Terra Incognita 2

Terra Incognita
Issue 2
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel

Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/


August 24th, 2007


Here are this weeks three articles below and attached. The full articles appear below these short abstracts.

1) Timothy Mcveigh: Freedom fighter? Most academics, news organizations and intellectuals agree that Timothy Mcveigh, the Oklahoma city bomber, is a terrorist. Yet many of the same people can not agree on whether Bin Laden is a terrorist. So why isn’t Mcveigh a freedom fighter, like Hasan Nasrallah? Here’s why none of these terrorists are freedom fighters.

2) The historiography of Partition. The partition on India and Pakistan caused up to 20 million people to become refugees. A million were killed. In India this is a remembered as a time when ‘racist’ Hindus drove out Muslim ‘victims’ just as the BJP is accused of doing today. In Pakistan it is remembered the same way. But then why is Pakistan 99% Muslim and India is only 80% Hindu. Where did all the Hindus and Sikhs in Pakistan disappear to in 1947?

3) A history of Islam in America: 2001-2007. The nature, visibility and position of Islam in America has changed dramatically since Sept. 11. In a strange irony 9/11 has benefited American Muslims in a plethora of ways. Now every University and public institution makes sure not to offend them and cater to their ‘needs’. Muslims have become the new cause celebre in America. Muslims are to the period 2000-2007 what gays were to the 1990s. And that bodes ill for the gays as well as everyone else.

4) Only a little better than Saudi Arabia? A recent survey of American foreign policy makers found that 14 out of 108 felt Israel was not a good ally of America. By contrast 17 said the same thing about Saudi Arabia. Is Saudi Arabia really only a slightly worse ally to America than Israel. What about those 19 Saudi men and 9/11?


1) Timothy Mcveigh: Freedom fighter?
August 23rd, 2007
Seth J. Frantzman

He had facial hair. He blew up a building. He killed 150 people. They blew up two buildings. They killed 3,000 people. Their leader had facial hair. So why is one a terrorist and the others ‘freedom fighters’ responding to ‘American foreign policy decisions’? Why is one incident called ‘blowback’ and the other is referred to as ‘racist, home grown murder’?

Obviously in the minds of almost every American Timothy Mcveigh is a terrorist. However what is surprising is that if one were to take the 100 deadliest bombings carried out against civilians worldwide in the last 10 years one would find that at least half of them are not carried out by ‘terrorists’ according to Reuters and many other news reports. Moreover many academics and intellectuals would not refer to them as terrorism. These are the work of ‘insurgents’ or ‘the resistance’ or ‘armed militants’ or ‘freedom fighters.’ According to this crowd of bombing theologians who parse the semantics of death, the mantra is “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.” For this crowd the Americans who died at Lexington, Concord and Bunker hill were ‘terrorists’ inasmuch as Bin Laden is a ‘terrorist.’ Among this crowd the word terrorist is always relaxing inside quotation marks like this: “Terrorist.”

So why wasn’t Tim Mcveigh a freedom fighter? He was disillusioned. He was angered by American policies. He decided to get revenge for what he perceived was the American government’s killing of civilians. In his case it wasn’t American support for the Zionist entity, it was his unhappiness over Janet Reno’s siege of the Waco compound that led to the deaths of over 80 Americans at the hands of other Americans, employed by the federal government. So, for Tim, the government had to go, and the Murrow Federal building in Oklahoma City was a ‘soft target’ sort of like the Sbarro in downtown Jerusalem. The intellectuals inform us that terrorists choose soft targets because they are weak and disadvantaged. Terrorists must use alternative methods to wage their armed struggle because they cannot confront the might of armed states on the battlefield. In addition the intellectuals inform us that terrorists don’t carry out attacks just to kill people, they really desire media attention, they want to strike fear, sometimes they want to compete with other terrorist organizations to ‘score political points.’ The casualties are merely peripheral. Tim didn’t really want those 150 people dead, he was merely engaging in ‘Armed struggle’ like the Weaver family at Ruby Ridge.

Except there is one difference between the Weaver family, the Branch Dividians at Waco and Tim. The Weavers and David Koresh fought honorably to the death. That may seem far fetched, after all they were outgunned and outnumbered by the unbelievable power of the U.S government’s ‘shock and awe’. But so was Geronimo.

There are roughly four schools of thought regarding the age old question of ‘who is a terrorist’. One school argues that terrorism is a widespread phenomenon and the definition is quite broad. It takes in the French resistance, the American bombing of Germany in the second world war, the American revolutionaries who fought the British, Tim Mcveigh and Bin Laden. For this school terrorism is sort of a catch all, but sometimes the phrase is found in quotations(the Chomsky School of terrorism). Another school argues that the word ‘terrorist’ is a loaded phrase that is in fact ‘racist’ and thus should never be employed(the Reuters school of terrorism). Another school argues that ‘terrorists’ are criminals and that they can be brought to justice and tried in international courts, which are famously efficient, and then imprisoned in the ultra-harsh prison conditions found in the Hague(The Wesley Clark school of terrorism). The last school seeks to create internationally accepted definitions for terrorism and create models whereby given a certain set of definitions each group can be labeled ‘terrorist’ or ‘freedom fighter’ or ‘football hooligan(the Guy Stecklov school of terrorism).’

I would argue that terrorism is a lot like obscenity, you know it when you see it(as in Justice Potter Stewart’s quip during the case Jacobellis v. Ohio, 1964),. Terrorists are essentially cowards who don’t like to fight like men. Terrorists are also essentially bullies. This is why all terrorists that have ever come to power commit the worst crimes and abuse people in the most degrading way. The Muslim terrorists and the Saudi Arabian regime are two of the same. One works as a coward, murdering civilians while the other works as a dictatorship, sentencing women to lashes for being promiscuous while importing prostitutes to feed the sexual appetites of the royals. The Communist terrorists in Russia were identical. As terrorists they were cowards, but as leaders of the Soviet Union they ate caviar while their people starved in the millions.

Leftists have mistaken the cowardly nature of terrorists for their weakness. They say that the terrorist is simply weaker than the state and thus must engage in his acts. This is where intellectuals get tongue tied about terrorism and it is why they confuse Bin Laden with the American revolutionaries at Lexington and Concord. On April 19th, 1775 the British advance guard under Major Pitcairn came marching up the road towards the town of Lexington in the Massachusetts Bay colony. It was an awesome force 700 well trained British soldiers. They came upon 77 American militiamen commanded by John Parker mustered on the town common. After a brief standoff the British opened fire on the militia, killing 8 of them. At the nearby town of Concord, the militia retired to nearby forests and hills and sniped at the British column, eventually killing 73 Englishmen. The September 11th terrorists are nothing like the men of Lexington common. In the one case where the 9/11 terrorists were confronted with resistance, aboard Flight 93, they ran like dogs and immediately crashed the plane they had hijacked. So everytime someone asks ‘is this terrorism’ they don’t need Chomsky or Wes Clark, Guy Stecklov, Reuters, or the Council on American Islamic Relations to answer that question. They just need to answer the Lexington and Concord question. Would the ‘terrorist’ have stood at Lexington? If the answer is yes, then he is not a terrorist.


2) The historiography of Partition
Seth J. Frantzman
August 16th, 2007


A half a million people were killed. Twelve million became refugees. On the 14th of August, 1947, Lord Mountbatten and his wife, who was having an affair with the Pandit Jawaharlal Nerhu, scurried out of India. In their wake they left the greatest mass movement of peoples in history. Pakistan is celebrating sixty years of independence this year. India is also celebrating. But they are not celebrating the same thing.

In commemoration of this anniversary The International Herald Tribune ran two editorials entitled the ‘Legacy of Partition.’ The first was by the Pakistani Muslim Mohsin Hamid, an author. The second was by the Indian Hindu Ramachandra Guha, author of India After Gandhi. Hamid’s editorial speaks of a birth of ‘exceptional pain.’ His father was a member of the Muslim League, the brainchild of the British and Mohammed Ali Jinnah, which had campaigned through bloody riots for the creation of a Muslim state from the Raj. His father was stabbed by Muslim rioters in Lahor in 1947. They thought he was a ‘kaffir’, a Hindu. But Hamid speaks of his mother who had a ‘fierce love for Pakistan.’ Hamid speaks of a Pakistan that has wielded a dagger against itself, first against his father, then when Bangladesh broke away in 1971. Hamid speaks of Ayub Khan’s coup of 1958 and Zia ul-Haq’s coup in 1977. He speaks of the Islamization of his country and of being ‘fiercely patriotic.’ Hamid wish for the anniversary is that ‘we finally take the knife we have turned too often upon ourselves and place it firmly in its sheath.’ The message is clear; be fiercely patriotic but don’t harm yourself through too much extremism.

Ramachandra Guha’s lesson is quite different. He begins by relating the story of the destruction of the Ayodha mosque in 1990 because of a ‘property dispute’ involving the ‘alleged ruins of a Hindu temple marking the birthplace of the legendary God-king Ram.’
Guha speaks of the ‘right wing Bharatiya Janata Party’ trying to ‘reclaim’ the site. For Guha the march to Ayodha by the Hindu masses ‘represented a grave threat to the inclusive, plural, secular and democratic idea of India.’ Guha’s hero is Nehru, who like Gandhi before him, ensured the world that ‘India would not be a Hindu Pakistan.’ Guha speaks of the ‘Hindu storm-troopers’ who intimidated the Muslim victims. Guha complains that Muslims are ‘conspicuously under-represented in law, medicine, business, and in the upper echelons of public service. Guha claims that as a young man he spoke ‘Hindustani’ not ‘Hindu’. Guha speaks of dreaming about his Muslim Pakistani friend, Tariq Bunari, and how ‘I dreamt of my Muslim friend at a time when my fellow Hindus were mounting attacks on Muslims.’
Guha complains that Delhi ‘once a center of Islamic civilization, became a city of and for Hindus and Sikhs.’ Guha whines that ‘the BJP preached a distrust of Muslims in general and Pakistan in particular’ after 100,000 Hindus were forced to flee Kashmir due to terrorist attacks in 1989. ‘Hindu radicals demanded retribution against Muslims in the rest of India.’ Guha speaks of going to Lahore in 1995 and visiting the last remaining Hindu family in the city. He makes sure to visit the Mosque built by Aurangzeb. At the mosque Guha is ‘seized with fear’ because it is Friday prayers and he has in his pocket a statue of the Hindu God Ganesh and although he says “I am not a believer’ he is afraid that they will see the ‘infidel’ in their midst. Guha sums up his article by noting that the creation ‘a Muslim homeland [in Pakistan] made the Muslims who remained in India even more vulnerable.’ The message is clear; India is being made too Hindu, Muslims are vulnerable and poor and Hindus are assaulting them at every turn and trying to ‘rewrite’ Indian history.

So the sum total of two articles on India and Pakistan is that the Muslim is patriotic and the Hindu feels sorry for the Muslims. The Hindu, who makes sure to point out that he doesn’t believe in his religion and makes sure to search out mosques and Muslims wherever he goes, only thinks about Muslims. He has been conditioned for this worldview by westernism. As a secular wealthy Indian he looks to the west for inspiration. The west teaches moral-relativism and caring for minorities, so his life is one where the only people that matter in India are the Muslims and being sure not to offend them. It is strange the idea that by giving the Muslims a country in Pakistan it actually made Muslims victims because now they were ‘vulnerable’ in India. Had they not been given a country they would be victims because they had to live under someone else’s rule. The Muslim always wins. He is always the victim. In the Muslim country the Muslim is patriotic and doesn’t ever speak of minorities. In the non-Muslim country all the non-Muslim elites spend their time worried about offending the Muslim.

It is amazing that in the partition of India the Muslims demanded their own state and received it. It is amazing that in the partition of Palestine the Muslims received another state. Islam is always successful this way. There is only one Jewish state in the world. There is only one Hindu state in the world. Yet those states are full of intellectuals who claim that they must be more ‘pluralistic’ and give Muslims special rights. There are forty Muslim run countries in the world. None of them take any notice of their minorities or worry about offending them. In China Muslims are the only group allowed to have more than one child under China’s birth control laws. Why? China is worried about offending the Muslims. In India the Sikhs, Christians, Jains, Jews, Buddhists and Hindus may only marry one woman and they must give her alimony and child custody in many divorce cases governed by secular civil laws. Muslims can marry up to four wives and divorce them at will in their special Family Law courts where they are governed by Shariah law. Any attempts to create a uniform Civil Code for Muslims and everyone else in India have been stopped for fear of ‘offending’ Muslims.

