Apologies for the shortness of this newsletter,
I am traveling in the U.S.
Ethnocentrism or liberalcentrism(Ethnonetralism)
September 16th, 2007
Seth J. Frantzman
A big theme of many books that discuss history is the question of ‘ethnocentrism.’ Just glancing at a recent history of Maine entitled ‘The Pine Tree State from Prehistory to he Present’ one is greeted with a discussion of the wicked ‘old’ history of Maine in which ‘ethnocentric’ Europeans viewed the various Maine Natives as one ‘tribe’ rather than a vast collection of bands and federations with all the nuances. Surely it is true that the first white historians of the Indians of Maine did classify them differently. But one might also remark on the fact that at least they took the time to classify them and record their existence and habits and culture. They could have just done what Islam did to all the minorities of the Middle East and exterminate them as ‘heathens’ and never record their existence.
In fact most of the Indians were killed anyway through disease and war. But what is wrong with a little ethnocentrism here and there. The Indians were also ‘ethnocentric.’ After all didn’t they call the Europeans ‘white eye’ or any number of nicknames. They didn’t spend time setting up universities to study all the inequalities and differences between the Europeans who invaded their world. Did they understand the difference between the puritan culture of John Adams and the patrician culture of Thomas Jefferson? No. Should they have? No.
The theory of liberalcentrism would make us believe we must understand other cultures better than they understand themselves. Liberalcentrism doesn’t really negate ethnocentrism, it merely replaces it with a new set of values modeled on another western view of the world. The liberalcentric view classifies Indians in a new way. It creates new rules about what a tribe is and what defines a tribal group. It labels certain places ‘cult centers.’ But the Indians didn’t call anything a ‘cult center.’ The models provided by anthropologists are just as arrogant and ridiculous, more so, than the ones contrived by the Europeans of the 19th century. If anyone reads an anthropological account or an archeological account of the Indians of North America they are treated to a whole litany of terms for these poor people that the people never used for themselves. Once again the westerner is applying his view, except now it is under the guise of academia and the liberalcentric worldview, rather than the ‘bad’ white ethnocentric worldview.
But what does the liberal base many of his assumptions and study on? He reads the old ethnocentric history and creates new models opposing it. But he uses the same source material. Rarely does he consult the native.
The truth is that ethnocentrism was honest. It was also better than the liberalcentric model. Every culture is ethnocentric and it should be. Why should it strive so had to understand others more than they understand themselves? The liberalcentric worldview is at the root of the liberal’s embrace of Islam. Liberals speak of knowing the ‘real’ Islam. They say things like ‘Islamic terrorism is based on a misreading of the Koran.’ But who’s misreading? The liberal claims to know the Koran better than the wisest Imam of Arabia. He claims to know that Islam is inherently peaceful. He claims to know that feminist Islam and Sufi Islam are the ‘real’ Islam. Liberals like Karen Armstrong imagine a Mohammed of peace who may have married a six year old but did so out of charity. It is the liberalcentric worldview that has allowed this fabrication to take place. But perhaps its time to let others speak for themselves and to be known by their actions rather than always allowing the liberal in his ivory tower to tell us how to classify and model the behavior of others.
Ethnocentrism is not racism. It is the response to a liberalcentric world. We do not want a world in which we must know others better than we know ourselves, in which our religion is replaced by world religions, in which we go to mosque before we go to our own place of worship. We do not want to know the ‘other.’ Let him remain the other. Let him remain diverse. Let us stop quoting Islamic law to the Muslim. Let the Maine Indians stay what they were in the 19th century, before they had ‘cult centers’ and all manner of models that were not their own.
It’s Ramadan in America
September 16th, 2007
Seth J. Frantzman
Its Ramadan again in America. The New York Times reminds us on its second page. PBS has a special program on it featuring an American woman who has converted to Islam. Who better to introduce us to Islam and Dhimmitude than one of our own. Her silky white liberal voice comes through the radio beckoning all of us to convert. She speaks of feminism and misogyny, and all these liberal terms, and then she speaks of god, that decidedly unliberal concept. But the leftists at PBS lap it up. When a Muslim speaks of god it is wonderful. When Jerry Fallwell spoke of God they grimace. The brilliance by which leftist-liberal women convert to Islam shows the true genius of Islam. Islam should appeal to men, since it is a religion of, by and for men. A religion with polygamy, like Mormonism. A Religion where a woman’s testimony is half a mans. A religion where beating your wife and murdering others are central tenants of the faith. Is it a surprise that this is the religion of the left? Communism and Nazism wee just such religions.
There will be no New York Times picture and special for the beginning of a Hindu holiday this year. There will be no interview with a Hindu or a Sikh on PBS this year. There will certainly be no interview with a Chabad Rabbi before Yom Kippur. But Avraham Burg is writing from Europe telling us all that Europe should be ‘impregnated with Islam’ and that Jews should encourage the Islamification of Europe because Muslims are the new ‘other’ of Europe and encouraging their acceptance would be to have Europeans do for Islam what they did not do for the Jews and other minorities. The idea is clear. Jews should help Europeans love Islam because Europeans didn’t love Jews. That way the mistakes of the past will not be repeated. So Islam must benefit from the suffering of Jews. Avraham Burg is a genius on the level of PBS.
Sunday, September 16, 2007
Sunday, September 9, 2007
Terra Incognita 4
Here are this weeks three articles below and attached. The full articles appear below these short abstracts.
1) A Jewish Heresy. The Functionalist school of Holocaust historiography argues that it was the ‘machine’ of Nazi bureaucracy that led to the Holocaust, not Hitler or any of the people involved. This idea was first broached in 1961 by Hilberg and has been elaborated upon by Arendt and Sivan, and they are all wrong.
2) What is wrong with ‘International Law?’ International law is a scam. It was created by Europeans for Europeans and it cannot be applied to the world. Here is one example why.
3) Kaffir! The word Kaffir is the same as the word Nigger. But the media presents it as an exotic wonderful word that is just the way Muslims describe non-Muslims.
4) Conspiracy theories. Conspiracy theories are an important part of American culture.
5) A letter to the Republican party. Is the vanishing Middle Class heralding the destruction of the Republican party?
6) Islam and the world. Why must every non-Muslim country in the world suffer Islamic terror and the imposition of Islamic law, while Muslim countries grant no rights to minorities.A Jewish heresy: The other interpretation of the Holocaust
Seth J. FrantzmanAugust
30th, 2007
In the West as the Holocaust has come to be accepted as one of the most important events of the 20th century it has largely been realized that those responsible it were evil. This is why the use of the word ‘Nazi’ outside of its original context has become so common. Nazi is a synonym for ‘evil’. But among Jewish historiography of the Holocaust this has not always been the case, nor is it the case today.Raul Hilberg, who published one of the seminal works on the Holocaust, The Destruction of European Jewry, argued that “the process of destruction was bureaucratic ... that a bureaucrat became a perpetrator by virtue of his position and skills at the precise time when the process had reached a stage that required his involvement, that he was a thinking individual, and that above all, he was available, neither evading his duty nor obstructing the administrative operation.” Hilberg’s massive work was published in 1961. In it he had relied on sources he had been privy to due to his being stationed in Munich in 1948 with the U.S Army’s War Documentation Project. As a child in Vienna he was also familiar with the rise of Nazism and anti-Semitism.In 1964 Hannah Arendt published her famous work, Eichmann in Jerusalem in which she described her subject as essentially a ‘banal’ character, merely a cog in a massive totalitarian machine. Hilberg and Arendt agreed on the basic fact that the Jews themselves played a major role in their own destruction. Had Jews not policed their own ghettos, had they not trusted in the government not to kill them, had they not been passive, they would have made it much harder to kill them all. But Hilberg broke with Arendt on two important points. He was unhappy that she did not reference his work and he complained that “the pathways that Eichmann found in the thicket of the German administrative machine for his unprecedented actions. ... There was no 'banality' in this 'evil.'”In 2000 Eyal Sivan placed his documentary, The Specialist before audiences worldwide. Following in the footsteps of Arendt his film argues that the banality or dullness of Eichmann the bureaucrat is essentially the most frightening aspect of him. Sivan has been an especially harsh critic of Israel, joining those such as Ilan Pappe, Neve Gordon, Baruch Kimmerling, Norman Finkelstien, Noam Chomsky and Yitzhak Laor in drawing parallels between Israeli actions and those of Nazi Germany. In a sense the ‘bureaucrats’ of Israel are presented as being the same kind of unthinking automatons as Eichmann. It is no surprise that those such as Martin Buber and his ideological partners like Judah Magnes, argued that putting Eichmann to death for his crimes would itself be a crime against humanity. After all, Eichmann deserved his humanity, even if he was a bureaucrat.Despite the fact that Hilberg had many critiques for Arendt, he is essentially the fountainhead of Holocaust historiography that has come to be known as the Functionalist school. Other important Holocaust scholars connected to this school include; Christopher Browning, Hans Mommsen, Martin Broszat, and Zygmunt Bauman. This line of reasoning argues that the Holocaust did not come out of a master plan and that Hitler and his Mien Kampf played a very minor role in the Holocaust. The essential idea is that the Holocaust came about due to the bureaucracy of the state. It was this ‘machinery of destruction’ and the extreme bureaucratization of the Nazi state that led to the Holocaust.The argument that the Holocaust is part of a ‘function’ of the totalitarian state is a combination of Marxism, libertarian theory and modern sociology. The liberal arts have long been obsessed by the concept of the ‘state’ and its crimes. This is why ‘state sponsored terror’ and ‘right wing death squads’ are usually juxtaposed with ‘militants’ and ‘insurgents.’ Whatever crimes the state may commit they are viewed as being essentially worse because they are committed by the ‘state’ rather than individuals or terrorist gangs. According to this view the main sin of Nazism was not its crimes but its figure, its government, its size, its organization. In a sense, the main flaw of Nazism was in its flowchart, not its death camps.This stream of logic relies on three pillars that are essentially flawed. Since the argument hinges on the idea that any state composed of the same components as the Nazi state in 1938 will lead to a Holocaust it must work very hard to prove that other highly bureaucratized dictatorships, are not really like Nazi Germany in form. It also hinges on the idea that the perpetrators are not guilty for their crimes since they are merely part of a ‘machine’ they are not to be blamed for their actions. Lastly it relies on the belief that the Jewish victims are essential to the process and that they are therefore at fault for being killed, since they didn’t resist sufficiently.But the Nazi state is not unique in its bureaucracy. It was not unique in its form or structure. Very few things about its ‘machine’ were unique. What was unique about it was that it set out to slaughter people in an efficient and unprecedented scale. Even Stalin, whose Gulag killed millions, didn’t set up death camps. If the functionalist argument were correct more bureaucratic dictatorships would engage in genocide and genocide would never have taken place in chaotic places such as Darfur, Cambodia, Rwanda or the Ottoman empire.Furthermore if the argument that the role of Hitler was so insignificant then there is no plausible way to explain why Mussolini’s Italy did not also create death camps. The role of Hitler was precisely different than Mussolini and it was that difference that caused the Holocaust to happen at the behest of Germany rather than in Stalin’s Russia or Mussolini’s Italy.The argument that the Jews were to blame is far fetched because it relies on the theory that all victims are to blame for their victimhood by the very fact that they do not resist. But where is it written that only through armed resistance does one become a victim? Precisely the opposite, those who are the greatest victims of genocide are those who are murdered for having done nothing. If 6 million Jews had fought the Nazis and subsequently been killed in the course of the war then what would be unique about the Holocaust?The idea that the perpetrators are not to blame for their actions because they are mindless bureaucrats seems to imply that the real problem with the world is not wicked people but the wicked state. If only the bureaucratic nature of the state could be abolished, in a Libertarian model, then there would be no more genocides. But then what would one make of the mass killing taking place today in Darfur?What is wrong with ‘international law?’
