Recently Jeppe Juhl, the editor of a Danish newspaper, was dumped on the motorway by his Palestinian taxi driver Ali, as it dawned on Ali that his passenger was Jewish.
Subsequently Mr. Juhl wrote an open letter to Ali.
I find this letter so well written and the content so important for us in the UK multicultural society that an English translation is worth the effort in the hope that a few more people with roots in the Islamic culture might read it. I have changed a few sentences with reference to Danish names and also to make them flow in colloquial English.
Hereby I pass the word to Jeppe Juhl:
Dear Ali
You don’t know me. I don’t know you. But one thing I know for sure: it is a statistically accepted fact that you and yours hate me and mine. If we met in a dark alleyway you would not hesitate attacking me and you would most likely be proud about the fact that you had caused me grievous bodily harm.
In court you would feel like a hero in the eyes of your friends and your status, in the open rather pleasant Danish prison system, would be strong and powerful.
You see, Ali: I am Jewish.
I don’t look like one, I have no cap or hat and no side curls (peyos) and have only been to the synagogue 6 times since my Bar Mitzvah 36 years ago. I don’t even belong to a Jewish congregation – but all this doesn’t matter. You’d hate me anyway. I don’t believe in Zeus, the Tooth-fairy or Jahwe. The stories about Moses on Mount Zinai and the Jewish sojourn in Egypt, both certainly unhistorical events, are equally absurd and ridiculous to me, as is the legend about Jesus walking on water and Mohammed going to Heaven on a white horse. Whatever I say or believe, you will hate me anyway. Because I’m Jewish.
But I am proud of being Jewish and proud of all the great contributions of the Jewish people throughout history. Perhaps this is a bit embarrassing, even ridiculous, but there you are. And I am proud of being Danish. Perhaps also a bit embarrassing and ridiculous, but please do observe, that I don’t say “also Danish”. To me there is no religious, ethnic, cultural or emotional difference between my being Jewish and being as Danish as they come.
My family’s history is sad, covering endless pogroms and persecution and being robbed of all basic human rights in Eastern Europe. Scorn, mockery and ridicule, concentration camps and fight for survival have been the daily fare for us. Luckily it ended well for my family, as we have landed in one of the world’s best countries: the beautiful little Denmark.
My grandparents worked hard to become assimilated and they succeeded with the help of a country that accepted them so readily and openly. The simplest way to illustrate how grateful we are and ultimately our ‘danishness’ can be seen from the final sentence during worship in the synagogue in Copenhagen: “God save the queen and our mother country Denmark.”
Yes Ali, I am Jewish. A Danish Jew with a strong Jewish identity and I love Israel. Of course I don’t blame you for not loving Israel – but there is another major difference between you and me: I don’t hate you. On the contrary, I wish you, your family and your people a long and happy life. Why shouldn’t I?
The reason I am writing to you, Ali, is deeply personal. You see: I have given up the thought of having a dialogue. A dialogue needs two parties, both willing to listen. It demands empathy and the ability to accept that sometimes the truth hurts. With that in mind I am sure that this letter is likely to be a complete waste of time. Nevertheless, I am trying, letting the benefit of doubt rule, while giving you and yours a chance to wake up!
Let us try this experiment: cleanse your thoughts of all prejudice, wipe the slate clean. No ‘no’s, no buts. I know it is difficult, but try for a while to forget the bombardments of Gaza, the illegal Israeli settlements and the prevailing unintelligent attitudes to war and proportionality. Forget the Allied bombing of Dresden and Hamburg, forget Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Forget the double morals of a meaningless UN and a lame duck Europe. Forget that the world’s most powerful super state with one hand dishes out their version of unwanted democracy through war, and with the other cooperates with the Saudi Arabian Wahabits, who spend billions of dollars on faith-schools, poisoning the minds of young children. Forget about almost 100 years political mismanagement and history of the Middle East with its absurd attempts to project western concepts of morality and values onto an irrational world, where life after death seems more important than the present. Let us try to forget what we think we know about the background of the conflict.
For my part I am trying to forget all that. I am also trying to cleanse my mind from the belief, that you and your brothers have been raised in hate and a systemic lie of such huge proportions that all hope about peace within the next 2-3 generations is an illusion. That the lies become the truth if they are repeated often enough. That your Mullahs are preaching death and dark ages, exploiting you and your young brothers to the extent that you find it impossible to get out of this enforced spiral of hopelessness, death and suppression. That your religion doesn’t possess and never will encompass free information, the absolute essence of a free life. That lack of hope and an existence in poverty force you to listen to these dark powers. I am trying to undo my observation that you and your brothers are being used as pawns in a deadly political game, the origin of which can be found in a deep rooted hate to the Jews. I am trying to ignore the fact that Israeli transgressions are being looked upon 10 times stronger than those committed by everyone else. I am forgetting that Israel’s fight increasingly is becoming the fight for the West, when we consider the rising power of a demon state like Iran. I am suppressing my negative feelings about the illegal Israeli settlements and I am doing my best to hide my contempt for the religiously motivated mechanisms that keep the fire burning under the biggest problem of all: the division of Jerusalem. I am forgetting your hate and I ignore Hamas’ statement: “We Muslims love death as much as you, the Jews, love life”.
