The Great Debate - http://www.fredparhad.com/realaudio/debate.ram Marzillier: Before we start, I'd like to introduce the president of the college, Dr. Tyree Weider, to welcome you to the college. (applause) Dr. Weider: Thank you Leon. Several months ago, I believe it was, it was brought to my attention that we had some information that had been posted on the college web site or on a web site by one of our faculty members that some members of the community found somewhat objectionable and felt that they had another side of the story to tell. So, we had a meeting, with this wonderful gentleman here, Mr. Par-HAD...did I say that correctly? (Mr. Parhad nods) And... good enough? Parhad: Parhad. Dr. Weider: Parhad. Parhaad. Ok. And we talked about what we could... "What could we as a college do to try to put some balance to the information that had been distributed?" and so we talked about it and said well this might be a good way to do it -- to have a forum, so that people could come together and talk and exchange ideas, and so that's what we decided to do. We waited a little bit because it was during finals and we were... the students were finishing up their finals and then we had summer session, so, this was the first time we were able to get everyone together and that's what we hoped would happen today. So, this is an opportunity for information, and for people to exchange ideas, and that's what a college community is about. So, on... in that light I welcome you all here, and we wanted to have this taped so that other people have the opportunity to watch it. So thank you very much, and I think it's going to be a very interesting period of time. Thank you. (Applause. Dr. Weider shakes Mr. Parhad's hand, then Dr. Ross') Marzillier: As I said, I'm the president of the Faculty association. I don't know anything much about this subject because my discipline is mathematics, but I'm going to moderate it and so I'm going to introduce the speakers and let you know a little bit about the ground rules. On my left here is Mr. Fred Parhad. He is an Assyrian sculptor, born in Baghdad, Iraq. And the Assyrian community worldwide has provided funding enabling him to create three Assyrian monuments which have been presented as gifts to the American people. The monument of Ashurb-- Ashurbanipal..excuse my pronounciation (he chuckles).. was installed in San Francisco in 1988, The monument of Queen Shumirum, called Semiramis by the Greeks, was accepted for installation by Chicago, and a third monument of Hammurabi is currently being made for Detroit. Mr. Parhad has kindly donated this sculpture to the college and it is a representation which is particularly Assyrian - it is a bull's body, with a king's head, and wings. So, we thank you for that. [The sculpture is of the Lamasu] On my right is Dr. Kelley Ross, who is a professor of philosophy at Los Angeles Valley College and he has been since 1987. He attended the university of New Mexico, followed by UCLA, where he got his bachelor's. And during his stay at UCLA he spent one year at the American University of Beirut. And then he got his Masters at the university of Hawaii, and his Ph.D. at the university of Texas. So, the ground rules for this forum were that Mr. Parhad would present for 10 minutes, followed by Dr. Ross for 10 minutes, and then 5 minutes-- up to five minutes each if they wanted to respond to it.. what each other said. And then if.. there's a microphone on the floor if the.. and members of the audience would like to make a comment or ask a question, followed by a responses of a couple of minutes each for each of the speakers...and then we would wrap it up with five minutes summation after that. So, those are the ground rules for the forum. SO, without any further ado, I'd like to introduce Mr. Fred Parhad. (applause) Parhad: Thank you. This paper that I became aware of, that our community became aware of, that was written by Dr. Ross was presented to students in his class and it was titled "Notes on MODERN Assyrians" and that became a matter of concern to me and to several of us in the community because we are concerned with what our young people learn about our own history from other people in this country - we are having a hard enough time teaching them our own history ourselves so we did not appreciate the sorts of comments that were coming. I would like to take this opportunity to thank Dr. Weider and Dr. Ross. They were under no obligation to do this. Dr. Ross did not have to agree to have a debate forum on this subject, and I think it was very forthright and forthcoming that he would be willing to do that. It seems to me there are some points in the paper that are significant. One of the overriding concerns I have is that we seem to be judging the past by the standards of the present and I think that's a mistake whenever you do that - it's bad scholarship. The questions that I saw in the the paper were: Were the Assyrians more cruel or barbaric than any of their Contemporaries? Another one would be: What was their relationship to the Hebrews? Another