https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-67047034

And this “rave” no doubt was part of the problem. You see, it seriously looks to have been drug-oriented. And this kind of techno-house music festival has absolutely zilch to do with celebrating Suqot! It’s all about illicit substance use and abuse. You can see from the map of the area where the event was held (next image). They have these zones and the stage is called a “mushroom” stage, of course pertaining to nothing other than magic mushrooms. The other area “chanti stage – chill area” sounds like a place where gunja (marijuana) is all the rage and well, “safe zone – ‘good people’ ” sounds like a space where u can get away from the drug-binge for a while but then looking at the map, the shape of the tent in that space makes it look more like a first-aid hub. But get this – the very names “Universo Paralello” and “Tribe of Nova” have psychedelic drug connotations written all over them. I am personally familiar with this kind of thing from my own wayward days of drug-addiction. I used to be away from my faith, family, and healthy sense of cultural awareness and I fell into recreational drug use. That was some time ago now and I am thankful that the Lord God Almighty got me out of that descent into perdition. No one is beyond salvation btw. We should not give up hope on God’s restorative promise for any and all those who have fallen away from the truth, away from the desire to cultivate a culture of life & civilization of love in their midst all because of substance abuse. Once an addict does not by any means mean always an addict. Hence we must not underestimate the power of prayer on this front and on the myriad of other scathing fronts boasting the fragility of life sorely in our midst right now.

Hence I wouldn’t be surprised if the very promoters, (not the attendees as such but more astutely, the behind-the-scenes promoters) of this horrendously hedonistic event had links with the terrorists, whoever these terrorists that appeared on the scene, as though from “out of nowhere”, actually were. The very notion of them calling themselves “Universo Paralello” gives more than a faint hint of punning on words. Terrorists paralelling it with techno-house rave djs. The Italian flavour of the name does echo possible Mafiosa links. For all we know, this could have been a set-up by some of the far-right elements in Netanyahu’s current administration sophisticatedly planned and designed so that in the end, they could point the blame on Gaza instead of some clandestine hit-men hired by far-right Israeli politicians to set-off an armed skirmish under the cover of a techno rave held right next to the Gaza border. A fairly recent news article published in La Croix* said that Benjamin Netanyahu had earlier in the year aligned himself with some far-right coalitional forces and that this somehow had been linked to various random attacks on Christian places of worship by Zionistic extremists that had been on the rise since January of this year.

Considering the above then, might it just be that the rave was a “set-up” not by HAMAS as initially supposed, but by far-right aligned Israeli politicians with links to drug cartels that made a deal with these politicians to set-up a trap so that the governing administration in Gaza and it’s own army could then be blamed for starting the conflict?? So instead of HAMAS taking hostages out of some kind of vindication, is it at all likely that certain people from Gaza who just happened on the scene at the time the hired hit-men went on a terror rampage, may have actually “rescued” the mostly Israeli victims of the rave drug-lords who were hiding behind the masks of festival organizers but who then went on an all-out mad killing rampage to confuse and terrorize these rave attendees into thinking HAMAS had broken through security checkpoints in order to start a conflict? It’s really very difficult to say because the various reports from different news sources are not all consistent. However, there is still a certain amount of unease about the news which is far and wide that these people who were wisked away from the zone of the rave rampage are actually being forcibly made to stay within the borders of Gaza until a certain political ultimatum is granted by the Israeli state. In official terms this does amount to a hostage crisis even though reports circulating tell that those who are mandatorily required to remain in Gaza have been given much humanitarian assistance and by and large are doing well from an everyday life perspective only that by Gazan government orders, they are not allowed to leave the area until a certain political agreement has been reached. That said, this in no way denies the validity of the circumstantial evidence which seems to suggest that this rave was quite possibly organized officially as an unsuspecting front or veneer for an elaborate political stunt co-opted by the far-right politicians in Israel so that the Gaza administration could cop the blame for the surprise attack, bearing in mind that the attackers were all balaclava wearing masked hit-men so nobody could see their real identities but the vast majority of the Israeli public suspected Gaza was behind the attack. Readers need to rest assured that I am not for one minute condoning these terrorists just because I have posed the likelihood of an entirely different scenario as to who exactly instigated the initial attack point blank. Rather, because many reports over the recent few days have so many conflicting angles, it’s really difficult to point the blame fair and square in any one singular direction.

