I'm standing here before the walls of old Jericho. This is the oldest city known to human excavation. It runs all the way back to 9,000 or even 10,000 BC and we also know it comes from Jewish history and Old Testament history ...
Now we now also that the account in Joshua says that every man woman and child was killed and even someone that took a little bit of the silver was killed for taking anything from the city ... total destruction apart from Rahab the prostitute who allowed them into the city.
Now this is an account of genocide. It's not the only account by any means of genocide. Some historians have said that the destruction of the Canaanite cities was less than imagined that in many places there was integration or an intermixing of cultures and certainly we see that from the tradition of the Kings and the statements of Jeremiah that the Queen of Heaven was still celebrated in the streets of Jerusalem in peace.
However, this is a tradition of genocide that runs back also to the Levites when worshipping the golden calf [Hathor] and three thousand people were reputed to have been slaughtered over the worship of the golden calf.
Now this sets a tradition and the holocaust is a horrific incident to happen in human history but its only one of many genocides. This is in many ways, although every century in perhaps the entire patriarchal epoch has been a century of genocide, this century, the twentieth century is apocalyptic in the genocide not only of the Jews, six million Jews but of the people of Rwanda, the people of Cambodia [and of Russia and of Hirsohima and Nagasaki].
Now it has led to an unfortunate tradition in the Judeo-Christian patriarchal religious paradigm and its led to a very unfortunate guardedness on the part of the Jews, particularly in regard to the holocaust and particularly in Israel today in the tension between Arab and Israeli, Palestinian and Israeli. Israel is now holding on to two hundred nuclear warheads. We went up to the north and stood on one of the mountains where these warheads are meant to be located. This is the Sampson option, to pull the pillars down on the whole Middle East, to destroy everybody if there is a threat to Israel. This is a very dangerous attitude.
The mountain of Yeshua's wilderness
vigil above Old Jericho
Muhammad is still revered as the final prophet, in a sense, although the Madhi and Isa are supposed to come back at the end of time. Muhammad is unique among spiritual leaders to have participated and authorized a genocide of seven hundred Jews in the Souk of Medina. This is a unique situation that a person is still revered directly today as the living prophet in human history and perhaps the final prophet, and the enunciator of jihad actually participated very centrally in causing a dying man to pass judgement on the Jews in Medina who hadn't actually participated in a war against the umma of early Islam.
So I just want to say again the message of Sakina. Although Muhammad embraced jihad, later at Hudaybiyah, he embraced sakina, which is the spirit of tranquillity. It's only through the spirit of peace and tranquillity that Muhammad actually entered the gates of Mecca. And in Mecca was the feminine, the goddess in which the satanic verses were pronounced against al Uzza, al-Lat and Manat who were in many ways symbols of the very high point of Arab culture throughout many centuries right back to Jesus. [And on the first day in Mecca ,Muhammad ordered the slave singer Sarah murdered and other singers had their tongues cut out, so it's far from clear he heeded the true maening of Sakina but rather takiya faking peace to gain a strategic advantage later.]
This is a dangerous account for humanity today because there are many fundamentalistic aspects of Islam that would embrace jihad, not just as struggle, there's a sense of needing to struggle, jihad means struggle, there's a necessity for struggle, a sense of needing to struggle in all aspects of life and to reveal the concealed. Its never easy. Its never easy to love your neighbour as flesh of our flesh.
Jericho today is a fertile oasis
But one thing I will say about Muhammad's tradition is that he fell in line in a historical tradition that shortly before Muhammad and the Souk of Medina, the Prince of Curls, who was a Jew, set fire to all the Christians of one of the similar pilgrimage centres to the south - half way between Sa'ana in Southern Arabia and Mecca, so the tradition was practised again here by Jewish people who said "convert to Judaism" to the Christians, a tragic irony for the Christians who tried to convert the Jews to Christianity.
So I would just like to say nevertheless for Islam to look very very [carefully] with great scrutiny at the fact that the prophet Muhammad did participate a genocide of seven hundred Jewish men who had only considered cooperating with the Quraysh and never made their minds up - had never opened the gates [of Medina oasis] to the enemy. This is a very serious question that has to be asked about the tradition of Jihad.
I stand here in the name of Sakina as Isa pronouncing the reunion of all the peoples of the book, and the reunion of all peoples, and I say this can happen only through Islam in submission embracing Sakina the spirit of tranquillity which is also the Shekhinah and Sophia the spirit of wisdom.