one is: Are modern-day Assyrians related to the ancient Assyrians, can they claim that? And who have the Assyrians influenced? Have they influenced anybody in any civilization past their own? And of course the Bible and the Assyrains. The period of time that I am concerned with in this paper is the Neo-Assyrian empire from about 1000BC on beacuse that seems to coincide with the biblical tales that include the Assyrians...and it's from there that I think most of Western Civilization has learned what they have learned about the Assyrians. Now, in the last 100 years of Assyriology the predominant view has been whatever was written in the Old Testament about the Assyrians. Current scholarship is finding that there is a lot more in the cuneiform tablets that have been stored in the vaults of several museums around the world from the British to the Berlin to the Louvre...many of these are just being read, and what they are telling us about the Assyrians and their culture and their civilization has opened up many many things about them that we never even dreamed of before - I certainly didn't. In many ways I'm an ignorant person but then I am in good company. There's nothing wrong with being ignorant, except if you insist on staying that way, then you're stupid. I have learned a lot in researching this subject, things that I didn't even know about my own culture - and for that I do thank Dr. Ross - and I hope that he can benefit by the things that we might be able to enlighten him about. The first point is "Were the Assyrians more cruel than any of their contemporaries?" I would like to reference an article by someone named H.W.F. Saggs. He is an Englishman, he is a writer, and he has written a lot about Assyrian History. He says in his article "Assyrian Prisoners of War and the Right to Live" that "there is no comparative evidence that has yet been deduced to establish the commonly held belief that the Assyrians were inordinantly and arbitrarily brutal towards conquered people." There is none. "They merely suffered the misfortune of running afoul of one of the world's most effective and enduring propaganda machines: the Israelite prophetic movement. With it's ability to still...with it's" - excuse me... "with it's ability still to mold the thought of many in the the Western World two and a half millenia later." As an example... I don't want to make this a lesson in history.. I mean, there are many many sources that I can refer you to, but I would just like to hit on a few of them and talk rather than read... he makes a comparison between King Sol and his war on the Malakites, and you might also know of the Midyonites but let's stick with the Malakites. The entire tribe of the Malakites were wiped out. Men, women, and children. They were wiped out because 200 years earlier, they had crossed the Israelites as they left Egypt, coming back. Everybody was killed. As Mark Twain said: "Not even the Comanches would do a thing like that." In contrast, the Assyrian kings reserved their harshest punishment for those who rebelled. They made a distinction between rebellion and crossing borders. If you crossed the borders into Assyria you would be attacked, you would not be wiped out. Their use of violence against prisoners was judiciously used, it was not used indiscriminantly. They did not wipe out men, women, and children. It's a little odd to have to stand up here and defend my culture of 2000 years ago when all around me I can see a comntmporary history, the treatment of people (prisoners included) that matches in barbarity anything we were accused of doing. Very often when enemy people were defeated, it was only the king and the royal family that were taken off to captivity. They were treated well. There is a passage where the king Tiglath-Pilessar warns his general, who is in charge of the prisoners of war, that if any of them come to harm, it will mean his life. The basic difference was that the Assyrians were not racialists. They accepted people of all different cultures and different religions - they had their temples in their capital cities, whereas the Israelits and their God Yahweh were tribal. Their god was for them and them alone. Ashur, the king of the Assyrians, was a universal God. When people were defeated they were welcomed into Nineveh, into Ashur, and by the Babylonians into Babylon. They had temples built their of their own kings. Many, many an enemy king - Josaiah for one, Jeuwakhin for another, ... were taken to Nineveh, or taken to Babylon. They lived there well, at the King's expense. In the case of.. I believe it was Jeuwahkin I believe it was Nebuchadnessar who took him and his royal family there, kept them for 37 years, and released him to go back, still as king, to Judah. If you want to list Assyrian atrocities that the Bible claims happened we can only go back 50 years and talk about what the Germans did but we don't need to go that far back - we've had several instances of war recently and people can be cruel. But there is no evidence, no evidence at all that the Assyrians were