Terra Incognita
Issue 8
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
October 26th, 2007
Here are this week’s articles below and attached. This week’s theme is liberalism-leftism. The full articles appear below these short abstracts.
1) Should American foreign policy be Wilsonistic or Nixonian? : American foreign policy has been thrown into a conundrum with the recent controversy sourounding a Congressional vote on the Armenian genocide which brings us to the subject of whether it should be based on pragmatism of idealism. A look at American history and the future of this debate.
2) Judgment: Mans best friend: Judging is often condemned on a variety of grounds, but a world without judgment would be savage.
3) The Lone Voice: A Liberal literary device : Leftist-liberals frequently claim they are standing up against the ‘system’ and opposing the ‘state’ and that their ideas are both unique and original and that those ideas are a minority ‘radical’ voice. An analysis of this literary device and why it is both successful and a massive fabrication.
Should American foreign policy be Wilsonistic or Nixonian?
Seth J. Frantzman
October 22nd, 2007
The debate over the logic of the Armenian genocide bill has divided normally party line voters. Charles Krauthammer and the Economist agree that, although the genocide happened, a congressional vote on it is not necessary and comes at a bad time for American-Turkish relations. The Armenians living in Armenian do not care about the resolution and the Armenian patriarch in Constantinople (Istanbul) claims to oppose it (although he may merely fear being gunned down like the Armenian editor Hrant Dink).
Zionist and Israel defenders such as Abe Foxman (ADL president) and Caled Ben-David (author of a Jerusalem Post oped ‘Caught between an Armenian anvil and a Turkish Hammer’) have both opposed the non-binding resolution, although Foxman recanted after pressure from Jewish groups Elie Wiesel. It has split Republican and Democrats. Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House supports it, Robert Livingston, a former Republican heavy, works for the Turkish lobby now (which is like the Jewish lobby but with less emphasis on banks and world domination). However Republican Representative Chris Smith has declared that ‘friends don’t let friends commit crimes against humanity’ and many Democrats have shied away from their earlier support of the genocide bill.
For some people who count themselves Republican, conservative and supporters of Israel this means they have to make up their minds for themselves. That’s a tough call. For those that condemn the crimes of liberalism and Islamism it doesn’t lead to an easy answer either. Liberals support the bill. The Turkish Islamists don’t like it, but neither to the Turkish secular-nationalists. Turkish liberals like it though, especially dissident authors such as Taner Akcam and Orhan Pamuk, who one might compare ideologically to Israel’s Ilan Pappe and America’s Noam Chomsky. So does a western conservative sympathize with Turkish liberal-leftists who are slightly self-critical, or does he sympathize with the Turkish secularist-nationalists.
Certainly for many Israelis there has been a long denial of the Armenian genocide. But this has been for very pragmatic reasons and also because of parallels that Israelis see with Turks. The Armenian claims against Turkey are compared to those of the Palestinians. The terrorism suffered by Turkey at the hands of Kurds (and in the 1970s the Armenians Secret army for the liberation of Armenia that killed Turkish diplomats and was based in Lebanon and the U.S) is comparable to Palestinian terrorism against Israel. Turkey and Israel are both U.S allies. The Ottoman empire invited the Jews to settle in its regions in 1492 when they were expelled by Spain. Turkey didn’t join with Hitler (but it did put Jews in camps during the Second World War.) Turkey has been the oldest Muslim ally of Israel.
But there is an ominous link between the Armenian genocide and the Holocaust. Jews such as Henry Morganthau were the first to recognize the Armenian genocide and Hitler used the genocide to justify the Holocaust. The arguments by the supporters of Turkey, that the ‘question of the genocide should be left up to politicians not historians’ echoes the speeches of David Irving, the Holocaust ‘questioner’ who also thinks Holocaust denial laws should be repealed, and libel laws should be raised, so that he can deny the Holocaust and receive legal protection from anyone daring to call him a ‘holocaust denier.’ With Turkish backing many Universities and many scholars already deny the Armenian genocide.
The question of how to deal with the Armenian genocide is one that cuts to the heart of America’s foreign policy dilemma. On the one hand America has a history of a foreign policy based on idealism: Washington’s advice about staying out of foreign entanglements, Jefferson’s sympathy for the French Revolution, Lincoln’s freeing of the slaves, Mckinley’s desire to free Cuba from the shackles of colonialism, Wilson’s desire to make the world safe for democracy, FDR’s condemnation of colonialism while fighting the war on the side of England against Nazism, Carter’s ending of American support for Iran because of the Shah and Reagan’s ending of American support for the Philippines because of Marcos, Clintons bombing of Serbia to stop the ‘ethnic-cleansing’ of Bosnia and Albania, Bush’s desire to bring democracy to Afghanistan and Iraq.
But America has an equally strong history of pragmatic policies: Adams’ support for England, Monroe’s doctrine, Jackson’s relocation of the Cherokees, Polk’s war with Mexico, Lincoln’s support of Grant and Sherman, Mckinley’s decision to keep Cuba and the Philippines, the Congress’ refusal to join the League of Nations or support the Treaty of Versailles, the isolationism of the 1930s, Truman dropping the bomb, Eisenhower’s fiddling with Iran and Lebanon, JFK’s Bay of Pigs, LBJ’s Vietnam, Nixon’s détente, Ford’s refusal to help the Vietnamese in 1975, Reagan’s support of the Contras and the Mujahadin in Afghanistan, Bush I’s war in the Gulf, Clinton’s withdrawal from Somalia and his refusal to help the Tutsi in Rwanda, Bush II’s decision not to invade Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.
Pragmatism demands that America not recognize the Armenian genocide, which we are reminded took place 90 years ago, for feat of ‘offending’ the Turks and perhaps jeopardizing the war in Iraq should Turkey invade Iraqi Kurdistan.
Idealism argues for recognizing the genocide, and in a time honored fashion, say one thing at home and do another abroad.
What America should do is not just recognize the genocide and build a museum to it but it should go further. Pragmatism in the Middle East has brought America much woe. The Arabists, descendants of American missionaries to the Middle East who founded the American Universities in Beirut and Cairo, who controlled American foreign policy with the Middle East until the 1960s and still hold a great sway over it, focused American support in the region on a pragmatic alliance with the secular Sunni elites. These Arabists are not a myth, they were e tight group of connected individuals who worked for the State Department or American corporations (oil for instance) in the Middle East and lobbied successfully for an American alliance with the Saudi regime, the Sunni elite in Beirut (such as the current Prime Minister, Fuad Siniora), Saddam Hussein (who was a whisky guzzling Sunni) and Egypt (America supported Egypt against Israel in 1956, lest some forget). But these alliances with the devil, in the case of Saudi Arabia, have brought grief and suffering, not just on 9/11, but throughout the region. It helped bring the deaths of the American marines in Beirut in 1982. It helped bring about the ridiculous policies for and against Saddam. Its only positive outcome has been the support for Jordan’s king, and that has mostly been a British project. The whole region has fallen like a house of cards. America’s Sunni Palestinian friend, Mahmud Abbas, is a failure and the Islamists are winning in ‘Palestine.’ The Muslim Brotherhood, descendants of Said Qutb who became an Islamist because an American woman tried ‘chatted him up’ immodestly, are ascendant in Egypt. Saudi Arabia provides up to 90% of the foreign fighters and terrorists in Iraq. Almost all of the 9/11 hijackers were Saudi. The Gulf Arab states, all Sunni led, are cesspools of irrational exuberance and discriminatory apartheid which suppress the foreign workers who make up 90% of their populations. Lebanon is a Shiite ministate. Libya, led by a good-ole Sunni Bedouin, is no friend. Syria, led by an Alawite, is no friend. Now Turkey is threatening to leave America.
So how can America go further? America should build an alliance of minorities across the Middle East. This was the dream of Ben-Gurion who fantasized about an Israeli alliance with a Druze ministate in Syria, a Maronite Lebanon, a Persian Iran, A Bedouin Jordan, a Christian southern Sudan, and a Turkish Turkey. Ben-Gurion was right, except his policy was right for America, not Israel. America has abandoned the minorities of the Middle East because of expediency. But America should reverse course immediately. Take every policy of the last 20 years and do the opposite. Support, armed support, for the Southern Sudanese. Support for the foreign workers in the Gulf. Support for the Shiites in Saudi. Support for the Druze in Lebanon and Syria. Support for the Copts in Egypt and the Maronites in Lebanon. Support for all the Christians such as the Assyrians, Chaldeans, Jacobites and Mandeans (Gnostics). Support for the Jews, well America already has Israel. Most of all, support for the Kurds.
In fact America should be arming the Kurdish militias. Surely this will bring cries of hypocrisy, since America is fighting a ‘war on terror’ how can it arm terrorist Kurds? Well America is not fighting a war on terror, she is fighting a war against Sunni and Shia terror, mostly Sunni, and in fact mostly Sunni Arab. America should use the twin prongs of anti-Turkish statelets in Iraqi Kurdistan and Armenian to challenge the Turks. America should rescind her barbarous policy of supporting the Bosnians and Albanians, and switch that policy to one of supporting the Serbs. Reagan would have supported the Serbs because Reagan was nostalgic about those people who had fought alongside the U.S against the Nazis. The Serbs lost 10% of their people fighting the Nazis while the Albanians and Bosnians sent 40,000 of their young men to serve in S.S units. America coddles racist proto-Nazi states such as Croatia, there can be no excuse for such a mangling of historical memory.
People are always afraid that America may ‘lose’ Turkey and Turkey will become yet another anti-American state. But it already is anti-American, 90% of the Turks now have an unfavorable opinion of the USA. Besides, what kind of foreign policy is run on the basis of winning friends and making people like us when ideals, historical truth, justice and decency are on the line.
Remember George Washington, the American Cincinnatus? He advised against foreign entanglements and treaties with Europe. Why? He abhorred the dictatorships in Europe, the monarchies and state sponsored churches. He also felt it was not pragmatic to join one alliance and risk offending others. We can learn from that. Washington’s was not a policy of making friends. But it was also a policy of isolation. America cannot afford to be isolated. But if we cannot afford isolation then we should make sure to ally ourselves with the weak and those with few resources.
America was the first country to recognize Toussaint L’Ouvertoure’s Haiti in 1804, she should be the first nation to recognize an independent Kurdistan and the Armenian genocide.
Judgment: Mans best friend
Seth J. Frantzman
October 25th, 2007
We are often told not to judge. This is the mantra of the post-humanist moral-relativist crowd. It is part of post-modernism. Judgment is like racism, to judge is to label and to label is to stereotype and that becomes eugenics and we all know where that goes. So goes the logic.
Another reason we are often told not to judge is the old argument that one shouldn’t judge others until they have walked in their shoes. Despite the logical fallacy of this argument; it precludes debate about anything except what one has actually experienced, it is quite common.
Thus we have two extremes. We have those who tell us not to judge and we have all the judgments and judging that takes place on a daily basis. Journalists speak of being unbiased protectors of the truth, and yet their reporting is massively judgmental. Those people who tell us not to judge are usually the ones who use the word ‘racist’ and ‘nazi’ to describe groups of people and actions of others the most. There are also private judgments that are made all the time. Value judgments. Judgments about all sorts of things. Wrong and right, good and evil, all are judgments.
But there is a great drive to take away all this judgment and to replace it with a cynical, pessimistic, very nuanced version of things. We should therefore ask ourselves; ‘is judgment wrong.’
Jesus instructed people; ‘he who hath no sin may cast the first stone,’ in other words he gave us a very high bar to jump over before we should judge the behavior of others. There is the common refrain, “don’t judge lest you be judged.” This goes to the heart of the matter, you should not judge the actions of others harshly for they will then judge you.
This is all well and good but where does judgment fit in among the rest of the qualities of man? Animals do not judge. This is a fact. They may make value judgments. Put a bowl of rotten beef out and another bowl of freshly sliced ham and the animal will choose the better portion. But this is not a judgment based on anything more than the obvious. What makes man so different is that he judges the actions of others. He judges based on historical outcomes. He judges based on logic, and illogic. In fact man has an instinct to judge. The person who says “do not judge” does not really mean it for they are usually the most judgmental of all. It is a deep imbedded instinct within man that makes him judge and it is this instinct that separates him from beast, it is this instinct that leads to choice and it is this instinct that is behind the notions of good and evil and right and wrong.
The attempt to strip society of judgment is an attempt to make society like animals. It is even an attempt to make society worse than animals. Animals are territorial and they learn from their mistakes. But this idea that one should never judge asks us to never learn from our mistakes. Take the people that argue against racial profiling. They argue that one must not judge based on race. They don’t make this argument from logic because it is quite clear that many types of crime in different places are associated with certain racial, economic and religious groups. Profiling is based on logic and judgment.
It is ironic that the very police who are asked not to judge also keep drug sniffing dogs at their side. Since the police may not examine any visual characteristics of the person to determine who might be a candidate for drug possession they rely on the animal to do it for them. In this case the man has so dehumanized himself that the animal must make his decisions. But if animals make better policeman than humans than why not dress them in little uniforms and call them ‘officer’. After-all half the jobs performed by airport security can also be performed by monkeys. The recent case of a woman at Skyharbor International Airport in Phoenix, Arizona who got angry because she missed her flight and was subsequently restrained so harshly that it caused her to die might lead us to ask a little bit about judgment. The TSA thugs who beat and dragged the woman from the airline gate to a holding room and restrained her and ended up choking her to death; These beasts could not judge. For them she was a security threat, as bad as any suicide bomber or knife wielding terrorist. They couldn’t make a judgment call regarding a crazed and unhappy woman who had experienced an especially hard day and a terrorist. Its all the same.
A society that ceases to judge becomes savage. It becomes inhuman. It degenerates into an animal-like kingdom of viciousness, except it is worse than animals because its judgments are not based on instinct or logic, but on a sub-human beast like judgment that is far more insidious than any animal could dream up.
The Lone Voice: A Liberal literary device
Seth J. Frantzman
October 26th, 2007
Along with such words as ‘unbiased account’ one of the most common claims in left wing literature is that a particular book is a ‘lone’ voice in the wilderness, some ‘radical’ rebellion against the norm that ‘challenges’ us and ‘explodes myths.’ There is a never ending search within the leftist dialectic to be the loner, the rebel, who is standing up against a society in which consent is manufactured. This theme can be seen in all of Noam Chomsky’s writings but it can also be found in such recent books as Ilan Pappe’s The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine and Walt and Merheimer’s The Israel Lobby. They all contain the claim that their opinion is being censored or quashed or silenced and that they are the only ones contributing their ‘original’ thesis to a public shrouded in wool.
But what is most fascinating is the degree to which this claim is increasingly made at the same time that such literature is frequently the most common and well known. This is an excersize in massive self delusion on the part of the author and on the part of the reader. The author tells the reader ‘people are silencing me, I am the only one standing up for this issue’ and the reader says ‘I am being brave to read this radical and dissenting document.’ Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent is the most brilliant part of this strange dialogue. He claims that the media and corporations and the government work hand in hand to ‘manufacture consent.’ Everyone who reads his polemic agrees and he is now considered the most popular academic in the U.S. But he himself, through the amount of exposure his book and his ideas have received, has actually manufactured consent. This is how brilliant a delusion it is. Every college student reads Chomsky and each one thinks he or she is being original and a ‘rebel’ by reading Chomsky. It is like people reading J.D Sallinger and pretending they are breaking some taboo, when everyone is forced to read the Catcher in the Rye.
The mere fact that Merhseimer and Walt dared include a chapter entitled ‘silencing debate’ must be beyond insanity. Here is a book that is plastered in every bestsellers area in every Borders books, a book that has full page adds in the New York Times. Yet we are supposed to believe this book is being ‘silenced’ and the debate is being ‘quashed.’ But then again, its easy to think oneself a hero and convince oneself to buy a book when someone thinks they are doing something to stand up for a free and ‘open’ debate.
But there is one problem with all this and that is the fact that these opinions and texts are so widespread that you are frequently exposed to nothing else. Take Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing book. There is no opposite read. There is no rebuttal. It stands alone. Our world is completely dominated in this respect by the Chomsky theory and yet it is a theory that declares that our world is being dominated by something other than it.
Sitting in a class in Jerusalem in 2005 I experienced this first hand. In a class that was more than half European and non-Jewish a professor actually said “I know you are all Zionists and have been raised in Zionist households, but here, unlike in your other classes, I cam going to present you with a more radical, more open-minded, view.” But what was most striking was that the exact same speech was repeated by another professor in a different class. Here were two professors addresses two different classes, each claiming that the class of secular European Christians were Zionists and each claiming that he was the ‘lone voice’ that would challenge Zionism. The truth is that the professor began his class this way not because he really thought his class was full of Zionists or because he thought he was a ‘lone voice’ but because this was a rhetorical device so that he could then proceed to pretend that he was being original and ‘radical.’ What is most fascinating is that many people don’t even know they are doing it, they subconsciously ascribe originality to themselves when no such thing exists. Every college student who has a Dali on his wall and one of those reproduction French advertisements from the 1930s pretends he is being so original. No one knows who Salvador Dali is. But everyone has a Dali, and a bad Dali at that. No one has a Goya.
The truth is that leftists and liberals have discovered that at the heart of their movement is this desire to be different, this desire to be unique and be a rebel. But there is also the nature desire of people to move in herds. Conservatives don’t try to mask this. They admit that people like tradition and they encourage people by saying ‘this is the way things have always been done and this is the way they should be done.’
But just like every leftist shops at the ‘right’ organic food store and every leftist ‘discovers’ the right Mexican ceramic shop and every hippie uses the ‘correct’ bees wax and peculie gel for their hair, there is a massive tendency even among the ‘rebels’ to all march in lockstep.
So every person who wants to ‘rebel against the consensus’ read Chomsky, and it turns out everyone is reading Chomsky and they are all sitting around discussing how their media is being controlled by some nefarious conspiracy and they are all nodding in agreement. Chomsky was right on this point. There is a manufactured consent, but it cuts both ways, Chomsky himself has manufactured a massive amount of consent.
Friday, October 26, 2007
Friday, October 19, 2007
Terra Incognita Issue 7
Terra Incognita
Issue 7
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
October 19th, 2007
Here are this week’s articles below and attached. This week’s theme is liberalism-leftism. The full articles appear below these short abstracts.
1) The dialectic of Liberalism: Liberalism is part of a dialectic, in much the same way that Marx drew his strength from history. The story of an Israeli theatre director Arna Mer and her ‘children’ is an insight into the way Liberalism works and how it leads increasingly to radicalization and violence and the support of murder in the name of the nationalism of the other.
2) Our Freedom of Speech Model: Freedom of speech is the new fad among leftists and liberals. But a survey of past leftist protest against that very freedom they have granted Mr. Ahmadinjed seems to show that a very dangerous transformation is taking place in Liberal-Leftist discourse.
3) The rape of history: Liberal-Leftists increasingly cast their sights on history as a place to wage their cultural war against those they disagree with. But the leftist-liberal assault on history is doomed to failure, not because of conservative historians, but because of the slow, grinding, plodding power that history maintains against her adversaries..
The dialectic of Liberalism
Seth J. Frantzman
October 17th, 2007
Arna (Orna) Mer was born in 1930 in the Galilee. She was the daughter of Gideon Mer, a prominent professor of Medicine. Gideon was born in Russian in 1894. But he was soon off to study medicine in France and in 1914 settled in Rosh Pina in Palestine. He was a Zionist. He eventually became a colonel in the British army in the Second World war and taught at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He passed away in 1961. His daughter meanwhile went on to marry Saliba Khamis, a Protestant Arab leader of the Israeli Communist party in 1950. Biographies of her describe their wedding in a ‘Catholic church’ attended by a drunk priest, which may be a fabrication because Saliba was a Protestant and it is unlikely that the Catholic church would marry a mixed Jewish-Protestant couple (perhaps that’s why the priest was drunk).
Reports on the pairing note that it was unusual because intermarriage was and is infrequent in Israel. But it was not infrequent in the Communist party. Before Arna Mer had married a Communist Arab, two other female Communist Jews had already married Emil Toma (Tume) and Tewfiq Tubi, the leaders of the Communist party in Israel, both Arab members of the Greek-Orthodox church and both from Haifa. The Communist party in Israel in the 1940s had a knack as a matchmaker for Arab male communists and Jewish female communists all of whome came from the same class, the upper class.
Not long after Arna Mer’s wedding another wedding took place in Jaffa, this one between Salim Andraus and a Jewish woman named Hilana. Hilana’s Jewish Rumanian relatives had all been killed in the Holocaust. We do not know if Salim was a Communist. But we do know that Salim’s father, Amin, was a leader of the Christian community of Jaffa, who is profiled in Adam LeBor’s book City of Oranges. Amin Andraus was from Nazareth and his name suggests he was Greek-Orthodox, which would make it likely that his son, would have been a Communist, a party favored by many Arab Christians in Israel, especially the Orthodox. Azmi Bishara, a Christian from Nazareth, was the leader of the Arab Communist Balad party in Israel until he fled the country in early 2007 due to an investigation that showed he had been in contact with Hizbullah. He was merely continuing a long tradition of Christian Arab Communist leadership opposing Zionism and collaborating with Islamism.
The pairing of Salim and Hilana led to the birth of a daughter in 1970, Robyn Andraus who has been described as “part of the answer” to Israel’s problems by Adam LeBor. She has been showcased by the Times of London as an example of a good Israeli with a promising outlook on the future of Israel, LeBor’s article on her is entitled ‘we don’t need a Jewish state anymore’ and Robyn states emphatically that “I don't think anyone should have the right of return, Jewish or Palestinian.”
