File this under Annals of Ugliness.  And have paper towels handy to wipe off the sleaze if you watch it.

It’s Dutch über-racist Geert Wilders at a ‘Christian’ megachurch in Nashville, TN, getting standing O’s for tripe like “Muhammad was a terrorist worse than Bin Laden ever was” and “If Jerusalem falls, Nashville falls.”  Which makes me think that if this is Nashville, its fall might be a thing much to be desired.  And that with friends like this, Israel needs no enemies.

Transcript follows, courtesy of Loonwatch:

Geert Wilders: “Its Islam Stupid (raucous applause). We must stop the Islamization of our countries, more Islam means less freedom”…”And now, now Europe is looking slowly but gradually like Arabia”…”It was the land of our fathers, it is our land now, it is our values, our values are based on Christianity, Judaism and Humanism and not Islam, it is that simple (applause)”…”and I have a message for all those people who want to rob us from our freedoms, and my message is stay in your own country (loud applause)”…”we are not going to allow Islam to steal our country from us (applause)”…”if Jerusalem falls, Athens, Rome, Amsterdam and Nashville will fall therefore my point is we all are Israel (applause)”…”the only place where Christians are safe in the Middle East is that beautiful country called Israel (loud applause)”…”Make no mistake, please make no mistake, Islam is also coming to America, in fact Islam already is in America. America is facing a stealth jihad, the Islamic attempt to introduce Sharia’ law bit by bit”…”what we need my friends, what we need to turn the tide is a spirit of resistance, what we need I repeat it again is a spirit of resistance”…”we must repeat it over and over again, especially to our children, our Western values and culture based on Christianity and Judaism is better and superior to the Islamic culture (applause), and leaders who talk about immigration without mentioning Islam are blind (applause)”…”we must stop the immigration from non-Western countries and we must forbid the construction of new hate palaces called mosques (applause)”…”the press calls it an Arab spring, I call it unfortunately an Arab winter (applause), Islam and freedom, Islam and democracy are incompatible (applause)”…”the so called Prophet Muhammad was a terrorist worse than Bin Laden ever was (applause)”…”neutrality my friends, neutrality in the face of evil is evil itself (applause).”

I’d say that Wilders should stay in his own country, but that’s not fair to the Dutch.  So Harold Camping, where are you now that we need you?  Could you please arrange for this scumbag to be Raptured?

A girl can get really tired of writing about burqas, so I’d sworn I’d give it a rest.  But this is just so nuts I had to break my vow:

The first time I saw this photo, some months ago, I knew it had to be a hoax.  You know, one of those photoshop deals.  Besides, it could be anywhere, right?   Nothing to indicate that it was, as claimed, in the Israeli town of Beit Shemesh, and that these women weren’t ultra-conservative Muslims but ultra-Orthodox Jews.

Still, who could resist such a delicious idea?  Clearly not that grande dame of British journalism, The Daily Telegraph, which today ran the same photo with an accompanying story from its Israel correspondent:

Well, it happened again:  the high-desert high.  I don’t know if it’s something only certain people are liable to – some peculiar set of eye, brain, and metabolism – but every time I go into high desert, whether southern Sinai, northern New Mexico, or as this time, the 5000-foot high volcanic hills northwest of Guadalajara, my mind and body seem to soar.  The air is clearer, the colors sharper, the dust cleaner.  I feel lighter on my feet, lighter in spirit.  I become a mountain goat again, trotting up narrow mountain tracks and leaping from rock to rock across foaming streams, always (nearly always) sure-footed, as though I was born into such a wild and harsh landscape instead of into the placidly tamed greenery of England’s Thames Valley.

So the accidental theologist in me wonders:  is there a direct correlation between physical light and spiritual light?  I mean, is the mystical metaphor – seeing the light, being in the light – a function of climate and physics as much as of imagination?

I don’t think there is such a thing as accidental geography.  Not when it comes to ancient sacred places.   No accident, then, that Jerusalem is high desert.  Mecca and Medina (well, Medina, in any case):  high desert.  The Hopi mesas:  high desert.  The Iranian holy city of Qum:  high desert.   It’s nothing as simplistic as nearer-my-God-to-thee and all that.   It’s that high desert air really does have a heady quality.  Then add in water — the oxygenation  of a bubbling spring — and what can an over-stimulated brain do but start bubbling too?