Pakistani history does not mention the pre-Islamic history of Pakistan. Pakistan history begins with Islam. According to Pakistani history books there were never any Sikhs or Hindus or Buddhists in Pakistan. Turkish history teaches that there were never any Armenians. But Indian history must always include laudatory chapters on the benefits of ‘Islamic civilization.’ Guha reminds us how terrible it is that Delhi has forgotten the contributions of Islam. He must visit Aurangzeb’s mosque. But when it comes to Ayodhya he speaks of its ‘alleged’ Hindu past. So his history too begins with Islam. He is worried that the ‘right wing’ BJP wants to emphasize India’s pre-Islamic Hindu past. He doesn’t want Muslim students to be ‘offended’. So Hindus in India must learn how wonderful the Muslim colonization from 1000-1857 was. Aurangzeb spent his life destroying Hindu temples and slaughtering and enslaving ‘kaffirs’. In fact slavery was brought to India by Islam. But Hindus must learn how wonderful it was for them to be colonized and enslaved and for mosques to built atop their temples. Everywhere else in the world it is common for people to teach the evils of colonialism and slavery, but in India they must glory in their own enslavement.







3) A history of Islam in America: 2001-2007
Seth J. Frantzman
August 19th, 2007

Since September 11th Islam has become an important part of the fabric of America. In historically this may be 9/11’s greatest impact, the slow Islamization of America.

The Koranization of America or ‘why do they hate us’

The first step in this process was the call for every American to ‘read the Koran’ to ‘understand why they hate us.’ A college in South Carolina assigned the Koran as required reading for incoming Freshmen. Every Borders and Barnes and Nobles book store created a special ‘Islam’ stand at the front of the store and every customer was bombarded with books about Islam, most of them written in a sycophantic, loving manner that describes Islam as a ‘religion of peace.’ This was when the ‘religion of peace’ rhetoric first entered the American psyche.


The rise of Muslim ‘civil rights’: CAIR

The hitherto unknown Council on American Islamic Relations suddenly got a spotlight in every major newspaper and television program. According to them Muslims were now suffering ‘racism’ everywhere in America. Muslims were being deprived of their rights. It was CAIR and its lawyers who made sure that airline security searched an equal number of 2 year old children and 90 year old grandmothers as they did 25 year old Arab males. In 2006 CAIR sent half a dozen Imams onto a plane and they prayed on the plane, and spoke loudly in Arabic, moved from their assigned seats, moved back and forth from First Class to third class and asked for special seat belt extenders despite not being overweight. They were consequently thrown off the plane when an Arabic speaker heard them speaking about Saddam and Osama. They sued the airline and threatened to sue the passengers who had complained about them. CAIR also launched lawsuits against Steve Emerson, Daniel Pipes, Jihad Watch and Anti-Cair, any website or person who condemned them. But their bully got a setback in July of 2007 when Congress made it illegal to sue people who had merely reported suspicious behavior. Like many Islamist organizations, CAIR is run by converts.


The Islamization of the leftist movement(lesbians and 9/11), ‘Jewish-Muslims for peace’, ‘racism’

The greatest impact of 9/11 was it gave the impetus to those intellectuals who had critiqued American policy in the past to suddenly find that their cause dovetailed with Islam. Beginning with professors in Colorado such as Ward Churchill and in New Mexico America was described as being not only ‘at fault’ for 9/11 but the victims of 9/11 were called ‘little Eichmans’. One leftist writer in New York wrote an essay entitled ‘the myth of the innocent civilian’ that claimed the 9/11 victims were not innocent because they had spoken up for the Palestinians. Muslims were supposedly the victims of ‘hate crimes’ after 9/11 although all of the hate crimes that were revealed in the media were killings of Sikhs, rather than Muslims.
But it didn’t take long to see the leftist-Muslim alliance come into being. Only two weeks after 9/11 in Tucson, Arizona a Lesbian activist group led a march with Muslims against the bombing of Afghanistan. Muslim-Jewish ‘peace marches’ began where ‘progressive’ Jews, many of whome had never been to Synagogue and didn’t believe in God would march arm in arm with religious Muslim men and their covered women to a mosque and pray. The Jewish women made sure to cover their hair and dress modestly so as not to ‘offend Islam.’ This became the cornerstone of the leftist-Muslim alliance. The left argued that America had ‘offended’ Islam through her music, food, attire, and foreign policy. American support for Israel and Saudi Arabia, American support for the mujahadin in Afghanistan had supposedly created a ‘blowback’ as Noam Chomsky called it.
The left abandoned its other minority groups such as blacks, gays and Mexicans and suddenly adopted Islam as its newest ‘cause celebre’. Leftists flocked en masse to learn Arabic. Then they went to Israel to protest the ‘occupation’. The enrolled en masse in schools such as CASA in Egypt in order to ‘learn about Islam.’ Numerous leftists converted to Islam as the religion became the new Buddhism, something romantic and exotic.
Arab voters in America universally turned to the left and religious Muslims began showing up at Democratic rallies alongside gays. Prior to 2001 Muslims had always voted Republican because they oppose abortion, oppose gay rights, are pro-family, pro-religion and are for the death penalty. However 9/11 changed all that as they convinced themselves there was a ‘war on Islam’. Ironically Democratic party leaders such as John Kerry snuggled up to Muslim leaders such as the former Iranian president, who he sat next to at Davos in Switzerland and referred to America as a ‘pariah’.

The Islamization of the University

The greatest Islamization has taken place at the University. Reading the Koran is part of the course of study at some places. Universities such as George Mason have established government funded prayer rooms for Muslims with separate areas for men and women. Floor baths have been established in Minnesota at the cost of $25,000 per foot bath so that Muslims can pray five times a day(they are supposedly required to wash their feat, oddly enough Neggelwassers or traditional Jewish washing cups have not been established so Jews can wash their hands before they eat, a requirement for religious Jews. The ACLU opposed the latter, just as it opposed allowing the Boy Scouts to use public parks).

The slow Islamization of America

The United States has issued ‘happy Eid’ postage stamps since 9/11. Bush has celebrated Ramadan. Driver licenses have allowed women to cover their faces with the Islamic naqib. American teachers have begun covering their hair and having ‘Muslim week’ and ‘Jihad day’ at schools where students make a mock ‘Hajj’ to Mecca and women cover their hair and they learn about the ‘inner Jihad’ against sin. A new Arabic language academy is opening in New York called the Khalil Gibran academy. The Muslim Eids are celebrated in NY and New Jersey schools. Taxi drivers in Minneapolis have begun banning dogs and alcohol from their taxis because Islam forbids alcohol and the touching of dogs(because dogs are compared to Jews in the Koran).

9/11 was a victory for Islam, not because of the death toll of American ‘kaffirs’ but because Islam has now penetrated the psyche of America. This is the opposite affect than the one caused by the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7th, 1941. After Pearl Harbor Americans didn’t study the Shinto religion, they didn’t learn Japanese(except to break codes) and none of them wanted to convert to Buddhism. American students weren’t forced to learn the history of Japan. Japanese people didn’t become ‘exotic.’ Americans weren’t sued for reporting suspicious activities by Japanese in America. Americans didn’t accuse their government of suffering ‘blowback’ for policies in Asia. Americans didn’t describe the victims of the attack as ‘little nazis’. Americans didn’t suddenly start having postage stamps for Japanese-Americans or celebrating Buddhist holidays. There were no peace marches on behalf of Japan. Americans weren’t forced to learn that the nationalist ideology of Japan was ‘really peaceful’ and that Japanese were a ‘people of peace.’ America is lucky in this respect. Had things been different in 1941 when Japan and America declared war on America, the U.S may not have been able to confront Nazism and Japanese nationalism, because too many Americans would have been supporting Nazism and asking Americans to ‘understand that Nazism is a movement of peace’ and that it was ‘blowback for WWI’.

4) Only a little better than Saudi Arabia?
August 23rd, 2003
Seth J. Frantzman

Between May and June of 2007 Foreign Policy magazine conducted a survey of 108 American foreign policy experts. The list apparently included academics, diplomats and Americans who are influential in foreign policy.

Question13 stated the following: “Below is a list of U.S allies. Please choose the one country that least serves U.S national security interests. The top four countries that were listed as not serving American interests were Russian, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Israel. They received 34, 22, 17 and 14 votes respectively(the next highest was Mexico, which 5 people felt was not serving American interests.) Basically what this indicates is that Israel is only a slightly better ally of American than Saudi Arabia.

This is quite extraordinary. All but one of the 9/11 terrorists were from Saudi Arabia. Up to 20% of the insurgents currently fighting in Iraq today are from Saudi Arabia. Saudis are responsible for the dissemination of the Wahhabi Islamist doctrines that have been responsible for recruiting terrorists from Indonesia to Sudan, Bosnia and Chechnya among other places. Saudi Islamists have turned up everywhere there is terrorism, from Kashmir to Nigeria. Despite the fact that the U.S government is in denial, the ‘war on terror’ is really a war against Saudi Arabia. When George W. Bush admitted that Americans were ‘addicted to oil’ he was specifically pointing the finger at Saudi Arabia, whose dominance of the oil trade is used to blackmail the U.S and fund terror. The decision to invade Iraq in 2003 was taken partially in order to wean America of her reliance on Saudi Arabia as an ally and potentially find another ally in a democratic Iraq.

But despite the realization at the highest level of the Bush administration that Saudi is not serving American interests, that it is in fact responsible for the world’s terrorist troubles, it doesn’t seem this fact has sunk in among the foreign policy elites in the U.S. Why is this? How is it that Israel is only slightly better than Saudi Arabia? Israel didn’t produce 19 men who went to America and killed 3,000 people. Israel has been a staunch ally of the United States since 1960 when JFK courted Ben-Gurion to help thwart Communist infiltration of the Middle East. Israel was actively involved in the American policies throughout the region, helping America channel arms to Afghanistan between 1980 and 1990, engaging with Reagan’s cronies in the Iran-Contra scandal and sitting by during the Gulf War while scuds rained down on Tel Aviv. Meanwhile America was forced to send 400,000 men to defend Saudi Arabia against Iraq, sacrificing billions for a country whose people have a passionate hatred of America and who engage in terrorism around the world.

One reason that Israel is ranked only slightly higher than Saudi Arabia is because Saudi works to censor any criticism of it in the West and works through its investments in the media, Islamic charities, human rights organizations such as CAIR and funding of academic studies such as Islamic studies at Universities. One article critical of Saudi Arabia that appeared in the two-horse town of Tucson Arizona in the weekly newspaper known as the Tucson Weekly on page five, on July 6th, 2006 entitled ‘Why do congressmen like Jim Kolbe continue to support a sexist, hate-filled, hypocritical regime?’ engendered an immediate response from the Royal Embassy of Saudi Arabia in Washington D.C. In a public statement written by Nail A. Al-Jubeir and issued on July 20th, 2006 the embassy claimed the article was “malicious and offensive to the people of Saudi Arabia. The editorial is grossly inaccurate, hate-filled and potentially libelous.” The state of Saudi Arabia which is one of the wealthiest per capita in the world was willing to sue a columnist at a tiny newspaper because of an article critiquing the Kingdom. Imagine if Israel attempted to sue every columnist or academic that criticized it. The fact that Saudi feels it must reach so far to crush the slightest criticism shows not only how scared it is of losing American support but also shows that it has been able to restrict criticism of it to only the most marginal places. In a sense it has succeeded in silencing American free speech almost as successfully as it has stymied free speech in its own country.
Saudi Arabia remains one of the worst regimes in the world. It imports millions of people to do slave-like work and denies them the most basic human rights. It does not allow women to drive and women may only travel abroad with the permission of their nearest male ‘guardian’. It has a mandatory dress code for women. It does not allow people to enter the country with crosses or any religious memorabilia that is not Islamic. It has famous signs on roads entering Mecca and Madina which separate traffic into ‘Muslims’ bound for the holy cities and ‘non-Muslims’ who may not enter. It is not only an apartheid regime, it is a brutal and disgusting regime. It will take a lot more than 17 American foreign policy experts to finally wake the world up to the danger it poses to peace throughout the globe.

Seth J. Frantzman is in the Doctoral studies program at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is also a commentator on current affairs, his work has appeared in the Jerusalem Post, the Tucson Weekly and other publications.

