A Passion of the Palestinians

My Meaningful Encounter with a Tiny Worm

This supposedly worthless creature taught me a memorable lesson about how Great Love defeated venomous hate.

I could not believe that my eyes had just seen what I thought that they saw.While I was beginning my prayer walk on a little path near a lake, I decided that before I would begin praying, I would meditate on some verses from the scriptures about the Messiah.

I immediately thought about Psalm 22, where King David wrote some thoughts which are considered by many to be some of the very words the Messiah said to himself as he was suspended on the cross.Since I agree with this explanation, I was repeating to myself some of the Messiah’s own words which I had memorized.

“I am a worm and not a man, despised and rejected.”

At the precise instant that I said the word, “worm” in my mind, my eyes spotted what I thought was a tiny twig on the path which had a similar appearance to a very small worm.I was absolutely amazed that this came into my view at the exact instant that I said the word worm.

As I continued on my slow walk, I had a new thought.Wouldn’t it be even more remarkable if the twig was not a twig at all, but actually was a living worm.So I turned around and made my way back to where I thought that it was.However, I was fairly certain that I would not be able to find it again because there were so many broken leaves on the path.To my amazement, I quickly found it.

To my surprise, when I bent down and touched it, it moved, but barely.It actually was a living worm that I had seen exactly at the time I had said worm.I had walked around this same lake many, many times and had never remembered ever seeing a worm.But on this day, when I said worm in the context of Isa being treated as a worm, I saw this tiny worm.

As I considered how ALLAH may be using the unusual coincidence to send me a message about the significance of the use of the word worm in this Psalm about the Messiah, I continued on my walk. After I had walked for about a minute, I was suddenly shocked at the vivid message which invaded my mind.My own callousness and hard-heartedness toward the worm was the message.

Though I had to come to the conclusion that this tiny worm was somehow being used to teach me a lesson from ALLAH, I had still considered the worm totally worthless.I had for just a second or two considered saving the worm's life by moving it off the path where it would soon be crushed when someone stepped on it. But I quickly decided against expending the effort.I reasoned that there was absolutely no reason to delay my prayer in order to save a valueless worm.

(On further reflection, my callous initial refusal to save the worm’s life reminded me of a severe rebuke the Messiah delivered against the religious system of his time in the form of a short story.In my mind, praying against the brutal treatment of the Palestinians by the Israelis and praying against the potential bloody war of the U.S. against Iraq totally justified my not delaying prayer for a few seconds to save the worm.I had consciously chose not to save the worm even though I thought it was possibly being used by ALLAH to give me an important message about the brutalization, dehumanization and demonization that our Messiah received from the Israelis. In the vivid story told by Isa, he exposed a Jewish Priest and a Jewish Levite in their callous refusal to save the life of a brother Jew who they avoided helping as they traveled from their religious capitol, Jerusalem, down to lowly Jericho.

The dying man whom these two religious authorities consciously chose not to rescue was the innocent victim of random brutalization and would soon die if his severe wounds did not receive immediate attention. But the Messiah did not hesitate to portray these two religious officials as truly not caring what horrible suffering was being experienced by a Jewish brother.So, according to Isa’s story, it was necessary for God to raise up a non-Jew to save the life of this dying Jew.Regretfully, his story is strikingly similar to the attitude of too many contemporary Jewish leaders toward brutalized, dehumanized and demonized Palestinians.However, if ALLAH’s Own Risen Messiah’s assessment was that these representatives of the Jewish religious system were calloused to the needs of a dying brother Jew, how can that some system later be responsive to suffering people whom it has dehumanized out of existence?)

Some readers may think I possess twisted values for even considering saving the life of a worm.However, that I considered the worm worthless, was a somewhat normal response. But, that Israeli leadership actually considered the Messiah worthless like I considered the worm worthless, was the shocking message driven into my mind.And because of his great love, worthless like a worm was exactly what ALLAH’s only Messiah had been willing to become in the eyes of those whom he was attempting to serve and to physically and spiritually heal.

He had healed their sick.Still, they considered him worthless like a worm.He drove demons from those who were possessed.They still considered him to be worthless.He defended ALLAH’s Temple against their corruption so they despised him as a person despises a worm.He taught the people to love and to show mercy.Yet, their leaders hated him so much that they sought every opportunity to have him crucified.Why? Because they considered him worthless like a worm in addition to their rage at the corruption he was exposing in their religious system.

Did their cruel hate stop him from giving sight to their blind?Did their vicious hostility prevent him from healing lepers with his gentle touch, though his rough hands were calloused from his years of labor as a carpenter? Did their despising him, prevent him from raising a weeping widow’s only son up alive as they were slowly carrying him to his place of burial?