But let us leave Robyn for a moment and return to Arna and her son Juliano. Arna decided to open a Palestinian theatre in Jenin in the late 1980s. She explained that “I have not come here because of philanthropic reasons. I have not come here in order to show that there are nice Jews that help the Arabs. I came to struggle against the Israeli occupation”. She did just that. She filled the theatre with political messages. Ashraf, Nidal, Yusuf, Ala'a and Zakaria, five of the male child actors performed mostly anti-Israel plays. Ashraf described it thus: “I give my entire self on the stage. I try to forget the audience in front of me, so I can attract them. I will not let the occupation leave us in the sewage and garbage. When I am on stage, I feel as though I throw a Molotov [cocktail] and stones at the occupation.”
The room for the rehearsals was donated to Arna Mer by Samira Zubeida, mother of Zakaria. In 2002 Ashraf and Nidal (a member of Islamic Jihad) joined the Al-Aqsa martyr’s brigades and transformed the performance room into a bunker. On the third of April of that year they died in battle fighting the Israeli army. During the battle the theatre house was also destroyed.
Yusuf Sweitat, another veteran of Arna’s theatre became a Palestinian Authority policeman under Yasser Arafat. On the 28th of October 2001, Yusuf and a friend of his drove into the Israeli town of Hadera and shot four Israeli women waiting for a bus. They were subsequently killed in a gunbattle with the Israeli police. Yusuf was 22, he had begun acting in the Arna Mer theatre when he was nine years old.
Alaa Sabagh, another veteran of the Arna Mer theatre troupe became a leader of the Al-Aqsa martyr’s brigades in Jenin. He was killed in November of 2002 in an Israeli airstrike.
Zakaria Zubeida, the last surviving male member of the theatre is today the leader of the al-Aqsa martyrs brigades in Jenin. In the 1990s his mother’s house became a meeting place for peace actvists but it lost its glammer after Arna passed away in 1995. In 2003 he met Tali Fahima, an Israeli peace activist and daughter of Algerian born parents. She was involved with Juliano Mer Khamis, the son of Arna, in making the film Arna’s Children. She also helped Zakaria to translate material from Hebrew that aided him in his terrorist actions against Israel. Furthermore she spoke of serving as a human shield for him against Israeli airstrikes (like all ‘human shields’ who jurneyed to Israel during the second intifada none of them would dare to be a human shield on an Israeli bus to help prevent suicide bombings, liberal human shielding only goes so far). She was rumoured to be having an affair with him despite the fact that he was married and she had a child. On Israeli independence day, 2007, she lit a candle for Zakaria, while everyone else in her country was lighting candles to celebrate independence.
Robyn Andraus helps Palestinian children in Jaffa. She explains how she raises her son: “We did not circumcise our son. We don't believe in mutilating children's bodies. I am going to raise him as a human being. I think religion is secondary, if not irrelevant. I want Ido to be aware of religions, and if he chooses one, that is fine. But I am not going to label him.” Her ‘partner’ is Jewish and his name is Roni.
The author of a piece on Arna’s theatre and her ‘children’ asks us “what makes a ‘terrorist’. (Hint: it's not genetic, it's not anti-Semitism, they're not brainwashed, and they certainly don't ‘hate us for our freedoms’).” But in this, despite the fact that the author wants us to answer ‘poverty and oppression,’ what helped make these terrorists may very well have been the good intentioned role of a leftist-liberal human rights activist. Arna abhorred the nationalism in her own Zionistic upbringing and it led her to marry the most opposite other, an Arab Communist. But she worked to encourage the very nationalism in her theatre that she abhorred at home. Like so many liberals in Western society who speak out against war, but support violence in the name of ending the ‘occupation’, she helped to create an incubator of terrorism in her theatre. Is it just a coincidence that all five of her male actors became renowned ‘freedom fighters’? Not every male born in Jenin in 1980, when they were born, became a Palestinian fighter. Furthermore these men were not just run-of-the mill fighters. They became leaders of the top terrorist organizations in the West Bank, Islamic Jihad and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, that were responsible for some 400 deaths, many of them civilians, among Israelis between 2000 and 2007. The fact that two of these ‘freedom fighters’ decided to gun down four unarmed women standing at a bus stop truly reveals the nature of the fact that they are not ‘terrorists’ as leftists put it in parenthesis, but terrorists with no ambiguity.
The articles on these boys-cum-terrorists like to point out how the trauma of occupation and roadblocks and checkpoints and Israeli army patrols and seeing their loved ones die made them into the hard men they became. That’s a nice narrative. It was part of the narrative of the men who committed the Mai Lai massacre. Remember Lt. William Calley and his boys. They gunned down a whole village because they had found one of their comrades (loved ones) dead in the village, the victim of the supposedly friendly South Vietnamese peasants. They were fed up with the ‘farmer by day, fighter by night’ Viet Cong who lived in these villages and so they killed a bunch of people. Lt. Calley’s boys had been made hard from their tour in Vietnam. Except in their case there was no leftist-liberal sympathy back home in the U.S, they just got spit on and called ‘baby killer’ which in their case, tragically, they actually were. But Zubeida isn’t a ‘baby killer’ in the Western media, he is a celebrity and so to are Tali Fahima and Arna Mer-Khamis and Robyn Andraus. They are all part of the leftist-liberal dialectic of the West. They all pose with little female Arab children whose faces are swaddled in the requisite white headscarf, lest the hair of a six year old girl entice older men to rape her. If they had been born in Europe or America instead of Israel, they would have the requisite black children around them, preferably starving Africans with bloated stomachs.
Maybe if they were truly lucky they could have volunteered with Hutu refugees and helped train them, through theatre, to oppose the Tutsi occupation of their ‘homeland’. And then they might have gotten to collaborate in the Rwandan genocide, rather than just help give birth to Palestinian terrorists. After all its more glorious to butcher people with a machete than a suicide belt.
Remember Tali Fahima. Her parents were refugees from the religion of tolerance. They fled Algeria, despite the fact that Jews had lived there for 2,500 years, they were forced out by a friendly religion of peace. They were ‘collaborators’ with the French colonial power. So, along with 1,000,000 Pied Noirs and another million Harkis, they fled. But Tali, like a good leftist, had to have sympathy with her persecutors, so she devoted her time to the Palestinian cause. Hilana Andraus too made sure to support Palestinian Nationalism, it would have been to much for her, a daughter of the Holocaust, to want to create some more Jewish children to replace the ones the Nazis killed. It made perfect since for her to marry in a church, after all the church had been so good to the Jews in her native Europe.
Poor Tali’s ancestors. For 2,000 years her ancestors preserved their tradition despite terrible discrimination and grinding poverty (note: their poverty didn’t make them terrorists). But she can only see fit to devote herself to the Muslim-Arab cause. Ms. Andraus, what of her ancestors? They preserved themselves for 2,000 years against persecution in Europe. But all she can do is devote herself to the cause of others and make sure her kids have no religion. And Juliano Mer. His ancestors preserved themselves in Russia, even when the Tsar used to take Jewish children and conscript them for 25 years in the Russian army. But he can only see fit to help Muslim-Arabs. After all there are 1.3 billion Muslims, they control the wealthiest states in the Gulf of Arabia, and surely they need all the help they can get.
But its not enough to help the ‘other’. One has to convince the other to be patriots and nationalists. One has to teach them to fight and resist and hate. The dialectic of the liberal is the most dangerous dialectic in the world. As one old secular Egyptian once noted “The leftist secular liberal is a greater enemy to us secular progressives in Egypt than the Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood, for the liberal uses our own freedoms against us and encourages the Islamists, excusing their actions and their terrorism.” If we have to suffer the existence of liberals in our own culture it would be nice for liberals to at least explain to us why, in those cultures that liberals love the most such as Saudi Arabia, why there are no Tali Fahimas or Arna Mers or Hilana Andrauses. There are no legions of educated Arab Muslim women dedicated to helping the lives of non-Muslim minorities. There are no Arab Muslim women adopting our dress (the way western liberal women adopt Islamic dress out of ‘respect for modesty’ in Islamic countries) and encouraging us through patriotic nationalistic plays to be more self-loving. I would like to see just one. Oh, there is Ayan Hisri Ali, bless her soul.
Our Freedom of Speech Model
Seth J. Frantzman
October 19, 2007
On January 14th, 2003 when Benjamin Netanyahu went to Concordia University there was no freedom of speech for him. Let us recall how one newspaper editorial described the logic for using violence to cancel Netanyahu’s speech: “A Riot is the language of the unheard” According to the article, ‘Netanyahu talk shut down at Concordia’ by Jon Elmer in the Dalhousie Gazette, on September 11th, 2002;
“While former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sipped drinks at the bar of the nearby Ritz Charlton Hotel, upward of 2,000 protestors gnarled the Hall Building at Concordia University, making delivery of the Hardliner's exclusive speech on Monday impossible… For Netanyahu, it is the third time in less than two years that he has had talks canceled amid raucous protest at North American universities - the others were at UC Berkeley in late November and at Northwestern in February… . free speech is such a slippery little fish: Is censorship to be found only in Netanyahu’s being forced to give the gist of his talk at a press conference (for international broadcast) instead of to an exclusive group within the university auditorium? …We must reject the reactionary and simplistic agenda of the media monopolies in Canada and understand the protest against Netanyahu at Concordia, and elsewhere, as the manifestation of legitimate outrage at the ongoing crimes of Israel in the West Bank and Gaza, and targeted at those who are responsible.”
On October 4th, 2006 Minutemen founder Jim Gilchrist was attacked by angry protesters while he gave a speech as Columbia University in the Roone Arledge Auditorium. The Minutemen, a civilian militia that opposes immigration, had been invited to address the Young Republican club at Columbia University. Instead the event was stopped after the protests turned violent and protesters took over the stage. The students unrolled a banner that read, in both Arabic and English, “No one is ever illegal.”
Two weeks after the Minutemen event was cancelled due to protests, Walid Shoebat had his speech at Columbia toned down to only a few dozen listeners because of ‘security threats’. Shoebat is a former PLO terrorist turned anti-terrorism speaker. When Republican writer Dinesh D'Souza came to speak at Columbia in 1999 the same thing happened. Needless to say Lee Bolinger, the President of Columbia, didn’t introduce any of these speakers. He did, however, allow invitations to the Minutemen to be sent out to speak again, only to cancel the speech on security grounds.
On March 29th, 2000 when Charleton Heston, president of the National Rifle Association, an organization that supports the right to gun ownership, went to speak at Brandeis University it was only after the conservative group that invited him was charged thousands of dollars to hire private security and bomb sniffing dogs and an emergency blood transfusion for Mr. Heston (in case he was attacked). The massive protests at Brandeis and threats of violence forced the hiring of massive security. Talking to a crowd of about 700 students Heston declared, “Political correctness is tyranny with manners.”
On October 18th, 2007 Dr. James Watson, discoverer of DNA, had his speech cancelled at the London Museum of Science because of his controversial claims that Africans and Westerners have different intelligence levels. The 79-year-old American geneticist said he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours - whereas all the testing says not really.”
On September 24th, 2007, when Mahmud Ahmadinjed went to speak at Columbia there were no violent protests. The University paid the price of security. Lee Bolinger, the president of the University, introduced the dictator, albeit in a less than friendly manner. One writer named Paul Woodward explained that “While Ahmadinjed’s address can be understood in terms of its domestic political focus and likewise his masterful use of the media, as an exercise in free speech it deserves consideration in terms of its substance.” When Ahmandinjad spoke there was applause. The transcript of the speech (http://www.azstarnet.com/sn/hourlyupdate/202820.php) states that Ahmadinjed was introduced thus:
John Coatsworth: Our principal speaker today is His Excellency the president of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Mr. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Mr. President. (Applause.)
Applause. They applauded when he condemned Bollinger’s comments against him. They applauded when he spoke about the right of the Palestinians and how the Holocaust shouldn’t be used as an excuse to harm Palestinians. They applauded when he spoke about Iran’s right to peaceful nuclear energy. They applauded when he spoke about the death penalty and how Iran and the U.S both have it.
Lee Bollinger explained during his introduction of the tyrant that “Lastly, in universities we have a deep and almost single-minded commitment to pursue the truth. We do not have access to the levers of power, we cannot make war or peace, we can only make minds, and to do this, we must have the most fulsome freedom of inquiry.”
On October 12th, 2007, in the spirit of Freedom of Speech, the Oxford Union debating society invited David Irving the ‘holocaust researcher’ and denier, Nick Griffin, the head of the British National Party which is the direct descendant of Mosley’s British Nazi Party, and Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenka.
Luke Tryl, head of the society noted that “The Oxford Union is famous for its commitment to free speech and although I do think these people have awful and abhorrent views I do think Oxford students are intelligent enough to challenge and ridicule them,” A majority of the same union’s members accused the “Pro-Israel Lobby of Stifling Debate” Unsurprisingly the same people voted to boycott Israeli universities.
When Robert Faurisson published a book on Holocaust denial in France Noam Chomsky signed a letter in his defense, arguing freedom of speech.
So what is this ‘freedom of speech’? Who gets it and who doesn’t? Who is entitled? Why weren’t there disruptions and pie throwing and people shouting down Ahmadinjed? Why was there applause? Why did the University president introduce certain speakers and not others? Why is security paid by the University for some and not others?
How do we decide what is ‘good freedom of speech’ and who must be silenced? How do we decide which dictators and racists and Nazis to invite to the commencement speech and which ones to reject? Actually, its not up to us to decide. Its up to liberals and leftists and all the protesters who manifest themselves at these events. So the question really should be put to them. How do they decide?
Well lets try to figure it out.
Netanyahu: Jewish, Israeli, supports killing terrorists, right wing: bad.
The Minutemen: Christian, against immigration, right wing: bad.
Charleton Heston: actor, likes guns, right wing: bad.
Dr. Watson: Said Africans are dumber than westerners: bad.
Ahmadinjed: Muslim, denies Holocaust, compares Jews to Hitler, hates Bush: good.
Chavez and Castro: Hates Bush, supports Iran, dictators: good.
David Irving: Denies Holocaust, right wing: good.
The British National Party: Hates immigrants, white: good.
So what do we have here? The most acceptable traits of a candidate for freedom of speech are holocaust denial and hating George Bush. Muslim is good too. Jewish is bad. Israeli is a no-no. Right wing is a toss up.
Let us pose a few people and see what the model tells us: Jerry Fallwell and Pat Robertson: bad. David Horowitz: bad. David Duke: good. Saddam Hussein and Stalin: good. Hitler: toss up.
The truth is that the liberal-leftist freedom of speech fascists have betrayed their own souls in the name of their fake virtue. In a distant past things might have been different. Dictators who run a country where it is illegal for women to show their hair in public and where homosexuals are hung and minorities suppressed would have been shunned. Right wing Nazis would have been shunned. Holocaust deniers would have been shunned. In a distant past there would have been disruptions and pie throwing at Ahmadinjed and no University president would have introduced him and no one would have called him ‘his Excellency’ and people would not have applauded.
We are not dealing with that time anymore. Today we are dealing with a time where there isn’t just freedom of speech but freedom to hate. There isn’t merely a freedom to hate there is an invite to hate. There is an implicit change taking place within liberalism, within the college student protest masses of people who call themselves leftists. We are watching it before our eyes. We should be honored to be present at this time when such a change is taking place. We are watching the slow migration of an entire movement from the extreme left of the political spectrum to the extreme right. We are watching the creation of an iron-clad alliance between Islamists, Nazis, white supremacists, holocaust deniers, and Islamists. For years we tolerated the likes of the ACLU supporting the right of Nazis to march and we said “they are right, lest one day our freedoms be squashed.” But in the alliance between the extreme left and the extreme right we are witnessing what has only happened a few times in human history, the complete re-alignment of the political universe. We are watching people support freedom of speech in order to give dictators a platform in our country to tell us how to live. We are watching people who support freedom of speech implicitly going out of their way to invite those who deny us those freedoms and invite them into the halls of our most honored institutions. We are watching as these honored institutions betray us. They have no shame in their betrayal. They use McCarthy like tactics, they use threats of violence, they ally with dictators, they ally with terrorists, they support mass murder. And we sit idly by and do nothing.
We should be ashamed of ourselves. Have not we learned our lesson? We should not have sat idly by while Ahmadinjed spoke. We should have struggled against it. Time and again the decent classes of people, the conservative, traditional people, the modest people, the silent majority, have been whisked away and destroyed in violent revolution because they refused to do anything to save themselves. They have allowed, time and again, a tiny minority of extremists to dictate their lives to them. We had a chance to do something when that dog called Ahmadinjed came into our house. We had a chance to oppose, with violence if necessary, the attempt by our universities to force us to listen to a dictator, a dictator who already has a whole country that must listen to him and a dictator who is coddled by Putin, a dictator who already has the U.N as a platform.
Freedom of speech is meant for us. Just like the Bill of Rights. It is meant for us. The Bill of Rights doesn’t extend to terrorists in Afghanistan. We get freedom of speech because we extend it to every American citizen. Freedom of speech is not for thugs from elsewhere. They get nothing. They shouldn’t be allowed on our soil. Our founding fathers understood that. They didn’t invite dictators and thugs into America. That was a time when the world was entirely run by dictators and thugs and so we did not have any of them travel to our beloved country called America. We opened our doors to immigrants so that they could enjoy the fruits of our freedom and we invited the wretched huddled masses yearning to breathe free to come to our shores.
Ahmadinjed isn’t a huddled mass, he is a tyrant. We should grant those in exile against his rule freedom of speech, we should grant anyone who has fled his evil country the freedoms they are denied there. What we shouldn’t do, and what we should be eternally ashamed of having done, is granting a dictator the right to speak in our country, having let him not just terrorize his own people but also come her to terrorize us and terrorize, again, the people who have fled him.
Columbia University is a stain on America. It is a blot on our country. It is a blot the way the America’s First movement and Charles Lindbergh association with Hitler was a blot. It is a blot like Jane Fonda. But it is a worse blot than Charles Lindbergh and Jane Fonda, because at least they were Americans and they contributed something to acting and aviation. Columbia is no longer an American institution. It is an Iranian institution. It brought a wolf in to speak, when it is the sheep that should have been allowed to speak. It is the weak who deserve freedom of speech, not the strong. Rupert Murdoch, an Australian media mogul and owner of my beloved Foxnews, doesn’t need freedom of speech any more than Mr. Ahmadinjed. Our country, long the sheltering arms of opposition and exiles, is now turned into the collaborator with dictators. All in the name of freedom.
The fact that Ahmadinjed is now a role model for people on the right and left of American politics is a very sad commentary on the changes taking place in American culture. People such as Virginia Tilley, an American citizen, a leftist whose commentary appears in such online journals as New Left Review and Counterpunch.org, who received her M.A from the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University and supports the boycott of Israel, is a supporter of the Iranian tyrant (unsurprisingly one finds leftist Western women are usually the greatest supporters of regimes that deny women basic freedoms, and they are the first to don headscarfs and burkas in the name of modesty and tolerance).
The way the modern liberal-left views Mr. Ahmadinjed and the way in which they warp their views to align with his can best be viewed in this exchange at Columbia:
Mr. Coatsworth: Mr. President, another student asks, Iranian women are now denied basic human rights, and your government has imposed draconian punishments, including execution on Iranian citizens who are homosexuals. Why are you doing those things?
Ahmadinjed: But as for the executions, I'd like to raise two questions. If someone comes and establishes a network for illicit drug trafficking that affects the (use ?) in Iran, Turkey, Europe, the United States by introducing these illicit drugs and destroys them, would you ever reward them? People who lead the lives -- cause the deterioration of the lives of hundreds of millions of youth around the world, including in Iran, can we have any sympathy to them? Don't you have capital punishment in the United States? You do, too. (Applause.)
Leftists applauded this statement. Why? They applauded it because they see that Mr. Ahmadinjed is supposedly poking fun at the hypocrisy of Mr. Coatworth’s question, since he is showing that the U.S should not condemn the death penalty when it too employs this punishment.
But try to get inside the head of the people who applauded this. They are the same people who oppose the death penalty in America. They are the same people who oppose the war on drugs. They are the same people who support homosexual rights. Yet here they are marching in lock-step and applauding someone who is justifying the execution of people who sell illicit drugs.
Remember, the people who applauded were not right wingers. They weren’t Republicans. Republicans would probably applaud if someone suggested executing drug dealers. Some right wingers might will agree with Mr. Ahmadinjed’s policy on gays. But it is disturbing to see that the left will agree with someone who opposes everything leftists support, just because that person condemns America. In the old days, when there was a good honest left (if there ever was one), the leftist would not have applauded. The students would not have applauded. They would have booed. They would have seen that Ahmadinjed was not condemning America, but merely saying “you have the death penalty and so do we.” They would have booed him for the same crimes they saw in their own country. They would have held him to the same standard.
The rape of history
Seth J. Frantzman
October 16th, 2007
Those who rape history, and they are quite common in the West and the East, do not ask the question ‘what happened’ but instead ask the question ‘how do people think about what happened.’ They don’t want to know any longer what actually took place. They want to know the cynical, plotting, wordy, pseudo-scientific model, of what took place. They do not ask how many died in the Boston Massacre. They instead ask how it was interpreted by the British and colonial public and how ‘discourses’ in ‘British and American historiography’ speak about ‘the event.’
The rapist knows there is no truth. Why should he believe in truth. After all, a rapist is a criminal and criminals have no interest in what took place, merely in how to get out of the predicament of criminality and punishment that they now find themselves in. Because the modern intellectual rapes his subject, he must then twist it, change it, warp it, so that he will not be found guilty. The rapist says that his victim is to blame. Thus the intellectual who rapes the sources and rapes history blames those very sources for having been raped. Biblical criticism is guilty of this, it takes the Bible, condemns it for being a myth and then uses the same Bible and its categorizations and terms in order to condemn it. Biblical critics look at the prohibition against easting a ‘child in its mother’s milk’ and speak of the ‘cultural milieu the Israelites found themselves in while in Egypt and the need to distinguish themselves from the other.’
