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?