August 27th, 2007
Seth J. Frantzman
In the assault on Israel by leftists, the media and others the newest condemnation centers around the Sudanese refugees who have found their way into the country. The Economist opined on August 25th, 2007 that “in defiance of the UN convention [on refugees(1951)], the [Israeli] government reserves the right to refuse people from enemy countries.” But that’s not the end of it. In addition the Economist notes that “if Israel deports even people who do not qualify for asylum, and they are subsequently mistreated, it could fall foul of international law.” Even worse, supposedly, is the fact that nasty Israel “gives refugees just 30 days after arrival to apply; most Western countries have no time limit.”Lets get this strait. In Egypt the Sudanese are called ‘abd(slave)’ and ‘chocolata africaca(African feces).’ They are given no rights. They are not given any sort of asylum or government assistance. In 2005 Egyptian police murdered more than 27 Sudanese refugees in Cairo in the course of breaking up a demonstration by them. In July of this year Egyptian troops on the border with Israel beat and murdered three Sudanese men. But Egypt apparently isn’t violating ‘international law.’ Egypt just kills the refugees. It doesn’t violate the ‘law’ by denying them entrance from ‘enemy countries’ or ‘deporting them to countries in which they might be mistreated.’This is how international law always works. It never applies to outright murder or acts of genocide. If it did apply then we would see it in action against the Janjaweed who have killed 300,000 Africans in the Sudan and caused all these refugees to begin with. But this thing called ‘international law’ doesn’t apply there. But it does apply the moment the Sudanese cross the border into Israel. All of a sudden they gain millions of protections that they never possessed previously. All of a sudden they are being monitored by the U.N, by the media, by human rights organizations and by the Economist. Why doesn’t this famous thing called ‘international law’ apply in the Gulf Arab states where foreign workers are denied freedoms and now make up 80% of the population? Why doesn’t it apply in Saudi Arabia? Why doesn’t it apply in Iran? Why doesn’t it apply in Libya? It doesn’t seem to apply almost anywhere in fact. Robert Mugabe has dispossessed hundreds of thousands of people of their land. He has caused two million of Zimbabwe’s residents to become refugees. But he doesn’t fall foul of this ‘international law.’It might be cynical to simply see in all this discrimination against Israel or double standards. But a careful examination of the invocation of ‘international law’ shows that it also applies to the Russian treatment of Chechans, the Bosnian attempt to deport Mujahadin, the Sri Lankan treatment of Tamil guerillas, the Ethiopian treatment of Muslim rebels in the Ogadan, the U.S treatment of Iraqis and the Thai treatment of Muslim terrorists in its southern areas. One can predict whether international law and ‘human rights’ applies if the answer to either of the following questions is yes; Is the country a democracy? Is the country fighting Muslim terrorists or insurgents? If the country is both a democracy and fighting Muslim terrorists than even more international laws apply.International law was created by Europeans for Europeans. It was created in the 19th century by the colonial powers. Not even the United States was a signatory to many of the early conventions that created the laws and processes that would eventually form many of the U.N conventions and what is known as the Geneva convention. Today ‘international law’ still serves Europeans, except instead of applying only to Europeans as it did before 1945, now it applies only to those countries that Europeans don’t like. Until the world, and especially those countries victimized the most by ‘human rights’ groups stand up and rescind their membership and signatures on international agreements the present system of double standards and slander will prevail.Seth J. Frantzman is a PhD student at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a Jerusalem based writer on current affairs.Kaffir! The history of IslamSeth J. FrantzmanJuly 30th, 2007The Wednesday the 18th, 2007 copy of The Independent, a prominent English newspaper included a story entitled ‘Unveiled: the Pakistani tribe that dares to Defy the Fundamentalists.’ Shrouded in the mountains of the North-West frontier province in the Rumbur valley in the Chitral region there exists a tiny tribe that numbers only a few thousand. The Kalasha are an ancient indigenous people living in the shadow of the Hindu Kush, mountains whose name harkens back to the tribes ancient history of contact with pre-Islamic Pakistan, that was once vibrantly diverse, full of Hindus, Buddhists(the builders of the famous Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan that the Taliban blew up) and others. The Kalasha probably saw the first Sikhs who had been influenced by Islam but were forced to take up the sword to defend themselves from extermination as heretics at the hands of the Mughals. They probably saw the Farsis, those Zaroastrians escaping persecution in Iran, where they were seen as devil worshippers, alongside the Yezedis. In the 19th century the last of the Kalshas were driven out of Afghanistan into today’s Pakistan and any who stayed were butchered for not being Muslim. Abdur Rahman Kahn, the first modern ruler of Afghanistan destroyed all the non-Muslims of his nascent realm, an echo of Mohammed of Ghazni of the 12th century. Azam Kalash, a member of this tiny tribe where women walk around without veils and are free of Islamic law, notes that “we’ve always been called kafirs(infidels)[sic] but most people simply left us alone.”In 1927 W. Douglas Burden made his way into the jungles of what is today Indonesia, but was then the Dutch East Indies. In his subsequent account of his adventures Dragon Lizards of Komodo: An Expedition to the lost World of the Dutch East Indies he recalls the island of Bali in the 1920s. “Bali has many attractions. Not the least of these is the nudity…thatched villages sleeping in the shade of coconut groves, combined with the lack of wearing apparel melt together so harmoniously…the fame of Bali has spread to the ends of the earth. But to return to the nudity, which is really astonishing in both its quantity and quality. There are women, women, everywhere, such round, plump partridges, yet so lithe and graceful and exhibiting such perfection as to inspire the artist…at every turn we came upon age-old temples buried in verdure…here the Hindu religion still holds sway…At twilight we hid by a mossy pool and watched an entire village come wandering, one by one, down the leafy paths to bathe. There is no false modesty in Bali, men and women bathe together in a state of nature, with perfect unconcern…For several days we wandered through the matchless isle of Bali, which is still untrammeled by Westerners, undisturbed by European Civilization.” Today Mr. Burden might be surprised to find that Bali’s exoticism has been disturbed, not by the West, but by Islamic terror and its endless bombings on the island. The media reports that the bombings target the Australian tourists who flock to Bali, which is more open and free than the rest of Islamic Indonesia, but the target is also the Hindus who not coincidently make up the bare majority of the area. Few recall that until recently the whole of Indonesia was a blend of Hinduism and native religions.But it is that one word, Kaffir, that explains the disappearance all over the world, one by one, of cultures, of diversity, of people. Islam’s role in the world is not as a religion, it is not as a culture, it is as a thing, a thing that turns everything it touches into a carbon copy of itself. Whatever existed before is forgotten and slowly erased from history, first from books and then from the geography of the land to the extent possible. The fact that the Pyrimids remain while the Bamiyan Buddhas do not, is merely because Islam never had a chance to blow them up, yet.Kaffir. That word. It is that word that separates Islam from humanity, from the rest of the world. When a religion divides the world into its adherents and the ‘other’ that may be no surpise. But when the religion ascribes all non-beleivers to be ‘Kaffir’ it turns them into objects, into beasts, slaves, things that do not deserve to live. Kaffir.Kaffir is the word that has dehumanized the world. It is that word that when a well educated white woman who recalls apartheid hears it she cringes. Nigger. But Kaffir in the west is not like Nigger. The white woman who today cringes at Nigger is no longer the woman who cringes at Kaffir. Like the Kalasha native in Pakistan, the white western woman has internalized ‘kaffir’, just as she internalized ‘white girl’. Kaffir doesn’t shock, because the west accepts that it is indeed ‘kaffir’. The west couldn’t countenance that the blacks of South Africa were ‘kaffir’ but when it comes to the entire world being viewed as kaffir by one of the world’s ‘fastest growing religions’ the western, the weakling, the liberal, the leftist, has no problem.Kaffir. How many people have died because they were deemed ‘kaffir’? How many people have been enslaved because they were kaffir? How many women have been raped because they were kaffir? How many nations and religions and ethnic groups and tribes have disappeared entirely because they were kaffir? The number will never be known. What is known is that before the coming of Islam the world was a rich and diverse place. Everywhere the shadow of Islam has fallen the people have become impoverished, the land has slowly become depopulated and fallen into ruin, all the minority groups have been destroyed, the history of the place has come to be only ‘Islamic history’ and subsequently the attire of all the women has changed: they can no longer be seen.This is perhaps what is most striking in the accounts above. The presence of women is prominent in both the article on the Kalasha and in the account of Bali. It was, after-all, before the 7th century a world in which women played a part. It was a world that actually included women. The Bible speaks of women. They did exist in society then. But should we turn the clock forward to 20th century Pakistan and Indonesia, we see countries without women. Should a foreigner visit them he or she will never interact with Muslim women. They do not exist. We can see this in Israel. The tens of thousands of foreigners who come to Israel every month to work as human rights activists will meet hundreds of Palestinians and Arabs. But only 1% or less of the Arab Muslims they meet will be women. Those women of Bali no longer bathe in the nude. They no longer lack modesty. Do they? Even Sir Wilfred Thesiger who traveled in Arabia between 1930 and 1960 documented the presence in one of the few pictures of a woman, of a woman’s breast. A breast. A kaffir breast perhaps. But there it is staring back at you from a 1948 photograph taken deep in the empty quarter of Arabia among the Bedouin. A breast protrudes ever so slightly from a loosely wrapped robe of a Bedouin woman. At first it seems like a mirage, as is so common in the desert, but there can be no mistaking it. The explanation? These kaffirs haven’t been introduced to Islam thoroughly yet. Since 1968 the King Faisal Settlement Project which provides for, among others, the Al-Murrah Bedouin,
1) A Jewish Heresy. The Functionalist school of Holocaust historiography argues that it was the ‘machine’ of Nazi bureaucracy that led to the Holocaust, not Hitler or any of the people involved. This idea was first broached in 1961 by Hilberg and has been elaborated upon by Arendt and Sivan, and they are all wrong.
2) What is wrong with ‘International Law?’ International law is a scam. It was created by Europeans for Europeans and it cannot be applied to the world. Here is one example why.
3) Kaffir! The word Kaffir is the same as the word Nigger. But the media presents it as an exotic wonderful word that is just the way Muslims describe non-Muslims.
4) Conspiracy theories. Conspiracy theories are an important part of American culture.
5) A letter to the Republican party. Is the vanishing Middle Class heralding the destruction of the Republican party?
6) Islam and the world. Why must every non-Muslim country in the world suffer Islamic terror and the imposition of Islamic law, while Muslim countries grant no rights to minorities.A Jewish heresy: The other interpretation of the Holocaust
Seth J. FrantzmanAugust
30th, 2007
In the West as the Holocaust has come to be accepted as one of the most important events of the 20th century it has largely been realized that those responsible it were evil. This is why the use of the word ‘Nazi’ outside of its original context has become so common. Nazi is a synonym for ‘evil’. But among Jewish historiography of the Holocaust this has not always been the case, nor is it the case today.Raul Hilberg, who published one of the seminal works on the Holocaust, The Destruction of European Jewry, argued that “the process of destruction was bureaucratic ... that a bureaucrat became a perpetrator by virtue of his position and skills at the precise time when the process had reached a stage that required his involvement, that he was a thinking individual, and that above all, he was available, neither evading his duty nor obstructing the administrative operation.” Hilberg’s massive work was published in 1961. In it he had relied on sources he had been privy to due to his being stationed in Munich in 1948 with the U.S Army’s War Documentation Project. As a child in Vienna he was also familiar with the rise of Nazism and anti-Semitism.In 1964 Hannah Arendt published her famous work, Eichmann in Jerusalem in which she described her subject as essentially a ‘banal’ character, merely a cog in a massive totalitarian machine. Hilberg and Arendt agreed on the basic fact that the Jews themselves played a major role in their own destruction. Had Jews not policed their own ghettos, had they not trusted in the government not to kill them, had they not been passive, they would have made it much harder to kill them all. But Hilberg broke with Arendt on two important points. He was unhappy that she did not reference his work and he complained that “the pathways that Eichmann found in the thicket of the German administrative machine for his unprecedented actions. ... There was no 'banality' in this 'evil.'”In 2000 Eyal Sivan placed his documentary, The Specialist before audiences worldwide. Following in the footsteps of Arendt his film argues that the banality or dullness of Eichmann the bureaucrat is essentially the most frightening aspect of him. Sivan has been an especially harsh critic of Israel, joining those such as Ilan Pappe, Neve Gordon, Baruch Kimmerling, Norman Finkelstien, Noam Chomsky and Yitzhak Laor in drawing parallels between Israeli actions and those of Nazi Germany. In a sense the ‘bureaucrats’ of Israel are presented as being the same kind of unthinking automatons as Eichmann. It is no surprise that those such as Martin Buber and his ideological partners like Judah Magnes, argued that putting Eichmann to death for his crimes would itself be a crime against humanity. After all, Eichmann deserved his humanity, even if he was a bureaucrat.Despite the fact that Hilberg had many critiques for Arendt, he is essentially the fountainhead of Holocaust historiography that has come to be known as the Functionalist school. Other important Holocaust scholars connected to this school include; Christopher Browning, Hans Mommsen, Martin Broszat, and Zygmunt Bauman. This line of reasoning argues that the Holocaust did not come out of a master plan and that Hitler and his Mien Kampf played a very minor role in the Holocaust. The essential idea is that the Holocaust came about due to the bureaucracy of the state. It was this ‘machinery of destruction’ and the extreme bureaucratization of the Nazi state that led to the Holocaust.The argument that the Holocaust is part of a ‘function’ of the totalitarian state is a combination of Marxism, libertarian theory and modern sociology. The liberal arts have long been obsessed by the concept of the ‘state’ and its crimes. This is why ‘state sponsored terror’ and ‘right wing death squads’ are usually juxtaposed with ‘militants’ and ‘insurgents.’ Whatever crimes the state may commit they are viewed as being essentially worse because they are committed by the ‘state’ rather than individuals or terrorist gangs. According to this view the main sin of Nazism was not its crimes but its figure, its government, its size, its organization. In a sense, the main flaw of Nazism was in its flowchart, not its death camps.This stream of logic relies on three pillars that are essentially flawed. Since the argument hinges on the idea that any state composed of the same components as the Nazi state in 1938 will lead to a Holocaust it must work very hard to prove that other highly bureaucratized dictatorships, are not really like Nazi Germany in form. It also hinges on the idea that the perpetrators are not guilty for their crimes since they are merely part of a ‘machine’ they are not to be blamed for their actions. Lastly it relies on the belief that the Jewish victims are essential to the process and that they are therefore at fault for being killed, since they didn’t resist sufficiently.But the Nazi state is not unique in its bureaucracy. It was not unique in its form or structure. Very few things about its ‘machine’ were unique. What was unique about it was that it set out to slaughter people in an efficient and unprecedented scale. Even Stalin, whose Gulag killed millions, didn’t set up death camps. If the functionalist argument were correct more bureaucratic dictatorships would engage in genocide and genocide would never have taken place in chaotic places such as Darfur, Cambodia, Rwanda or the Ottoman empire.Furthermore if the argument that the role of Hitler was so insignificant then there is no plausible way to explain why Mussolini’s Italy did not also create death camps. The role of Hitler was precisely different than Mussolini and it was that difference that caused the Holocaust to happen at the behest of Germany rather than in Stalin’s Russia or Mussolini’s Italy.The argument that the Jews were to blame is far fetched because it relies on the theory that all victims are to blame for their victimhood by the very fact that they do not resist. But where is it written that only through armed resistance does one become a victim? Precisely the opposite, those who are the greatest victims of genocide are those who are murdered for having done nothing. If 6 million Jews had fought the Nazis and subsequently been killed in the course of the war then what would be unique about the Holocaust?The idea that the perpetrators are not to blame for their actions because they are mindless bureaucrats seems to imply that the real problem with the world is not wicked people but the wicked state. If only the bureaucratic nature of the state could be abolished, in a Libertarian model, then there would be no more genocides. But then what would one make of the mass killing taking place today in Darfur?What is wrong with ‘international law?’