When the rapists of history were given the job of running an entire country, the Soviet Union, it is no surprise that they excelled beyond their wildest dreams. They found that anything could be re-written. The same leftist historians who had indulged so deeply in faking history, in categorizing it all based on economics, now found that they could simply make up whatever they pleased for a whole country. The same people who accused the ‘state’ of having hoodwinked ‘the people’ into believing in nationalism and god, saw that by harnessing the state to their own nefarious goals they had no problem making history a myth. They cajoled America for its ‘colonial’ war in Vietnam while they embarked on a colonization of Eastern Europe for fifty years. They spoke about ‘class warfare’ and the ‘inequalities of capitalism’ while they turned an entire nation into slaves.
Examine the following text entitled Ottoman Rule over Palestine: Its Evaluation in Arab, Turkish and Israeli Histories, 1970-90 by Mauros Reinkowski
“In her monograph Jaffa, Ruth Kark does not once use the term 'Arab'
itself (except in a citation, p.16) until .page 52. Again 'Arabness' appears only
in the form of attributes or composites: p.15: 'Arab-Muslim regions of
Asia'; p.3 1: 'Arabic and Turkish notables'; p.32: 'Greek-orthodox Arabs';
p.42: 'Arabic language'; p.45: 'Arab kaymakam'; p.5 1: 'Arab elite'. The
Palestinian population of the 19th century is categorized on p.43 as
'foreigners, Jews and local Arabs'. More frequent, however, is the
categorization of the Arab population according to religious criteria: p. 16:
'Muslims and non-Muslims alike'; p.20: 'Muslim and Christian inhabi-
tants'; p.22: 'Muslim population'. In the chapter 'Demographic and Social
Features' (pp.156-203) the population is categorized into the three groups
'Muslim community', 'Christian community' and 'The Jews' (pp.6, 18, 20
respectively). The activities of the European missionaries are integrated into
the chapter about the Christian community.' Categorizing according to
denomination places Christian Arabs closer to Christian Europeans than to
Muslim Arabs. It is certainly inaccurate to subsume Muslims and Christians
under the heading 'Arabs' without mentioning the internal frictions. But it
is even less appropriate to separate Muslims and Christians into completely
different categories. The Arab population, never described as Arabs, is
referred to as local Arabs. The term insinuates that the Arabs do not belong
to Palestine, but that a srnall group out of the total number of Arabs
accidentally lives in this place. The categorization according to religious
communities ignores the ethnic existence of the Arabs. Quite the contrary,
the twin meaning of 'Jew' as a religious communitarian und ethnic term
confers on the Jewish population in Palestine a more concrete and
comprehensive reality.
This tendency in Israeli history and political science to Fragmentize the
others has been repeatedly criticized, for example by G.W. Bowersock in his
assessment of intentional biases in Israeli studies of classical antiquity. He
particularly objects to the attempt to describe Palestine as a fragmentized
area before the unification under the Roman Empire.' Alexander Schölch
criticized the tendency of Israeli political scientists to describe the
Palestinians as a fundamentally fragmented and underdeveloped society
that was modernized and homogenized by the Jewish state.
The corruption of the Ottoman authorities in Palestine is frequently
stressed.”
To a rapist nothing is what it seems. How can it be? He has an overburdened sex drive and deep seated hatred that forces him to want to dominate and degrade others, to penetrate and punish them because of his own inadequacy. He transforms every women into a object and beyond that he creates a world of fantastical solipsism. The rapist of history does the same, except in his case he transforms history into a woman, penetrating her, creating myths when none exist and calling things myths that are not.
The central question should be, is history a woman waiting to be ravaged? The central character in the French revolution is a raped woman holding the banner of France. Likewise the central character in a poem by Yitzhak Sadeh is a former Jewish inmate of a concentration camp with the word’s ‘camp whore’ tattooed in German on her chest. Likewise the story of Yael and Sisera is interpreted as one in which she takes revenge for his raping her by driving a nail through his head. But is this history? A ravaged woman, looking for revenge against intellectuals for having sullied her?
Is the more proper view of history perhaps that of Deborah, the judge of Israel, gathering her armies against the Philistine menace. Is it perhaps the strong women of Sparta who, when asked why Spartan women were the only women in Greece who rules their, the reply was that it was because ‘only Spartan women give birth to men.’ If history is feminine, if it is a woman, it is a strong, indomitable woman like Elizabeth, not an angry rape victim. But if history is a strong overweight women, plodding, modest and in love with tradition, then what does this say about the fate of the rapist? The intellectual who meddles with history, who tampers with it, who ceaselessly interprets it cannot escape the fact that revenge comes slowly, over time. The rapists like to remind us, in a snide manner, that history is written by the victors. They certainly think they are the victors and that they have written our history. After all, haven’t they told us that James Polk was a terrible man for owning slaves, that Thomas Jefferson raped his and that George Washington cannot be forgiven for owning them. They have turned the founding fathers of America into a bunch of self interested rich white ‘honkies.’ But history isn’t written by the victors. The zealots who died at Masada, the Spartans at Thermopylae, the Warsaw ghetto fighters, General Gordon. Not winners. But does anyone recall the name of the Mahdi whose army killed Gordon?
Issue 7
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
October 19th, 2007
Here are this week’s articles below and attached. This week’s theme is liberalism-leftism. The full articles appear below these short abstracts.
1) The dialectic of Liberalism: Liberalism is part of a dialectic, in much the same way that Marx drew his strength from history. The story of an Israeli theatre director Arna Mer and her ‘children’ is an insight into the way Liberalism works and how it leads increasingly to radicalization and violence and the support of murder in the name of the nationalism of the other.
2) Our Freedom of Speech Model: Freedom of speech is the new fad among leftists and liberals. But a survey of past leftist protest against that very freedom they have granted Mr. Ahmadinjed seems to show that a very dangerous transformation is taking place in Liberal-Leftist discourse.
3) The rape of history: Liberal-Leftists increasingly cast their sights on history as a place to wage their cultural war against those they disagree with. But the leftist-liberal assault on history is doomed to failure, not because of conservative historians, but because of the slow, grinding, plodding power that history maintains against her adversaries..
The dialectic of Liberalism
Seth J. Frantzman
October 17th, 2007
Arna (Orna) Mer was born in 1930 in the Galilee. She was the daughter of Gideon Mer, a prominent professor of Medicine. Gideon was born in Russian in 1894. But he was soon off to study medicine in France and in 1914 settled in Rosh Pina in Palestine. He was a Zionist. He eventually became a colonel in the British army in the Second World war and taught at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He passed away in 1961. His daughter meanwhile went on to marry Saliba Khamis, a Protestant Arab leader of the Israeli Communist party in 1950. Biographies of her describe their wedding in a ‘Catholic church’ attended by a drunk priest, which may be a fabrication because Saliba was a Protestant and it is unlikely that the Catholic church would marry a mixed Jewish-Protestant couple (perhaps that’s why the priest was drunk).
Reports on the pairing note that it was unusual because intermarriage was and is infrequent in Israel. But it was not infrequent in the Communist party. Before Arna Mer had married a Communist Arab, two other female Communist Jews had already married Emil Toma (Tume) and Tewfiq Tubi, the leaders of the Communist party in Israel, both Arab members of the Greek-Orthodox church and both from Haifa. The Communist party in Israel in the 1940s had a knack as a matchmaker for Arab male communists and Jewish female communists all of whome came from the same class, the upper class.
Not long after Arna Mer’s wedding another wedding took place in Jaffa, this one between Salim Andraus and a Jewish woman named Hilana. Hilana’s Jewish Rumanian relatives had all been killed in the Holocaust. We do not know if Salim was a Communist. But we do know that Salim’s father, Amin, was a leader of the Christian community of Jaffa, who is profiled in Adam LeBor’s book City of Oranges. Amin Andraus was from Nazareth and his name suggests he was Greek-Orthodox, which would make it likely that his son, would have been a Communist, a party favored by many Arab Christians in Israel, especially the Orthodox. Azmi Bishara, a Christian from Nazareth, was the leader of the Arab Communist Balad party in Israel until he fled the country in early 2007 due to an investigation that showed he had been in contact with Hizbullah. He was merely continuing a long tradition of Christian Arab Communist leadership opposing Zionism and collaborating with Islamism.
The pairing of Salim and Hilana led to the birth of a daughter in 1970, Robyn Andraus who has been described as “part of the answer” to Israel’s problems by Adam LeBor. She has been showcased by the Times of London as an example of a good Israeli with a promising outlook on the future of Israel, LeBor’s article on her is entitled ‘we don’t need a Jewish state anymore’ and Robyn states emphatically that “I don't think anyone should have the right of return, Jewish or Palestinian.”
But let us leave Robyn for a moment and return to Arna and her son Juliano. Arna decided to open a Palestinian theatre in Jenin in the late 1980s. She explained that “I have not come here because of philanthropic reasons. I have not come here in order to show that there are nice Jews that help the Arabs. I came to struggle against the Israeli occupation”. She did just that. She filled the theatre with political messages. Ashraf, Nidal, Yusuf, Ala'a and Zakaria, five of the male child actors performed mostly anti-Israel plays. Ashraf described it thus: “I give my entire self on the stage. I try to forget the audience in front of me, so I can attract them. I will not let the occupation leave us in the sewage and garbage. When I am on stage, I feel as though I throw a Molotov [cocktail] and stones at the occupation.”
The room for the rehearsals was donated to Arna Mer by Samira Zubeida, mother of Zakaria. In 2002 Ashraf and Nidal (a member of Islamic Jihad) joined the Al-Aqsa martyr’s brigades and transformed the performance room into a bunker. On the third of April of that year they died in battle fighting the Israeli army. During the battle the theatre house was also destroyed.
Yusuf Sweitat, another veteran of Arna’s theatre became a Palestinian Authority policeman under Yasser Arafat. On the 28th of October 2001, Yusuf and a friend of his drove into the Israeli town of Hadera and shot four Israeli women waiting for a bus. They were subsequently killed in a gunbattle with the Israeli police. Yusuf was 22, he had begun acting in the Arna Mer theatre when he was nine years old.
Alaa Sabagh, another veteran of the Arna Mer theatre troupe became a leader of the Al-Aqsa martyr’s brigades in Jenin. He was killed in November of 2002 in an Israeli airstrike.
Zakaria Zubeida, the last surviving male member of the theatre is today the leader of the al-Aqsa martyrs brigades in Jenin. In the 1990s his mother’s house became a meeting place for peace actvists but it lost its glammer after Arna passed away in 1995. In 2003 he met Tali Fahima, an Israeli peace activist and daughter of Algerian born parents. She was involved with Juliano Mer Khamis, the son of Arna, in making the film Arna’s Children. She also helped Zakaria to translate material from Hebrew that aided him in his terrorist actions against Israel. Furthermore she spoke of serving as a human shield for him against Israeli airstrikes (like all ‘human shields’ who jurneyed to Israel during the second intifada none of them would dare to be a human shield on an Israeli bus to help prevent suicide bombings, liberal human shielding only goes so far). She was rumoured to be having an affair with him despite the fact that he was married and she had a child. On Israeli independence day, 2007, she lit a candle for Zakaria, while everyone else in her country was lighting candles to celebrate independence.
Robyn Andraus helps Palestinian children in Jaffa. She explains how she raises her son: “We did not circumcise our son. We don't believe in mutilating children's bodies. I am going to raise him as a human being. I think religion is secondary, if not irrelevant. I want Ido to be aware of religions, and if he chooses one, that is fine. But I am not going to label him.” Her ‘partner’ is Jewish and his name is Roni.
The author of a piece on Arna’s theatre and her ‘children’ asks us “what makes a ‘terrorist’. (Hint: it's not genetic, it's not anti-Semitism, they're not brainwashed, and they certainly don't ‘hate us for our freedoms’).” But in this, despite the fact that the author wants us to answer ‘poverty and oppression,’ what helped make these terrorists may very well have been the good intentioned role of a leftist-liberal human rights activist. Arna abhorred the nationalism in her own Zionistic upbringing and it led her to marry the most opposite other, an Arab Communist. But she worked to encourage the very nationalism in her theatre that she abhorred at home. Like so many liberals in Western society who speak out against war, but support violence in the name of ending the ‘occupation’, she helped to create an incubator of terrorism in her theatre. Is it just a coincidence that all five of her male actors became renowned ‘freedom fighters’? Not every male born in Jenin in 1980, when they were born, became a Palestinian fighter. Furthermore these men were not just run-of-the mill fighters. They became leaders of the top terrorist organizations in the West Bank, Islamic Jihad and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, that were responsible for some 400 deaths, many of them civilians, among Israelis between 2000 and 2007. The fact that two of these ‘freedom fighters’ decided to gun down four unarmed women standing at a bus stop truly reveals the nature of the fact that they are not ‘terrorists’ as leftists put it in parenthesis, but terrorists with no ambiguity.
The articles on these boys-cum-terrorists like to point out how the trauma of occupation and roadblocks and checkpoints and Israeli army patrols and seeing their loved ones die made them into the hard men they became. That’s a nice narrative. It was part of the narrative of the men who committed the Mai Lai massacre. Remember Lt. William Calley and his boys. They gunned down a whole village because they had found one of their comrades (loved ones) dead in the village, the victim of the supposedly friendly South Vietnamese peasants. They were fed up with the ‘farmer by day, fighter by night’ Viet Cong who lived in these villages and so they killed a bunch of people. Lt. Calley’s boys had been made hard from their tour in Vietnam. Except in their case there was no leftist-liberal sympathy back home in the U.S, they just got spit on and called ‘baby killer’ which in their case, tragically, they actually were. But Zubeida isn’t a ‘baby killer’ in the Western media, he is a celebrity and so to are Tali Fahima and Arna Mer-Khamis and Robyn Andraus. They are all part of the leftist-liberal dialectic of the West. They all pose with little female Arab children whose faces are swaddled in the requisite white headscarf, lest the hair of a six year old girl entice older men to rape her. If they had been born in Europe or America instead of Israel, they would have the requisite black children around them, preferably starving Africans with bloated stomachs.
Maybe if they were truly lucky they could have volunteered with Hutu refugees and helped train them, through theatre, to oppose the Tutsi occupation of their ‘homeland’. And then they might have gotten to collaborate in the Rwandan genocide, rather than just help give birth to Palestinian terrorists. After all its more glorious to butcher people with a machete than a suicide belt.
Remember Tali Fahima. Her parents were refugees from the religion of tolerance. They fled Algeria, despite the fact that Jews had lived there for 2,500 years, they were forced out by a friendly religion of peace. They were ‘collaborators’ with the French colonial power. So, along with 1,000,000 Pied Noirs and another million Harkis, they fled. But Tali, like a good leftist, had to have sympathy with her persecutors, so she devoted her time to the Palestinian cause. Hilana Andraus too made sure to support Palestinian Nationalism, it would have been to much for her, a daughter of the Holocaust, to want to create some more Jewish children to replace the ones the Nazis killed. It made perfect since for her to marry in a church, after all the church had been so good to the Jews in her native Europe.
Poor Tali’s ancestors. For 2,000 years her ancestors preserved their tradition despite terrible discrimination and grinding poverty (note: their poverty didn’t make them terrorists). But she can only see fit to devote herself to the Muslim-Arab cause. Ms. Andraus, what of her ancestors? They preserved themselves for 2,000 years against persecution in Europe. But all she can do is devote herself to the cause of others and make sure her kids have no religion. And Juliano Mer. His ancestors preserved themselves in Russia, even when the Tsar used to take Jewish children and conscript them for 25 years in the Russian army. But he can only see fit to help Muslim-Arabs. After all there are 1.3 billion Muslims, they control the wealthiest states in the Gulf of Arabia, and surely they need all the help they can get.
But its not enough to help the ‘other’. One has to convince the other to be patriots and nationalists. One has to teach them to fight and resist and hate. The dialectic of the liberal is the most dangerous dialectic in the world. As one old secular Egyptian once noted “The leftist secular liberal is a greater enemy to us secular progressives in Egypt than the Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood, for the liberal uses our own freedoms against us and encourages the Islamists, excusing their actions and their terrorism.” If we have to suffer the existence of liberals in our own culture it would be nice for liberals to at least explain to us why, in those cultures that liberals love the most such as Saudi Arabia, why there are no Tali Fahimas or Arna Mers or Hilana Andrauses. There are no legions of educated Arab Muslim women dedicated to helping the lives of non-Muslim minorities. There are no Arab Muslim women adopting our dress (the way western liberal women adopt Islamic dress out of ‘respect for modesty’ in Islamic countries) and encouraging us through patriotic nationalistic plays to be more self-loving. I would like to see just one. Oh, there is Ayan Hisri Ali, bless her soul.
Our Freedom of Speech Model
Seth J. Frantzman
October 19, 2007
On January 14th, 2003 when Benjamin Netanyahu went to Concordia University there was no freedom of speech for him. Let us recall how one newspaper editorial described the logic for using violence to cancel Netanyahu’s speech: “A Riot is the language of the unheard” According to the article, ‘Netanyahu talk shut down at Concordia’ by Jon Elmer in the Dalhousie Gazette, on September 11th, 2002;
“While former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sipped drinks at the bar of the nearby Ritz Charlton Hotel, upward of 2,000 protestors gnarled the Hall Building at Concordia University, making delivery of the Hardliner's exclusive speech on Monday impossible… For Netanyahu, it is the third time in less than two years that he has had talks canceled amid raucous protest at North American universities - the others were at UC Berkeley in late November and at Northwestern in February… . free speech is such a slippery little fish: Is censorship to be found only in Netanyahu’s being forced to give the gist of his talk at a press conference (for international broadcast) instead of to an exclusive group within the university auditorium? …We must reject the reactionary and simplistic agenda of the media monopolies in Canada and understand the protest against Netanyahu at Concordia, and elsewhere, as the manifestation of legitimate outrage at the ongoing crimes of Israel in the West Bank and Gaza, and targeted at those who are responsible.”
On October 4th, 2006 Minutemen founder Jim Gilchrist was attacked by angry protesters while he gave a speech as Columbia University in the Roone Arledge Auditorium. The Minutemen, a civilian militia that opposes immigration, had been invited to address the Young Republican club at Columbia University. Instead the event was stopped after the protests turned violent and protesters took over the stage. The students unrolled a banner that read, in both Arabic and English, “No one is ever illegal.”
Two weeks after the Minutemen event was cancelled due to protests, Walid Shoebat had his speech at Columbia toned down to only a few dozen listeners because of ‘security threats’. Shoebat is a former PLO terrorist turned anti-terrorism speaker. When Republican writer Dinesh D'Souza came to speak at Columbia in 1999 the same thing happened. Needless to say Lee Bolinger, the President of Columbia, didn’t introduce any of these speakers. He did, however, allow invitations to the Minutemen to be sent out to speak again, only to cancel the speech on security grounds.
On March 29th, 2000 when Charleton Heston, president of the National Rifle Association, an organization that supports the right to gun ownership, went to speak at Brandeis University it was only after the conservative group that invited him was charged thousands of dollars to hire private security and bomb sniffing dogs and an emergency blood transfusion for Mr. Heston (in case he was attacked). The massive protests at Brandeis and threats of violence forced the hiring of massive security. Talking to a crowd of about 700 students Heston declared, “Political correctness is tyranny with manners.”
On October 18th, 2007 Dr. James Watson, discoverer of DNA, had his speech cancelled at the London Museum of Science because of his controversial claims that Africans and Westerners have different intelligence levels. The 79-year-old American geneticist said he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours - whereas all the testing says not really.”
On September 24th, 2007, when Mahmud Ahmadinjed went to speak at Columbia there were no violent protests. The University paid the price of security. Lee Bolinger, the president of the University, introduced the dictator, albeit in a less than friendly manner. One writer named Paul Woodward explained that “While Ahmadinjed’s address can be understood in terms of its domestic political focus and likewise his masterful use of the media, as an exercise in free speech it deserves consideration in terms of its substance.” When Ahmandinjad spoke there was applause. The transcript of the speech (http://www.azstarnet.com/sn/hourlyupdate/202820.php) states that Ahmadinjed was introduced thus:
John Coatsworth: Our principal speaker today is His Excellency the president of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Mr. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Mr. President. (Applause.)
Applause. They applauded when he condemned Bollinger’s comments against him. They applauded when he spoke about the right of the Palestinians and how the Holocaust shouldn’t be used as an excuse to harm Palestinians. They applauded when he spoke about Iran’s right to peaceful nuclear energy. They applauded when he spoke about the death penalty and how Iran and the U.S both have it.
Lee Bollinger explained during his introduction of the tyrant that “Lastly, in universities we have a deep and almost single-minded commitment to pursue the truth. We do not have access to the levers of power, we cannot make war or peace, we can only make minds, and to do this, we must have the most fulsome freedom of inquiry.”
On October 12th, 2007, in the spirit of Freedom of Speech, the Oxford Union debating society invited David Irving the ‘holocaust researcher’ and denier, Nick Griffin, the head of the British National Party which is the direct descendant of Mosley’s British Nazi Party, and Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenka.
Luke Tryl, head of the society noted that “The Oxford Union is famous for its commitment to free speech and although I do think these people have awful and abhorrent views I do think Oxford students are intelligent enough to challenge and ridicule them,” A majority of the same union’s members accused the “Pro-Israel Lobby of Stifling Debate” Unsurprisingly the same people voted to boycott Israeli universities.
When Robert Faurisson published a book on Holocaust denial in France Noam Chomsky signed a letter in his defense, arguing freedom of speech.
So what is this ‘freedom of speech’? Who gets it and who doesn’t? Who is entitled? Why weren’t there disruptions and pie throwing and people shouting down Ahmadinjed? Why was there applause? Why did the University president introduce certain speakers and not others? Why is security paid by the University for some and not others?
