Terra Incognita
Issue 17
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
December 30th, 2007
The last straw: The death of Benezir: The death of Mrs. Bhutto at the hands of terrorists should cause the world to stand up and finally confront terrorism and those who support it and those who excuse it. We are tired of watching as U.N officials in Afghanistan meet with the Taliban and then having Ban Ki Moon say the murder of Bhutto was merely a ‘crime against stability’ and having the headlines read “Bhutto dies” rather than “Bhutto was murdered.”
The Ethiopian and Japanese model and what we can learn from them: When Muslims demanded that Ethiopia allow them to build a Mosque in the holy city of Aksum Ethiopia responded that they would allow it when an Ehtiopian church is built in Mecca. When the Jesuits tried to convert Japan to Christianity and asked for special rights the Japanese emperor declared them a security threat and expelled them all. We could learn from both their countries and how they confronted pushy religious people.
Legacy of blood: the U.N, Israel and the Jews: The day the Nazis were defeated and European Jewry was destroyed the world decided to defend human rights and human rights organizations and the U.N have waged an unending war from that day forward against Israel and the Jewish people accusing them of violating human rights. Irony?
Gaydamak and the Segev Phenomenon: Tom Segev demands Israelis apologize for the Kfar Kassem massacre, but it is he and his generation that should apologize, not the average Israeli whose ancestors weren’t in Israel at the time. Furthermore the leftist-establishment hatred for Arcadi Gaydamak smacks not only of racism and xenophobia but also shows how the elite hates people who made their own money and scoffs at those who haven’t worked for the government their whole lives, like Mr. Olmert or Mr. Al Gore.
The last straw: The death of Benezir
Seth J. Frantzman
December 28th, 2007
The death of Ms. Bhutto in Pakistan at the hands of a terrorist bomb is the last straw. The Islamists hung her father. Now they have murdered her while the world sits by and human rights organizations complain about the government of Pakistan.
We have had enough.
In Lebanon Human Rights Watch cancelled its report on Hizbullah’s war crimes because they feared they might offend Hizbullah. In Afghanistan two weeks ago two high ranking U.N officials met with the Taliban, and were subsequently thrown out of the country by Hamid Karzai. The U.N said “we must talk to all sides for their to be peace.” It turns out that the U.N official, Mervyn Patterson, an Englishman, and the EU official Michael Semple, from Ireland (a country that collaborated with the Nazis) met with Taliban officials in Musa Qela in Helmand province. The Al Quieda official accused of ordering the murder of Bhutto turns out to be Baitullah Mehsud, one of those the U.N officials may have met with, thus illustrating the nefarious connection between the U.N and terrorism and the U.N’s attempt to undermine both Afghanistan and Pakistan. The U.N conception of peace, no doubt, was under the Taliban. In Israel a leftist scholar receives a degree for writing a thesis that claims Israeli soldiers don’t rape Palestinian women because the soldiers are racist and view Palestinian women as sub-human. Thus the leftist implicitly claims that the raping of women should be viewed as tolerance and an act of coexistence.
We have had enough.
After Sept. 11 every leftist in America claimed it was ‘blowback’ and that America deserved what had happened to it because of America’s role in the Middle East and America’s support for Israel. Leftists excused the deaths of 3,000 civilians by claiming that the civilians were not innocent but were really ‘little eichmanns’. In subsequent years leftists the world over blamed terrorist attacks in London, Madrid and elsewhere on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. One wonders, will the leftists blame the death of Bhutto on the ‘conflict’ and the ‘occupation’?
We have had enough
Under the guise of free speech leftists and human rights activists invited Ahmadinjed of Iran, a dictator and Islamist, to speak at Columbia University. Leftists scoff at the ‘war on terror’. Leftists in every country work with Islamism under he guise of human rights and free speech, always giving free legal advise to Islamists and protesting on their behalf.
We have had enough.
Leftists are there in the Sudan volunteering to teach the children of the country’s Arab elite who are running the Sudan. In Chad leftists kidnap children and label them ‘Darfur orphans’. They accuse those resisting the genocide of committing ‘war crimes’ which would be tantamount o calling the Warsaw ghetto fighters ‘war criminals’. Leftists were there in Rwanda and leftists crafted Clintons infamous ‘acts of genocide’ speech where he refused to call the Rwandan genocide a genocide. Leftist professors such as Prof. McCarthy are hired by the Turkish government to white-wash the Armenian genocide. Leftists defend Holocaust deniers in France and Germany and under the guise of free speech invite them to speak at the Oxford student union. Leftists were there with Pol Pot, the only two Europeans in the country during the genocide were two French leftist journalists who called his country a ‘socialist utopia’. Abroad leftists such as Noam Chomsky white washed the genocide in Cambodia and claimed it was a right wing conspiracy. In Cuba the leftists helped Castro overthrow the government and thus helped enslave the Cuban people for 50 years so far. In Venezuela the leftists cheered as Chavez shut down independent paper sand television as part of his ‘socialist revolution’. Leftists have been there at every genocide. Leftists objected to the hanging of Adolph Eichmann, claiming that he should have been tried by the U.N.(a twist of irony considering leftists claimed the victims of 9/11 deserved to die because they were ‘little eichmanns’. The leftists protested the hanging of the real Eichmann more than they did 9/11).
We have had enough.
We are tired of Leftist support for Islamism. We are tired of watching good decent leaders be assassinated by Islamists and have leftists come in and accuse the government of ‘human rights violations’ and never condemn Islamism for its crimes. Leftist organizations from the U.N to amnesty international to Human rights watch to the Red Cross have never condemned terrorism. It doesn’t matter if its 3,000 dead Buddhists in Southern Thailand or 3,000 dead in the Philippines or hundreds killed in India and 100,000 Hindus cleansed from Kashmir, or 1,000 Israelis dead or 300 children at Breslan murdered, or the genocide of 300,000 in the Sudan or the ethnic cleansing of Christians in Lebanon, Iraq and Egypt, or the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas or the murder of people in Bali and Algiers and Morocco and Buenos Aires and London and Madrid and Beirut. It never matters. The millions dead at the hands of Islamism have never been condemned by human rights organizations. Leftists only criticize the governments that are fighting this genocide, they critique the U.S, Israel, Pakistan, India, Thailand, Uzbekistan, the Philippines. Everywhere that a government says “no thanks, we do not want terrorism, we do not want Islamism, we do not want the Taliban, we do not want genocide and ethnic-cleansing’ that government will be attacked by leftists and will be forced to have ‘free speech’ so that Islamists can spout their hate and it will be forced to have ‘democracy’ so that Hamas and Hizbullah and the Muslim brotherhood can come to power. Leftists expect the Algerian government to apologize for daring to fight a war against Islamism in which 100,000 died. Leftists have always target the governments that are being victimized by terrorism, while the terrorist governments such as the Taliban or Khartoum or Saudi are left alone. Ethiopia is indicted by the Human rights mafia, but not Eritrea or Somalia or Sudan. The U.N met with the Taliban between 1992 and 2001 and aided them. Then after they fell from power the U.N refused to help Hamid Karzai create a free Afghanistan, instead the U.N meets with the Taliban and gives them aid, hoping to bring them back to power.
We have had enough.
The U.S won’t allow the democratically elected Hindu governor of Gujarat to visit the U.S under allegations that he allowed rioters to hurt ‘religious freedom’ but America allows the Saudi king, a dictator who forces women to cover their hair and faces, to visit the U.S. England welcomes Saudi dictators and French leaders welcome Quaddafi and cry at Arafat’s grave. Meanwhile the same England that welcomes dictators and gives holocaust deniers a prime venue at the nation’s top universities, is the same one that forbids Israeli generals from visiting the country lest they be charged with ‘war crimes’. Oddly enough Sudanese politicians, whose genocide has killed 300,000 people are welcomed with open arms in England and allowed diplomatic status. While academics in the U.S bemoan the Jewish ‘Israel lobby’ they allow their university’s Islamic studies departments to be funded by the Saudis.
We have had enough.
The war against terror is not just a war against Islamism, it is an international war against the internal leftist enemy. It is a war against the U.N and the Red Cross and Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. There is no difference between these NGOs and the terrorists themselves because the human rights organizations and leftists provide shelter, financing, moral support and justification for terrorism and always excuse its acts. They use free speech and democracy as weapons.
Legacy of blood: the U.N, Israel and the Jews
Seth J. Frantzman
December 30th, 2007
In April of 1945 the United States, Russia and the U.K sat down and sought to create an organization that would prevent wars of the kind just experienced in the future. At the same time they sought to prevent future genocides. The logic of the creation of the U.N was, in short: now that the European Jews are all dead and Europe has completed its ethnic-cleansing we should have an organization to protect human rights and prevent war. Since those heady days in 1945 the U.N has succeeded in defending the human rights, primarily, of the one people who have sought to kill as many Jews as possible in the last 60 years; the Arabs.
Before the creation of the U.N, the League of nations ensured that the Second World War would take place and helped to seal the fate of European Jewry. European nations helped in the efforts to keep the Jews in Europe where they would be murdered by preventing their emigration to other lands. The Prime Minister of Australia noted ‘we have no racial problem here and we do not wish to import one.’ But in case the Nazis could not finish their efforts in time another international organization run by Europeans stepped in to lend a hand, the Red Cross not only whitewashed Nazism and stole packages intended for Jews in the camps but it then set about running the concentration camp of Thereseinstadt for 18 days (22nd of April to the 8th of May, 1945) after the Nazis abandoned the camp in 1945 and before it was liberated by the Red Army. It is certainly an irony that the Soviet army had to liberate the Jews, not only from the clutches of the Nazis, but also from the clutches of an NGO, from the Red Cross, whose cross is reminiscent of the crusader cross. Since 1948 the Red Cross, in collaboration with the U.N has sought to give aid and comfort to the Palestinians, sponsoring competitions for people in the Middle East to write essays about why Israel’s occupation is ‘illegal’ and condemning Israel each year as one of the greatest abusers of Human rights. In short the Europeans discovered in 1945, the very year that European Jewry became extinct, that human rights were suddenly an important value and since that date have made sure that the people who deserve the most human rights are the very people in conflict with the Jews, i.e. the Palestinians. In short, the Europeans managed after 1945 to continue to wage their war against the Jews, except they have done so in the guise now of defending human rights. They have done so by labeling the Jewish people racists and Nazis and fascists.
Sitting atop the highest hill in Jerusalem, aptly named the ‘hill of evil counsel’ is a colonial fort called Government house. This is the headquarters of the U.N’s colonial army in the Middle East and since 1945 it has served as the nerve center for planning, funding and organizing the murder of as many Jews as possible in the Holy Land, otherwise known as Palestine to Europeans or Eretz Israel to religious Jews.
The first campaign the U.N waged against Israel was the 1948 war. The U.N decided that it, a collection of European nations, had the right to partition Palestine into two states, one for Arabs and one for Jews and Arabs. How the U.N decided it had this power is not exactly clear, but beginning with the passage of the partition plan on November 29th, 1947, Arab rioters began to kill Jews in Palestine. All in all more than 5,000 Jews, a full 1% of the Jewish population in Palestine in 1947 would die at the hands of Arabs in the next year while the U.N did nothing to prevent the bloodshed.
Next, when the war was over, the U.N set up refugee camps for the Arab refugees and registered them. In cooperation with the Red Cross it set up tent cities throughout the Middle East, cramming the Palestinian refugees into the most terrible places to ensure that they would become and as poor and wretched as possible. This ensured that they would not only demand a ‘right of return’ but that they would make wonderful photo opportunities for those who wanted to claim that the “Jews have become like the Nazis”. Furthermore it ensured that they would yearn for revenge and would form terror bands to begin the ‘armed struggle’ against Israel. The U.N provided education for the Arabs and selected nationalist and Islamist educators to fill the Palestinian children’s heads with propaganda. The U.N paid for maps to be printed that showed ‘one Palestine, complete’ without Israel or the Jews.
In 1967 when Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser demanded that U Thant remove the U.N observers from the Sinai, who had been stationed there to prevent war between Egypt and Israel, the U.N complied. This was the height of the U.N’s collaboration with Arab regimes to aid them in their war against Israel. The U.N had a mandate to prevent war and in the end made sure to help Nasser with his invasion plans by removing the U.N troops who were supposed to be an obstacle to just such an invasion. When, a month later, Israel was winning the 1967 war the U.N made sure to pass resolutions to stop the war.
In 1976 when Israel rescued Jewish hostages held at Entebbe in Uganda the U.N made sure to condemn the rescue and support the German-Palestinian terrorist team who had not only hijacked the plane but separated the Jews from the non-Jewish passengers. It may have been no surprise since the same U.N had condemned Israel’s execution of Adolph Eichman some 12 years previously, making sure to condemn the execution of a Nazi. Some 20 years later the same U.N would begin to demand prosecution of Israeli generals as ‘war criminals’.
The U.N went further however. It elected a former Nazi and SS trooper, Kurt Waldheim, who had been known as the ‘expert’ in his supervision of the gassing of Jews in Eastern Europe and the creation of ‘gas vans’, to head the U.N. Thus a Nazi became head of the U.N and a few years later he presided over the U.Ns resolution to define Zionism as racism. Thus a Nazi, whose entire belief system was based on racism, became the head of the leading NGO and condemned Israel for being a ‘racist’ state.
The U.N went further. It established an occupation throughout Israel and on its borders. It aided Hizbullah in Lebanon and provided cover for Hamas rocket launchers in Gaza. Its schools continued to drill hate in the heads of children and it passed a resolution that declared that the grandchildren of any Palestinians would be considered refugees, despite the fact that international law requires that people stop being refugees after the third generation. The Palestinians became permanent refugees, and the U.N continued to house them in concentration camps in order to make them as hateful as possible.
The U.N created a human rights council with the sole intention that its one permanent investigation would be Israel crimes against the Palestinians.
This is the U.N. It is an instrument of hate, an organization whose roots are in Nazism, which has been run by former Nazis and which acts as an occupation force in the Middle East and throughout the world, colonizing countries and excusing genocide.
The Ethiopian and Japanese model and what we can learn from them
Seth J. Frantzman
December 27th, 2007
Xenophone observed that the one word those oppressed by the Persians did not seem to possess was the word ‘no’. It was not a word that was lacking in Greek society and certainly not among the Spartans. Had Xenophone lived today he might very well have made a similar realization about western society, it does not have the word ‘no’. Whenever people are willing to beg or kill enough, westerners inevitably grant them whatever they wish. (Dr. Vijay Sazawal has noted in regards to India that “this is one of the most common mistakes made by outside observers who customarily equate violence with severity of demands.”)