August 27th, 2007
Seth J. Frantzman
In the assault on Israel by leftists, the media and others the newest condemnation centers around the Sudanese refugees who have found their way into the country. The Economist opined on August 25th, 2007 that “in defiance of the UN convention [on refugees(1951)], the [Israeli] government reserves the right to refuse people from enemy countries.” But that’s not the end of it. In addition the Economist notes that “if Israel deports even people who do not qualify for asylum, and they are subsequently mistreated, it could fall foul of international law.” Even worse, supposedly, is the fact that nasty Israel “gives refugees just 30 days after arrival to apply; most Western countries have no time limit.”Lets get this strait. In Egypt the Sudanese are called ‘abd(slave)’ and ‘chocolata africaca(African feces).’ They are given no rights. They are not given any sort of asylum or government assistance. In 2005 Egyptian police murdered more than 27 Sudanese refugees in Cairo in the course of breaking up a demonstration by them. In July of this year Egyptian troops on the border with Israel beat and murdered three Sudanese men. But Egypt apparently isn’t violating ‘international law.’ Egypt just kills the refugees. It doesn’t violate the ‘law’ by denying them entrance from ‘enemy countries’ or ‘deporting them to countries in which they might be mistreated.’This is how international law always works. It never applies to outright murder or acts of genocide. If it did apply then we would see it in action against the Janjaweed who have killed 300,000 Africans in the Sudan and caused all these refugees to begin with. But this thing called ‘international law’ doesn’t apply there. But it does apply the moment the Sudanese cross the border into Israel. All of a sudden they gain millions of protections that they never possessed previously. All of a sudden they are being monitored by the U.N, by the media, by human rights organizations and by the Economist. Why doesn’t this famous thing called ‘international law’ apply in the Gulf Arab states where foreign workers are denied freedoms and now make up 80% of the population? Why doesn’t it apply in Saudi Arabia? Why doesn’t it apply in Iran? Why doesn’t it apply in Libya? It doesn’t seem to apply almost anywhere in fact. Robert Mugabe has dispossessed hundreds of thousands of people of their land. He has caused two million of Zimbabwe’s residents to become refugees. But he doesn’t fall foul of this ‘international law.’It might be cynical to simply see in all this discrimination against Israel or double standards. But a careful examination of the invocation of ‘international law’ shows that it also applies to the Russian treatment of Chechans, the Bosnian attempt to deport Mujahadin, the Sri Lankan treatment of Tamil guerillas, the Ethiopian treatment of Muslim rebels in the Ogadan, the U.S treatment of Iraqis and the Thai treatment of Muslim terrorists in its southern areas. One can predict whether international law and ‘human rights’ applies if the answer to either of the following questions is yes; Is the country a democracy? Is the country fighting Muslim terrorists or insurgents? If the country is both a democracy and fighting Muslim terrorists than even more international laws apply.International law was created by Europeans for Europeans. It was created in the 19th century by the colonial powers. Not even the United States was a signatory to many of the early conventions that created the laws and processes that would eventually form many of the U.N conventions and what is known as the Geneva convention. Today ‘international law’ still serves Europeans, except instead of applying only to Europeans as it did before 1945, now it applies only to those countries that Europeans don’t like. Until the world, and especially those countries victimized the most by ‘human rights’ groups stand up and rescind their membership and signatures on international agreements the present system of double standards and slander will prevail.Seth J. Frantzman is a PhD student at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a Jerusalem based writer on current affairs.Kaffir! The history of IslamSeth J. FrantzmanJuly 30th, 2007The Wednesday the 18th, 2007 copy of The Independent, a prominent English newspaper included a story entitled ‘Unveiled: the Pakistani tribe that dares to Defy the Fundamentalists.’ Shrouded in the mountains of the North-West frontier province in the Rumbur valley in the Chitral region there exists a tiny tribe that numbers only a few thousand. The Kalasha are an ancient indigenous people living in the shadow of the Hindu Kush, mountains whose name harkens back to the tribes ancient history of contact with pre-Islamic Pakistan, that was once vibrantly diverse, full of Hindus, Buddhists(the builders of the famous Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan that the Taliban blew up) and others. The Kalasha probably saw the first Sikhs who had been influenced by Islam but were forced to take up the sword to defend themselves from extermination as heretics at the hands of the Mughals. They probably saw the Farsis, those Zaroastrians escaping persecution in Iran, where they were seen as devil worshippers, alongside the Yezedis. In the 19th century the last of the Kalshas were driven out of Afghanistan into today’s Pakistan and any who stayed were butchered for not being Muslim. Abdur Rahman Kahn, the first modern ruler of Afghanistan destroyed all the non-Muslims of his nascent realm, an echo of Mohammed of Ghazni of the 12th century. Azam Kalash, a member of this tiny tribe where women walk around without veils and are free of Islamic law, notes that “we’ve always been called kafirs(infidels)[sic] but most people simply left us alone.”In 1927 W. Douglas Burden made his way into the jungles of what is today Indonesia, but was then the Dutch East Indies. In his subsequent account of his adventures Dragon Lizards of Komodo: An Expedition to the lost World of the Dutch East Indies he recalls the island of Bali in the 1920s. “Bali has many attractions. Not the least of these is the nudity…thatched villages sleeping in the shade of coconut groves, combined with the lack of wearing apparel melt together so harmoniously…the fame of Bali has spread to the ends of the earth. But to return to the nudity, which is really astonishing in both its quantity and quality. There are women, women, everywhere, such round, plump partridges, yet so lithe and graceful and exhibiting such perfection as to inspire the artist…at every turn we came upon age-old temples buried in verdure…here the Hindu religion still holds sway…At twilight we hid by a mossy pool and watched an entire village come wandering, one by one, down the leafy paths to bathe. There is no false modesty in Bali, men and women bathe together in a state of nature, with perfect unconcern…For several days we wandered through the matchless isle of Bali, which is still untrammeled by Westerners, undisturbed by European Civilization.” Today Mr. Burden might be surprised to find that Bali’s exoticism has been disturbed, not by the West, but by Islamic terror and its endless bombings on the island. The media reports that the bombings target the Australian tourists who flock to Bali, which is more open and free than the rest of Islamic Indonesia, but the target is also the Hindus who not coincidently make up the bare majority of the area. Few recall that until recently the whole of Indonesia was a blend of Hinduism and native religions.But it is that one word, Kaffir, that explains the disappearance all over the world, one by one, of cultures, of diversity, of people. Islam’s role in the world is not as a religion, it is not as a culture, it is as a thing, a thing that turns everything it touches into a carbon copy of itself. Whatever existed before is forgotten and slowly erased from history, first from books and then from the geography of the land to the extent possible. The fact that the Pyrimids remain while the Bamiyan Buddhas do not, is merely because Islam never had a chance to blow them up, yet.Kaffir. That word. It is that word that separates Islam from humanity, from the rest of the world. When a religion divides the world into its adherents and the ‘other’ that may be no surpise. But when the religion ascribes all non-beleivers to be ‘Kaffir’ it turns them into objects, into beasts, slaves, things that do not deserve to live. Kaffir.Kaffir is the word that has dehumanized the world. It is that word that when a well educated white woman who recalls apartheid hears it she cringes. Nigger. But Kaffir in the west is not like Nigger. The white woman who today cringes at Nigger is no longer the woman who cringes at Kaffir. Like the Kalasha native in Pakistan, the white western woman has internalized ‘kaffir’, just as she internalized ‘white girl’. Kaffir doesn’t shock, because the west accepts that it is indeed ‘kaffir’. The west couldn’t countenance that the blacks of South Africa were ‘kaffir’ but when it comes to the entire world being viewed as kaffir by one of the world’s ‘fastest growing religions’ the western, the weakling, the liberal, the leftist, has no problem.Kaffir. How many people have died because they were deemed ‘kaffir’? How many people have been enslaved because they were kaffir? How many women have been raped because they were kaffir? How many nations and religions and ethnic groups and tribes have disappeared entirely because they were kaffir? The number will never be known. What is known is that before the coming of Islam the world was a rich and diverse place. Everywhere the shadow of Islam has fallen the people have become impoverished, the land has slowly become depopulated and fallen into ruin, all the minority groups have been destroyed, the history of the place has come to be only ‘Islamic history’ and subsequently the attire of all the women has changed: they can no longer be seen.This is perhaps what is most striking in the accounts above. The presence of women is prominent in both the article on the Kalasha and in the account of Bali. It was, after-all, before the 7th century a world in which women played a part. It was a world that actually included women. The Bible speaks of women. They did exist in society then. But should we turn the clock forward to 20th century Pakistan and Indonesia, we see countries without women. Should a foreigner visit them he or she will never interact with Muslim women. They do not exist. We can see this in Israel. The tens of thousands of foreigners who come to Israel every month to work as human rights activists will meet hundreds of Palestinians and Arabs. But only 1% or less of the Arab Muslims they meet will be women. Those women of Bali no longer bathe in the nude. They no longer lack modesty. Do they? Even Sir Wilfred Thesiger who traveled in Arabia between 1930 and 1960 documented the presence in one of the few pictures of a woman, of a woman’s breast. A breast. A kaffir breast perhaps. But there it is staring back at you from a 1948 photograph taken deep in the empty quarter of Arabia among the Bedouin. A breast protrudes ever so slightly from a loosely wrapped robe of a Bedouin woman. At first it seems like a mirage, as is so common in the desert, but there can be no mistaking it. The explanation? These kaffirs haven’t been introduced to Islam thoroughly yet. Since 1968 the King Faisal Settlement Project which provides for, among others, the Al-Murrah Bedouin,
Saturday, September 1, 2007
Terra Incognita Issue 3
Terra Incognita
Issue 3
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
August 30th, 2007
Here are this week's three articles below and attached. The full articles appear below these short abstracts.
1) Communal responsibility is practiced by Bedouins and many other people. An examination of a number of cases shows that communal responsibility would decrease violence in society by holding entire community’s responsible for the actions of some members of those community’s.
2) Mearsheimer and Walt are back. Their ‘working paper’ is being published as a book. It is worthwhile to take time and re-visit their most extreme arguments and examine them in detail to show how completely wrong they are.
3) Christiane Amanpour recently hosted a CNN six hour special called ‘God’s Warriors.’ It’s central thesis was that Judaism, Christianity and Islam are essentially the same. They all have fundamentalists. They all commit violence. But can these religions really be compared? Why not include Hinduism and Sikhism?
1) In praise of communal responsibility
August 27th, 2007
Seth J. Frantzman
In December of 2006 the burned body of Mika Dabab, an Ethiopian girl was found in the Bedouin town of Rahat in southern Israel. She had been seen the night before at a club with her Bedouin boyfriend and some of his friends. She was the daughter of immigrants from Ethiopia. She was 16 years old. When friends and family in the community of Kiryat Gat found out they were saddened. The police investigated the matter and arrested the boyfriend. That was the end of it.
On July 11th, 2007 Valentina Dombayev, a 24 year old Russian immigrant to Israel was found murdered by the side of the road near Ashdod. She had been kidnapped with a friend of hers, Elena Zaorov, and handcuffed, placed in the trunk of a car and taken to the desert and murdered. The murderer, her husband Iyad Sami, an Arab of Ramallah was arrested.
In a separate case beginning in April of 2005 six Bedouin men from the village of Bir Al-Maksur in the Galilee began gang raping women from nearby Jewish towns. First in Kiryat Yam, then Kiryat Ata, Kiryat Bialik and finally in Carmel. The raped women were 13, 16, 19 and 25 respectively. The case, like the others, is apparently still in court.
On Sunday, August 26th, 2007 it was reported that the mayor of Rahat, Talal al-Karnawi had claimed that “if rumors about Mahmoud’s death turn out to be true it might inflame the public.” Mahmoud al-Karnawi, evidently a member of the mayor’s Hamula or clan, was killed in crossfire between the Israeli army and Islamic Jihad militants in Tulkarm on the West Bank. The mayor of Rahat was expressing an age old Bedouin tradition of holding those responsible for the killing communally responsible. Therefore it is not the individual IDF soldier that shot the boy(or the Islamic Jihad member), it is Israel in general and Jews in general who are responsible. In the Bedouin world such things, even accidental deaths, are solved by communal feuds and finally through Sulhas or Hudnas: truces between families, clans or tribes. These traditions and their elaborate ceremonies go back thousands of years. Many other cultures in the world have similar traditions, long since buried, of holding people communally responsible for murder.
Unfortunately the Russian community of Lod where Dombayev was from, or the Ethiopian community or Kiryat Gat, where Dabab was from no longer have these traditions. The Ethiopians used to, when they lived in Ethiopia, but they have drunk from the poisoned chalice of western culture and they no longer do.
But some people still cling to such ancient customs. In Kiryat Yam on the night of March 11th, 2006 three Bedouin men arrived in a car. Jalal Tawili, a Bedouin from Tamra, got out and opened the back door for his Russian girlfriend who the three men were dropping off. It was 2am. The Russian girl was 17. Tawili was 20 and his friends were 21. According to Tawili, who is a soldier in the Israeli army, a group of young men from the neighborhood appeared. They asked the Bedouins to turn off their music because “we don’t speak Arabic here.” Then a ‘whole group of young men came out with chains and clubs.’ While the third Bedouin fled, the Tawili brothers were beaten with chains and bats and clubs. Both had to receive extensive hospital care. The Tawilis couldn’t distinguish between the men who beat them and most other Jews in Israel. Tawili knew his girlfriend was ‘Russian’ and he probably assumed that the Russians of Kiryat Yam were like the Russians in Lod or the Ethiopians in Kiryat Gat. They didn’t care what was done to their community. Kill their women, rape their women, they won’t care. But Tawili wasn’t aware that Zalman Shazar Street, where the attack took place, is inhabited by immigrants from the Caucuses known as Kavkaz. These mountain people happen to have a shared sense of communal responsibility. The media, as is it nature, referred to the attack as ‘racially motivated.’ But the Kavkaz didn’t react the way they did out of racism. Racism does not exist among tribal people who have no concept of race outside tribal and communal affiliation. The Kavkaz reacted communally to what they perceived was an assault on their community’s honor. The shear arrogance of a Bedouin to bring home a teenage girl at 2am in the morning and play his music so as to wake them up offended their sensibilities.
Perhaps the Kavkaz connected these Bedouin to the Bedouin gang who had raped a girl from the town in April the year before. The media that reported the Kiryat Yam beating didn’t connect these two events. But some communities in the world don’t like it when people from other communities come and rape their women, or burn them, or handcuff them and place them in a trunk of a car and murder them in the desert. Sometimes those people react violently with chains and bat and clubs. The modern world and particularly the West abhors this type of communal action and places it under the category of ‘racism.’ The papers described the beating of the Tawilis as a ‘lynching.’
But one must ponder the question: do Bedouin from Tamra still go to Kiryat Yam to fulfill their sexual desires? Perhaps word has spread quickly, as it usually does among Bedouin, that Kiryat Yam, or at least Zalman Shazar street is not the place to court underage girls. Lod or Kiryat Gat are better targets. After all, everyone knows the Ethiopian and Russian men who live there will never raise a fist if you murder their daughters. Rahat Mayor, Talal al Karnawi said it best in July of 2007 when he noted that “We in the Beduin[sic] sector do not encourage romantic relations between Beduins and Jews as well. It hurts our families just like it hurts the Jews. It causes a lot of difficult problems and internal conflicts which often end in violence.” Maybe the media will call him racist. But then the media should ask why Bedouins don’t usually rape or murder other Bedouin women, even from neighboring villages. They know the violence it will bring down upon their houses should they transgress the communal laws of stability. Not so with their Israeli neighbors. Not so in the Western world. That is one reason violent crime and rape is so common in Westernized cities.