How do we decide what is ‘good freedom of speech’ and who must be silenced? How do we decide which dictators and racists and Nazis to invite to the commencement speech and which ones to reject? Actually, its not up to us to decide. Its up to liberals and leftists and all the protesters who manifest themselves at these events. So the question really should be put to them. How do they decide?
Well lets try to figure it out.
Netanyahu: Jewish, Israeli, supports killing terrorists, right wing: bad.
The Minutemen: Christian, against immigration, right wing: bad.
Charleton Heston: actor, likes guns, right wing: bad.
Dr. Watson: Said Africans are dumber than westerners: bad.
Ahmadinjed: Muslim, denies Holocaust, compares Jews to Hitler, hates Bush: good.
Chavez and Castro: Hates Bush, supports Iran, dictators: good.
David Irving: Denies Holocaust, right wing: good.
The British National Party: Hates immigrants, white: good.
So what do we have here? The most acceptable traits of a candidate for freedom of speech are holocaust denial and hating George Bush. Muslim is good too. Jewish is bad. Israeli is a no-no. Right wing is a toss up.
Let us pose a few people and see what the model tells us: Jerry Fallwell and Pat Robertson: bad. David Horowitz: bad. David Duke: good. Saddam Hussein and Stalin: good. Hitler: toss up.
The truth is that the liberal-leftist freedom of speech fascists have betrayed their own souls in the name of their fake virtue. In a distant past things might have been different. Dictators who run a country where it is illegal for women to show their hair in public and where homosexuals are hung and minorities suppressed would have been shunned. Right wing Nazis would have been shunned. Holocaust deniers would have been shunned. In a distant past there would have been disruptions and pie throwing at Ahmadinjed and no University president would have introduced him and no one would have called him ‘his Excellency’ and people would not have applauded.
We are not dealing with that time anymore. Today we are dealing with a time where there isn’t just freedom of speech but freedom to hate. There isn’t merely a freedom to hate there is an invite to hate. There is an implicit change taking place within liberalism, within the college student protest masses of people who call themselves leftists. We are watching it before our eyes. We should be honored to be present at this time when such a change is taking place. We are watching the slow migration of an entire movement from the extreme left of the political spectrum to the extreme right. We are watching the creation of an iron-clad alliance between Islamists, Nazis, white supremacists, holocaust deniers, and Islamists. For years we tolerated the likes of the ACLU supporting the right of Nazis to march and we said “they are right, lest one day our freedoms be squashed.” But in the alliance between the extreme left and the extreme right we are witnessing what has only happened a few times in human history, the complete re-alignment of the political universe. We are watching people support freedom of speech in order to give dictators a platform in our country to tell us how to live. We are watching people who support freedom of speech implicitly going out of their way to invite those who deny us those freedoms and invite them into the halls of our most honored institutions. We are watching as these honored institutions betray us. They have no shame in their betrayal. They use McCarthy like tactics, they use threats of violence, they ally with dictators, they ally with terrorists, they support mass murder. And we sit idly by and do nothing.
We should be ashamed of ourselves. Have not we learned our lesson? We should not have sat idly by while Ahmadinjed spoke. We should have struggled against it. Time and again the decent classes of people, the conservative, traditional people, the modest people, the silent majority, have been whisked away and destroyed in violent revolution because they refused to do anything to save themselves. They have allowed, time and again, a tiny minority of extremists to dictate their lives to them. We had a chance to do something when that dog called Ahmadinjed came into our house. We had a chance to oppose, with violence if necessary, the attempt by our universities to force us to listen to a dictator, a dictator who already has a whole country that must listen to him and a dictator who is coddled by Putin, a dictator who already has the U.N as a platform.
Freedom of speech is meant for us. Just like the Bill of Rights. It is meant for us. The Bill of Rights doesn’t extend to terrorists in Afghanistan. We get freedom of speech because we extend it to every American citizen. Freedom of speech is not for thugs from elsewhere. They get nothing. They shouldn’t be allowed on our soil. Our founding fathers understood that. They didn’t invite dictators and thugs into America. That was a time when the world was entirely run by dictators and thugs and so we did not have any of them travel to our beloved country called America. We opened our doors to immigrants so that they could enjoy the fruits of our freedom and we invited the wretched huddled masses yearning to breathe free to come to our shores.
Ahmadinjed isn’t a huddled mass, he is a tyrant. We should grant those in exile against his rule freedom of speech, we should grant anyone who has fled his evil country the freedoms they are denied there. What we shouldn’t do, and what we should be eternally ashamed of having done, is granting a dictator the right to speak in our country, having let him not just terrorize his own people but also come her to terrorize us and terrorize, again, the people who have fled him.
Columbia University is a stain on America. It is a blot on our country. It is a blot the way the America’s First movement and Charles Lindbergh association with Hitler was a blot. It is a blot like Jane Fonda. But it is a worse blot than Charles Lindbergh and Jane Fonda, because at least they were Americans and they contributed something to acting and aviation. Columbia is no longer an American institution. It is an Iranian institution. It brought a wolf in to speak, when it is the sheep that should have been allowed to speak. It is the weak who deserve freedom of speech, not the strong. Rupert Murdoch, an Australian media mogul and owner of my beloved Foxnews, doesn’t need freedom of speech any more than Mr. Ahmadinjed. Our country, long the sheltering arms of opposition and exiles, is now turned into the collaborator with dictators. All in the name of freedom.
The fact that Ahmadinjed is now a role model for people on the right and left of American politics is a very sad commentary on the changes taking place in American culture. People such as Virginia Tilley, an American citizen, a leftist whose commentary appears in such online journals as New Left Review and Counterpunch.org, who received her M.A from the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University and supports the boycott of Israel, is a supporter of the Iranian tyrant (unsurprisingly one finds leftist Western women are usually the greatest supporters of regimes that deny women basic freedoms, and they are the first to don headscarfs and burkas in the name of modesty and tolerance).
The way the modern liberal-left views Mr. Ahmadinjed and the way in which they warp their views to align with his can best be viewed in this exchange at Columbia:
Mr. Coatsworth: Mr. President, another student asks, Iranian women are now denied basic human rights, and your government has imposed draconian punishments, including execution on Iranian citizens who are homosexuals. Why are you doing those things?
Ahmadinjed: But as for the executions, I'd like to raise two questions. If someone comes and establishes a network for illicit drug trafficking that affects the (use ?) in Iran, Turkey, Europe, the United States by introducing these illicit drugs and destroys them, would you ever reward them? People who lead the lives -- cause the deterioration of the lives of hundreds of millions of youth around the world, including in Iran, can we have any sympathy to them? Don't you have capital punishment in the United States? You do, too. (Applause.)
Leftists applauded this statement. Why? They applauded it because they see that Mr. Ahmadinjed is supposedly poking fun at the hypocrisy of Mr. Coatworth’s question, since he is showing that the U.S should not condemn the death penalty when it too employs this punishment.
But try to get inside the head of the people who applauded this. They are the same people who oppose the death penalty in America. They are the same people who oppose the war on drugs. They are the same people who support homosexual rights. Yet here they are marching in lock-step and applauding someone who is justifying the execution of people who sell illicit drugs.
Remember, the people who applauded were not right wingers. They weren’t Republicans. Republicans would probably applaud if someone suggested executing drug dealers. Some right wingers might will agree with Mr. Ahmadinjed’s policy on gays. But it is disturbing to see that the left will agree with someone who opposes everything leftists support, just because that person condemns America. In the old days, when there was a good honest left (if there ever was one), the leftist would not have applauded. The students would not have applauded. They would have booed. They would have seen that Ahmadinjed was not condemning America, but merely saying “you have the death penalty and so do we.” They would have booed him for the same crimes they saw in their own country. They would have held him to the same standard.
The rape of history
Seth J. Frantzman
October 16th, 2007
Those who rape history, and they are quite common in the West and the East, do not ask the question ‘what happened’ but instead ask the question ‘how do people think about what happened.’ They don’t want to know any longer what actually took place. They want to know the cynical, plotting, wordy, pseudo-scientific model, of what took place. They do not ask how many died in the Boston Massacre. They instead ask how it was interpreted by the British and colonial public and how ‘discourses’ in ‘British and American historiography’ speak about ‘the event.’
The rapist knows there is no truth. Why should he believe in truth. After all, a rapist is a criminal and criminals have no interest in what took place, merely in how to get out of the predicament of criminality and punishment that they now find themselves in. Because the modern intellectual rapes his subject, he must then twist it, change it, warp it, so that he will not be found guilty. The rapist says that his victim is to blame. Thus the intellectual who rapes the sources and rapes history blames those very sources for having been raped. Biblical criticism is guilty of this, it takes the Bible, condemns it for being a myth and then uses the same Bible and its categorizations and terms in order to condemn it. Biblical critics look at the prohibition against easting a ‘child in its mother’s milk’ and speak of the ‘cultural milieu the Israelites found themselves in while in Egypt and the need to distinguish themselves from the other.’
When the rapists of history were given the job of running an entire country, the Soviet Union, it is no surprise that they excelled beyond their wildest dreams. They found that anything could be re-written. The same leftist historians who had indulged so deeply in faking history, in categorizing it all based on economics, now found that they could simply make up whatever they pleased for a whole country. The same people who accused the ‘state’ of having hoodwinked ‘the people’ into believing in nationalism and god, saw that by harnessing the state to their own nefarious goals they had no problem making history a myth. They cajoled America for its ‘colonial’ war in Vietnam while they embarked on a colonization of Eastern Europe for fifty years. They spoke about ‘class warfare’ and the ‘inequalities of capitalism’ while they turned an entire nation into slaves.
Examine the following text entitled Ottoman Rule over Palestine: Its Evaluation in Arab, Turkish and Israeli Histories, 1970-90 by Mauros Reinkowski
“In her monograph Jaffa, Ruth Kark does not once use the term 'Arab'
itself (except in a citation, p.16) until .page 52. Again 'Arabness' appears only
in the form of attributes or composites: p.15: 'Arab-Muslim regions of
Asia'; p.3 1: 'Arabic and Turkish notables'; p.32: 'Greek-orthodox Arabs';
p.42: 'Arabic language'; p.45: 'Arab kaymakam'; p.5 1: 'Arab elite'. The
Palestinian population of the 19th century is categorized on p.43 as
'foreigners, Jews and local Arabs'. More frequent, however, is the
categorization of the Arab population according to religious criteria: p. 16:
'Muslims and non-Muslims alike'; p.20: 'Muslim and Christian inhabi-
tants'; p.22: 'Muslim population'. In the chapter 'Demographic and Social
Features' (pp.156-203) the population is categorized into the three groups
'Muslim community', 'Christian community' and 'The Jews' (pp.6, 18, 20
respectively). The activities of the European missionaries are integrated into
the chapter about the Christian community.' Categorizing according to
denomination places Christian Arabs closer to Christian Europeans than to
Muslim Arabs. It is certainly inaccurate to subsume Muslims and Christians
under the heading 'Arabs' without mentioning the internal frictions. But it
is even less appropriate to separate Muslims and Christians into completely
different categories. The Arab population, never described as Arabs, is
referred to as local Arabs. The term insinuates that the Arabs do not belong
to Palestine, but that a srnall group out of the total number of Arabs
accidentally lives in this place. The categorization according to religious
communities ignores the ethnic existence of the Arabs. Quite the contrary,
the twin meaning of 'Jew' as a religious communitarian und ethnic term
confers on the Jewish population in Palestine a more concrete and
comprehensive reality.
This tendency in Israeli history and political science to Fragmentize the
others has been repeatedly criticized, for example by G.W. Bowersock in his
assessment of intentional biases in Israeli studies of classical antiquity. He
particularly objects to the attempt to describe Palestine as a fragmentized
area before the unification under the Roman Empire.' Alexander Schölch
criticized the tendency of Israeli political scientists to describe the
Palestinians as a fundamentally fragmented and underdeveloped society
that was modernized and homogenized by the Jewish state.
The corruption of the Ottoman authorities in Palestine is frequently
stressed.”
To a rapist nothing is what it seems. How can it be? He has an overburdened sex drive and deep seated hatred that forces him to want to dominate and degrade others, to penetrate and punish them because of his own inadequacy. He transforms every women into a object and beyond that he creates a world of fantastical solipsism. The rapist of history does the same, except in his case he transforms history into a woman, penetrating her, creating myths when none exist and calling things myths that are not.
The central question should be, is history a woman waiting to be ravaged? The central character in the French revolution is a raped woman holding the banner of France. Likewise the central character in a poem by Yitzhak Sadeh is a former Jewish inmate of a concentration camp with the word’s ‘camp whore’ tattooed in German on her chest. Likewise the story of Yael and Sisera is interpreted as one in which she takes revenge for his raping her by driving a nail through his head. But is this history? A ravaged woman, looking for revenge against intellectuals for having sullied her?
Is the more proper view of history perhaps that of Deborah, the judge of Israel, gathering her armies against the Philistine menace. Is it perhaps the strong women of Sparta who, when asked why Spartan women were the only women in Greece who rules their, the reply was that it was because ‘only Spartan women give birth to men.’ If history is feminine, if it is a woman, it is a strong, indomitable woman like Elizabeth, not an angry rape victim. But if history is a strong overweight women, plodding, modest and in love with tradition, then what does this say about the fate of the rapist? The intellectual who meddles with history, who tampers with it, who ceaselessly interprets it cannot escape the fact that revenge comes slowly, over time. The rapists like to remind us, in a snide manner, that history is written by the victors. They certainly think they are the victors and that they have written our history. After all, haven’t they told us that James Polk was a terrible man for owning slaves, that Thomas Jefferson raped his and that George Washington cannot be forgiven for owning them. They have turned the founding fathers of America into a bunch of self interested rich white ‘honkies.’ But history isn’t written by the victors. The zealots who died at Masada, the Spartans at Thermopylae, the Warsaw ghetto fighters, General Gordon. Not winners. But does anyone recall the name of the Mahdi whose army killed Gordon?
Saturday, October 13, 2007
Terra Incognita 5
Terra Incognita
Issue 5
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
October 5th, 2007
*note on last weeks supplement: Someone has brought it to my attention that last week’s article ‘The life of the Muslim (terrorist)’ was both inappropriate, hysterical, in bad taste and would lead people to not take the author seriously. I have taken this critique to heart, and hopefully this week’s columns as well as those in the future will reflect more depth, thought, and maturity. However it should be pointed out that this article on the hypothetical Muslim terrorist was supposed to be a reflection on the lives of the 9/11 hijackers, a hypothetical insight into the lives they probably led. Many pieces of information from the biographies of the 19 hijackers were cobbled together in my hypothetical biography, including details about their visits to strip clubs, their birthplace of Saudi Arabia and their lives Germany and attendance at government funded Mosques in Frankfurt. My article was also based upon my own reflection of a piece by Ian Buruma in The New York Review of Books, on September 27, 2007 titled ‘his toughness problem-and ours’ regarding a recent book by Norman Podhoretz. In the article Mr. Buruma, an Anglo-Dutch contributor to the New Yorker, noted that poverty and dictatorship in the Middle East and the Muslim world are the main causes of terrorism. My hypothetical life of a Muslim terrorist was supposed to reflect the reality, almost all terrorists whether Muslim or Communist or Anarchist, are born middle class or wealthy. They almost always grow up or are educated in democracies or reasonably free societies. In fact one might reasonable argue that wealth and democracy are better incubators and indicators of terrorism than vice-versa. India, the United States, Sri Lanka, Nigeria, Thailand, the Philippines, Europe and Israel suffer more terror than most dictatorships. Furthermore the poorest societies that are also dictatorships, such as those found across Africa, rarely if ever produce terrorists. The most recent African terrorists have come from Kenya, a rare island of reasonable democracy that contains a middle class. Perhaps it would have been more high brow, proper, and less hysterical, less bordering on racism or Islamophobia to have given this introduction to last weeks ‘The Life of the Muslim (terrorist).’ Apologies.*
Here are this week’s articles below and attached. The full articles appear below these short abstracts. This weeks theme is race, contemporary racism and western society.
1) Race, class and prostitution: Prostitution is not the universal phenomenon we have been led to believe. Neither is it the ‘world’s oldest profession.’ It is neither natural to society, nor does it exist on a one to one basis with society, growing as society does. It is instead a distorted, racist world of slavery and hypocrisy that is often ignored.
2) The tragedy of victimhood: Well meaning leftists have convinced themselves that the world is divided into the ‘racist whites’ and ‘victimized non-whites.’ By the same token minorities in the United States have been led to believe that they cannot succeed due to their skin color, because of ever present racism and endemic ‘white privilege.’ This is a great tragedy.
3) My Chinese child: Westerners are increasingly adopting children from non-western countries. While one cannot say if this is right or wrong it is worthwhile to ponder what this says about the values of the west and its inability to reproduce itself naturally.
Race, class and prostitution
Seth J. Frantzman
October 1st, 2007
The great mantra of the West is that “prostitution is the world’s oldest occupation.” To be sure there is evidence that Justinian’s wife was a prostitute, that the Crusader armies had prostitutes with them at the siege of Acre and that in Pompeii there is a brothel with diagrams of the women’s specialties drawn above their rooms. Many scholars of Near Eastern studies love to point to the famous ‘temple prostitutes’ supposedly found in ancient Mesopotamia. The Kama Sutra and the courtesans of India and the concubines of Asia are surely evidence of some form of sexual ‘work.’
Even if its not the world’s oldest occupation, since this statement hinges on the meaning of the word ‘occupation’, it has apparently been around for a long time. It has almost always existed in cities. Since prostitutes are very rarely regarded as a positive part of society, and are frequently reviled and below the law, they must exist in an urban environment that provides anonymity and the ability to hide them alongside other vices such as opium dens, drug dealers, the mafia and pubs. Since many societies that contain prostitution also contain honor codes and shame women who are prostitutes, women must work their trade, or be forced to work, in brothels in an urban environment, a rural prostitute would be either murdered by her family or driven from the town where she resided. The only slight deviation to this rule might be strange frontier societies such as the American West where brothels did exist even in relatively minor towns, but due to the fact that the women inhabiting them had all been imported from, or emigrated from the east coast, they remained anonymous.
But prostitution does not exist in a vacuum. It is not an equal equation of every society that has a certain number of urban centers and a certain number of people produces X number of prostitutes. Some societies produce more. Some societies import more. Some societies spend more per capita on them.
People usually associate prostitutes with poverty. The phrase “she was driven to prostitution” is a common one. It implies that women who end up as prostitutes are poor and poverty stricken. While this may be barely accurate it is not true that all prostitutes come from poor environments or that they come from the lowest portions of society. Furthermore prostitutes very infrequently come from the poorest countries in the world.
So who are the prostitutes? Which women are sold into sex slavery year after year? Which culture produces prostitutes? Which culture consumes them? Where are the most prostitutes per capita born and where do they end their lives? It is not an easy topic to delve into. But it is certainly one that sheds light on a number of the problems with many cultures.
Mark Kurlansky, author of a Continent of Islands remarks that in the Caribbean ten years ago the most common prostitutes were from the Dominican Republic. Kurlansky explained that the black and white populations of the Caribbean, the whites being tourists and the blacks being local residents, desired mixed ‘mulatto’ women because they were either seen as ‘exotic’ or unobtainable. For the blacks the idea of sex with a ‘white’ mulatto women was fetishistic. It said something about conquest, and about revenge for the trauma of slavery and poverty, degradation of those usually beyond their grasp (V.S Naipal also has something to say about this in his essay ‘Comrade X and the Black Power killings in Trinidad’). For the whites the desire was apparently slightly imbued with racism and the desire to dominate and to experience the ‘exotic black’ mulatto women (apparently a fully ‘blue’ black African prostitute would no longer be ‘exotic’, her features would be undesirable to the white clientele). Whatever the truth behind the instincts of the ‘johns,’ Kurlansky found mulatto prostitutes outnumbered the local blacks wherever he traveled. He surmised that the reason they came from the Dominican Republic was that there was a large supply of relatively poor Mulatto women on that island. But the Dominican Republic is not the poorest island in the Caribbean. Neither is it over-crowded. So why did it have such a supply of loose women? That may not be an easy question to answer. Was its society more open? Was it easier for women to leave home at a young age and to travel alone and be taken into the world of the sex trade? But let us rest this story at the fact that the majority of prostitutes in the Caribbean were of a mixed race background, which means they were a minority and thus were different in their race than the clientele. Let us also rest on the fact that it was not the poorest island, Haiti, that produced the majority of the prostitutes.
In Israel, beginning in the 1990s with the large scale immigration of Jews and non-Jews from the former Soviet Union, a virtual tidal wave of prostitutes broke on the shores of Judea. Like a biblical scourge some 5,000 or more women from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union were being imported as sex slaves into Israel every year. But Israel may not have been the first country to be swamped by the post-Communist prostitute invasion. Turkey was also invaded by them. The ‘Natashas’ became famous in Prague. They showed up in Japan and also in South Africa. Then they became common in the United Arab Emirates and farther afield. Advertisements in London in 2007 invited clients to come to brothels stocked with ‘Polish supermodels.’ When the supply of Russian prostitutes began to ebb, they were replaced by Ukrainian girls and then Moldovans. A report from 2002 noted that 120,000 Ukrainian women were trafficked as sex slaves in 2001 alone. For a country of 23 million women (46 million people) that means that between the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 and today more than 1 million or more Ukrainian women have become prostitutes. Since the age pyramid in the Ukraine is shaped like a funnel (with more old people than young), of the 5 million Ukrainian women between 15 and 27, one in five or more had become a sex slave or prostitute. One in five women. The report noted that 10% of prostitutes in Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, Italy, Greece and Spain, were Ukrainian. That’s only Ukraine. If one were to add in the percentage of prostitutes in these places and elsewhere originating in the post-Communist nations the percentage would rise to more than 60-80% in many places.
