My business, for many reasons developing throughout my lifetime. (Note: My primary motivation in creating this entire Website has been recent, 2002, one-sided attacks on Islamics by The Rev. Jerry Falwell and The Rev. Pat Robertson.)
Boyhood Biblical Scholar To please Mother, I -- between ages 6 to 12 -- read every word in the King James Version of The Bible SEVEN COMPLETE TIMES. So I learned early Pentateuchal accounts of geneocide led by Moses and "right hand man" and successor, Joshua. I asked Mother, my school teachers, and Sunday School teachers, ministers, and other adults about the justification for these events and was thoroughly "stifled". (I decided from this experience something confirmed these 70 years -- that many who say they read The Bible either don't learn some "lessons" or choose to ignore them. For example, this book is famed for so many instances of "Thou shalt not", but nowhere says "Thou shalt not enslave." So, during our Civil War, slave-owners were able to quote The Bible and the Abolitionists could not. For example. Leviticus 25: 44-5: "Both thy bondsmen, and thy bondmaids, which thou shalt have, shall be of the heathen that are round about you; of them shall ye buy bondsmen and bondmaids. Morover of the children of the strangers that do sojourn among you, of them shall ye buy, and of their families that are with you, which they begat in your land; and they shall be your possession." Born son of a Southern Methodist Minister -- who left the ministry to return to his real love in the parks -- I became an "in spite of"-Presbyterian at age 7. In spite of Mother, who switched me for joining. Later, going from Tulsa, OK, to Springfield, MO, in spite of church elders who thought banning a teen-ager from Service would induce the parents to come. (I sat on the steps in sunshine or rain or snow, listening to the Sermon as best I could.) At College Hill Presbyterian Church in Tulsa, where I was allowed to attend the Service and take Communion as a member, I became aware of the saying of Jesus at the Last Supper, "This is my cup of the New Covenant". So I reconciled my horror of the genocides cited in the Old Testament and the "wrath" of a "jealous God" -- who "rained down fire and brimstone" and flooded the World and allegedly decided upon "The Elect" before they were born -- by considering myself a "New Covenant Christian", avoiding the extremes of the Albigenses (cited in a file at this Website), even though labeled a "predestined hellion. And, in later years, I came to terms with the "plaint of Theodicy". This, and the lesson of Stewarship, which I learned at College Hill, have sustained and comforted me over the years. And, years after, I read a "second opinion" in terms of the importance of "process" and the terror of those fearing the loss of the "results" of process.
Scholar of History As noted elsewhere, in my last semester of High School in Tulsa, OK, I was expelled for weeks of nonattendance. I was bored and despaired of receiving an education in public school. (I've often said that the only subjects I really learned in public school were music and Latin.) At the Tulsa Library, I'd found a wonderful 1200+ page book, The intellectual and Cultural History of the Western World, by Harry Elmer Barnes. I first read about the burning of the great Library of Alexandria (Egypt) by Christian mobs and their assassinattion of the great woman mathematician, Hypatia. (I've found nothing to compare with the Barnes book -- which I have on my shelf today -- these past 54 years.) This reading "whetted my my appetite", and motivated me to realize (as I've also noted elsewhere) that some of the most important historical events never get into the history books (not even in Barnes) or in the media. Oh, yes, I was allowed to come back to school and completed, in two weeks, a full semester's work in six courses (including physics and chemistry) by submitting extra written work a week before Graduation to receive free tickets to all Tulsa movie theaters. So I earned my interest in history -- more of my business.
My Business Because My Wife's Business This is my business because the event which I believed initiated modern terrorism ruined the work of my new bride and threatened her life and the life of her boss.Weeks before our wedding (Aug. 28, 1948), Esther spent many office hours preparing material for her boss, Dr. Frank Laubach --- worldwide literacy teacher -- to take on his next literacy campaign in August. Some of these hours were unpaid overtime, time she'd rather devote toward her coming wedding -- office work all in vain.
Dr. Laubach was going to Palestine for literacy teaching both among the Palestinians and the Israelis. (European Sephardic Jews were highly or sufficiently literate but some of the Eastern Askenazi Jews of that time were not.)
Laubach had communicated, and hoped to work, with Count Folke Bernadotte, United Nations mediator for Palestine.
The Swedish Count, as WWII head of the Swedish Red Cross, was credited with saving thousands of escapees from Nazi prison camps, and later with other missions of peace. He was rumored in line to receive the next Nobel Prize for Peace.
But, on Sept. 17 (1948), two weeks after we returned from our honeymoon, the Count was shot to death in Jerusalem, along with French Col. André Serot. Terrorist members of The Stern Gang claimed credit for this assassination. And Dr. Laubach's life was so threatened he had to abandon his literacy campaign. Thus Esther's many hours of work preparing for Laubach's literacy campaign among Jews and Islamics "went down the drain".
Esther opened letters to her office with threats not only toward Laubach but toward the Literacy office staff, presumably from American sympathizers, angry about Laubach's association with Count Folke Bernadotte and at suggestions that any Israelis needed teaching. All the work Esther had done before our wedding was scuttled.
At different later times, the founder of The Stern Gang and one of its members became Prime Ministers of Israel, which might indicate to any young Palestinian that terrorism was ok with the Israeli government and our government and the media if it was directed against Palestinians or any one trying to help them.
The Count did not receive the Peace Prize because Alfred Nobel's Will does not allow a Prize to be given to a deceased person. The Count was succeeded by his aide, Dr. Ralph Bunche, the first African-American to receive a Nobel Prize (for Peace).
Have you ever heard anything about this assassination? You can get details ONLINE. For example, http://www.us-israel.org/jsource/History/folke.html and http://www.gustavus.edu/oncampus/academics/library/folke.html .
I pray for no more bloodshed over the issues cited at this Website. Only that knowledge and understanding may flourish. "You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free."