Terra Incognita 1

August 18th, 2007

1) ‘The Foreign devils and Iraq’: Abdullah Rashid al-Baghdadi, a leader of the insurgency in Iraq has recently been revealed to be a fake. He was created by Al-Quaida to make the Iraqis think the insurgency is led by locals. However the history of terrorism shows that terrorists usually aren’t locals, they don’t ‘spoil their own nest’

2) ‘Monster in the Garden, Karen Armstrong’: Armstrong is one of the leading writers on religion in the world today. Her books on Islam and Mohammed who she describes as ‘a prophet for our time’ are supposed to bridge the clash of civilizations. However a careful reading of her and her fellow travelers reveals a tragic agenda.

3) ‘The ADL’s rotten mistake’: Abe Foxman of the ADL has condemned a campaign to have the U.S Congress recall the Armenian genocide. The ADL, a Jewish organization that fights anti-Semitism and hate, has no business doing this and by siding with Turkey is making an immoral mistake that it should be ashamed of.




The Foreign devils and Iraq
Seth J. Frantzman
August 16th 2007

Abdullah Rashid al-Baghdadi was a brutal mastermind of terror operations in Iraq. He was a local born leader who had vowed to drive out the Americans and the Shia. As a local leader of the Islamic State in Iraq, he was affiliated with Al Qaida. But there was one problem. He wasn’t a real person.

Many people will react to this news by scoffing at how stupid the Americans must be to have been fighting a fictional character. American officers used to complain in Vietnam that the man in the black pajamas would attack them and then fade away into the neighboring jungle and villages. But at least the Vietcong were real people. Its disturbing to think that the ‘insurgency’ in Iraq is being led by characters as far fetched as Mighty Mouse and Wolverine.

But it turns out that Mr. Baghdadi wasn’t exactly fictional. He was more of a stand in for the foreign born leaders and fighters that make up al Qaida in Mesopatamia, the man Sunni insurgent group. According to reports the voice of Baghdadi was provided by Adullah al-Naima and the idea behind this ruse was masterminded by Abu Ayub al-Masri, the Egyptian born leader of Al Qaeda in Mesopatamia. The terrorists went to these lengths in order to mask the degree to which foreigners make up the worst terrorists in Iraq.

This will surprise those who often refer to terrorists as ‘freedom fighters’. But the history of terrorism also has a certain ‘not in my backyard’ mentality to it. Oh how quickly we forget. The anarchists who terrorized the United States in the late 1890s and first twenty years of the 20th century were mostly foreigners. Many had been in the United States less than ten years and it was no surprise that the U.S deported many of them including the Lithuanian born Emma Goldman in 1919(she had been in the U.S for 35 years).

Communist terrorism was often led and caused by foreigners. The top leadership of the Soviets after the death of Lenin in 1924 were composed of Georgians(Stalin and Beria), A Pole(Dzerzhinsky), an Armenian(Mikoyan), A Ukrainian(Khrushchev), a peasant(Kalinin), Jews(Trotsky, Kamanev, Zinoviev, Sverdlov) and other people who were either foreigners or not considered Russian(the only prominent Russians included Molotov and Bukharin).

The history of Palestinian terrorism is almost always tied up with foreigners, including its most infamous leader, Yasser Arafat, who was probably born in Egypt. Many other prominent Palestinian terrorists have been born abroad, in Beirut, Syria or Jordan, not in Palestinian refugee camps, they simply were not Palestinian in the first place. The most famous Palestinian leader in the 1948 war outside Abdal Kader Husseini, was Fauzi Kaukji, a Syrian.

Islamist terrorism has relied on foreigners in all of its major campaigns. From Lebanon(1976-1988) to Afghanistan(1980-2001) to Algeria(1990-1998) to Bosnia(1994-1998) to Chechnya(1991-2000) and beyond. In East Africa, Kashmir, Sudan and most recently in Iraq. Islamists speak of fighting for the ‘Umma’ or Muslim nation, but this has had an elastic quality to it. In Afghanistan the foreigners slaughtered natives who disagreed with them including the ethnic Tajiks and the Shiites. In Bosnia the imported Arabs who worked as terrorists during the Balkan wars were known to have raped Bosnian women, thinking them to be ‘kaffirs’ since they went about uncovered and looked European. The same situation has played out in Chechnya where Arab recruits for the Jihad against Russia have abused and carried out depredations among the local Chechen population who they view as immoral and secular. In Jordan the Palestinian terrorists residing there under the banner of the PLO imposed their will on the local Bedouin population to such as extent that the King ordered his Bedouin soldiers to destroy the PLO in 1970. The main reason why Afghanistan fell so easily to the Americans in 2001 was because the ethnic Pashtun Afghans had tired of watching foreign fighters, mostly Saudis, overrun their homes and assault their women. They turned on the Arab Jihadists with a vengeance, happily naming names so the Americans could bring them to Guantanamo. Anyone who believes the insurgency in Iraq is fueled by Iraqis is mistaken, without the presence of foreign fighters, foreign weapons and foreign propaganda the insurgency would be far less deadly to both the American soldiers and the residents of Iraq.



Monster in the Garden: Karen Armstrong
Seth J. Frantzman
August 15, 2007

In an introduction to her book Mohammed: A Biography of the Prophet, Karen Armstrong wrote that “it has been difficult for the west to understand Islam’s reaction to Salman Rushdi’s depiction of Mohammed in the ‘Satanic Verses’…” Therefore she embarks on a search for the ‘historical Mohammed’. In this farce passing itself off as scholarship she uses the Koran as her source for the life of Mohammed, hardly a good way to get to the ‘historical’ Mohammed, but perhaps a good way to get to the Islamic Mohammed.
Karen Armstrong is the author of a number of popular books on religion, including; A History of God, The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions, The Battle For God, Mohammed: A Biography of the Prophet, Buddha and Mohammad: A Prophet for Our Time. She is one of the world’s most respected commentators on religion and a member of the Alliance of Civilizations, a group supposedly dedicated to inter-religious dialogue. She is a devotee of the ‘every religion has fundamentalism and violence’ mantra.

“Fundamentalism has erupted in every single major faith worldwide, not just in the Islamic world. The term "fundamentalism" was coined here in the United States, at the turn of the 20th century, when Protestant Christians said that they wanted to go back to the fundamentals of their faith… we have fundamentalist Judaism, Islam, Sikhism, Confucianism, Hinduism.”

Like all those who have recently written on religious extremism from Christiane Amanpour(God’s Warriors), Christopher Hitchens(God is not Great), Sam Harris (The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason), Avraham Burg, there is the general argument that all religions are violent(A parallel stream of thought argues that all religions engage in terrorism and that terrorism began with the Jewish zealots in 70 A.D and that the ‘first use of the word terrorism was used to describe the Jewish underground movement in Palestine in the 1930s’ But this logic the Jews Baruch Goldstien and Yigal Amar are as important as the Christian’s who have bombed abortion clinics and together they are as important as all the thousands of Islamic terrorist movements in the world and the tens of thousands of deaths caused by them yearly. See for instance: ‘A History of Terrorism’ by Gerard Chaliand, ‘Inside Terrorism’ by Bruce Hoffman, Reuters ‘Israeli-Palestinian Conflict’, Robert Pape’s ‘Dying to Win’ )

Karen Armstrong was born in 1962 and joined a nunnery at the age of 17. She left when she was 24. In one book she has described this ‘dark’ period of her life and how she did not ‘find God’ in the convent. Perhaps this shaded the rest of her work on Christianity and Judaism, and affected her subsequent writing on Islam, that borders on being a sycophant. Armstrong once noted that “I usually describe myself, perhaps flippantly, as a freelance monotheist. I draw sustenance from all three of the faiths of Abraham. I can't see any one of them as having the monopoly of truth, any one of them as superior to any of the others.”

According to professor Juan Eduardo Campo, Karen Armstrong has been influential in conveying the more objective post-19th-century scholarship of Islam to a wide reading in Europe and North America. Her view of Islam can be summed up by the following paragraph in her biography of Mohammed:

“After Mohammad’s death, Jews and Christians were never required to convert to Islam but were allowed to practice their religion freely in the Islamic empire. Later Zoroastrians, Hindus, Buddhists and Sikhs were also counted among the People of the Book. It has never been a problem for Muslims to coexist with people of other religions. The Islamic empire was able to play hose to Christians and Jews for centuries; but Western Europe has found it almost impossible to tolerant Muslims and Jews in Christian territory(page 87).”

Armstrong has pretended in her writing to be unbiased and objective. But she is emblematic of the typical British and western view of Islam as enshrined by T.E. Lawrence, Richard Burton, John Bagot Glubb and Lady Evelyn Cobbold. It is the romanticizing of Islam and ascribing to Islam the perfection that its devotees ascribe to it. It is never criticizing or judging Islam but accepting its view of history from its point of view. This is the most blatant form of moral-relativism and the blindness of this type of scholarship has been responsible for much misunderstanding and countless deaths.

Deaths. How could it be that Ms. Armstrong has been responsible for deaths? But let us recall this friend of Ms. Armstrong, Feisal Abdul Rauf. Rauf is the imam of the al-Farah mosque in New York City and founder of the American Sufi Muslim Association. He teaches Islam and Sufism at the Center for Religious Inquiry at St. Bartholomew's Church and at New York Seminary. He was quoted during a seminar on fundamentalism with Armstrong as saying:

“One of the things that has been bothersome to many of us in the Muslim world is the so-called "clash of civilizations" [language] that was fostered by Samuel Huntington. His paradigm was that when people engage in conflict, they do it along civilizational lines. But it's become a very catchy phrase. People say civilizations clash, and the next big clash is the West against Islam. We've been demonized in that way. You have to have a dialogue amongst civilizations rather than speak of it in terms of a clash. Because the United States is the sole superpower today, we have the power of the bully pulpit. How we frame the dialogue will frame the future. If we frame the dialectic in terms of a dialogue among civilizations, we will create harmony. But if we foster the dialectic as a clash of civilizations, we will actually perpetuate the clash.”
The ideology of Armstrong means that people must ignore reality. By pretending that all of Muslim history was a utopia of tolerance the world is continually drugged into a false sense of security. When terrorism and violence breaks out among Muslims, the blinded people then blame themselves, wondering how they could have made the perfectly peaceful religion so violent. Witness the Pope who made comments at Regensburg about the connection of Islam and violence. Over the next week churches were bombed in Iraq, firebombed in Gaza, a priest was stabbed in Turkey and a nun was shot to death in Somalia. Islam turned violent. Muslims protested in England and one protestor held a sign that said “behead those who call Islam violent.” To a rational person the response should be obvious: Islam is violent, the fact that Muslims all around the world reacted the same way to the statements, by calling for the killing of Christians and murdering Christians who were not even Catholic, Islam showed itself to be violent. The logical person would ask “what would Buddhists do if they were called violent?” What of Christians or Jews? Christians are continually called violent by the press, accused of being the leaders of the inquisition and the crusades and accused of being fundamentalists who blow up abortion clinics. But Christians don’t react violently to being called violent, they usually say things like “the Crusaders weren’t real Christians.”
But the blindness of Armstrong and her acolytes drives people to claim that the Pope ‘caused violence by his comments and should retract them.’ The same logic was employed after the Cartoon affair in Denmark. The attacks all over the Muslim world on Christians, including riots in Damascus and Beirut and more firebombings of churches in the West Bank and Gaza, were said to be the fault of Denmark. After all the cartoons had ‘provoked violence.’ The same westerners who make these excuses would never make a similar excuse for a Jew who murdered an Englishmen in revenge for the Dave Brown Cartoon of Ariel Sharon eating a Palestinian Child that appeared in the U.K newspaper ‘The Independent’ in January of 2003. Would the west have made excuses for Jews who murdered Iranians after Iran hosted a Holocaust Denial conference and a Holocaust Cartoon contest. Actually we know how the west reacted to this. A number of Western leftists actually attended the Holocaust denial conference, including Canadian Professor and admirer of Chomsky, Dr. Shiraz Dosa. In addition Westerners framed the Holocaust denial conference as ‘showboating’ or ‘standing up to the west’ or ‘shedding light on the injustice forced upon the Palestinians for the Holocaust.’ Professors such as Virginia Tilley went out of their way to claim that Iranian President Ahmedinjad didn’t really call for any harm to come to Jews or Israel. Her comments must be read to be believed:

‘Putting Words in Ahmadinejad’s Mouth’ by Virginia Tilley in Counterpunch.org on August 28th, 2006.
“every supposed quote, every supposed instance of his doing so, is wrong. The most infamous quote, "Israel must be wiped off the map", is the most glaringly wrong. ..According to Farsi-language experts like Juan Cole, what he actually said was "this regime that is occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time."
What did he mean?,Mr. Ahmadinejad was being prophetic, not threatening. He was citing Imam Khomeini, who said this line in the 1980s…
But what about his other "threats" against Israel? He said "There is no doubt: the new wave of assaults in Palestine will erase the stigma in [the] countenance of the Islamic world." "Stigma" was interpreted as "Israel" and "wave of assaults" was ominous. But what he actually said was, "I have no doubt that the new movement taking place in our dear Palestine is a wave of morality which is spanning the entire Islamic world and which will soon remove this stain of disgrace from the Islamic world." "Wave of morality" is not "wave of assaults." The preceding sentence had made clear that the "stain of disgrace" was the Muslim world's failure to eliminate the "occupying regime".
For months, scholars like Cole and journalists like the London Guardian's Jonathan Steele have been pointing out these mistranslations while more and more appear: for example, Mr. Ahmadinejad’s comments at the Organization of Islamic Countries meeting on August 3, 2006. Radio Free Europe reported that he said "that the 'main cure' for crisis in the Middle East is the elimination of Israel.”...According to al-Jazeera, what he actually said was "The real cure for the conflict is the elimination of the Zionist regime, but there should be an immediate ceasefire first."
Nefarious agendas are evident in consistently translating "eliminating the occupation regime" as "destruction of Israel". "Regime" refers to governance, not populations or cities. "Zionist regime" is the government of Israel and its system of laws, which have annexed Palestinian land and hold millions of Palestinians under military occupation. Many mainstream human rights activists believe that Israel's "regime" must indeed be transformed, although they disagree how. Some hope that Israel can be redeemed by a change of philosophy and government (regime) that would allow a two-state solution. Others believe that Jewish statehood itself is inherently unjust, as it embeds racist principles into state governance, and call for its transformation into a secular democracy (change of regime). None of these ideas about regime change signifies the expulsion of Jews into the sea or the ravaging of their towns and cities. All signify profound political change, necessary to creating a just peace.
A final word is due about Mr. Ahmadinejad’s "Holocaust denial". Holocaust denial is a very sensitive issue in the West, where it notoriously serves anti-Semitism. Elsewhere in the world, however, fogginess about the Holocaust traces more to a sheer lack of information. One might think there is plenty of information about the Holocaust worldwide, but this is a mistake… Skepticism about the Holocaust narrative has started to take hold in the Middle East not because people hate Jews but because that narrative is deployed to argue that Israel has a right to "defend itself" by attacking every country in its vicinity. Middle East publics are so used to western canards legitimizing colonial or imperial takeovers that some wonder if the six-million-dead argument is just another myth or exaggerated tale.
Still, Mr. Ahmadinejad did not say what the US Subcommittee on Intelligence Policy reported that he said: "They have invented a myth that Jews were massacred and place this above God, religions and the prophets." He actually said, "In the name of the Holocaust they have created a myth and regard it to be worthier than God, religion and the prophets." This language targets the myth of the Holocaust, not the Holocaust itself - i.e., "myth" as "mystique", or what has been done with the Holocaust… In any case, Mr. Ahmadinejad’s main message has been that, if the Holocaust happened as Europe says it did, then Europe, and not the Muslim world, is responsible for it.
Virginia Tilley is a professor of political science, a US citizen working in South Africa, and author of ‘The One-State Solution: A Breakthrough for Peace in the Israeli-Palestinian Deadlock’ (University of Michigan Press and Manchester University Press, 2005).
We live in a world dominated by Armstrongs and Tilleys. These people are little different than the Lady Evelyn Cobbold who in 1929 converted to Islam and made the Hajj to Mecca in 1933. They are converts to Islam already and yet they pass themselves off as scholars in the west writing ‘objective’ accounts of Islam. They are like Feisal Abdul Rauf who teaches Islam at the Center for Religious Inquiry at St. Bartholomew's Church and at New York Seminary. Like him, a Muslim teaching Islam at Christian institutions, they are Muslims as well.

The ADL’s rotten mistake
August 17th, 2007
Seth J. Frantzman

A bill is making its way through the U.S Congress that condemns the Armenian genocide. Who would oppose that, except Turkish nationalists? It turns out Jews oppose it. The Anti-Defamation League, B’nai B’rith, the AJC and the JINSA, some of the biggest and most influential Jewish organizations in the United States, have made it clear they oppose the bill. One of the organizations claims that the question of the Armenian genocide should be ‘settled by historians’. Abe Foxman, chief of the ADL, is one of the leaders in the Jewish community calling on Congress to take no action. He has claimed that the “Jury is still out on whether those massacres [Armenians] qualify as genocide” and he has further noted that “it is not the job of Congress to settle the question” of the Armenian genocide.

This seems pretty rich coming from someone who heads an organization that works to end anti-Semitism towards Jews and expose those who issue anti-Semitic statements or carry out such actions. When a professor such as Norman Finkelstien says “the jury is still out on the Holocaust” or “the question of the Holocaust is one that academics should settle” he is called a Holocaust denier and rightfully so. Iranian President Ahmadinjed has often said that ‘scholars’ should decide the extent of the Holocaust, rather than Jews or governments. But ‘scholars’ is usually a code-word for ‘scholars that agree with me.’ In Turkey, for instance, there are plenty of scholars who study Turkish and Ottoman history and not one of them has ever confirmed the Armenian genocide. This is because academics in Turkey are prosecuted for ‘insulting the Turkish state’ if they mention the Armenian genocide, or insinuate that there might have even been massacres of Armenians. Turkish academics are at the forefront of Turkish nationalism and they reject the Armenian genocide as slander against ‘Turkishness.’ There is nothing scholarly about such extremely nationalistic professors. Yet Foxman basically collaborates with them. Since the majority of academics studying Turkish history are Turkish and since most departments of Turkish studies in the United States are funded by Turkey and since any professors who studies Turkish history would be banned from the country should be mention the genocide, it is not surprise that the ‘scholars’ have decided mostly that no such genocide took place.

Imagine if Germany barred any professor who accepted the Holocaust as truth from doing research in Germany. Imagine if Germany bankrolled all departments of German studies in the United States and forbid those departments from mentioning the Holocaust. Imagine if German academics denied the Holocaust. All of a sudden we would find that there were far less professors studying the Holocaust. It is the German support for Holocaust studies and the opening of Nazi archives that have made that study progress. Turkish archives, by contrast, are closed for the period in question, 1915-1922.

What of Foxman’s strange claim that the issue of the Armenian genocide is not one for Congress to deal with? The U.S Congress supported the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. The U.S has supported the creation of an international Holocaust remembrance day. U.S public schools teach the Holocaust. Foxman has not complained when legislatures in France, Germany, Austria and elsewhere in Europe have made Holocaust denial a crime. So where was Foxman at the opening of the Holocaust museum to protest the interference of Congress in legislating the Holocaust? Where has he been all these years to tell us that Holocaust is a matter for ‘scholars’ such as Finkelstien and Chomsky.

The fact is that Foxman has been bought off, at least in part, by the Turkish lobby. This is not a conspiracy. Reports have noted that the Turkish government has met with Jewish groups in America to note that the Turkish cause dovetails with Israel and that Jews should support Turkey because Turkey has traditionally sheltered Jews and the Jews in Turkey even support Turkey in the matter of denying the genocide.

Those who support Israel and Israelis themselves often find themselves confused about the Armenian genocide because of fears that Turkey, as Israel’s only Muslim ally, might turn on Israel and the Jews should Jews voice too much interest in the genocide. But blackmail is not a good reason for people to deny history. This is seen often in Arab countries where minorities are encouraged to support national movements for fears of being called ‘traitors.’ In Egypt this is the case with the Copts, they are expected to not only stomach being called infidels but they are supposed to be in total denial about their suppression under Islam for 1400 years and the disappearance of their language, in order to not be called traitors by Egypt’s leaders. But the Jews are not Copts. There is no reason to deny the Armenian genocide.

What is worse is that there is no excuse to sit by while others deny it and thereby collaborate with the deniers. But Foxman is doing just that. Why didn’t Foxman just keep his mouth shut? Is he worried the Armenian Genocide will compete with the Holocaust(after all the anti-Israel writer at the Independent, Robert Fisk has tried to get people to refer to it as the ‘Armenian Holocaust’ or ‘The First Holocaust’)? No, that’s not the reason apparently. Foxman has a big mouth perhaps, he has apparently been convinced that it is somehow bad for the Jews if the Armenian genocide will be recognized. This baffles me. Does Foxman have similar fears about recognition of genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda and Sudan? No. That is why it is obvious it has much to do with Turkey. Some people have tried to draw parallels between the shrill condemnations of Israeli ‘ethnic-cleansing’ and ‘massacres’ and the accusations of Turkish genocide against the Armenians. Turks certainly feel this way. They say the Armenians were terrorists, like the Palestinians, and that the Armenians collaborated with Turkey’s enemies during the First World War, the way the Palestinians collaborated with Israel’s enemies, and that the deportation of the Armenians was the result, just as Palestinians fled Israel in 1948. Some supporters of Israel and Israelis have accepted this. They have accepted that the media inflated the Armenian massacres the way the media inflates the Israeli occupation to make it the ‘most brutal apartheid occupation in the world.’ But the situation of Israel and Turkey is not the same. Israel doesn’t deny its human rights violations or its history, it merely contests the extreme interpretations of them. By contrast in Turkey it is illegal to discuss the genocide. In Israel it is common for academics such as Kimmerling, Gordon, Zimmerman and Pappe to compare Israel to a ‘Nazi state’.

The ADL should be ashamed of itself for taking part in debating the Armenian genocide. The Armenians don’t comment on the Holocaust and nor should they. Many people would also write that its improper for the Jews to comment on the authenticity of the genocides of others because the Jews suffered a genocide. Many would say that the Jews should also be at the forefront of defending the victims of genocide, which is what Jewish activists did in Bosnia(for the wrong reasons) and have done in Darfur(for the right reasons). But I won’t say that. Its just wrong, period. Not because of Jewish history, but because of hypocrisy, sleaze, and collaboration with evil.





Seth J. Frantzman is a former aide to U.S Congressman Jim Kolbe, and is currently working on a Doctorate at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is the creator of the theory of Post-Humanism and a contributor to the Tucson Weekly.

Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem
Israel
sfrantzman@hotmail.com

The Business of Peace

Frantzman Weekly Newsletter 34
The Business of Peace

Seth J. Frantzman
June 15, 2007

Does the peace movement have a vested interest in wars and in encouraging conflict? Do all the documentaries and the ‘peace activism’ actually enflame tensions, harden stances and make people more hateful? Does the west colonize the minds of people through this?

The total numbers of ‘peace’ organizations is truly massive. There is a peace movie industry made up of films. There are student organizations such as the Union For Peace and Justice in the Middle East on almost every college campus in the West. There are numerous organizations devoted solely to ‘dialogue’. There is the money donated by NGOs to other NGOs in Israel. There are all the peace organizations that come to Israel such as the ISM and Anarchists against the Fence and Birthright Unplugged. There are the numerous Jewish groups that oppose the ‘occupation.’ There are all the Israeli organizations: the Committee against House demolitions, Peace Now, Women in Black, Machsom Watch, Planners for Planning rights, Architects for Peace, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, the Association Against Torture, Seeds of Peace, Gush Shalom, Rabbis For Human Rights, Yesh Gvul, New Profile, B’Tselem, Ta’ayush, Bat Shalom, the Alternative Information Center, the numerous centers devoted to peace and rights such as ADVA, Ahali, Arab Center for Alternative Planning, ADALAH, Al Awda, Al Haq, JCSER, JCW, Jerusalem Watch, Miftah, WCLAC, Badil.org, Passia.org. There are the UN organizations, there is TIPH(Temporary International Presence in Hebron). The Red Cross, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International. The workers and unions and socialist organizations. The faculty organizations. The women’s groups and Muslim groups. The church organizations such as the Mennonite group for Peace, the International Council of Churches, the Middle East Council of Churches, Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center in Jerusalem the Quakers, and many others.
A recent list from Haaretz that illustrated only a partial list of those organizations working to boycott Israel included the following groups, just in the U.K: Arab Labor Group, Association of the Palestinian Community in the U.K, Britain-Palestine All Party Parliamentary Group, Communication Workers Union, Friends of the Earth, Public and Commercial Services Union, the Green Party, Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions-U.K Branch(which reminds me of the PFLP-GC for some reason), Jewish Socialists Group, Jews Against Zionism, Jews for Justice for the Palestinians, Muslim Parliament of Great Britain, National Union of Mineworkers, Transport and General Workers Union, Council for Arab-British Understanding, Islamic Council for Human Rights and Jews for Boycotting Israeli Goods. I must reiterate, this is a partial list. The number of organizations just in England when one includes all the local chapters might be more than a thousand. And Ireland, Canada, France and the United States produce many more thousands, not to mention the ‘little’ anti-Israel countries where the campaigns are less well funded and smaller such as Italy, Sweden, Germany, Austria, South Africa and Belgium for instance.