People like to pretend that the reason that post-communist countries produced a tidal wave of whoredom was because they were poor. Communism ‘collapsed.’ But it collapsed mostly on the elderly and middle aged, trained professionals and pensioners lost everything. Their state guaranteed jobs, their security, their years of service to the motherland. The young did not lose out to the same degree. A 10 year old girl didn’t lose out the way a 50 year old woman did. So why is it that the 10 year old girl in 1990 had almost a 20% chance of becoming a prostitute if she was from the Ukraine? If one adds in all the other types of sexual entertainment such as pornography and stripping, she might have had a 50% chance of becoming a sex worker. Why? It wasn’t poverty for one thing. Ukraine may have been poorer than England in 1995, but it wasn’t poorer than Africa, or many Middle Eastern Countries. It was wealthier in many respects than parts of Mexico and other parts of Central and South America. So why did it supply so many women to the world, the to dark hole of sex slavery from whence few if any returned? Why did its main export become women? After all we aren’t counting all the women who became ‘mail order brides’ or simply emigrated? Between 1990 and 2007 Ukraine became virtually devoid of women between the ages 15 and 27. How did that happen and why?
Ukraine became a ‘pimpers paradise’ for two reasons. Its women were blond and blue eyed and thus desirable(like the mulattos). Its culture had no tradition of honor or shame because for 80 years it had suffered under the atheistic yoke of Communism which never encouraged modesty among women or proscribed shame for those women who were seen as ‘loose.’ There was no culture in the Ukraine that demanded women stay home or occupy a traditional place in society, and there was no punishment for young women who strayed morally, there was no restraint on women traveling alone abroad to seek work. An extremely free society, with no morals, produced a generation of women who would never return and most of whome would end their days locked in a room in a foreign nation servicing 10 men a day so a foreigner could make profit of them (ironically Communism is still seen as having offered women ‘freedom’ so it may be a surprise to note the degree to which women in post-communist societies simply disappeared to become slaves. In this respect ‘freedom’ is a double-edged sword, women in Eastern Europe are free to believe advertisements that offer them money as ‘waitresses’ in Dubai, and they are therefore free to become slaves whereas a Saudi Muslim women may not travel abroad without the permission of a male relative, she is not free, but her form of slavery is no worse than that enjoyed by so many ‘free’ women who become prostitutes). A communist society had produced the ultimate alienation of labor, women were sold as chattel for $2,000 a girl, to be sold to the highest bidder and raped until they died. It wasn’t their poverty. It was their culture and the desirability of their blond hair and ‘fair’ skin that led them astray.
It is surely a touchy subject that exposes the fact that prostitution is not a one to one game. Prostitutes and ‘sex workers’ in the United States are invariably white. They are almost all derived from the middle class, which is also mostly white. Thailand is not the poorest country in Asia but it produces more than its fair share of prostitutes. Indonesia, by contrast, being poorer and Muslim, produces few. In Israel there are Jewish prostitutes but no Muslim or Arab ones, despite the fact that Jews make up the wealthier sectors of society. In England there is no shortage of English prostitutes despite the incredible wealth of the country. There are, perhaps needless to say, no Pakistani sex workers, despite the fact that they make up the poorer sectors of society in England. In Albania and Macedonia and Kosovo, the Albanian triangle, the local Muslim Albanians, despite their poverty, produce few prostitutes for the brothel cities that service the Nato forces and the locals, but tens of thousands of Eastern European women from Moldova and Ukraine pass through the area as slaves on their way to Europe. In Turkey there are few native born prostitutes but there are a fair share of Armenian prostitutes and large numbers of other foreign prostitutes mostly from Russia and the Ukraine. Turks are poorer by and large than their northern neighbors, but they provide few if any of the prostitutes. It may not be a surprise to find that Turks enjoy the irony that the Armenians who they massacred now work in Turkey as sex slaves, but no longer exist as a people in a land that they once were indigenous to. Perhaps the Germans enjoy the same irony that the very people they massacred and destroyed in the Second World War, the Russians, Ukrainians and Poles, now provide Germans with sexual entertainment in Prague. There is a deep seated racist fetish that lurks behind prostitution. The Nazis accused the Jews of making up the majority of prostitutes and pimps in 1920s Germany (although pictures of German women offering ‘Mutter und Tochter’ sex don’t bare this out), but the same Nazis established brothels for SS officers in the concentration and death camps. Their pretended hatred for the immorality of prostitution and miscegenation was not born out in their actions during the Final Solution.
In India and Egypt in the 19th century there were entire castes of ‘dancing girls.’ In Egypt they were known as ‘Alma’ and in India they were known as ‘Bayadere’. In the book Dancing Girls of Lahore Louise Brown chronicles this caste of nominally non-Muslim ‘dancing girls’ and how their virgins are sold to sheikhs from Dubai. Edward Lane’s famous 1836 Manners and Customs of Modern Egyptians includes an entire chapter on public dancing girls. He describes them as a tribe known as ‘Ghawazee’ He notes that they go about unveiled, dressing in public as Muslim Egyptian women dress only in the Harem or in private. He mentions that they consume alcohol, something forbidden to Muslims. In 19th century Greece, before and after the liberation from Ottoman rule the country was renowned for its large number of prostitutes, both Jewish and Greek, but never Turkish or Muslim.
In Palestine in 1917 Sir Ronald Storrs, the first British governor of Jerusalem, found numerous houses of prostitution. He found that they were inhabited usually by Syrian Christian women, imported for use in the flesh trade. In the book Newsgirl in Palestine by Barbara Beard published during the British mandate she spends a part of a chapter describing the Christian and Jewish prostitutes of the country (“all the prostitutes in Tel Aviv are Jewesses, but in Jerusalem and Haifa you may find local Christians-Armenians and Greeks”), needless to say neither Christians nor Jews were the majority in Palestine in the 1930s when the book was written and the clientele, as the prostitute ‘Ruth’ describes in the book were not all Jews and Christians ( “in the winter if I am having a bad time I go up to Beyrouth [sic] or Tripoli or Damascus for a little time and get an engagement in a cabaret there.”) As is the case in modern day Prague and Turkey it may be no surprise that the former abusive overlord, the Turks or Germans or Muslim Arabs, now has his choice of prostitutes among the formerly suppressed, Jews, Armenians, Greeks. The situation is no more different today. A recent article on prostitution in Haaretz noted that the prostitutes “feel sorry” for the Arab clientele, who are unable to find women in their local villages (because the same Arab men who go to prostitutes are the same ones who forbid their sisters from leaving the house due to ‘morality’). It may be no surprise that upon the death of King Fahd of Saudi Arabia the Economist eulogized him as a “modern Arab statesman who could be found in Beirut with a Lebanese beauty on each arm.” He was ‘modern’ because he flew to Beirut to cavort with Christian sex workers there? He was ‘modern’ because he cheated on his wife while laws in his country forbid his wife to drive a car or go outside with her hair uncovered? It goes without mentioning that the sex industry in Beirut is entirely made up of either imported women from Eastern Europe, Armenians or local Christian women. Of the other confessions represented in the government, Druze, Sunnis and Shias, there are no prostitutes.
The massive amount of prostitution found in Southeast Asia does not exist equally across the countries. Prostitutes are common in Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand and Burma. But just across the border in Muslim Pakistan, Indonesia and Malaysia the prostitutes are either imported from the neighboring Buddhist prostitution fleshpots or are local minorities such as Hindus or Chinese.
Prostitution is not a universal phenomenon. It is not this thing that occurs naturally in every society, in every culture and among every people. Prostitutes are derived from certain classes, certain stations in life, certain cultures and in most places where they exist the majority of them are made up of a certain race, religion or ethnicity that is not always that of the majority and usually represents the deep racist and fetishistic attitudes of the clientele. From the Dominican mulattos in the Caribbean to the blond haired and blue eyed Ukrainians ‘working’ in Dubai to the Nepalese imported to Calcutta to the Thais and Russians imported to Japan, to the Armenians re-enslaved in Turkish brothels to the Moldovans in Kosovo, prostitution has an often times sickening, tragic and racist side to it that is all too often ignored in the statement ‘the world’s oldest profession.’
The tragedy of victimhood
Seth J. Frantzman
October 4th, 2007
Not long ago I received a forwarded letter entitled ‘White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack’ by Peggy McIntosh’ which had apparently been posted by someone named Andre at the Northern California Indian Development Council. Peggy McIntosh is the associate director of the Wellesley Collage Center for Research on Women. Her strange article can be found at http://seamonkey.ed.asu.edu/~mcisaac/emc598ge/Unpacking.html. In response to her musings I composed an article entitled ‘What is White Privilege?’ which appears here:
http://lawlib.lclark.edu/blog/native_america/?p=555 at a website run by Robert J. Miller, an author. Soon after I began to receive mail from people that disagreed.
One person named Jeremiah Davis explained to me that:“Jews are white. Irish, Italians, and white Catholics are white. I workwith Mexicans who say they are ‘white’. They aren't white. They are brown.Believe me, they know it when they wake up and look in the mirror. White‘rednecks’, ‘trailer trash’, etc. are raised like sheep or, as we used tosay where I came from originally, ‘raised like mushrooms: fed bullshit and
kept in the dark.’ ”
But the most interesting response was from Dominic Herrera who noted the following:
“as a member of that privileged class you have no idea what type of prejudicial treatment the rest of ‘us dark skinned people live with’, the only way you might possibly understand, is to become dark, and be treated as a second class person.”
It isn’t necessary to quibble with these types of statements, what is most interesting is to wonder about the frame of mind of the type of people that believe them. The number of people who believe that they can and should divide the world into ‘white’ and ‘non-white’ and the number of people who believe that they as ‘non-white’ people are destined to be ‘second class’ because of their skin color is quite large. Mostly these people come from the middle college educated classes but they also can be found among the working poor and the elite. They are all invariably on the left of the political spectrum.
It is a tragedy that because of perceived notions of racism people have actually convinced themselves that due to some invisible hand of ‘white privilege’ they cannot succeed. There is, of course, a supreme irony in this victimhood. It begins with a person deciding that he is ‘non-white.’ Then he claims that racists hate ‘non-white’ people. Then he comes to believe that due to his ‘non-white’ skin color he cannot succeed and is doomed to failure and victimization because of secret, hidden, all-powerful ‘white privilege.’
In a sense the kind of person who deludes themselves like this not only implicitly accepts the racist’s ideology but also dooms himself to failure. Any ‘white’ person who believes that there is such a thing as ‘white privilege’ that implicitly divides the world between ‘white’ and ‘non-white’ not only adheres to a nazi-like race theory but embraces it while pretending to condemn it. This is the ultimate irony of everyone who dwells to deeply on ‘racism’ and seeks to always expose prejudice, by believing so deeply in the racial divisions of society they accept the racists argument that society is divided on racial lines rather than ideological, religious, ethnic, linguistic or class lines.
But the fate of those who believe themselves destined to be victims due to their skin color is truly tragic. These are usually people who otherwise might well have succeeded. They might well have accomplished things and built themselves up professionally and financially. By believing, however, that they are doomed to failure because of racism and bias and prejudice and the hidden hand of ‘white privilege’ they will never succeed. Imagine what it must be like to wake up everyday and believe oneself to be a second-class person. Those who believe such things ask us to ‘walk in their footsteps.’ But for most of us that is not possible whether we fit into their category of ‘white’ or ‘non-white.’ For a successful and intelligent person who has overcome obstacles it is difficult to surrender to the temptation of being a neer-do-well victim. It is not only physically impossible for a ‘white’ person to change his skin, but it is also mentally unlikely that this ‘white’ person can perceive himself as ‘the victim.’ Victimhood and its ideology is not a racial thing, probably more ‘white’ people buy into this idea that they are privileged, than minorities buy into the idea that a hidden hand keeps them down. That is, after all, the bane of the WASP-rot culture of portions of America.
Much of the last forty years has been spent telling minorities in America that they cannot succeed because of their skin color. Blacks cannot succeed because racism is everywhere. Whether they are on the playground or watching TV or driving their car or applying for a mortgage, the entire system is racist. After all we were informed just last week that “there are more black men in prison than in college”(there are 15.9 million American college students, 4.3 million are considered ‘minorities.’ 40% of blacks attend college while 46% of whites do so. There are 1.7 million black students in U.S colleges. 42 percent of black female high school graduates attend college. There are 2.2 million Americans in prison and 7 million in prison, probation or on parole). According to the Socialist Worker in the UK, “The US penal system discriminates against black people. Some 12.6 percent of black men in their late 20s are behind bars, compared to 3.6 percent for Hispanic men and 1.6 percent for white. The ethnic make-up of prisons also displays the deep racism that characterizes US society. Black men in the US are more likely to go to prison than to university.” According to the New York Times “another important finding was that 10.4 percent of black men ages 25 to 29, or 442,300 people, were in [federal or state] prison last year. By comparison, 2.4 percent of Hispanic men and 1.2 percent of white men in the same age group were in prison.” While it may be true that there actually are more black men in prison than college, just barely, its not true that black men are more likely to go to prison than University(actually the statistics don’t take account of the number of black men who have gone to prison and to University, which are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Perhaps black men are likely to go to University and then go to prison or vice-versa. Either way the statistic is bunk. )
What is most tragic is that it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. Some black person reads this statistic and says “I can’t succeed, I am destined for prison.” Surely once someone convinces themselves they are a failure and destined for a life behind bars, it is only a matter of time. It may only take the chance meeting with a few will meaning white academics who explain to blacks that “the cards are stacked against you, the system is rigged, you can’t succeed because of your race” to ensure their belief in their second class victimized status.
Mr. Dominic Herrera cannot succeed because he has convinced himself he is a second rate person who will forever be punished for his ‘dark skin.’ But one might wonder at the result should he move to live in a country where dark skinned people were the majority. Then what would be the excuse for his failure? Surely then it would be globalization, the long arm of the white man reaching out to suppress him wherever he goes.
Historically tenacious minorities have succeeded far beyond the expectations given them by the Anglo majority of 19th century America. Again and again underestimated minorities have been washed ashore in the United States and accomplished far beyond what they could have done in their former countries. Tragically after 200 years of American independence that tide of successful minorities began to shift. The belief in the ideology of the victim which began to be preached in the 1960s and 1970s and is now malignant in American society has resulted in a generation of failure and will only continue to create more and more American failures as time goes on. For every minority and white person who embraces the new eugenics of race based determinations of success, it is merely another tragic path to the dregs of American society.
My Chinese child
Seth J. Frantzman
September 29th, 2007
Why do Western couples adopt Asian children? Does it say something about Western culture that they do this, does it say something about Asians that they give their children up for adoption and if so, does it say something about racism and slavery in today’s society? Is this a modern day sale of children, and why is China limiting births while Islam is increasing them? What would a white couple say if they were in Asia and saw a Chinese family with a white child? More importantly, why can’t western women have enough children naturally? What does that say about the ‘I love myself’ society?
One cannot say whether it is improper for people to adopt children that are not of the same race, culture or religion of the parents. But one can say that 98% of such adoptions occur between western white people adopting children from non-western, usually Asian countries. Sometime it takes the form of the adoption of African children, such as was the case with Madonna. Why does this happen? It does not go the other way around. Even the wealthiest Asians and Africans do not adopt children from the west. Thabo Mbeki or Lee Kuan Hew, or Jackie Chan do not have little kids whose parents were named Chris and Thom and Erin. Surely their wealth would allow them to adopt the children of poor white folks. But they resist the inclination to do so. Why? Don’t they also feel the need to have a child from another culture?
The Romans and Soviets adopted children. Adoption is not a western phenomenon. However its current form is. In the old days people adopted the children of parents who died or perhaps could not afford to feed the children. Adoption was common among the Soviet elites in the 1920s because so many comrades had been lost in the Civil War. But the modern western phenomenon of adopting children because western women are either unwilling or unable to have children or because the family feels it is proper to adopt unwanted children is a phenomenon.
It seems there is something decidedly paternalistic and racist in the idea that one ‘should’ adopt a non-western child. It is sort of a strange twisted form of manifest destiny. We can’t go colonize some society so lets bring their children here. We desire a ‘multi-ethnic’ and ‘diverse’ society so we should bring in children that don’t look like us in order to achieve this. Forget the fact that those kids will merely look different, their culture will be ours and in their mannerism and speech they will be indistinguishable to their peers. Only in that all important western idea of ‘race’ will they differ. There must be nothing more pleasing than bringing in Asian and black children, making them ape western culture through their upbringing, and then saying ‘look at my diverse family.’ But it is a fake diversity, like all diversity in the west. It is the fake diversity that always pretends that diversity can be found in a postcard, in counting the number of black and brown and white and yellow faces and saying ‘look diversity.’ It is precisely the opposite of honest diversity and tolerance and coexistence where people are actually diverse based on their different culture and diets and languages and religions and upbringing and ideology and class. Western diversity, the diversity of the adopted children, is like Islamic diversity, everyone looks different but they all act the same way. That’s a dangerous hypocritical diversity. It also says much about a culture that can no longer perpetuate itself through childbirth.
Issue 5
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
October 5th, 2007
*note on last weeks supplement: Someone has brought it to my attention that last week’s article ‘The life of the Muslim (terrorist)’ was both inappropriate, hysterical, in bad taste and would lead people to not take the author seriously. I have taken this critique to heart, and hopefully this week’s columns as well as those in the future will reflect more depth, thought, and maturity. However it should be pointed out that this article on the hypothetical Muslim terrorist was supposed to be a reflection on the lives of the 9/11 hijackers, a hypothetical insight into the lives they probably led. Many pieces of information from the biographies of the 19 hijackers were cobbled together in my hypothetical biography, including details about their visits to strip clubs, their birthplace of Saudi Arabia and their lives Germany and attendance at government funded Mosques in Frankfurt. My article was also based upon my own reflection of a piece by Ian Buruma in The New York Review of Books, on September 27, 2007 titled ‘his toughness problem-and ours’ regarding a recent book by Norman Podhoretz. In the article Mr. Buruma, an Anglo-Dutch contributor to the New Yorker, noted that poverty and dictatorship in the Middle East and the Muslim world are the main causes of terrorism. My hypothetical life of a Muslim terrorist was supposed to reflect the reality, almost all terrorists whether Muslim or Communist or Anarchist, are born middle class or wealthy. They almost always grow up or are educated in democracies or reasonably free societies. In fact one might reasonable argue that wealth and democracy are better incubators and indicators of terrorism than vice-versa. India, the United States, Sri Lanka, Nigeria, Thailand, the Philippines, Europe and Israel suffer more terror than most dictatorships. Furthermore the poorest societies that are also dictatorships, such as those found across Africa, rarely if ever produce terrorists. The most recent African terrorists have come from Kenya, a rare island of reasonable democracy that contains a middle class. Perhaps it would have been more high brow, proper, and less hysterical, less bordering on racism or Islamophobia to have given this introduction to last weeks ‘The Life of the Muslim (terrorist).’ Apologies.*
Here are this week’s articles below and attached. The full articles appear below these short abstracts. This weeks theme is race, contemporary racism and western society.
1) Race, class and prostitution: Prostitution is not the universal phenomenon we have been led to believe. Neither is it the ‘world’s oldest profession.’ It is neither natural to society, nor does it exist on a one to one basis with society, growing as society does. It is instead a distorted, racist world of slavery and hypocrisy that is often ignored.
2) The tragedy of victimhood: Well meaning leftists have convinced themselves that the world is divided into the ‘racist whites’ and ‘victimized non-whites.’ By the same token minorities in the United States have been led to believe that they cannot succeed due to their skin color, because of ever present racism and endemic ‘white privilege.’ This is a great tragedy.
3) My Chinese child: Westerners are increasingly adopting children from non-western countries. While one cannot say if this is right or wrong it is worthwhile to ponder what this says about the values of the west and its inability to reproduce itself naturally.
Race, class and prostitution
Seth J. Frantzman
October 1st, 2007
The great mantra of the West is that “prostitution is the world’s oldest occupation.” To be sure there is evidence that Justinian’s wife was a prostitute, that the Crusader armies had prostitutes with them at the siege of Acre and that in Pompeii there is a brothel with diagrams of the women’s specialties drawn above their rooms. Many scholars of Near Eastern studies love to point to the famous ‘temple prostitutes’ supposedly found in ancient Mesopotamia. The Kama Sutra and the courtesans of India and the concubines of Asia are surely evidence of some form of sexual ‘work.’
Even if its not the world’s oldest occupation, since this statement hinges on the meaning of the word ‘occupation’, it has apparently been around for a long time. It has almost always existed in cities. Since prostitutes are very rarely regarded as a positive part of society, and are frequently reviled and below the law, they must exist in an urban environment that provides anonymity and the ability to hide them alongside other vices such as opium dens, drug dealers, the mafia and pubs. Since many societies that contain prostitution also contain honor codes and shame women who are prostitutes, women must work their trade, or be forced to work, in brothels in an urban environment, a rural prostitute would be either murdered by her family or driven from the town where she resided. The only slight deviation to this rule might be strange frontier societies such as the American West where brothels did exist even in relatively minor towns, but due to the fact that the women inhabiting them had all been imported from, or emigrated from the east coast, they remained anonymous.
But prostitution does not exist in a vacuum. It is not an equal equation of every society that has a certain number of urban centers and a certain number of people produces X number of prostitutes. Some societies produce more. Some societies import more. Some societies spend more per capita on them.
People usually associate prostitutes with poverty. The phrase “she was driven to prostitution” is a common one. It implies that women who end up as prostitutes are poor and poverty stricken. While this may be barely accurate it is not true that all prostitutes come from poor environments or that they come from the lowest portions of society. Furthermore prostitutes very infrequently come from the poorest countries in the world.