In praise of communal responsibility
August 27th, 2007
Seth J. Frantzman
In December of 2006 the burned body of Mika Dabab, an Ethiopian girl was found in the Bedouin town of Rahat in southern Israel. She had been seen the night before at a club with her Bedouin boyfriend and some of his friends. She was the daughter of immigrants from Ethiopia. She was 16 years old. When friends and family in the community of Kiryat Gat found out they were saddened. The police investigated the matter and arrested the boyfriend. That was the end of it.
On July 11th, 2007 Valentina Dombayev, a 24 year old Russian immigrant to Israel was found murdered by the side of the road near Ashdod. She had been kidnapped with a friend of hers, Elena Zaorov, and handcuffed, placed in the trunk of a car and taken to the desert and murdered. The murderer, her husband Iyad Sami, an Arab of Ramallah was arrested.
In a separate case beginning in April of 2005 six Bedouin men from the village of Bir Al-Maksur in the Galilee began gang raping women from nearby Jewish towns. First in Kiryat Yam, then Kiryat Ata, Kiryat Bialik and finally in Carmel. The raped women were 13, 16, 19 and 25 respectively. The case, like the others, is apparently still in court.
On Sunday, August 26th, 2007 it was reported that the mayor of Rahat, Talal al-Karnawi had claimed that “if rumors about Mahmoud’s death turn out to be true it might inflame the public.” Mahmoud al-Karnawi, evidently a member of the mayor’s Hamula or clan, was killed in crossfire between the Israeli army and Islamic Jihad militants in Tulkarm on the West Bank. The mayor of Rahat was expressing an age old Bedouin tradition of holding those responsible for the killing communally responsible. Therefore it is not the individual IDF soldier that shot the boy(or the Islamic Jihad member), it is Israel in general and Jews in general who are responsible. In the Bedouin world such things, even accidental deaths, are solved by communal feuds and finally through Sulhas or Hudnas: truces between families, clans or tribes. These traditions and their elaborate ceremonies go back thousands of years. Many other cultures in the world have similar traditions, long since buried, of holding people communally responsible for murder.
Unfortunately the Russian community of Lod where Dombayev was from, or the Ethiopian community or Kiryat Gat, where Dabab was from no longer have these traditions. The Ethiopians used to, when they lived in Ethiopia, but they have drunk from the poisoned chalice of western culture and they no longer do.
But some people still cling to such ancient customs. In Kiryat Yam on the night of March 11th, 2006 three Bedouin men arrived in a car. Jalal Tawili, a Bedouin from Tamra, got out and opened the back door for his Russian girlfriend who the three men were dropping off. It was 2am. The Russian girl was 17. Tawili was 20 and his friends were 21. According to Tawili, who is a soldier in the Israeli army, a group of young men from the neighborhood appeared. They asked the Bedouins to turn off their music because “we don’t speak Arabic here.” Then a ‘whole group of young men came out with chains and clubs.’ While the third Bedouin fled, the Tawili brothers were beaten with chains and bats and clubs. Both had to receive extensive hospital care. The Tawilis couldn’t distinguish between the men who beat them and most other Jews in Israel. Tawili knew his girlfriend was ‘Russian’ and he probably assumed that the Russians of Kiryat Yam were like the Russians in Lod or the Ethiopians in Kiryat Gat. They didn’t care what was done to their community. Kill their women, rape their women, they won’t care. But Tawili wasn’t aware that Zalman Shazar Street, where the attack took place, is inhabited by immigrants from the Caucuses known as Kavkaz. These mountain people happen to have a shared sense of communal responsibility. The media, as is it nature, referred to the attack as ‘racially motivated.’ But the Kavkaz didn’t react the way they did out of racism. Racism does not exist among tribal people who have no concept of race outside tribal and communal affiliation. The Kavkaz reacted communally to what they perceived was an assault on their community’s honor. The shear arrogance of a Bedouin to bring home a teenage girl at 2am in the morning and play his music so as to wake them up offended their sensibilities.
Perhaps the Kavkaz connected these Bedouin to the Bedouin gang who had raped a girl from the town in April the year before. The media that reported the Kiryat Yam beating didn’t connect these two events. But some communities in the world don’t like it when people from other communities come and rape their women, or burn them, or handcuff them and place them in a trunk of a car and murder them in the desert. Sometimes those people react violently with chains and bat and clubs. The modern world and particularly the West abhors this type of communal action and places it under the category of ‘racism.’ The papers described the beating of the Tawilis as a ‘lynching.’
But one must ponder the question: do Bedouin from Tamra still go to Kiryat Yam to fulfill their sexual desires? Perhaps word has spread quickly, as it usually does among Bedouin, that Kiryat Yam, or at least Zalman Shazar street is not the place to court underage girls. Lod or Kiryat Gat are better targets. After all, everyone knows the Ethiopian and Russian men who live there will never raise a fist if you murder their daughters. Rahat Mayor, Talal al Karnawi said it best in July of 2007 when he noted that “We in the Beduin[sic] sector do not encourage romantic relations between Beduins and Jews as well. It hurts our families just like it hurts the Jews. It causes a lot of difficult problems and internal conflicts which often end in violence.” Maybe the media will call him racist. But then the media should ask why Bedouins don’t usually rape or murder other Bedouin women, even from neighboring villages. They know the violence it will bring down upon their houses should they transgress the communal laws of stability. Not so with their Israeli neighbors. Not so in the Western world. That is one reason violent crime and rape is so common in Westernized cities.
20 The problem with Mearsheimer and Walt
Seth J. Frantzman
August 19th, 2007
The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy is to be released on September 4th, 2007. This is the book version of the John J. Mearsheimer and Stephem M. Walt’s working paper published at Harvard. John Mearsheimer is the Wendell Harrison Professor of Political Science at Chicago, and the author of The Tragedy of Great Power Politics. Stephen Walt is the Robert and Renee Belfer Professor of International Affairs at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. His most recent book is Taming American Power: The Global Response to US Primacy. Their essay can be located in full at the London Review of Books, http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n06/mear01_.html.
Their thesis is wide ranging but it is worthwhile to deal with a few of its most strident accusations.
America helps Israel harm Palestinians
Mearsheimer and Walt write:
“Between 1949 and 1956, for example, Israeli security forces killed between 2700 and 5000 Arab infiltrators, the overwhelming majority of them unarmed. The IDF murdered hundreds of Egyptian prisoners of war in both the 1956 and 1967 wars, while in 1967, it expelled between 100,000 and 260,000 Palestinians from the newly conquered West Bank, and drove 80,000 Syrians from the Golan Heights…During the first intifada, the IDF distributed truncheons to its troops and encouraged them to break the bones of Palestinian protesters. The Swedish branch of Save the Children estimated that ‘23,600 to 29,900 children required medical treatment for their beating injuries in the first two years of the intifada.’ Nearly a third of them were aged ten or under…Thanks to the Lobby, the United States has become the de facto enabler of Israeli expansion in the Occupied Territories.”
This is a strange accusation given the fact that America is also a close ally of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and many other countries that use less than peaceful methods in dealing with dissidents and terrorists. Egypt, for instance, rounded up 3,000 Bedouin in the Sinai, subjecting some to electric shocks, after bombing took place in Sharm el Sheikh. If American policy was based on forcing the allies of America to have American standards in dealing with enemies all of America’s allies that are not in Europe would have to be dropped. Oddly enough Mearsheimer and Walt do not argue for such a sweeping moralistic policy.
Influence on Congress
Mearsheimer and Walt write “a key pillar of the Lobby’s effectiveness is its influence in Congress, where Israel is virtually immune from criticism…Here is one example: in the 1984 elections, AIPAC helped defeat Senator Charles Percy from Illinois, who, according to a prominent Lobby figure, had ‘displayed insensitivity and even hostility to our concerns’.”
The idea here is that the Lobby is all powerful in American elections. One wonders how this is possible. Outside of areas with large Jewish concentrations, such as New York or Florida, how would it be possible for the tiny minority of Jews, who are only five percent of America, to influence elections to the degree they are accused of. Mearsheimer and Walt admit that many Jews don’t even support the Israel Lobby, so that means that 1% of the American people are able to pick and choose which candidates win and lose. This is a pretty extraordinary conclusion, especially when one recalls all the other lobbies working to elect politicians, such as the labour lobby known as the AFL-CIO, which possesses more money and more voters than the Israel Lobby.
Influence on the Press
Mearsheimer and Walt write that “ ‘Shamir, Sharon, Bibi – whatever those guys want is pretty much fine by me,’ Robert Bartley once remarked. Not surprisingly, his newspaper, the Wall Street Journal, along with other prominent papers like the Chicago Sun-Times and the Washington Times, regularly runs editorials that strongly support Israel.”
The Lobby is accused of controlling the American press. Mearsheimer and Walt even accuse the Israel Lobby of controlling the New York Times because, in their opinion, the Times is not critical enough of Israel. This is an interesting accusation that hinges not on evidence, but the mere perception that the Times does not apparently share the deep critique of Israel that Mearsheimer and Walt have. But by this logic the Times is also owned by the Chinese and the Saudis because it only criticizes these countries rarely. Furthermore most pro-Israel groups believe the Times is actually stridently anti-Israel. How to reconcile the two opinions?
Influence on education and free speech
Mearsheimer and Walt complain that during the Second Intifada “the Lobby moved immediately to ‘take back the campuses’. New groups sprang up, like the Caravan for Democracy, which brought Israeli speakers to US colleges…A classic illustration of the effort to police academia occurred towards the end of 2004, when the David Project produced a film alleging that faculty members of Columbia’s Middle East Studies programme were anti-Semitic and were intimidating Jewish students who stood up for Israel…the Lobby’s campaign to quash debate about Israel is unhealthy for democracy.”
The argument here is that since there are pro-Israel groups on campus and because one of those groups made one documentary that therefore the Israel Lobby controls thought on American college campuses. Just to give a very obvious example, the University of Arizona has at least four groups that actively protest against Israel. The Arizona Daily Wildcat, the campus newspaper often carries anti-Israel columns in its oped section. If the pro-Israel lobby was so successful then logically these wouldn’t exist. Furthermore the faculty at Harvard even considered divesting Harvard’s endowment from companies that do business in Israel. They never once, in the history of Harvard, considered divestment from any other country. Columbia University has invited the Iranian President, Ahmadinjed, to speak at their campus. Mearsheimer and Walt and still employed at their campuses, along with other notable anti-Israel professors such as Chomsky and Finkelstien. The very existence of the Mearsheimer and Walt working paper, which is not based on any original research, is evidence of the existence of the very debate that Mearsheimer and Walt would have us believe is being ‘quashed’.
Anti-Semitism
According to Mearsheimer and Walt the Lobby also destroys debate by calling opponents of Israel ‘anti-Semitic’; “No discussion of the Lobby would be complete without an examination of one of its most powerful weapons: the charge of anti-Semitism.”
It is interesting that the charge of ‘anti-Semitism’ is a ‘weapon’. By making this claim the authors obviously want to shield themselves from just such a charge, by claiming that any charges of anti-Semitism are used to ‘silence debate’. It is a brilliant rhetorical device, like the above one, that first makes the claim that X is being ‘quashed’ and therefore we need more X. Then the argument proceeds by claiming that anyone who supports X is accused of racism and therefore cannot be a racist because it has been shown that the accusation of racism is a weapon to quash the debate of X. Thus two things are accomplished; people believe that there needs to be more condemnation of Israel in order to ‘speak out’ against the quashing of democratic debate and that one must in fact condemn Israel in order to prove that free speech still exists. They can condemn Israel and the ‘Jewish lobby’ in the most shrill tones because now they have ‘proven’ that any accusation of being anti-Jewish is merely a device used to silence them. In fact, by this logic, being anti-Jewish would be a method of exercising free speech. Its odd that the very same logic doesn’t pertain to complaining about Jesse Jackson and the ‘black lobby’.
The Role of the Lobby in Fomenting Terrorism
The most damning accusation of Mearsheimer and Walt is that support of Israel is the root cause for terrorism: “In the autumn of 2001, and especially in the spring of 2002, the Bush administration tried to reduce anti-American sentiment in the Arab world and undermine support for terrorist groups like al-Qaida by halting Israel’s expansionist policies in the Occupied Territories and advocating the creation of a Palestinian state…It increases the terrorist danger that all states face – including America’s European allies. It has made it impossible to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a situation that gives extremists a powerful recruiting tool, increases the pool of potential terrorists and sympathizers, and contributes to Islamic radicalism in Europe and Asia.”
This is an especially brilliant argument in light of the fact that Bin Laden specifically noted that he opposed the basing of American troops in the Muslim Holy Land, Saudi Arabia. Since it would be difficult to blame America it makes more sense to blame Israel. By this logic one should have blamed Poland and England for dragging America into war with Nazi Germany. After all it was America’s support of the U.K that encouraged the Fuhrer to declare war on America. In fact the argument should be taken one step further, it was actually the Jews that are to blame for American involvement in the Second World War since Hitler’s hatred of Jews led him to power and to invade Poland and thus to bring the U.K into the war and thus to bring the U.S into the war. Therefore, just like today, the Jews are to blame for bringing America into war. The logic should be taken further. American support for capitalism caused Communist countries such irritation that it caused them to encourage revolutions against American allies. The Jews are behind much of American capitalism, and therefore the Jews were to blame for the Cold War, since without the Jewish capitalists and their banks, America could have allied herself with the Soviet Union.
The greatest and most disturbing flaw in the reasoning of Mearsheimer and Walt is that it implies somehow that America’s true allies should be the Bin Ladens. America’s support of Israel has ‘provoked’ the terrorists and therefore America must stop her support for X simply because it makes Y unhappy. But just because certain people are unhappy with something doesn’t necessarily lead to the conclusion that it is wrong. The KKK was a terrorist organization. According to the famous film Birth of a Nation the KKK was a reaction to the Northern support of Carpet-baggers and uppity negroes. In the 1960s the KKK was reacting to the forces of de-segregation. By the logic of Mearsheimer and Walt, since support for the Southern Blacks caused provocation to white southerners and led them to terrorism, therefore America should not have supported blacks. By always accepting the terrorist standpoint and their arguments one implicitly allies with them, and usually that means supporting the worst, most aggressive regimes against the weaker ones. Communist terrorism was based on its critique of the capitalist society, does that mean the world should have abandoned capitalism so as not to ‘provoke’ communism?
