By Chandrashekar (Chandra) Tamirisa, (On Twitter) @c_tamirisa
Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney went on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem in the tradition of all Christians after The Christ and since the rise of Islam to want to be Jewish, treading on the lands Jesus had roamed on. The outcome of the pilgrimage, however, may not be as beautiful for America.
Baptizing himself in the treacherous waters of Israeli-Palestinian politics, the aspiring president of the United States can engulf his country in the fire of his initiation.
In lockstep with the US vote in the UN on the recognition of Palestinian statehood, Romney is widely reported both in the liberal and conservative press on both sides of the Atlantic, as compiled by The Economist, supporting Israel. At issue, though, is his capacity for diplomacy.
Culture – reminiscing about Max Weber’s Protestant work ethic – says the American Mormon minority Mitt Romney courting other minorities in his country: Jews, Catholics and Hindus – is responsible for the Palestinian plight, blissfully unaware that his own people since Joseph Smith Jr., in America were not wealthy until they ceased to be internally displaced.
Settlement is civilization and culture follows settlement. Internal displacement – occupiers removing people from their dwellings in their own lands and consequently destroying their cultures and populations – is not beautiful for anybody: Jews since Egypt and antiquity, American Indians and now Palestinians – all because of the other pilgrimage Romney took to Thames – Europeans.
Obsessed by and embroiled in the contest of cultures trying to save civilization, no prospective American president should forget that real American interest lays in oil and gas since Winston Churchill in 1911.