The west might do well to learn from others who have had the courage over the years to say ‘no’ to the demands of religion upon society. In Ethiopia the city of Axum (Aksum) is one of the holiest cities of Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity. It is a site of pilgrimages and for many years the emperors of Ethiopia were crowned there. Inevitably with the birth of Islam the city was immediately attacked by Muslim invaders who traveled across the Red Sea in order to kill off the non-Muslim Ethiopian Christians. As with all sites holy to non-Muslims, such as Jerusalem, Hebron, Nazareth, Bethlehem Ayodha and Constantinople, Muslims invented a tradition that claimed that Mohammed’s companions had visited an area near Axum when they were on the run. Inevitably the Christian king of Axum had supposedly given them aid and Mohammed had said “Leave the Abyssinians in peace, as long as they do not take the offensive.” But as in all Islamic history the Ethiopians were perceived as ‘taking the offensive’ merely by existing and not wishing to convert to a new religion and not wishing to have all of their children and women sold into bondage by Arab slave traders. So Axum resisted. Islam suceeded in destroying much of Ethiopia, but it did not conquer Axum. However over the years Muslims managed to become 25% of the population of the city. As with every Muslim demographic invasion they then demanded that a large mosque be built in this city that was holy to Christianity. The emperor of Ethiopia agreed that a mosque could only be constructed in Axum if a church were built in Mecca. This was quite an original proposal and it is one all nations can learn from. As Muslims request access to ancient mosques in Spain that are now churches the Spanish can request that old Churches in Damascus and elsewhere, holy to Christians but not taken over by Muslims, be returned to Christianity. If Muslims want more mosques in India Hindus and Sikhs should request that temples be built in Islamabad in Pakistan. If Muslims want special prayer rooms and foot baths in airports in the west then Muslim countries should have special synagogues and churches in airports in Saudi Arabia and Jordan. Muslims in Greece demand mosques and in exchange Turkey should return stolen and ruined churches to the Orthodox and Armenian faiths. Palestinians want a special prayer room at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem so there should be a synagogue at Al Quds University in Jerusalem. There should never be another mosque or another special prayer room constructed in any western country unless more churches, temples and synagogues are constructed in Muslim countries in exchange. The Saudis complain that Muslims are not ‘free to practice their religion’ in Europe, so Saudi should grant freedom of religion to non-Muslims in Saudi Arabia. Muslims want reserved slots at universities in India and they want the year of the pig banned in China and they want to be able to slaughter lambs in public in an inhumane manner in Europe, all of these things should be countered with requests such as giving special slots to Hindus and Chinese Buddhists in Malaysia and banning the certain foods in Muslim countries. Islam should never be given an inch, not even a centimeter. It is a religion that thrives on denying others precisely the rights it wants for itself. Muslims say “do not judge all Muslims by the acts of a few terrorists” when Muslims judge all Christians for the words of the Pope or they judge all Jews for the acts of one Israeli. Muslims treat others as Dhimmi and grant affirmative action to themselves in their countries and trade in slaves, they deserve to treated in the exact same manner by others. Muslims want westerners to learn about Islam then they should learn about others. Only through the prodigious use of the word ‘no’ can the creeping Islamization of the world be stopped. But if ‘no’ does not work then the west might do well to learn from the Japanese how to deal with pushy religions.
In 1542 the first Christian missionary arrived in Japan (although earlier evidence points to the first arrival being an Assyrian Nestorian missionary in 199AD). For forty years Portuguese missionaries converted local Buddhists and pushed themselves upon the Japanese, establishing trading stations and requesting special rights for their church. However beginning in 1587 Toyotomi Hideyoshi, the leader of Japan, declared Christianity to be seditious and prohibited Christianity. In 1597 official persecution of Christians began. By 1638 Portuguese traders had been banned from Japan and from that date Japan is said to have entered its period of ‘isolation’ or ‘closed door’. But it was not so much a closed door to foreigners as it was a demand by the Japanese to not have their culture, values and religion meddled with. The Japanese shoguns understood all too well that Buddhists were easily tempted to convert due to the structure of Buddhism. Perhaps understanding, without having seen for themselves, the fate that Buddhism had experienced in Afghanistan and elsewhere when Muslims had simply killed all the Buddhists after Buddhist nations had been pleasant enough to allow Muslim traders access to their towns, the Japanese set out to be rid of foreign influence.
Historians see this in a negative light. This is defined as being ‘exclusionary’ and having a negative attitude towards the ‘other’. But Japan didn’t so much hate the other as it resented the pushiness of the other, the ever increasing demands of the other. While the Portuguese were eager to bring Catholicism to Japan there was no talk of allowing Shinto Buddhist missionaries access to Portugal. It was to be a one way street whereby Japan was to be ‘opened’ and foreigners were supposed to be tolerated in Japan while no Japanese were to be tolerated in Europe. While modern day leftist liberal historians would have encouraged Japan to ‘open herself up’ and be ‘tolerant’ to foreigners the evidence shows that had Japan done so she would today be a poor third world country, exploited, raped, colonized and eventually Christianized and Islamisized by the world, like Africa. Japan wished to be left alone, to have her own unique culture and language and heritage and history. When Japan did decide to ‘open herself’ she did so on her own terms when the Meiji decided to invest heavily in bringing western know-how to Japan without bringing western religion or western culture. This has saved Japan and it is why Japan is unique. Japanese women do not dress like Indonesian women, whose culture was long ago ripped away from them so that they could have their hair covered and become good Muslims. Japan still has her temples and her pagodas unlike other countries such as India where the local temples were ripped up and the people sold into slavery by the Mughal Muslim conquerors. Japan is a model of how people can preserve their society against foreign domination and the insidious creeping foreign cultures of intolerance and terrorism that are being visited upon all cultures in the world. Leftists point out that Japan is a ‘racist’ society. Surely Japanese are known for their racism. Be that as it may would it be preferable that Japan was instead like everywhere else in the world? Would it preferable that Japanese culture had disappeared long ago and been replaced by the globalized culture that much of the rest of the world is suppressed by? The same people who complain that Japan is ‘racist’ are the same ones who oppose globalization. The same moral relativists and multi-culturalists are the ones that complain about globalization. But Japan successfully prevented globalization in the 17th century by requesting that foreigners leave her soil. Modern historiography resents this expulsion of the ‘other’ but what law in the universe says that all countries must have the yoke of the ‘other’ hung around their necks? It is good that some countries can be diverse melting pots, such as the United States, but it is also good that we have some countries where unique cultures still exist. All the obsession with diversity ignores the fact that multi-culturalism and assimilation and intermarriage and tolerance and coexistence is a killer of diversity. In America every city may have their plethora of cultures, but within a generation each unique culture of immigrants that emigrate to the United States is slowly ground into dust. This is why there is no longer a Yiddish theatre in New York. The Yiddish culture has been smashed and crushed under the wheels of assimilation. All the multi-culturalism aimed at preserving some tiny reservation of Yiddish culture is exactly that, preserving a tiny reserve of it where people can see a tiny little bit of it in a museum. It is not a genuine preservation. It is like most of the Indian reservations in the United States which are too small and have too few people to actually preserve the cultures that call them home. Outside of the largest Indian reservations there is little authentic preservation of Native American language, religion or culture. So which is better for diversity? Japan’s model or the model of the United States? Which is better in terms of diversity, the relics of Buddhism that are ground into dust by Islamists in Afghanistan or the real live Buddhism practiced in Japan? Which is better, the fake adherence to diversity in Europe that grinds minorities into hard hateful slum dwellers, or the true decency and pride felt by a Kurdish villager in his mountain stronghold in northern Iraq?
The west’s model for diversity and multi-culturalism is as bad as the Muslim model. Islam kills off all the indigenous people and makes everyone dress the same and speak the same and act the same. It is why honor killings exist in Jordan and London and Afghanistan. It is why the headscarf of Muslim women is identical today in Zanzibar, India and New York City. The western model celebrates fake diversity and slowly kills off every culture and boils every culture down so that each culture gets one day to express itself and the rest of the year it is crushed under the boot of multi-culturalism and forced to learn about other cultures. By contrast the Japanese-homogenous- exclusive culture says “I would like to have my culture and you can have your culture and I will stay on my island and you can live in your place. Thank you for being interested in bringing your religion, which you love, to my doorstep but I would prefer if you left now.” The best way to deal with an ever shrinking world is to say to it what one says to Jehovah’s Witnesses, ‘thanks, now please go away.” Or, in the words of Xenophone, ‘no’.
Gaydamak and the Segev Phenomenon
Seth J. Frantzman
December 27th, 2007
Tom Segev’s lies
Tom Segev penned an oped in Haaretz on Tuesday, December 26th, arguing that Israelis should apologize en masse for the killing of a 47 Arab citizens of Israel in 1956. The Kfar Kassem massacre was a real massacre. The Arab citizens had been ordered to stay home due to a curfew along the border because of the approaching 1956 war with Egypt. They had gone out nonetheless and were returning from field work when Israeli border came upon them. Even though it was obvious they were farm hands and not fighters the police shot them all.
Subsequently the officer in charge of the massacre was sentenced to prison and the soldiers were punished. No history book, whether western or Israeli, denies what took place. A dozen soldiers took part. According to Tom Segev of the 18,000 members of the village today some 15% are related to the massacre victims and "they live with the heritage of the massacre as a key element in their identities." According to Mr. Segev "ceremonious apologies for historical injustices…have become a rather common phenomenon everywhere in recent years, from South Africa to Argentina." But Tom Segev is ignorant regarding world affairs (just like when he claimed that 'arrogant' Israel had dared to establish a different holocaust memorial day than the U.N and that Israel should 'conform' to the world communities day of remembrance.) It is true that the Afrikaners were supposed to collectively apologize for Apartheid. It is true that an American president did apologize for interning the Japanese in the Second World War. Argentina's depth of apology stemmed from the fact that a new regime simply apologized for the crimes of an old one, which wasn't really an apology but a condemnation of the political party that carried out the Argentine disappearances.
Tom Segev is like so many white European westerners who want everyone to apologize for things they themselves had no part in. In the United States this takes the form of asking all 'white' people to apologize for slavery and the destruction of the Native American, regardless of the fact that 60% of those deemed 'white' immigrated to the United States after the end of slavery.
The irony of Segev's complain that Israelis don't collectively apologize for Kafr Kasem is the fact that while he and his family were resident in Israel at the time, many of today's Israelis were not. Mr. Segev wants the million Russian-Israelis to apologize for a crime they didn't commit when those same Russians have never received an apology from the Soviet leaders for 50 years of state sanctioned anti-Semitism in that country. No doubt the Red Cross would like the Jews to apologize, when the Red Cross has never apologized for its roll in white-washing the Nazi death camps and collaborating with the Nazis during the Holocaust and even running a concentration camp for 17 days.
The Arabs demand an apology, the same Arab Muslims that always say "not all Muslims should be judged for the actions of a few fanatics on 9/11". We should learn from the Arabs and Muslims. Muslims have never apologized for any of the crimes they have committed over the years in the name of their religion. There has been no apology from Turkey for the Armenian genocide. There has been no apology from Islam for its colonization of Spain, Eastern Europe, East Africa or India. There has been no apology for the salve trade that took 11 million Africans away from their homes in chains to be sold as soldiers and sex slaves in the Muslim world. There has been no apology from Islam for any of the Muslim terrorism that has taken the lives of tens of thousands. There has been no apology from Islam for the slaughter of Jews in Hebron in 1929 of Kfar Etzion in 1948 or for the destruction of the Jewish Quarter in 1948 or for keeping Jews as dhimmi for 1400 years.
We should all take a lesson from Islam and never apologize for anything. The past is the past and as Muslims like to say "one should not judge all of us for the actions of a few." But if white people want to apologize for some perceived wrongdoing then they should go ahead and do so and stop telling others to apologize. Instead of telling everyone else to apologize he should apologize, for it was his generation that engaged in the massacre. Mr. Segev should apologize.
But leftist Ashkenazi Israelis find it impossible to recognize their crimes. They enjoy calling the occupation 'illegal' while they themselves live on lands taken from the Arabs in 1948.
Hating Gaydamak
Today's target of the leftist Israeli elite is Arcadi Gaydamak, a Russian born Israeli millionaire who is running for the mayoralty of Jerusalem. Wealthy leftist Israelis hate him as is evident from the headlines in Haaretz. The reasons are quite diverse. They accuse him of being a 'foreigner' who is usurping Israel. They claim he is corrupt. They claim he is rich and thus should not be allowed to 'buy' his way into office. Each insult and slanderous comment smacks of hypocrisy.
They hate him for being a foreigner and yet most leftist Ashkenazi politicians were not born in Israel up into the 1970s. It takes quite a lot of chutzpah to claim that a 'foreigner' is coming to Israel to steal an election given the fact that David Ben-Gurion was born in Eastern Europe and Golda Meir was also not from Israel. They claim he is corrupt but every single Ashkenazi politician in Israel is corrupt in one way or another. They accuse him of being rich and 'buying' votes. But what of the other leaders of Israel. Ehud Olmert was born to a rich family in one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in Jerusalem. He never worked a day in his life and yet he has managed to get wealthy through donations from 'friends'. Gaydamak, by contrast, was born poor and once lived on the streets. He worked his whole life to achieve his wealth, despite the anti-Semitism of his home country. But like John Edwards and the left's love for him, it turns out that self made men are not welcomed by the left, in fact 95% of all leftist candidates for high political office come from the elite sectors of society and were born wealthy and most never worked for the money they have, living off a trust fund instead. It is quite a lot of chutzpah for the wealthy leftist elites to complain that a 'rich' usurper is coming to buy votes away from them. The most glaring hypocrisy is when Gaydamak has distributed his money to charity to help the victims of the Lebanon war and Sderot. The politicians complained that he was buying votes, but he was doing what the government should have done, taking children out of a combat zone and giving them peace and quiet. It may be no surprise that people who are born wealthy rarely give money to charity, preferring to spend the money that others give by working for the government, while those who make their own money (like Rockefeller and Henry Ford and Bill Gates) are the biggest givers. Compare the giving of men such as Bill Gates and Warren Buffet with the giving of the Kennedy family or Ariana Huffington or any other people who were born wealthy and one will always find those who are born rich rarely donate money, but they are always happy to accuse others of 'buying influence.'
There is a common theme between Tom Segev claiming that all Israelis, including the Russian immigrants, should apologize for Kfar Kassem and the hatred with which Haaretz views Mr. Gaydamak. Segev doesn't want to apologize. He wants everyone else to apologize, despite the fact that it was his generation who caused the massacre. He wants the Russian Israelis and Mizrachim to apologize, when it was not they who participated. By contrast when it comes to elections suddenly the Mizrachim and Russians become 'foreigners' who are slandered for not having the correct culture (read: corrupt) to assume an office in Israel. This is a perfect study of how an elite Bourougise culture works. It demands of others that they make up for the wrongs of the elites. Thus everyone must apologize for things carried out by members of the elite. But when it comes time to divvy up the tax money and take the well paying government jobs suddenly those who were asked to apologize are then considered 'outsiders' who do not deserve to have a say in managing the affairs of the nation. This is how the elite has always managed to govern, by dividing people and by insinuation and slander. It should be the other way around. The Tom Segev’s and John Edwards types who represent 1% of society are the ones that should apologize, it is their families who carried out the crimes of the past. The recent immigrants and poor should be the ones who should be elected to office, it is they who make up the majority of the country.
Sunday, December 30, 2007
Terra Incognita 16 Global warming, genocide, hate
Terra Incognita
Issue 16
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
December 23rd, 2007
1) Arrogance, the End of Days and Global Warming: The Global warming hysteria reaches new levels every month as people predict that the oceans will rise and consume us, the deserts will take over the world and ‘wild weather’ will cause a new ice age. It is oddly reminiscent of the old End of Days predictions of the 19th century.
2) Is Genocide Modern: Many authors take it for granted that genocide is a modern phenomenon restricted to the 20th century. But genocide is as old as mankind.
3) Hating the other: Ward Churchill, Michael Snatamauro and making the other an ‘eichmann’ in order to justify his murder: Many scholars, politicians and intellectuals these days revel in condemning everyone they disagree with as ‘nazis’. Furthermore they define civilians as ‘little eichmans’ in order to justify mass murder. This is a disturbing phenomenon and it says much about the way in which hating those who hate is used as an excuse to encourage the murder of perfectly innocent people under the pretext that those people are ‘nazis’.
Arrogance, the End of Days and Global Warming
Seth J. Frantzman
December 20th, 2007
Yossi Sarid, a respected journalist and leftist intellectual in Israel toted the line of many when he wrote recently that places in the world are going to "sink and disappear when the icebergs melt, the oceans rise, the storms intensify, the species become extinct and the deserts spread and cover the land." But if one were to think about this statement with some retrospect in mind they might realize that this is not such an original idea. The belief that the end of days is coming is as old as Christianity and has its origins in the Old testament and elsewhere. The fact that global warming hysterics have taken up the same tune should bother people when they come to consider questions surrounding the 'greenhouse affect' and 'global warming' and the latest obsession with environmental catastrophe.
