I am still flying over the dark and mysterious seas, which seems as good a time as any to consider the mystery that is Immanuel Shmuel.
Mr Shmuel is a strange candidate indeed. He ran as a candidate for Australian Voice a few years ago, which alas tells us little about his views on the world, since they seemed to be a bit all over the place politically, with individual party members creating individual policies.
Mr Shmuel has no political website, though he does have one for his financial planning website, which has a logo that is one big Star of David with lots of little stars of David, and also his initials, IS, in a very cursive, Arabic-looking script, which seems a little unfortunate given current associations with those initials. Conversely, his Facebook page – and yes, it is the same man – is full of inspirational quotes, many of which seem to have quite a strong Christian bent, and there is also Arabic text. And then he has this odd slogan:
‘I am’ Australian, collectively, ‘I am’ Australia. Feel, sense and own the same.
I can’t tell if the emphasis on ‘I am’ is a strange reference to YHWH (in which case, what does he mean by it?), or if I have been spending too much time around Old Testament theologians in the last week and am reading way to much into what is just a weird choice of punctuation.
Seriously, this is doing my head in.
(It is not my intention to harp on a candidate’s possible religious affiliations, but Mr Shmuel’s online presence seems to be remarkably full of very mixed religious symbology, and very little else, suggesting that religion that is pretty important to him. I’m finding this very distracting, especially given the dearth of other material I have to work with.)