Israel encourages America to invade other countries and sacrifice lives needlessly
Mearsheimer and Walt have also made the claim that Israel is single-handedly responsible for American policy in the Middle East. Between 2000 and 2001 Ariel Sharon, Israel’s Prime Minister, was critiqued for comparing Bush to Neville Chamberlain. According to Mearsheimer and Walt “Sharon offered a pro forma apology, but quickly joined forces with the Lobby to persuade the administration and the American people that the United States and Israel faced a common threat from terrorism…The Israeli government and pro-Israel groups in the United States have worked together to shape the administration’s policy towards Iraq, Syria and Iran, as well as its grand scheme for reordering the Middle East…Equally worrying, the Lobby’s campaign for regime change in Iran and Syria could lead the US to attack those countries…On 16 August 2002, 11 days before Dick Cheney kicked off the campaign for war with a hardline speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the Washington Post reported that ‘Israel is urging US officials not to delay a military strike against Iraq’s Saddam Hussein.’ …neo-conservatives and other Lobby leaders were eager to invade Iraq…Once Baghdad fell in mid-April 2003, Sharon and his lieutenants began urging Washington to target Damascus…Israelis tend to describe every threat in the starkest terms, but Iran is widely seen as their most dangerous enemy because it is the most likely to acquire nuclear weapons.”
So what we have here is a pretty clear case of Israel and her Lobby having been responsible for every American move in the Middle East between 2001 and 2007. Furthermore Israel is directly responsible for American policy towards Iran and Syria. What Mearsheimer and Walt are arguing for is a reversal of American policy in the Middle East. But what would such a flip look like? First of all America would abandon Israel. Then she would have to abandon her other closest allies in the Middle East including Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the gulf states. Then America would ally with Iran, Syria and Hizbullah. America would bring back the Ba’athist regime of Iraq under Tariq Aziz(most of the other high ranking officials have been hung). America would also have to ally herself with Mumar Quadafi in Libya and the regime in the Sudan. Now America would need to ally herself with Putin in Russia, since he is providing Iran with arms. Then America would reconcile with Chavez of Venezuela and Castro of Cuba because they are allies of Iran. All this of course is predicated on the idea that any of these countries would have America as an ally. America would need to abandon Musharref as part of her re-alignment. The first country to be destroyed from this policy would be Pakistan, which would become an Islamist state and a new American ally now that Musharref is gone. Next Egypt will fall to Islamism and its new Muslim Brotherhood government will be an American ally. Now America will run into trouble in the Middle East because her Ba’athist friends in Baghdad will find themselves at war with Iran and its Shias in the south. America won’t know who to support. The Kurds in the North, having been abandoned by America’s great policy shift, will take to arms unsettling northern Iran, Syria, Iraq and Turkey. The chaos of the region will eventually overwhelm America’s new policy and its internal contradictions and American foreign policy makers will yearn for the ‘good ole days’ when America’s closest ally was the Jewish state the Saudi Kingdom.
Without the Israel Lobby
Mearsheimer and Walt: “If [the Israel Lobby’s] efforts to shape US policy succeed, Israel’s enemies will be weakened or overthrown, Israel will get a free hand with the Palestinians, and the US will do most of the fighting, dying, rebuilding and paying.”
This brilliant line of reasoning blames America’s invasion of Iraq on Israel and blames all of the ‘fighting’ and ‘dying’ of American troops on Israel. This is nice way to excuse the fact that the most powerful nation in the world made its own choice to invade a country and then made its own mistakes in trying to govern that country. It is convenient to blame American Jews for the policy in Iraq but one wonders, how can the Jews and Israel be blamed for Vietnam. America did most of the ‘fighting, dying, rebuilding and paying’ in Vietnam. Was it the Diem and the South Vietnamese who were to blame. Sure. It wasn’t JFK and LBJ or Macnamara and Westmoreland. No. It was those ‘slopes’ in South Vietnam, those chinks who made us do it. They hoodwinked us into fighting communism. Just like in the Second World War, the British hoodwinked us into doing all the “fighting, dying, rebuilding and paying.” It’s a brilliant thesis to always blame others for one’s own mistakes. So it must be Israel’s fault. It couldn’t possibly be America’s fault. America is not an adult, its just a child, it’s the Jewish adults who played America like a fiddle.
The power of the Lobby
According to Mearsheimer and Walt “AIPAC and its allies (including Christian Zionists) have no serious opponents in the lobbying world.” No serious opponents? What about the Saudi oil lobby and its GDP that is five times greater than Israel’s? Its convenient to pretend that Israel’s Jewish lobby in the U.S is the only lobby, that makes it easy to blame the Jews for all of America’s choices, but it ignores all the other groups in America who spend 5,000 times more money lobbying than the Israel lobby. The Israel lobby isn’t even the only ethnic lobby, there was an Irish lobby that encouraged America to support the IRA and there was an Albanian lobby that helped get America involved in the Balkan wars.
The Jews in the government
Mearsheimer and Walt argue that the Jewish lobby has even infiltrated the government: “Wolfowitz is equally committed to Israel. The Forward once described him as ‘the most hawkishly pro-Israel voice in the administration’, and selected him in 2002 as first among 50 notables who ‘have consciously pursued Jewish activism’.” But one wonders where the critique is of the Ambassadors and State Department employees who have created the close alliance with Saudi Arabia over the last seventy years.
Mearsheimer and Walt assert that “not surprisingly, American Jewish leaders often consult Israeli officials, to make sure that their actions advance Israeli goals.” Where is the evidence for this? Frequently American Jewish leaders believe they know what is best for Israel. Israeli leaders are frequently far less sophisticated and far sighted as American Jewish leaders, because Israeli leaders must actually deal with the unstable politics in their country they tend to be more pragmatic, American Jewish leaders are idealists. Anyone who has studied the American Jewish leadership and its relationship with Israel has found that there are always numerous problems between the two, the latest example is the differing opinions on the Sudanese refugees. American Jews support Darfur and think Israel should take the refugees, Israelis by contrast, don’t want them. But perhaps if you live in the ivory tower like Mearsheimer and Walt you are able to convince yourself that the two groups march in lockstep, since they are all Jews they must think the same way. Not surprisingly Mearsheimer and Walt have never been to Israel or met with either Israeli government officials or American Jewish leaders.
The Mearsheimer and Walt thesis is not only wrong in the details of its accusations but it is also wrong on four major points.
1) The alliance with Israel is not against America’s best interest, it would be worse to only have Saudi Arabia and the Arabs as allies, it would not end terrorism and they would then have no balance of power in the Middle East but they could blackmail us, as Turkey has done with the ADL over the Armenian Genocide.
2) The Israel lobby is no more nefarious than other ethnic lobbies in the U.S, the Saudi Islamic lobby, the Albanian lobby, the Anglo lobby, the Irish lobby.
3) By singling out American Jews and Israel as the source of all of America’s problems, and accusing it of so many nefarious plots, and relying on the books of Chomsky and Finkelstien rather than doing primary research not only constitutes Anti-Semitism but bad scholarship. The number of things the ‘Lobby’ is said to control, from the media to political campaigns to the U.S government to being the cause of terrorism, sounds suspiciously like the ‘protocols of the elders of Zion’.
4) The study over-estimates the world-view of Israeli government officials, in a sense it ascribes to the Israeli government powers and knowledge and influence it has never had or has wanted to have. By claiming that it is the Israelis that control the ‘Lobby’ the study betrays its complete misunderstanding of the relationship between AIPAC and Israel.
5) The study forgets about the degree to which America involves itself in Israel’s foreign policy. America has told Israel if it should or should not negotiate with Syria and has ordered Israel not to sell certain types of weapons to China. If the Israel lobby controlled the United States then it would not stand to reason that the U.S would need to pressure Israel to do things. The same people who claim that the U.S is adversely controlled by the Israel lobby are the same ones who claim America should ‘force’ Israel to give up the occupied territories and ‘force’ her to make peace. This seems to be a contradiction in terms, if America is controlled by the ‘Lobby’ then it wouldn’t need to force Israel to do anything, because America and Israel would always see eye to eye.
Mearsheimer and Walt conclude that:
“Open debate will expose the limits of the strategic and moral case for one-sided US support and could move the US to a position more consistent with its own national interest, with the interests of the other states in the region, and with Israel’s long-term interests as well.” The day that America abandons its ‘one sided’ support for Israel so that it can ally itself with the Islamist and Shiite majorities of the region, and the day that America begins working for the ‘best interests’ of wealthy Gulf Arabs more than it already does and the day that America pretends it knows that the ‘long term’ best interests of Israel are, is the day that America will truly have lost her way. Perhaps the ‘long term’ best interests of Poland in 1939 were to be gobbled up by the Germans, luckily the world sided with the minority democratic state in 1939 rather than with the rising tide of the ‘other interests’ in Europe, who were dictatorships and fascists. Surely the America’s First movement wanted more open debate and an end to America’s ‘one sided’ support for Churchill’s England. FDR was smart enough not to listen.
3) Christiane Amanpour’s introduction to World Religions
Seth J. Frantzman
August 17th, 2007
“Meet God’s Warriors. On Wednesday the Jewish Warriors. On Thursday the Muslims and on Friday the Christians.”
According to Christian Amanpour Judaism, Islam and Christianity are all the same. They all produce ‘warriors of God’. These warriors are all the same in their hatred and extremism. These groups all produce terrorism and are insular and hateful. All religions are the same and they all affect the world in the same manner.
In the Amanpour worldview there are 1.3 Billion Jews, there are 1.3 Billion Muslims and 1.3 Billion Christians. In the Amanpour worldview Jews, Christians and Muslims all commit honor killings. They all circumcise their daughters. They are all polygamous. They are all waging holy wars. This is because all religions are the same, they all have a violent fundamentalist fringe.
But there is a problem with this line of reasoning that is so common in any discussion of religious extremism and terrorism. We are always reminded when anyone speaks of Islamic fundamentalism or Islamic terrorism, that neither fundamentalism or terrorism are unique to Islam. “All religions have extremists.” “Terrorism has ancient roots.” These are the hail Marys that one must repeat over and over again in order to repent for the sin of having singled out Islam
But when you are done repenting you should reflect. Does every religion really have its ‘fundamentalists’. The Amanpour needs every religion to have its fundamentalist in order to do her program on CNN, otherwise it might look like she is singling out Islam, and thus offending Islam, and then she might provoke the same violence that the Pope did when he noted that Islam was violent. Books on fundamentalism are the same. Every book on terrorism is organized thus; Chapter 1: Jewish terrorism against the Romans, Yigal Amar and Baruch Goldstein, Chapter 2: Christian fundamentalism, the Crusades, Jerry Fallwell, abortion clinic bombing and Tim Mcveigh, Chapter 2: Islamic fundamentalism, poverty in the Islamic world, colonialism and Islam, the Israeli occupation.
This is the standard discussion of fundamentalism and terrorism. The insinuation is that not only are all the religions exactly the same but that the roots of terrorism are actually Jewish and the roots of fundamentalism are found in the Christian Crusades. All Muslim terrorism however has different roots; it is from poverty and suppression, colonialism, Israeli occupation or it is a response to the Crusades. We are always informed that ‘Muslims have a long memory and they recall the injustice of the crusades.’
But lets be honest. The book ‘Dying to Win’ by Robert Pape repeats the same canards about the Jewish Sicarri and the Christian Crusaders but it includes one tiny piece of information that bares out the facts. Pape made the mistake of including an Appendix that supposedly includes every instance of suicide terrorism between 1980 and 2004. Even if his list included only half of the Muslim suicide bombings it would still be enough to illustrate the truth. There have been no Jewish suicide bombings. There have been no Christian suicide bombings. Yet the body count from the Muslim attacks is in the thousands, 800 in Israel alone, not to mention Morocco, Turkey, Thailand, Indonesia and London. But remember the three religions are the same. They are all equally fundamentalist. They all have terrorists.
Amanpour brags that she is going ‘face to face with God’s warriors’. But is she. Her footage shows the Orthodox Jew kissing his Torah. It shows the Christians at a tent revival with their hands in the air towards God. It shows the Muslims bowing down to Allah. But these aren’t ‘Gods Warriors’. These are religious people. Yes, surprise, they are people that are religious. They aren’t carrying swords. They aren’t murdering anyone.
This is apparently the great confusion. The secular leftist who desires not to offend Islam and therefore points out that there are ‘Christian fundamentalists and terrorists’ and then goes on to list Pat Robertson, Jerry Fallwell, Timothy Mcveigh and Billy Graham has simply missed the point. The Leftist notes that Israel is full of ‘God’s Warriors’ and mentions Yigal Amer and Baruch Goldstien, and then shows us footage of a bunch of black-clad Orthodox Jews.
But the liberal missed the point. He equates all religion with fanaticism. He says: “the Muslim terrorists come from the mosque where they meet extremists and therefore anyone who is religious is a terrorist and every religion has religious people so all religions have terrorists and they are therefore all the same.”
But all religions are not the same. Maybe its true that in the past many religions have experienced different patterns of extremism. Maybe it is true the Christians were once like the Muslims are today. The Christians used to have their Bin Ladens and their Wahhabis. Maybe that is partially true. Maybe it is true that there was a time when the Romans called the Jews ‘terrorists’ and there was another time when Jewish ‘terrorists’ blew up the King David Hotel, the headquarters of the British Mandate in Jerusalem.
But in the last fifty years the violence inherent in Islam have had no parallel in Christianity and Judaism. Two Jews who murdered together 30 people between 1990 and 2000 are supposed to represent all the Jewish religious people. Two Christians, Tim Mcveigh and Eric Rudolph, the abortion clinic bomber are supposed to represent all the secretly hidden Christian terrorists.
But how can one compare 4 people with the thousands of Islamic terrorist organizations waging wars all over the world. We are talking about thousands. Just in the West Bank and Gaza there are thousands of members of a dozen terrorist organizations. In Chechnya, Bosnia, Kosovo, Nigeria, Algeria, Egypt, Morocco, Sudan, Kenya, Jordan, Iran, Iraq, Kashmir, Afghanistan, western China, the Philippines and Indonesia are tens of thousands of other members of terrorist organizations. And these people are not just members, they are killers. They are killing people everyday. 3,000 in the Philippines since 2003, and 2,500 in southern Thailand in the same period. 52 people in London, hundreds in Madrid. Hundreds in Turkey. Hundreds of children at the Breslan school siege in Russia. Hundreds dead in Bali in two different bombings, Fifty dead in Sinai in the course of four bombings.
How can one equate one with the other. How can one equate Mcveigh, who wasn’t even a fundamentalist, with all these Muslims. Mcveigh killed 150 people. Ok. That’s tragic. That’s terrible. But that is one day in the life of Islam. Yes, everyday somewhere in the world the number of people murdered in Oklahoma city by Mcveigh are being murdered by Muslim terrorists. Baruch Goldstein’s massacre in Hebron, horrific as it was, is a drop in the bucket compared to the Russians, Algerians, Turks, Hindus, Buddhists, Australians and Africans killed every week by Muslim terrorists.