I have now cleansed my mind of all these old dogmas.
Have you done the same?
OK – now we can dig deep, deep down to the roots that define us as human beings and ask ourselves the ultimate question: “Do we want peace?”
And finally: Do you think Hamas and Hizbollah want peace?
Thursday, 30 June 2011
Monday, 13 June 2011
Fyn Island Denmark 2003
 |
| Jorgen Faxholm, "The bridge". Oil on Board, 2011. |
The Bridge.
The Bridge over 'Storebaelt', connecting Sjaelland and Fyn, viewed from the Fyn side.
Samsoe Summer, Denmark, Oil on Board.
 |
| Samso Island, 1994, Oil on Board |
The gentle landscape of Samso Island in Denmark just called out to be painted.
Rolling hills, fields, farms, the light house and houses half hidden by the trees with the backdrop of a deep blue ocean was too much to resist.From sketches made during a long forgotten holiday - - -
Monday, 6 June 2011
Einstein debunked
In a book called "Time, the hidden dimension of the missing physics" Frank Atkinson deals a blow to Einstein's theory of relativity - - and thereby goes a lot of the subsequent theories concerning the Universe - straight to the bin.
This is heavy, but hugely interesting, stuff.
I find it quite incomprehensible that the establishment still hangs on to an artificial device such as Dark Matter and that E=mc2 stays unchallenged, considering the main argument that things ARE relative, according to Einstein, and therefore a train, passing you at the speed of light, should make YOU weigh a million tonnes.
How about mass staying constant and the 'speed' of light being variable?
We know that time goes at a different 'speed', depending on the speed of the device in which time is measured and how close or far from a considerable mass the device is.
Our Caesium clocks prove this fact.
Atkinson argues very well for the relative speed of light and it comes across quite elegantly, when he highlights the consequences.
Time, as a driver, is a truly fascinating idea.
It is the ultimate generator of gravity, one of the least understood concepts in physics and the weakest of the basic forces.
Understanding 'time' will generate understanding on both a quantum and a cosmic scale.
As all mass is energy, i.e. atoms tied together by the strongest universal force, in constant 'oscillation', time is an intrinsic part of the atoms' characteristic. There simply is no 'process' without time and we seem to have understood this concept reasonably well.
It is on a cosmic scale we still fumble around in blindness, having gone down a blind alley without seeing the effect on light, as it passes through the universe. Time-dilation even explains the red-shift and the faulty notion of Dark Matter.
Einstein's train.
Watching the celebrity professor Brian Cox on TV is both interesting and sad, as he comes across as stuck in the theories of the 1930s, only slightly modified by Hawking. Quite disappointing, but understandable - it is probably not a good career move to go against Hawking and Einstein. But it doesn't even take a lot of mathematics to prove Einstein wrong - using his own example of a lightning fast train speeding past an observer on the embankment.
To the observer, the train will be a vertical line - front to back compressed - at infinite mass.
To a person on the train everything would seem normal.
But if you shine a laser light at 45 degrees from the front of a train compartment and one from the back of the same compartment, letting the light hit the middle of the compartment at, say, 2m up on a screen - then the consequence would be, close to the speed of light, that the laser beam would hit the screen simultaneously at two different spots.
Clearly not possible.
Let alone that the train would suck you up, if it passed you at the speed of light, as it according to Albert would have an infinite inertial mass.
Not so, I think - Inertial Mass and Gravitational Mass must be separate entities at speeds close to that of light. The difference is explained by time dilation, but that's another chapter.
Dark Matter, Red Shift and Background Radiation from the Big Bang.
The concept of 'time-dilation' and its impact upon light, as it travels through an endless Universe, delivers a very elegant explanation concerning the redshift of light and the supposed background radiation from the Big Bang.
Dark Matter should be dropped as a theory more akin to a religious belief than a fact. It is an artifice, invented as we couldn't explain our observations about a (possibly) expanding Universe and as our equations didn't seem to work. Well, perhaps the equations are wrong. I shall come back to this later - suffice to say, that the invisible Dark Matter, which possesses mass, but emits no energy radiation, according to conventional Newtonian laws would have attracted 'stuff' for billions of years and hence not be Dark Matter any more - like the invisible man, who could only be seen when dressed.
