Kabir Helminski on Gaza and “What Would a Moral Israel Look Like?”

Kabir Helminski, one of the best-known names in American Sufism, discusses “Gaza: Witnessing for Justice” and  “What Would a Moral Israel Look Like?”

Kabir Helminski is co-director and co-founder — together with his wife Camille Helminski(also profiled in the Living Spiritual Teachers Project) — of The Threshold Society, a nonprofit educational foundation that has developed programs to provide a structure for practice and study within Sufism and spiritual psychology. He is a Shaikh of the Mevlevi Order of Sufis, which traces its inspiration to Jelaluddin Rumi, and has authored and translated numerous books. (more)

Excerpt from the first 15 minutes:

Welcome to the live edition of Truth Jihad Radio. I'm Kevin Barrett, waging the all-out struggle for truth from my new home in Saidia, Morocco. Well, it's not that new. I've been here since late July, and today is Friday, January 26, 2024. Just a few hours ago, the International Court of Justice ruled that South Africa has presented a plausible case that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. The ICJ ruled that indeed it has jurisdiction, that it orders Israel to prevent acts of genocide and to take measures to prevent genocide and report back to it about what it has done in one month. It has ruled that Israel must prevent and punish incitement to genocide. Israel must allow humanitarian aid into Gaza. And the ICJ obliges Israel to protect Palestinian lives.

It does not order a ceasefire, but actually there are questions about whether the court can order a ceasefire, which is really a military term rather than ordering remedies for genocide, which is the current case. So this is a historic ruling and to discuss it on tonight's show I'm very pleased to bring on two great American spiritual leaders who in fact are both Muslim spiritual leaders.

Kabir Helminski is one of the great interpreters of Jalal ad-Din Rumi, and he has translated him. He and Coleman Barks are the two big names in Rumi's studies. He has done all kinds of amazing work that I was following long before I came to Islam, and it's great to have him on the show tonight.

And then in the second I will bring on John Andrew Morrow, another great American Muslim spiritual leader, who is the number one force alongside Charles Upton, of course, in pushing the Covenants Initiative, publicizing the Covenants of Prophet Muhammad, peace upon him, to protect other religions.

So let's talk about Gaza and other things, starting with Kabir Helminski. Welcome, Kabir.

How are you? Thank you, Kevin. Happy to be here for the first time.

…My own work is primarily in the field of what I might call applied spirituality. It's within a traditional Islamic framework. And at the same time, I believe it's we're sharing universal truths and training hearts and minds to know what a human being truly is and what the human being's relationship to reality, to the divine reality actually is.

And so this is really my focus and it's also within Rumi's tradition, a 700 year old tradition. And so when I speak today, I'm not speaking in the name of any organization, not in the name of my spiritual lineage, for the non-profit Threshold Society, where we do our work, but I'm speaking solely as an individual.

And we have to take the broadest possible perspective on human affairs today, both in order to be fair and just and also not to lose hope. And this decision by the International Court of Justice is a welcome sign that humanity as a whole is able to rule, is able to…name this atrocity for what it is, and to call for justice.

Always we want to remember that our fight is not against individual souls, though individual souls can go astray. Individual souls can be instruments of great injustice, but we're not the judge of anyone. And from a spiritual perspective, we could say that we have no enemies, as the prophets themselves had no enemies. Truth be known, anyone who is an enemy of the prophets is really an enemy to themselves.

So we are in the side of Abraham and Solomon and David and Moses, all of the Hebrew prophets, and Jesus, son of Mary, and Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon them all. And those prophets have often taken a very critical view of their own peoples and have spoken up against injustice. And at the same time there's no place for hatred in this. Hatred is a toxin that would poison us. So it's not easy, I know. And we feel anger and rage and we just want to be able to take the weapons from the hands of criminals wherever they are.

But hopefully this ruling by the court of justice is one step in that direction and as depressing and painful as these recent months have been, we also take hope in that this could be a turning point for humanity. More and more people are waking up. More and more people are becoming aware of 75-year history of the occupation of Palestine.

And there's always a mystery when we see the fact that evil exists in this world. And what is evil? Evil is cruelty and injustice. And even more so evil is taking pleasure in cruelty and injustice.

So this is what we're dealing with. And what's called for, I think, is greater awareness from this vast perspective that includes the era in which we live, in which some of us would like to believe that this is not an era of doom. It's not the end times, that it may it be an era of awakening.

That's a great introduction and that introduction raises the question that you raised in your Huffington Post article, What Would a Moral Israel Look Like? Now it's interesting that right now the world is seeing an unveiled true face of Israel which is obviously a grotesquely immoral Israel. Some of us even suspect that Israel in its current incarnation is basically satanic, in that it's one of the many offshoots of a denatured and satanic turn from Jewish messianic millenarianism. We see Shabtai Zvi's movement from 400 years ago and then Jacob Frank picking that up. These are people who are explicitly against God and in favor of all sorts of abominations. And it seems that those who thought that Jews should plant a Jewish state in the Holy Land against the will of God, and maybe force God's hand to bring them their Messiah, and so on, that whole line of thought seems basically satanic. Now we're seeing the unveiling of a basically satanic state of Israel with its leader Netanyahu very much in the running to have my vote in the Antichrist election. So how do we get there to this vision of what a moral Israel would look like, in light of this unveiling that we're witnessing right now?

Yes, well, a little background here. Some years ago, I was a regular contributor to the Huffington Post at their invitation. Typically, it was in areas of spirituality. And at a certain point, I think it was maybe around 2014, I felt moved to write an article called “What Would a Moral Israel Look Like?” because I wanted to take the most positive approach that I could imagine—instead of just condemning Zionism, to really reason in a positive way and take the most positive outlook.

So I wrote an article that was willing to detail the cruelties and terrorist actions of the Zionist state, that was clear in spelling those things out. Because at that time, the Obama administration had just come in, and Israel was “mowing the lawn,” as they say, in Palestine, which means they were bombing and killing thousands of people. And the Obama administration went along with this. And I was horrified.

Still, I wanted to present the most positive vision I could. I submitted the article, and I waited. And there was nothing but silence.

It was not published. It was not featured in Huffington Post.

So that was the end of my relationship to Huffington Post, although they kept my name as a writer and I had the privilege of being able to post on their website. And so it was maybe almost two years later that I thought, well, let me post the article so that at least it would be online somewhere and people could read it. There it is, and there it remains to this day. If you do a search for the title What Would a Moral Israel Look Like, you can find it there on the Huffington Post.

One of the interesting things that came about was that we hear again and again that Hamas is calling for the annihilation of Israel and the killing of all Jews. And I thought I'd better look into this and see: What does the Hamas charter call for? I don't know how many people have read the Hamas charter. But what I'm about to read to you, I haven't heard mentioned by anyone in all the years since.

I hear this charge against Hamas being repeated and repeated. And no one actually quotes the Hamas charter, which says about relations with non-Muslims—by the way, I'm not advocating for Hamas, I'm simply quoting their charter:

“Hamas is a humane movement which cares for human rights and is committed to the tolerance inherent in Islam as regards attitudes towards other religions. It is only hostile to those who are hostile towards it or stand in its way in order to disturb its moves or to frustrate its efforts. Under the shadow of Islam it is possible for the members of the three religions, Islam, Christianity and Judaism to coexist in safety and security.”

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This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit kevinbarrett.substack.com