If a day comes when Christianity, which has 2 billion adherents is committing acts of terror everywhere in the world everyday on the scale that Islam does, then it will be time to compare Christianity to Islam. When the day comes that the 15 million Jews in the world are blowing themselves up all over the world wherever they live, it will be time to compare the Jews to Islam.
Christian Amanpour is a coward. She included the Jews, who are .0001% of the world, in her report because she wanted to appease Islam. She could have included the Hindus, whose Tamil Tigers actually have killed thousands of people over the last ten years in Sri Lanka. Yes, the Hindu Tamils actually do produce suicide bombers. It doesn’t make Hinduism like Islam but at least it would be a farer comparison than the Jews. There are 800 million Hindus, so at least in numbers it could be compared. But even when it is compared one will find that there are .1% as many Hindu terrorists as Muslims. By contrast there are .000001% as many Jewish and Christian terrorists as Muslim ones. Perhaps Amanpour could have included the Sikhs, who also produced a number of famous terrorists in the 1980s, such as the Babbar Khalsa which blew up an Air India plane and Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale who carried out acts in Punjab in 1984. They even killed Indira Gandhi. Apparently the Sikhs, who number 25 million, are not as nefarious as the 13 million Jews whose terrorism truly threatens the world.
CNN calls Amanpour’s reporting a “groundbreaking documentary series.”
Mrs. Amanpour dons a black headscarf and runs around interviewing eloquent and friendly looking Muslims about their religion. When it comes to the ‘Jews’ she takes off her headscarf because she would never enter a religious Jewish neighborhood and dress modestly for them, and instead she makes sure to locate the most extreme Jews in Israel, Jews who barely speak English. When it comes to the Christians she mocks them, showing footage of Bible belt preachers and ‘brainwashed’ Christian children wearing chastity rings or protesting Abortion.
I call it a massive fabrication of the truth, a disgusting comparison that is so disproportionate and biased in its analysis that it should be ashamed of itself. If Amanpour wanted to do it right and devote two hours to describe ‘God’s Warriors’ among the Jews then she should have spent ten years devoting 24 hours a day to ‘God’s warriors’ in Islam. That would be proportionate and honest.
But we wouldn’t want honesty. The Jews and Christians are all terrorists, it’s a normal part of their religion, and most religious Jews and Christians are just biding their time to blow themselves up. Worst of all Jews and Christians have no excuse to be terrorists, they aren’t being occupied, they didn’t suffer colonialism, they don’t suffer discrimination, and they are rich.
Christiane Amanpour is a disgusting person, a rotten example of all that is diseased about the west and its secular media. She can spit on the Jews and Christians all she wants by equating them to Muslim terrorists and pretending that Jerry Fallwell and Rabbi Ovadia Yosef are the same as Osama Bin Laden. But one wonders, when Amanpour gets on that plane to cross the Atlantic, to crawl back to Atlanta to CNN’s headquarters, one wonders if when she is sandwiched between an overweight Orthodox Rabbi who is mumbling Tefilah HaDerech(the wayfarers prayer) and a skinny old Catholic woman clutching her Rosary. One wonders if she will notice the three Muslim men dressed in business suits settling into first class. Will she see them, their clean shaven faces, one is white, one Asian and one black. Will she notice? Will she be scared of the Rabbi and his mumbling? Perhaps it will annoy her, she will think in her head how disgusting the Jews are, how their rotten Hebrew poisons the air. She will think to herself how beautiful Arabic sounds, how romantic it is and how Hebrew is a language of the gutter. Maybe she will think, like so many secular people do when confronted with Orthodox Jews, “now I understand why Hitler killed them, these useless specimens of humanity.” While Amanpour is dwelling on how disgusted she is by being forced to sit next to the fanatical Jew, who she imagines is smushing himself against the window so as to avoid touching her, an impure women, perhaps she will not notice the Muslims and their oversized carry-on bags. They know how to treat a western woman, her body doesn’t offend them. No, she won’t notice. She won’t fear them. After all, the plane has an equal chance of being hijacked or blown up by the Rabbi, the Catholic nun or the clean shaven twenty-five year old Muslim male.
Issue 3
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
August 30th, 2007
Here are this week's three articles below and attached. The full articles appear below these short abstracts.
1) Communal responsibility is practiced by Bedouins and many other people. An examination of a number of cases shows that communal responsibility would decrease violence in society by holding entire community’s responsible for the actions of some members of those community’s.
2) Mearsheimer and Walt are back. Their ‘working paper’ is being published as a book. It is worthwhile to take time and re-visit their most extreme arguments and examine them in detail to show how completely wrong they are.
3) Christiane Amanpour recently hosted a CNN six hour special called ‘God’s Warriors.’ It’s central thesis was that Judaism, Christianity and Islam are essentially the same. They all have fundamentalists. They all commit violence. But can these religions really be compared? Why not include Hinduism and Sikhism?
1) In praise of communal responsibility
August 27th, 2007
Seth J. Frantzman
In December of 2006 the burned body of Mika Dabab, an Ethiopian girl was found in the Bedouin town of Rahat in southern Israel. She had been seen the night before at a club with her Bedouin boyfriend and some of his friends. She was the daughter of immigrants from Ethiopia. She was 16 years old. When friends and family in the community of Kiryat Gat found out they were saddened. The police investigated the matter and arrested the boyfriend. That was the end of it.
On July 11th, 2007 Valentina Dombayev, a 24 year old Russian immigrant to Israel was found murdered by the side of the road near Ashdod. She had been kidnapped with a friend of hers, Elena Zaorov, and handcuffed, placed in the trunk of a car and taken to the desert and murdered. The murderer, her husband Iyad Sami, an Arab of Ramallah was arrested.
In a separate case beginning in April of 2005 six Bedouin men from the village of Bir Al-Maksur in the Galilee began gang raping women from nearby Jewish towns. First in Kiryat Yam, then Kiryat Ata, Kiryat Bialik and finally in Carmel. The raped women were 13, 16, 19 and 25 respectively. The case, like the others, is apparently still in court.
On Sunday, August 26th, 2007 it was reported that the mayor of Rahat, Talal al-Karnawi had claimed that “if rumors about Mahmoud’s death turn out to be true it might inflame the public.” Mahmoud al-Karnawi, evidently a member of the mayor’s Hamula or clan, was killed in crossfire between the Israeli army and Islamic Jihad militants in Tulkarm on the West Bank. The mayor of Rahat was expressing an age old Bedouin tradition of holding those responsible for the killing communally responsible. Therefore it is not the individual IDF soldier that shot the boy(or the Islamic Jihad member), it is Israel in general and Jews in general who are responsible. In the Bedouin world such things, even accidental deaths, are solved by communal feuds and finally through Sulhas or Hudnas: truces between families, clans or tribes. These traditions and their elaborate ceremonies go back thousands of years. Many other cultures in the world have similar traditions, long since buried, of holding people communally responsible for murder.
Unfortunately the Russian community of Lod where Dombayev was from, or the Ethiopian community or Kiryat Gat, where Dabab was from no longer have these traditions. The Ethiopians used to, when they lived in Ethiopia, but they have drunk from the poisoned chalice of western culture and they no longer do.
But some people still cling to such ancient customs. In Kiryat Yam on the night of March 11th, 2006 three Bedouin men arrived in a car. Jalal Tawili, a Bedouin from Tamra, got out and opened the back door for his Russian girlfriend who the three men were dropping off. It was 2am. The Russian girl was 17. Tawili was 20 and his friends were 21. According to Tawili, who is a soldier in the Israeli army, a group of young men from the neighborhood appeared. They asked the Bedouins to turn off their music because “we don’t speak Arabic here.” Then a ‘whole group of young men came out with chains and clubs.’ While the third Bedouin fled, the Tawili brothers were beaten with chains and bats and clubs. Both had to receive extensive hospital care. The Tawilis couldn’t distinguish between the men who beat them and most other Jews in Israel. Tawili knew his girlfriend was ‘Russian’ and he probably assumed that the Russians of Kiryat Yam were like the Russians in Lod or the Ethiopians in Kiryat Gat. They didn’t care what was done to their community. Kill their women, rape their women, they won’t care. But Tawili wasn’t aware that Zalman Shazar Street, where the attack took place, is inhabited by immigrants from the Caucuses known as Kavkaz. These mountain people happen to have a shared sense of communal responsibility. The media, as is it nature, referred to the attack as ‘racially motivated.’ But the Kavkaz didn’t react the way they did out of racism. Racism does not exist among tribal people who have no concept of race outside tribal and communal affiliation. The Kavkaz reacted communally to what they perceived was an assault on their community’s honor. The shear arrogance of a Bedouin to bring home a teenage girl at 2am in the morning and play his music so as to wake them up offended their sensibilities.
Perhaps the Kavkaz connected these Bedouin to the Bedouin gang who had raped a girl from the town in April the year before. The media that reported the Kiryat Yam beating didn’t connect these two events. But some communities in the world don’t like it when people from other communities come and rape their women, or burn them, or handcuff them and place them in a trunk of a car and murder them in the desert. Sometimes those people react violently with chains and bat and clubs. The modern world and particularly the West abhors this type of communal action and places it under the category of ‘racism.’ The papers described the beating of the Tawilis as a ‘lynching.’
But one must ponder the question: do Bedouin from Tamra still go to Kiryat Yam to fulfill their sexual desires? Perhaps word has spread quickly, as it usually does among Bedouin, that Kiryat Yam, or at least Zalman Shazar street is not the place to court underage girls. Lod or Kiryat Gat are better targets. After all, everyone knows the Ethiopian and Russian men who live there will never raise a fist if you murder their daughters. Rahat Mayor, Talal al Karnawi said it best in July of 2007 when he noted that “We in the Beduin[sic] sector do not encourage romantic relations between Beduins and Jews as well. It hurts our families just like it hurts the Jews. It causes a lot of difficult problems and internal conflicts which often end in violence.” Maybe the media will call him racist. But then the media should ask why Bedouins don’t usually rape or murder other Bedouin women, even from neighboring villages. They know the violence it will bring down upon their houses should they transgress the communal laws of stability. Not so with their Israeli neighbors. Not so in the Western world. That is one reason violent crime and rape is so common in Westernized cities.
In praise of communal responsibility
August 27th, 2007
Seth J. Frantzman
In December of 2006 the burned body of Mika Dabab, an Ethiopian girl was found in the Bedouin town of Rahat in southern Israel. She had been seen the night before at a club with her Bedouin boyfriend and some of his friends. She was the daughter of immigrants from Ethiopia. She was 16 years old. When friends and family in the community of Kiryat Gat found out they were saddened. The police investigated the matter and arrested the boyfriend. That was the end of it.
On July 11th, 2007 Valentina Dombayev, a 24 year old Russian immigrant to Israel was found murdered by the side of the road near Ashdod. She had been kidnapped with a friend of hers, Elena Zaorov, and handcuffed, placed in the trunk of a car and taken to the desert and murdered. The murderer, her husband Iyad Sami, an Arab of Ramallah was arrested.
In a separate case beginning in April of 2005 six Bedouin men from the village of Bir Al-Maksur in the Galilee began gang raping women from nearby Jewish towns. First in Kiryat Yam, then Kiryat Ata, Kiryat Bialik and finally in Carmel. The raped women were 13, 16, 19 and 25 respectively. The case, like the others, is apparently still in court.
On Sunday, August 26th, 2007 it was reported that the mayor of Rahat, Talal al-Karnawi had claimed that “if rumors about Mahmoud’s death turn out to be true it might inflame the public.” Mahmoud al-Karnawi, evidently a member of the mayor’s Hamula or clan, was killed in crossfire between the Israeli army and Islamic Jihad militants in Tulkarm on the West Bank. The mayor of Rahat was expressing an age old Bedouin tradition of holding those responsible for the killing communally responsible. Therefore it is not the individual IDF soldier that shot the boy(or the Islamic Jihad member), it is Israel in general and Jews in general who are responsible. In the Bedouin world such things, even accidental deaths, are solved by communal feuds and finally through Sulhas or Hudnas: truces between families, clans or tribes. These traditions and their elaborate ceremonies go back thousands of years. Many other cultures in the world have similar traditions, long since buried, of holding people communally responsible for murder.
Unfortunately the Russian community of Lod where Dombayev was from, or the Ethiopian community or Kiryat Gat, where Dabab was from no longer have these traditions. The Ethiopians used to, when they lived in Ethiopia, but they have drunk from the poisoned chalice of western culture and they no longer do.
But some people still cling to such ancient customs. In Kiryat Yam on the night of March 11th, 2006 three Bedouin men arrived in a car. Jalal Tawili, a Bedouin from Tamra, got out and opened the back door for his Russian girlfriend who the three men were dropping off. It was 2am. The Russian girl was 17. Tawili was 20 and his friends were 21. According to Tawili, who is a soldier in the Israeli army, a group of young men from the neighborhood appeared. They asked the Bedouins to turn off their music because “we don’t speak Arabic here.” Then a ‘whole group of young men came out with chains and clubs.’ While the third Bedouin fled, the Tawili brothers were beaten with chains and bats and clubs. Both had to receive extensive hospital care. The Tawilis couldn’t distinguish between the men who beat them and most other Jews in Israel. Tawili knew his girlfriend was ‘Russian’ and he probably assumed that the Russians of Kiryat Yam were like the Russians in Lod or the Ethiopians in Kiryat Gat. They didn’t care what was done to their community. Kill their women, rape their women, they won’t care. But Tawili wasn’t aware that Zalman Shazar Street, where the attack took place, is inhabited by immigrants from the Caucuses known as Kavkaz. These mountain people happen to have a shared sense of communal responsibility. The media, as is it nature, referred to the attack as ‘racially motivated.’ But the Kavkaz didn’t react the way they did out of racism. Racism does not exist among tribal people who have no concept of race outside tribal and communal affiliation. The Kavkaz reacted communally to what they perceived was an assault on their community’s honor. The shear arrogance of a Bedouin to bring home a teenage girl at 2am in the morning and play his music so as to wake them up offended their sensibilities.
Perhaps the Kavkaz connected these Bedouin to the Bedouin gang who had raped a girl from the town in April the year before. The media that reported the Kiryat Yam beating didn’t connect these two events. But some communities in the world don’t like it when people from other communities come and rape their women, or burn them, or handcuff them and place them in a trunk of a car and murder them in the desert. Sometimes those people react violently with chains and bat and clubs. The modern world and particularly the West abhors this type of communal action and places it under the category of ‘racism.’ The papers described the beating of the Tawilis as a ‘lynching.’