The number of ‘peace’ and ‘justice’ organizations is simply staggering. In Israel there are special groups for Jewish-Arab architects, Jewish-Arab soccer teams, Jewish-Arab art work, Jewish-Arab judo. Beyond that there are organizations such as Seeds of Peace and dozens, if not hundreds, of community centers for Jewish-Arab cultural coexistence. Then there are all the Arab cultural groups such as Adalah, and the various professional peace groups already mentioned that includes Lawyers and Doctors(Doctors without borders). And all the newsletters published for ‘peace’ including the Palestine-Israel Journal and the Palestine Times.

If one could total it all up and it would be a near impossible task it would create a fascinating, diverse and massive list. If one were to add all the short lived coexistence groups and events, such as a ‘peace concert’ held in the summer of 2006 run by a Yeshiva student from Bat Ayin where half the money went to Lebanese harmed in the war, the number would balloon upwards. But it is not simply a matter of totaling up all the organizations. It is also a matter of estimating the total number of people employed and active in them. There may be today thousands of European settlers in Ramallah, the cultural and protest-European-activist center of the West Bank. The Rothberg international school at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem alone produces hundreds of activists each year, many of whome attend classes part time while working on various peace projects(I can recall the following students: Steve who worked with a Palestinian media organization called Searching for a Common Ground), Michael who made a film where Palestinians are asked to pretend they are Israelis and vice versa, Aksenia who was also involved in Palestinian media, Eve Sabbagh who worked on the ‘environmental affect of the Occupation’, some French girl who was studying the growth of Palestinian towns, Goldie who received a scholarship from a peace institute, and the list goes on).

This is the business of peace. Can we quantify it? How many active employees does this list include. The U.N alone employs tens of thousands of Palestinians, but even if we only include the ones working for ‘peace’ it is a large number. And there are a dozen different U.N organizations just in Jerusalem. How many westerners currently reside in the West Bank working full time for these organizations? How many are employed abroad.

This movement for ‘peace’ is not like the groups that opposed the Vietnam war. Those groups were grass roots groups without employees. They didn’t have offices and SUVs and computers. They didn’t have staffs, they were’nt professionals and they didn’t request that people have years of experience ‘working in the field’ in order to work for them. Those were groups made up almost solely of volunteers. Even as they grew more sophisticated, those organizations remained small and underfunded.

But the business of peace is a billion dollar project today. It is an immense organism whose overall number of employees and full time activists includes more people than the biggest corporations. It is as large as a small country and its financing outstrips the budgets of most African Countries. The Peace Lobby is gigantic.

But that must make one wonder. What if there was peace? What is the Peace Lobby’s ultimate goal? Is it peace? Does it not have a vested interest in conflict? Think of the media’s interest as well. Every newspaper that bases so many reporters in Jerusalem to document the ‘crises in the Middle East.’ And it is always a crises, even when its quiet. I see some of you saying: “but there is a crises in the Middle East.” But the crises ridden parts of the Middle East are not the ones where all the activism takes place. There are not activists in Gaza, in Iraq or in Nahr al Balad in Lebanon. The activists make sure to remain just outside of the danger(although for Rachel Corrie and John Hurndall, that was, oh so tragically, not the case). But do any of the ‘peace’ organizations actually show results. What is their net benefit? Is peace ever achieved in places dominated by such organizations? How many ‘natives’ are actually ever served by peace organizations? Don’t the peace organizations just exist for the sake of existing? What if all the money spent on ‘peace’ went instead into training local people to be accountants, doctors and business owners? What if it was invested in building manufacturing plants and training people to work in them?

The U.N has had a chance recently to colonize a few places and impose its version of ‘peace’ upon them. Kosovo, Haiti, Gaza, Southern Lebanon and East Timor are five examples. Those are the most chaotic places in the world. Their chaos and murder rates and terrorism is proportional to the amount of foreign Aid and U.N support: the more Aid, the more U.N workers, the more chaos and the less peace.

In the 1960s people used to say “what if they had a war and no one came?” But today the more interesting question might be “what if they opened a peace center and no one showed up?” In many cases this is precisely the fact. The dozens of peace organizations have budgets and little to show for it(http://www.law.emory.edu/IHR/is_pl.html, http://www.againstbombing.org/peacegroups.htm, http://peace.mennolink.org/articles/israelpeacegroups.html). They are self-masturbatory. They exist for the sake of existence. Their budgets are self-justifying. While it has never been shown that these peace centers actually produce terrorists, it has never been shown that the ‘graduates’ of places like Seeds of Peace actually are more peaceful and actually help the never ending ‘peace process.’ Additionally a number of peace activists actively encourage terror through their definitions such as ‘international law’, among them Hilary Rose who declared in the Manchester Guardian on May 26th, 2007 in an article ‘the Only Weapon Available’ that “today it is hard to see what weapons, other than the counterproductive, though legitimate, armed intifada (though legitimacy does not extend to suicide bombers killing civilians) the even harder pressed Palestinians have.” Baruch Kimmerling, a tenured Professor at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem declared on March 27th, 2001 in an article in Haaretz entitled ‘The Right to Resist’ that “the continuing circumstances of occupation and repression give them[the Palestinians], by any measure, the right to resist that occupation with any means at their disposal and to rise up in violence against that occupation. This is a moral right inherent to natural law and international law.” The Peace Lobby actively excuses and may in fact in some instances incite and educate for hate and terror and murder, only so that the same peace lobby can then help the ‘victims’ work towards peace, a peace they have helped so brutally shatter.

Is it a surprise, after all, that it is a never ending ‘peace process’ and the newspapers inform us ‘peace may never come’ and ‘peace has suffered another setback’ and ‘peace seems less likely now more than ever’ and the ‘conflict is even more impossible to resolve due to _______.” And whenever it appears that some issue that the peace lobby has fought for has been resolved, such as the disengagement from Gaza, the peace activists such as Virginia Tilley or Sue Blackwell change the definition of ‘occupation’ declaring that “Israel is still, according to international law, an occupying power of Gaza.” Its not a coincidence that the BBC website includes a list of the ‘obstacles to peace’ including the ‘Right of Return’, ‘Jerusalem’ and ‘Water’. Water is an obstacle to peace. Who knew? What did the water do? In the 1990s we were informed that Israel was stealing ‘Palestinian water’. The water jumped out of the ground and shouted ‘Salaaam’ and thus we knew it had an ethnicity(a similar although equally weird argument is that the U.S steals Mexican water by damming up the Colorado river).

Who attends all these peace workshops? In Israel the left wing Jews and the westerners attend them. The Arabs are made up of Arab nationalists and Islamists. In fact there is an entire village named Neveh Shalom that the peace lobby has built in Israel. A whole town of peace. The voting results from it were available in the newspaper after Israel’s last election and they show that the town voted for the most extreme Israeli leftist party, Meretz, and the most right wing anti-Israeli Arab parties. And the village is half Arab and half Jewish. That is what a peace organization is. That is what an inter-faith organization is. Anyone who has attended a peace rally or an inter-faith meeting knows that the only people who show up are lesbian priests, Rabbis for human rights and Imams trained in Saudi Arabia or from CAIR or the Muslim Students Association, which are both Islamist organizations. That’s interfaith. The Muslim-Jewish peace walks group in the U.S is another fascinating example. It is composed of religious Muslims who wear Muslim skullcaps and Muslim women in headscarves and Hijab and Jewish women from the reform and reconstructionist movement, the most ‘progressive’ and liberal forms of Judaism. It is no surprise the founders of the Peace walks, is composed of a male Muslim Imam and a female Rabbi. That is the model.

But let us remember another conflict that was ‘unsolvable’. Remember Northern Ireland. Remember the movies every American had to watch in the 1990s, The Crying Game, and In the Name of the Father. They were about Northern Ireland. But did the movies change Northern Ireland? Did the Catholic fundraising for the Irish Republican Army among the Irish in America lead to peace in Northern Ireland? Did all the peace organizations bring peace to northern Ireland? Who was it that sat down two months ago to organize the new government of Northern Ireland? Was it a bunch of peace activists? Guess again. Was it a leftist self hating Protestant and a right wing Irish-Catholic? No. It was Reverend Ian Paisley and Gerry Adams. The ‘Reverend’ should be a give away. Many of you will not recall Mr. Paisley, the large, Protestant religious leader who was responsible for organizing Unionist paramilitaries in Northern Ireland in the 1970s and 1980s. The man who was an ‘obstacle’ to peace. And who is Gerry Adams but a member of the IRA(his organization, Sien Fien is the ‘political wing’ of the IRA). It was the warriors who sat down. It took them to make the peace. It was the Ariel Sharon and the Yaser Arafat, not the Tom Segev and the Saed Erakat, not the Michael Moore, the George Soros and the Castro.

Peace organizations don’t like to hear it. They don’t to think that it is the average people and the right wing people that need to make the peace. They like to think that peace is made between self hating people and hateful people. Their model for peace is always the idea that the leftist-feminists should make peace with the Bin Ladens. But it’s the John McCains that should make peace with the Bin Ladens. Its the George S. Pattons that make peace with the Stalins.

Peace organizations have no impact. In fact the impact they have is negative, counter-productive and in many cases provokes and empowers the conflict, fanning the flames of hatred. Peace organizations would hate to fathom this idea. However the recent example of a ‘multi-cultural’ peace textbook for Israeli and Palestinian students is the perfect example. It tells two narratives to the two populations. For the Palestinian students a Palestinian narrative about their heroic struggle against apartheid and racism. For the Jewish students a narrative about brutal Jews ruining the lives of Palestinians while building their state. It is a recipe for raising a generation of Hamas followers. You can’t teach students extremist biased history in the name of peace. If you want peace you have to teach them self respect, dignity, honor for their heritage and some measure of understanding for others. That doesn’t mean self hatred. It doesn’t mean nationalism. In America it would mean teaching them that Paul Revere did his midnight ride and that the Geronimo was a great Indian leader. It means teaching them that Thomas Jefferson and Martin Luther King were both good leaders, not that King was like Jesus and Jefferson was a slave owning ‘honkie’.

Peace organizations exacerbate the conflict by colonizing it. They make the conflict their own and they perpetuate it. 90% of the information on Palestinians that is distributed to Palestinians by peace organizations is data collected by westerners. Most of the protests organized in the West Bank are organized by westerners. 99% of the funding for human rights and peace organizations comes from the west. The human rights organizations therefore create the conflict. They provide the maps and literary material and the studies. They even go so far as to fabricate history in order to make the conflict worse. In the Negev the ADVA center publishes western funded pamphlets on the Negev Bedouin. The ‘history’ of the Negev Bedouin now claims that the 49 ‘unrecognized’ Bedouin settlements in the Negev are pre-1948, that they predate the State of Israel. But they don’t predate the state. They are from the 1960s and 1970s. That isn’t a secret. Aerial photographs and army surveys never showed these 49 settlements in the 1940s or 1950s. But now you have a generation of Bedouin activists trained and educated by westerners and Jews to believe that their rights have been violated, that they are living on millions of dunams of land that they never lived on in the same manner before. This would be a little like educating Apache Indians that they had a claim to all of Arizona, when in reality their wanderings never exceeded the southwest portion of the state and even then they were a miniscule, albeit violent, tribe. The peace organizations educate for hate, not for peace. They tell Palestinians they will never be happy.

Think of the latest statement by the BBC on June 15th. The victory of Hamas from Gaza has severed Gaza from the West Bank politically and “this has destroyed the Palestinian’s dream of a unified state.” Really? What Palestinians dreamed of such a state? The Gazan fishermen? The Taibeh milkman? What the BBC meant was, it has destroyed the peace organizations dreams for a unified state. It has destroyed the western educated Palestinians’ dreams of a unified state, such as Saed Erekat, Rashid Khalidi, Sari Nusseibeh, Mohammed Dajani and the late Edward Said. It hasn’t destroyed the average person’s dreams. The peace organizations will now have to work doubly hard to convince West Bank Fatah members that Gaza is really part of Palestine. But it will indeed be westerners encouraging them. After all, who has encouraged the Palestinian refugees to believe in a ‘right of return’ for the last sixty years? The U.N and the west. The 100,000 Palestinians who never bother to move to refugee camps in 1949, such as John Sonunu’s family, don’t want to return to ‘Palestine’. They are happy in the U.S.A, The Caribbean, Latin America, Europe, Kuwait, Beirut and Amman. But the refugees whose trips to Israel to ‘see their villages’ are funded by the west, every aspect of their history and the teaching of it is funded by the west. Every part of their mythical and real history is funded and written by the west. They have no input. They exist to have their pictures taken, preferably women in headscarves with little children.

