The Quaker City, an American pleasure ship, sailed in 1867 on a pilgrimage to Europe and the Holy Lands. The average age of the fifty - six excursionists was fifty years, and many of them were men and women of remarkable social or professional standing.

Among them was the famous American writer, Samuel L. Clemens, who recorded the details of this pilgrimage in a book entitled "The Innocents Abroad" or, "The New Pilgrims Progress" being some account of The steamship Quaker City's Pleasure Excursion To Europe and The Holy lands." Appropriately amplified, the undertones of this book will sound quite similar to the undertones presently humming in the corridors of international politics and diplomacy. Let it be remembered that, in the first place, Clemens blemished the message of (The Pilgrim's Progress) written by John Bunyan, whose title Clemens borrowed as part of his own book.

"Magdala is not a beautiful place," writes S. L. Clemens. "It is thoroughly Syrian, and that is to say that it is thoroughly ugly... and filthy.... All "its inhabitants" were abject beggars by nature, by instinct and by education.... Out of their infidel throats burst an agonizing and most infernal chorus: 'Howajji, Bucksheesh, Howajji, Bucksheesh"

Magdala is a Biblical site in the northern part of Palestine, and "howajji" seems to be Clemens's personal way of transliteration for the word khawaja, a dignified term used to address a gentleman from the West. Syria must here be understood to mean the whole of the Levants, not only the Syrian Arab Republic of today.

The same undertones can be sensed when Clemens talks about the exquisitely infernal tunes of the Arab shepherd pipe, about the "hated Jaffa" and about the vagrant, savage, rascal Arabs, to cite but a few of such derogatory words and phrases.
The Arabs, however, were not the only victims- the Azoreans, the French, the Italians and the Turks were all victims to Clemens's plethora of abusive words and expressions. The Arabs, nevertheless, got the harshest of this tremendously large plethora.

To do justice to the man, it must be stated that he did talk kindly about people in two occasions: when the excursionists visited Nablous, Clemens admired the small Samaritan minority forgetting all about its Arab inhabitants. In Bermuda, Clemens says the excursionists made friends with many inhabitants of the Islands.

Who can fail to discern a similar attitude of professed discrimination, of self- assumed supremacy, of publicly proclaimed contempt for all others?

The "Innocents" hated their guides, whatever they did, however they behaved. They unilaterally decided to call each of their guides by the name of Ferguson; to them a guide was a Ferguson regardless of whether he happened to be a Frenchman, an Italian, a Turk or an Arab. In the same vein, a Syrian village was given the name Jonesborough as if it were the private property of these 'Innocent Pilgrims.' Clemens goes even further than that. He proclaims the following moral verdict:
"If Latin monks and Arabs cried 'to see Jerusalem,' I will know to a moral certainty that the horses cried."

Who can fail to recognize the same bid for provocative misnomers? The legalization of usurpation, annexation and occupation is named peace these days; liberation is called terrorism. Who knows? Some politicians may choose to call a massacre by the innocent, the harmless name of Ferguson. They are already prescribing remedies according to their taste for the problems of the various areas of the world without even caring to consider the viewpoints of inhabitants, let alone their interests and values. There are unending Ferguson- and Jonesborough- prescriptions in their heads. Besides too many moral verdicts, Clemens's type.

Clemens refers tirelessly to the hatred for Christians harboured in Arab hearts. He ignores the fact that Arabs had known and adopted Christianity centuries before his earliest ancestors did. But who hates whom? The man projects his own venom on the inhabitants of the area.

"I can never forget old Godfrey's sword, now," writes Clemens. (... I tried it on a Moslem, and clove him in twain, like a doughnut. If I had had a graveyard, I would have destroyed all the infidels in Jerusalem. "Destroyed all the infidels in Jerusalem."

Is there no country in this world that projects the venom of its politicians and diplomats on other countries? Is there no country in this world where the wish for a vast graveyard is obsessing its politicians and army generals? Is there no country in this world that is working hard to transform our earth into a graveyard to be filled by the carnages of believers and infidels alike? Are there no efforts to design an interplanetary graveyard?

The Pilgrims entered Palestine (with their verdicts ready). Their verdict was hatred. "We went away... to the fountain of the Virgin," writes Clemens. There was no comfort or peace any where on account of the regiment of boys and girls and beggars that persecuted us all the time for bucksheesh. The guide wanted us to give them some money, and we did it; but when he went on to say that they were starving to death we could not but feel that we had done a great sin in throwing obstacles in the way of such a desirable consummation, and so we tried to collect it." Re-collection is practiced over and over again. Foreign aid is grudgingly granted, and greedily re-collected by donor--often with a bonus from the recipient.

Bucksheesh, can roughly be defined as a payment made by a superior to an unworthy inferior. In international politics, bucksheeshism is being exercised, as everybody knows, to buy cheap hirelings, ready and willing to commit atrocities against innocent people in their homes, in their villages, in their camps: it is being exercised to achieve the procurement of heinous deeds exactly as the Pilgrims did when the\ paid several dollars just for the fun of witnessing an Egyptian pyramid- climber break his neck. Paradoxically, even the most devout of Clemens's pilgrims refused to pay two dollars as a full day's charge for a boatman who was to take them to all the sacred places around the Sea of Galilee associated with Jesus Christ... Politicians in some powerful rich states should understand that bucksheeshism can never bring about noble enterprises; in fact, a bucksheesh is a cheap payment made by a cheap donor to a cheap recipient.
Clemens narrates with relish how he was caught up trying to drown the innkeeper's dog in Damascus, how the Pilgrims illegally infiltrated into the Greek soil, how they tried to steal as many clusters of Greek grapes as they could, how they entertained violating the quarantine regulations of Italy and Spain, and how some of them tried to snatch specimens even from places like the Church of the Holy sepulchre and the Pyramids.

Have the politicians of the powerful countries been emancipated from such conflagrations?

Such values may be consonant with the isolationist America of the nineteenth century; they may have been reinforced or inspired by the Monroe motto raised in the 1820's proclaiming America for the Americans. But America is not isolationist now; are we to understand that the two Americas— the isolationist and the non- isolationist— are the same? And that the foregoing values 'mark the twain?' This seems to be the modern message of the book of Samuel Clemens, alias Mark Twain.

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