Son of Hamas

By Mosab Hassan Yousef

This book first describes in a rational way the evolution of thought and it's subsequent behavior of an Islamic imam’s sanctioning of terror against it's oppressors. He, the father of the author of this book laid claim to the Quran's call for jihad as the protagonist agent. His claim however was one of default based both on the manipulation of men of power and the doctrine of the Quran. Son of Hamas details the systematic oppression of Palestinians, and police mentality akin to that of the 1770 British in our American rise to independence, the Palestinian mind, and their systematic method for continuous agitation of people to foster terror.

As Mosab Yousef approaches his father on the terrorist's killing of innocent Jews his father's answer implies the notion that they are not people. Yousef in the telling of the story draws on his reading of Act:8 where the people stone Stephen and Saul approves. In the context of the story to this point Mosab draws a parallel between the bible and the Quran. He asserts both giving approval to murder. With the Quran approval is found on the top rung of Islamic mandates, jihad. He doesn't quote it in his book so I immediately read Act:8 where the approval was found in forgiveness. In this divergence is the seed for Mosab to move away from the violence between Muslims and Jews and towards Christianity and eventually becomes a baptized Christian.

As the story is told the reader gets first hand experience of how an adult world of violence can shape a child’s mind. Beginning at pre-adolescence in Mosabs life the setting is pre second intifada (1980’s) and at a time where there was a segregation of Muslim Palestinian communities and Jewish communities in Israel and from a child’s view the life style of the Jew was a”one-over-the-other” arrangement where the Jew was far better off. The reality of strife had not set in until the burials at his local cemetery began to increase. This brought Mosab closer to the reality of the situation at hand from a Palestinian perspective. Being as such Mosab sympathized with his people and began throwing rocks and taking up arms, without full understanding the consequences.

Mosabs antics find him in a Israeli prison where the conditions from capture to detainment was brutal and torturous. An American reader fully appraised with our own self criticism would be aghast at the description of his treatment. At this point of the book the reader becomes critical of Israel in its oppression and torture of Palestinians. However this view is soon to change.

Appreciating that Mosab Hassen Yousef was actually the son of the Imam who is deemed one of the founding fathers of Hamas the Israeli intelligence agency decided to recruit him as a spy. To provide a cover rather than release him immediately they put him in a prison where conditions provided by the Israelis were better and this prison was largely dedicated to Hamas prisoners. As it turns out inside that prison Mosab witnesses a much harsher torture regime inflicted by Hamas on Hamas people to be sure they hold to their terrorist ways. Where Mosab’s agreement to spy had yet to be put to the test, what he witnessed convinced him that perhaps the Palestinian people were being manipulated by their own people. This eased his conscience on his role as a spy.

In his role as a spy the details of how Hamas activity works around a fog of procedure aimed at always keeping the Palistanian people agitated and dis-satisfied with their Israeli neighbor. Mosab begins to realize that perhaps the Palestinians were not being oppressed and the military law was merely a reaction to Palestinian civil unrest. The book clearly points to Yasser Arafat as a master puppeteer at the head of the PLA for his own selfish gains. When a peace agreement was offered for a Palestinian State within the State of Israel most Palestinians saw it as a workable solution for peace and were willing to sign the agreement. Arafat did not sign it and it is Mosab’s feeling from what he heard from inside is that agreement would mean an end to the bountiful flow if international funding to the PLA treasury for continued conflict. It was this flow of funding that caused people to stop their productive lives working side by side with Jews and instead takes up arms against them. This created friction between Hamas and the PLA and positioned the PLA to sell out both Hamas and his father to portray Hamas as the terrorist cell. Mosab’s father was manipulated to make statements in behalf of Hammas’s cause without knowing where the power was coming form or what the real agenda of the statements were. He, still ignorant to cause and effect of his actions, conceded in the name of Islam. With the death of Arafat the manipulation continued leaving Mosab and his father, the loved and blindly followed Imam puzzled as to who was pulling the strings. As it turns out, the men at the controls are actually not devout Muslims. They were men of selfish ambition taking advantage of a people’s religious doctrine that encourages jihad. I have read many other books where this is the case.

