Al Owski > Recent Status Updates

“We are all Godseed, but no more or less so than any other aspect of the universe, Godseed is all there is—all that Changes. Earthseed is all that spreads Earthlife to new earths. The universe is Godseed. Only we are Earthseed. And the Destiny of Earthseed is to take root among the stars.”

“Drowning people Sometimes die Fighting their rescuers.”

“Belief Initiates and guides action — Or it does nothing.”

“Intelligence is ongoing, individual adaptability. Adaptations that an intelligent species may make in a single generation, other species make over many generations of selective breeding and selective dying. Yet intelligence is demanding. If it is misdirected by accident or by intent, it can foster its own orgies of breeding and dying.”

“Everyone knows that change is inevitable. From the second law of thermodynamics to Darwinian evolution, from Buddhism's insistence that nothing is permanent and all suffering results from our delusions of permanence to the third chapter of Ecclesiastes ("To everything there is a season....."), change is part of life, of existence, of the common wisdom.”

“God is Power- Infinite, Irresistible, Inexorable, Indifferent. And yet, God is Pliable- Trickster, Teacher, Chaos, Clay. God exists to be shaped. God is Change. This is the literal truth. God can't be resisted or stopped, but can be shaped and focused.”

“We do not worship God. We perceive and attend God. We learn from God. With forethought and work, We shape God. In the end, we yield to God. We adapt and endure, For we are Earthseed And God is Change.”

“All that you touch You Change. All that you Change Changes you. The only lasting truth Is Change. God Is Change.”

“I know that there are a lot of writers who believe they have access to a kind of artistic magic that allows them to inhabit any community in the world and write about it as if it is their own. I think those writers overestimate the power of their talent and intelligence, and underestimate how wisdom accrues over time, among nations and peoples, across ancestry.”

“The elevation of complexity over justice is part…of the effort to forge a story of Palestine told solely by the colonizer, an effort that extends to the proscribing of boycotts by American states, revocation of articles by journals, expulsion of students from universities, dismissal of news anchors by skittish networks, shooting of journalists by army snipers, and the car-bombing of novelists by spy agencies.”

“But here, I felt something that I have always enjoyed about reporting, about seeing worlds beyond my own—I feel myself disappear. When no one is holding my hand or guiding me, and I am watching people living out their particular customs, engaged in their small conversations, I can feel myself dissolving into it all. The group spoke about politics in a manner of communal intimacy...”

“[Benny] Morris described Palestinians as "barbarians who want to take our lives." There was but one way to constrain the threat: "Something like a cage has to be built for them. There is a wild animal there that has to be locked up in one way or another."… Morris approvingly invoked a genocide. "Even the great American democracy could not have been created without the annihilation of the Indians."”

“"As long as in this territory west of the Jordan river there is only one political entity called Israel it is going to be either non-Jewish, or non-democratic. If this bloc of millions of Palestinians cannot vote, that will be an apartheid state." (Ehud Barak)”

“"They took Israel away from the Arabs after the Arabs lived there for a thousand years," said South African prime minister Hendrik Verwoerd in 1961. "In that, I agree with them. Israel, like South Africa, is an apartheid state."”

“"be always on guard, carry your stick always with you this is the only way of surviving in this wolfish battle of all against all" (Jabotinsky) That was 1911. Within 40 years, the West would stand by and watch as a third of the Jewish people were consumed. I think of the fury the Shoah's survivors must have felt, the rage at their oppressors, at the bystanders...”

“The astonishment was for me for my own ignorance, for my own incuriosity, for the limits of my sense of reparations. The betrayal was for my colleagues in journalism—betrayal for the way they reported, for the way they'd laundered open discrimination, for the voices they'd erased. And the anger was for my own past for Black Bottom, for Rosewood, for Tulsa—which I could not help but feel being evoked here.”

“By routing the savage "Arab," by murdering his leaders, by confining him to the Bantustans of Tuba, or the reservations of Gaza, or the ghettoes of Lydd, Jewish national honor was restored in the traditional manner of Western European powers. The "mass mutation" into whiteness was advanced, and "IDF" "Mossad," and "Shin Bet" all became synonyms for righteous manly violence.”

“Righteous violence vented on some brutish, blighted lower caste has always been the key to entry into the fraternity of Western nations.”

“Congress passed an immigration bill in 1948 that employed geographical and time restrictions in the hopes of keeping Jewish immigration to a minimum. That same year, the United States became the first country to recognize Israeli independence. The cause of Jewish whiteness was thus advanced by keeping "them over there" and better still, over there warring against natives and savages.”

“In a 1945 poll, only 5 percent of Americans believed that immigration should be increased, while 37 percent believed immigration should be further restricted. When Congress, at President Truman's behest, attempted to adjust its immigration laws to allow for more Displaced Persons to enter the country, Texas Congressman Ed Gossett denounced them as "the refuse of Europe." ”

“The Indian. The Zulu. The Arab. In Exodus, the image of marauding Arabs, cowardly and prone to rape, will be familiar to anyone who has seen the depiction of Black people in Griffith's Birth of a Nation. For just as the vulgar caricature of Black people served the cause of white Redemption, so too did the Arabs in Exodus serve the cause of Zionism.”

“I would be reminded of the sin of abstraction”

“They were raised under the story that the Jewish people were the ultimate victims of history. But they had been confronted with an incredible truth that there was no ultimate victim, that victims and victimizers were ever flowing.”

“A system of supremacy justifies itself through illusion, so that those moments when the illusion can no longer hold always come as a great shock. The Trump years amazed a certain kind of white person; they had no reference for national vulgarity, for such broad corruption and venality, until it was too late. The least reflective of them say, "This is not America" But some of them suspect that it is America...”

“These people, white people, were living under a lie. More, they were, in some profound way, suffering for the lie. They had seen more of the world than I had but not more of humanity itself. Most stunningly, I realized that they were deeply ignorant of their own country's history, and thus they had no intimate sense of how far their country could fall.”

“When I was young, I felt the physical weight of race constantly. We had less. Our lives were more violent... whether by genes, culture, or divine judgment, this was said to be our fault. The only tool to escape this damnation for a lucky few was school. Later I went out into the world and saw the other side, those who allegedly, by genes, culture, or divine judgment, had more but—as I came to understand—knew less.”

“It was all propaganda, and I knew it. But I had not yet learned the lesson I brought with me to Palestine. I did not yet understand my own faculties, that I had the right to set my brackets as I would in Palestine and shove bullshit—no matter how politely articulated, no matter how elegantly crafted—out of the frame.”

“The notion that a colonialist Zionism exists merely in the hallucinations of leftist professors and the chants of their wayward students ignores a crucial source—the very words of Zionists themselves. But Herzl, Jabotinsky, and Ben-Yehuda were of a time when it was still possible for the West to propagate an untrammeled image of a noble colonialism. That is no longer the case.”

“Whatever connections formed in my mind between the Israeli oppression and American segregation, Israel's version did not make the case for itself in the language of Jim Crow but in the dialect of liberal expansionism—with its descriptions of barbaric natives and promises of the great improvements brought to the savages by their betters.”

“This putative "Jewish democracy" is, like its American patron, an expansionist power. Zionism demands, as Levi Eshkol, prime minister of Israel during the 1960s, once put it, "the dowry, not the bride" that is to say, the land without the Palestinians on it. And every expansionist power needs a good story to justify its plunder.”