It is like the Africans who exist merely to appear on the webpages of Oxfam to encourage westerners to donate more money so that other westerns can keep working to raise money for Aid so that other westerners can keep their jobs distributing it. The westerners working in peace genuinely don’t care about peace, they care about getting another job, another resume builder, they care about having an entire career working for non-profits, its part of their career. A career of peace. It is an entire new economic sector in the world. It never existed before. The NGO sector. The new colonizing white westerner who has to ‘help’ the ‘other’ because the other can’t do it for himself, which is a racist and typically western assumption. Peace is racism, colonialism and arrogance. The assumption that other people can’t make peace without a westerner to sit at the table. Is it any surprise that the same white westerners appear in Cambodia to tell the Cambodians how to conduct war crimes trials, that it was a Norwegian white man who was telling the Sri Lankans how to make peace with the Tamils, that a Finnish white man runs Kosovo, that another white European person runs Bosnia, and that a white woman named Carla Del Ponte is in charge of hunting for ‘war crimes’ suspects in Serbia, that white people kidnapped Charles Taylor and brought him to Europe, because god-forbid, Africans should be allowed to kill their own dictators. Everywhere in the world you will see Europeans ‘educating’ the ‘natives’ about how to conduct peace. There is never an acceptance that true peace comes from allowing other people to make it for themselves, not jamming western ideas and western notions down their throats. But westerners have a knee-jerk reaction to go globetrotting around the world telling everyone else how to live, while at the same time pretending to ‘love the culture of the other’. One just wonders why westerners didn’t allow Pakistanis to come and advise the Peace Process in Northern Ireland? Why weren’t their Japanese people advising in Kosovo? Why isn’t their a Kenyan man to advise Spain on how to make peace with the Basques, don’t the Kenyans have great experience fighting Joe Kony’s Lords Resistance Army? Oh, but the West can’t take the advise of the Asians and Blacks to solve its ‘peace’ problems. So maybe the west should stop meddling in Asia and Africa’s affairs.

The Business of Peace not only creates conflict, it fuels identity politics and racism and hate and irredentism, Xenophobia. It prohibits peace. It always wants to dictate when and where and under what manner and under what conditions peace should be made. Is it a surprise there is an entire academic discipline now devoted to ‘conflict studies’ and ‘conflict resolution’.

It should remind us that in 1940, after the outbreak of the Second World War, the British Union of Fascists run by Oswald Mosley held a peace protest in London. A peace protest declaring that ‘Mosley wants peace’ and ‘England wants peace’. But what kind of peace would that have been? Peace is not an end all be all goal. It is not a financial entity, it is not an organization, it is not something that requires activists. Peace is partially a figment of the imagination, partially the result of genocide and the creation of homogenous nation states, the result of wealth and of extreme poverty. Peace is something that exists when there are no more peace organizations(just as today there are no organizations working for peace between France and Germany, and there never were any such organizations).

The current practice of disparate organizations and contests such as Red Cross’s Hebron Law Contest and MIT’s ‘Just Jerusalem’ that encouraged foreigners to redraw the borders of Jerusalem and propose how a ‘just’ Jerusalem should look, show the degree to which the NGO’s are actively involved in colonialism. Statements by a ‘Peace Palestine’ blogger named Artie Fishel(http://peacepalestine.blogspot.com/ ) are indicative of the mentality of the Peace Lobby: “I believe that the Palestinian people have the right to return to their homeland, and that Israel, in order to truly be a land that can call itself a democracy, has to abandon its character as a Jewish State, and become a State for all, from the Jordan to the Mediterranean. Only through Justice can there be peace,” These statements indicate the degree to which the Europeans and the westerners have never given up their colonialistic ideas that they must reshape the world in their image, whatever their current fad is(whether it is Nazism, Communism or Peacism). What will the world do when the last European realizes the world no longer cares what she thinks and doesn’t need the European to run her affairs and doesn’t need the European to redraw the maps of the world?

The west has elevated ‘peace’ to the status of an idol, of an ideology. Peace is the new word by which the west exercises neo-colonialism over the world, enslaving the world once again to the west, making the world beholden to the west. The U.N is the imperial instrument of the West and the billions of dollars spent on peace organizations is the west’s export of settlers to the world, to colonize the minds of people, to create the ‘viscous cycle’ of conflict so that more westerners will be required to help ‘stop the viscous cycle’. By opposing peace organizations and the U.N one is opposing colonialism and paternalism, one is struggling for freedom and resisting tyranny. There is no greater tyranny than having a foreigner tell someone how to live their lives and instructing someone about ‘justice’ as if people do not know justice when they see it.