So who are the prostitutes? Which women are sold into sex slavery year after year? Which culture produces prostitutes? Which culture consumes them? Where are the most prostitutes per capita born and where do they end their lives? It is not an easy topic to delve into. But it is certainly one that sheds light on a number of the problems with many cultures.
Mark Kurlansky, author of a Continent of Islands remarks that in the Caribbean ten years ago the most common prostitutes were from the Dominican Republic. Kurlansky explained that the black and white populations of the Caribbean, the whites being tourists and the blacks being local residents, desired mixed ‘mulatto’ women because they were either seen as ‘exotic’ or unobtainable. For the blacks the idea of sex with a ‘white’ mulatto women was fetishistic. It said something about conquest, and about revenge for the trauma of slavery and poverty, degradation of those usually beyond their grasp (V.S Naipal also has something to say about this in his essay ‘Comrade X and the Black Power killings in Trinidad’). For the whites the desire was apparently slightly imbued with racism and the desire to dominate and to experience the ‘exotic black’ mulatto women (apparently a fully ‘blue’ black African prostitute would no longer be ‘exotic’, her features would be undesirable to the white clientele). Whatever the truth behind the instincts of the ‘johns,’ Kurlansky found mulatto prostitutes outnumbered the local blacks wherever he traveled. He surmised that the reason they came from the Dominican Republic was that there was a large supply of relatively poor Mulatto women on that island. But the Dominican Republic is not the poorest island in the Caribbean. Neither is it over-crowded. So why did it have such a supply of loose women? That may not be an easy question to answer. Was its society more open? Was it easier for women to leave home at a young age and to travel alone and be taken into the world of the sex trade? But let us rest this story at the fact that the majority of prostitutes in the Caribbean were of a mixed race background, which means they were a minority and thus were different in their race than the clientele. Let us also rest on the fact that it was not the poorest island, Haiti, that produced the majority of the prostitutes.
In Israel, beginning in the 1990s with the large scale immigration of Jews and non-Jews from the former Soviet Union, a virtual tidal wave of prostitutes broke on the shores of Judea. Like a biblical scourge some 5,000 or more women from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union were being imported as sex slaves into Israel every year. But Israel may not have been the first country to be swamped by the post-Communist prostitute invasion. Turkey was also invaded by them. The ‘Natashas’ became famous in Prague. They showed up in Japan and also in South Africa. Then they became common in the United Arab Emirates and farther afield. Advertisements in London in 2007 invited clients to come to brothels stocked with ‘Polish supermodels.’ When the supply of Russian prostitutes began to ebb, they were replaced by Ukrainian girls and then Moldovans. A report from 2002 noted that 120,000 Ukrainian women were trafficked as sex slaves in 2001 alone. For a country of 23 million women (46 million people) that means that between the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 and today more than 1 million or more Ukrainian women have become prostitutes. Since the age pyramid in the Ukraine is shaped like a funnel (with more old people than young), of the 5 million Ukrainian women between 15 and 27, one in five or more had become a sex slave or prostitute. One in five women. The report noted that 10% of prostitutes in Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, Italy, Greece and Spain, were Ukrainian. That’s only Ukraine. If one were to add in the percentage of prostitutes in these places and elsewhere originating in the post-Communist nations the percentage would rise to more than 60-80% in many places.
People like to pretend that the reason that post-communist countries produced a tidal wave of whoredom was because they were poor. Communism ‘collapsed.’ But it collapsed mostly on the elderly and middle aged, trained professionals and pensioners lost everything. Their state guaranteed jobs, their security, their years of service to the motherland. The young did not lose out to the same degree. A 10 year old girl didn’t lose out the way a 50 year old woman did. So why is it that the 10 year old girl in 1990 had almost a 20% chance of becoming a prostitute if she was from the Ukraine? If one adds in all the other types of sexual entertainment such as pornography and stripping, she might have had a 50% chance of becoming a sex worker. Why? It wasn’t poverty for one thing. Ukraine may have been poorer than England in 1995, but it wasn’t poorer than Africa, or many Middle Eastern Countries. It was wealthier in many respects than parts of Mexico and other parts of Central and South America. So why did it supply so many women to the world, the to dark hole of sex slavery from whence few if any returned? Why did its main export become women? After all we aren’t counting all the women who became ‘mail order brides’ or simply emigrated? Between 1990 and 2007 Ukraine became virtually devoid of women between the ages 15 and 27. How did that happen and why?
Ukraine became a ‘pimpers paradise’ for two reasons. Its women were blond and blue eyed and thus desirable(like the mulattos). Its culture had no tradition of honor or shame because for 80 years it had suffered under the atheistic yoke of Communism which never encouraged modesty among women or proscribed shame for those women who were seen as ‘loose.’ There was no culture in the Ukraine that demanded women stay home or occupy a traditional place in society, and there was no punishment for young women who strayed morally, there was no restraint on women traveling alone abroad to seek work. An extremely free society, with no morals, produced a generation of women who would never return and most of whome would end their days locked in a room in a foreign nation servicing 10 men a day so a foreigner could make profit of them (ironically Communism is still seen as having offered women ‘freedom’ so it may be a surprise to note the degree to which women in post-communist societies simply disappeared to become slaves. In this respect ‘freedom’ is a double-edged sword, women in Eastern Europe are free to believe advertisements that offer them money as ‘waitresses’ in Dubai, and they are therefore free to become slaves whereas a Saudi Muslim women may not travel abroad without the permission of a male relative, she is not free, but her form of slavery is no worse than that enjoyed by so many ‘free’ women who become prostitutes). A communist society had produced the ultimate alienation of labor, women were sold as chattel for $2,000 a girl, to be sold to the highest bidder and raped until they died. It wasn’t their poverty. It was their culture and the desirability of their blond hair and ‘fair’ skin that led them astray.
It is surely a touchy subject that exposes the fact that prostitution is not a one to one game. Prostitutes and ‘sex workers’ in the United States are invariably white. They are almost all derived from the middle class, which is also mostly white. Thailand is not the poorest country in Asia but it produces more than its fair share of prostitutes. Indonesia, by contrast, being poorer and Muslim, produces few. In Israel there are Jewish prostitutes but no Muslim or Arab ones, despite the fact that Jews make up the wealthier sectors of society. In England there is no shortage of English prostitutes despite the incredible wealth of the country. There are, perhaps needless to say, no Pakistani sex workers, despite the fact that they make up the poorer sectors of society in England. In Albania and Macedonia and Kosovo, the Albanian triangle, the local Muslim Albanians, despite their poverty, produce few prostitutes for the brothel cities that service the Nato forces and the locals, but tens of thousands of Eastern European women from Moldova and Ukraine pass through the area as slaves on their way to Europe. In Turkey there are few native born prostitutes but there are a fair share of Armenian prostitutes and large numbers of other foreign prostitutes mostly from Russia and the Ukraine. Turks are poorer by and large than their northern neighbors, but they provide few if any of the prostitutes. It may not be a surprise to find that Turks enjoy the irony that the Armenians who they massacred now work in Turkey as sex slaves, but no longer exist as a people in a land that they once were indigenous to. Perhaps the Germans enjoy the same irony that the very people they massacred and destroyed in the Second World War, the Russians, Ukrainians and Poles, now provide Germans with sexual entertainment in Prague. There is a deep seated racist fetish that lurks behind prostitution. The Nazis accused the Jews of making up the majority of prostitutes and pimps in 1920s Germany (although pictures of German women offering ‘Mutter und Tochter’ sex don’t bare this out), but the same Nazis established brothels for SS officers in the concentration and death camps. Their pretended hatred for the immorality of prostitution and miscegenation was not born out in their actions during the Final Solution.
In India and Egypt in the 19th century there were entire castes of ‘dancing girls.’ In Egypt they were known as ‘Alma’ and in India they were known as ‘Bayadere’. In the book Dancing Girls of Lahore Louise Brown chronicles this caste of nominally non-Muslim ‘dancing girls’ and how their virgins are sold to sheikhs from Dubai. Edward Lane’s famous 1836 Manners and Customs of Modern Egyptians includes an entire chapter on public dancing girls. He describes them as a tribe known as ‘Ghawazee’ He notes that they go about unveiled, dressing in public as Muslim Egyptian women dress only in the Harem or in private. He mentions that they consume alcohol, something forbidden to Muslims. In 19th century Greece, before and after the liberation from Ottoman rule the country was renowned for its large number of prostitutes, both Jewish and Greek, but never Turkish or Muslim.
In Palestine in 1917 Sir Ronald Storrs, the first British governor of Jerusalem, found numerous houses of prostitution. He found that they were inhabited usually by Syrian Christian women, imported for use in the flesh trade. In the book Newsgirl in Palestine by Barbara Beard published during the British mandate she spends a part of a chapter describing the Christian and Jewish prostitutes of the country (“all the prostitutes in Tel Aviv are Jewesses, but in Jerusalem and Haifa you may find local Christians-Armenians and Greeks”), needless to say neither Christians nor Jews were the majority in Palestine in the 1930s when the book was written and the clientele, as the prostitute ‘Ruth’ describes in the book were not all Jews and Christians ( “in the winter if I am having a bad time I go up to Beyrouth [sic] or Tripoli or Damascus for a little time and get an engagement in a cabaret there.”) As is the case in modern day Prague and Turkey it may be no surprise that the former abusive overlord, the Turks or Germans or Muslim Arabs, now has his choice of prostitutes among the formerly suppressed, Jews, Armenians, Greeks. The situation is no more different today. A recent article on prostitution in Haaretz noted that the prostitutes “feel sorry” for the Arab clientele, who are unable to find women in their local villages (because the same Arab men who go to prostitutes are the same ones who forbid their sisters from leaving the house due to ‘morality’). It may be no surprise that upon the death of King Fahd of Saudi Arabia the Economist eulogized him as a “modern Arab statesman who could be found in Beirut with a Lebanese beauty on each arm.” He was ‘modern’ because he flew to Beirut to cavort with Christian sex workers there? He was ‘modern’ because he cheated on his wife while laws in his country forbid his wife to drive a car or go outside with her hair uncovered? It goes without mentioning that the sex industry in Beirut is entirely made up of either imported women from Eastern Europe, Armenians or local Christian women. Of the other confessions represented in the government, Druze, Sunnis and Shias, there are no prostitutes.
The massive amount of prostitution found in Southeast Asia does not exist equally across the countries. Prostitutes are common in Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand and Burma. But just across the border in Muslim Pakistan, Indonesia and Malaysia the prostitutes are either imported from the neighboring Buddhist prostitution fleshpots or are local minorities such as Hindus or Chinese.
Prostitution is not a universal phenomenon. It is not this thing that occurs naturally in every society, in every culture and among every people. Prostitutes are derived from certain classes, certain stations in life, certain cultures and in most places where they exist the majority of them are made up of a certain race, religion or ethnicity that is not always that of the majority and usually represents the deep racist and fetishistic attitudes of the clientele. From the Dominican mulattos in the Caribbean to the blond haired and blue eyed Ukrainians ‘working’ in Dubai to the Nepalese imported to Calcutta to the Thais and Russians imported to Japan, to the Armenians re-enslaved in Turkish brothels to the Moldovans in Kosovo, prostitution has an often times sickening, tragic and racist side to it that is all too often ignored in the statement ‘the world’s oldest profession.’
The tragedy of victimhood
Seth J. Frantzman
October 4th, 2007
Not long ago I received a forwarded letter entitled ‘White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack’ by Peggy McIntosh’ which had apparently been posted by someone named Andre at the Northern California Indian Development Council. Peggy McIntosh is the associate director of the Wellesley Collage Center for Research on Women. Her strange article can be found at http://seamonkey.ed.asu.edu/~mcisaac/emc598ge/Unpacking.html. In response to her musings I composed an article entitled ‘What is White Privilege?’ which appears here:
http://lawlib.lclark.edu/blog/native_america/?p=555 at a website run by Robert J. Miller, an author. Soon after I began to receive mail from people that disagreed.
One person named Jeremiah Davis explained to me that:“Jews are white. Irish, Italians, and white Catholics are white. I workwith Mexicans who say they are ‘white’. They aren't white. They are brown.Believe me, they know it when they wake up and look in the mirror. White‘rednecks’, ‘trailer trash’, etc. are raised like sheep or, as we used tosay where I came from originally, ‘raised like mushrooms: fed bullshit and
kept in the dark.’ ”
But the most interesting response was from Dominic Herrera who noted the following:
“as a member of that privileged class you have no idea what type of prejudicial treatment the rest of ‘us dark skinned people live with’, the only way you might possibly understand, is to become dark, and be treated as a second class person.”
It isn’t necessary to quibble with these types of statements, what is most interesting is to wonder about the frame of mind of the type of people that believe them. The number of people who believe that they can and should divide the world into ‘white’ and ‘non-white’ and the number of people who believe that they as ‘non-white’ people are destined to be ‘second class’ because of their skin color is quite large. Mostly these people come from the middle college educated classes but they also can be found among the working poor and the elite. They are all invariably on the left of the political spectrum.
It is a tragedy that because of perceived notions of racism people have actually convinced themselves that due to some invisible hand of ‘white privilege’ they cannot succeed. There is, of course, a supreme irony in this victimhood. It begins with a person deciding that he is ‘non-white.’ Then he claims that racists hate ‘non-white’ people. Then he comes to believe that due to his ‘non-white’ skin color he cannot succeed and is doomed to failure and victimization because of secret, hidden, all-powerful ‘white privilege.’
In a sense the kind of person who deludes themselves like this not only implicitly accepts the racist’s ideology but also dooms himself to failure. Any ‘white’ person who believes that there is such a thing as ‘white privilege’ that implicitly divides the world between ‘white’ and ‘non-white’ not only adheres to a nazi-like race theory but embraces it while pretending to condemn it. This is the ultimate irony of everyone who dwells to deeply on ‘racism’ and seeks to always expose prejudice, by believing so deeply in the racial divisions of society they accept the racists argument that society is divided on racial lines rather than ideological, religious, ethnic, linguistic or class lines.
But the fate of those who believe themselves destined to be victims due to their skin color is truly tragic. These are usually people who otherwise might well have succeeded. They might well have accomplished things and built themselves up professionally and financially. By believing, however, that they are doomed to failure because of racism and bias and prejudice and the hidden hand of ‘white privilege’ they will never succeed. Imagine what it must be like to wake up everyday and believe oneself to be a second-class person. Those who believe such things ask us to ‘walk in their footsteps.’ But for most of us that is not possible whether we fit into their category of ‘white’ or ‘non-white.’ For a successful and intelligent person who has overcome obstacles it is difficult to surrender to the temptation of being a neer-do-well victim. It is not only physically impossible for a ‘white’ person to change his skin, but it is also mentally unlikely that this ‘white’ person can perceive himself as ‘the victim.’ Victimhood and its ideology is not a racial thing, probably more ‘white’ people buy into this idea that they are privileged, than minorities buy into the idea that a hidden hand keeps them down. That is, after all, the bane of the WASP-rot culture of portions of America.
Much of the last forty years has been spent telling minorities in America that they cannot succeed because of their skin color. Blacks cannot succeed because racism is everywhere. Whether they are on the playground or watching TV or driving their car or applying for a mortgage, the entire system is racist. After all we were informed just last week that “there are more black men in prison than in college”(there are 15.9 million American college students, 4.3 million are considered ‘minorities.’ 40% of blacks attend college while 46% of whites do so. There are 1.7 million black students in U.S colleges. 42 percent of black female high school graduates attend college. There are 2.2 million Americans in prison and 7 million in prison, probation or on parole). According to the Socialist Worker in the UK, “The US penal system discriminates against black people. Some 12.6 percent of black men in their late 20s are behind bars, compared to 3.6 percent for Hispanic men and 1.6 percent for white. The ethnic make-up of prisons also displays the deep racism that characterizes US society. Black men in the US are more likely to go to prison than to university.” According to the New York Times “another important finding was that 10.4 percent of black men ages 25 to 29, or 442,300 people, were in [federal or state] prison last year. By comparison, 2.4 percent of Hispanic men and 1.2 percent of white men in the same age group were in prison.” While it may be true that there actually are more black men in prison than college, just barely, its not true that black men are more likely to go to prison than University(actually the statistics don’t take account of the number of black men who have gone to prison and to University, which are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Perhaps black men are likely to go to University and then go to prison or vice-versa. Either way the statistic is bunk. )
What is most tragic is that it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. Some black person reads this statistic and says “I can’t succeed, I am destined for prison.” Surely once someone convinces themselves they are a failure and destined for a life behind bars, it is only a matter of time. It may only take the chance meeting with a few will meaning white academics who explain to blacks that “the cards are stacked against you, the system is rigged, you can’t succeed because of your race” to ensure their belief in their second class victimized status.
Mr. Dominic Herrera cannot succeed because he has convinced himself he is a second rate person who will forever be punished for his ‘dark skin.’ But one might wonder at the result should he move to live in a country where dark skinned people were the majority. Then what would be the excuse for his failure? Surely then it would be globalization, the long arm of the white man reaching out to suppress him wherever he goes.
Historically tenacious minorities have succeeded far beyond the expectations given them by the Anglo majority of 19th century America. Again and again underestimated minorities have been washed ashore in the United States and accomplished far beyond what they could have done in their former countries. Tragically after 200 years of American independence that tide of successful minorities began to shift. The belief in the ideology of the victim which began to be preached in the 1960s and 1970s and is now malignant in American society has resulted in a generation of failure and will only continue to create more and more American failures as time goes on. For every minority and white person who embraces the new eugenics of race based determinations of success, it is merely another tragic path to the dregs of American society.
My Chinese child
Seth J. Frantzman
September 29th, 2007
Why do Western couples adopt Asian children? Does it say something about Western culture that they do this, does it say something about Asians that they give their children up for adoption and if so, does it say something about racism and slavery in today’s society? Is this a modern day sale of children, and why is China limiting births while Islam is increasing them? What would a white couple say if they were in Asia and saw a Chinese family with a white child? More importantly, why can’t western women have enough children naturally? What does that say about the ‘I love myself’ society?
One cannot say whether it is improper for people to adopt children that are not of the same race, culture or religion of the parents. But one can say that 98% of such adoptions occur between western white people adopting children from non-western, usually Asian countries. Sometime it takes the form of the adoption of African children, such as was the case with Madonna. Why does this happen? It does not go the other way around. Even the wealthiest Asians and Africans do not adopt children from the west. Thabo Mbeki or Lee Kuan Hew, or Jackie Chan do not have little kids whose parents were named Chris and Thom and Erin. Surely their wealth would allow them to adopt the children of poor white folks. But they resist the inclination to do so. Why? Don’t they also feel the need to have a child from another culture?
The Romans and Soviets adopted children. Adoption is not a western phenomenon. However its current form is. In the old days people adopted the children of parents who died or perhaps could not afford to feed the children. Adoption was common among the Soviet elites in the 1920s because so many comrades had been lost in the Civil War. But the modern western phenomenon of adopting children because western women are either unwilling or unable to have children or because the family feels it is proper to adopt unwanted children is a phenomenon.
It seems there is something decidedly paternalistic and racist in the idea that one ‘should’ adopt a non-western child. It is sort of a strange twisted form of manifest destiny. We can’t go colonize some society so lets bring their children here. We desire a ‘multi-ethnic’ and ‘diverse’ society so we should bring in children that don’t look like us in order to achieve this. Forget the fact that those kids will merely look different, their culture will be ours and in their mannerism and speech they will be indistinguishable to their peers. Only in that all important western idea of ‘race’ will they differ. There must be nothing more pleasing than bringing in Asian and black children, making them ape western culture through their upbringing, and then saying ‘look at my diverse family.’ But it is a fake diversity, like all diversity in the west. It is the fake diversity that always pretends that diversity can be found in a postcard, in counting the number of black and brown and white and yellow faces and saying ‘look diversity.’ It is precisely the opposite of honest diversity and tolerance and coexistence where people are actually diverse based on their different culture and diets and languages and religions and upbringing and ideology and class. Western diversity, the diversity of the adopted children, is like Islamic diversity, everyone looks different but they all act the same way. That’s a dangerous hypocritical diversity. It also says much about a culture that can no longer perpetuate itself through childbirth.
Terra Incognita 6
Terra Incognita
Issue 6
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
October 13th, 2007
Here are this week’s articles below and attached. The full articles appear below these short abstracts.
1) Was Cleopatra Circumcised? Cleopatra wasn’t circumcised. However it is ironic to see feminists supporting this practice, just as it is ironic to see them sporting bikinis that say ‘no war on Iran.’
2) To be feared or hated? Machiavelli claimed it was good for a Prince to be feared, but disastrous for him to be hated. Westerners claim that hate implies fear. How can we reconcile these logical fallacies? If one is already hated they might as well be feared as well.
3) The Fall of the Nobel Peace Prize: The fact that the Nobel Peace prize was awarded to Al Gore and the U.N merely shows how little the prize means.
Was Cleopatra Circumcised?
Seth J. Frantzman
September 29th, 2007
The New York Times reported three weeks ago on September 20th, 2007, on protests against the practice of female circumcision in Egypt. The Times intelligently informed the reader that opponents of the practice refer to it as Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) and defenders of it call it circumcision. The New York Times neutral word for it is ‘genital cutting.’ Unlike the practice of circumcision in Judaism, where boys are circumcised at the behest of men, in Egypt the defenders of circumcision for girls are all men, a picture accompanying the article shows the men, standing around a coffee shop saying “Even if the state doesn’t like it, we will circumcise the girls.”
