Mythic Stories: Mahmoud Darwish

Mahmoud Darwish

The Mythic stories often seem of another place, another time, seeming to be omni-temporal and omnipresent in the consciousness of mankind. That is indeed their nature. Observe criticism of Mahmoud Darwish, recently deceased, and a poet from Palestine, from a town destroyed in 1948...destroyed in 1948 and buried, while he yet lived until death sought him out, too.  

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7559565.stm  
Fitting farewell to Palestinian poet 
 By Heather Sharp BBC News, Ramallah

  ... But in Israel there has been mixed feeling. Many respected his abilities as a writer, but others saw some of his writing as anti-Semitic and even racist - in one poem he urged Israelis to "leave our land / Our shore, our sea / Our wheat, our salt, our wound" and "take with you your dead". However, acclaimed Israeli writer Avraham B Yehoshua said he was deeply saddened by Darwish's death. "Of course there were poems that were very much aggressive," he said, "but it's important that we know what they are thinking - you have to know your enemy because your enemy is your neighbour and future friend." 

  There is nothing particularly mythic about a cry of pain directed against an inimical force. There is, however, in the attitude that even the slightest criticism somehow infects and must be painted as "Anti-Semitism". This is the same process we have described earlier (below) by which certain forces or "deities of power" - good and evil- are set up and let free to rule consciousness; the same process we employ by calling people "nazis" or "Hitler".
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