This then begs the question, who is HAMAS really?? Reading this article here https://international.la-croix.com/news/politics/pope-francis-tells-israel-and-hamas-stop-stop/18558 sheds some light on who they actually might be versus what is often said and publicized about them in the news outlets favourable to the current far right Zionist regime in Israel. And yes, it is HAMAS that are often painted as “terrorists”. And yes, they are likely to have acted on official government orders from Gaza to issue mandatory stay visas to those people they brought in from the border skirmish. But there is one thing that just does not measure up about this whole thing, and it is this: If this HAMAS group were really an Islamic State terror organization in the vein of ISIS, there would not be a single Christian Church or place of worship, charitable organization or even community or individual allowed in Gaza! They would have all perished by the sword long ago. But isn’t HAMAS supposed to be the defence force, i.e. the official armed force of the ruling political power in Gaza, the Gazan equivalent to the IDF? And of course, in times of war, the army is often called upon by the government to enforce certain extreme measures just like what we’re seeing with those Israeli citizens who were wisked from that frightful scene on the border and who were being issued government orders by the Gazan army that they are locked down in Gaza until a certain ultimatum is reached. Not that this is really a just politics. It’s not! It’s full of hate and vengence and as Pope Francis exhorts, needs to STOP! But one of the main questions that bugs me here is how’s this?? How is it that this so-called terrorist government in Gaza seems to be tolerant and accepting of Christianity peacefully coexisting beside Islam, much more so than ISIS ever was? So this completely turns on its head the bold and oftentimes convincing statements made in various blogs which align themselves with Netanyahu’s current regime – namely that HAMAS is simply another version of ISIS, when circumstantial evidence from other miscellaneous reports shows that it is not. ISIS are proven to be pro-Islamic State extremists who kill anyone and everyone else except those who willingly agree with them, but it appears (and here I’m emphasizing “appears”) that HAMAS isn’t like that, only because the government in Gaza which is supposedly headed up by them is rather welcoming of Muslims & Christians to share the place on equal terms but it’s main beef also seems to be that it doesn’t agree with the Zionist political framework currently operative in Israel. Instead, it appears (again, get that I’m saying “appears” as opposed to “is proven”) that HAMAS may want to return things to pre-Ben Guron/Golda Meir period when the British were more of a peace-keeping force in the region. How exactly true this is of their real aims I cannot definitively say. It just seems to be an impression that manifests from the flavour of the reports coming from both the Vatican and Gaza itself. However, as much as I agree that this return to a pre-Ben Guron form of government in the region, (preferrably with all parties, i.e. Jewish, Christians & Muslims coming to table to co-share in the mapping out of a new way forward) is far preferable to a far right Zionist government, I don’t think using the force of arms or any kind of military terror is the right way to achieve this outcome either. The seeking of a peaceful accord or resolution is the most desirable and really, the only path compatible with God’s holy will. All else is folly.

And further, now that we know from the news reports that various Churches and Christian-run hospitals in Gaza have been the places bearing the brunt in recent days from this whole conflict, and not actually mosques or places specifically connected with Islam, we have to conclude then that the vast majority of versions of ‘truth’ or ‘reality’ being bandied about by the Zionist press about what kind horrendous extremism Gaza is supposedly a stronghold for is nothing other than pro-Netanyahu state propaganda! I am completely gob-smacked. Because for a while since this whole thing started, I believed all the reports which were coming from the official Israeli side of the drama. I am now besieged by a conflicting set of story-lines so I need to be transparent about how all of this is affecting me, which is why I have posited a number of different “sides” if you will, to the whole story, and these by no means make up the complete story either insofar as what is really going on there actually goes. And it would do us well here to be reminded that the ruling administration of both Gaza and the West Bank of the Jordan is officially recognized by the Holy See as legitimate and has been for quite some time now.