But one must ponder the question: do Bedouin from Tamra still go to Kiryat Yam to fulfill their sexual desires? Perhaps word has spread quickly, as it usually does among Bedouin, that Kiryat Yam, or at least Zalman Shazar street is not the place to court underage girls. Lod or Kiryat Gat are better targets. After all, everyone knows the Ethiopian and Russian men who live there will never raise a fist if you murder their daughters. Rahat Mayor, Talal al Karnawi said it best in July of 2007 when he noted that “We in the Beduin[sic] sector do not encourage romantic relations between Beduins and Jews as well. It hurts our families just like it hurts the Jews. It causes a lot of difficult problems and internal conflicts which often end in violence.” Maybe the media will call him racist. But then the media should ask why Bedouins don’t usually rape or murder other Bedouin women, even from neighboring villages. They know the violence it will bring down upon their houses should they transgress the communal laws of stability. Not so with their Israeli neighbors. Not so in the Western world. That is one reason violent crime and rape is so common in Westernized cities.
20 The problem with Mearsheimer and Walt
Seth J. Frantzman
August 19th, 2007
The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy is to be released on September 4th, 2007. This is the book version of the John J. Mearsheimer and Stephem M. Walt’s working paper published at Harvard. John Mearsheimer is the Wendell Harrison Professor of Political Science at Chicago, and the author of The Tragedy of Great Power Politics. Stephen Walt is the Robert and Renee Belfer Professor of International Affairs at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. His most recent book is Taming American Power: The Global Response to US Primacy. Their essay can be located in full at the London Review of Books, http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n06/mear01_.html.
Their thesis is wide ranging but it is worthwhile to deal with a few of its most strident accusations.
America helps Israel harm Palestinians
Mearsheimer and Walt write:
“Between 1949 and 1956, for example, Israeli security forces killed between 2700 and 5000 Arab infiltrators, the overwhelming majority of them unarmed. The IDF murdered hundreds of Egyptian prisoners of war in both the 1956 and 1967 wars, while in 1967, it expelled between 100,000 and 260,000 Palestinians from the newly conquered West Bank, and drove 80,000 Syrians from the Golan Heights…During the first intifada, the IDF distributed truncheons to its troops and encouraged them to break the bones of Palestinian protesters. The Swedish branch of Save the Children estimated that ‘23,600 to 29,900 children required medical treatment for their beating injuries in the first two years of the intifada.’ Nearly a third of them were aged ten or under…Thanks to the Lobby, the United States has become the de facto enabler of Israeli expansion in the Occupied Territories.”
This is a strange accusation given the fact that America is also a close ally of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and many other countries that use less than peaceful methods in dealing with dissidents and terrorists. Egypt, for instance, rounded up 3,000 Bedouin in the Sinai, subjecting some to electric shocks, after bombing took place in Sharm el Sheikh. If American policy was based on forcing the allies of America to have American standards in dealing with enemies all of America’s allies that are not in Europe would have to be dropped. Oddly enough Mearsheimer and Walt do not argue for such a sweeping moralistic policy.
Influence on Congress
Mearsheimer and Walt write “a key pillar of the Lobby’s effectiveness is its influence in Congress, where Israel is virtually immune from criticism…Here is one example: in the 1984 elections, AIPAC helped defeat Senator Charles Percy from Illinois, who, according to a prominent Lobby figure, had ‘displayed insensitivity and even hostility to our concerns’.”
The idea here is that the Lobby is all powerful in American elections. One wonders how this is possible. Outside of areas with large Jewish concentrations, such as New York or Florida, how would it be possible for the tiny minority of Jews, who are only five percent of America, to influence elections to the degree they are accused of. Mearsheimer and Walt admit that many Jews don’t even support the Israel Lobby, so that means that 1% of the American people are able to pick and choose which candidates win and lose. This is a pretty extraordinary conclusion, especially when one recalls all the other lobbies working to elect politicians, such as the labour lobby known as the AFL-CIO, which possesses more money and more voters than the Israel Lobby.
Influence on the Press
Mearsheimer and Walt write that “ ‘Shamir, Sharon, Bibi – whatever those guys want is pretty much fine by me,’ Robert Bartley once remarked. Not surprisingly, his newspaper, the Wall Street Journal, along with other prominent papers like the Chicago Sun-Times and the Washington Times, regularly runs editorials that strongly support Israel.”
The Lobby is accused of controlling the American press. Mearsheimer and Walt even accuse the Israel Lobby of controlling the New York Times because, in their opinion, the Times is not critical enough of Israel. This is an interesting accusation that hinges not on evidence, but the mere perception that the Times does not apparently share the deep critique of Israel that Mearsheimer and Walt have. But by this logic the Times is also owned by the Chinese and the Saudis because it only criticizes these countries rarely. Furthermore most pro-Israel groups believe the Times is actually stridently anti-Israel. How to reconcile the two opinions?
Influence on education and free speech
Mearsheimer and Walt complain that during the Second Intifada “the Lobby moved immediately to ‘take back the campuses’. New groups sprang up, like the Caravan for Democracy, which brought Israeli speakers to US colleges…A classic illustration of the effort to police academia occurred towards the end of 2004, when the David Project produced a film alleging that faculty members of Columbia’s Middle East Studies programme were anti-Semitic and were intimidating Jewish students who stood up for Israel…the Lobby’s campaign to quash debate about Israel is unhealthy for democracy.”
The argument here is that since there are pro-Israel groups on campus and because one of those groups made one documentary that therefore the Israel Lobby controls thought on American college campuses. Just to give a very obvious example, the University of Arizona has at least four groups that actively protest against Israel. The Arizona Daily Wildcat, the campus newspaper often carries anti-Israel columns in its oped section. If the pro-Israel lobby was so successful then logically these wouldn’t exist. Furthermore the faculty at Harvard even considered divesting Harvard’s endowment from companies that do business in Israel. They never once, in the history of Harvard, considered divestment from any other country. Columbia University has invited the Iranian President, Ahmadinjed, to speak at their campus. Mearsheimer and Walt and still employed at their campuses, along with other notable anti-Israel professors such as Chomsky and Finkelstien. The very existence of the Mearsheimer and Walt working paper, which is not based on any original research, is evidence of the existence of the very debate that Mearsheimer and Walt would have us believe is being ‘quashed’.
Anti-Semitism
According to Mearsheimer and Walt the Lobby also destroys debate by calling opponents of Israel ‘anti-Semitic’; “No discussion of the Lobby would be complete without an examination of one of its most powerful weapons: the charge of anti-Semitism.”
It is interesting that the charge of ‘anti-Semitism’ is a ‘weapon’. By making this claim the authors obviously want to shield themselves from just such a charge, by claiming that any charges of anti-Semitism are used to ‘silence debate’. It is a brilliant rhetorical device, like the above one, that first makes the claim that X is being ‘quashed’ and therefore we need more X. Then the argument proceeds by claiming that anyone who supports X is accused of racism and therefore cannot be a racist because it has been shown that the accusation of racism is a weapon to quash the debate of X. Thus two things are accomplished; people believe that there needs to be more condemnation of Israel in order to ‘speak out’ against the quashing of democratic debate and that one must in fact condemn Israel in order to prove that free speech still exists. They can condemn Israel and the ‘Jewish lobby’ in the most shrill tones because now they have ‘proven’ that any accusation of being anti-Jewish is merely a device used to silence them. In fact, by this logic, being anti-Jewish would be a method of exercising free speech. Its odd that the very same logic doesn’t pertain to complaining about Jesse Jackson and the ‘black lobby’.
The Role of the Lobby in Fomenting Terrorism
The most damning accusation of Mearsheimer and Walt is that support of Israel is the root cause for terrorism: “In the autumn of 2001, and especially in the spring of 2002, the Bush administration tried to reduce anti-American sentiment in the Arab world and undermine support for terrorist groups like al-Qaida by halting Israel’s expansionist policies in the Occupied Territories and advocating the creation of a Palestinian state…It increases the terrorist danger that all states face – including America’s European allies. It has made it impossible to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a situation that gives extremists a powerful recruiting tool, increases the pool of potential terrorists and sympathizers, and contributes to Islamic radicalism in Europe and Asia.”
This is an especially brilliant argument in light of the fact that Bin Laden specifically noted that he opposed the basing of American troops in the Muslim Holy Land, Saudi Arabia. Since it would be difficult to blame America it makes more sense to blame Israel. By this logic one should have blamed Poland and England for dragging America into war with Nazi Germany. After all it was America’s support of the U.K that encouraged the Fuhrer to declare war on America. In fact the argument should be taken one step further, it was actually the Jews that are to blame for American involvement in the Second World War since Hitler’s hatred of Jews led him to power and to invade Poland and thus to bring the U.K into the war and thus to bring the U.S into the war. Therefore, just like today, the Jews are to blame for bringing America into war. The logic should be taken further. American support for capitalism caused Communist countries such irritation that it caused them to encourage revolutions against American allies. The Jews are behind much of American capitalism, and therefore the Jews were to blame for the Cold War, since without the Jewish capitalists and their banks, America could have allied herself with the Soviet Union.
The greatest and most disturbing flaw in the reasoning of Mearsheimer and Walt is that it implies somehow that America’s true allies should be the Bin Ladens. America’s support of Israel has ‘provoked’ the terrorists and therefore America must stop her support for X simply because it makes Y unhappy. But just because certain people are unhappy with something doesn’t necessarily lead to the conclusion that it is wrong. The KKK was a terrorist organization. According to the famous film Birth of a Nation the KKK was a reaction to the Northern support of Carpet-baggers and uppity negroes. In the 1960s the KKK was reacting to the forces of de-segregation. By the logic of Mearsheimer and Walt, since support for the Southern Blacks caused provocation to white southerners and led them to terrorism, therefore America should not have supported blacks. By always accepting the terrorist standpoint and their arguments one implicitly allies with them, and usually that means supporting the worst, most aggressive regimes against the weaker ones. Communist terrorism was based on its critique of the capitalist society, does that mean the world should have abandoned capitalism so as not to ‘provoke’ communism?
Israel encourages America to invade other countries and sacrifice lives needlessly
Mearsheimer and Walt have also made the claim that Israel is single-handedly responsible for American policy in the Middle East. Between 2000 and 2001 Ariel Sharon, Israel’s Prime Minister, was critiqued for comparing Bush to Neville Chamberlain. According to Mearsheimer and Walt “Sharon offered a pro forma apology, but quickly joined forces with the Lobby to persuade the administration and the American people that the United States and Israel faced a common threat from terrorism…The Israeli government and pro-Israel groups in the United States have worked together to shape the administration’s policy towards Iraq, Syria and Iran, as well as its grand scheme for reordering the Middle East…Equally worrying, the Lobby’s campaign for regime change in Iran and Syria could lead the US to attack those countries…On 16 August 2002, 11 days before Dick Cheney kicked off the campaign for war with a hardline speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the Washington Post reported that ‘Israel is urging US officials not to delay a military strike against Iraq’s Saddam Hussein.’ …neo-conservatives and other Lobby leaders were eager to invade Iraq…Once Baghdad fell in mid-April 2003, Sharon and his lieutenants began urging Washington to target Damascus…Israelis tend to describe every threat in the starkest terms, but Iran is widely seen as their most dangerous enemy because it is the most likely to acquire nuclear weapons.”
So what we have here is a pretty clear case of Israel and her Lobby having been responsible for every American move in the Middle East between 2001 and 2007. Furthermore Israel is directly responsible for American policy towards Iran and Syria. What Mearsheimer and Walt are arguing for is a reversal of American policy in the Middle East. But what would such a flip look like? First of all America would abandon Israel. Then she would have to abandon her other closest allies in the Middle East including Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the gulf states. Then America would ally with Iran, Syria and Hizbullah. America would bring back the Ba’athist regime of Iraq under Tariq Aziz(most of the other high ranking officials have been hung). America would also have to ally herself with Mumar Quadafi in Libya and the regime in the Sudan. Now America would need to ally herself with Putin in Russia, since he is providing Iran with arms. Then America would reconcile with Chavez of Venezuela and Castro of Cuba because they are allies of Iran. All this of course is predicated on the idea that any of these countries would have America as an ally. America would need to abandon Musharref as part of her re-alignment. The first country to be destroyed from this policy would be Pakistan, which would become an Islamist state and a new American ally now that Musharref is gone. Next Egypt will fall to Islamism and its new Muslim Brotherhood government will be an American ally. Now America will run into trouble in the Middle East because her Ba’athist friends in Baghdad will find themselves at war with Iran and its Shias in the south. America won’t know who to support. The Kurds in the North, having been abandoned by America’s great policy shift, will take to arms unsettling northern Iran, Syria, Iraq and Turkey. The chaos of the region will eventually overwhelm America’s new policy and its internal contradictions and American foreign policy makers will yearn for the ‘good ole days’ when America’s closest ally was the Jewish state the Saudi Kingdom.
Without the Israel Lobby
Mearsheimer and Walt: “If [the Israel Lobby’s] efforts to shape US policy succeed, Israel’s enemies will be weakened or overthrown, Israel will get a free hand with the Palestinians, and the US will do most of the fighting, dying, rebuilding and paying.”
This brilliant line of reasoning blames America’s invasion of Iraq on Israel and blames all of the ‘fighting’ and ‘dying’ of American troops on Israel. This is nice way to excuse the fact that the most powerful nation in the world made its own choice to invade a country and then made its own mistakes in trying to govern that country. It is convenient to blame American Jews for the policy in Iraq but one wonders, how can the Jews and Israel be blamed for Vietnam. America did most of the ‘fighting, dying, rebuilding and paying’ in Vietnam. Was it the Diem and the South Vietnamese who were to blame. Sure. It wasn’t JFK and LBJ or Macnamara and Westmoreland. No. It was those ‘slopes’ in South Vietnam, those chinks who made us do it. They hoodwinked us into fighting communism. Just like in the Second World War, the British hoodwinked us into doing all the “fighting, dying, rebuilding and paying.” It’s a brilliant thesis to always blame others for one’s own mistakes. So it must be Israel’s fault. It couldn’t possibly be America’s fault. America is not an adult, its just a child, it’s the Jewish adults who played America like a fiddle.
The power of the Lobby
According to Mearsheimer and Walt “AIPAC and its allies (including Christian Zionists) have no serious opponents in the lobbying world.” No serious opponents? What about the Saudi oil lobby and its GDP that is five times greater than Israel’s? Its convenient to pretend that Israel’s Jewish lobby in the U.S is the only lobby, that makes it easy to blame the Jews for all of America’s choices, but it ignores all the other groups in America who spend 5,000 times more money lobbying than the Israel lobby. The Israel lobby isn’t even the only ethnic lobby, there was an Irish lobby that encouraged America to support the IRA and there was an Albanian lobby that helped get America involved in the Balkan wars.