inordinantly cruel and any more cruel than the people around them. But yet there is a lot more evidence that they treated their prisoners of war with much more consideration than was afforded to others. And a lot of it, by the way, was propaganda. There is a quote, by Olmsted, another great writer in the field, and a scholar. He says "Assyrians have been accused of spilling oceans of blood. They did so, in their statistics. All historians know that the statistics of enemy loss are enormously overestimated... even in these days of statistical associations and professors of statistics. Yet it has been the fashion of many Orientalists not merely to accept the Assyrian statistics at face value, but if there was a choice of numbers, to take the higher." That's the point about Assyrians being more brutal than others at that time. In Dr. Ross' paper there was also a statement which I found very offensive, personally. And it said that the Assyrians killed more Jews than even Hitler did, in percentage, not in total numbers but in a percentage. This is the old notion that the Babylonians (more than the Assyrians) took away the 10 tribes of Israel and somehow they were lost to history. There were no 10 tribes of Israel taken away. Nebuchadnessar took about 4000 members of the Royal Family, of the people... of the Jews that he defeated. They were not subject to slavery. They were not mistreated in any way. There are several, several records of people going to work for Sargon the second - the Assyrian king - going as charioteers, as mercenaries, as business men... the Assyrian empire was the most wealthy and powerful one of its day. The city of Babylon was an amazing city. Many, many Jews remained in Babylon even when Cyrus captured babylon and set them free. Many of them returned. Many of them remained there. Jews have been in Mesopotamia since they were first taken there - and they have remained there. There were no 10 tribes. Cyrus Gordon, the orientalist, has written about this as have many, many others. This is a common myth and it was mentioned in Dr. Ross' paper. There are many many parallels in the Old Testament to Assyrian and Babylonian and even earlier mythology. The story of Moses and the reeds and the boat is the story of Sargon the first, Sargon of Akkad, Sargon of Aggadi. The dreams that were forecast by Joseph - the pharaoe's dreams that Joseph told... Sargon did the same thing and much earlier. In the Epic of Gilgamish there is a mention of the precursor of Noah. His name was Napishtum. Uta-Napishtum. It was not Noah. The story of Genesis, and many other of these myths can be found in Babylonian, in Assyrian, in Sumerian legends. It was the proximity of the Israelites to the Assyrians and the fact that the Assyrians had many garrison towns in Israel and much contact and commerce - even next to Nazareth there was an Assyrian garrison town. The Assyrians were universalists in the sense that they took people in and they spread their knowledge, their learning, their science among other people. They were not exclusively only for themselves. This enabled them to teach and educate many many people. There are sources, after sources, after sources... I don't want to go through them all, but this is more contemporary science and archaeology than the papers, I think, that Dr. Ross relied upon. There is much much more current thought. I would like to read a letter from a Dr. Simo Parpola - (Marzillier: you have about a minute left) - who teaches at the University of Helsinki (to Marzillier:) Thank you. He says: "Dear Dr. Ross, Two comments occasioned by your article, "Note on the modern Assyrians," which was brought to my attention by the Assyrian community of Los Angeles. Number One: The way the ancient Assyrians treated their enemies did not differ significantly from the way enemies were treated by the contemporary peoples in their world." Then he mentiones some sources in the Bible. And then he says that: "Nobody denies the Jewish background of Christianity. However, there are features in primitive Judaism and early Christianity that cannot be explained without reference to Assyrian religion and royal ideology." The basic point here is that we have many Assyriologists who are experts in the field who know this field far better than Dr. Ross does and for him to have written this paper and given it to our own students to read in his class and spread it among other students in the class... we felt was something that was wrong and we are very happy that the College gave us this chance to respond to it. (Applause) Marzillier: Thank you Mr. Parhead. Now, I will call on Dr. Ross for his first 10 minute presentation and then we will have 5 minutes each after that. Dr. Ross... (Mr. Parhad walks from the podium to his seat; Dr. Ross approaches the podium and begins) Dr. Ross: Well, I think I'm gonna do this a little more in-formally than Mr. Parhad did. I... This doesn't like to plant (referring to his handwatch). Alright, now we are we are all here because of a protest about my web page. A web page that was