In Egypt women are beginning to protest the circumcising of girls between the ages of 7-13. An estimated 96% of Egyptian girls are circumcised and circumcision is the norm in many countries where Islam exists in Africa, such as the Sudan, Ethiopia and Tanzania. Most reports on FGM note that it has nothing to do with Islam: “Other faiths that have supported FGM include Coptic Christianity as practiced in Egypt; Orthodox and Ethiopian Jews; and the Falashas, a group of Ethiopians Jews who live in Israel.” Another report by the U.S State Department notes that: “These practices cross religious boundaries, including Christians, Muslims and Ethiopian Jews (Falashas).” But how many of the estimated 137 million circumcised women in 28 African countries are non-Muslim? In places where Islam is not present female circumcision is rare. In many places without Islam tribes circumcise the men such as the Xhosa’s Nelson Mandela.
But let us return to this statement made by www.faqs.org, that “Other faiths that have supported FGM include FGM include Coptic Christianity…Orthodox and Ethiopian Jews.” The same article notes that FGM “has been challenged by Islamic scholars.” So connecting FGM to Islam is improper, perhaps racist, but surely it is fair to claim that Christianity and Judaism support it, regardless of the accuracy of such statements.
But the central question should be: was Cleopatra circumcised? Cleopatra, the last of the Ptolemaic line in Egypt, died in the 1st century B.C, alongside her lover Mark Anthony. There is no mention in the quite lurid details of their love life of her sexual appearance having been different than those of Roman women. If she had been circumcised the lurid, X rated, sources of the period would have noted it, they were not coy to note the sexual abilities of people in the period. Furthermore there is no mention anywhere of the Queen of Sheba, Solomon’s lover, having been ‘cut’. So whence did this circumcision come?
Whence did the practice of veiling come? We are always assured that this practice is pre-Islamic. The Persians veiled their women. Catholic nuns were veiled. But if we travel to the Balkans and Central Asia in the 19th century and examine pictures of the women we will find that Muslim women were forced to walk about in heavy horsehair veils. Ungainly massive blankets that covered them, like horses or beasts of burden, weighing them down so they could not go far from the home, much less be seen. But the Pagan and Christian women, who were sometimes enslaved by the Muslims, did not go about like this. If veiling was pre-Islamic we would expect to see it among Buddhists, Hindus, Navajos, Christians, Jews, or any other of the myriad peoples in the world. There is one problem however. We don’t.
But if Cleopatra wasn’t circumcised and it therefore becomes obvious that the circumcision of young girls, like the destruction of the Library of Alexandria, originated with Islam, we might wonder why ‘human rights’ organizations and feminists in the west can be counted among the greatest defenders and excusers of the practice.
There is no greater cause in feminism today than justifying chauvinism in the name of culture. Feminism works to ensure things in the Islamic world remain unchanged, the same movement that argues for ‘progress’ in women’s rights in the west ensures that they are denied rights elsewhere. From supporting the legal obligation of veiling in Iran to opposing the elimination of the Taliban in Afghanistan (feminist-lesbian groups protested the American invasion of Afghanistan on September 29th, 2001 in Tucson Arizona), to coddling the UAE and worst of all, supporting female circumcision in Egypt. The feminist at the New York Times changes the name FGM to ‘genital cutting’ to make it benign. The feminists at AdventureDivas support veiling in Iran and having female tourists veil themselves when traveling there (http://www.adventuredivas.com/pilgrimage/inga-la-gringa/unveiling-iran/). Unsurprisingly the same leftist-feminists support boycotting tourism to Burma.
In the 17th century witches were burned at the stake. If that happened today and it took place in ‘Islam’ but it was a ‘pre-Islamic practice’ we would find leftists, liberals and feminists defending it in the name of culture and changing its name to something benign such as ‘human immolation’. Just because something is ‘cultural’ doesn’t make it a fact of life, the west denied women the vote, but cultures change.
We don’t have to go far to see the twisted nature of feministic liberalism. During Mahmud Ahmadinejad’s speech at Columbia University there were thousands of people gathered outside protesting and speaking. One of the speakers was named Sheenah Shirakhon, a Jewish girl born in L.A whose parents had fled the Islamist government in Tehran. While speaking to a crowd of people in defense of Mr. Ahmadinjed, saying how ‘freedom of speech’ guaranteed him the right to speak at Columbia and how not allowing him to speak would be an intolerant violation of his right to ‘freedom of speech’, she ripped off her short skirt and top to reveal a silver bikini with the words ‘no war on Iran’ written across the chest and back. Only a Jewish female refugee from Iran would do such a stunt. Only a woman whose family had been persecuted by a dictatorship, who had lived in a country where women were forced by law to cover their hair, would make sure to pose with a tiny bikini to defend the very country that suppressed her and her family and her religion. Only liberalism and feminism is responsible for such a stunt.
But it shouldn’t be any surprise that this is how a girl raised in America, whose family was suppressed in Iran, should choose to express herself. She can think of no other way to get attention except by disrobing. We might be reminded of the pseudo-feminist book of photographs entitled Women by Susan Sontag. Of the hundreds of pictures of women, some of whome are famous such as Madeline Albright, almost one in five is in some state of undress. All the actresses that appear in the book, such as Christina Ricci and Nicole Kidman, are in their panties. Numerous other women appear with the title ‘performing artist’ in the nude or semi-nude. In one of the many PETA stunts that involved nude women, they had a State of the Union Undress where a young 19 year old girl takes off all her clothes while the screen shows her various states of undress and George Bush delivering his State of the Union speech. Unsurprisingly the Australian female soccer team and a group of American female Olympic athletes all posed nude, the former for a calendar, the latter for Playboy.
But while Western women can think of few ways outside of being partially nude to express themselves in the West, they can think of few ways for Muslim women to express themselves except by being behind a wall. Women authors, especially feminists and leftists, play a leading role in supporting Islam and conversion to it. Take the title of Karen Armstrong’s latest book; Mohammed: a Prophet for our Time. Take Dr. Faegheh Shirazi, associate professor in Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures in the College of Liberal Arts at The University of Texas at Austin, who is the author of ‘The Veil Unveiled: The Hijab in Modern Culture.’ She describes the Western idea that the veil in the Middle East is a symbol of female repression as simplistic and misplaced. Here is the typical canard; “the practice actually outdates Islamic culture by thousands of years. Veiling and seclusion were marks of prestige and symbols of status in the Assyrian, Greco-Roman and Byzantine empires as well as in pre-Islamic Iran.” Then there is the typical defense and excuse; “Throughout history the veil has been used to promote political agendas… we can discern three major advertising strategies exploiting three different stereotypes about the Muslim woman: the mysterious woman hiding behind her veil, waiting to be conquered by an American man; the submissive woman, forced to hide behind the veil; and the generic veiled woman, representing all peoples and cultures of the Middle East… many American-born Muslims choose to wear the hijab out of respect, humility and religious solidarity.” It is no surprise that this person is a professor of ‘Liberal arts’ for it is truly an art form to watch feminists defend and embrace countries like Iran where women have few rights. It is always artistic to watch the degree to which leftist-liberals in the west have embraced Islamism, how they have embraced a culture that supports the death penalty and hates abortion. It is always artistic to watch them condemn Jerry Fallwell and defend Ahmadinjed in the same sentence.
Where were the feminists to defend the Catholic church and encourage women to enter the nunnery? Where are the feminists to speak in glowing terms about the role of women in Medieval society? Where are they to speak in glowing terms about the lives and exoticism of Orthodox Jewish women, Mormon women in polygamous marriages or Amish women? Western feminists are like the murderers of Caesar. In the name of blind cultural excuses they embrace dictatorship and hatred, using freedoms granted them by our culture to do it. We, as defenders of our culture and impugners of the other, should say to them ‘Et, Tu Brute?’
To be hated or feared?
Seth J. Frantzman
October 9th, 2007
Machiavelli famously noted that it was good for a leader to be feared, but one should never be hated. In the west people claim that ‘hate implies fear.’ How can these two statements be true? If hate implies fear than a prince who is feared would also be hated. The reason westerners claim that hate implies fear is because of the ongoing campaigns against racism, homophobia and Islamophobia. People are hateful against other races, for instance blacks, because they fear them. This is why the word ‘phobia’ was attached to Homo and Islam, in order to imply that people’s child-like knee-jerk fear of gays and Muslims leads to hatred of the two. But westerners have missed something about hate and fear.
Sometimes it happens that in Israel and the Palestinian territories when a U.N vehicle is driving down a road that a pedestrian will give it ‘the finger’ or that a driver will stop his car in the path of the U.N SUV in order to prevent its passage. Sometimes people spit on the U.N cars, sometimes they vandalize them, sometimes they even smash their windows and shoot at them. It happens quite frequently that when a white person will walk in a ‘bad’ neighborhood in London or New York that they will be accosted, laughed at, or cursed. In Israel two weeks ago, on Yom Kippur, an Arab man drove his ATV (four wheeler) into a Jewish Kibbutz named Kfar Tavor. He sped around at full speed in the quiet neighborhood and drove past the synagogue several times, where people were gathered in solemn prayer. When he was asked to leave and confronted by Jewish residents he drove wildly and ran over a young Jewish girl, killing her. But why was he there in the first place? Why did he feel he could drive around a community on its most holy day with impunity? Had it been the other way around, had a Jew entered an Arab neighborhood on Ramadan, and driven wildly and screamed at the residents, he would have been lynched.
Lack of fear and hate are two very different things. People lack fear and it is why they allow their hatred to be voiced in numerous circumstances. People hate the U.N. They hate it because it is a colonial occupying force. In Africa people hate the U.N because its soldiers are known for trading candies for sexual favors among the young African girls. It is no surprise that from time to time a French U.N soldier will be pulled from his car in the dead of night and stabbed to death. Africans do not fear the U.N. Why should they? It has no power to arrest or prosecute.
The Arab who ran over a Jewish girl on Yom Kippur lacked fear. If he had been fearful of being lynched, of having his family murdered, of having his sister raped, because of his actions, he would not have done what he did. People in 1960s New York, Boston or Chicago feared harming Italians, they implicitly thought that by doing so they would be subject to a mafia hit. There is no more poignant scene in the film the Godfather than the first scene when a man describes what happened to his daughter: “Two men took her for a drive. They tried to have their way with her but she kept her honor. So they beat her like an animal. I was a good American so I called the police. They arrested the men. The Judge sentenced them to two years in prison and then he suspend [sic] the sentence. Suspend the sentence! They walked free that very day, and they smiled at me.” The Godfather promised revenge. It is not a surprise that in the third Godfather the sister of Michael Corleone told him that he should take revenge swiftly: “then they will fear you.”
Western societies have lost the ability to strike fear into the hearts of their enemies. The Crusaders struck fear. The Romans struck fear. The modern western army and police forces no longer strike fear. Is it a surprise that in the Falklands war the British brought Gurkas with them to fight the Argentines? They Gurkas, with their curved knives made in the hills of India struck fear into to the Latins. No lilly-white British bobby would do the same. Is it a surprise that after the Athenians sent an entire army under Alcibiades to conquer Sicily the Spartans responded by sending one man. Who was more feared? The British who controlled India did so with a small band of administrators. Now all of England cannot control the immigrant sections of London.
The Guardian newspaper summed up the situation without knowing it in an article entitled ‘The Ripple Effect’ from Tuesday, April 6th, 2004: “In some parts of Israel, such as Haifa, Jews and Arabs live side by side, but in Jerusalem Jewish and Arab neighborhoods are separate. In the Jewish part the fear is palpable. People scurry around, afraid to enter shops or cafes with no guard on the door, afraid of buses, afraid to listen to the interminable news bulletins. In Ein Rafa the atmosphere is relaxed.” Ein Rafa is a meandering Arab village west of Jerusalem whose inhabitants fled a nearby village two kilometers to the south called Suba in 1948. On a visit to the village last week one of the friendly inhabitants threw a rock at a group of us. There is no fear there today. No fear of retaliation. No fear of police. For leftists this lack of fear is called a ‘relaxed atmosphere.’ But relaxed atmospheres can hide hatred and intolerance.
All the bloodletting that overtook the Greeks and Turks in 1922, the Jews and Arabs in Israel in 1948, the Hindus and Muslims in India in 1948 and the Hutus and Xhosas in 1994, and the Bosnians, Croats, Serbs and Albanians in the 1990s, all of it is traceable to a lack of fear and a surfeit of hate. Books on these subjects always wax poetic about how these peoples ‘coexisted’ and ‘lived in harmony’ for generations. They lived in harmony because their hatred did not overcome their fear, fear of retaliation or fear of the government. Genocide is a product of a lack of fear. Fear of prosecution, fear of retaliation, fear of judgment in the afterlife or before god.
Only in the west does hate imply fear, and this is a product of a society where people hate because they no longer have the power to strike fear into the hearts of their enemies. Machiavelli was right, a prince should be feared, but he should surely guard against being hated. The liberals claim that the prince should be loved, and this is the basis of all the coexistence programs funded by leftists. But all the tolerance programs and the interfaith councils have never proven to prevent hate, or to stop fear, or to prevent crime and violence. If anything they cater to the old saying ‘familiarity breeds contempt.’ Contempt is the first stage of hatred, and it is also an emotion that lacks fear. Contempt leads to genocide.
9/11 was a direct result of a lack of fear, and too much unrestrained hatred. The Second Lebanon war between Nasrallah and Olmert was a result of contempt and a realization that Israel had lost her deterrent. Deterrents are a form of striking fear into the hearts of the enemy. But used incautiously, they don’t usually work. The Nazi deterrent to Serbian and Italian partisans was to kill ten civilians for every German soldier killed by a partisan. This policy never proved effective at destroying resistance to Nazism. The American nuclear Bomb dropped on Hiroshima didn’t deter the North Koran invasion of South Korea in 1950.
There is nothing implicitly wrong with hatred. But there is something wrong with being fearful. The instant one becomes fearful of a person or a place or a thing they suddenly become irrational and they are incapable of making correct decisions. The West lives under a cloud of fear, especially regarding terrorism. Because of their fear Western states create all sorts of ridiculous policies, such as moral relativism, diversity programs, anti-terrorism training that includes padding down 2 year old children and 80 year old grandmas, and creating new words like Islamophobia to describe their irrational fear. There is nothing to fear from Islamic terrorists. This is not an argument in favor of the oft-mentioned ‘if we allow them to change our lives or laws then they have won.’ They should cause us to change our lives and laws. We should craft our lives and laws towards hating them, rooting them out, crushing them, bombing them, ripping out their toe-nails and eradicating them as one does the plague. Terrorism is like a disease, the more you fear it, the faster it kills you. The Catholic church tells us to ‘hate the sin, love the sinner.’ In the case of terrorism we should ignore the sin and hate the sinner. We might do well to follow the policies of John ‘black Jack’ Pershing who sowed up Muslim terrorists in pig skins before burial during his campaign in the Philippines. It’s no surprise that the Islamic slave trade in the Congo was only ended when the British employed African cannibal tribes to eat the Muslim slave-traders. How did the British avenge the death of General Gordon at the battle of Omdurman? The Maxim gun. Whatever one does the end case should be to create a Muslim world in fear. The Koran commands its followers to hate, so there is no way of ever preventing that, no matter how many Sufis one employs or how many Western scholars tell Muslims that their religion is a ‘religion of peace.’ In the absence of preventing hate, which is impossible, one should always try to ensure fear among hateful people. If one cannot instill fear in one’s enemies than one must keep fighting until they find a way to do so. Building large walls such as the Romans did in England (Hadrian’s wall), the Chinese did (The Great Wall), the Athenians did (linking Athens to its port), the Byzantines (the wall of Constantinople), the French (Maginot line) and now the Israelis is a foolish and extremely short sighted way of dealing with hate.
The fall of the Nobel peace prize
October 12th, 2007
It may be no surprise that the committee of the Nobel Peace Prize awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to the U.N. In many ways it serves to illustrate the uselessness and utter failure of both organizations. The U.N is incapable of making peace and the Nobel Prize committee has essentially awarded the prize to itself: or rather another nebulous body of erudite Europeans and groveling third worlders. The fact that Al Gore was named, along with the ‘U.N’ as a recipient merely shows how low he has sunk.
The Nobel Peace Prize was first awarded in 1901 to Frederic Passy and Jean Henry Dunant, the first a peace activist and the latter the father of the Red Cross. For the first 13 years of the Prize’s existence it continued to be awarded to men of caliber who were involved in international arbitration, or international peace work. Some of the recipients were obscure. Some were not. Teddy Roosevelt received the prize due to his long work at international arbitration including the conference to end he Russo-Japanese war. Members of the ‘inter-parliamentary union’, socialists, and peace advocates from Italy to Germany were recipients. The first organization to receive the prize was the Institute of International Law in 1904.
During the first world war the prizes, except in 1917, were awarded to the Red Cross. After the war many of them went to men involved with the League of Nations, including Woodrow Wilson. Fridjof Nansen, famous explorer and peace activist was also awarded a prize in 1922. In the 1930s many members of the committee were in favor of awarding the League of Nations itself the prize, but Halvdan Koht, a historian, threatened to resign and the League, which had proved useless at stopping Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia and countless other aggressions, did not receive the prize. A Prisoner of the Nazis, Carl Von Ossietzky received the prize, as did writers and women’s peace activists.
Perhaps the first seeds of the fall of the Nobel prize can be seen in these years between 1930 and 1945 when it not only awarded the Red Cross a Prize during the war, despite the fact that the Red Cross covered up Nazi atrocities, but also suggested the League of Nations for a prize. After the war many of the prizes were awarded to men involved with the U.N, including Ralph Bunche and Cordell Hull, both Americans. The first U.N body to receive the prize was the Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees. The Nobel prize at this time began to take a lasting interest in the Middle East, Bunche, the Office of the High Commissioner and Canada’s Lester Bowles Pearson and Dag Hammarskjold were all awarded prizes between 1950 and 1965. The first non-westerner to receive the prize was Zulu chief Albert John Lutuli, for his work as head of the ANC and as a ‘human rights’ activist.
In the 1980s the U.N continued to rack up awards including one for the Office of the High Commissioner on Refugees (again) and the United Nations peacekeeping Forces. More deserving individuals also received prizes such as Lech Walsea, Andrea Sakharov, Willy Brandt and Eisaku Sato (former Japanese P.M). Henry Kissinger and Lee Duc Tho received a prize in 1973 for helping to pretend to end the Vietnam war. Manachem Begin, the first Jew to receive the prize, and Anwar Sadat received the prize in 1978. Eilie Weasel, The Dalai Lama and Mother Theresa would also receive prizes in 1979 and 186 respectively. Gorbachev got one and so did De Klerk and Mandela. Shimon Peres, Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin got one. David Trimble and John Hume got one for their role in ending the violence in Northern Ireland. Amnesty international, Medicines San Frontieres, anti-nuclear and anti-landmines groups all received prizes. 2003-2006 were the Muslim Years of the Nobel Peace Prize as it altered its outlook due to 9/11 and realized the Muslims needed to be included in its largesse. Shirin Ebadi, Mohammed El Baradei and Muhammed Yunus were awarded prizes for women’s rights, nuclear proliferation and helping the poor respectively.
Perhaps the inclusion of El Baradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Commission presaged the 2007 award. He has sat atop an organization that has done the opposite of its purview for the past 10 years. During his tenure nuclear weapons have proliferated on a massive scale, to North Korea, India, Pakistan, Syria, Iran, Libya, and beyond. He has, unsurprisingly, been the largest opponent of doing anything to prevent Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
In 2007 the award went to Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Neither one has ever campaigned for peace in even the most rudimentary war. However they have both been involved in the latest fad of claiming that conflicts are due to climate change. The brilliant assessment of leading anti-global warming people that climate change fuels the genocide in the Sudan has provided a wonderful excuse for the genocidaires. They aren’t to blame, it’s the hot weather that makes them rape and kill. Perhaps climate change caused Hitler and the Nazis to need more Labensraum.
It seems the history of the Nobel Peace Prize and its recipients could best be broken down into two groups of people and organizations: Those that did something to achieve peace, and those that did nothing except talk. Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Elihu Root, Nelson Mandela, Mother Theresa and Manachem Begin might be included in the former category. The U.N, the Red Cross and numerous other organizations and people could be included in the latter. They talk about peace, talk, and talk and talk, but they do nothing. The U.N has never, in its history, done anything to bring peace to anywhere. It has taken credit, of course, for bringing peace, but it has only done so after the actual parties to the conflict had already resolved to have peace. In many places the U.N has actively encouraged violence, been part and parcel to the conflict or sat by while genocide has taken place. The U.N did nothing to end the fighting in the Lebanese refugee camp, Nahr al Balad, for the four months in which it was slowly leveled and destroyed by the Lebanese Army. It did nothing between 1976 and 2005 to ensure peace on Israel’s northern border and in 1967 it collaborated with Gamel Abdel Nasser to evacuate the Sinai peninsula, against its mandate, so that the area could be re-militarized. In Rwanda it watched and sipped tea as 400,000 people died. It has done nothing in the Sudan. In many places, including Hutu refugee camps in the Congo and Palestinian refugee camps in Gaza, its buildings and organizations have been infiltrated by militants and it has been used by terrorists and killers.
The time is coming with the Nobel Committee will award itself a prize for its fake work at encouraging peace. That will be its ultimate tombstone.
Issue 6
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
October 13th, 2007
Here are this week’s articles below and attached. The full articles appear below these short abstracts.
1) Was Cleopatra Circumcised? Cleopatra wasn’t circumcised. However it is ironic to see feminists supporting this practice, just as it is ironic to see them sporting bikinis that say ‘no war on Iran.’
2) To be feared or hated? Machiavelli claimed it was good for a Prince to be feared, but disastrous for him to be hated. Westerners claim that hate implies fear. How can we reconcile these logical fallacies? If one is already hated they might as well be feared as well.
3) The Fall of the Nobel Peace Prize: The fact that the Nobel Peace prize was awarded to Al Gore and the U.N merely shows how little the prize means.
Was Cleopatra Circumcised?