The Jews in the government
Mearsheimer and Walt argue that the Jewish lobby has even infiltrated the government: “Wolfowitz is equally committed to Israel. The Forward once described him as ‘the most hawkishly pro-Israel voice in the administration’, and selected him in 2002 as first among 50 notables who ‘have consciously pursued Jewish activism’.” But one wonders where the critique is of the Ambassadors and State Department employees who have created the close alliance with Saudi Arabia over the last seventy years.
Mearsheimer and Walt assert that “not surprisingly, American Jewish leaders often consult Israeli officials, to make sure that their actions advance Israeli goals.” Where is the evidence for this? Frequently American Jewish leaders believe they know what is best for Israel. Israeli leaders are frequently far less sophisticated and far sighted as American Jewish leaders, because Israeli leaders must actually deal with the unstable politics in their country they tend to be more pragmatic, American Jewish leaders are idealists. Anyone who has studied the American Jewish leadership and its relationship with Israel has found that there are always numerous problems between the two, the latest example is the differing opinions on the Sudanese refugees. American Jews support Darfur and think Israel should take the refugees, Israelis by contrast, don’t want them. But perhaps if you live in the ivory tower like Mearsheimer and Walt you are able to convince yourself that the two groups march in lockstep, since they are all Jews they must think the same way. Not surprisingly Mearsheimer and Walt have never been to Israel or met with either Israeli government officials or American Jewish leaders.
The Mearsheimer and Walt thesis is not only wrong in the details of its accusations but it is also wrong on four major points.
1) The alliance with Israel is not against America’s best interest, it would be worse to only have Saudi Arabia and the Arabs as allies, it would not end terrorism and they would then have no balance of power in the Middle East but they could blackmail us, as Turkey has done with the ADL over the Armenian Genocide.
2) The Israel lobby is no more nefarious than other ethnic lobbies in the U.S, the Saudi Islamic lobby, the Albanian lobby, the Anglo lobby, the Irish lobby.
3) By singling out American Jews and Israel as the source of all of America’s problems, and accusing it of so many nefarious plots, and relying on the books of Chomsky and Finkelstien rather than doing primary research not only constitutes Anti-Semitism but bad scholarship. The number of things the ‘Lobby’ is said to control, from the media to political campaigns to the U.S government to being the cause of terrorism, sounds suspiciously like the ‘protocols of the elders of Zion’.
4) The study over-estimates the world-view of Israeli government officials, in a sense it ascribes to the Israeli government powers and knowledge and influence it has never had or has wanted to have. By claiming that it is the Israelis that control the ‘Lobby’ the study betrays its complete misunderstanding of the relationship between AIPAC and Israel.
5) The study forgets about the degree to which America involves itself in Israel’s foreign policy. America has told Israel if it should or should not negotiate with Syria and has ordered Israel not to sell certain types of weapons to China. If the Israel lobby controlled the United States then it would not stand to reason that the U.S would need to pressure Israel to do things. The same people who claim that the U.S is adversely controlled by the Israel lobby are the same ones who claim America should ‘force’ Israel to give up the occupied territories and ‘force’ her to make peace. This seems to be a contradiction in terms, if America is controlled by the ‘Lobby’ then it wouldn’t need to force Israel to do anything, because America and Israel would always see eye to eye.
Mearsheimer and Walt conclude that:
“Open debate will expose the limits of the strategic and moral case for one-sided US support and could move the US to a position more consistent with its own national interest, with the interests of the other states in the region, and with Israel’s long-term interests as well.” The day that America abandons its ‘one sided’ support for Israel so that it can ally itself with the Islamist and Shiite majorities of the region, and the day that America begins working for the ‘best interests’ of wealthy Gulf Arabs more than it already does and the day that America pretends it knows that the ‘long term’ best interests of Israel are, is the day that America will truly have lost her way. Perhaps the ‘long term’ best interests of Poland in 1939 were to be gobbled up by the Germans, luckily the world sided with the minority democratic state in 1939 rather than with the rising tide of the ‘other interests’ in Europe, who were dictatorships and fascists. Surely the America’s First movement wanted more open debate and an end to America’s ‘one sided’ support for Churchill’s England. FDR was smart enough not to listen.
3) Christiane Amanpour’s introduction to World Religions
Seth J. Frantzman
August 17th, 2007
“Meet God’s Warriors. On Wednesday the Jewish Warriors. On Thursday the Muslims and on Friday the Christians.”
According to Christian Amanpour Judaism, Islam and Christianity are all the same. They all produce ‘warriors of God’. These warriors are all the same in their hatred and extremism. These groups all produce terrorism and are insular and hateful. All religions are the same and they all affect the world in the same manner.
In the Amanpour worldview there are 1.3 Billion Jews, there are 1.3 Billion Muslims and 1.3 Billion Christians. In the Amanpour worldview Jews, Christians and Muslims all commit honor killings. They all circumcise their daughters. They are all polygamous. They are all waging holy wars. This is because all religions are the same, they all have a violent fundamentalist fringe.
But there is a problem with this line of reasoning that is so common in any discussion of religious extremism and terrorism. We are always reminded when anyone speaks of Islamic fundamentalism or Islamic terrorism, that neither fundamentalism or terrorism are unique to Islam. “All religions have extremists.” “Terrorism has ancient roots.” These are the hail Marys that one must repeat over and over again in order to repent for the sin of having singled out Islam
But when you are done repenting you should reflect. Does every religion really have its ‘fundamentalists’. The Amanpour needs every religion to have its fundamentalist in order to do her program on CNN, otherwise it might look like she is singling out Islam, and thus offending Islam, and then she might provoke the same violence that the Pope did when he noted that Islam was violent. Books on fundamentalism are the same. Every book on terrorism is organized thus; Chapter 1: Jewish terrorism against the Romans, Yigal Amar and Baruch Goldstein, Chapter 2: Christian fundamentalism, the Crusades, Jerry Fallwell, abortion clinic bombing and Tim Mcveigh, Chapter 2: Islamic fundamentalism, poverty in the Islamic world, colonialism and Islam, the Israeli occupation.
This is the standard discussion of fundamentalism and terrorism. The insinuation is that not only are all the religions exactly the same but that the roots of terrorism are actually Jewish and the roots of fundamentalism are found in the Christian Crusades. All Muslim terrorism however has different roots; it is from poverty and suppression, colonialism, Israeli occupation or it is a response to the Crusades. We are always informed that ‘Muslims have a long memory and they recall the injustice of the crusades.’
But lets be honest. The book ‘Dying to Win’ by Robert Pape repeats the same canards about the Jewish Sicarri and the Christian Crusaders but it includes one tiny piece of information that bares out the facts. Pape made the mistake of including an Appendix that supposedly includes every instance of suicide terrorism between 1980 and 2004. Even if his list included only half of the Muslim suicide bombings it would still be enough to illustrate the truth. There have been no Jewish suicide bombings. There have been no Christian suicide bombings. Yet the body count from the Muslim attacks is in the thousands, 800 in Israel alone, not to mention Morocco, Turkey, Thailand, Indonesia and London. But remember the three religions are the same. They are all equally fundamentalist. They all have terrorists.
Amanpour brags that she is going ‘face to face with God’s warriors’. But is she. Her footage shows the Orthodox Jew kissing his Torah. It shows the Christians at a tent revival with their hands in the air towards God. It shows the Muslims bowing down to Allah. But these aren’t ‘Gods Warriors’. These are religious people. Yes, surprise, they are people that are religious. They aren’t carrying swords. They aren’t murdering anyone.
This is apparently the great confusion. The secular leftist who desires not to offend Islam and therefore points out that there are ‘Christian fundamentalists and terrorists’ and then goes on to list Pat Robertson, Jerry Fallwell, Timothy Mcveigh and Billy Graham has simply missed the point. The Leftist notes that Israel is full of ‘God’s Warriors’ and mentions Yigal Amer and Baruch Goldstien, and then shows us footage of a bunch of black-clad Orthodox Jews.
But the liberal missed the point. He equates all religion with fanaticism. He says: “the Muslim terrorists come from the mosque where they meet extremists and therefore anyone who is religious is a terrorist and every religion has religious people so all religions have terrorists and they are therefore all the same.”
But all religions are not the same. Maybe its true that in the past many religions have experienced different patterns of extremism. Maybe it is true the Christians were once like the Muslims are today. The Christians used to have their Bin Ladens and their Wahhabis. Maybe that is partially true. Maybe it is true that there was a time when the Romans called the Jews ‘terrorists’ and there was another time when Jewish ‘terrorists’ blew up the King David Hotel, the headquarters of the British Mandate in Jerusalem.
But in the last fifty years the violence inherent in Islam have had no parallel in Christianity and Judaism. Two Jews who murdered together 30 people between 1990 and 2000 are supposed to represent all the Jewish religious people. Two Christians, Tim Mcveigh and Eric Rudolph, the abortion clinic bomber are supposed to represent all the secretly hidden Christian terrorists.
But how can one compare 4 people with the thousands of Islamic terrorist organizations waging wars all over the world. We are talking about thousands. Just in the West Bank and Gaza there are thousands of members of a dozen terrorist organizations. In Chechnya, Bosnia, Kosovo, Nigeria, Algeria, Egypt, Morocco, Sudan, Kenya, Jordan, Iran, Iraq, Kashmir, Afghanistan, western China, the Philippines and Indonesia are tens of thousands of other members of terrorist organizations. And these people are not just members, they are killers. They are killing people everyday. 3,000 in the Philippines since 2003, and 2,500 in southern Thailand in the same period. 52 people in London, hundreds in Madrid. Hundreds in Turkey. Hundreds of children at the Breslan school siege in Russia. Hundreds dead in Bali in two different bombings, Fifty dead in Sinai in the course of four bombings.
How can one equate one with the other. How can one equate Mcveigh, who wasn’t even a fundamentalist, with all these Muslims. Mcveigh killed 150 people. Ok. That’s tragic. That’s terrible. But that is one day in the life of Islam. Yes, everyday somewhere in the world the number of people murdered in Oklahoma city by Mcveigh are being murdered by Muslim terrorists. Baruch Goldstein’s massacre in Hebron, horrific as it was, is a drop in the bucket compared to the Russians, Algerians, Turks, Hindus, Buddhists, Australians and Africans killed every week by Muslim terrorists.
If a day comes when Christianity, which has 2 billion adherents is committing acts of terror everywhere in the world everyday on the scale that Islam does, then it will be time to compare Christianity to Islam. When the day comes that the 15 million Jews in the world are blowing themselves up all over the world wherever they live, it will be time to compare the Jews to Islam.
Christian Amanpour is a coward. She included the Jews, who are .0001% of the world, in her report because she wanted to appease Islam. She could have included the Hindus, whose Tamil Tigers actually have killed thousands of people over the last ten years in Sri Lanka. Yes, the Hindu Tamils actually do produce suicide bombers. It doesn’t make Hinduism like Islam but at least it would be a farer comparison than the Jews. There are 800 million Hindus, so at least in numbers it could be compared. But even when it is compared one will find that there are .1% as many Hindu terrorists as Muslims. By contrast there are .000001% as many Jewish and Christian terrorists as Muslim ones. Perhaps Amanpour could have included the Sikhs, who also produced a number of famous terrorists in the 1980s, such as the Babbar Khalsa which blew up an Air India plane and Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale who carried out acts in Punjab in 1984. They even killed Indira Gandhi. Apparently the Sikhs, who number 25 million, are not as nefarious as the 13 million Jews whose terrorism truly threatens the world.
CNN calls Amanpour’s reporting a “groundbreaking documentary series.”
Mrs. Amanpour dons a black headscarf and runs around interviewing eloquent and friendly looking Muslims about their religion. When it comes to the ‘Jews’ she takes off her headscarf because she would never enter a religious Jewish neighborhood and dress modestly for them, and instead she makes sure to locate the most extreme Jews in Israel, Jews who barely speak English. When it comes to the Christians she mocks them, showing footage of Bible belt preachers and ‘brainwashed’ Christian children wearing chastity rings or protesting Abortion.
I call it a massive fabrication of the truth, a disgusting comparison that is so disproportionate and biased in its analysis that it should be ashamed of itself. If Amanpour wanted to do it right and devote two hours to describe ‘God’s Warriors’ among the Jews then she should have spent ten years devoting 24 hours a day to ‘God’s warriors’ in Islam. That would be proportionate and honest.
But we wouldn’t want honesty. The Jews and Christians are all terrorists, it’s a normal part of their religion, and most religious Jews and Christians are just biding their time to blow themselves up. Worst of all Jews and Christians have no excuse to be terrorists, they aren’t being occupied, they didn’t suffer colonialism, they don’t suffer discrimination, and they are rich.
Christiane Amanpour is a disgusting person, a rotten example of all that is diseased about the west and its secular media. She can spit on the Jews and Christians all she wants by equating them to Muslim terrorists and pretending that Jerry Fallwell and Rabbi Ovadia Yosef are the same as Osama Bin Laden. But one wonders, when Amanpour gets on that plane to cross the Atlantic, to crawl back to Atlanta to CNN’s headquarters, one wonders if when she is sandwiched between an overweight Orthodox Rabbi who is mumbling Tefilah HaDerech(the wayfarers prayer) and a skinny old Catholic woman clutching her Rosary. One wonders if she will notice the three Muslim men dressed in business suits settling into first class. Will she see them, their clean shaven faces, one is white, one Asian and one black. Will she notice? Will she be scared of the Rabbi and his mumbling? Perhaps it will annoy her, she will think in her head how disgusting the Jews are, how their rotten Hebrew poisons the air. She will think to herself how beautiful Arabic sounds, how romantic it is and how Hebrew is a language of the gutter. Maybe she will think, like so many secular people do when confronted with Orthodox Jews, “now I understand why Hitler killed them, these useless specimens of humanity.” While Amanpour is dwelling on how disgusted she is by being forced to sit next to the fanatical Jew, who she imagines is smushing himself against the window so as to avoid touching her, an impure women, perhaps she will not notice the Muslims and their oversized carry-on bags. They know how to treat a western woman, her body doesn’t offend them. No, she won’t notice. She won’t fear them. After all, the plane has an equal chance of being hijacked or blown up by the Rabbi, the Catholic nun or the clean shaven twenty-five year old Muslim male.
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