Why is it that the Establishment has such a hard time letting go of clearly dubious theories? Why invent Dark Matter, ostensibly constituting 70% of matter in the universe, to explain an apparent, but probably misunderstood, accelerating expansion of the Universe. Personally I think it would be more credible to believe it is God blowing up a Universal balloon - - -
Time dilation and Redshift (like the Doppler Effect) of light.
The redshift is normally used to explain the expanding Universe - but how about an infinite Universe, where light passes through an endless number of time dilations as it passes millions of galaxies on the way to an Earth-observer? This would surely explain the red shift very easily.
An infinite Universe would also explain the 'Background Radiation' from the so-called 'Big Bang'.
If light has come to Earth from everywhere, for ever, in an infinite Universe, the sky would be brilliant as the Sun, you might say? Not so, I say, as the pulling to and fro of electromagnetic waves caused by the time dilation in the vicinity of huge galactic masses would suck up the energy to such an extent, that we end up with the mere 2.3 degrees Kelvin we can observe.
Redshifted beyond recognition, i.e. way into the invisible spectrum.
Yes, exactly: "Dark Matter".
And perhaps there is a better explanation of Black Holes: Light redshifted into the invisible spectrum by an infinite number of rather awesome events - collapsing electron stars and possibly "local" Big Bangs?
No Dark Matter, No Big Bang, an Infinite Universe, no Black Holes - - - - the mind boggles.
Errare Humanum Est.
Studying the universe today appears to be more of a mathematical exercise (e.g. string theory, Event Horizons) than a search for cosmologically based evidence. But once a theory has become super-glued, it takes a superhuman power to unglue it and it is nigh on impossible to get rid of Einstein's Time-Space curvature and the fallacious arguments in both the General and Special Relativity Theory - e.g. the foreshortening of distance in the direction of travel as speed increases.
Understanding 'Time Dilation' provides a simple and much more credible theory.
As a student of electronics engineering a life time ago, I was once assigned the task to unravel a differential equation that modelled a certain behaviour for automatic control. It was claimed that as a 1st-2nd-3rd differential equation it got closer and closer to modelling the curve observed in reality, yet at the 4th differential it 'flipped'. The effect was described in several books of the day as fact - copying the initial calculation error. I proved that all the books were wrong - higher differentials modelled reality better and better.
Since then I have always asked: " why - or why not" - when new ideas came up or old ideas were challenged.
Authority doesn't always mean 'right'.
There are too many convenient explanations that defy even an irrational mind - e.g. galaxies 40Bill lightyears away in a 14Bill year old universe, and yet they are visible to us??
Apparently someone has recently found the magnetic monopole, extant at very low temperatures. While the concept of an electric monopole (plus or minus charged) is easy to understand, this is almost like saying: this coin only has one side. Was it a South or a North? Consequences?
Our understanding of particle characteristics, size, behaviour and appearance also seems to change, although Higg's Boson remains elusive or even non-extant. If that is the case, then CERN's particle accelerator, built for millions of $$, is looking in vain for physic's version of the “squaring of the circle”.
The size of the Universe is still an unresolved matter - except it now seems clear that at least it is not contracting. Status is a belief in an accelerating expansion, but somehow we shy away from considering infinity!
What if it really is infinite?
Does it not mean that an event with even a 10-to-the-minus-100,000th of a chance to happen (or any number of additional 0's you'd like to put on), would have happened?
Perhaps it did!!
Physics, Religion and our place in the Universe - a thought.
Our more objective understanding of who we are, i.e. free of endless magic (often called religion), is slowly being unravelled. Controversy started for real with Darwin 150 years ago.
New knowledge appears as we peel off the onion-layers covering the "truth" whatever that might be - and the more we peel, the more it becomes obvious there is no going back to a time of ignorance. That is – unless you use your brain to grow moss, rather than to think, like the Creationists.
Personally I am convinced, that if we ever arrive at the onion's centre, the final question will be: "But hang on - where is God then?"
And the answer will be: "He/She never was".
Things, time, matter - the Universe - just "is".
The fact that we can't comprehend this concept, in particular the concept of infinity, shows how small we are.
As much as I support the idea that we must keep asking "Why" and "What" - who says we are supposed to comprehend anything at such an unfathomable level?
Perhaps it is our implicit understanding, our subconsciously and finally giving up on questions we can't stop asking, that turns us towards rites and mumbo-jumbo like digging up old popes and frantically looking for miracles they have performed.