While this is a book review, the details are in this must read book. It helps a westerner including Russians and those of our brothers in India who daily meet with Muslim born terrorism, better understand the mind of a Muslim involved in terror. It helps you better understand how that mind is formulated. That Muslim mind is formulated from within Islam’s current agenda and not strictly founded in the Quran. The Western reaction has yet to find the keys to peace and wont if they allow the argument to be founded in a book debate. Ironically, is it truly a question of surrender to Islam, as the Quran spells out? While the doctrine of Christianity says surrender to God is the path to peace, one begins to question whether God and Allah are the same concept.

Alternatively, like in WWII’s Hitler it takes evil minds with ambitious agendas to dupe a people. Those people must have a historic formulation of traits that allow for the deception to give birth to terror, to be dupped. It is my opinion that the teachings of Islam lay the ground work for easy manipulation of people to commit terrorist acts. Today we see it in Afghanistan, Iran, Israel, Russia, India, Europe, and here in America. Islam’s doctrine is suspect, but not the culprit. Because there is an overwhelming mountain of evidence where I will mention the word madrasa, the question seems to loom; are we at war with Islam or are we at war with terrorist, who happen to be Muslim? Is the answer in our strategy to fight that war? It was once a strategy that States that harbor the seeds to terrorism (madrassas) were the enemy. The new strategy is we are not at war with Islam and will never be at war with Islam as emphatically stated by our current president Obama. The word terrorist, code for gorilla soldiers, soldiers who are recruited in these Stated funded madrassas, soldiers who plot not in jungles or hills but in back rooms of our neighborhoods, has yet to be used in a strategy to combat those that intend us harm. In fact the word combat is now not applied to our mission in Iraq, albeit we have 4,500 combat trained U.S. soldiers still engaged in combat there. This new Obama strategy is akin to the strategy that was our undoing in Vietnam and Neville Chamberlain’s strategy in 1938. Is Obama the dupped ore is he part of the duping agenda of the power brokers of Islam? The fact that I raise that question alone raises another question. If we have doubt, do we have the right commander in chief?

In the end of the book Mosab is offered a ticket out of Israel. The offer was to Europe. Mosab refused as he saw his new home in America. This is something to be proud of and Mosab is someone that we should pay attention to. His message helps to understand what is going on yet falls short of the magic key to peace. Mosab Hassan Yousef’s visa is running out. He is at risk of having to return to a land where he would likely be meet doom. Since this legal immigrant is a contributing member of the American society with a message that must be heard by all people, could our questionable leader make a step to remove the doubt and write an executive order, a power he is fond of, to keep Mosab in a place where he can contribute to peace?

The Israel Test

By George Gilder

What is your attitude toward people who excel you in the creation of wealth or in other accomplishment? Do you aspire to their excellence, or do you seethe at it? Do you admire and celebrate exceptional achievement, or do you impugn it and seek to tear it down? This in a nut shell is the Israel Test. In summary, some people admire success; some people envy it. The "enviers" hate Israel. I found while reading the book that those who fail the Israel test do so not with just Jews or Israelis but with all those who excel beyond their capabilities. It is rather the many people who collectively despise the minds of the few that this book is about. For it is the critical thinking mind that produces the fertile ground to advance mankind and the multitudes that envy the wealth they so justifiably earned.

But it is really more than that and this book peels back the layers of the onion and provides a cross-sectional view effect and cause. Specifically he describes accomplishments of Jews and then colludes with their causes. In the process he takes a critical view on leftward leaning thinkers like Barak Obama as they are never a cause for success in the form of a nurturing perspective. However they may be the cause from a survival or self defense perspective. In the mind of Gilder, Barak Obama and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad albeit one Sunni and the other Shea, find themselves of like minds. Notice both men advance their agendas, by attacking their opponent to distract from the flaws of their own agenda. With this thought in mind you can imagine the “pearl in store” for Israel and America and really appreciate what it is that is at stake should they lose their momentum.

The book does an amazing bit of enlightenment to readers not familiar with accomplishments of Jews in America, Jews in Israel, and then Jews of the world. Ironically, while the book is about Jewish contributions to the world and therefore their necessity in the world, it is just as much about the foundation of capitalism within a democracy that allows for a people to move mankind forward. There is always a nagging question on the readers mind; surely excellence cannot be the sole domain of Jews can it? Without a capitalistic economy on a free democracy, the world would be stuck in a time warp of pre-industrial revolution era....Where Islam had been until oil brought a new dynamic on world order. Gilder takes a high horse posture in his presentation of Jewish accomplishment to set the reader up for the test, to answer the opening questions of this review.

