Frank Greenall: Holy Moses! Terrorist or errorist?

A FEW thousand years ago, Moses came down from the mountain and in his hot little hands he had a couple of tablets.

No, not that sort - bit early for that. These were real deal stone ones.

He'd had a rough time up there - 40 days and nights, blustery, electrical storms, all that sort of stuff. But it had been worth it, for now he had The Word from the Big Fella (no, not Jonah - bit early for him too, may he RIP). This Word actually comprised commandments - all 10 of them.

But when Moses finally made it back down, he found his followers doing a bit of innocent knees-up around a golden calf.

The frolickers had yet to see the tablets so they weren't to know they were now unwittingly contravening the first two of these new commandment thingies. Stuff about a sole-charge God, graven images ... that sort of thing.

Even so, this peeved Moses greatly.

In fact, it peeved him so much he himself decided to ignore one of the other new commandments - the one saying "Thou shalt not kill" - and teach these bodgies a lesson.

So with the help of the men of Levi (the tribe, not the denim jeans), Moses put to the sword all those who'd made whoopee with the golden calf. All 3000 of them.

It's in The Book - Exodus 32: 27-28, to be precise. A 9/11 event, but - holy Moses! - inflicted on your own people.

So was Big Mo a terrorist, then? But aren't terrorists meant to kill innocent people on the other side - not your own side? So maybe he was just an errorist - just made a wrong call, stressed out from sleeping rough up the mountain.

But considering the tablets were meant to be heralding a new world order of ethics, this heavy duty massacre of your own folk wasn't great role-modelling by the patriarch.

Especially - having sneak-previewed the tablets - he knew mass murder was a big no-no. With a CV like that, his chances in today's job market would be pretty thin.

Such is the fraught nature of religious texts, not to mention their interpretation and implementation.

Most have been through a veritable tumble-drier of translations and interpretations, to the extent there will always be a bit of bastardised text available to speciously support whatever hank of extremism is being hawked.

So it is with the Bible ... and the Q'uran. True Muslims know that so-called jihadism (in the sense that it is death to all non-believing infidels, etc) is an absolute crock.

The utterly overwhelming consensus is that jihad simply refers to the ongoing battle against "wrong-doing" in everyday life - the same theosophical challenge that confronts peoples of all religions as to how to meritoriously lead life allied with a beneficent spiritual mentor.

But, like mission creep, there's message corruption. In the Q'uran, a couple of verses (the "sword verses") sanction retaliation against "non-believers" - but only in particular circumstances.

In the early days of proselytising, new converts were physically attacked by traditionalists, so righteous defence was justified in this context, as indeed it was against any external aggression in exactly the same way the so-called West justifies armed warfare. It was never intended as a blank cheque edict.

Paris-type rampages by so-called jihadists aren't any part of Islam.

They are eruptions of disaffected cohorts (albeit mainly from Muslim backgrounds) who have been, for a whole package of reasons, ghettoised, marginalised and brutalised in a witches' brew of sectarian conflict and ongoing historical Western intervention and opportunism in the Middle East. Out the other end spews the disenfranchised delusionals, clutching at theosophical straws to justify their aberrations.

Combine it with a slick social media campaign, and you've got a modern, more gruesome equivalent of Che Guevara posters on the wall of the student flats back in the sixties.

That all looked pretty cool and you got to fight the Big Bad Oppressor, and now the same dynamic induces 15-year-old British schoolgirls to jump on planes and join the ... the what exactly?

Just as well Moses and his Levites only had swords and not Kalashnikovs.