Do unto us as they do unto Judas
Judas Iscariot is to be rehabilitated by a Vatican council. A German Pope is to carry out the restitution, to reverse thousands of years of Jew baiting as a result of Judas's portrayal as the archetypal treacherous Jew in the Biblical canon. In Pope Benedict's Germany, it counts to this day as an offense to name any baby Judas. It shows the import of the decision to rehabilitate the Bible's Jewish villain, who is said to be burning in hell having being devoured physically in three parts by a devilish wing-flapping bird.

Why would a columnist want to waste column inches talking of Judas's imminent reclamation from those hellfires, in a week that Sri Lanka's political cauldron is boiling over with hostilities at the threshold, and Geoffrey Lunstead is attacking the LTTE and daring its leader Prabhakaran to go to war?

The link is that demonisation can last for thousands of years, while it is never too late to rehabilitate. I'm not even talking of Prabhakaran here. To me Lunstead's Uncle Sam would do as the demon. If Lunstead dares Prabhakaran to go to war and implies America will help Sri Lanka, then Uncle Sam might have some chance of redemption in my eyes?

If Judas's depiction in the Bible as the hook nosed Jewish betrayer brought on thousands of years of Jew baiting resulting in the holocaust, can it be possible that enlightenment can be produced with a swiftly timed late cut of rehabilitation? Can the Jews be sanitized in Christian eyes by simply anointing Judas a 'non-betrayer', a man who clinically carried out god's plan?

Izeth Hussein making a brilliant analysis in 'The Island' of last Thursday writes that the Sri Lankan conflict is a racial issue in the main.
Racial politics can be whipped out of nothing, obviously, if a few passages in the Bible on Judas Isacriot can blight the Jewish race forever in Christian eyes. It shows racism is the invention of men -- be they saints who wrote the gospels, or Prabhakaran who currently interprets the Mahawamsa mindset of the Sinhalese. Judas's rehabilitation in Rome will indicate that racism begins in the minds of men with a bang and ends there with a whimper.

How does one end the racism of Prabhakaran and the counter racism that arises resultantly in the minds of the Sinhalese? Can the Sinhalese be rehabilitated by re-aligning, or somehow rehabilitating the Mahawamsa mindset?

Historically what's clear is that the worst enmities are between those who fought historically for a stranglehold over the same minds in the same extended communities. Christianity sprang from the wellsprings of Judaism, but it's the New Testament of the Christians that put words in the mouths of men that demonized the Jewish race forever in the eyes of Christians. (‘His blood be upon us and our children' was the cry of the temple elders who handed Jesus over to the Romans.)

What's not so funny is that the demonisation which started thousands of years back can surface in different eras through men who make historical text their own private project. There is Jew baiting in Hitler's time and now in the Ipod age, and Prabhakaran has dug out a text over two thousand years old to stereotype a race that seems to be more interested today in Portuguese originated baila and British originated cricket than in any Mahawamsa ordered agit-prop.

But Prabhakaran is doing it for the good of his people, while the Christians at various times down the ages "did it'' for the "good'' of their "own people'' against the Jews. It was John Kenneth Galbraith who cheekily observed that if someone claims to own a project on behalf of his people he needs to be watched closely. It is likely that it is a matter of economics -- there is something in it, for the project's champion and his people, in terms of simple returns.

Galbraith therefore gave economic meaning to often formless and graceless racism. The Jew stereotype has lived down the ages, and now they are telling us of rehabilitation? This is after the holocaust, the creation of modern Israel as "restitution'' which alienated the Palestinians and caused the whole of the Middle East to convulse as if the Jews just had to be reconciled physically with their Judas who was condemned biblically to his burning hell.

Two millennia later, we are told it’s all a mistake, and that we can enjoy the entire history of Jew baiting by thinking about it as a blip in the historical text, and live contended that Judas has been rehabilitated, and therefore by extension, the Jews. Hallelujah.

That will be much like the international community telling us after the Sinhala race is annihilated that it was all a mistake, and that Prabhakaran's stereotyping of the Sinhala race as Mahawamsa maniacs was never to be bought as gospel. Nothing is gospel, of course, not even the gospels, if Judas is to be rehabilitated, and the gospel of Judas is to be released soon as they are now contemplating in the Vatican.
But while we are waiting for that café latte on the day we will be told that the demonisation of the Sinhala race was all a mistake, there will be no more Sinhalese perhaps to drink any lattes or eat any kotthu rottis in any of Colombo's night-kades.

The Anglo Saxons the Scandinavians and white Anglo Saxon Protestants of the European persuasion in any case need to wrap their fingers around somebody else's project. Jesus Christ was somebody else's project -- and the apparent damnation of Jews in the Bible was these people's project, but it was Hitler in the end that took that to the zenith to further his own Nazi Socialism.

With Prabhakaran's project, it's the same wine in new bottles. The European Union and the Americans for long sponsored his demonisation of the Sinhala race, and if Galbraith was very self-effacing he might also say that the Europeans and Americans had an economic project in seeing Prabhakaran de-stabilizing the Sinhalese, and by extension the region. One day, when it's all over, a scholar perhaps from Norway will write an epitaph for the Sinhala race.

He will say that historically what was done to Judas was done to the Sinhalese. This extinct race, he will say, was demonized by reference to a 2000 year old text, and unfortunately, by the time this historical injustice was discovered by us scholars, what Judas's rehabilitation did to save the Jews at the eleventh hour could not be done to save the Sinhalese. Jehan Perera and Kumar Rupesinghe will be in Norway to say Hallelujah -- what's to be done annai?

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