But the key question is: Did the fact that the Israelis considered their Messiah to be as worthless as garbage, and as despicable as a worm, discourage him from being willing to die in agony on a cross? No!Their contempt for him did not prevent Isa from trusting ALLAH.He knew in his heart that the depraved evil which was driving them to murder their innocent Messiah would ultimately be defeated by the perfect goodness of a totally Loving ALLAH.For he was convinced that darkness cannot defeat light.

As for the common argument that ALLAH would not allow such evil leaders to have crucified such an innocent Messiah, there is a simple explanation.If ALLAH were limited in his ability, His limitation may have kept Him from allowing His faultless Messiah from suffering.But He is not limited.The Holy Quran and the Scriptures both emphatically teach that He is able to do all things.So, through the wonderful virgin Maryam, ALLAH brought a rugged man into the world.ALLAH knew that His rugged Messiah could endure intense physical and emotional suffering.So His Messiah, instead of attempting to avoid or evade the Israeli’s most lethal weapon, Roman crucification, took their best shot.For three days ALLAH allowed Jewish leaders to think that they had won.Then triumphantly but quietly, ALLAH’s Messiah walked out of his tomb alive when ALLAH raised him up unto Himself.Is not ALLAH’s true Messiah much more worthy of the Glorious Quran than a “sneak away in the confusion,” Messiah?

As the magnificence of the lesson which I had been taught by the lowly worm was being processed in my mind, in humiliation I once again retraced my steps to search for the tiny worm that I had despised and rejected and treated as worthless.Thankfully, I found it.So I gently placed it in a safe environment where it could once again return to its home underground and do its silent work of enriching the soil.

Yes, ALLAH’s own Messiah’s allowed himself to be treated as a valueless worm by his own people.He allowed himself to be despised and rejected as Psalm 22 portrays him saying these words to describe himself.

“I am a worm and not a man scorned by men and despised by the people.”

But, are all of my words about the Israeli’s contempt for their Messiah, possibly an exaggeration?It is legitimate to ask: Would people with the strong spiritual heritage of the Israelis become so degenerate and be so filled with hate toward ALLAH that they would treat His Messiah in such a contemptible way? Would their descent into dark depths be so complete that they would treat ALLAH'’ Own Messiah like a worm?

In order to determine if this is actually true, we will ask ourselves this question: Are there indications in contemporary Israeli society that key segments of their society have sunk so low that they would have treated their own Messiah, not as a man would be treated, but as a worm would be treated?

Regrettably, a quick analysis of key samples of the contemporary Isreali treatment of Palestinians will confirm our worse fears.

There can be no serious argument with the reality that Israelis are now living on land given to them by an outside party that was mostly occupied and legally owned by Palestinians.A gross injustice is almost too mild a term to describe such a circumstance.The Palestinians were so worthless in the eyes of the Jews that the Jews inspired immigration to the Palestinian’s land using a slogan which claimed that they did not exist.They actually had the audacity and supreme arrogance to refer to the land the Palestinians were quite visibly living on as

“…a land without a people.”

So common human decency would seemingly dictate that the unscrupulous displacers would finally realize and acknowledge the great depth of their crime.Then they would show mercy, compassion, and sympathy toward these whom they so callously displaced and whom they treated as though they did not exist.

Instead of anything resembling apologies or compassion, it is part of the historical record that Israelis despised, devalued and dehumanized the displaced Palestinians with the following degenerate worm-like terminology.Israeli leaders have publicly referred to Palestinians as “grasshoppers” to be crushed.A prominent Israeli Rabbi has publicly referred to Palestinians as lice to be exterminated.Finally, Israeli soldiers consistently refer to Palestinians as insects to be crushed. The soldiers even specialize in reducing captured Palestinians to a stature lower than animals by torturing them until they are willing to curse their own mothers genitals in order to stop the torture.

This inhumane language is only one example of the ways Israelis reduce Palestinians to a worm-like stature so that Israeli soldiers will have less reluctance to kill them as a person does not hesitate to kill an insect.This is without even mentioning the other multiple ways that Israelis punish and dehumanize innocent, displaced Palestinians.So there is this kind of evidence in contemporary Israeli society of degenerate values, which lead to a systematic dehumanization by indoctrination by Israelis of Palestinians.To realize that there was a similar view at the time of Isa so that they treated their loving Messiah as the Scriptures faithfully portray; as a worthless worm and not as a man, seems to be consistent with an arrogant presupposition which appears to exist among some Israeli leadership.

