I’m not holding my breath, but it looks like the UN is finally doing its job of neutral mediation in the middle east. The UN human rights envoy for the Palestinian territories publicly stated two days ago that the UN should withdraw from the ‘quartet’ (US, Russia, EU and UN) to protest lack of concern for Palestinian human rights on the part of the other quartet members. Of course the UN has no power at all, except to lend legitimacy to mediation processes; so it’s completely appropriate that it withdraw under these circumstances.

You know, the professor we have post-Friday Prayer lunch with asked the same question: What do you mean by tribalism? For my own soul, let me at least give it a try: What I mean is that we elevate the interests of other members, in this case Muslims, over the interests of non-members, no matter how severe the harm is. Thus, we do not use independent measures such as which issue harms people the most and not just Muslims; i.e. there is no collective triage. We make excuses for the violence of other Muslims, but moralize ceaselessly over the violece of others done to us. We are not even handed and have abandoned the Quran as the Criterion. In its place is group membership, i.e. tribalism. Some ethnicities get thier victimhood pushed to the fore while others languish in obscurity. My lunchmate told me that Palestine has a long history behind it; but Kashmir, Tibet and Chinese Turkistan were occupied at around the same time in the late 1940's and are being colonized much more severely than Palestine could ever imagine being. But, Tibetans aren't Muslim; Turkistanis aren't well represented around the world; and Kashmiris just don't committ national suicide often enough to grab our attention.