There is a famous postcard of a naked man walking off into the desert while another man in a tweed jacket walking the other way gives him an alarming look. The caption reads "if everyone is thinking the same thing then someone isn't thinking." In the quest to alarm us all about global warming and the coming ice age we are being led into this trap where 'all' the scientists 'believe' the same thing and we are being asked to march in lock step with them.
There are two problems with the global warming hypothesis. The first is that it is extremist. It ascribes all the problems in the world to one simple thing and it claims that if we don't act now the world will end shortly. Listen to Mr. Sarid: "the deserts will spread and cover the land." Does this remind you more of science or something from Deuteronomy or Revelations? The apostle Paul also predicted all sorts of terrible catastrophes and so did half the other prophets in the Bible. Should we perhaps have awarded them the Nobel Peace prize instead of Al Gore for warning us of the coming catastrophe? The Hale-Bop comet people dressed themselves up in purple, cut off their own genitals and killed themselves because of the End of Days. Perhaps they too should join the pantheon of global warming crazies. Or perhaps we should look to the 19th century and all the insane movements that predicted an End of Days such as the Millenarians and the Millerites. Surely those people were no more extreme in their pronouncements than Mr. Sarid and his ilk.
The second problem with the Global warming movement is its emphases on man. Whereas in previous times the End of Days believers claimed that god was going to destroy the world or that Christ was going to return, our secular scientific age demands that it be man who is said to have caused the End of Days. This is a logical assumption since science cannot blame god for global warming and the coming desertification/ice melting/wild storms that will come. So science blames me. It blames you. It blames us. But it doesn't just blame us for triggering the problem, it actually claims something more. The Global warming people claim that we, you and I, have the power to destroy the world through our conspicuous consumption. This is the second problem. Global warming theories assume that man is capable of destroying the world. Its not the first time man arrogantly thought he could do so. The builders of the first nuclear bomb huddled in a concrete bunker outside of Alamagordo, New Mexico in 1945 and they too thought that the world might end. At the time some of them believed the detonation of a nuclear bomb would cause a chain reaction that would burn up all the Oxygen in the air. They didn't bother to tell us, the public, of this slight side affect of their new weapon. They went ahead and blew it up and low and behold it didn't destroy the world. Man has become more arrogant since. Man now thinks he has the power to destroy the earth. Is he kidding? One only has to abandon a building for a few years before nature begins to take back that building. Nature is far more powerful than man. Man is only superficially aware of his power. He cuts down an old growth forest and says "look what I have done!" There is an oil spill and he says "I have ruined the environment!" But man has done no such thing. He can only temporarily alter his environment in the most insignificant way. He might be able to kill off Dodo birds but he can't defeat pesky creatures like ants and cockroaches. Killing off Dodo birds is not the same as ending the world through the use of carbon. But man believes it. He believes it so much that he now purchases 'carbon offsets'. The money donated to offset his carbon use goes to NGOs who then pay people to drive around in SUVs and talk about offsetting carbon. Every penny spent on offsetting carbon only increases the amount of carbon being put out. But man is foolish. He says "I can be equal, I can fly my jet plane and donate 1,000 dollars to some obscure charity and I am now no longer guilty." Its no surprise that all the environmental campaigners seem to be the most conspicuous users of big fat carbon producing planes and SUVs. This alone should be enough reason not to trust them. The fact that people make a living, nay, make a career, on whining about the environment should be enough reason not to trust them. But we have the U.N to assure us that there is a 'catastrophic foot shortage' this year. Really? If there was a catastrophic food shortage then wouldn't there be more famines? But I haven't seen posters of any more starving African children with distended bellies being cared for by European women than last year. Are there simply not enough Norwegian women to put in all the pictures, so they haven't distributed them yet? Are they still developing the film?
It is ironic that those who complain about global warming are usually the same people who detest Foxnews. Foxnews has the most alarmist weather reports day after day. Any tiny thunder storm is described as 'Whicked Weather' with a special headline and introduction. According to Foxnews we are suffering the worst ______ everyday. If its not hurricanes its tornadoes and wind chill and ice storms.
When I was a boy I also had to be indoctrinated about global warming. I was even given an assignment to draw a picture of the 'greenhouse affect'. I had to draw a picture of a happy little salmon and how his stream is polluted by 'evil' factories and how dams are built and how pollution causes acid rain that inevitably kills the poor salmon. I was told about how the world would end lest we do something 'now'. I recall being in high school in Jim Wigren's history class and seeing the poster on the wall that predicted the rising sea levels and how much of the earth would disappear But isn't 95% of an ice berg submerged? That’s what I learned about the Titanic disaster. The ice berg was mostly under water so that’s why the captain couldn't see it. Remember? If the North Pole ice cap is going to melt and cause the seas to rise isn't there one slight problem with this hypothesis, namely that 95% of the ice cap is underwater and therefore only 5% stands to be added to the surface of the ocean, producing a one inch rise the world over? After all, what percentage of the sea is taken up by that scary ice cap. People look at Mercator projections and think 'by gosh its huge!' But the Mercator distorts the size of items at the poles, in reality it is not very big. The biggest tragedy of it melting is that people will no longer be able to walk to the pole.
There is no reasoning with 'science'. There is certainly no reasoning with scientific bodies set up the U.N to tell us that the entire world will end and that all the problems of the world are due to our harming the environment. If we wanted to do our part towards alleviating how much we harm the environment we would start by dismantling the U.N and its 60 billion dollar budget and its 100,000 employees and its army and its planes and all the cars and SUVs associated with it. Make the U.N workers ride bicycles, that will ease not only the traffic problem in New York, but also help end global warming, and then they won't have to purchase carbon off-sets.
I put it to you Mr. Ban Ki Moon: do your part to end Global warming and put your foot where your mouth is, put it to the peddle of bicycle the next time you ride to work.
Is Genocide Modern?
Seth J. Frantzman
December 20th, 2007
Mark Levene argues in the book Genocide in the age of the Nation State that genocide is a product of modernity created mostly by the west and especially used against native peoples through imperialism. Benjamin Lieberman makes a similar argument in Terrible Fate: Ethnic-Cleansing in the making of Modern Europe. Ben Kiernan and Robert Gellately have made similar claims. Gary Clayton Anderson in his book Conquest claims that the white man brought 'ethnic-cleansing' to Texas in the 19th century and Ward Churchill makes similar claims about the genocide of native-Americans. Samantha Power in A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide claims that America has sat by while many genocides took place and in doing so enabled them.
The problem with genocide, so some authors tell us, is in its definition. Many like to use the U.N's definition of genocide. But seeing as how that definition didn't seem to apply to the Rwandan genocide and yet got turned around so that Israel was accused of committing a genocide against the Palestinians and that the American border was in affect a 'genocide' against Mexican immigrants(see the book Annihilating Difference), one must be cautious to rely to heavily on it. Authors like to define genocide against modernity mostly in order to claim that the West is solely responsible for creating the idea of genocide. Certainly the origins of the word genocide are modern. It implies the destruction of people through the destruction of their genes and thus is linked to eugenics and modern ideas about race. But if we examine the most well know genocide of the 20th century: the Armenian, Cambodian, the Rwandan, the Sudanese and the Holocaust we find that what took place is both diverse and unique. In all but one case(Cambodia), the genocide was directed against an ethnic-linguistic-religious group. In the case of Cambodia the mass killing was only called a genocide because such a large number of people died.
In the 19th century the West is said to have laid the foundations for genocide through its destruction of native populations in the Americas and elsewhere. But here scholars are mistaken. The great killing of natives in the Americas took place long before the birth of the 'modern' world or the 'nation-state'. Before the treaty of Westphalia, most of the natives in the Americas were already dead. Scholars claim 90% died of disease. The subsequent genocide, was no so much a calculated genocide as a slow, grinding reduction of native rights and landholdings. As a percentage less died after 1700 than before. Few countries ever set out to exterminate the native tribes, even if in many cases that was the result. For instance General Crook who fought the Apache never had any hate for them, but his campaign resulted in their destruction. Kit Carson's campaign against the Navajo was especially brutal, but most Navajo survived. By contrast the California tribes were almost completely annihilated and yet few were destroyed in concerted campaigns. Claims that America invented ethnic-cleansing of the natives in Texas seems to ignore the fact that the Spanish had been up to it for years.
I have stated before that Nazism and the Holocaust can be seen as the highest form of Western civilization. This is because in one strange form western civilization produced this strange extremism, this mechanical dark age of cleansing and counting and efficiency gone mad. The Nazi genocide was unique only in its thoroughness. It was not even unique in its ability to kill large numbers of people. In the space of a few months the Hutus butchered, using machetes, 800,000 Tutsi in Rwanda. That was a much higher volume of killing, using primitive weapons, than the Nazis were able to do using modern machinery. Thus the Nazi genocide is unique not for the numbers killed or even the end result, but it is unique for its methods and its organization and bureaucracy of murder. No regime before ever perfected such a bureaucracy devoted to death.
But other regimes in the past perfected killing machines. Many have seen the western colonization of the world as a prelude to genocide. People point to the German campaign against the Herero between 1904 and 1907 that resulted in 80% of the tribe being killed. It is another one of those 'first' genocides of the 20th century along with the Armenian. But what befell the Heroro is not unique in history. Its not first time an empire set about destroying a people.
Tamarlane was famous for it. The Assyrain kings were famous for it. Mohammed did it. The Romans did it. Alexander did it. History is replete with stories of genocide disguised in our vocabulary as massacres. If one wants to find out where a genocide took place they merely need to find mentions of people in history who no longer exist. More often then not a genocide befell them. That is what happened to the Samaritans. It is also what happened to the Carthaginians. It is what happened to the Jewish tribes of Arabia. It is what happened for 2000 years in Africa as Arabs and then Europeans deported millions of Africans as slaves. Genocide is in no way modern, the only thing that is modern is terms like ‘genocide’ and ethnic-cleansing’.
Hating the other: Ward Churchill, Michael Snatamauro and making the other an ‘eichmann’ in order to justify his murder
Seth J. Frantzman
December 17th, 2007
On September 12th, Ward Churchill, an American professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder published an essay entitled Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens(later published as a booklet in 2003 titled On the Justice of Roosting Chickens: reflections on the consequences of U.S. imperial arrogance and criminality). Churchill has since become a cause celebre among the American left with solidarity networks, free speech campaigns, and articles at Chomsky’s website Znet devoted to him. In it he discussed his reflections on 9/11:
“As for those in the World Trade Center... Well, really, let's get a grip here, shall we? True enough, they were civilians of a sort. But innocent? Gimme a break. They formed a technocratic corps at the very heart of America's global financial empire - the "mighty engine of profit" to which the military dimension of U.S. policy has always been enslaved - and they did so both willingly and knowingly. Recourse to "ignorance" - a derivative, after all, of the word "ignore" - counts as less than an excuse among this relatively well-educated elite. To the extent that any of them were unaware of the costs and consequences to others of what they were involved in - and in many cases excelling at - it was because of their absolute refusal to see. More likely, it was because they were too busy braying, incessantly and self-importantly, into their cell phones, arranging power lunches and stock transactions, each of which translated, conveniently out of sight, mind and smelling distance, into the starved and rotting flesh of infants. If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers, I'd really be interested in hearing about it.”
In an essay attributed to Harold Thomas entitled ‘The Myth of the Innocent Civilian’ that appeared on a left wing website(http://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/2007/08/29/the-myth-of-the-innocent-civilian-audio-booklet/) which includes links to other ‘dissident’ websites and Al Jazeera we see an explanation of the theory:
“The Myth of the Innocent Civilian”, questions the relationship that people have with artificial entities such as governments and corporations. An artificial entity does not spring into existence on its own, has no will or intelligence of its own and cannot be held accountable for “behavior”. Only people can reason, act and take responsibility.
In exchange for a variety of benefits, citizens submit to “government” demands which include all manner of taxation, licensing, and even compelled servitude. Great numbers of citizens are even directly employed by government. Yet when confronted with evidence of gross misdeeds committed in the name of government, citizens typically do not see themselves as accountable or responsible in any way.”
Michael Santomauro is a prominent New York leftist who runs the website www.reportersnotebook.com/. He signs his blog with the word ‘peace’ and his essays have appeared on many leftist websites such as Counterpunch.org, alongside essays by people like Noam Chomsky. In his essay the “Myth of the Innocent Civilian he noted the following after 9/11:
“I think if the typical American does not make an attempt to understand the damage our weapons have inflicted on the Arabs by proxy with Israel and the continuous dishonest one-sided United States foreign policy in the region, then maybe we deserve more of what we got on Sept. 11, 2001…The typical, now dead American from 9/11 lived his life knowing these facts and not caring about it. The arrogance and the callousness was part of his everyday being. Was his life worth living if he didn't care how the American government was using his tax money to hurt people? - to destroy the livelihoods of an entire region?.... Nine-eleven should be a reminder that if more Americans have an early death, it is because of the end result of not caring. Peace.”
In a follow-up essay in which he declared why he wouldn’t apologize for his first essay he noted his observations after 9/11:
“I notice all the Muslim owned shops closed-up... Afraid….Actually, all the restaurants that are non-Muslim owned were open - packed with diners….he tells me that on Tuesday morning on 9/11 when the bank was getting ready to close early his Jewish clients had happy smirks on their face.”
A commentator named Sarah expanded on this theory in a discussion at Wikipedia over the content of Wikipedia’s ‘List of Massacres’. Apparently the discussion had something to do with Northern Ireland but her explanation of the question of innocence is what is important:
“Leaving aside the question of whether settlers (ie ethnic cleansers) can ever be ‘innocent’ - there was NO "Irish Government" at the time; there was the occupying Crown forces and their "plantations" (genocide and ethnic cleansing in modern parlance). Even conceding the bizarre notion of "settler innocence" there is no evidence of a massacre of settlers - just the battles against the yeomanry. On the other hand there is voluminous evidence of the massacres done by the planters during and after the rebellion. (Sarah777 (talk) 23:33, 16 December 2007 (UTC))”
These four extended quotes serve as the starting point for a discussion of the way in which the modern left or extreme left has created an ‘other’ in order to justify its need to hate something. It is interesting how this works. These leftists have decided that civilians are not interested based on them being complicit in their government’s harm of others and thus the civilians are re-defined as ‘eichmanns’ or Nazis and thus they are no longer innocent and deserve death by those who ‘push back’. What is most fascinating is that in doing this the leftist has re-defined all those he hates as ‘Nazis’ and then declared that Nazis deserve to be hated and killed. In doing so he doesn’t realize it but rather than simply stating that Nazis deserve death he has implicitly also revealed that all those he disagrees with, especially complacent civilians, deserve death. If only they were to be activists like a good leftist, then they could be spared by those who ‘push back’.
But what is most fascinating about this dialogue of the left is what it reveals about hate. Leftists cast a lot of dispersions on those they regard as being hateful. The crime of the racist is that he hates. The Crime of the Republican is that he hates. The crime of the Homophobe is that he hates. The Crime of the Christian fundamentalist is that he hates. The crime of the Islamophobe is that he is a racist and that he hates. The Crime of the Nazi is that he hates. The Crime of George Bush is that he hates. Hate is usually what is behind the reason that leftists have a negative comment about something. Leftists are said to be ‘anti-hate’ or they march to ‘stop the hate’. But what is most fascinating about the way the hater is transformed into him who must be hated and deserves death is the transformation that takes place in the psyche of the leftist. In his campaign against hate he becomes as virulent and hateful as those he claims are the haters. In his campaign against racism he declares all white people racist. In his campaign against Israel he declares all Americans ‘little eichmanns’ for supporting the American government which supports Israel.