Hence I am nonetheless moved to say that after reading more of the Catholic news reports, a totally different picture is emerging. I had absolutely no idea that this place called Gaza was a location which has both vibrant Muslim and Christian communities living side by side like in the Convivencia but without the Jewish quarter, and this absence of the latter only because of some long-term conflict with the Israeli state that started after 1948 when a certain motley group of Arab refugees from Jordan and Syria had their legitimate status of asylum revoked, when in fact that status ought to have remained. I guess this just goes to show that learning these facts is a process and cannot be understood immediately if and when all one has ever heard about a certain place only ever came from one perspective, much of which unfortunately has been clouded by certain ‘politically correct’ assumptions seen as favourable to the Zionist rallying cry but not necessarily altogether entirely truthful precisely because of the ideological backstory influencing the way some of the content is filtered.

And now come to think of it, what if things really were so very different to how many of the pro-Netanyahu reports conveyed how the trouble started at the location of that techno rave? How gullible though these poor people were who attended this “Universo Paralello” rave, and who essentially fell into the trap unsuspectingly of “going with the flow” of these hedonistic evil-doers. These Israelis, including many people of Jewish heritage, and many at that who have obviously, fallen away from an authentic appreciation of and devotion to their own spiritual traditions, have instead cottoned on to very secularist trends of pop-culture which deny the healthy value of religious tradition and culture and in its place, promote hedonistic clap trap for these unsuspecting drifting hearts to fall prey to. I am saying this, not to in any way shape or form, slight the severity of the suffering these attendees now bear but I am speaking as someone, also of Jewish descent, who has in times gone by, fallen by the way-side into the dark cavern of drug-addiction and hedonistic debauchery. So, I know first-hand all about what goes on at a rave since I used to attend them myself back in the day. Therefore, Israel mourns because she has been tragically hit so hard in more ways than one. Her people are dying on one side from the stealthy grip of secularization and on the other from the constant threat of terrorism and war. These battles have many angles but in two quinessential ways they are both spiritual and temporal in the sense they begin in the spiritual realm and then manifest themselves in the temporal, usually when a door or doors in the spirit world have unsuspectingly been left open by something overlooked in the temporal so that then the ravagers find their way in. Hence my loathing of recreational drug use. It can do so much more damage than simply cause a ‘cosmetic addiction’. Illicit drugs of the psychedellic variety can open you up to places in the spirit that you would be better off staying away from. And this btw, has absolutely nothing to do with the other bane of addiction world – mental illness. Mental illness is also like a veneer. It’s a cosmetic symptom that something more serious is amiss, and this more serious stuff is a spiritual disorder. We are literally dealling with the manifestation of evil in a spiritual sense which is impacting the temporal or physical realm. Hence the reason why the politics of those so-called social libertarian ideologues is so dangerous. Such people believe that free-drug use and free sex and so forth is the “way to go” to make life less constraining and freer. Well, let me say this. That’s a lie. And it’s the same lie too told by the sneaky serpent to our first parents Adam & Eve in the Garden of Eden. That if u ignore the advice of your Father who cares about you, and go right ahead and eat the forbidden fruit, you ‘will be free’, you will be ‘free to live like gods’. This is the deceit of recreational drug-use and other kinds of hedonistic allurements. And Satan wants to push the youth of our planet into these things so that he can wrest more control over the entire world. So, this is a dire spiritual conflict and tragically it has temporal outworkings and consequences. This is why the Sexual Revolution of the 60s and 70s was one of the worst things that has ever happened in terms of changing social ethics and moral norms. People have been more and more since its inception been falling prey to its deceptions not only on the front of personal morals but also on the political front. This has led to certain so-called libertarian movements alluring people into deadly minefields of sociopolitical narcissicism where because they already have descended into the quogmire of siding with campaigns to freely access pornography, they will side with those issues which are popularized in conjunction with free-sex, free-drugs, free-this & that just so they can numb their conscience all the more, thinking that by doing so that this will somehow take their problems away and make things in society at large less problematic for everyone. However, the reality couldn’t be further from the truth.