not given to my students, but was available for anybody who wanted to look at my web site. Now, what I teach is philosophy. And what I teach in that is logic and ethnics, and the kinds of critiques that I often have are about reasoning and about right and wrong, and the-- the web page in question was a web page about the politicization of history and about a nationalistic history and a nationalistic use of history and the support of distortions that often happen when history becomes politicized and people want to idealize their own people or their own tradition or their own history. Now, the sorts of things that bothered me, that originally moved me to write that page, ah.. really a couple of them, were already in Mr. Parhad's remarks. And one of them was just his mention of King Nebuchadnessar as though King Nebuchadnessar was an Assyrian and Nebuchadnessar was not an Assyrian, Nebuchadnessar was a Babylonian, and also Hammurabi was a Babylonian. Now, on my web page there are a number of examples of mistakes like that what I consider to be distortions, and I don't have sources with me here to list, but the sources are listed on the page and the web site. Now, another what I felt was a confusion in Mr. Parhad's remarks, was that the deportation of the 10 tribes of Israel was not done by King Nebuchadnessar. The Babylonian captivity of the Jews under-- originally under Nebuchadnessar, that was many years later, then the deportation of the 10 tribes of Israel. Now, if the question is: Do the cruelties in the Bible meet or surpass or don't exist in the comparison to the cruelties of the Assyrians, it is not my interest or business to defend the Bible as a work of Ethics. In the Bible, God tells the tribes of Israel to go into the Promised Land and kill everybody! Well, I'm not interested in defending that. All I'm interested in is a neutral conception of history, and my objection is to an idealization of peoples in history. Now, one of the remarks I made on the web page that Mr. Parhad and others seem to take particular exception to goes like this - cause I did bring what the actual quote is - and it says: "In sacred history, where it involved Israel, this [namely, and I have an example of the kinds of reprisals the Assyrians took against rebels] this could make the Assyrians as much the moral equivalent of Babylon, Pharaoh, and worse. Now, Babylon and Pharaoh are all condemned in the Bible because they do things that they are not supposed to, to Israel. But the context there is sacred history...cause if you are a Christian or a Jew, it doesn't matter whether elements of Christianity or Judaism came from Ancient Mesopotamia, (whether that was the Epic of Gilgamesh or something else) to believing, Christians and Jews, they all come from God, even if there are these comparisons, cause after all, in Islam, if there are other religions that have elements that look like things in Islam, the explanation has always been, "Well, that did come from God, independently." And I'm sure Christians and Jews want to say the same thing. Now, you might wonder "Well why did that matter? Why was I talking about sacred history?" Well, I was talking about the modern Assyrian community AS a Christian community, and all of my remarks were addressed in that context. Now, if there are modern Assyrians who are NOT Christians, that just isn't going to mean anything to them. It's not relevant. And there's no reason why they should be protesting me about that, cause I'm not interested otherwise in saying that the Ancient Israelites were morally superior to anybody - although I think in a couple of matters, maybe they were - but that could be argued independently. I would certainly not personally want to argue that all their religion comes directly from God. So really there is a context to this statement, and I think the context gets overlooked. If you are going to ignore the authority that some people vest in religion, than what I would have to say might be very different. In the passage, that's where it goes on to say "Now, even Hitler-NOT even Hitler got rid of so large a percentage of Jews." Now, that was quoted by Mr. Parhad as being that the Assyrians killed the Jews. And, of course they didn't...they just deported them, but we don't really know what happened to them because they disappeared from history. Now, why did that deportation happen? Well, that was one of the practices of the Assyrians. Now, others had practiced deportations, the Hittites, even the Egyptians to an extent, had practiced deportations. Those are all part of Imperial policies. And why did the Assyrians do stuff like that? Well to break resistance. So Mr. Parhad mentioned that it's rebels that get punished. Of course, rebels to the Assyrians are, you know, an insurrection to the people who practice the insurrection. And it may not be the Assyrians were any crueler than anybody else, but they had the largest empire of the day, they had the largest empire that had existed up to that point, and the problem that creates is they had to do everything on a