Too High a Mount

A new book is out,  Jerusalem, Jerusalem by James Carroll and it is blurbed so:

...the ancient city became, unlike any other in the world --- reaching far into our contemporary lives -- an incendiary fantasy of a city.  In Carroll's provocative reading of the deep past, the Bible’s brutality was a response to the violence that threatened Jerusalem from the start. Tracing the richly intertwined threads of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim history, Carroll illuminates the mounting European fixation on a heavenly Jerusalem as spark of both antisemitism and racist colonial contempt...Carroll's brilliant and original leap is to show how, as Christopher Columbus carried his own Jerusalem-centric world view to the West, America too was powerfully shaped by the dream of the City on the Hill -- from Governor Winthrop to Abraham Lincoln to Woodrow Wilson to Ronald Reagan. The nuclear brinksmanship of the 1973 Yom Kippur War helps prove his point: religion and violence fuel each other to this day, with Jerusalem the ground zero of the heat.

This has a familar ring of liberation theology and Christian anti-Christian Zionism.

It is highlighted over at NPR, but you would expect that.  The book is presented this way:

On the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, there is a rock. Jews call it the foundation stone...to Muslims, it's the Haram a- Sharif, the place where the Prophet Mohammed ascended to heaven...The conflict over the meaning of this stone is part of why James Carroll calls the holy city the "home base of religious violence" in his new book, Jerusalem, Jerusalem.

Carroll first visited the city in 1973 as a young Catholic priest looking to restore his faith...he tells Weekends on All Things Considered host Guy Raz.  It led Carroll to reevaluate his faith, and he left the priesthood. But Carroll fell under the spell of the city. He says this has happened to people of all faiths who visit...Carroll believes this leads to two Jerusalems: real and imagined. The real Jerusalem is a city divided by barbed wire and security barriers. It's a place where some people devote so much time to faith, they are impoverished.  The imagined Jerusalem is what has caused so much disagreement and conflict over thousands of years — but it has also been inspirational, in the Holy Land and beyond.  "Even today, the United States of America defines itself as the city on a hill, which, an inch below the surface of our rhetoric, is Jerusalem," Carroll says. The idea of Jerusalem, according to Carroll, has shaped history of western civilization.

Let the book speak for itself.  An excerpt:

This book is about the lethal feedback loop between the actual city of Jerusalem and the apocalyptic fantasy it inspires. It is a book, therefore, about two Jerusalems: the earthly and the heavenly, the mundane and the imagined. That doubleness shows up in the tension between Christian Jerusalem and Jewish Jerusalem, between European Jerusalem and Islamic Jerusalem, between Israeli Jerusalem and Palestinian Jerusalem, and between the City on a Hill and the Messiah nation that, beginning with John Winthrop, understands itself in its terms...

...It is as if the two Jerusalems rub against each other like stone against flint, generating the spark that ignites fire. There is the literal fire of wars among peoples and nations, taken to be holy because ignited in the holy city, and that will be our subject. There is the fire of the God who first appeared as a burning bush, and then as flames hovering over the heads of chosen ones. That God will be our subject. But Jerusalem also ignites heat in the human breast, a viral fever of zealotry and true belief that lodged in the DNA of Western civilization. That fever lives — an infection but also, as happens with the mind on fire, an inspiration...

...Ultimately, a continuous twentieth- and twenty-first-century war against evil turns out, surprisingly, to be centered on Jerusalem, a pivot point of both the Cold War and the War on Terror. Having begun as the ancient city of Apocalypse, it became the magnetic pole of Western history, doing more to create the modern world than any other city...It is the earthly reflection of heaven — but heaven, it turns out, casts a shadow.

Carroll, however, is also a journalist and CAMERA caught him out last Februaryand the organization complained that

On February 22, 2010, he penned another highly biased opinion piece about Israel, relying heavily on personal claims leveled by Palestinians. The topic is evictions of several Palestinian families from disputed property in eastern Jerusalem. The writer promotes falsehoods about the disposition of the property and trashes Israeli legal proceedings that preceded the evictions. Beyond misrepresenting the facts and history of the case, Carroll offers a skewed portrayal of the two sides...The column focuses on the eviction of Palestinian families in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of Jerusalem. Carroll describes the land on which the homes were built for the Palestinian families in the 1950s as "vacant," obscuring a crucial element of this story. The land had been purchased by two Jewish organizations in the late 1800s, but was siezed by the Jordanians during the 1948 war...He dismisses out of hand the history of Jewish ownership while giving voice in detail to the claim by the Arab occupants that their failure to secure the property deed was due to the 1967 war in which Israel took control of the land.  The 700 word piece also never mentions the salient fact that even after Jewish claims of ownership were confirmed, the evictions only came about because the Arab families stopped paying rent.

He was caught out in 2009, too and a few other instances.

So, is his book a collection of biased, warped and prejudicial opinion rather than objective fact?

Like this:

Throughout centuries of diaspora, the Jewish fantasy of Jerusalem kept communal cohesion intact, enabled survival of exile and oppression, and ultimately spawned Zionism.

Is the Temple Mount too high for his low esteem of Judaism, Israel and Zionism?

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