Seth J. Frantzman
September 29th, 2007
The New York Times reported three weeks ago on September 20th, 2007, on protests against the practice of female circumcision in Egypt. The Times intelligently informed the reader that opponents of the practice refer to it as Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) and defenders of it call it circumcision. The New York Times neutral word for it is ‘genital cutting.’ Unlike the practice of circumcision in Judaism, where boys are circumcised at the behest of men, in Egypt the defenders of circumcision for girls are all men, a picture accompanying the article shows the men, standing around a coffee shop saying “Even if the state doesn’t like it, we will circumcise the girls.”
In Egypt women are beginning to protest the circumcising of girls between the ages of 7-13. An estimated 96% of Egyptian girls are circumcised and circumcision is the norm in many countries where Islam exists in Africa, such as the Sudan, Ethiopia and Tanzania. Most reports on FGM note that it has nothing to do with Islam: “Other faiths that have supported FGM include Coptic Christianity as practiced in Egypt; Orthodox and Ethiopian Jews; and the Falashas, a group of Ethiopians Jews who live in Israel.” Another report by the U.S State Department notes that: “These practices cross religious boundaries, including Christians, Muslims and Ethiopian Jews (Falashas).” But how many of the estimated 137 million circumcised women in 28 African countries are non-Muslim? In places where Islam is not present female circumcision is rare. In many places without Islam tribes circumcise the men such as the Xhosa’s Nelson Mandela.
But let us return to this statement made by www.faqs.org, that “Other faiths that have supported FGM include FGM include Coptic Christianity…Orthodox and Ethiopian Jews.” The same article notes that FGM “has been challenged by Islamic scholars.” So connecting FGM to Islam is improper, perhaps racist, but surely it is fair to claim that Christianity and Judaism support it, regardless of the accuracy of such statements.
But the central question should be: was Cleopatra circumcised? Cleopatra, the last of the Ptolemaic line in Egypt, died in the 1st century B.C, alongside her lover Mark Anthony. There is no mention in the quite lurid details of their love life of her sexual appearance having been different than those of Roman women. If she had been circumcised the lurid, X rated, sources of the period would have noted it, they were not coy to note the sexual abilities of people in the period. Furthermore there is no mention anywhere of the Queen of Sheba, Solomon’s lover, having been ‘cut’. So whence did this circumcision come?
Whence did the practice of veiling come? We are always assured that this practice is pre-Islamic. The Persians veiled their women. Catholic nuns were veiled. But if we travel to the Balkans and Central Asia in the 19th century and examine pictures of the women we will find that Muslim women were forced to walk about in heavy horsehair veils. Ungainly massive blankets that covered them, like horses or beasts of burden, weighing them down so they could not go far from the home, much less be seen. But the Pagan and Christian women, who were sometimes enslaved by the Muslims, did not go about like this. If veiling was pre-Islamic we would expect to see it among Buddhists, Hindus, Navajos, Christians, Jews, or any other of the myriad peoples in the world. There is one problem however. We don’t.
But if Cleopatra wasn’t circumcised and it therefore becomes obvious that the circumcision of young girls, like the destruction of the Library of Alexandria, originated with Islam, we might wonder why ‘human rights’ organizations and feminists in the west can be counted among the greatest defenders and excusers of the practice.
There is no greater cause in feminism today than justifying chauvinism in the name of culture. Feminism works to ensure things in the Islamic world remain unchanged, the same movement that argues for ‘progress’ in women’s rights in the west ensures that they are denied rights elsewhere. From supporting the legal obligation of veiling in Iran to opposing the elimination of the Taliban in Afghanistan (feminist-lesbian groups protested the American invasion of Afghanistan on September 29th, 2001 in Tucson Arizona), to coddling the UAE and worst of all, supporting female circumcision in Egypt. The feminist at the New York Times changes the name FGM to ‘genital cutting’ to make it benign. The feminists at AdventureDivas support veiling in Iran and having female tourists veil themselves when traveling there (http://www.adventuredivas.com/pilgrimage/inga-la-gringa/unveiling-iran/). Unsurprisingly the same leftist-feminists support boycotting tourism to Burma.
In the 17th century witches were burned at the stake. If that happened today and it took place in ‘Islam’ but it was a ‘pre-Islamic practice’ we would find leftists, liberals and feminists defending it in the name of culture and changing its name to something benign such as ‘human immolation’. Just because something is ‘cultural’ doesn’t make it a fact of life, the west denied women the vote, but cultures change.
We don’t have to go far to see the twisted nature of feministic liberalism. During Mahmud Ahmadinejad’s speech at Columbia University there were thousands of people gathered outside protesting and speaking. One of the speakers was named Sheenah Shirakhon, a Jewish girl born in L.A whose parents had fled the Islamist government in Tehran. While speaking to a crowd of people in defense of Mr. Ahmadinjed, saying how ‘freedom of speech’ guaranteed him the right to speak at Columbia and how not allowing him to speak would be an intolerant violation of his right to ‘freedom of speech’, she ripped off her short skirt and top to reveal a silver bikini with the words ‘no war on Iran’ written across the chest and back. Only a Jewish female refugee from Iran would do such a stunt. Only a woman whose family had been persecuted by a dictatorship, who had lived in a country where women were forced by law to cover their hair, would make sure to pose with a tiny bikini to defend the very country that suppressed her and her family and her religion. Only liberalism and feminism is responsible for such a stunt.
But it shouldn’t be any surprise that this is how a girl raised in America, whose family was suppressed in Iran, should choose to express herself. She can think of no other way to get attention except by disrobing. We might be reminded of the pseudo-feminist book of photographs entitled Women by Susan Sontag. Of the hundreds of pictures of women, some of whome are famous such as Madeline Albright, almost one in five is in some state of undress. All the actresses that appear in the book, such as Christina Ricci and Nicole Kidman, are in their panties. Numerous other women appear with the title ‘performing artist’ in the nude or semi-nude. In one of the many PETA stunts that involved nude women, they had a State of the Union Undress where a young 19 year old girl takes off all her clothes while the screen shows her various states of undress and George Bush delivering his State of the Union speech. Unsurprisingly the Australian female soccer team and a group of American female Olympic athletes all posed nude, the former for a calendar, the latter for Playboy.
But while Western women can think of few ways outside of being partially nude to express themselves in the West, they can think of few ways for Muslim women to express themselves except by being behind a wall. Women authors, especially feminists and leftists, play a leading role in supporting Islam and conversion to it. Take the title of Karen Armstrong’s latest book; Mohammed: a Prophet for our Time. Take Dr. Faegheh Shirazi, associate professor in Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures in the College of Liberal Arts at The University of Texas at Austin, who is the author of ‘The Veil Unveiled: The Hijab in Modern Culture.’ She describes the Western idea that the veil in the Middle East is a symbol of female repression as simplistic and misplaced. Here is the typical canard; “the practice actually outdates Islamic culture by thousands of years. Veiling and seclusion were marks of prestige and symbols of status in the Assyrian, Greco-Roman and Byzantine empires as well as in pre-Islamic Iran.” Then there is the typical defense and excuse; “Throughout history the veil has been used to promote political agendas… we can discern three major advertising strategies exploiting three different stereotypes about the Muslim woman: the mysterious woman hiding behind her veil, waiting to be conquered by an American man; the submissive woman, forced to hide behind the veil; and the generic veiled woman, representing all peoples and cultures of the Middle East… many American-born Muslims choose to wear the hijab out of respect, humility and religious solidarity.” It is no surprise that this person is a professor of ‘Liberal arts’ for it is truly an art form to watch feminists defend and embrace countries like Iran where women have few rights. It is always artistic to watch the degree to which leftist-liberals in the west have embraced Islamism, how they have embraced a culture that supports the death penalty and hates abortion. It is always artistic to watch them condemn Jerry Fallwell and defend Ahmadinjed in the same sentence.
Where were the feminists to defend the Catholic church and encourage women to enter the nunnery? Where are the feminists to speak in glowing terms about the role of women in Medieval society? Where are they to speak in glowing terms about the lives and exoticism of Orthodox Jewish women, Mormon women in polygamous marriages or Amish women? Western feminists are like the murderers of Caesar. In the name of blind cultural excuses they embrace dictatorship and hatred, using freedoms granted them by our culture to do it. We, as defenders of our culture and impugners of the other, should say to them ‘Et, Tu Brute?’
To be hated or feared?
Seth J. Frantzman
October 9th, 2007
Machiavelli famously noted that it was good for a leader to be feared, but one should never be hated. In the west people claim that ‘hate implies fear.’ How can these two statements be true? If hate implies fear than a prince who is feared would also be hated. The reason westerners claim that hate implies fear is because of the ongoing campaigns against racism, homophobia and Islamophobia. People are hateful against other races, for instance blacks, because they fear them. This is why the word ‘phobia’ was attached to Homo and Islam, in order to imply that people’s child-like knee-jerk fear of gays and Muslims leads to hatred of the two. But westerners have missed something about hate and fear.
Sometimes it happens that in Israel and the Palestinian territories when a U.N vehicle is driving down a road that a pedestrian will give it ‘the finger’ or that a driver will stop his car in the path of the U.N SUV in order to prevent its passage. Sometimes people spit on the U.N cars, sometimes they vandalize them, sometimes they even smash their windows and shoot at them. It happens quite frequently that when a white person will walk in a ‘bad’ neighborhood in London or New York that they will be accosted, laughed at, or cursed. In Israel two weeks ago, on Yom Kippur, an Arab man drove his ATV (four wheeler) into a Jewish Kibbutz named Kfar Tavor. He sped around at full speed in the quiet neighborhood and drove past the synagogue several times, where people were gathered in solemn prayer. When he was asked to leave and confronted by Jewish residents he drove wildly and ran over a young Jewish girl, killing her. But why was he there in the first place? Why did he feel he could drive around a community on its most holy day with impunity? Had it been the other way around, had a Jew entered an Arab neighborhood on Ramadan, and driven wildly and screamed at the residents, he would have been lynched.
Lack of fear and hate are two very different things. People lack fear and it is why they allow their hatred to be voiced in numerous circumstances. People hate the U.N. They hate it because it is a colonial occupying force. In Africa people hate the U.N because its soldiers are known for trading candies for sexual favors among the young African girls. It is no surprise that from time to time a French U.N soldier will be pulled from his car in the dead of night and stabbed to death. Africans do not fear the U.N. Why should they? It has no power to arrest or prosecute.
The Arab who ran over a Jewish girl on Yom Kippur lacked fear. If he had been fearful of being lynched, of having his family murdered, of having his sister raped, because of his actions, he would not have done what he did. People in 1960s New York, Boston or Chicago feared harming Italians, they implicitly thought that by doing so they would be subject to a mafia hit. There is no more poignant scene in the film the Godfather than the first scene when a man describes what happened to his daughter: “Two men took her for a drive. They tried to have their way with her but she kept her honor. So they beat her like an animal. I was a good American so I called the police. They arrested the men. The Judge sentenced them to two years in prison and then he suspend [sic] the sentence. Suspend the sentence! They walked free that very day, and they smiled at me.” The Godfather promised revenge. It is not a surprise that in the third Godfather the sister of Michael Corleone told him that he should take revenge swiftly: “then they will fear you.”
Western societies have lost the ability to strike fear into the hearts of their enemies. The Crusaders struck fear. The Romans struck fear. The modern western army and police forces no longer strike fear. Is it a surprise that in the Falklands war the British brought Gurkas with them to fight the Argentines? They Gurkas, with their curved knives made in the hills of India struck fear into to the Latins. No lilly-white British bobby would do the same. Is it a surprise that after the Athenians sent an entire army under Alcibiades to conquer Sicily the Spartans responded by sending one man. Who was more feared? The British who controlled India did so with a small band of administrators. Now all of England cannot control the immigrant sections of London.
The Guardian newspaper summed up the situation without knowing it in an article entitled ‘The Ripple Effect’ from Tuesday, April 6th, 2004: “In some parts of Israel, such as Haifa, Jews and Arabs live side by side, but in Jerusalem Jewish and Arab neighborhoods are separate. In the Jewish part the fear is palpable. People scurry around, afraid to enter shops or cafes with no guard on the door, afraid of buses, afraid to listen to the interminable news bulletins. In Ein Rafa the atmosphere is relaxed.” Ein Rafa is a meandering Arab village west of Jerusalem whose inhabitants fled a nearby village two kilometers to the south called Suba in 1948. On a visit to the village last week one of the friendly inhabitants threw a rock at a group of us. There is no fear there today. No fear of retaliation. No fear of police. For leftists this lack of fear is called a ‘relaxed atmosphere.’ But relaxed atmospheres can hide hatred and intolerance.
All the bloodletting that overtook the Greeks and Turks in 1922, the Jews and Arabs in Israel in 1948, the Hindus and Muslims in India in 1948 and the Hutus and Xhosas in 1994, and the Bosnians, Croats, Serbs and Albanians in the 1990s, all of it is traceable to a lack of fear and a surfeit of hate. Books on these subjects always wax poetic about how these peoples ‘coexisted’ and ‘lived in harmony’ for generations. They lived in harmony because their hatred did not overcome their fear, fear of retaliation or fear of the government. Genocide is a product of a lack of fear. Fear of prosecution, fear of retaliation, fear of judgment in the afterlife or before god.
Only in the west does hate imply fear, and this is a product of a society where people hate because they no longer have the power to strike fear into the hearts of their enemies. Machiavelli was right, a prince should be feared, but he should surely guard against being hated. The liberals claim that the prince should be loved, and this is the basis of all the coexistence programs funded by leftists. But all the tolerance programs and the interfaith councils have never proven to prevent hate, or to stop fear, or to prevent crime and violence. If anything they cater to the old saying ‘familiarity breeds contempt.’ Contempt is the first stage of hatred, and it is also an emotion that lacks fear. Contempt leads to genocide.
9/11 was a direct result of a lack of fear, and too much unrestrained hatred. The Second Lebanon war between Nasrallah and Olmert was a result of contempt and a realization that Israel had lost her deterrent. Deterrents are a form of striking fear into the hearts of the enemy. But used incautiously, they don’t usually work. The Nazi deterrent to Serbian and Italian partisans was to kill ten civilians for every German soldier killed by a partisan. This policy never proved effective at destroying resistance to Nazism. The American nuclear Bomb dropped on Hiroshima didn’t deter the North Koran invasion of South Korea in 1950.
There is nothing implicitly wrong with hatred. But there is something wrong with being fearful. The instant one becomes fearful of a person or a place or a thing they suddenly become irrational and they are incapable of making correct decisions. The West lives under a cloud of fear, especially regarding terrorism. Because of their fear Western states create all sorts of ridiculous policies, such as moral relativism, diversity programs, anti-terrorism training that includes padding down 2 year old children and 80 year old grandmas, and creating new words like Islamophobia to describe their irrational fear. There is nothing to fear from Islamic terrorists. This is not an argument in favor of the oft-mentioned ‘if we allow them to change our lives or laws then they have won.’ They should cause us to change our lives and laws. We should craft our lives and laws towards hating them, rooting them out, crushing them, bombing them, ripping out their toe-nails and eradicating them as one does the plague. Terrorism is like a disease, the more you fear it, the faster it kills you. The Catholic church tells us to ‘hate the sin, love the sinner.’ In the case of terrorism we should ignore the sin and hate the sinner. We might do well to follow the policies of John ‘black Jack’ Pershing who sowed up Muslim terrorists in pig skins before burial during his campaign in the Philippines. It’s no surprise that the Islamic slave trade in the Congo was only ended when the British employed African cannibal tribes to eat the Muslim slave-traders. How did the British avenge the death of General Gordon at the battle of Omdurman? The Maxim gun. Whatever one does the end case should be to create a Muslim world in fear. The Koran commands its followers to hate, so there is no way of ever preventing that, no matter how many Sufis one employs or how many Western scholars tell Muslims that their religion is a ‘religion of peace.’ In the absence of preventing hate, which is impossible, one should always try to ensure fear among hateful people. If one cannot instill fear in one’s enemies than one must keep fighting until they find a way to do so. Building large walls such as the Romans did in England (Hadrian’s wall), the Chinese did (The Great Wall), the Athenians did (linking Athens to its port), the Byzantines (the wall of Constantinople), the French (Maginot line) and now the Israelis is a foolish and extremely short sighted way of dealing with hate.
The fall of the Nobel peace prize
October 12th, 2007
It may be no surprise that the committee of the Nobel Peace Prize awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to the U.N. In many ways it serves to illustrate the uselessness and utter failure of both organizations. The U.N is incapable of making peace and the Nobel Prize committee has essentially awarded the prize to itself: or rather another nebulous body of erudite Europeans and groveling third worlders. The fact that Al Gore was named, along with the ‘U.N’ as a recipient merely shows how low he has sunk.
The Nobel Peace Prize was first awarded in 1901 to Frederic Passy and Jean Henry Dunant, the first a peace activist and the latter the father of the Red Cross. For the first 13 years of the Prize’s existence it continued to be awarded to men of caliber who were involved in international arbitration, or international peace work. Some of the recipients were obscure. Some were not. Teddy Roosevelt received the prize due to his long work at international arbitration including the conference to end he Russo-Japanese war. Members of the ‘inter-parliamentary union’, socialists, and peace advocates from Italy to Germany were recipients. The first organization to receive the prize was the Institute of International Law in 1904.
During the first world war the prizes, except in 1917, were awarded to the Red Cross. After the war many of them went to men involved with the League of Nations, including Woodrow Wilson. Fridjof Nansen, famous explorer and peace activist was also awarded a prize in 1922. In the 1930s many members of the committee were in favor of awarding the League of Nations itself the prize, but Halvdan Koht, a historian, threatened to resign and the League, which had proved useless at stopping Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia and countless other aggressions, did not receive the prize. A Prisoner of the Nazis, Carl Von Ossietzky received the prize, as did writers and women’s peace activists.
Perhaps the first seeds of the fall of the Nobel prize can be seen in these years between 1930 and 1945 when it not only awarded the Red Cross a Prize during the war, despite the fact that the Red Cross covered up Nazi atrocities, but also suggested the League of Nations for a prize. After the war many of the prizes were awarded to men involved with the U.N, including Ralph Bunche and Cordell Hull, both Americans. The first U.N body to receive the prize was the Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees. The Nobel prize at this time began to take a lasting interest in the Middle East, Bunche, the Office of the High Commissioner and Canada’s Lester Bowles Pearson and Dag Hammarskjold were all awarded prizes between 1950 and 1965. The first non-westerner to receive the prize was Zulu chief Albert John Lutuli, for his work as head of the ANC and as a ‘human rights’ activist.
In the 1980s the U.N continued to rack up awards including one for the Office of the High Commissioner on Refugees (again) and the United Nations peacekeeping Forces. More deserving individuals also received prizes such as Lech Walsea, Andrea Sakharov, Willy Brandt and Eisaku Sato (former Japanese P.M). Henry Kissinger and Lee Duc Tho received a prize in 1973 for helping to pretend to end the Vietnam war. Manachem Begin, the first Jew to receive the prize, and Anwar Sadat received the prize in 1978. Eilie Weasel, The Dalai Lama and Mother Theresa would also receive prizes in 1979 and 186 respectively. Gorbachev got one and so did De Klerk and Mandela. Shimon Peres, Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin got one. David Trimble and John Hume got one for their role in ending the violence in Northern Ireland. Amnesty international, Medicines San Frontieres, anti-nuclear and anti-landmines groups all received prizes. 2003-2006 were the Muslim Years of the Nobel Peace Prize as it altered its outlook due to 9/11 and realized the Muslims needed to be included in its largesse. Shirin Ebadi, Mohammed El Baradei and Muhammed Yunus were awarded prizes for women’s rights, nuclear proliferation and helping the poor respectively.
Perhaps the inclusion of El Baradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Commission presaged the 2007 award. He has sat atop an organization that has done the opposite of its purview for the past 10 years. During his tenure nuclear weapons have proliferated on a massive scale, to North Korea, India, Pakistan, Syria, Iran, Libya, and beyond. He has, unsurprisingly, been the largest opponent of doing anything to prevent Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
In 2007 the award went to Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Neither one has ever campaigned for peace in even the most rudimentary war. However they have both been involved in the latest fad of claiming that conflicts are due to climate change. The brilliant assessment of leading anti-global warming people that climate change fuels the genocide in the Sudan has provided a wonderful excuse for the genocidaires. They aren’t to blame, it’s the hot weather that makes them rape and kill. Perhaps climate change caused Hitler and the Nazis to need more Labensraum.
It seems the history of the Nobel Peace Prize and its recipients could best be broken down into two groups of people and organizations: Those that did something to achieve peace, and those that did nothing except talk. Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Elihu Root, Nelson Mandela, Mother Theresa and Manachem Begin might be included in the former category. The U.N, the Red Cross and numerous other organizations and people could be included in the latter. They talk about peace, talk, and talk and talk, but they do nothing. The U.N has never, in its history, done anything to bring peace to anywhere. It has taken credit, of course, for bringing peace, but it has only done so after the actual parties to the conflict had already resolved to have peace. In many places the U.N has actively encouraged violence, been part and parcel to the conflict or sat by while genocide has taken place. The U.N did nothing to end the fighting in the Lebanese refugee camp, Nahr al Balad, for the four months in which it was slowly leveled and destroyed by the Lebanese Army. It did nothing between 1976 and 2005 to ensure peace on Israel’s northern border and in 1967 it collaborated with Gamel Abdel Nasser to evacuate the Sinai peninsula, against its mandate, so that the area could be re-militarized. In Rwanda it watched and sipped tea as 400,000 people died. It has done nothing in the Sudan. In many places, including Hutu refugee camps in the Congo and Palestinian refugee camps in Gaza, its buildings and organizations have been infiltrated by militants and it has been used by terrorists and killers.
The time is coming with the Nobel Committee will award itself a prize for its fake work at encouraging peace. That will be its ultimate tombstone.
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