Perhaps we feel that this is easier to understand than understanding the Universe?
Jane Goodall's discovery that we share not only 99% of our genes with chimpanzees, but also most of our minds, emotions and tribal behaviours, is also easier to understand - and closer to reality and fact. One only needs to compare the Chimps’ cannibalistic traits and aggressive killer instinct with the human behaviour in Kosovo in the 1990s and Sri Lanka in 2008-10 to understand what I mean.
Perhaps we should concentrate our research energies on chimp studies instead of trying to unravel the Universe. Learning from others, who mirror our own behaviour, tend to have an enlightening effect. The retrieved knowledge could help us live better and more meaningful lives, moving even further away from the apes than caused by the split from the common ancestral tree 5 mill years ago.
Ultimately we should accept that in 3 Bill years we will all burn up as the sun dies - if we haven't self destructed much earlier.
An infinite Universe will have lost nothing.
.
This is heavy, but hugely interesting, stuff.
I find it quite incomprehensible that the establishment still hangs on to an artificial device such as Dark Matter and that E=mc2 stays unchallenged, considering the main argument that things ARE relative, according to Einstein, and therefore a train, passing you at the speed of light, should make YOU weigh a million tonnes.
How about mass staying constant and the 'speed' of light being variable?
We know that time goes at a different 'speed', depending on the speed of the device in which time is measured and how close or far from a considerable mass the device is.
Our Caesium clocks prove this fact.
Atkinson argues very well for the relative speed of light and it comes across quite elegantly, when he highlights the consequences.
Time, as a driver, is a truly fascinating idea.
It is the ultimate generator of gravity, one of the least understood concepts in physics and the weakest of the basic forces.
Understanding 'time' will generate understanding on both a quantum and a cosmic scale.
As all mass is energy, i.e. atoms tied together by the strongest universal force, in constant 'oscillation', time is an intrinsic part of the atoms' characteristic. There simply is no 'process' without time and we seem to have understood this concept reasonably well.
It is on a cosmic scale we still fumble around in blindness, having gone down a blind alley without seeing the effect on light, as it passes through the universe. Time-dilation even explains the red-shift and the faulty notion of Dark Matter.
Einstein's train.
Watching the celebrity professor Brian Cox on TV is both interesting and sad, as he comes across as stuck in the theories of the 1930s, only slightly modified by Hawking. Quite disappointing, but understandable - it is probably not a good career move to go against Hawking and Einstein. But it doesn't even take a lot of mathematics to prove Einstein wrong - using his own example of a lightning fast train speeding past an observer on the embankment.
To the observer, the train will be a vertical line - front to back compressed - at infinite mass.
To a person on the train everything would seem normal.
But if you shine a laser light at 45 degrees from the front of a train compartment and one from the back of the same compartment, letting the light hit the middle of the compartment at, say, 2m up on a screen - then the consequence would be, close to the speed of light, that the laser beam would hit the screen simultaneously at two different spots.
Clearly not possible.
Let alone that the train would suck you up, if it passed you at the speed of light, as it according to Albert would have an infinite inertial mass.
Not so, I think - Inertial Mass and Gravitational Mass must be separate entities at speeds close to that of light. The difference is explained by time dilation, but that's another chapter.
Dark Matter, Red Shift and Background Radiation from the Big Bang.
The concept of 'time-dilation' and its impact upon light, as it travels through an endless Universe, delivers a very elegant explanation concerning the redshift of light and the supposed background radiation from the Big Bang.
Dark Matter should be dropped as a theory more akin to a religious belief than a fact. It is an artifice, invented as we couldn't explain our observations about a (possibly) expanding Universe and as our equations didn't seem to work. Well, perhaps the equations are wrong. I shall come back to this later - suffice to say, that the invisible Dark Matter, which possesses mass, but emits no energy radiation, according to conventional Newtonian laws would have attracted 'stuff' for billions of years and hence not be Dark Matter any more - like the invisible man, who could only be seen when dressed.
Why is it that the Establishment has such a hard time letting go of clearly dubious theories? Why invent Dark Matter, ostensibly constituting 70% of matter in the universe, to explain an apparent, but probably misunderstood, accelerating expansion of the Universe. Personally I think it would be more credible to believe it is God blowing up a Universal balloon - - -
Time dilation and Redshift (like the Doppler Effect) of light.
The redshift is normally used to explain the expanding Universe - but how about an infinite Universe, where light passes through an endless number of time dilations as it passes millions of galaxies on the way to an Earth-observer? This would surely explain the red shift very easily.
An infinite Universe would also explain the 'Background Radiation' from the so-called 'Big Bang'.