I understand animism.  I once spent an hour crouched by a spring on the Golan Heights, watching and listening as the bubbles came to the surface at irregular intervals, each one bursting with a little pop.  Even now, years later, there is no way my rational mind can overcome the feeling that the spirit of the spring was talking to me.   I did the same just last week at a spring feeding a natural grotto in the Bosque de Primavera, the rock gouged out by steaming hot water, the algae in it shimmeringly turquoise and dark green and Virgin-Mary-blue from the volcanic metals it contained.  Mesmerized, I knelt down gently and settled in for a while, some primal part of me convinced that if I was patient, if I listened carefully, I could decipher what it was saying.

“Silly,” you say?  Well, part of me agrees, but then another part of me thinks you a fool for taking a cursory look and walking right on by.  Hey, this is water coming out of the rock.  Why else would Moses striking the rock with his rod and making water gush forth be such a big deal?   It’s the grateful astonishment of water in the desert, the miracle – yes, dammit, miracle — of a sudden ribbon of vegetation coursing down a bare-rock ravine, of the scent of sage and mint mixing with that of dust and sun-baked stone, of shade and softness where you expected only harshness.

Or I can understand how you might venerate a tree.  I think of the golden spruce, sacred to the Haida of British Columbia’s Queen Charlotte Islands and the iconic center of John Vaillant’s wonderful book by that name, subtitled “a true story of myth, madness, and greed.”  Or solitary trees growing out of rock, like the gnarly Yosemite pine photographed by Ansel Adams, shown here, or the ‘lone cypress’ on the Monterey Peninsula, now cutely trimmed and walled up and all but labeled “Icon,” to be photographed by everyone who’s ever heard of Ansel Adams as well as many who wouldn’t know the man from the beer.  They may have none of his patience or sense of light and shadow, yet still they feel compelled to perform the most popular 21^st-century form of worship:  to take a picture.   And why?  Because life growing out of rock seems to defy all odds.  It’s a perfectly natural phenomenon, of course, yet the human mind, self-centered as always, attributes human qualities — grittiness, determination, the will to live – and admiration turns to awe.

I could, I suppose, now be accused of tree worship.  Each morning in Mexico, I’d wake before dawn, make some coffee, read for an hour or so, then grab my iPod and go out in search of the first rays of sunlight hitting the valley, with Johann Sebastian or Paul Simon or Nusrat Ali Khan feeding straight into my brain.  And when I found that place, a different one each time depending on which ray of light I followed, I’d face the rising sun only to be blinded by it, so I’d turn around, the sun warming my back, and focus on a tree – the most generous one nearby, the spreadingest one.  I’d watch the glitter of the leaves in the light, the way what I knew to be green was really silver and gold, and I’d stand there gazing up at the tree as though I’d never really seen one before, and dance, a fool for light, just me and the tree and the fresh new sun.

Was it too much sun?  Something in the water?  A sea-level brain reacting to altitude?   Who cares?  The memory of those early mornings is imprinted on my mind, and I’m inordinately grateful for that overwhelming sense of light and color and warmth:  it will see me through the damp and gloom of another Seattle winter.

What a bunch of hypocrites they are at the Anti-Defamation League.   The up-front bigotry of the Dove World Church in Florida, whose redneck pastor has declared September 11 “Burn a Quran Day,” is almost refreshing by comparison.  At least he’s not trying to hide beneath a  veil of sensitivity, and he sure as hell isn’t trying to kid anyone that he’s into anything like civil rights.

The ADL has the astounding chutzpah to describe itself as “the nation’s premier civil rights agency,” declaring that it “fights anti-Semitism and all forms of bigotry, defends democratic ideals, and protects civil rights for us all.”

So yesterday it issued a statement against Cordoba House, the proposed Muslim community center whose opponents have deliberately and misleadingly dubbed it “the mosque at Ground Zero.”   (It’s not a mosque, and it’s not “at Ground Zero,” but two blocks away.)   In fact check out the Cordoba House website and you’ll see that it’s a perfect example of what Jewish tradition calls tikkun olam, repairing the world –- dedicated to interfaith communicaton in the spirit of the convivencia, the “Golden Age” of Muslim and Jewish intellectual achievement in Spain that came to a crashing end with the Catholic Inquisition and the expulsion of both Muslims and Jews.