Once the New Left stopped supporting the civil rights & anti-racist struggles of the Jewish people among other things, I stopped supporting the New Left position on many areas. It is a complete affront what many of its supprters are doing nowadays unlike the era when Noam Chomski & Hannah Arendt were at the forefront of civil society debates. A great many of those so-called New Left supporters are actually in favour, can you believe it, of anti-Semitic extremism, get this, ONLY because poor Israel has been over the decades since 1949, negatively implicated in some political disagreements over the refugee status of people from neighbouring countries, which btw, they ought to have honoured instead of dishonouring by chpopping and changing the citizenship status of these poor Arab cousins of theirs who rightly deserve asylum in Israel. How appalling is this! And then you have the other bane of the contemporary New Left, which has to do in more recent times with the rise of Islamic State militancy within so-called civil rights groups in the United States such as Nation of Islam in conjunction with the ideological descendants of the Black Panther movement who support the quasi-fascist wing of the BLM – Black Lives Matter. This is also abominable because Martin Luther King & Sammy Davis Jnr would be horrified at the foul turn of events in the civil rights movement over the last few decades. It is no longer internationalist and has become very sectarian and in some instances ultra-nationalistic in the sense of aligning itself with some far-right sentiments cloaked in the garb of ‘black power’. It must be emphasised here too that back in the time before the exile of many Jewish diasporas to the Askenaz lands of Europe, these folk from Israel, although not as black as some Africans, particularly those from the Ivory Coast, were none the less brown, for God saw it favourable that a simple brown-skinned nation of nomadic tribes, that called by the name of Israel should come to be as numerous as the sand on the sea-shore by becoming in a geospatial sense, enculturated into the ethnic flavours of the lighter-skinned lands. After all, the Jewish faith was from ancient times a proselytic one and many pagan Europeans were converted to Judaism shortly after the 70ad exile into the territories of Askenaz’ descendants. Hence u have many Ashkenazi Jews who look white. Many of these are of mixed marriages due to the proselytic sojourns of their ancestors but some also retain the genetic features of their original forebears. Like my own great great Aunt Amelia Gishe Pepper. She has the negroid fuzzy hair and some facial features which make her look either of Oriental or African descent. And btw, the Jewish side of my family is from my mother’s maternal lineage, while my father is Chinese. However upon looking at Aunt Amelia’s photo, there is also a facial resemblance to my own features. I’m mystified though as to whether I inherited these from her side of the family or from my dad’s. You see, my mother though looks nothing like her but takes more after her dad’s side of the family which btw take their ancestry from the Emerald Isle 😄