Hate is a strange thing. It may be typical of many people. But what is most fascinating is that hating those who hate is now the vague among the left. This is a very sad detail of the evolution of leftist. Radical hate is not pretty and its manifests itself in a very deep and instinctual way among those who describe themselves as leftists. It is why leftists have an increasingly knee jerk reaction against comments they deem ‘racist’ and against those they deem ‘racist’. But their extreme reaction merely reveals their own hate.
It is an irony that in the campaign to ‘stop the hate’ the protestors have themselves become hateful of those they have labeled haters. The campaign has grown to such proportions that civilians are described as ‘eichmann’ as an excuse to revel in their deaths. This re-labeling civilians as accomplices has a strange reverberation in the history of genocide. The way that genocidal regimes have been able to excuse the mass murder of people, in fact they way that Islamists have been able to justify murdering civilians, is by labeling them deserving of death. The liberal has done the same by labeling those he hates and civilians ‘eichmanns’. Since a Nazi deserves death in the eyes of the liberal by labeling all civilians collaborators with Nazism he has implicitly said that all civilians deserve death. This type of attitude is reminiscent of the Nazi and Stalinist era and its protestations that ‘no one is innocent’. The way in which Communist justified the mass killing of people was to label them ‘exploiters’ or ‘capitalists’ or ‘Kulaks’. Labels are an easy way to de-humanize people in order to justify killing them. The Hutus called the Tutsis ‘cockroaches’ in order to justify the murder of them.
Liberals are quite familiar with this. They always like to remind us that hateful people use labels to de-humanize people. They frequently claim that Israelis dehumanize Arabs by calling them ‘rats’ or some other label. But it is interesting to note that the leftist-liberal has not been able to escape this dehumanizing and labeling in his own hate.
Perhaps one should hate Nazis. But hating people is not a good policy, especially if one seeks to ‘stop the hate.’ Hate has a way of getting out of control, especially when one begins expanding the bounds of who deserves to be hated. One can see just how easily it was for the label Nazi to grow beyond its original use. Eichmann was one man but now his name is used to describe every American civilian. It is perhaps an irony that the same people who use the word Nazi so loosely to describe American civilians are the same ones who describe the bombing of German cities in the Second World War as war crime. However by this definition of the ‘myth of the innocent civilian’ the German inhabitants of Dresden were certainly less innocent than the American employees in the twin towers. But the leftist-liberal doesn’t see that. He doesn’t see that the German civilians in Dresden were culpable for Nazism. He does however think that Americans, and foreigners who had the ill fortune to work in the twin towers were guilty of being ‘little Eichmanns.’
One problem with terrorism is that it disproportionately affects working people. Very few intellectuals die in terror attacks. This is perhaps a shame. Intellectuals like to pontificate a lot about terrorism. They like to act as judge and jury regarding who deserves to be a victim of terrorism and who does not. They describe “settlers” as ‘ethnic-cleansers’ and property owners as genociders and thus declare that they deserve death. But where exactly does Noam Chomsky and his ilk think they came from? They can claim that their fellow Americans deserve death but they themselves are not very far removed from those Americans, despite their residence in the ivory tower. They are juiced into the capitalist market, they shop at the same stores and they receive American tax dollars to fund their rights to free speech at American Universities. Their ancestors were also ‘settlers’. The problem with history is it usually victimizes the wrong people. Academics rarely die in terrorist attacks because they are shielded from them by the fact that they are wealthy and work in un-crowded environments. In Israel the majority of the 1000 victims of the Second Intifada were working people who used buses for transportation and soldiers. Needless to say few academics use buses and none serve in the armed forces. People like Ward Churchill deserve to be dispatched to the front. For too long academics have escaped the dangers of the conflicts they themselves support and fuel with their hate. Professors may determine that I am no innocent civilian, but I do not think they are innocent. I think that if someone were to bring vengeance upon the intellectuals who have for too long called everyone else ‘Nazi’ that one would be warranted to do so. Ward Churchill speaks of those who ‘push back’. Perhaps one day people will tire of being described as Nazis and they will show Churchill how the Nazis actually dealt with those who insulted them. In fact the very existence of people like Mr. Churchill shows the degree to which we are not in fact Nazis, had we been Nazis people like Mr. Churchill would have been gassed long ago. He should glory in the fact that civilians and workers are so docile in the face of his hate and vitriol which is funded by their tax dollars. He should have been lynched long ago, then he might know the face of hate and then at least he would have an excuse to judge all of us and decide that we deserve death. Hitler once noted in a speech he gave that “when I hear the word ‘intellectual’ the first thing I do is draw my gun.” Perhaps those deemed ‘little eichmanns’ would do well to arm themselves. We are tired of being condemned to death because people think we are ‘nazis’. Too many nations which consist of perfectly decent people have already been trampled under foot because of this slander.
Issue 16
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
December 23rd, 2007
1) Arrogance, the End of Days and Global Warming: The Global warming hysteria reaches new levels every month as people predict that the oceans will rise and consume us, the deserts will take over the world and ‘wild weather’ will cause a new ice age. It is oddly reminiscent of the old End of Days predictions of the 19th century.
2) Is Genocide Modern: Many authors take it for granted that genocide is a modern phenomenon restricted to the 20th century. But genocide is as old as mankind.
3) Hating the other: Ward Churchill, Michael Snatamauro and making the other an ‘eichmann’ in order to justify his murder: Many scholars, politicians and intellectuals these days revel in condemning everyone they disagree with as ‘nazis’. Furthermore they define civilians as ‘little eichmans’ in order to justify mass murder. This is a disturbing phenomenon and it says much about the way in which hating those who hate is used as an excuse to encourage the murder of perfectly innocent people under the pretext that those people are ‘nazis’.
Arrogance, the End of Days and Global Warming
Seth J. Frantzman
December 20th, 2007
Yossi Sarid, a respected journalist and leftist intellectual in Israel toted the line of many when he wrote recently that places in the world are going to "sink and disappear when the icebergs melt, the oceans rise, the storms intensify, the species become extinct and the deserts spread and cover the land." But if one were to think about this statement with some retrospect in mind they might realize that this is not such an original idea. The belief that the end of days is coming is as old as Christianity and has its origins in the Old testament and elsewhere. The fact that global warming hysterics have taken up the same tune should bother people when they come to consider questions surrounding the 'greenhouse affect' and 'global warming' and the latest obsession with environmental catastrophe.
There is a famous postcard of a naked man walking off into the desert while another man in a tweed jacket walking the other way gives him an alarming look. The caption reads "if everyone is thinking the same thing then someone isn't thinking." In the quest to alarm us all about global warming and the coming ice age we are being led into this trap where 'all' the scientists 'believe' the same thing and we are being asked to march in lock step with them.
There are two problems with the global warming hypothesis. The first is that it is extremist. It ascribes all the problems in the world to one simple thing and it claims that if we don't act now the world will end shortly. Listen to Mr. Sarid: "the deserts will spread and cover the land." Does this remind you more of science or something from Deuteronomy or Revelations? The apostle Paul also predicted all sorts of terrible catastrophes and so did half the other prophets in the Bible. Should we perhaps have awarded them the Nobel Peace prize instead of Al Gore for warning us of the coming catastrophe? The Hale-Bop comet people dressed themselves up in purple, cut off their own genitals and killed themselves because of the End of Days. Perhaps they too should join the pantheon of global warming crazies. Or perhaps we should look to the 19th century and all the insane movements that predicted an End of Days such as the Millenarians and the Millerites. Surely those people were no more extreme in their pronouncements than Mr. Sarid and his ilk.
The second problem with the Global warming movement is its emphases on man. Whereas in previous times the End of Days believers claimed that god was going to destroy the world or that Christ was going to return, our secular scientific age demands that it be man who is said to have caused the End of Days. This is a logical assumption since science cannot blame god for global warming and the coming desertification/ice melting/wild storms that will come. So science blames me. It blames you. It blames us. But it doesn't just blame us for triggering the problem, it actually claims something more. The Global warming people claim that we, you and I, have the power to destroy the world through our conspicuous consumption. This is the second problem. Global warming theories assume that man is capable of destroying the world. Its not the first time man arrogantly thought he could do so. The builders of the first nuclear bomb huddled in a concrete bunker outside of Alamagordo, New Mexico in 1945 and they too thought that the world might end. At the time some of them believed the detonation of a nuclear bomb would cause a chain reaction that would burn up all the Oxygen in the air. They didn't bother to tell us, the public, of this slight side affect of their new weapon. They went ahead and blew it up and low and behold it didn't destroy the world. Man has become more arrogant since. Man now thinks he has the power to destroy the earth. Is he kidding? One only has to abandon a building for a few years before nature begins to take back that building. Nature is far more powerful than man. Man is only superficially aware of his power. He cuts down an old growth forest and says "look what I have done!" There is an oil spill and he says "I have ruined the environment!" But man has done no such thing. He can only temporarily alter his environment in the most insignificant way. He might be able to kill off Dodo birds but he can't defeat pesky creatures like ants and cockroaches. Killing off Dodo birds is not the same as ending the world through the use of carbon. But man believes it. He believes it so much that he now purchases 'carbon offsets'. The money donated to offset his carbon use goes to NGOs who then pay people to drive around in SUVs and talk about offsetting carbon. Every penny spent on offsetting carbon only increases the amount of carbon being put out. But man is foolish. He says "I can be equal, I can fly my jet plane and donate 1,000 dollars to some obscure charity and I am now no longer guilty." Its no surprise that all the environmental campaigners seem to be the most conspicuous users of big fat carbon producing planes and SUVs. This alone should be enough reason not to trust them. The fact that people make a living, nay, make a career, on whining about the environment should be enough reason not to trust them. But we have the U.N to assure us that there is a 'catastrophic foot shortage' this year. Really? If there was a catastrophic food shortage then wouldn't there be more famines? But I haven't seen posters of any more starving African children with distended bellies being cared for by European women than last year. Are there simply not enough Norwegian women to put in all the pictures, so they haven't distributed them yet? Are they still developing the film?
It is ironic that those who complain about global warming are usually the same people who detest Foxnews. Foxnews has the most alarmist weather reports day after day. Any tiny thunder storm is described as 'Whicked Weather' with a special headline and introduction. According to Foxnews we are suffering the worst ______ everyday. If its not hurricanes its tornadoes and wind chill and ice storms.
When I was a boy I also had to be indoctrinated about global warming. I was even given an assignment to draw a picture of the 'greenhouse affect'. I had to draw a picture of a happy little salmon and how his stream is polluted by 'evil' factories and how dams are built and how pollution causes acid rain that inevitably kills the poor salmon. I was told about how the world would end lest we do something 'now'. I recall being in high school in Jim Wigren's history class and seeing the poster on the wall that predicted the rising sea levels and how much of the earth would disappear But isn't 95% of an ice berg submerged? That’s what I learned about the Titanic disaster. The ice berg was mostly under water so that’s why the captain couldn't see it. Remember? If the North Pole ice cap is going to melt and cause the seas to rise isn't there one slight problem with this hypothesis, namely that 95% of the ice cap is underwater and therefore only 5% stands to be added to the surface of the ocean, producing a one inch rise the world over? After all, what percentage of the sea is taken up by that scary ice cap. People look at Mercator projections and think 'by gosh its huge!' But the Mercator distorts the size of items at the poles, in reality it is not very big. The biggest tragedy of it melting is that people will no longer be able to walk to the pole.
There is no reasoning with 'science'. There is certainly no reasoning with scientific bodies set up the U.N to tell us that the entire world will end and that all the problems of the world are due to our harming the environment. If we wanted to do our part towards alleviating how much we harm the environment we would start by dismantling the U.N and its 60 billion dollar budget and its 100,000 employees and its army and its planes and all the cars and SUVs associated with it. Make the U.N workers ride bicycles, that will ease not only the traffic problem in New York, but also help end global warming, and then they won't have to purchase carbon off-sets.
I put it to you Mr. Ban Ki Moon: do your part to end Global warming and put your foot where your mouth is, put it to the peddle of bicycle the next time you ride to work.
Is Genocide Modern?
Seth J. Frantzman
December 20th, 2007
Mark Levene argues in the book Genocide in the age of the Nation State that genocide is a product of modernity created mostly by the west and especially used against native peoples through imperialism. Benjamin Lieberman makes a similar argument in Terrible Fate: Ethnic-Cleansing in the making of Modern Europe. Ben Kiernan and Robert Gellately have made similar claims. Gary Clayton Anderson in his book Conquest claims that the white man brought 'ethnic-cleansing' to Texas in the 19th century and Ward Churchill makes similar claims about the genocide of native-Americans. Samantha Power in A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide claims that America has sat by while many genocides took place and in doing so enabled them.
The problem with genocide, so some authors tell us, is in its definition. Many like to use the U.N's definition of genocide. But seeing as how that definition didn't seem to apply to the Rwandan genocide and yet got turned around so that Israel was accused of committing a genocide against the Palestinians and that the American border was in affect a 'genocide' against Mexican immigrants(see the book Annihilating Difference), one must be cautious to rely to heavily on it. Authors like to define genocide against modernity mostly in order to claim that the West is solely responsible for creating the idea of genocide. Certainly the origins of the word genocide are modern. It implies the destruction of people through the destruction of their genes and thus is linked to eugenics and modern ideas about race. But if we examine the most well know genocide of the 20th century: the Armenian, Cambodian, the Rwandan, the Sudanese and the Holocaust we find that what took place is both diverse and unique. In all but one case(Cambodia), the genocide was directed against an ethnic-linguistic-religious group. In the case of Cambodia the mass killing was only called a genocide because such a large number of people died.
In the 19th century the West is said to have laid the foundations for genocide through its destruction of native populations in the Americas and elsewhere. But here scholars are mistaken. The great killing of natives in the Americas took place long before the birth of the 'modern' world or the 'nation-state'. Before the treaty of Westphalia, most of the natives in the Americas were already dead. Scholars claim 90% died of disease. The subsequent genocide, was no so much a calculated genocide as a slow, grinding reduction of native rights and landholdings. As a percentage less died after 1700 than before. Few countries ever set out to exterminate the native tribes, even if in many cases that was the result. For instance General Crook who fought the Apache never had any hate for them, but his campaign resulted in their destruction. Kit Carson's campaign against the Navajo was especially brutal, but most Navajo survived. By contrast the California tribes were almost completely annihilated and yet few were destroyed in concerted campaigns. Claims that America invented ethnic-cleansing of the natives in Texas seems to ignore the fact that the Spanish had been up to it for years.
I have stated before that Nazism and the Holocaust can be seen as the highest form of Western civilization. This is because in one strange form western civilization produced this strange extremism, this mechanical dark age of cleansing and counting and efficiency gone mad. The Nazi genocide was unique only in its thoroughness. It was not even unique in its ability to kill large numbers of people. In the space of a few months the Hutus butchered, using machetes, 800,000 Tutsi in Rwanda. That was a much higher volume of killing, using primitive weapons, than the Nazis were able to do using modern machinery. Thus the Nazi genocide is unique not for the numbers killed or even the end result, but it is unique for its methods and its organization and bureaucracy of murder. No regime before ever perfected such a bureaucracy devoted to death.
But other regimes in the past perfected killing machines. Many have seen the western colonization of the world as a prelude to genocide. People point to the German campaign against the Herero between 1904 and 1907 that resulted in 80% of the tribe being killed. It is another one of those 'first' genocides of the 20th century along with the Armenian. But what befell the Heroro is not unique in history. Its not first time an empire set about destroying a people.
