Budo and the Olympics

DoubleQuote Sources:

Budo for peace program in Delphi, prior to the Olympics
Judo withdrawal story from the Olympic Games

This DoubleQuotes touches me particularly closely, because I've been doing volunteer work with Danny Hakim and the folks who put together Budo Movement for Peace and their festival in Delphi celebrating the Olympic Truce. As the quote says, they are working with Palestinian and Israeli children, as well as others from Kosovo and Cyprus, and their Budo philosophy is nicely summed up in this quote from John Stevens' book, Budo Secrets - Teachings of the Martial Arts Masters:

The Japanese word BUDO consists of two characters. Although usually translated as "martial", the original components of the character BU have the meaning "to stop clashing weapons," with a definite connotation of restoring peace. BU may also be translated as "valorous action", "courageous living," and "commitment to justice." DO is TAO, "the Way to truth," "the Path to liberation." The two concepts merge as BUDO, "the Way of brave and enlightened activity."

The second quote, describing an incident at the Olympic Games, is interestingly nuanced, since it conveys both the power of the powers that be to flat out ignore the Olympic spirit -- and the Budo spitit too, for that matter -- in the interests of nationalism and conflict, and the capacity of an athlete to respect a colleague across such boundaries, in the true Budo -- and true Olympic -- spirit.

Messianic Longing

It is often suggested that Islam is a variant on Christianity which is itself a variant on Judaism, but it sometimes seems on closer inspection as though Islam and Judaism have more in common with each other than they do with Christianity -- and this pairing of rabbinic utterance with hadith is a pleasant indicator in that direction...

Both utterances, interestingly enough, give pause to those in their respective traditions caught up in apocalyptic expectation...

Human Worth

Here, the ripples between the quotes have to do with the value of a human life, in cash, in slavery, in payment for its extinction, here, there, when we're paying, when they're paying...

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Consider this:

The flip side of this decision is the way the British have dealt with the issue of Iraqis killed by the British forces by mistake. The south is very tribal. Killing someone, especially if he came from a powerful tribe, might start a chain of revenge killings unless the two tribes were to agree on some sort of compensation, ie blood money. So while we are sitting with some people in Amarah we hear the following story. During a wedding celebration, two young men fire celebratory shots into the air. A British patrol happens to be near by, they think they have a couple of Fedayeen shooting at them. Bang bang, the Iraqis are dead. The British take the bodies to the hospital, and after conducting an investigation they find out they were not Fedayeen, a mistake has been made. So the next day two British officers, two Iraqi lawyers and a translator go to the hospital and ask how the locals deal with this sort of thing. The concept of "Fasil" or blood money is explained to them. A couple of days later the word spreads that the British have paid 15 million Iraqi dinars in blood money to the families of the two Iraqi men. Further bloodshed was stopped. Perfect. I am not discussing the moral correctness of blood money. This is the way things are done here and if this money will stop any sort of revenge killings then it is worth it.

Basra under the Brits

Fall of Rome

An Islamist magazine from Algeria, Al-Jama'a, proposing a list of targets for Islamic attack, includes a number we are familiar with because they outline the Islamic empire at its greatest extent - places which Muslim thought can plausibly identify as already "given" to Islam and due to be retaken: Constantinople, Andalus, Tours (the "Pavement of the Martyrs"), Vienna. Rome, however, has never been taken (nor even approached, as was Vienna) by Islamic forces, and its presence here therefore begs the question: why is it listed?

The answer, I'd suggest, is to be found in the hadith or tradition of the prophet quoted in the second "bead" of this doublequote: the fall of Rome has been promised to the believers by their Prophet, as an event which will take place before the returning Christ's war against the Dajjal (the Islamic Antichrist).

This in turn raises the broader issue of Tradition and Strategy, or the degree to which intelligence aanalysts are reading the hadith of the Prophet with an eye towards their possible strategic interpretation. In an analytic piece that I am currently putting together, I hope to show that predictions of the Mahdi's activities may be of importance in understanding bin Laden's strategic objectives.

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It is worth mention that in the interpretation of apocalyptic texts, place names are sometimes used in a purely symbolic manner, as when Martin Luther remarks "The papacy is indeed nothing but the kingdom of Babylon and of the true Antichrist" -- associating Babylon (as named in the Book of Revelation) with Rome.