larger scale than everybody else. And so if there's resistance, if there is a "rebellion" in their eyes, then you kill the leaders...and you kill them with exemplary tortures and then if that does not break the resistance of the community, you deport them, and it is not something just out of the bible, it is extensively documented in Assyrian records. And the estimates by Professor Roux in "Ancient Iraq" is that over 3 centuries, something like 4 million people got deported. Now, does that mean that I don't like the Ancient Assyrians? Well, no. They were doing what other people did but they were doing a lot of it. [Dr. Ross is notified that he has one minute left] Ok. And why did I write about it? Well, again the context was that if you are a Christian or a Jew, they are on the wrong side of the religious issue. If you just don't care about what Christians or Jews might think, well then: it's not relevant. It doesn't matter. The Assyrians were doing things other people did. But what we do have in the bible is the testimony of one of the conquered people. Cause really it has not ever been very well explained why the Assyrian empire fell...if it was so well governed, and it was so solidly founded, and it was so well supported, what happened? Well, one bit of evidence may be the Bible, may be the book of (________) especially that the Assyrians were hated by many of their subjects, even if the subjects were no longer able to resist, nor willing to resist. And of course the kingdom of Judah never resisted anybody else until the Celluseds centuries later. Thank you. (Applause) Marzillier: Okay. Now for a rebuttal, 5 minutes for Mr. Par-Parhad. (Mr. Parhad approaches the podium) Parhad: It's interesting. This so obviously "Euro-centric" view being expressed here: the first comments out of his mouth were that I don't know who Nebhchadnessar was, that I said he was an Assyrian. Rather than thinking he didn't hear correctly, he assumed that I - who am an Assyrian sculptor, who have placed monuments in cities, and know damn well the difference between the Babylonians and Assyrians - made that mistake. And second of all, Hammurabi was not Babylonian. He was an Amorite from the West. The idea that the ancient Hebrews were justified in doing what they did because their God told them to but the Assyrians were somehow villainous because they did what their God told them to do strikes me as odd. If one people get away with saying, "Well, God told me to do it", I don't see why the others can't say, "God told me to do it" and get off the same way. I am kind of stunned by the complacent arrogance... I mean, if you are going to talk about the Assyrian empire as being a very powerful and large empire that got away with murder, you might ask yourself about the American Empire. You might, but then again, you might not. It seems to me that empires do these kinds of things...and to level all of this against the Assyrian empire while not looking at other empires could explain why there are so few Assyrians here. There are Sikhs who are being killed. There are Arab American Christians who are being killed now because the Americans are terrified. And the Assyrians are a little afraid, too. I mean, I'm born in Iraq and we have Assyrians who come from Syria and from Turkey. This is not the best of times to be talking about Assyrians as being violent and brutal, and all the rest of it. To tell us that there is something wrong with us as Assyrian Christians if we find any pride in our ancestors is ridiculous, it is absolutely ridiculous. That's like telling an Englishman he should have no pride in his ancestors because of the things they did - I mean, it's just absurd... or to tell a modern Jew that he should be ashamed of the ancient Jews because they killed every man, woman, and child because their God told them to. There is a wide disparity here. Assyrians, I guess, because of the way they appear in the bible, are kind of fair game. I'll say again, that there is far more current research than what Dr. Ross is familiar with. He is not an expert in the field, to say the least. And what upset us was that he was so complacent in putting out this article, which, by the way he says in the paper he did present to his students. It was written for that purpose. It was not only on a web page, and that the entire paper came about from a disagreement he had with one Assyrian student in his class. Our position still is that the things in this paper are inexcusable, and it will remain there. Is that my time? (Prof. Marzillier tells Mr. Parhad that his time is NOT up) I'm sorry... I thought that was... it was somebody's phone. But my concern more was with modern day Assyrians and that's why I took umbrage at this. I mean, there are all kinds of historical misrepresentations going on - I could care less. But to present this kind of view, right now, to our people, our young people, in this country, I think is a terrible crime, and I'm surprised that the Academic Senate here - which has rules against doing these kinds of things, which says that