Tamarlane was famous for it. The Assyrain kings were famous for it. Mohammed did it. The Romans did it. Alexander did it. History is replete with stories of genocide disguised in our vocabulary as massacres. If one wants to find out where a genocide took place they merely need to find mentions of people in history who no longer exist. More often then not a genocide befell them. That is what happened to the Samaritans. It is also what happened to the Carthaginians. It is what happened to the Jewish tribes of Arabia. It is what happened for 2000 years in Africa as Arabs and then Europeans deported millions of Africans as slaves. Genocide is in no way modern, the only thing that is modern is terms like ‘genocide’ and ethnic-cleansing’.
Hating the other: Ward Churchill, Michael Snatamauro and making the other an ‘eichmann’ in order to justify his murder
Seth J. Frantzman
December 17th, 2007
On September 12th, Ward Churchill, an American professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder published an essay entitled Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens(later published as a booklet in 2003 titled On the Justice of Roosting Chickens: reflections on the consequences of U.S. imperial arrogance and criminality). Churchill has since become a cause celebre among the American left with solidarity networks, free speech campaigns, and articles at Chomsky’s website Znet devoted to him. In it he discussed his reflections on 9/11:
“As for those in the World Trade Center... Well, really, let's get a grip here, shall we? True enough, they were civilians of a sort. But innocent? Gimme a break. They formed a technocratic corps at the very heart of America's global financial empire - the "mighty engine of profit" to which the military dimension of U.S. policy has always been enslaved - and they did so both willingly and knowingly. Recourse to "ignorance" - a derivative, after all, of the word "ignore" - counts as less than an excuse among this relatively well-educated elite. To the extent that any of them were unaware of the costs and consequences to others of what they were involved in - and in many cases excelling at - it was because of their absolute refusal to see. More likely, it was because they were too busy braying, incessantly and self-importantly, into their cell phones, arranging power lunches and stock transactions, each of which translated, conveniently out of sight, mind and smelling distance, into the starved and rotting flesh of infants. If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers, I'd really be interested in hearing about it.”
In an essay attributed to Harold Thomas entitled ‘The Myth of the Innocent Civilian’ that appeared on a left wing website(http://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/2007/08/29/the-myth-of-the-innocent-civilian-audio-booklet/) which includes links to other ‘dissident’ websites and Al Jazeera we see an explanation of the theory:
“The Myth of the Innocent Civilian”, questions the relationship that people have with artificial entities such as governments and corporations. An artificial entity does not spring into existence on its own, has no will or intelligence of its own and cannot be held accountable for “behavior”. Only people can reason, act and take responsibility.
In exchange for a variety of benefits, citizens submit to “government” demands which include all manner of taxation, licensing, and even compelled servitude. Great numbers of citizens are even directly employed by government. Yet when confronted with evidence of gross misdeeds committed in the name of government, citizens typically do not see themselves as accountable or responsible in any way.”
Michael Santomauro is a prominent New York leftist who runs the website www.reportersnotebook.com/. He signs his blog with the word ‘peace’ and his essays have appeared on many leftist websites such as Counterpunch.org, alongside essays by people like Noam Chomsky. In his essay the “Myth of the Innocent Civilian he noted the following after 9/11:
“I think if the typical American does not make an attempt to understand the damage our weapons have inflicted on the Arabs by proxy with Israel and the continuous dishonest one-sided United States foreign policy in the region, then maybe we deserve more of what we got on Sept. 11, 2001…The typical, now dead American from 9/11 lived his life knowing these facts and not caring about it. The arrogance and the callousness was part of his everyday being. Was his life worth living if he didn't care how the American government was using his tax money to hurt people? - to destroy the livelihoods of an entire region?.... Nine-eleven should be a reminder that if more Americans have an early death, it is because of the end result of not caring. Peace.”
In a follow-up essay in which he declared why he wouldn’t apologize for his first essay he noted his observations after 9/11:
“I notice all the Muslim owned shops closed-up... Afraid….Actually, all the restaurants that are non-Muslim owned were open - packed with diners….he tells me that on Tuesday morning on 9/11 when the bank was getting ready to close early his Jewish clients had happy smirks on their face.”
A commentator named Sarah expanded on this theory in a discussion at Wikipedia over the content of Wikipedia’s ‘List of Massacres’. Apparently the discussion had something to do with Northern Ireland but her explanation of the question of innocence is what is important:
“Leaving aside the question of whether settlers (ie ethnic cleansers) can ever be ‘innocent’ - there was NO "Irish Government" at the time; there was the occupying Crown forces and their "plantations" (genocide and ethnic cleansing in modern parlance). Even conceding the bizarre notion of "settler innocence" there is no evidence of a massacre of settlers - just the battles against the yeomanry. On the other hand there is voluminous evidence of the massacres done by the planters during and after the rebellion. (Sarah777 (talk) 23:33, 16 December 2007 (UTC))”
These four extended quotes serve as the starting point for a discussion of the way in which the modern left or extreme left has created an ‘other’ in order to justify its need to hate something. It is interesting how this works. These leftists have decided that civilians are not interested based on them being complicit in their government’s harm of others and thus the civilians are re-defined as ‘eichmanns’ or Nazis and thus they are no longer innocent and deserve death by those who ‘push back’. What is most fascinating is that in doing this the leftist has re-defined all those he hates as ‘Nazis’ and then declared that Nazis deserve to be hated and killed. In doing so he doesn’t realize it but rather than simply stating that Nazis deserve death he has implicitly also revealed that all those he disagrees with, especially complacent civilians, deserve death. If only they were to be activists like a good leftist, then they could be spared by those who ‘push back’.
But what is most fascinating about this dialogue of the left is what it reveals about hate. Leftists cast a lot of dispersions on those they regard as being hateful. The crime of the racist is that he hates. The Crime of the Republican is that he hates. The crime of the Homophobe is that he hates. The Crime of the Christian fundamentalist is that he hates. The crime of the Islamophobe is that he is a racist and that he hates. The Crime of the Nazi is that he hates. The Crime of George Bush is that he hates. Hate is usually what is behind the reason that leftists have a negative comment about something. Leftists are said to be ‘anti-hate’ or they march to ‘stop the hate’. But what is most fascinating about the way the hater is transformed into him who must be hated and deserves death is the transformation that takes place in the psyche of the leftist. In his campaign against hate he becomes as virulent and hateful as those he claims are the haters. In his campaign against racism he declares all white people racist. In his campaign against Israel he declares all Americans ‘little eichmanns’ for supporting the American government which supports Israel.
Hate is a strange thing. It may be typical of many people. But what is most fascinating is that hating those who hate is now the vague among the left. This is a very sad detail of the evolution of leftist. Radical hate is not pretty and its manifests itself in a very deep and instinctual way among those who describe themselves as leftists. It is why leftists have an increasingly knee jerk reaction against comments they deem ‘racist’ and against those they deem ‘racist’. But their extreme reaction merely reveals their own hate.
It is an irony that in the campaign to ‘stop the hate’ the protestors have themselves become hateful of those they have labeled haters. The campaign has grown to such proportions that civilians are described as ‘eichmann’ as an excuse to revel in their deaths. This re-labeling civilians as accomplices has a strange reverberation in the history of genocide. The way that genocidal regimes have been able to excuse the mass murder of people, in fact they way that Islamists have been able to justify murdering civilians, is by labeling them deserving of death. The liberal has done the same by labeling those he hates and civilians ‘eichmanns’. Since a Nazi deserves death in the eyes of the liberal by labeling all civilians collaborators with Nazism he has implicitly said that all civilians deserve death. This type of attitude is reminiscent of the Nazi and Stalinist era and its protestations that ‘no one is innocent’. The way in which Communist justified the mass killing of people was to label them ‘exploiters’ or ‘capitalists’ or ‘Kulaks’. Labels are an easy way to de-humanize people in order to justify killing them. The Hutus called the Tutsis ‘cockroaches’ in order to justify the murder of them.
Liberals are quite familiar with this. They always like to remind us that hateful people use labels to de-humanize people. They frequently claim that Israelis dehumanize Arabs by calling them ‘rats’ or some other label. But it is interesting to note that the leftist-liberal has not been able to escape this dehumanizing and labeling in his own hate.
Perhaps one should hate Nazis. But hating people is not a good policy, especially if one seeks to ‘stop the hate.’ Hate has a way of getting out of control, especially when one begins expanding the bounds of who deserves to be hated. One can see just how easily it was for the label Nazi to grow beyond its original use. Eichmann was one man but now his name is used to describe every American civilian. It is perhaps an irony that the same people who use the word Nazi so loosely to describe American civilians are the same ones who describe the bombing of German cities in the Second World War as war crime. However by this definition of the ‘myth of the innocent civilian’ the German inhabitants of Dresden were certainly less innocent than the American employees in the twin towers. But the leftist-liberal doesn’t see that. He doesn’t see that the German civilians in Dresden were culpable for Nazism. He does however think that Americans, and foreigners who had the ill fortune to work in the twin towers were guilty of being ‘little Eichmanns.’
One problem with terrorism is that it disproportionately affects working people. Very few intellectuals die in terror attacks. This is perhaps a shame. Intellectuals like to pontificate a lot about terrorism. They like to act as judge and jury regarding who deserves to be a victim of terrorism and who does not. They describe “settlers” as ‘ethnic-cleansers’ and property owners as genociders and thus declare that they deserve death. But where exactly does Noam Chomsky and his ilk think they came from? They can claim that their fellow Americans deserve death but they themselves are not very far removed from those Americans, despite their residence in the ivory tower. They are juiced into the capitalist market, they shop at the same stores and they receive American tax dollars to fund their rights to free speech at American Universities. Their ancestors were also ‘settlers’. The problem with history is it usually victimizes the wrong people. Academics rarely die in terrorist attacks because they are shielded from them by the fact that they are wealthy and work in un-crowded environments. In Israel the majority of the 1000 victims of the Second Intifada were working people who used buses for transportation and soldiers. Needless to say few academics use buses and none serve in the armed forces. People like Ward Churchill deserve to be dispatched to the front. For too long academics have escaped the dangers of the conflicts they themselves support and fuel with their hate. Professors may determine that I am no innocent civilian, but I do not think they are innocent. I think that if someone were to bring vengeance upon the intellectuals who have for too long called everyone else ‘Nazi’ that one would be warranted to do so. Ward Churchill speaks of those who ‘push back’. Perhaps one day people will tire of being described as Nazis and they will show Churchill how the Nazis actually dealt with those who insulted them. In fact the very existence of people like Mr. Churchill shows the degree to which we are not in fact Nazis, had we been Nazis people like Mr. Churchill would have been gassed long ago. He should glory in the fact that civilians and workers are so docile in the face of his hate and vitriol which is funded by their tax dollars. He should have been lynched long ago, then he might know the face of hate and then at least he would have an excuse to judge all of us and decide that we deserve death. Hitler once noted in a speech he gave that “when I hear the word ‘intellectual’ the first thing I do is draw my gun.” Perhaps those deemed ‘little eichmanns’ would do well to arm themselves. We are tired of being condemned to death because people think we are ‘nazis’. Too many nations which consist of perfectly decent people have already been trampled under foot because of this slander.
Sunday, December 16, 2007
Newsletter 15 The New International Class and the Media
Terra Incognita
Issue 15
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
December 16th, 2007
This is a slightly new format, the first article is quite but it organized in a new and dynamic way.
1) Anthropology of the New International Class: There is a class of people that work for international organizations such as the Red Cross, the U.N, Amnesty International and Human Right Watch. I propose to examine this class using anthropology. What are its internal social norms? What does it eat, how does it speak, what are its working ways and its spiritual ways? What kind of family does it come from and what kind of lifestyle does it live, how does it speak? What is its heritage and how did it come about. I also propose to define this group as its own Class in the Marxist sense, a class of bourgeoisie people who do not work in a genuine manner and yet have a very powerful, domineering and colonialist-racist role in the world. I propose to also examine those groups who have actively resisted the imposition of this class, such as American citizens, Congolese generals and Al Quaida in the Islamic Maghreb. In short, the whole world has a role to play in combating this new imperialism.
2) The Media and the understanding of history: The media doesn’t so much manufacture consent as it manufactures history. It no longer plays the role of informing the public but rather it tells the public how to think. It is a nefarious thing and its main role in modern society is the purposeful distortion of reality.
Anthropology of the New International Class
Seth J. Frantzman
December 13th, 2007
The world bank just endorsed $5.6 billion dollars in aid for the Palestinians over the next three years. In order to disperse that aid and oversee its distribution a virtual army of people is required. That army is composed of people who are members of what should be called the New International Class.
Who they are; traditions, demographics, origins
Anthropology is usually used to tell us about the cultures, traditions and societies of 'simple' and 'savage' peoples. It applies best to nude people who usually live in jungles. Needless to say it is rarely used to examine Europeans or wealthy people. But important strides have been made in the field of cultural geography and anthropology. The book Albions Seed applies many classic anthropological descriptions to understand the four waves of British settlers who came to the Americas between 1600 and 1800. The book-turned movie Nanny Diaries makes a joking attempt to analyze the culture of women on the upper west side of Manhattan.
I have identified a class of people that exist that deserve to be studied anthropologically. Membership in this class is not based on tribe. In fact membership in this class is mostly based on membership or employment by an international organization, usually an NGO. Examples might include Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, any U.N organization(UNESCO, UNHCR) or the ICRC(International Committee of the Red Cross). The number of people that are members of this class may number in the millions worldwide. A study has never been to try to quantify their numbers or the amount of money spend on this tribe of internationals. Let us begin by trying to describe who they are.
These people are mostly born in Western European countries or the United States. A minority of them come from the rest of the world, such as South America, Asia and Africa. All of the members of this class are born into wealthy families in their home countries. They are likely to be descendents of people that were once landed gentry. The poorer the country they come from the more likely it is that they come from the absolute upper crust of society. In the United States a disproportionate number of them are Jews and Blue-bloods. Needless to say very few African-Americans become members of this class. The Europeans who become members of this class are invariably from the urban Bourgeoisie. All of the members of this class have college educations and some of them have second degrees. Almost all of them have never worked a job in their lives that was not in some way connected with an NGO or a governmental organization. They have never worked for a business or a company and they have never had a 'blue collar' job. Most of them have traveled in their lives. For the Americans that become members of this class most have traveled a great deal more than the average American.
Working habits
They are usually employed in countries they know nothing about, and it is not infrequent that they do not even speak the languages of the people of the country in which they 'work'. They almost always live alone in large houses paid for by their organization. Many of them receive cars from their 'employer'. They usually make between ten and one hundred time what the average salary is in the country in which they are employed. When they work in places like Africa they may make as much as 10,000 times what the average person in their host country earns.
Social rituals
They associate mostly with eachother. If they have friendships with people outside their International Class it is usually with journalists, government employees, diplomats or wealthy tourists from their home countries or European countries. They dine at the nicest restaurants. Many of them smoke. Many of them are alcoholics. They always know where the best bars are in every country they have visited and invariably they compare stories of where the best bar and 'secret wonderful' place to drink and club is. Even in the most backward country where people are the most poor, such as the Congo, the International Class will have their club and their bar that they know about and go to. Whether it is Ramallah or Gaza City they have their place of choice. Usually they provide the only income for these places so that the bar actually exists only to serve them. In countries where drinking is prohibited for the masses and where men and women rarely meet in public places after nightfall they will have a bar where men and women dance and drink together that caters only to them. In some countries, especially in Africa, they will be some of the only people in the country who drive expensive SUVs. In fact the SUV is part of their culture. Usually the SUV is white and has the symbol of their organization printed on it.