On capitalism Gilder writes, “What makes capitalism succeed is not chiefly it's structure of incentives but it's use of knowledge and experience... Under capitalism knowledge grows apace with wealth. Democracy without capitalism has no content, since no power centers outside the state can form and sustain themselves. Without capitalism and free trade, self determination is a pretext for constant civil war, as each shard of nationality is sharpened into a sword implanted in it's own holy specified agenda, presumably defended by the United States or the United Nations. The critical test for democracy is it's ability to free human energies and intellect on the frontiers of human accomplishment.” To test to see if there is something evidently in the human mind, even when carefully honed at Oxford or at Sorbonne, that hesitates to believe in capitalism?

The actual trial on Israel , a Test on mankind as Gilder calls it, of which is taking ample space above the fold on the front pages of world newspapers does not completely hold Israeli’s without flaw. But he demonstrates that not only could Jewish people make adjustments to their own mistakes they were able to for the first time in the history of Palestinian people provide for an improvement in their standard of living. Gilder provides statistics of the land prior to the State of Israel and then specifically illustrates that in the time post the 1967 Six Day War and prior to the 1987 intifada, Palestinians saw significant, 40% year over year, gains in their living standard as they worked side by side with Jews. The trial is not about a fight over a small piece of land, but rather the Muslim’s refusal to work for and acknowledge a Jew for his accomplishments. In this the Muslims fail the Test. At a higher level “The Test “is about all mans’ willingness to work for and in the graciousness of those few people that make the standard of life for all better.

Gilder at times may appear to come across as an “in your face Jew”. However he is everything but and you learn that what is in your face is likely your own denial that the facts. So what is in your face is not Gilder but your own subconscious as Guilder enlightens you with ample cause and effect to demonstrate the world’s dependence on our passing the Israel Test. Where Israel is at the apex of a test for man kind is the culmination of Jewish success second only to the United States against a world of Islamic hatred for them. In this gauntlet under the umbrella of the United States as US citizens Jewish entrepreneurial prowess was given birth in a new and modern world. They then made their pilgrimage to Israel and continued under the protection of Western powers to found a democracy underwritten by capitalism and perpetuated entrepreneurial contributions enhance the living conditions of mankind.

They did this on a small piece of unproductive land that laid fallow under Islamic rule for 1,500 years. Could this test be applied else where? Will time allow India to demonstrate the same prowess? Absolutely and the reason for this is India like many western powers that have found success, are based in the freedoms within democratic law that allow the engines of capitalism to produce the advancement required to meet the needs of a modern world. I bring India in to the equation so that you can read the book and when challenged by the word Jew simply substitute Indian. This is not to slight either peoples, but rather to help you over come the “Jew in your face” reaction and afford a little objectivity as the facts settle in. When you read Gilders final chapter on his own Israel Test, you will appreciate that it is not an insult to awaken to a need for recognition and acceptance of the hand that feeds you, whether it be America, Israeli, Chinese, Japanese, or Indian. Gilder’s Israel Test is just that wake up call.
 
My notes:
Page 26 after the Arabs refused all offers of land for peace in the wake of the 1967 war, the Israelis inherited it by default. Under Israeli management, economic growth in the West Bank and Gaza surged for some twenty years? And the number of Arabs grew for roughly one million to almost three million in some 261 new towns while the number of Jews in territories rose merely 250,000, settled on land not exceeding 2% of the area of the West Bank. As the Israelis spurred development, Arabs thronged in to participate in it. Between 1967 and the first intifada in 1987, Arab settlers moving in from Jordan and other countries out numbered Israeli settlers by a factor of ten.

Page 27 Hostility toward Jews stems not from any alleged legal violation or untoward violence but from there exceptional virtues. This is the essence of anti-Semitism.

Page 46. In the 19th century Jews purchased land in Palestine a barren land under Arab rule with a poor economy they built an economy that attracted Arab and Jew alike. Arab population surged to 1.35 million the Jews grew to 650 thousand. The peace-process brought millions of dollars in foreign aid which shifted Palestinians from entrepreneurs to codependent ghetto violent male gangs and welfare queens.