you should respect the students of a community - would allow this to happen and would maintain that there was no big deal when the Assyrian students in our community would certainly be upset if you told them the people who taught them their history are FRAUDS. I don't know who taught you your first history, but my parents taught me mine, and my grandparents. That's not a nice thing to say about people's parents. I doubt if he would have said that about any other ethnic group that I can think of that goes to school here. This is a fantastic time to begin teaching people about the different kinds of people who make up America. It's not just Germans and it's not just Irish and French. There are a lot of people from the Middle East who are now Americans. And as you can see by what's happening, a lot of them are feeling targeted, and are being targeted. So this would be an excellent time to stop engaging in this sort of thing, to not insist that I don't know who the King of Babylon was, and that Nabuchadnessar was an Assyrian. I know better than that, but I also know that the Assyrians also ruled Babylon, as the Babylonians ruled Assyria. There was intermarriage, and this "deportation" you speak of, was to the benefit of many people, as I said Jews, many of them, did not return to Judea but chose to stay in Babylon. And there has been a Jewish community there since that time, to this day. Marzillier: One minute left Parhad: I'll end on that point. (Mr. Parhad is seated) Marzillier: Okay, Dr. Ross for 5 minutes Ross: Okay. Well, yes, of course Hammurabi was an Amorite because the first dynasty of Babylon was an Amorite dynasty, but they are regarded as Babylonian because they became the first dynasty of Babylon. Now, what I was objecting to, I didn't know whether Mr. Parhad knew whether Nebuchadnessar was an Assyrian or not, because he did not make that clear. And that is one of the things that I was objecting to in my paper, that I had noticed in the nationalistic Assyrian material, that these kinds of things were not being made clear, that a clear distinction was not being made between Babylonians and Assyrians, or other ancient people, and since one of my students had said that the Sumerians were Assyrians - when they certainly were not - Assyria didn't even exist yet when the Sumerians got started... that is what was bothering me. Now, about this Euro-centric business, I don't really know where that's coming from. If there was anything I was discussing, it would be a Biblio-centric view, which I was not endorsing, but merely describing. Now, as for the Bible as a propaganda machine, well, maybe so, but the Bible is no more and no less a propaganda machine than is any other ancient record. The bible, you can say as a work of history, is self centered and self-serving, but then all other ancient records are. And as for the idea that deportations were good for the people that did them, well any empire has some good effects, but when people are deported they usually don't like that - they may end up accepting it later on - but I really don't want to get into details of arguments about that stuff because it doesn't matter. Now, my point in the paper was about ethnic mythology, about leaving some details unclear, or distorting history. Now the thing about nationalism is that it makes for friends and enemies. Now, the friends and enemies of truth may be different thing, but when the issue is truth, then that's dealt with merely by argument. Now the modern Assyrian people historically have suffered and have enemies, have been massacred, have been driven out of their homes, and the people who have done that in the 20th century and earlier were Turks, Kurds, Iranians, Arabs, but you know what? I don't think that the Jews have inflicting any evils on the Assyrians. And the idea that the persecution of the Assyrians has been motivated by the bible - I find that very unbelievable. I think that the problem that the modern Assyrians have always had, always have had, had for 1400 years has simply been militant Islam, and that will continue to be a problem for all Christians in the middle east. But, if my problem is just being Euro-centric, then I don't understand why there is so hostility and so much conflict among Aramaic speaking Christians from the Middle East, cause the modern Assyrians are not the only Aramaic speaking Christians. There are Chaldeans, there are Aramaens, and there is no reason (one minute), there is no reason why there should be hostility between those peoples. They have a common interest, and they are natural, natural allies. And I just wondered, and the kind of page I wrote is simply asking why there is this hostility? Why is it that there are conflicts with people who really have no reason for hostility towards the modern Assyrians? Why are Christian Aramaeans angry at a lot of modern Assyrians? Why are a lot of Chaldeans angry at a lot of modern Assyrians? And it's all because of this nationalism. And that is my, was my moral critique about the evils of Nationalism. (Dr. Ross is seated).