They are good at writing reports on the people they 'observe' as part of their 'work'. Many of them spend most of their day judging and condemning the citizens of the countries they are posted to. They frequently share stories about their experiences with the native population. Their experience may include endless stories about being ripped off by cab drivers or slumming it in their host cities red light district. In fact 'slumming it' and 'talking to the natives' is a major part of their culture. Frequently they receive praise and congratulations each time they describe an encounter with a 'native' to their friends. Their story may include going to a wedding of a native or observing a native in his house or having a native 'friend'. The friend is not a genuine friend for them but a token, a sort of badge they wear. So they may say things like "my Palestinian friend" or "my Kenyan friend". One can know the difference between a genuine friend and one of these token friends by the way there are introduced in a conversation. If the person is a genuine friend they are introduced by their name first. If they are a trophy or a token they are introduced first by their race, ethnicity, religion or country of origin. The reason for the difference is that members of this class view the 'natives' they meet as not being completely human and that is why they describe them first as a race or a religion rather than as a person. For them the only people that exist are members of their class or members of their home country.
Many of them wear clothes and act certain ways and do things in order to tell about it later. For instance one of them I examined wore a 'Taybeh beer shirt' that was brand new. He didn't wear the shirt because he liked it but because he wanted to use it as a conversation piece. He said "this shirt offends right wing people, I wear it see the reactions I get." Members of this class do not get genuine satisfaction out of experiences they have unless this experience can be relayed to a friend as part of an endless competition between members about who is more cultural and tolerant and diverse. They go to cultural events mostly to say they want rather than to appreciate them. Many times they will go to a country and know absolutely nothing about it but they will go to a wedding or some festival mostly to tell their friends about the festival. The female members of this class will go so far as to become sexually intimate with 'natives' in order to tell their girlfriends about it. Despite their claims of not being racist they will begin a sentence with "I went out with a black man" or "I saw a gorgeous black man" or "I once dated a Palestinian." The sentence reveals the fact that they didn't date the person because of a genuine interest in the native as a person but merely as a conquest the way a frat boy might say "we had an Asian stripper come over last night." Members of this class dwell in the exotic and the taboo. They decorate their houses with 'exotic' things but things that are not genuine. They mostly buy the decorations so they can talk about them, rather than because they genuinely like them. Most interestingly many members of this class do not keep pictures of their family in their houses but rather pictures of natives they have met. The pictures serve as another badge.
This class speaks about racism a lot. It is a subject of many of their conversations and they are quick to ostracize a member who has become a 'racist'. In one conversation I had with one of these people he was telling me how he had a 'Kenyan friend.' His friend didn't have a name. He was just "my Kenyan." So I asked with a devilish grin; "Is he black? Does he have big lips." This of course offended the person I was speaking to and he proceeded to make a mental note that I was a 'racist'. This is how this class thinks. It is quite sensitive to its perceptions of what racism is. It is often quite judgmental regarding the natives. While it may revel in attending the native ceremonies and cultures and festivals, it is quick to condemn certain aspects of the native society. The class has a contempt for the people they deal with on a daily basis and they revel in stories about how horrible the native makes their lives, while at the same time reveling in other stories about how exotic the natives are. The class also has a notable lack of honor. They revel in stories about fleeing cabs without paying and not paying for their drinks. They revel in stories about going out with their friend's ex-girlfriends and then allowing their same friends to beat on those ex-girlfriends, all the while playing the innocent victim of circumstances. In reality this is simply a class that lacks control. Unlike their ancestors who frequently exercised a great deal of self control and personal responsibility, these people do not have these concepts. They also do not understand the concepts of humiliation or honor. Members of this class never donate money to anything. They live on the donated money of others, but they themselves never give their own money to anyone or anything, unless they are paying too much for something in a foreign bizarre and then they excuse it by saying the 'local people are poor. Most members of this class do not have any interest in their own culture. They are not religious and they adhere to the philosophies of post-humanism, moral-relativism and secular-humanism. They usually know almost nothing about their own family background and while they may study the religions and intricate religious laws of others, they frequently know nothing about their own historical heritage. Even they are they the descendants of dirt poor refugees or Holocaust survivors they invariably will help the majority, such as Muslims in Morocco, rather than their own people or minorities (for instance one Jewish member of this class who works for the Red Cross and whose family were Holocaust survivors, when he learned that the author works for a Jewish charity, asked ‘I would like to know more about what they do for Palestinians’. Incidentally, during the Holocaust the Red Cross covered up Nazi crimes and actively collaborated with the Nazi regime, it is no surprise that a descendant of the very Jews the Red Cross helped murder would work for the Red Cross helping Muslims).
Historical roots
The New International Class came into existence in the aftermath of the Second World War when 'Wasp rot' set in among the wealthy classes of the west and rather then devoting themselves to working they devoted themselves to charity and aid and setting up organizations and trusts that would support themselves and their children. Towards this end they harnessed their home governments with huge obligations and they engaged in endless fundraising among the working wealthy to create giant organizations who sole purpose was the largesse associated with employing the children of the elite cultured classes of the west.
Conflict, growth and geographic structure
But the New International Class is not completely safe in the bubbles of security and wealth it creates in foreign countries. Despite the fact that it shuttles from expensive first class seats on an airline to a five star hotel and then to its expensive apartment in the most prestigious part of town(the U.N office in Algiers in the prestigious Hydra neighborhood for instance) and then to work in a large building guarded by locals it is not completely immune from what goes on around it. Sometimes the native resistance against the foreign New International Class consists of minor things such as theft, mugging or harassment. Sometimes it consists of stone throwing. Sometimes this can get worse. Sometimes members of the class are murdered and raped. Very infrequently a local resistance organization will blow up a building the houses members of the International Class. This has been the case in bombings of U.N compounds in Afghanistan, Iraq, Gaza and most recently in Algeria. But the New International Class is pernicious. Its reports can harm the international standing and reputation of the countries that the class reports upon. Thus like a parasite the class is able to have a stranglehold over a country's ability to get rid of it. Expelling members of the U.N or Amnesty International or the Red Cross merely makes the country seem evil and increases the chances of sanctions and boycotts of that country. If the country is particularly offensive to members of the International Class the class may be able to rally western countries to bomb, invade and occupy the country. This has been the case in Kosovo, Bosnia, East Timor and Haiti to name a few places. In some cases the International Class is able to take over the judicial systems of other countries, deporting leaders it doesn't like such as Charles Taylor and Slobodan Milosevic and jailing them in the west. Other times the International Class merely sets up judicial shop in a country such as Cambodia and then presumes to prosecute former war criminals in that country. The International Class assumes that locals cannot do any of these things themselves. Corruption is usually the word that is uses by the International Class to tar the countries that they don't like. When a country is said to be 'Corrupt' then the International Class has an excuse to move in to begin taking over the country, whether it is the judicial system or the banks. Countries have a hard time extricating themselves from this cancer once it has infested a country. The International Class never leaves once it has gotten a foothold. Organizations such as the Temporary International Presence in Hebron (TIPH) are infamously not temporary. They never leave once they have a 'mandate' to do something. They are self supporting in the sense that they employ a certain number of the International Class who now lobby their home country to keep supporting their 'important, significant and necessary' work. One of the only countries to extricate itself from this horror in recent years has been Eritrea and even it was only able to expel the international aid organizations. Aid and charitable organizations are especially adept in Africa at creating dependence among the 'natives' so that the aid organization then becomes necessary to the survival of the local population. Because the International Class has no expertise at doing anything that involves working with their hands they are incapable of providing genuine aid that might help people survive, so the International Class provides hand outs in the form of food stuffs that create dependency. Then more jobs are created for wealth white westerners and their SUVs to move in to distribute more food. The International Class is not entirely benign when it comes to the sex slave trade either. Many countries such as Djibouti offer girls as young as 10 to clients who more often than not are members of the International Class. In some countries U.N workers and thus members of the Class were found to have traded food for sex with teenage girls and boys.
Resistance
The New International Class is a pariah, a cancer, a parasite. It is a thing that sucks the life blood out of nations and destroys the souls of the people it comes in contact with. Staffed by secular cynical addicted westerners, it spreads its sickness throughout the globe. Few organizations have the wherewithal to combat it. Those organizations such as Al Quieda in the Islamic Maghreb that have set as their goal the cleansing of North Africa of non-Muslims may target members of the Class but they also murder innocent people in the process (a recent bombing in Algeirs killed five U.N workers and 26 civilians). While the prospect of Islamism in places like Egypt may not be something the west likes very much it may turn out that this is the only way to remove the parasite from the body. I heard the members of this class talking this week about their days drinking in Egypt and going to the brothels and running away from cabbies who were trying to scam them and giggling about how the 'tourist police' beat down the natives who dared to try anything. Wouldn't Egypt be better off without these people? Wouldn't Africa be better off if all the money that is spent on the white charity workers and their SUVs went instead to local people? The parasite of Internationalism should spend its time fixing the ills in its home country. Human Rights Watch should be on the streets of suburban Paris. There should be a Temporary International presence there.
General Nkunda's solution
One can barely open a newspaper without seeing article after article discussing the role of this Class in the world. An article entitled 'A battered Congo again in convulsions' in the Herald Tribune on December 13th noted that "UN peacekeepers swept in late Tuesday to occupy the town as the Congolese Army fled. The fight came only a year after Western nations helped organize and pay for an election…the violence is also unfolding despite years of military and diplomatic intervention by the United Nations, the European Union and the United States…to create, for the first time since its independence from Belgium in 1960, a stable and prosperous Congo. 'The fundamental issues that led to the Congo war have never really been dealt with' said Anneke Van Woudenberg of Human Rights Watch.' " The article describes how General Nkunda has been trying to protect the Tutsi minority in Eastern Congo from being massacred by U.N supported Hutu militias, the same militias driven out of Rwanda in 1994 because of their involvement in the genocide. Notice how this article reveals the usual suspects meddling in another country's affairs: the U.N, the E.U and Human Rights Watch all have their fangs in the Congo. A white woman named Anneke is the 'expert' on the Congo, certainly the media couldn't interview one of the 'blacks'. Although the U.N and the International Class portray this as a warlord, Mr. Nkunda, fighting the government of the Congo it is really about a General fighting to save his people from a U.N sponsored genocide. Nkunda, like Al Quieda in North Africa, is resisting the International Class's attempt to re-colonize the Congo. Note how the article admits that the U.N and the E.U are trying to bring Congo back to the 'peace' that she experienced under Belgium colonialism. In fact the EU and the UN and Human Rights Watch are trying to impose a new imperial order in the Congo. Some people in the Congo don't appreciate it. Meanwhile at the Hague the Un Yugoslav War Crimes tribunal, which is staffed by whig wearing members of the International Class, sentenced a Serb general named Dragomir Milosevic to 33 years in prison for bombarding Sarajevo. His crime was using artillery against a city during a siege. Its odd that in European history they never convicted any other western Europeans of this crime. America dropped an atomic bomb on a city and no one convicted those who ordered that of 'war crimes'. Nato bombed the civilian inhabited capital of Serbia and yet that was not an 'illegal' act or a war crime for which the American Commander Wesley Clark was ever put on trial for. Yasser Arafat conducted a bombing campaign against Israel. According to the article "the use of indiscriminate weapons is illegal." Also according to the article Mr. Milosevic caused shoppers to be "terrified". Oddly enough when Jewish shoppers were terrified of Palestinian bombers between 2000 and 2004 the same International Class accused Israel of war crimes and described those who murdered Israeli shoppers as 'freedom fighters.' It is odd that this illegality only applies to people that the International Class doesn't like. Not one of those responsible for the Sudanese genocide will ever be brought to justice, for instance.
The American Solution and the potential for cultural change
I recall once I saw a bumper sticker in the United States that said 'warning to evil' and it depicted a U.N helmet with a bullet hole in it. Ordinary Americans are famous for their hatred of the New International Class. What the world needs to learn, particularly the countries being victimized by this class, is a lesson from America. More firearms and an independent spirit make for less U.N workers. Al Quaida in the Islamic Maghreb is a pathetic organization that will never succeed in freeing its country from the International Cancer. Only popular resistance can rid one of the menace. The day will come when this Class will be washed away. Most likely however this will come about not because of an uprising in the host countries but because the west is being overrun by poverty stricken immigrants who will eventually plunge the west into a downward economic spiral and thus the resources for the support of the Class will evaporate and all the wealthy bourgeoisie people who made up the recruits for this class will find themselves having to get real jobs where they work with their hands, perhaps in the soil. Only then will they be returned to a genuine spirit and only then perhaps, after many years, when one of the members of this Class is working in a field with his hands next to a man named Robert who happens to come from Kenya, only then will the member of this Class refer to his friend as Robert rather than "my Kenyan" or "my black friend."
A complete re-write of history: The media's role in crafting what we think and how we remember.
Seth J. Frantzman
December 11th, 2007
The media plays the most nefarious role in creating history, in creating a selective history based on the outlook and beliefs of those who write for the media, journalists. The media does not so much convey the news to the public but rather it frames the news so that the public is deceived into viewing the world their the lens that the media places in front of us.
Take very simple things. The BBC informs readers, on a report about a road trip around South Africa, that "Mr Majozi was born in 1948, the year the National Party came to power and began implementing apartheid." This is, however, untrue. The system of Apartheid, almost all of the racial basis for it, were created long before 1948 by the British colonial administration of the country. 1948 marked the victory of the National party, a predominantly Afrikaner based political party that made Apartheid a pillar of the country, adding greater emphasis to it. The News desires simple answers. So its answer is to create a mythical history by enshrining a date with historical significance.
BBC writers inform us that a town in South Africa is "a soulless place where even the atmosphere in the local taxi rank is subdued." It is nice to have such editorializing in a 'news' story, but many people would prefer to live without this. Who is a white journalist from an upper class family in England to judge what is soulless? Perhaps many of us would consider England, with is dismal weather, its rampant crime, and its arrogant news organizations to be a soulless place.
Showing his discomfort with what the author considers is the "old South Africa" he notes that "The streets still bear the names of Afrikaner heroes such as Paul Kruger. That is not in the least bit unusual in predominantly Afrikaans-speaking towns, but I am surprised to find myself in 'President' Kruger Street." It is strange to hear an Englishmen speak this way since it was, after all, his ancestors who colonized South Africa, who named half the country with English names (Ladysmith, Queenstown, King William Town, East London, Jamestown, Port Elizabeth). It was the English crown that sent 350,000 men to fight the Boers in 1899 and to destroy the independence of President Kruger's Boer Republic. In doing so they managed to build the first concentration camps and murder 24,000 Afrikaner women and children. It is perhaps no surprise then that a BBC journalist today would wince at the sight of a President Kruger Street. Surely the same BBC journalist is annoyed at the fact that the capital of the United States is named Washington after another independence minded president who didn't appreciate English colonialism.
But there is something insidious in the way the journalist writes "still bear the names" as if the journalist objects, as if he feels he should have a right to change the names to fit his image of how people should live. It is strange that journalists reporting on the Soviet Union in the 1930s had no problem with all the name changes going on there at the time. It is perhaps no surprise that journalists in the 1930s covered up Stalin's genocide in the Ukraine and that they were even awarded Pulitzer prizes for having done so.
What is this profession then? This journalism? Chomsky called it an attempt to 'manufacture consent'. But journalists and the media don't manufacture consent so much as they manufacture opinion and history. What is most fascinating is that the media likes to publish polls of what people think. Take all the polls we see that are published regarding global warming. The media tells us that a huge percentage of people now believe global warming to be the greatest threat to the world and the greatest threat to their daily lives. But this perception of global warming as the End of Days wasn't thought up by the public overnight. The public didn't have an epiphany and all wake up believing that Global Warming would end life on earth as we know it within the coming years. The public was told to believe this by the media. The media fashioned a massive number of hysterical reports about global warming and then produced survey after survey showing us, the public, getting more concerned. Everyone's initial reaction to a survey that shows that 90% of people believe something is to immediately ask themselves "why don't I believe that…everyone else does…I should too." People are innately programmed to go along and if they find out that everyone else is scared to death of global warming it is no surprise that in order to fit in they now feel global warming is a great menace. The only exception is people that are naturally and instinctually contrarian who believe that if everyone else believes something then they should believe the opposite. But whether it is the follower or the contrarian both of them are affected by the way in which the media warps people's minds.
