what's being tried for, worried about, attempted. The tone is smug and arrogant yet at the same time shrill and desperate, it's the accent of the not-quite-behind-the-scenes not-quite-yet-in-control.
This is the money quote though, because it's explicit in its conflation of the Old Testament God with the Father of Christ, what Erikson calls the "Judeo-Christian God of love." The only love exhibited by the God of the Old Testament is for the Jewish people. The New Testament, by being attached without any other linkage than editorial placement to the Old, becomes a confirmation of that exclusive relationship. The actions of the God of the Old Testament are nowhere acts of love for anything or anyone outside that special, exclusive relationship.
Agape is not an Old Testament practice, though it was I'm sure a practice of many Jews then, as it is today. But it's not official, it isn't in the book. The book is about doing what you're told, obeying the law. Compassion is a New Testament thing, compassion even when it's against the law. The story of Christ is exactly that, and the actions of the most genuine Christians today is exactly that.
The seamless joining of the Judeo-Christian religions, as though they were consistent with one another, is what's created a force for intolerance and bigotry in America, a vicious and angry cloud of righteousness that elevates ignorant obedience and blesses itself as privileged.
Self-love is not what Jesus meant by "Love one another." That was not an endorsement of exclusivity.
This is dangerously close to blasphemy - it is blasphemy really, and it's hard for me to write, not only because I was thoroughly indoctrinated by Christian schooling when I was too young to think for myself, but because I have been, in my personal life, marked out and watched for years by vigilant witnesses, searching for signs of the end times, and this will make me even more vulnerable to them. The causes of that are beyond the scope of this writing.
So at the same time I cut myself free from the early comfort of faith, I expose myself to powerful and vicious zealots whose morality is only their own benefit. Even saying that means a commitment to a reality that seems too fantastic and paranoid to be real, but these are strange fantastic times, and it's what I believe is the truth.
The earliest Christians were persecuted, Christianity began with persecution as its landscape and atmosphere. Somehow between the death of Christ and the Council of Nicea 300 years later Christianity became an organized political force, and the Bible became what it is today, an abridged version of Jewish holy scripture, the curiously edited story of the life of Jesus Christ, organizational memoranda from the beginnings of the Church hierarchy, and the stunningly psychedelic visions of Revelations that with their complete absence of mercy and compassion fit more easily with the retributive majesty of the Old Testament than with the forgiving and compassionate Christ of the New Testament.
The earliest Christians did not have Bibles. The earliest Christians were persecuted by Jews. That will read like classic anti-Semitist nonsense to some, but tomorrow I'll do a piece on Paul, the founder of Christianity as a political and social force that I think will disprove that charge.
As part of this series I wanted to do a piece today on so-called "Christian" names, the first names many of us were given at birth. It was part of an attempt at structure. From circumcision to naming, then on to schooling, the alphabet and the english language. But I got sidetracked by Erikson, and followed the impulse. So it goes.
Selah.