And what’s more is that today’s sociopolitical climate has moved alot further in the direction of crazy extremes since the late 70s and early 80s when the Holy Land was internally besieged by strife as has now begun once more as of a few days ago. In those days, although not all that far removed historically from our time, at least people were in some ways more spiritually authentic, be it within Catholicism or in other faiths. Now we are living in the time of a great and perhaps never before seen gross spiritual superficiality and negligence, which is pervading hearts and lives on a perplexedly massive scale, only accentuated by the manifold, unrelenting, indifferently ignored cries of those who mournfully plead for answers from the depths of their hearts with cries of “Who is my brother’s, my sister’s keeper? Are you truly my brother, my sister?” And the gross superficiality of our times are at their core “unwatchful” and pay next to no heed to Christ’s exhortation to “Be watchful” as they are in part fuelled by an irreverent and irresponsible use of technology which, btw, didn’t begin only a decade or so ago but in fact has its roots in the ghastly phenomenon I touched on a couple of paragraphs ago – that of the Sexual Revolution. And at the time this was bourgeoning, in conjunction there was the supercharged development of optical fibre tele-technologies alongside computerization and which helped a great deal more in the fluid syphoning of information and audio-visual materials of one sort or another across the globe, thereby making accesibility far greater than it was prior to television. Technology has become a great means by which the Devil has been able to porously seep through the inter-fibre-optical mesh and send all kinds of messages into the minds and hearts of unsuspecting billions. Because what came alongside all of this rubbish was a sore & steep decline in the collective social appreciation of relational moral rigour to the point where people gave up on social graces such as common courtesy en masse and this has led to a livid casuality which, when practiced more habitually over time,  disengages people from being connected to each other in a spirit of genuine interest, and instead has instigated the habitual stunning of relational encounters with a numbness or cold disinterest dressed up as polite neutrality. This is the grave tragedy of our social climate. Children are being brought up to almost routinely become clones of Augustus Gloop, Veruca Salt and Violet Beauregarde (the oompa-loompa girl) from Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. They want anything and everything they set their eyes onto and they want it now. This climate of unappreciative demand coupled with cold-disinterested human relationality in conjunction with a sharp decline in moral and spiritual enthusiasm has caused a huge bellicose proliferation of ingratitude and wastefulness to sweep the earth. And to make matters worse, this climate has become (although in albeit more subtle ways at this time), rather impervious & impartial to culture or nation, to geographical location. And on top of this, the habit of turning a blind eye to the popularity of recreational drug use is further exaccerbating these problems. Even in the reports we have seen over the last few days regarding what happened at the Tribe of Nova rave, none of them ever mentioned the problematic issue of drugs yet everybody knows, and it kind of goes without saying, that where there is a rave there are bound to be drugs. That’s just the way these things work. But oh no, the news reports never even dared to mention it. And I suppose one of the reasons may have been due to this popular sentiment, also rather prevalent in our time, of a polite but nonethess superficial compassion, as though it would be insensitive to the victims of the tragedy to mention the drugs for fear that to mention the issue somehow automatically credits us with ‘pointing fingers of blame’ at the victims for attending something which routinely is well-known to involve consumption of narcotics, psychedellics, and other illicit substances. Such an attitude of crediting those of us who dare to speak the truth about the dangerous reality of recreational drug use with ‘blame shaming’ is not only harmful but dishonest as such accusations amount to the legitimization of turning a blind eye to things which actually go against the moral truths of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the three faiths which according to reports made up background-wise at least, the faith demographic of the vast majority of attendees at the rave. And again it cannot be overstated, I speak as someone who has come from a perilous background of lived-experience in the area of recreational drug-use. Therefore, I’ll not unduely emphasize that what started out for me as seemingly harmless experimentation and recreation descended pretty fast into a cesspool of addiction without compromise. And as of the breaking-free from it? Well, to put it plainly, it’s taken years, decades actually. And that’s why prevention is in many respects preferable to cure – precisely because you avoid all the collateral damage and more that is part & parcel of the everyday aftermath of having been addicted in the past. And while the drug use situation of the rave might appear “secondary” to the disaster that followed, I will be zealously clear here, that where there are hedonistic pursuits, there are evil spirits lurking. It’s just the reality of how the spiritual life is. As in the temporal, so in the spiritual. It’s not worth the risk it affords, especially in a place which for one thing, is supposed to be hallowed ground. The geographical location of the Holy Land is generally a place where sacred sites and shrines of religious significance abound. And acting in a manner inconsistent with the due honour and respect these places deserve is not acting in good-will or good-spirits. And obviously, there was a huge element of ignorance or naiivety about this factor on the part of those attending the rave. This heartbreaking scenario hauntingly brings back rememberance of last year’s Halloween crowd crush tragedy in Korea. There is a tremendous glint of ghastly similarity about these two for-the-most-part, completely unrelated events, and it has to do with people follwing and gathering en masse in the name of not God or even Suqot or even Raya or All Saints, but rather popular trends manufactured and promoted by secularist ideas of pleasure-seeking in the wrong places. I sense deep inside that a spirit of secularization had most likely ensnared the lives of these folk who attended the rave without them realizing it for the most part. I also lived for the vast majority of my formative years on an unhealthy autopiloted and somewhat secularized rhythm of life. And let’s be real here, it’s not uncommon, even in the Holy Land, for people to become overcome by secularism – that is, by the mainstay of the way they live their everyday lives becoming submerged in worldly thinking or attitudes. It’s like the pattern of Sunday Mass attendance for many of those who identify as Catholic. They routinely attend Mass on Sunday out of dutiful obligation but every other day of the week is off-limits to God, to thinking about Him, to talking about Him, to talking with Him, to acting and treating others as if He is in your midst. And this is also a great and corresponding part of why the times we are in are just so tragic. Our times have become too switched on to autopilot, too unwatchful, uncaring. As hurtful as these things are, they are but wakeup calls. We need to heed the deeper messages they bring.

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References:

*https://international.la-croix.com/news/editorials/a-forewarning/17174