All the studies of media bias always seem to come to grief on the fact that those doing the research are seemingly incapable of measuring the bias, usually because the researchers themselves are biased. For this reason researchers have found rampant bias in Fox News but inexplicably have not found any Bias in CNN or the BBC. But it all hinges on what questions are being asked in their studies. One study I was privileged to work on investigated bias in the American and Israeli media. The variable it hinged on was how often certain people from certain political parties were mentioned in news reports and whether or not they were quoted. The professors involved, Drs Tamir Schaefer and Dr. Gadi Wolfsfeld of the Hebrew University thought they were measuring bias. They thought they were showing that a given news outlet quoted or mentioned one political party more than another. But the media is too shrewd to be caught in its bias by a simple study like this. Take our British reporter at the BBC and his report on South Africa. A simple test like this would show that he mentioned all the races and people of South Africa. He duly interviewed a white person and a black person. He mentioned Kruger and Mandela. What is important is not how often the news media mentions something but the way in which is frames its discussion of the thing. The Nazi run media in Germany mentioned the Jews a great deal. By the Shafer/Wolfsfeld model we would be led to believe that it was biased in favor of the Jews, because they got so much press. But just because something is mentioned a lot doesn't mean it is being mentioned in a positive or negative manner, and it is this framing that the media uses to alter public opinion. It doesn't matter if the media mentioned Hilary Clinton as often as it does Barak Obama in the run up to the 2008 Democratic primaries. If each mention of Clinton makes her out to be honorable and good and each mention of Barak describes him as inept and fumbling, we know what the media is trying to tell us. Some might claim that the media is telling us the truth. But one can be assured when dealing with the media that it does not engage in the truth.
The media has one function in society and that is to propagandize and manipulate public feelings, to craft and distort history and to lie to the public to such a degree that it makes the existence of a free press almost useless, given that fact that an unfree press can lie to the public just as well. The only difference between a free press and that run by a dictatorship is the likelihood that a free society may produce marginal voices that contradict the mainstream press's account of things. But in a place such as the United Kingdom the most popular news outlets such as the BBC, the Independent and the Guardian all march in lock step in their extreme emotional propagandistic view of events in the world and their interpretation of history. The only difference between the press in Stalinist Russia and that the New York Times in the 1930s was that the New York Times was written in English. No substantial difference existed between their portrayal of the socialist utopia being created by Comrade Uncle Joe Stalin.
The Press cannot help but to lie and manufacture history, since that is its job. One should not read any news publication without first asking "what is the narrative frame we are being asked to view these events through?" "Who is the author and what is his or her point of view?" Every news article should be read twice with these questions in mind. One should pay careful attention to any pictures that accompany the article to see how they may portray the people mentioned.
Lets do a simple analysis of a news article the BBC published on December 10th, 2007 entitled "In Pictures: West Bank Bedouin cling to traditions amid settlement pressure." According to the report 50,000 Bedouin live in the West Bank and 'Life has always been tough for these nomadic Arab tribes, but they now face a great challenge from the Israeli authorities settling Israeli citizens in the area." The author has already set the scene for us. There is already a good and an evil. The good or rather the victim, is the Bedouin. The evil is the Israeli. But now a face must go with the good. It is the face of Shaeb Hadolim, a 61 year old man who was "forced from Beersheba in 1948 by Jewish fighters." Now we begin to see more of the story. A wonderful picture of the saddened and poverty stricken victim, Mr. Hadolim, accompanies the article. He wears his traditional exotic Khaffiyeh or Arab headdress like Lawrence of Arabia, evoking our sympathy and our love of the 'other.' The heading of this section was 'flight'. The heading of the next section is "squeezed" and we see how in 1981 an Israeli "settlement" was built beside Mr. Hadolim's "home". Recall that in the first section these Bedouin were described as "nomads". The article explains that the Israeli settlements are "illegal under almost every interpretation of international law" and that they "squeeze" Mr. Hadolim off his land. The next section entitled 'Permission denied" explains that Mr. Hadolim once had an easy time building his encampment but now he cannot obtain permission. The next section of the article shows the Jew, Mr. Ron Tsorel, who lives in the settlement and says "God gave us the land." The Jew wears western clothing like any person in London might and sits in his well watered suburban yard. His is the wealthy oppressor. Whereas the camera angle on Mr. Hadolim was strait towards him, showing him as an equal to the reader, the camera angle portraying the Israeli Jew shows him towering over us with a smug nasty expression on his face. The next section is entitled "survival" and shows an Arab woman in all black bending over but not facing the camera. The BBC surely knows it would offend Arab sensibilities to show the women's face, so he complies. The article describes how there is not electricity for the Bedouin family and how they must live on handouts. Next we see a picture of the happy Bedouin children, smiling little girls, which make us more sympathetic. The last section is described as "until death" and includes a quote to this affect from Mr. Hadolim. He is at once heroic and a victim.
But what isn't included in this little vignette of good and evil of power versus weakness of government versus individual of Jew versus Arab? First of all Mr. Hadolim was only 2 years old when he was "forced" from Beersheba. Second of all why was he, a nomad' forced from a settled town? Neither one of these 'facts' seems very strong. Next one should ask about the way in which Mr. Hadolim and his family obtained the land that he was subsequently "squeezed" from. Did he pay for it or did he just build a camp there that consisted of a camel hair Bedouin tent? And what is the nature of the "home" that this man is being squeezed from if we were informed earlier that he was a "nomad." And what of the other 54,999 Bedouin who live in the West Bank? The article insinuates that they are all being thrown off their land by Israel. What percentage of them live next to settlements that were established after the Bedouin had already built encampments? Furthermore the article insinuates that the Bedouin "cling to traditions amid settlement pressure." What does this mean? It means the settlements are taking away their tradition of nomadism? But would'nt nomadism solve the problem depicted in this story? If Mr. Hadolim was a real nomad then would'nt he move from place to place every year, like the Bedouin used to do and then the existence of a small settlement wouldn't make no difference to him. What percent of the lands of the West Bank are taken up by Israeli settlements? In addition what percentage are taken up by settled Arab villages? What percentage does that leave Mr. Hadolim to use as his nomadic grazing land?
The entire story is a fabrication anyway. A close examination of the pictures show that the settlement has no impact on the lifestyle of Mr. Hadolim and the Israeli army does not demolish structures on the West Bank, unless they are used by terrorists or if they are illegally built Jewish outposts. Israel doesn't engage in town planning for Arabs in the West Bank, which is evident to anyone who uses Google Earth to examine the Arab settlement pattern in the West Bank. In addition Israel doesn't interfere with the Bedouin of the West Bank, who small in number, poor and who take no interest in the political situation. The only time Bedouins in the west bank run afoul of Israel is when they engage in smuggling of weapons. For the most part they were unaffected by the second intifada and by all the Arab-Israeli wars.
The news story fabricated an event and a conflict where none exists. But the news story has nothing to do with Bedouin. It has everything to do with the Jews and Israel and the settlements and the interest of the BBC to find a reason to portray Israel in a negative light. The BBC uses the story of this Bedouin to do so. The pictures serve as a perfect frame for the argument and they help convince the reader of what is right and what is wrong. This article is a perfect example of what journalism is.
From describing the murder of Hindus at the hands of a Muslim mob in India as "100 Hindus were immolated" so as to make it seem that they died by mistake while claiming that the Hindu Governor of Gujarat was responsible for the deaths of Muslims killed in retaliation, to describing the Balkan conflict in 1998 as "Milosevic's war against the Albanian people" without mentioning the activities of the KLA or the Nato bombing campaign, the media is one massive instrument in the hands of elites who seek to distort history and make the public believe certain things.
What would it be like if the media and its journalists didn't have an opinion? Imagine a story about the West Bank Bedouin that was just a factual story about them, without some massive political agenda where they were being used as pawns to portray someone else in a bad light. Imagine if journalists didn't have to use words like 'soulless' as if they were writing a fiction novel rather than doing the news. Journalism is a dishonorable profession that uses the perception of honesty and fairness to hide its insidious motives and very extreme viewpoints. British journalists especially should never be trusted, they seem to believe that the roll of the media is only to convince people of things, rather than to inform people and it is why one will never find a news story that comes out of Britain that is unbiased, factual and does not express an obvious opinion or frame the story in some sort of 'good versus evil' scenario.
Issue 15
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
December 16th, 2007
This is a slightly new format, the first article is quite but it organized in a new and dynamic way.
1) Anthropology of the New International Class: There is a class of people that work for international organizations such as the Red Cross, the U.N, Amnesty International and Human Right Watch. I propose to examine this class using anthropology. What are its internal social norms? What does it eat, how does it speak, what are its working ways and its spiritual ways? What kind of family does it come from and what kind of lifestyle does it live, how does it speak? What is its heritage and how did it come about. I also propose to define this group as its own Class in the Marxist sense, a class of bourgeoisie people who do not work in a genuine manner and yet have a very powerful, domineering and colonialist-racist role in the world. I propose to also examine those groups who have actively resisted the imposition of this class, such as American citizens, Congolese generals and Al Quaida in the Islamic Maghreb. In short, the whole world has a role to play in combating this new imperialism.
2) The Media and the understanding of history: The media doesn’t so much manufacture consent as it manufactures history. It no longer plays the role of informing the public but rather it tells the public how to think. It is a nefarious thing and its main role in modern society is the purposeful distortion of reality.
Anthropology of the New International Class
Seth J. Frantzman
December 13th, 2007
The world bank just endorsed $5.6 billion dollars in aid for the Palestinians over the next three years. In order to disperse that aid and oversee its distribution a virtual army of people is required. That army is composed of people who are members of what should be called the New International Class.
Who they are; traditions, demographics, origins
Anthropology is usually used to tell us about the cultures, traditions and societies of 'simple' and 'savage' peoples. It applies best to nude people who usually live in jungles. Needless to say it is rarely used to examine Europeans or wealthy people. But important strides have been made in the field of cultural geography and anthropology. The book Albions Seed applies many classic anthropological descriptions to understand the four waves of British settlers who came to the Americas between 1600 and 1800. The book-turned movie Nanny Diaries makes a joking attempt to analyze the culture of women on the upper west side of Manhattan.
I have identified a class of people that exist that deserve to be studied anthropologically. Membership in this class is not based on tribe. In fact membership in this class is mostly based on membership or employment by an international organization, usually an NGO. Examples might include Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, any U.N organization(UNESCO, UNHCR) or the ICRC(International Committee of the Red Cross). The number of people that are members of this class may number in the millions worldwide. A study has never been to try to quantify their numbers or the amount of money spend on this tribe of internationals. Let us begin by trying to describe who they are.
These people are mostly born in Western European countries or the United States. A minority of them come from the rest of the world, such as South America, Asia and Africa. All of the members of this class are born into wealthy families in their home countries. They are likely to be descendents of people that were once landed gentry. The poorer the country they come from the more likely it is that they come from the absolute upper crust of society. In the United States a disproportionate number of them are Jews and Blue-bloods. Needless to say very few African-Americans become members of this class. The Europeans who become members of this class are invariably from the urban Bourgeoisie. All of the members of this class have college educations and some of them have second degrees. Almost all of them have never worked a job in their lives that was not in some way connected with an NGO or a governmental organization. They have never worked for a business or a company and they have never had a 'blue collar' job. Most of them have traveled in their lives. For the Americans that become members of this class most have traveled a great deal more than the average American.
Working habits
They are usually employed in countries they know nothing about, and it is not infrequent that they do not even speak the languages of the people of the country in which they 'work'. They almost always live alone in large houses paid for by their organization. Many of them receive cars from their 'employer'. They usually make between ten and one hundred time what the average salary is in the country in which they are employed. When they work in places like Africa they may make as much as 10,000 times what the average person in their host country earns.
Social rituals
They associate mostly with eachother. If they have friendships with people outside their International Class it is usually with journalists, government employees, diplomats or wealthy tourists from their home countries or European countries. They dine at the nicest restaurants. Many of them smoke. Many of them are alcoholics. They always know where the best bars are in every country they have visited and invariably they compare stories of where the best bar and 'secret wonderful' place to drink and club is. Even in the most backward country where people are the most poor, such as the Congo, the International Class will have their club and their bar that they know about and go to. Whether it is Ramallah or Gaza City they have their place of choice. Usually they provide the only income for these places so that the bar actually exists only to serve them. In countries where drinking is prohibited for the masses and where men and women rarely meet in public places after nightfall they will have a bar where men and women dance and drink together that caters only to them. In some countries, especially in Africa, they will be some of the only people in the country who drive expensive SUVs. In fact the SUV is part of their culture. Usually the SUV is white and has the symbol of their organization printed on it.
They are good at writing reports on the people they 'observe' as part of their 'work'. Many of them spend most of their day judging and condemning the citizens of the countries they are posted to. They frequently share stories about their experiences with the native population. Their experience may include endless stories about being ripped off by cab drivers or slumming it in their host cities red light district. In fact 'slumming it' and 'talking to the natives' is a major part of their culture. Frequently they receive praise and congratulations each time they describe an encounter with a 'native' to their friends. Their story may include going to a wedding of a native or observing a native in his house or having a native 'friend'. The friend is not a genuine friend for them but a token, a sort of badge they wear. So they may say things like "my Palestinian friend" or "my Kenyan friend". One can know the difference between a genuine friend and one of these token friends by the way there are introduced in a conversation. If the person is a genuine friend they are introduced by their name first. If they are a trophy or a token they are introduced first by their race, ethnicity, religion or country of origin. The reason for the difference is that members of this class view the 'natives' they meet as not being completely human and that is why they describe them first as a race or a religion rather than as a person. For them the only people that exist are members of their class or members of their home country.
Many of them wear clothes and act certain ways and do things in order to tell about it later. For instance one of them I examined wore a 'Taybeh beer shirt' that was brand new. He didn't wear the shirt because he liked it but because he wanted to use it as a conversation piece. He said "this shirt offends right wing people, I wear it see the reactions I get." Members of this class do not get genuine satisfaction out of experiences they have unless this experience can be relayed to a friend as part of an endless competition between members about who is more cultural and tolerant and diverse. They go to cultural events mostly to say they want rather than to appreciate them. Many times they will go to a country and know absolutely nothing about it but they will go to a wedding or some festival mostly to tell their friends about the festival. The female members of this class will go so far as to become sexually intimate with 'natives' in order to tell their girlfriends about it. Despite their claims of not being racist they will begin a sentence with "I went out with a black man" or "I saw a gorgeous black man" or "I once dated a Palestinian." The sentence reveals the fact that they didn't date the person because of a genuine interest in the native as a person but merely as a conquest the way a frat boy might say "we had an Asian stripper come over last night." Members of this class dwell in the exotic and the taboo. They decorate their houses with 'exotic' things but things that are not genuine. They mostly buy the decorations so they can talk about them, rather than because they genuinely like them. Most interestingly many members of this class do not keep pictures of their family in their houses but rather pictures of natives they have met. The pictures serve as another badge.