If Islam conquered the Aztecs

If Islam conquered the Aztecs
Seth J. Frantzman
December 30th, 2006

Mel Gibson’s new film Apocalypto opens with the quote “great civilizations are never conquered from the outside until they have destroyed themselves from within.” This is an interesting beginning for a film depicting the destruction of a tribe, the selling its members into slavery, a heartless empire, human sacrifice, retained honor, family and in its closing scene the arrival in Mexico of Spanish Conquistadors.
The story is loosely based on the Aztec empire, whose massive capital city Tenochtitlan rivaled Madrid in size in the 16th century, and its relations with its neighbors. The 16th century apparently saw the height of this empire which was only destroyed by the arrival of the Spanish. However the film shows that cracks are forming in its facade, rampant deforestation and degradation of common workers into nothing more than slaves and the peoples endless thirst for slaves and sacrifice and blood have led to a corrupt bourgeoisie society of bloodthirsty superstitious people. The only remotely honorable members of its society are those warriors who go out into the ‘forest’ to find new slaves. For the tribes living near the empire, depicted in this film as truly half naked aboriginals although in truth they were only slightly less civilized and advanced in their building expertise and size of their metropolises than the Aztecs, the Aztec war machine is devastating. None are left alive. Increasingly a mysterious illness(perhaps smallpox imported by the conquistadors who have arrived on outlying islands decades prior) is causing death in the areas outside the Aztec capital.
Hernando Cortes, like Hernando De Soto, Cabeza De Vaca, Vasco De Gama, Christopher Columbus, Francisco Pizarro and his other near contemporaries was a man of low birth and reasonable humble beginnings in the middling classes of Europe, which as has been pointed out by many had a civilization only slightly more advanced than the Aztecs themselves. The first Europeans had set foot in today’s Mexico in 1518 and in 1519, with 600 men and 20 horses, Cortes was sent to conquer the new lands. Like the tale of so many of the nations of North America and elsewhere(say Australia and Africa and the Americas) in their relations with Europeans(as we say in parlance ‘indigenous’ or ‘native’ or ‘aboriginal’ peoples and the colonailistic-imperialists) the tragedy of the Aztecs bares a common thread. The Aztec king welcomed Cortes, soon a large number of Aztec notables were killed by the Spaniards, the Aztecs rebelled, the Spanish destroyed the Aztec capital city and killed many of its people, those not dead soon died of plague and only a remnant remained. The Spanish colonial system should hardly be called one for it consisted mostly of Spanish men producing large numbers of mestizo or ‘mixed’ children with indigenous women and of cutting off the hands of recalcitrant Indians and searching for gold. Before the haranguing of Bartolomé de las Casas, that the natives should be converted rather than crushed, enslaved and killed, there was very little ‘state building’ of a ‘colony’ in Mexico, but truly the building of an imperial province of New Spain.
Slavery was not new in the world and it was not apparently brought to the Americas by the Spanish, since the Aztecs and other Indian tribes also enslaved one another. However the imposition of Christianity was certainly one major aspect of Spanish role. Cortes was said to regard “the Church as the main instrument for the education of the Indian.” In addition, according to the Catholic Encyclopedia “the condition of the Indians, especially those of the Greater Antilles, was not a satisfactory one. The earliest Spanish colonists in America were not the choicest examples of their race, neither were they numerous enough to improve the country and its resources as fast as they wished. Hence it was that the Indians were pressed into service; but those of the Antilles were not fitted for labour. The Indians had endured such tragedies since the arrival of Columbus in 1492 and in Mexico since 1520. However they early on had the advocacy of Bartolomé de las Casas, a Dominican priest, who had arrived as a young man in Hispañola in 1502. “Everywhere he found abuses, and everywhere painted them in the blackest colours, making no allowances for local conditions or for the dark side of the Indian character. That the natives, owing to centuries of isolation, were unable to understand European civilization did not enter his mind. He saw in them only victims of unjustifiable aggression.” He had been one of the drivers behind the "New Laws", “with their amendments of 1543 and 1544, were a surprise and a source of much concern, especially in America. They did not abolish serfdom, but they limited it in such a manner that the original settlers (Conquistadores) saw before them utter ruin by the eventual loss of their fiefs.”(http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/03397a.htm)
It is interesting here to wonder about slavery. According to historical sources “Slavery had repeatedly been abolished, except in the case of prisoners of war and as a punishment for rebellion.” This is an interesting problem considering that Black slaves would be imported to the New World up into the 1860s, and would not fully be abolished until 2 million Americans had laid down their lives to end it and until the Anti-Slavery Society in London encouraged the British government to bombard the slave ports in west Africa and at Zanzibar in East Africa. However the Catholic Encyclopedia explains, in elliptical language that must be quoted here in full,
“The charge often made against Las Casas, that he introduced negro slavery into the New World, is unjust. As early as 1505 negroes were sent to the Antilles to work in mines. After that they were repeatedly imported, but without his co-operation. Besides, slavery was at that time sanctioned by Spanish custom and law. But the fact that he tolerated slavery in the case of negroes, while condemning Indian servitude, appears to us a logical inconsistency. It did not occur to him that the personal liberty of negroes and Indians alike was sacred, and that in point of civilization there was little difference between the two races. At a later period he recognized his error, but the cause of the Indians had so completely absorbed his sympathies that he did nothing for the black race.”
This is what happened in the Americas in the 16th century and after. Mel Gibson’s film seems to ask at least one question, among its many, namely whether the arrival of the conquistadors saved the Indians from themselves. Without giving away the final scene this film shows an ‘indigenous’ empire engaged in mass pollution and rape, slavery, and the thirst for blood, a literal empire of murder and terror. Perhaps in a strange way the arrival of the conquistadors and their ‘colonialism’ and ‘imperialism’ did indeed save at least a few Indians from the fate of those shown in the film. On the other hand the smallpox epidemic the Europeans brought with them accomplished in the end to a great extent what no Las Casas could ever prevent, the natural death of a vast majority of the native peoples of the Americas, at an alarming rate many times exceeding 90% of the peoples.
But what we can learn from this overall story is at least two things: Not all ‘indigenous natives’ were pure and ‘noble’ and not all Europeans were bloodthirsty colonialists. In some ways the case of the Aztecs is especially nuanced for it was an expanding empire that only stopped its destruction because a much larger empire defeated it. This is realism, not colonialism. The winners happened to be white, but for their skin color, there was nothing ‘racist’ implicitly about this relationship(the concept of Race had not been invented anyway by that period and wouldn’t be until the 1870s), they simply triumphed. Had things been differently, as many would hope today, the Aztecs would have discovered Madrid and enslaved its people(This is the question to eloquently asked in Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel, which itself is terribly flawed in its thesis that all human achievement is due solely to evolution and resources and has nothing to do with individual people or culture).
Modern Post-humanism post-modernist Liberal moral relativism has turned most of this story on its head. The Whites are implicitly racist and greedy and their race says it all, they are white and therefore bad. They destroyed a wonderful, exotic and beautiful and apparently ‘tolerant’ diverse, multi-cultural civilization that had no ideas of racism, called the Aztecs. Later the cynical Las Casas exploited the Indians in some roundabout way in order to apparently profit off of book sales in which he pretended to sympathize with them, and by freeing the natives he ushered in the importation of African slaves. He must have had one bad bone in his body, for instance perhaps he sanctioned some sort of idea that natives were different than Europeans, or perhaps he was over-sympathetic and therefore ‘racist’ because he thought the natives not able to make up their own minds, or he was ‘racist’ because of his skin color.
Later efforts to abolish slavery by the ‘bad’ anti-slavery society surely are seen today as mere cynical manipulation of the all-notorious media in order to cast a bad light on ‘peaceful’ Islam and those anti-slavery advocated like Henry Morton Stanley and David Livingston only pretended to free slaves while secretly amassing great fortunes at the expense of the ‘poor’ Arab slave traders operating in the interior of Africa in the 19th century. Thus all British anti-slavery was itself racist for it dared to challenge the right of Arabs to enslave Blacks and since Arab culture was deeply entwined with slavery and since slavery is not ‘racist’ when Islam is involved in the slave trade because Islam is never ‘racist’ therefore it was ‘racist’ for colonialistic white Europeans to end slavery.
In the end even anti-slavery efforts in the Americas are chalked up to greed and evil because Abraham Lincoln is said to be a ‘racist’ and because the Civil War was not about slavery, despite the fact that it was the cause, but really about states rights and perhaps the greed of the northern factory owners who opposed the southern agrarians. Moral Relativism further tells us that we must never judge slavery in ‘other’ societies because that is part of culture, as is human sacrifice and gang rape or other such things, nevertheless even though slavery was apparently intertwined with Southern Culture in antebellum America, this is said to obviously be a great blight on the history of western civilization, which is inherently racist anyhow.
But if we step back from these two views of history, and after all there is not truth in history since all history is ‘interpretation’ we must than ask a more interesting question. What if Islam had conquered the Aztecs? After 9/11 in most American Universities and even high schools and in American intellectual culture Islam became a ‘religion of peace’ and a ‘tolerant’ religion that was ‘perverted by a few people who don’t represent Islam, anymore than Timothy McVeigh represents Christianity’. In addition Islam needed to be understood so that Americans would not once again walk down their oft-too-traveled road of racism(which is inherent and natural to them apparently) and a new term was coined, ‘Islamophobia’. This term was coined so that Islam could be the new victim, the new gays, who had been victimized by the much maligned ‘Homophobia’, and the new blacks, Islam and Muslims and especially Arabs were seen as the most discriminated against members of American society, and perhaps European society as well. The news-media never again showed the reels of Arab Palestinians dancing in the streets of Gaza, that had been aired on 9/11 and the footage taken that day(despite conspiracy theories to the contrary) and the media began phasing out the word ‘terrorists’ and ‘war on terror’ because of the idea that ‘terrorist’ might be taken to mean ‘Muslim’ or ‘Arab’. Then the word ‘Islam’ and ‘Muslim’ was banned from use when describing the war in the Sudan, Nigeria, Thailand or Russia or other places where Muslim movements were involved in terrorism or insurgency against countries. The religion of peace had certainly won the linguistic war. Most students at University were encouraged to take classes on Islam, Korans and the understanding of them were distributed at one college campus and a few high schools began having ‘Muslim week’ where students were encouraged to go on a ‘Jihad’(which as we are reminded everyday has a ‘lesser’ and ‘greater’ side to it, the ‘greater’ being the ‘inner Jihad’ against ones own sins), dress like Muslims and go on the Hajj. Islam had indeed won.
Part of the new chalice of Islam that everyone had to drink from after 9/11 was the persistent theory that Islam was neither racist, sexist, colonialistic or intolerant. The great departments of Middle Eastern Studies, mostly funded by the same Saudi Arabians who funded the 9/11 hijackers and fund most mosques and proselytizing in the west, were quick to remind everyone of these five pillars of Islam that differentiated itself from the West.
But what if Islam conquered the Aztecs? We have a number of scenarios that might have played out because we know of other places Islam conquered. If these campaigns are recalled correctly they are: North Africa, Persia, Anatolia and the Middle East in the 7th, Spain in the 8th century, Africa in the 10th, India in the 11th, Eastern Europe in the 15th and lesser campaigns which secured East Asia and Indonesia in the 18th and Central Asia and the Caucuses and Ukraine in the 16th and 18th respectively.
If we collate these comparisons we can come to some conclusions about how things might have worked out in Aztecia(the authors own word for the Aztec empire and neighboring areas). As in North Africa and Spain, where an indigenous population of Berbers and others thrived, the native people would have been enslaved when they resisted in battle. As at the siege of Famagusta, Constantinople or Thessalonica(Salonika) some of the inhabitants of great cities would have been sold into slavery almost in total. As in East Asia major cities like Samarkand were reduced to nothingness as a ‘slave levy’ was forced upon them following capitulation, the ‘levy’ included all men between the ages of 14-40 and all women from 13-35, thus meaning there would be few people left to procreate a new civilization. It is not known if Islam would have brought with it viruses such as small pox, however either way the city of Tenochtitlan would have been laid waste to some extent and new governors, Arabs presumably, sent to govern it. For a while, perhaps a few centuries as in North Africa and elsewhere, large numbers of non-Muslims would dwell in the countryside. In times of great spirituality roving bands of Sufis and dervishes might have gone down to the native villages and encouraged converts. Needless to say natives, viewed as ‘pagans’ and thus un-believers under Islam would have been treated harshly and their holy buildings destroyed and looted as was the case in India during the raids of Mohammed of Ghazni in 11th and 12th centuries. If a particular virulent, extreme or intolerant ruler came to govern the province he might launch a Jihad or ‘crusading holy war’ to whipe out heresy among the natives. Those natives who converted would rarely rise to high positions because there would be great suspicion that they were not ‘real Muslims’ who are usually regarded as those Arabs who might have been companions of Mohammed. However large numbers of native women who had been enslaved would be sold to local Arab landlords who would then give birth to mixed children and those children, free under Islamic law, would sometimes have the chance to rise high. Native men who converted to Islam and were pressed into slavery, many times captured at a young age by a slave raid out from the Aztec capital, now named Islamistanbul, might rise to high rank in the army. The Army itself would, after a few centuries probably be composed, as it was in Iraq and in Eastern Europe after a few hundred years of Muslim rule, would be composed mostly of native stock, most probably Mayans who had not been decimated in the original conquest of the Aztecia. The universe of new Arabia, as the America would have been called, would have been quite diverse, blacks would have arrived from Zanzibar, Arabs, Turks, and even Indian Muslims and some European traders, granted rights to trade out of the benevolence of Islam as they were in the Ottoman empire, would have filled the cities. In the countryside, ever readying for a time when Islam might seem weak, a larger mass of native stock, some converted to Islam and some still professing the native religion and some in between, would be hoping for salvation. Perhaps, as happened among Christians in Spain in the 10th century and in Eastern Europe in the 15th, some of their religious leaders might openly criticize Islam and invite execution for heresy. One leader might dare to spit on a mosque or call Mohammed the ‘son of Satan’ and thus be skinned alive at the Great Mosque in Islamistanbul, and he might note in his last seconds of life that the mosque was built atop the ruins where once stood the great temple of the sun, where virgins had been sacrificed to the gods. Virgins, captured as slaves would still be paraded down the streets, now for sale at the local slave market. The top Muslim clergy, made up of purer stock Arabs imported from abroad would preach form the madrasa attached to the great mosque about the savageries of the natives and how Islam had brought civilization and enlightenment from their jahaliyah or ignorance, just as Islam had done in Arabia. Needless to say there would be no Muslim lay preacher speaking out against slavery and servitude and the beatings of slaves or claiming that all the practices of the conquering Muslims had been wantonly cruel, Islam had never produced such a person that we know of anywhere in all its history.
This would have been the world of Mexico had it been conquered by Islam. Later books would be written in the west describing how the ‘servitude system of Islamic Mexico’ was freer and more tolerant and egalitarian than the similar system practiced in North America. In addition it would be pointed out that the system of Islamic slavery was not ‘racist’ because it did not discriminate by skin color. Writings would later show that in fact the early history if Islamic Mexico had been more tolerant than some thought, that slave raids were in fact a product of capital and commerce, not Islamic in nature and writing would mostly accept the Islamic interpretation that the pre-Muslim peoples of Mexico were savage, brutal and evil. When a few natives achieved independence from Mexico and went on to butcher the Muslim colonizers, as happened in India and Serbia, the literature would show that they were the truly intolerant ones. Later Orientalism would claim that no non-Muslim Mexican history of Mexico was acceptable because an outsider cannot understand the ‘other’ and thus only the majority Muslim Mexican can understand his or her own society. Thus upper-class Muslims in Mexico, mostly of Arab ancestry, would write the history of Mexico and chronicle the glorious exploits of its conqueror, Abdul Kadim, and how its people were saved from themselves by the arrival of benevolent, not racist, tolerant Islam. Eventually all history of the pre-Muslim Aztecs and Mayas would be pushed aside so that only their few surviving Temples, that had not been turned into mosques or razed to the ground as ‘divil worshipping sites(as was the case in India was many Hindu Temples), would be left as relics and one day a fanatical movement rebelling against the ‘secular’ Islamic government in Mexico would dynamite most of the last remaining temples or at least try to(as was done in Afghanistan with the Bamiyan Buddhas and attempted in Egypt). When a few natives requested the right to pray at the ruins of their temple, now the ‘great Mosque’ in the capital city and also the forth most holy site in Islam where bones belonging to one of the companions of ‘the prophet’ had recently been miraculously unearthed(as was done at Nazareth in 1998 and in Istanbul/Constantinople and Ayodha in India, and of course in Jerusalem), an international court of inquiry would be established to decide how much of the ruins, how many stones to be exact, the native people could actually claim as their own. Later rioting Muslims, who had been told in the press that the natives represented a ‘crusader infiltration’ and wanted to destroy the great mosque, would attack the natives who wanted worshipping rights and the natives would be arrested for ‘provocation’(as has happened in Jerusalem to Jews, in Nazareth to Christians, in Ayodha to Hindus and Constantinople to Christians). Of course Islamic law would apply to Mexico so that men might marry four women and divorce them at will while they would relatively no rights to divorce and so that Muslim men might marry non-Muslim women but it would be forbidden for a native men to marry a Muslim woman without converting(as is the law in all Muslim countries including ones with minorities such as Malaysia and the Palestinian authority). Later a Mexican Muslim terrorist would be implicated as the 12th hijacker on 9/11, arrested in August of that year by mistake, he would be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. He would claim that ‘allah the merciful had guided my hand to fight the un-believers’ and be sentenced to life in prison, while news-media and Noam Chomsky would caution viewed to not confuse his statements with ‘genuine Islam’.