Page 59. The concept of economic autarky is the chief cause of the poverty in the world. No one can be rich alone. Wealth is an effect of sharing and collaboration between an elite of capitalists and the insurgent new business rising around them. It is an effect of willingness of the young and less educated or less talented to work for the educated and able. It is a product of apprenticeship and learning followed by entrepreneurial rivalry. The success of the Israeli economy is not an imbalance that crates invidious gaps, it is a gap that summons new energies and new wealth.

All capitalist advance generates imbalances and disequilibrium. Growth is an effect of the dis-equilibrating activities of entrepreneurs, the creative destruction unleashed by rate feats of excellence.

Page 75 by delving down deep in the atom we rise up to a level of mathematical abstraction only glimpsed in the previous experimental science of the visible world.

But we do not, as Von Neumann supremely understood, rise all the way up. As Kurt Godel demonstrated in early twentieth century, and Von Neumann’s Goedel's first interpreter and greatest prophet, repeatedly showed, the symbolic logic driving both math an science - the computer and the quantum - is ultimately axiomatic. It cannot prove itself in it's own term but must rely on a set of assumptions outside the system.

Wealth springs from the minds of men, and, above all from the minds of a relatively few men who operate at the nexus of word and world - on the boarders of math and manufacturer - in the realm of the algorithm.

Page 81 Mathematics ultimately would repose on a foundation of faith. The universe rests on a logical coherence that cannot be proven but to which men must commit if they are to create

Page 104 until 1957 Israel was a high wage, secure job economy. It's economy was not producing. The absence of competition was a result in part of virtually complete protection from foreign competition afforded by import and exchange controls

Page 106 in the mid 1980's Yitzhak Shamir followed Reagan’s example and shortly after the USSR folded and allowed millions of scientist Jews to flee ti Israel. Being anti communist and intellectual gave Israel the engine to jolt them to scientific achievement at first rate based on entrepreneurial capitalism. Their brain power drew in capital which produced technological advancement at pace with the United States.

Page 109. The same forces of freedom unleashed on Israel in the 1990's could well dictate that fortunes will disappear within a few generations. It is a rigid rule of capitalism lm that over funded banks, are disasters waiting to happen, while small sums in the hands of a few exceptional men can yield equally unexpected riches.

Page127 Von Neuman was the paramount figure of the twentieth century science because he was the li k between the pioneered of quantum theory and the machines that won WWII, that prevailed in the Cold War, and the enabled the emergence of a global economy tied together and fructified by the internet. The entire saga is one fabric, woven largely by Jews.

Page 139 the Arab-Israeli conflict everywhere understood (wrongly in my view) as an impossibility embittered dispute over absurdly small patches of geography. The promise of a global network seamlessly providing near-infinite bandwidth indifferent to application is the promise, like almost every major economic advance for the past two hundred years, to render geography trivial.

Page148 Biological beings partake of the Godel proof of the limitations of symbolic logic - it's dependence on axioms that it cannot prove. Like mathematics, biological science depends on and transcends an orderly cosmos of monotheistic faith.

Page 155 Biology is a set of living algorithmic entities. Compile the biological entities into a database and apply the algorithms, and you can find the pathways to the inner logic of life.

The algorithmic thinking that fuels such ventures comes naturally to the gifted few. Without permitting the gifted and diligent to emerge, prevail, create, and ultimately rule the cpanding heights, there is no way to have a successful system based on the algorithms of a new economy.

Page 155 the Talpion system needs to be captured verbatim in the review. The system has vaulted Israel and India in engineering prowess.

Page 165. The successful allocation of capital, like the launch of a new technology, is an elegant expression if the capitalist law that mind rules and matter serves, just as squandering of capital can create havoc far beyond that wrought by any scarcity of goods.

Page 167 in the Period fro 1984 - 1990 evry significant reduction in top marginal tax rates anywhere I. The world for which we have decent data: economic growth surged, inflation fell ( down to 11 percent by 1993$, and tax receipts rose. And Netanyahu's reduction in personal tax rates continues - to a planned 39 percent by year 2015 down from 60% in 1980.

Page 173 Crucial to Netanyahu's is the power as a global financial center to transform the economics of the Middle East. Israel can become the "Hong Kong of the Desert" ultimately reshaped the Chinese economy of it's own image when Deng Xiaoping mimicked it's free economics in his free-zone program. Even the Taiwan and Communist China became turned capitalist and most of Taiwan’s investment moved to the mainland. Under Netanyahu, Israel can become a similar force in the Middle East, reaching out ti Palestinians and other Arabs.