Sadly, there is a way that Muslims are being almost as dishonoring toward their Messiah as many contemporary Israelis were dishonoring him two thousand years ago.The Israelis were open about considering their Messiah as a worthless, despicable worm whose very existence made him a worthy target for extra-judicial execution.

Muslims are far less direct.They want to simultaneously honor their Messiah and not honor him.For if the Messiah did endure the agony of a cruel crucification, and I am 100% convinced that an enlightened understanding of AN-Nisa 4:156, 157 confirmsthat he did, Muslims commit a far different crime than the Jews.But even though it is a different crime, it is still a grievous crime.

Whereas the Jews treated the Messiah himself as without value like a worm, Muslims treat the Messiah’s very deepest emotional and physical torment as worthless for they wrongly proclaim that the very deepest experience of his life on earth, did not occur.When you cancel out such a deep experience in a person’s life, you in effect treat that part of the person’s life as having no value. You do this when you insist that a person’s emotional and physical suffering did not occur when it most certainly did occur.Of course the emotionally wounded person relives some part of his or her agony every day.To deny that the person experienced personal agony when the person relives it daily is to dehumanize the person and to virtually cancel his or her personhood and inherent worth as a human being.

This denial of the occurrence of a horrible traumatic, personal experience would be similar to the Saudi Royal Family denying that innocent Palestinians are cruelly tortured and treated unjustly by the Israelis; that the Saudis are in total denial like the U.S. is in denial and virtually insist that no injustice or persecution is occurring to Palestinians. Would not that kind of calloused treatment of the suffering Palestinians by the Saudis be a horrible injustice?

But, thanks be to ALLAH that virtually all Saudis acknowledge the horrible suffering experienced by tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians at the hands of the Israelis.It is only the reality of the terrible suffering of one innocent Messiah at the hands of certain calloused Israelis two thousand years ago that the Saudis willfully chose to deny.But, all Muslims are both hurting themselves and displeasing ALLAH with their denial of Isa’s cruel crucification at the hands of the Israelis.

Significantly, many American Christians make the exact opposite mistake as Muslims make.These Christians openly acknowledge the horrible suffering and injustice the Messiah experienced at the hands of the Israelis.In fact, in the particular Christian group with which I was associated for years, the Plymouth Brethren, each and every Sunday at our open Communion Service we emphasized the injustice, suffering and inhumane crucification experienced by the innocent Messiah at the hands of his tormentors and false accusers.

In contrast to many Christians openly and consistently acknowledging this politically incorrect reality, an alarmingly large segment of American Christians are unwilling to openly acknowledge the horrible injustice which innocent Palestinians experience each and everyday at the hands of many calloused Israelis.So these Christians willingly acknowledge the politically incorrect certainty that Israelis manipulated the cruel murder of their own Messiah.No less significantly, they also openly acknowledge the politically incorrect certainty that the Scriptures clearly teach that the Jews murdered the majority of their own prophets and ruthlessly persecuted and even murdered many members of the early Christian Church.But in contrast, they insist on proclaiming the political correct certainty that current Israeli policy makes certain that Israelis always treat Palestinians in a manner that pleases the Eternal God.

How is that for blatant inconsistency and an inexplicable contradiction?This belief on the part of these particular Christians makes many question what kind of sadistic and unjust God that certain Christians believe in if they do not except the validity of the suffering and injustice being perpetrated by Israelis against Palestinians.

Yes, the vivid image of that tiny worm, about three centimeters long, will never leave my memory.That image burned into my mind for forever that our Messiah was willing to endure that depth of humility and cruelty from his own people so that he could reveal the height, the length, the breadth, and the depth of ALLAH’s great love for each of us.

The Prophet Moses

I do not know if a snake or serpent is a close relative of the worm or if it is just their similar appearances and that both are thought of as relatively worthless that are their main similarities.But I do know that after my meditation caused by this tiny worm, I will always have a greater appreciation of a certain famous bronze sculpture that I see each summer in Jordan when I visit Mount Nebo. (It was from Mount Nebo that the Prophet Moses viewed the Jordan Valley before he died.)

When I again see the bronze snake up on the pole representing the snake Moses lifted up in the desert to save Jewish lives, I will have even more appreciation of how Isa emphatically taught that this significant piece of Jewish history was symbolic of himself being lifted up for the benefit of all human beings of all time.

The Apostle John quoted the words of the Messiah himself teaching that the serpent event recorded in the book of Exodus pointed forward to his own death by his being lifted up to die such as one would be lifted up when experiencing a Roman crucification:

“As Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert, so the son man of man must be lifted up.”