If light has come to Earth from everywhere, for ever, in an infinite Universe, the sky would be brilliant as the Sun, you might say? Not so, I say, as the pulling to and fro of electromagnetic waves caused by the time dilation in the vicinity of huge galactic masses would suck up the energy to such an extent, that we end up with the mere 2.3 degrees Kelvin we can observe.
Redshifted beyond recognition, i.e. way into the invisible spectrum.
Yes, exactly: "Dark Matter".
And perhaps there is a better explanation of Black Holes: Light redshifted into the invisible spectrum by an infinite number of rather awesome events - collapsing electron stars and possibly "local" Big Bangs?
No Dark Matter, No Big Bang, an Infinite Universe, no Black Holes - - - - the mind boggles.
Errare Humanum Est.
Studying the universe today appears to be more of a mathematical exercise (e.g. string theory, Event Horizons) than a search for cosmologically based evidence. But once a theory has become super-glued, it takes a superhuman power to unglue it and it is nigh on impossible to get rid of Einstein's Time-Space curvature and the fallacious arguments in both the General and Special Relativity Theory - e.g. the foreshortening of distance in the direction of travel as speed increases.
Understanding 'Time Dilation' provides a simple and much more credible theory.
As a student of electronics engineering a life time ago, I was once assigned the task to unravel a differential equation that modelled a certain behaviour for automatic control. It was claimed that as a 1st-2nd-3rd differential equation it got closer and closer to modelling the curve observed in reality, yet at the 4th differential it 'flipped'. The effect was described in several books of the day as fact - copying the initial calculation error. I proved that all the books were wrong - higher differentials modelled reality better and better.
Since then I have always asked: " why - or why not" - when new ideas came up or old ideas were challenged.
Authority doesn't always mean 'right'.
There are too many convenient explanations that defy even an irrational mind - e.g. galaxies 40Bill lightyears away in a 14Bill year old universe, and yet they are visible to us??
Apparently someone has recently found the magnetic monopole, extant at very low temperatures. While the concept of an electric monopole (plus or minus charged) is easy to understand, this is almost like saying: this coin only has one side. Was it a South or a North? Consequences?
Our understanding of particle characteristics, size, behaviour and appearance also seems to change, although Higg's Boson remains elusive or even non-extant. If that is the case, then CERN's particle accelerator, built for millions of $$, is looking in vain for physic's version of the “squaring of the circle”.
The size of the Universe is still an unresolved matter - except it now seems clear that at least it is not contracting. Status is a belief in an accelerating expansion, but somehow we shy away from considering infinity!
What if it really is infinite?
Does it not mean that an event with even a 10-to-the-minus-100,000th of a chance to happen (or any number of additional 0's you'd like to put on), would have happened?
Perhaps it did!!
Physics, Religion and our place in the Universe - a thought.
Our more objective understanding of who we are, i.e. free of endless magic (often called religion), is slowly being unravelled. Controversy started for real with Darwin 150 years ago.
New knowledge appears as we peel off the onion-layers covering the "truth" whatever that might be - and the more we peel, the more it becomes obvious there is no going back to a time of ignorance. That is – unless you use your brain to grow moss, rather than to think, like the Creationists.
Personally I am convinced, that if we ever arrive at the onion's centre, the final question will be: "But hang on - where is God then?"
And the answer will be: "He/She never was".
Things, time, matter - the Universe - just "is".
The fact that we can't comprehend this concept, in particular the concept of infinity, shows how small we are.
As much as I support the idea that we must keep asking "Why" and "What" - who says we are supposed to comprehend anything at such an unfathomable level?
Perhaps it is our implicit understanding, our subconsciously and finally giving up on questions we can't stop asking, that turns us towards rites and mumbo-jumbo like digging up old popes and frantically looking for miracles they have performed.
Perhaps we feel that this is easier to understand than understanding the Universe?
Jane Goodall's discovery that we share not only 99% of our genes with chimpanzees, but also most of our minds, emotions and tribal behaviours, is also easier to understand - and closer to reality and fact. One only needs to compare the Chimps’ cannibalistic traits and aggressive killer instinct with the human behaviour in Kosovo in the 1990s and Sri Lanka in 2008-10 to understand what I mean.
Perhaps we should concentrate our research energies on chimp studies instead of trying to unravel the Universe. Learning from others, who mirror our own behaviour, tend to have an enlightening effect. The retrieved knowledge could help us live better and more meaningful lives, moving even further away from the apes than caused by the split from the common ancestral tree 5 mill years ago.
Ultimately we should accept that in 3 Bill years we will all burn up as the sun dies - if we haven't self destructed much earlier.
An infinite Universe will have lost nothing.
.
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