My challenge is why can't this same approach be made in Iraq, Iran or any other country in the Middle East? Is entrepreneurial spirit lacking in Muslim people? Or do their Imams subdue it? There exists an equal comparisons by analysis available between India and The Muslim world.

Page 184 Conspicuous weakness is a prime cause of war.

Page 195. Von Neuman was always concerned with dynamic processes and saw that economic systems could not achieve equilibrium outside an environment of growth. Capitalism by nature is a positive sum game, in which every transaction theoretically can yield two or more winners. As long as the exchanges are voluntary, they will not occur unless both parties believe they will gain from them

Page 197. Newman's message is that civilization depends on long time horizons in repetitive games. In a single exchange, the rational policy is predatory. If predatory action brings success, a player is never induced to extend the time horizon. By accommodating aggression, a nation invites it. Peace requires the imposition of penalties on aggression.

A crucial element in all games is the discount rate, which determines the time value of the reward, the terms in which one can trade benefits now for the benefits over the long run. In economics this factor is quantified as the rate is quantified as the rate of interest.

Capitalism works because if it's long time horizons and low discount rates that optimize behavior. The time element is crucial to the deepening of capital and the generation of positive sum games.

The more players focus on politics rather than on economics, the more the game tends to deteriorate. Without capitalism, democracy is a zero sum game that leads to conflict and war.

Page 217 Netanyahu told Congress after 9/11 that there is no international terrorism without the support of sovereign states...Terrorist are not suspended in mid air. The train, arm, and indoctrinate their killers fro safe havens in terrorists countries.... Iran, Pakistan, Egypt, Syria, North Korea. Until the world community applies 100% of their policy to not feed them in any way from business to negotiating with them terrorism will flourish at some level.

Over all notion of land for peace is in opposition to this idea.

Page 237 with regard to Israel' s survival not only are they the canary in the coal mine, they are an integral part of the coal mine

Seven Pillars of Wisdom

by T.E. Lawrence

I can’t remember how this book made it on my list. Yet I am quite sure another author somewhere on my list of read books made referenced to it. I would suspect by the title this book gained its reference in some material on philosophy or social study. In the back of my mind, as I began reading I did have a look out for the seven pillars of wisdom. Being of an English author I anticipated them to jump out with pomp and circumstance.

Yet the book was largely a journal of two years of a mans life in Arabia, Sir Lawrence’s Arabia. A landmass including what we now know as Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Lebanon, Qatar, Syria, and Yemen. The time setting is The Great War 1917-1918 where Britain and allies work to weaken the Ottoman Empire, a German ally for the larger purpose of winning the western front. The ultimate goal for T.E. Lawrence was the Arab capture of Damascus. This goal is slightly conflicted with the governments of Great Britain, France, and Egypt; who held no confidence that the Arab tribes could form a nation. Nearly one hundred years later in a much more sophisticated and changed international world the moral high ground of nation building T.E. Lawrence envisioned has yet to pan out; not only in Arabia but in Afghanistan and for that matter Eastern Europe, Russia, China

As I examine my notes and draw contrast to my first reaction. I found absolute value in this exercise: not only gaining a sense of Arabian militaristic and historical adventure against a descriptive backdrop to pale a National Geographic photojournalist: but I was able to discover Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Most importantly I was able to discover that my Seven Pillars, gleaned from the book; which may be expressed differently from others; may give the illusion of disagreement within my peers, our social, and then world community. SO, let it go.

I am sure the beauty of any desert would not immediately overtake your psyche and dislocate spiritual anchor, T.E. Lawrence in this setting drills deep enough into the fabric of the land and the people to open your heart to all walks of life; and accept them as different; yet allow them their space on earth and in spirit to coexist separately and peacefully on this one planet Earth. I am reminded of my Manhattan experience where the world works together but largely lives, albeit in graduations, in neighborhoods of common social-religious background.


As the book drew to a close I was reminded of a French author’s phrase that is apropos here. While Hugo cautions those with dreams to be ware of those with other dreams; Lawrence writes early on “All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they act their dream with open eyes to make it possible. This I did. I meant to make a nation, to restore lost influence, to give twenty million Semites the foundation to build an inspired dream-place of their national thoughts.” Hugo writes “Like a fly, flying to the light of the window to be caught in a spider’s web.” So often just when a character believed to be claiming success, something snatched him up to change his view. “Meddle not with fatality; be mindful of the spider web between fate and thee. Lawrence may have had success, but did he find peace?