When I see this sculpture I will again be amazed that when our Messiah was lifted up, he was being treated by his own people in such a degenerate way that he actually said of himself,

“I am a worm and not a man.”

Then my eyes will fill with tears as I face an exceptionally sad reality.The virtual cousins of the people to whom Isa first came, not callously, but because a false interpretation of one verse in the Quran has misled them, they reject the suffering and humiliation the courageous Messiah endured.So great was their rage toward him that he referred to them figuratively in Psalm 22 as strong bulls (which would gore him), as roaring lions tearing their victims, as a (pack of) dogs surrounding him and as wicked men surrounding him (who have lost all human sympathy).

But all Muslims insist that ALLAH did not allow the predictions of the Messiah's suffering as portrayed in Psalm 22, to occur.All Muslims, to remain in good favor with Islam, are taught and literally forced to believe that Isa did not suffer a crucification.And why must all Muslims believe that this is actually the way An Nisa 4:156 and 157 must be understood?Because that is the way that Muslim leaders command them to understand this verse despite all the facts against this interpretation.So one billion, two hundred million sincere Muslims must believe that their Messiah was either unwilling or was unable to endure the very worst that his own people could throw at him.But he did endure it.And through his being raised up alive by ALLAH after his awful execution, he triumphed over the degenerate downward spiral of evil which existed in Jerusalem that dark day.And to an extent, a spark of that evil exists in each of our own hearts.Yes, there is a spark of evil within each of us that can be ignited into a fierce flame so that it can result in even ALLAH’s very own Messiah being cruelly crucified.Or, that spark of evil can be spiritually defeated when we unite our hearts with the one who defeated evil in Jerusalem that dark day and who will defeat evil in each of our hearts.

“Palestinians Do Not Exist”

It is a common strategy of nations at war to teach their own warriors to think of the enemy as less than human.This way each soldier can mostly overcome the strong resistance which any normal person has to the thought of personally killing another human being.This revulsion at killing has undoubtedly been placed in us by ALLAH in order to give the potential to all people to live together as brothers and sisters in an international community.But this resistance to killing is mostly cancelled when the other person becomes to us something less than a human being.When they become insects or a non entity of some kind, killing them becomes much easier.

For instance, in the Vietnam War, American soldiers were indoctrinated so that they killed “gooks” or “cong” but it was like they were not killing actual human beings. So a soldier who had difficulty forcing himself to kill Vietnamese, had much less difficulty killing a “gook” or a “cong.”

The Israeli government also has become very adept at this indoctrination.So most I.D. F. soldiers never kill Palestinians.Instead, they crush grasshoppers, kill insects, exterminate vermin or kill terrorists or potential terrorists.But, most do not think of themselves as killing flesh and blood human beings.Rather, they see themselves as methodically crushing worthless insects.And the sure foundation for this dehumanization began when Jewish people settled in Palestine under the slogan of the Palestinian people not existing, when they called the land, “a land without a people.”So in a very real sense, Palestinians have been considered as less than worms by Israelis, since worms exist and Palestinians do not exist.

This significant conditioning of the Israeli Psyche to dehumanize Palestinians and to think of them as other than human or as not existing, even influences U.S. Policy toward supporting Israelis and not supporting Palestinians.

Since the American government has been subconsciously conditioned to consider Palestinians as expendable objects to the success of ALLAH’s reputed, “Chosen People,” who are virtually a superior race, what chance do reputed “terrorists” or even “insects” have to receive justice from the U.S.?Too many Americans have not made the effort to ponder the following flagrant credibility gap.If Israelis are truly a chosen people, would they continue to cruelly despise those whose land they politically stole?

As unlikely as it may seem, today’s ongoing tragedies for both Palestinians and Iraqis are inextricably linked to the Messiah’s extrajudicial execution on a dark Jerusalem hill many years ago. Also, exceptionally relevant to these present day tragedies is the marvelous triumph achieved by the son of Maryam, when, by ALLAH’s power, he was raised up alive from his Jerusalem tomb. Thus, he totally obliterated the wicked plot of Israeli leaders to cruelly end his life.So his stunning victory, even though it occurred twenty centuries ago, emphatically demonstrates this wonderful reality. Even today ALLAH will most certainly empower His Messiah to bring ultimate defeat to all whose plans are evil. This will finally occur even though the perpetrators of this evil may enjoy the reputation of being a chosen people or arrogantly boast of being the world’s mightiest nation.