Of course the ADL has no objection to the idea of a such a center.  My God, no.  That would be so intolerant.  Instead, yesterday’s statement concluded with this:

Proponents of the Islamic Center may have every right to build at this site, and may even have chosen the site to send a positive message about Islam. The bigotry some have expressed in attacking them is unfair, and wrong. But ultimately this is not a question of rights, but a question of what is right. In our judgment, building an Islamic Center in the shadow of the World Trade Center will cause some victims more pain – unnecessarily – and that is not right.

You see?  Others are bigots, but the ADL is not.  It’s demonstrating its exquisite sensitivity to pain – not its own, of course, but that of the families of those who died on 9/11,  some of whom (presumably not the Muslims among them) find the idea of Cordoba House “offensive” and are,  per ADL director Abe Foxman, entitled to their bigotry because – I wish I was making this up – 9/11 is the equivalent of the Holocaust.

Asked why the opposition of the families was so pivotal in the decision, Mr. Foxman, a Holocaust survivor, said they were entitled to their emotions.

“Survivors of the Holocaust are entitled to feelings that are irrational,” he said. Referring to the loved ones of Sept. 11 victims, he said, “Their anguish entitles them to positions that others would categorize as irrational or bigoted.”

Wow.  So the Holocaust is now a defense for bigotry?  Howzat for new-speak?  George Orwell, kindly rise up from your grave.

Not that this is the first time the ADL has used the Holocaust in such a way.  Witness its support of the so-called Museum of Tolerance  to be built on top of a thousand-year-old Muslim cemetery in Jerusalem as a wing of the Simon Wiesenthal Center.  The Wiesenthal Center is headed by  the oleaginous right-wing rabbi Marvin Hier, who pooh-poohed the idea first that Muslims care about their dead and then that there were even any bodies buried there.  There certainly aren’t any more:  as the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz discovered, Hier hired a contractor to swiftly and clandestinely “remove nuisances in the area of the project” – the “nuisances” being hundreds of skeletons, bones, and skulls.

So in ADL-think, the Jerusalem project is just fine – they’re Muslim bones, not Jewish ones, and besides, it’s all about “tolerance.”   But when someone else proposes a far more meaningful project and that someone else is – gevalt! – Muslim, that’s going beyond the pale .

Listen, Abe Foxman:   if you want to lead an organization of bigots, at least have the intellectual honesty of that dumb-ass pastor in Florida.

Meanwhile, the least you can do is this:  DELETE ALL REFERENCE ON YOUR WEBSITE TO THE ADL AS A CIVIL-RIGHTS ORGANIZATION.  IMMEDIATELY.  Just who do you think you’re kidding?

Must-read for non-hypocrites:  an open letter to Elie Wiesel in response to his urging President Obama not to “pressure” Israel into stopping Jewish settlement in East Jerusalem (the latest stage being the eviction of Arab residents of the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood, which has led to a protest vigil).

Wiesel maintained that Jerusalem, the most politicized city in the world, is “above politics” by virtue of its holiness — an argument that looks and smells like what it is:   a steaming pile of holy s**t.

Fortunately, the Israeli writers of this open letter, among them political scientists and Israel Prize laureates Avishai Margalit and Zeev Sternhell (who not long ago survived attempted assassination by a fundamentalist Jewish settler), put it rather more elegantly.

“We cannot recognize our city in the sentimental abstraction you call by its name,” they say.   To claim that Jerusalem is “above politics”  is outrageous.  “Being above politics is being devoid of the power to shape the reality of one’s life.  We cannot stand by and watch our city… being used as a springboard for crafty politicians and sentimental populists who claim that Jerusalem is above politics and negotiation, while all the while frantically ‘Judaizing’ East Jerusalem in order to transform its geopolitics beyond recognition….

“We who live in Jerusalem can no longer be sacrificed for the fantasies of those who love our city from afar.  Jerusalem must be shared by the people of the two nations residing in it.  Only a shared city will live up to the prophetic vision ‘Zion shall be redeemed with justice.’  As we chant weekly in our vigils in Sheikh Jarrah, ‘nothing can be holy in an occupied city!'”

To which, as a former Jerusalemite, I’d say ‘Amen,’ and add this:

When he was given the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986, Wiesel was cited for his “practical efforts in the path of peace” and for his “powerful message of peace, atonement, and human dignity.”   If it was unclear exactly what he’d done for peace, people kept quiet(ish) about it.  Now that it’s crystal clear what he’s doing against peace, it’s way past time for the Nobel Committee to demand their prize back.