In summary, this review like others I have written includes a voluminous amount of quotation for a book review. Yet to summarize such poetic description of an experience would shame the efforts of TE Lawrence. I am sharing the quotes that helped me shape only a poetic interpretation of what may be deemed Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Listing them out would be contradictory.




Seven Pillars of Wisdom – Abstract Sketch

While the book suggests Oxford, TE Lawrence is well read yet he is humble in applying his book knowledge to his fieldwork. Lawrence finds himself as a free agent of the British government acting as military advisor of the Arabs revolt against the Turks and coordinator of the British and French Armies. Lawrence was conflicted in his feelings about his assignment and the Arab response as he struggled with the Arabs propensity to believe in persons not institutions. “They saw me as a free agent of the British Government, and demanded from me an endorsement of written promises. So I had to join the conspiracy, and, for what my word was worth, assured the men of their reward. Over the two years of partnership under fire they grew accustomed to believing me to think my government and me were sincere. In this hope they performed some fine things, but, of course, instead of being proud of what we did together, I was continually and bitterly ashamed.”

As time brought on success Lawrence continued to wrestle with his feelings on the outcomes and the overarching goal. “ I began at last to think consecutively of the Arab Revolt….it should have been thought out long before action, and we had done what seemed be instinct, not probing in text for the why and what… formulating what we really wanted in the end. I looked for the equitation between my book reading and my movements…plucking at the tangle of our present."

“I was unfortunately in command as much as I pleased, and was untrained. In military theory I was tolerably read….In any case, my interest has been abstract, concerned with theory and philosophy of warfare especially from a metaphysical side.”


The international strategy of which Lawrence was aware of fueled Lawrence’s internal strife. In the course of military strategic debate Lawrence held a position that “the Arab Movement would not justify its creation if the enthusiasm of it did not carry the Arabs into Damascus.” This was unpopular to the French because “the Sykes- Picot Treaty of 1916 between France and England had been drawn by Sykes for the very eventuality; and to reward it; stipulated the establishment of independent Arab States in Damascus, Aleppo, and Mosul, districts which would otherwise fall into control of France. Neither Sykes or Picot believed the thing really possible: but Lawrence knew that it was, and believed that “after it the vigour of the Arab Movement would prevent the creation –by us or others-in Western Asia of unduly colonial schemes of exploitation”

The Arab strategy was less thought out yet equally pragmatic. The Arab participation…”Of religious fanaticism there was little trace. The Sherif refused in round terms to give religious twist to his rebellion. His fight creed was nationality. The tribes knew the Turks were Moslems, and thought the Germans were probably true friends of Islam. They knew the British were Christians and the British were their allies. In the circumstances, their religion would not have been of much help to them and they had to put it aside.

In the transition of international paradigms, the Arabs also began to believe in themselves with every successful demolition of train and track and every city taken from the Turks. In the advance in With in dialogue with Abd el Kerim where Kerim claims “we are no longer Arabs but a people”. He was half proud too, for the advance on Wijh was their biggest effort….Kerim was glad that his tribe had shown this new spirit of service, but also sorry; for to him the joys of life were a fast camel, the best weapons, and a short raid against his neighbor’s herd: and the gradual achievement of Feisal’s ambition was making such joys less and less easy for the responsible.

In dialogue with Feisal, the Arab national leader, after the capture of Wijh: “The Arabs had passed from doubt to violent optimism, and were promising exemplary service. Feisal enrolled most of the Billi. And The Moahib to..My vision of course was till purblind. I had not seen that the preaching was victory and fighting a delusion. For the moment I roped them together, and, as Feisal fortunately liked changing men’s minds rather than breaking railways, the preaching went much better.

In the afternoon, ibn Zaal arrived, with then other of Auda’s chief followers. He kissed Feisal’s hand once and then once for himself, and sitting back declared that he came from Auda to present his salutations and to ask for orders. Feisal, with policy, controlled his outward joy, and introduced him gravely to his blood enemies, the Jazi Hewitt….

