Israel
and the End Times:
Writings on the Logic and Surface
Turbulence of History
by Eugene Narrett,
Ph.D.
Authorhouse,
IN, 2006 ISBN: 1-4259-3745-4 183
pp.
Review by Isaac Mozeson
Boston University and Cambridge College
English Professor Eugene Narrett has
written another strikingly eloquent
collection of essays focusing on the
Middle East crisis. He follows up
Gathered
Against Jerusalem (2000) and
Israel
Awakened (2001) with thirty essays
that discuss the Israel situation from
late 2001 to early 2006.
While ostensibly about a crucial
political situation, Narrett is always
writing about philosophy and comparative
civilization. This explains his unique
aerial snapshots of the cultural scene,
and why the essays are written in
masterfully sculptured prose, with
marbling from rich veins of literature:
Greek myths to Hawthorne and Orwell.
Instead of growing more cowed by the
prevailing political correctness and
liberal Israel-bashing, the author has
become more stridently critical of Western
civilization. This third book also
reflects deepened reading of and
identification with classical Jewish
texts, especially the book of Genesis.
Narrett opens with reminders of the
problematic pagan and Christian
underpinnings of a failing Western
civilization, which is failing Israel and
botching the war on terror. Criminally
negligent forces around the American
government are blamed for faults as large
as refusing to see how Jihad is mainstream
Koranic Islam, and as small as having
Mohammad Atta released from an Israeli
jail as a "confidence-building
measure."
The author opposes Israel's separation
barrier as unworkable, and as a boon to
terrorists who would flock to areas ceded
by Jerusalem. Narrett likens the
"unilateral separation" favored by
conservatives like George Will and Charles
Krauthammer to the dangerous buffoonery of
Bill Clinton and Ehud Barak. Israel's
security wall is compared to the self-made
ghetto walls of Pithom and Ramses near the
Israelie settlement in Goshen, Egypt,
history's first concentration camps to
facilitate Jewish genocide.
The "Land for Peace" pretext for
shrinking the historic Jewish homeland
began long before Nixon and Carter, feels
the author. He dates it from back to the
British Foreign Ministry, who gave away
the scarcely-populated Eastern half of the
Palestine Mandate to placate the Arabs.
The U.N. Partition Plan of 1947
subsequently took away even more land that
was to have been part of Israel. Narrett
quotes PLO leaders who readily admit that
Oslo and the "Peace Process" is their
Trojan Horse, their cynical ploy to
victory via the peace process.
In November 2005 Narrett has fun with
the Moslem riots plaguing the Paris
suburbs. Turnabout is fair play, so the
author warns Chirac that there "is no
military solution" to the riots, that he
must not use police to further "the cycle
of violence" or put up roadblocks to defer
the bomb throwers' rights to protest their
insufficient government subsidies. Notre
Dame will be a Mosque, and Eurabia is a
future fact. Why is this happening to a
Western Civilization obsessed with
attacking its own Jewish roots? Because it
is payback time for centuries of rapine
and murder of those other Semites, the
Jews.
Professor Narrett could not have known
in winter 2005 that Gaza would dominate
the news in several months. But two essays
discuss Gush Katif, the Jewish enterprise
in Gaza, and the biblical past of the
area, harking back to the people of Gerar
and their hostility toward Isaac and
Rebecca. The Arabs of northern Gaza still
refer to their location as Gerara. They
had warned the Jewish settlers that the
area was cursed and would not yield
produce. Fifteen years of bumper crops
later, the 5,000 Gaza Arabs hired by Jews
admitted that the curse was lifted, and
even rainfall was more plentiful.
The forced evacuations are not in this
book, but one essay is entitled in part:
"How Israel's Ruling Elites Became
Cossacks."
Always attuned to historical ironies,
the author notes that the name "Palestine"
was adopted by the Romans to blot out the
Jewish history of Judea. Yet the biblical
Philistines were not non-Jewish natives,
but invaders. This is what the Hebrew word
Philishtim means. Therefore, when CNN
(called by Narrett the de facto sister
station of Al Jazeera) touts the
Palestinian "people," they are actually
referring to non-Jewish invaders of the
land deeded to Jews in the world's most
ancient and most common publication with
real estate records.
With the war in Iraq and Iranian
uranium on today's front burner, Narrett's
messages about the threat of Islam and the
threat to Israel are astoundingly
relevant. The disturbing case is made that
the West is on a runaway train to suicide
and apocalypse. And Bush and the Neocons
are barely applying the brakes. A switch
to Democratic tracks might only make for
an uglier train wreck.
Surely, Narrett must have much to say
about the traumatic Gaza disengagement
that followed the publication of this
collection. Stand by, his fourth
collection is being prepared for
publication by mid 2007.
Isaac
Mozeson is the author of The
Origin of Speeches: Intelligent Design in
Language.
Order at Amazon Now!
Israel
and the End Times:
Writings
on the Logic and Surface Turbulence of
History,
by
Eugene Narrett, Ph.D.
|