If Islam had conquered Mexico its first years would not have been any different than the arrival of the Spanish. Eventually there would have been noticeable differences particularly in the use of slaves. Depending on how things worked out it might have ended up that in particularly dense jungle areas of Oaxaca large Indian populations practicing their native religions might have held out, however in most Muslim history whereas Christian and Jewish populations have held out and dwindled over hundreds of years, only in South and East Asia have non-Muslim populations survived Muslim conquest. Slavery would have remained legal up into the late 19th century and would only have been abolished at the behest of the west. Never would any Muslim have come along to champion rights of ‘native peoples’ for that never happened in Muslim history. Conversion to Islam probably would have taken longer for Islam usually acted as a conquering religion without straying outside cities, hence the large numbers of minorities in Muslim India and Eastern Serbia, and even in Turkey up to the close present. However the end result would have been the same, any place that remained Muslim for more than 400 years eventually became almost 100% Muslim. In terms of the supposed upward mobility of the slaves there might have been some differences but not substantial. Ironically the Spaniards mirrored Muslims in their treatment of natives women, by bedding so many they produced many offspring. There would have been one real difference. For the most part the army of new Spain did not employ native auxiliaries and never had the idea, as the Ottomans did, to kidnap natives and train them as elite fighters. Thus they relied on imported Spanish blood or Mestizos to fight for them. Only in Brazil is there a parallel where the Paraguayan war of 1860-63 was fought by Brazil mostly with blacks, who proved to be better and hardier fighters than Indians. Thus large numbers of blacks, perhaps originally slaves and then former slaves were pressed into the army. This was also true in Belize where blacks formed much of the armed forces and in places such as Trinidad and Tobago blacks formed much of the armed forces rather than the Indian(from India in this case) population. But this was an aberration. In terms of overall ‘diversity’ there is no evidence that Muslim places really were more ‘diverse’ for the European and colonial capitals of old were places for many people to come together. Mexico and other South American states have a long history of diverse immigrant populations such as Italians, Turks, Arabs and Germans.
The irony is that only the historiography would differentiate between Spanish Mexico and Islamic Mexico in terms of what ‘really’ happened. Spanish Mexico is judged as negative because it is associated with the west and colonialism and racism and the destruction of native peoples. Islamic Mexico, had it existed, would surely have ended up as Islamic Turkey, or Islamic India or Malaysia, or Zanzibar or Muslim Spain or Ottoman Eastern Europe or Muslim Indonesia, it would have been viewed as a positive history of ‘tolerance’ and ‘diversity’ and it would mostly be seen as a natural development of a native people rather than colonialism. This is why books about the Crusades see them as ‘European colonialism in the Middle Ages’(as is chronicled in the book by Joshua Prawer, ‘The Crusader's Kingdom: European Colonialism in the Middle Ages’ which argues that “Interposed between the fall of the Roman Empire and the great Age of Discovery, the Crusades represented the opening chapter of European expansionism and were forerunners to the colonial movement that changed the course of world history..throws new light on the origins of colonialism and the nature of a colonial empire.”). Islam is not seen as ‘colonialistic’ or ‘racist’ or ‘imperialistic’ for the sheer Post-Humanist reason that it is the ‘other’ and the other can never rival the inherently flawed west in its crimes. Thus any imposition that perhaps there was no ‘golden age of Muslim Spain’ where Christians and Jews, despite there dhimmi status, supposedly were living in a perfect utopia. Perhaps there was no exotic glory to Constantinople or Salonika, as recently chronicled by two books, Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews 1430-1950 by Mark Mazower and Constantinople: City of the World's Desire, 1453-1924 by Phillip Mansel. In addition other books paint glowing pictures of Islam as it ruled over other cities and their minorities such as When Baghdad Ruled the Muslim World: The Rise And Fall of Islam's Greatest Dynasty by Hugh Kennedy. Muslim Spain is glorified in The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain by Maria Rosa Menocal.
What we are talking about here is two things. On the one hand we have the cynicisizing of all things western, every aspect of western history, ancient forays by westerners into Africa are seen as ‘racist’ despite the fact that the very word ‘race’ denoted something akin to ‘nation’ today without the ethnic stereotypes it has today. In addition ancient holy wars of the west, such as the crusades are seen as ‘precursors to colonialism’. By this logic the Athenian expedition to Syracuse in the 5th century B.C is surely also part of the colonialistic nature of the west. So the west’s history is critiqued to death, denigrated and every action seen as inherently manipulative, conspiratorial and ill-meaning. Even those in western history who seemingly live beyond their times and have great prescience such as the ‘freedom of man’ of Jefferson and Lincoln, or freeing of slaves and recognition of natives as ‘human’ such as Las Casas are castigated as nothing more than enlightened bigots.
At the same time that every scene in western history is seen in a shade of black, every scene in the history of Islam is scene in beauty and exoticism. A slave market in Richmond Virginia has the stench of evil and vile whereas the slave market in Baghdad is full of flavor, with scents and scenes of majesty, beautiful flowing robes and a great magnitude of people from all the world. All imbedded inside a romantic bizarre. In short, western writing on Islam has not progressed since Lawrence of Arabia, in fact it has gotten worse so that it is mere caricature. In addition new theories such as moral-relativism and Orientalism tell westerners it is not even proper to write about other cultures. This is part of one of the great charades and lies of the present period.
It does a disservice not only to the west but also to others. It tells Islam: “you are too emotional to confront your own history so you shouldn’t be held to our standards and in fact you are the most romantic wonderful thing, the true ‘other’ of our imagination.” It tells the west that “there is not truth in history, all things are cultural and you westerners have been responsible for much of the evil that has taken place and much of the evil that exists today such as terror is your fault.” It tells the non-western and non-Muslim, such as the Hindu that “your history does not matter however if you hate Muslims then you are just like the former racist westerner and your society should be tolerant.” Thus history is completely obscured. There is no history. India is a perfect example of this. At Ayodha an ancient Hindu temple was paved over by a mosque. The modern Hindu party, BJP, wants the site back. The secular state said no so the mob tore it down. This mob was condemned across the world as ‘intolerant, a terrible racist underbelly of Indian society, a disgusting cynical group of people manipulating Hinduism, which previously was so tolerant.’ Ironically in Jerusalem in 1929 when a similar rumor spread among the Muslims that the Jews were going to destroy the Mosque at the Temple mount the Muslims killed hundreds of Jews in the city of Hebron. Magically the Jews were condemned for ‘instigating and provoking the Muslims” just as the Pope was condemned in the summer of 2006 for causing Muslim violence by ‘offending Muslims when he called them violent.’ Serbian nationalism, which had it been Islamic would be called ‘anti-colonialist’ was widely condemned in the west as the ‘new Nazism’ and the west went to the Muslim’s aid in Bosnia and Albania. The irony here is that the Serbs were condemned for being the ‘perennial victim cynically manipulating history so that the power elite such as Milosevic could wage ethnic cleansing upon innocent Muslims.’ It was odd that here in this instance the people who had been colonized by the Ottomans, the Serbs, since the 16th century were now condemned for being ‘victims’ and ‘whining’. They were said to be ‘expert victims’ always manipulating their history, the battle of Kosovo Polje, for negative purposes. Strangely when Muslims rioted in Jerusalem against the ‘Zionists and the Crusaders’ they were not seen as ‘manipulating history’, and when they spoke of the colonialism they had suffered at the hands of the crusaders no one castigated them for complaining and having a long history. The fact the Bin Laden whined about Muslim Spain being retaken by the aptly named reconquista was not said to be a ‘cynical manipulation’. Instead the response among western intellectuals was to claim he had ‘very real grievances’.
Somehow though non-Muslims in Muslim countries, non-Muslims who have formerly been colonized by Muslims or Muslims of other ethnicities in Muslim countries are not said to have any decent grievances and Islam is never interpreted as being colonialistic(only in a recent book by Efraim Karsh entitled Islamic Imperialism which doesn’t include half the subjected discussed here).
Let us try and add up all the places currently not covered by modern academics: All of Eastern Europe including the Greeks, Bulgars, Rumanians and Serbs, as well as the Albanians who were not all converted to Islam. Southern Russia including the Tartars, Chechens(before they converted), the Armenians, Ukrainians and Georgians, Modern Turkey, including the people who no longer exist: the Pontic Greeks, Armenians, Assyrians and Greeks, the former people of Iraq, the Assyrians and Chaldeans who are Christian, the Kurds, the Maronites, the Alewites, the Christian Arabs of Palestine, the Copts, the Berbers, the former Christians who were all disappeared in North Africa in the 12th century, the African blacks of Sudan, the Ethiopians, the Blacks of east Africa, the Nubians of Egypt, the Zaroastrians of Persia/Iran, the Bahais and the Jews of Iran, the Sikhs and Hindus of India and Pakistan, who now no longer exist in Pakistan, the numerous native peoples of the Caucuses and Central Asia and Siberia, the numerous peoples of Southeast Asia, the Chinese of Indonesia, the Buddhists of Malaysia and the Chinese of Malaysia, the Africans and non-Muslims of sub-saharan west Africa and numerous other people who simply do not exist anymore because of Islam. Far be it from us to remember that the reason there are Bamiyan Buddhas, or were until the Taliban destroyed them, in Afghanistan is because before Islam Buddhism was the religion of the Afghans and the hill tribes of Pakistan such as the Waziris, Baluchis and Pathans had their own religions.
However history has conspired to deprive us of these stories. Histories of Central Asia for some reason begin in the 8th century with the arrival of Islam such as the one by Svat Soucek, histories of the ‘Arab Peoples’ begin with the 7th century and Islam, such as the one by Albert Hourani. Histories of north Africa invariably also begin with the Muslim Spain, as do histories of Turkey and Spain and the rest of the Middle East. Indian histories very quickly fast forward to the arrival of Islam or the first incursions of it in the 11th and 12th centuries. In addition histories of cities like Constantinople, Smyrna and Salonika invariably begin with, inexplicably due to their long history, with the Ottoman conquest. All other history of these regions, such as Egyptian, Persian, Mesopotamian, Spanish, Anatolia(Turkey) and elsewhere are usually referred to as ‘Classical’ or ‘Biblical’ or ‘antiquities’. How it is that everything before Islam, even in the west, has taken on the title as ‘before’ as it is called in Islam Jahaliyeh or ‘the time of ignorance’ is strange. New histories of South Africa invariably date ‘independence’ from 1994, as histories of Zimbabwe date it from 1980, and it is in this style of dating, the inevitable granting of the benefit of the doubt to a certain peoples interpretation of history that is a crime.
Moral Relativism would have us believe all interpretations are equal. If this were true than the Coptic interpretation or the Assyrian or the Armenian or the Jewish would not be shunted aside in favor of the Islamic view of history. In addition neither would the Hindu or the Serbian. However something strange happened along the way and it was this juncture that turned moral-relativism into Post-Humanism. The difference is that the latter believes not only that all interpretations and cultures are equal but that the ‘other’ is in fact better and more pure and that in the chance that the west is confronting a given civilization, such as Islam, then that interpretation is above the west’s and above all others. How else to explain that the west has allied its interpretation of Hindu India to the Muslim view, rather than the Hindu one? The Post-Humanist has a mantra and it is not just that Islam is a ‘religion of peace’ and ‘tolerant’ and ‘not racist’ but also that there is no ‘clash of civilizations(the famous Huntington thesis)’ but an alliance of civilizations. Nonetheless it invariably accepts one civilizations view of the world. Therefore it has plenty of sympathy for Islamists, wherever they should appear, whether it is Indonesia, Africa, the Middle East or Europe but very little sympathy for native cultures such as African Blacks, Assyrians, Copts, Serbs or Hindus. This is a strange situation where the vast majority of the intellect of the west is involved in supporting religious fanaticism and colonialistic doctrines but it may be no surprise.
Despite the claim that the west and the leftist supports ‘diversity’ this is mostly a lie for the true Post-Humanist supports Islam and Islam is the opposite of diversity but rather it is homogeneity. One must only look at the laws of Muslim countries or Saudi Arabia to see the end result of Islam, which is no diversity whatsoever. In addition the Post-Humanist also argues that the most diverse countries need to be ‘more tolerant’ hence the reason Russia, the United States, India, Israel and the U.K are cited as ‘racist’ countries that need more work on their ‘diversity’ and ‘acceptance’. Countries that are almost 100% homogenous, such as Japan, Saudi Arabia and Finland, are seen as invariably not-racist, despite the obvious opposite conclusion of logic. Hence pre-war Poland, which had many Jews and Germans, was described as ‘racist’ whereas post-war Poland, which had no Germans and a handful of Jews, was called ‘tolerant’. How it is that a country whose people had blood on their hands from the Holocaust and many of whome participated in post-war pogroms, such as at Jielce, were not called ‘racists’ is beyond description. The same can be observed in Serbia and India and Israel. In each case these countries had large minorities whereas their neighbors did not, Pakistan forced all the Sikhs and Hindus out, Croatia killed all the Serbs and Jordan had no non-Muslims, however it was Israel, India and Serbia that were and are described as ‘racist’.
Thus the post-humanist collaborates with the Islamist in order to destroy diversity and re-write history. It is a strange collaboration, on the one hand rabidly pro-homosexual marriage, irreligious, against abortion and the death penalty and on the other semi-fascist, extremely religious and all for the death penalty for homosexuals and practitioners of abortion. However in the conceptualization of history and ‘right and wrong’ is where the alliance lies.
Imagine a world where instead of this history was built on actual fact. Imagine a history that told the truth about slavery in all societies. Where slavery and human sacrifice was not white-washed but shown for what it was. A history where rather than applying outmoded words like racism and colonialism there was a description of what took place and possible comparison to other examples. If such a situation existed one might readily compare the policy of the conquering Spaniards in 1519 to the conquering Ottomans in 1453 in their parallel treatment of native peoples. One might learn much about how the world has functioned in the past. Instead history has indeed ended, not in the Francis Fukuyama sense, but in the sense that it no longer encapsulates what actually took place. In order to read between the lines one must read a text on the crusades and edit out all the judgments pushed upon the protagonists and one must read a book on Salonika and embellish a little then they are treated to only 2 mentions of slavery out of a book of 400 pages(imagine a history of Richmond, Virginia that didn’t mention the role of slavery in that society). The historian is no longer such but rather a warrior at the ramparts of truth, forced today to spend most of his time sifting through lies rather then learning anything new. He is forced into a terrible all consuming battle with half-wits and intellectual animals whose wicked distortions have all but obfuscated the past.