During two years Feisal labored daily, putting together and arranging in their natural order the innumerable tint pieces, which made up Arabian society, and combining them into one design of war against the Turks. There was no blood feud left in any of the districts of which he past…”

On religion Lawrence shares a reflective conversation, which may prove useful in gaining an understanding on religious conflicts today. In describing his companion Abdullah, Lawrence digress a bit on religion. “He heard me and leaned forward, peering with rheumy eyes at this white thing splashing in the hollow beyond the veil of sun mist. After a long stare he seemed content, and closed his eyes, groaning, “The love is from God; and of God; and towards God.”

His low-spoken words were caught by some trick distinctly in my water pool. They stopped me suddenly. I had believed Semites unable to use love as a link between themselves and God…Christianity seemed to me to be the first creed to proclaim love in this upper world, from which the desert and the Semite had shut it out: and Christianity was hybrid, except in its first root not essentially Semitic.

Its birth in Galilee had saved it from being just one more of the innumerable revelations of the Semite. Galilee was Syria’s non-Semitic province, contact with which was almost uncleanness for the perfect Jew. Like Whitechapel in London, it lay alien to Jerusalem. Christ by choice passed his ministry in its intellectual freedom; not among the mud-huts of a Syrian village, but in the polished streets among for a and pillared houses and rocco baths, products intense if very exotic provincial and corrupt Greek civilization.

Gadarene poets, stuttering their versus in prevailing excitement, held a mirror to the sensuality and disillusioned fatalism, passing into disordered lust, of their age and place, from whose earthiness the ascetic Semite religiously perhaps caught the tang of humanity and real love that made the distinction of Christ’s music and fitted it to sweep across the hearts of Europe in a fashion which Judaism and Islam could not achieve.

And then Christianity had had the fortune of later architects of genius; and in passage through time and clime had suffered sea-changes incomparably greater than the unchanging Jewry, from the abstraction of Alexandrian bookishness into Latin prose, for the mainland Europe: and last and most terrible passing of all, when it became Teuton, with a formal synthesis to suit our chilly disputations north. So remote was the Presbyterian creed from Orthodox faith of its first or second embodiment that, before the war, we were able to send missionaries to persuade these softer Oriental Christians to our presentation of a logical God.

Islam too, had inevitably changed from continent to continent. It avoided metaphysics, except in the introspective mysticism of Iranian devotees: but in Africa, it had take color of fetishism. An Arabia it had kept a Semitic character…expressing the monotheism of open spaces, the pass-through-infinity of pantheism and its everyday usefulness of an all pervading, household of God. Later Lawrence describes how Islam manifests itself in the Arab participation of the Arab revolt of 1917 Servitude, like other conduct, was profoundly modified to Eastern minds by their obsession with the antithesis between flesh and spirit. These lads took pleasure in subordination; in degrading the body so as to throw greater relief their freedom in equality of mind almost the preferred servitude as richer in experience than authority, and less binding in daily care.

Just prior to Lawrence leading his camel riding Arab force into Damascus he shares thoughts worth repetition here for this review. “Upon this text my mind went weaving across its dusty space amid the sunbeam thoughts and their dancing motes of idea. Then I saw that this preferring the Unknown to the God was a scapegoat idea, which lulled only to a false peace. To endure by order or because it was duty – that was easy… To invent a message, and then with open eye to perish for its self-made image – that was greater.

Yet in reality we had borne the vicarious for our own sakes, or at least because it was pointed for our benefit: and could escape from this knowledge only by a make-belief in sense as well as motive.

The self-immolated victim took for his own rare gift of sacrifice, and no pride and few pleasures in the world were so joyful, so rich as this choosing voluntarily another’s evil to the perfect of self. To each opportunity there could only be one vicar, and the snatching of it robbed the fellows of their due hurt. Their vicar rejoiced while their brethren were wounded in their manhood. To accept so humbly so rich a release was imperfection in them accessory, part guilty of inflecting it upon their mediator. His purer part, for the mediator, might have been to stand among the crowd, to watch another win the cleanness of a redeemer’s name. By the one road lay self-perfection, by the other immolation, and the making of a perfect neighbor. Hauptman told us to take as generously as we gave; but rather we seemed like cells of a bee-comb, of which one might change, or swell itself, only at the cost of all.

Yet I cannot put down my acquiescence in the Arab fraud to weakness of character or native hypocrisy; though of course I must have had some tendency, some aptitude, for deceit, or I would not have deceived me so well…”