This class speaks about racism a lot. It is a subject of many of their conversations and they are quick to ostracize a member who has become a 'racist'. In one conversation I had with one of these people he was telling me how he had a 'Kenyan friend.' His friend didn't have a name. He was just "my Kenyan." So I asked with a devilish grin; "Is he black? Does he have big lips." This of course offended the person I was speaking to and he proceeded to make a mental note that I was a 'racist'. This is how this class thinks. It is quite sensitive to its perceptions of what racism is. It is often quite judgmental regarding the natives. While it may revel in attending the native ceremonies and cultures and festivals, it is quick to condemn certain aspects of the native society. The class has a contempt for the people they deal with on a daily basis and they revel in stories about how horrible the native makes their lives, while at the same time reveling in other stories about how exotic the natives are. The class also has a notable lack of honor. They revel in stories about fleeing cabs without paying and not paying for their drinks. They revel in stories about going out with their friend's ex-girlfriends and then allowing their same friends to beat on those ex-girlfriends, all the while playing the innocent victim of circumstances. In reality this is simply a class that lacks control. Unlike their ancestors who frequently exercised a great deal of self control and personal responsibility, these people do not have these concepts. They also do not understand the concepts of humiliation or honor. Members of this class never donate money to anything. They live on the donated money of others, but they themselves never give their own money to anyone or anything, unless they are paying too much for something in a foreign bizarre and then they excuse it by saying the 'local people are poor. Most members of this class do not have any interest in their own culture. They are not religious and they adhere to the philosophies of post-humanism, moral-relativism and secular-humanism. They usually know almost nothing about their own family background and while they may study the religions and intricate religious laws of others, they frequently know nothing about their own historical heritage. Even they are they the descendants of dirt poor refugees or Holocaust survivors they invariably will help the majority, such as Muslims in Morocco, rather than their own people or minorities (for instance one Jewish member of this class who works for the Red Cross and whose family were Holocaust survivors, when he learned that the author works for a Jewish charity, asked ‘I would like to know more about what they do for Palestinians’. Incidentally, during the Holocaust the Red Cross covered up Nazi crimes and actively collaborated with the Nazi regime, it is no surprise that a descendant of the very Jews the Red Cross helped murder would work for the Red Cross helping Muslims).
Historical roots
The New International Class came into existence in the aftermath of the Second World War when 'Wasp rot' set in among the wealthy classes of the west and rather then devoting themselves to working they devoted themselves to charity and aid and setting up organizations and trusts that would support themselves and their children. Towards this end they harnessed their home governments with huge obligations and they engaged in endless fundraising among the working wealthy to create giant organizations who sole purpose was the largesse associated with employing the children of the elite cultured classes of the west.
Conflict, growth and geographic structure
But the New International Class is not completely safe in the bubbles of security and wealth it creates in foreign countries. Despite the fact that it shuttles from expensive first class seats on an airline to a five star hotel and then to its expensive apartment in the most prestigious part of town(the U.N office in Algiers in the prestigious Hydra neighborhood for instance) and then to work in a large building guarded by locals it is not completely immune from what goes on around it. Sometimes the native resistance against the foreign New International Class consists of minor things such as theft, mugging or harassment. Sometimes it consists of stone throwing. Sometimes this can get worse. Sometimes members of the class are murdered and raped. Very infrequently a local resistance organization will blow up a building the houses members of the International Class. This has been the case in bombings of U.N compounds in Afghanistan, Iraq, Gaza and most recently in Algeria. But the New International Class is pernicious. Its reports can harm the international standing and reputation of the countries that the class reports upon. Thus like a parasite the class is able to have a stranglehold over a country's ability to get rid of it. Expelling members of the U.N or Amnesty International or the Red Cross merely makes the country seem evil and increases the chances of sanctions and boycotts of that country. If the country is particularly offensive to members of the International Class the class may be able to rally western countries to bomb, invade and occupy the country. This has been the case in Kosovo, Bosnia, East Timor and Haiti to name a few places. In some cases the International Class is able to take over the judicial systems of other countries, deporting leaders it doesn't like such as Charles Taylor and Slobodan Milosevic and jailing them in the west. Other times the International Class merely sets up judicial shop in a country such as Cambodia and then presumes to prosecute former war criminals in that country. The International Class assumes that locals cannot do any of these things themselves. Corruption is usually the word that is uses by the International Class to tar the countries that they don't like. When a country is said to be 'Corrupt' then the International Class has an excuse to move in to begin taking over the country, whether it is the judicial system or the banks. Countries have a hard time extricating themselves from this cancer once it has infested a country. The International Class never leaves once it has gotten a foothold. Organizations such as the Temporary International Presence in Hebron (TIPH) are infamously not temporary. They never leave once they have a 'mandate' to do something. They are self supporting in the sense that they employ a certain number of the International Class who now lobby their home country to keep supporting their 'important, significant and necessary' work. One of the only countries to extricate itself from this horror in recent years has been Eritrea and even it was only able to expel the international aid organizations. Aid and charitable organizations are especially adept in Africa at creating dependence among the 'natives' so that the aid organization then becomes necessary to the survival of the local population. Because the International Class has no expertise at doing anything that involves working with their hands they are incapable of providing genuine aid that might help people survive, so the International Class provides hand outs in the form of food stuffs that create dependency. Then more jobs are created for wealth white westerners and their SUVs to move in to distribute more food. The International Class is not entirely benign when it comes to the sex slave trade either. Many countries such as Djibouti offer girls as young as 10 to clients who more often than not are members of the International Class. In some countries U.N workers and thus members of the Class were found to have traded food for sex with teenage girls and boys.
Resistance
The New International Class is a pariah, a cancer, a parasite. It is a thing that sucks the life blood out of nations and destroys the souls of the people it comes in contact with. Staffed by secular cynical addicted westerners, it spreads its sickness throughout the globe. Few organizations have the wherewithal to combat it. Those organizations such as Al Quieda in the Islamic Maghreb that have set as their goal the cleansing of North Africa of non-Muslims may target members of the Class but they also murder innocent people in the process (a recent bombing in Algeirs killed five U.N workers and 26 civilians). While the prospect of Islamism in places like Egypt may not be something the west likes very much it may turn out that this is the only way to remove the parasite from the body. I heard the members of this class talking this week about their days drinking in Egypt and going to the brothels and running away from cabbies who were trying to scam them and giggling about how the 'tourist police' beat down the natives who dared to try anything. Wouldn't Egypt be better off without these people? Wouldn't Africa be better off if all the money that is spent on the white charity workers and their SUVs went instead to local people? The parasite of Internationalism should spend its time fixing the ills in its home country. Human Rights Watch should be on the streets of suburban Paris. There should be a Temporary International presence there.
General Nkunda's solution
One can barely open a newspaper without seeing article after article discussing the role of this Class in the world. An article entitled 'A battered Congo again in convulsions' in the Herald Tribune on December 13th noted that "UN peacekeepers swept in late Tuesday to occupy the town as the Congolese Army fled. The fight came only a year after Western nations helped organize and pay for an election…the violence is also unfolding despite years of military and diplomatic intervention by the United Nations, the European Union and the United States…to create, for the first time since its independence from Belgium in 1960, a stable and prosperous Congo. 'The fundamental issues that led to the Congo war have never really been dealt with' said Anneke Van Woudenberg of Human Rights Watch.' " The article describes how General Nkunda has been trying to protect the Tutsi minority in Eastern Congo from being massacred by U.N supported Hutu militias, the same militias driven out of Rwanda in 1994 because of their involvement in the genocide. Notice how this article reveals the usual suspects meddling in another country's affairs: the U.N, the E.U and Human Rights Watch all have their fangs in the Congo. A white woman named Anneke is the 'expert' on the Congo, certainly the media couldn't interview one of the 'blacks'. Although the U.N and the International Class portray this as a warlord, Mr. Nkunda, fighting the government of the Congo it is really about a General fighting to save his people from a U.N sponsored genocide. Nkunda, like Al Quieda in North Africa, is resisting the International Class's attempt to re-colonize the Congo. Note how the article admits that the U.N and the E.U are trying to bring Congo back to the 'peace' that she experienced under Belgium colonialism. In fact the EU and the UN and Human Rights Watch are trying to impose a new imperial order in the Congo. Some people in the Congo don't appreciate it. Meanwhile at the Hague the Un Yugoslav War Crimes tribunal, which is staffed by whig wearing members of the International Class, sentenced a Serb general named Dragomir Milosevic to 33 years in prison for bombarding Sarajevo. His crime was using artillery against a city during a siege. Its odd that in European history they never convicted any other western Europeans of this crime. America dropped an atomic bomb on a city and no one convicted those who ordered that of 'war crimes'. Nato bombed the civilian inhabited capital of Serbia and yet that was not an 'illegal' act or a war crime for which the American Commander Wesley Clark was ever put on trial for. Yasser Arafat conducted a bombing campaign against Israel. According to the article "the use of indiscriminate weapons is illegal." Also according to the article Mr. Milosevic caused shoppers to be "terrified". Oddly enough when Jewish shoppers were terrified of Palestinian bombers between 2000 and 2004 the same International Class accused Israel of war crimes and described those who murdered Israeli shoppers as 'freedom fighters.' It is odd that this illegality only applies to people that the International Class doesn't like. Not one of those responsible for the Sudanese genocide will ever be brought to justice, for instance.
The American Solution and the potential for cultural change
I recall once I saw a bumper sticker in the United States that said 'warning to evil' and it depicted a U.N helmet with a bullet hole in it. Ordinary Americans are famous for their hatred of the New International Class. What the world needs to learn, particularly the countries being victimized by this class, is a lesson from America. More firearms and an independent spirit make for less U.N workers. Al Quaida in the Islamic Maghreb is a pathetic organization that will never succeed in freeing its country from the International Cancer. Only popular resistance can rid one of the menace. The day will come when this Class will be washed away. Most likely however this will come about not because of an uprising in the host countries but because the west is being overrun by poverty stricken immigrants who will eventually plunge the west into a downward economic spiral and thus the resources for the support of the Class will evaporate and all the wealthy bourgeoisie people who made up the recruits for this class will find themselves having to get real jobs where they work with their hands, perhaps in the soil. Only then will they be returned to a genuine spirit and only then perhaps, after many years, when one of the members of this Class is working in a field with his hands next to a man named Robert who happens to come from Kenya, only then will the member of this Class refer to his friend as Robert rather than "my Kenyan" or "my black friend."
A complete re-write of history: The media's role in crafting what we think and how we remember.
Seth J. Frantzman
December 11th, 2007
The media plays the most nefarious role in creating history, in creating a selective history based on the outlook and beliefs of those who write for the media, journalists. The media does not so much convey the news to the public but rather it frames the news so that the public is deceived into viewing the world their the lens that the media places in front of us.
Take very simple things. The BBC informs readers, on a report about a road trip around South Africa, that "Mr Majozi was born in 1948, the year the National Party came to power and began implementing apartheid." This is, however, untrue. The system of Apartheid, almost all of the racial basis for it, were created long before 1948 by the British colonial administration of the country. 1948 marked the victory of the National party, a predominantly Afrikaner based political party that made Apartheid a pillar of the country, adding greater emphasis to it. The News desires simple answers. So its answer is to create a mythical history by enshrining a date with historical significance.
BBC writers inform us that a town in South Africa is "a soulless place where even the atmosphere in the local taxi rank is subdued." It is nice to have such editorializing in a 'news' story, but many people would prefer to live without this. Who is a white journalist from an upper class family in England to judge what is soulless? Perhaps many of us would consider England, with is dismal weather, its rampant crime, and its arrogant news organizations to be a soulless place.
Showing his discomfort with what the author considers is the "old South Africa" he notes that "The streets still bear the names of Afrikaner heroes such as Paul Kruger. That is not in the least bit unusual in predominantly Afrikaans-speaking towns, but I am surprised to find myself in 'President' Kruger Street." It is strange to hear an Englishmen speak this way since it was, after all, his ancestors who colonized South Africa, who named half the country with English names (Ladysmith, Queenstown, King William Town, East London, Jamestown, Port Elizabeth). It was the English crown that sent 350,000 men to fight the Boers in 1899 and to destroy the independence of President Kruger's Boer Republic. In doing so they managed to build the first concentration camps and murder 24,000 Afrikaner women and children. It is perhaps no surprise then that a BBC journalist today would wince at the sight of a President Kruger Street. Surely the same BBC journalist is annoyed at the fact that the capital of the United States is named Washington after another independence minded president who didn't appreciate English colonialism.
But there is something insidious in the way the journalist writes "still bear the names" as if the journalist objects, as if he feels he should have a right to change the names to fit his image of how people should live. It is strange that journalists reporting on the Soviet Union in the 1930s had no problem with all the name changes going on there at the time. It is perhaps no surprise that journalists in the 1930s covered up Stalin's genocide in the Ukraine and that they were even awarded Pulitzer prizes for having done so.
What is this profession then? This journalism? Chomsky called it an attempt to 'manufacture consent'. But journalists and the media don't manufacture consent so much as they manufacture opinion and history. What is most fascinating is that the media likes to publish polls of what people think. Take all the polls we see that are published regarding global warming. The media tells us that a huge percentage of people now believe global warming to be the greatest threat to the world and the greatest threat to their daily lives. But this perception of global warming as the End of Days wasn't thought up by the public overnight. The public didn't have an epiphany and all wake up believing that Global Warming would end life on earth as we know it within the coming years. The public was told to believe this by the media. The media fashioned a massive number of hysterical reports about global warming and then produced survey after survey showing us, the public, getting more concerned. Everyone's initial reaction to a survey that shows that 90% of people believe something is to immediately ask themselves "why don't I believe that…everyone else does…I should too." People are innately programmed to go along and if they find out that everyone else is scared to death of global warming it is no surprise that in order to fit in they now feel global warming is a great menace. The only exception is people that are naturally and instinctually contrarian who believe that if everyone else believes something then they should believe the opposite. But whether it is the follower or the contrarian both of them are affected by the way in which the media warps people's minds.
All the studies of media bias always seem to come to grief on the fact that those doing the research are seemingly incapable of measuring the bias, usually because the researchers themselves are biased. For this reason researchers have found rampant bias in Fox News but inexplicably have not found any Bias in CNN or the BBC. But it all hinges on what questions are being asked in their studies. One study I was privileged to work on investigated bias in the American and Israeli media. The variable it hinged on was how often certain people from certain political parties were mentioned in news reports and whether or not they were quoted. The professors involved, Drs Tamir Schaefer and Dr. Gadi Wolfsfeld of the Hebrew University thought they were measuring bias. They thought they were showing that a given news outlet quoted or mentioned one political party more than another. But the media is too shrewd to be caught in its bias by a simple study like this. Take our British reporter at the BBC and his report on South Africa. A simple test like this would show that he mentioned all the races and people of South Africa. He duly interviewed a white person and a black person. He mentioned Kruger and Mandela. What is important is not how often the news media mentions something but the way in which is frames its discussion of the thing. The Nazi run media in Germany mentioned the Jews a great deal. By the Shafer/Wolfsfeld model we would be led to believe that it was biased in favor of the Jews, because they got so much press. But just because something is mentioned a lot doesn't mean it is being mentioned in a positive or negative manner, and it is this framing that the media uses to alter public opinion. It doesn't matter if the media mentioned Hilary Clinton as often as it does Barak Obama in the run up to the 2008 Democratic primaries. If each mention of Clinton makes her out to be honorable and good and each mention of Barak describes him as inept and fumbling, we know what the media is trying to tell us. Some might claim that the media is telling us the truth. But one can be assured when dealing with the media that it does not engage in the truth.
The media has one function in society and that is to propagandize and manipulate public feelings, to craft and distort history and to lie to the public to such a degree that it makes the existence of a free press almost useless, given that fact that an unfree press can lie to the public just as well. The only difference between a free press and that run by a dictatorship is the likelihood that a free society may produce marginal voices that contradict the mainstream press's account of things. But in a place such as the United Kingdom the most popular news outlets such as the BBC, the Independent and the Guardian all march in lock step in their extreme emotional propagandistic view of events in the world and their interpretation of history. The only difference between the press in Stalinist Russia and that the New York Times in the 1930s was that the New York Times was written in English. No substantial difference existed between their portrayal of the socialist utopia being created by Comrade Uncle Joe Stalin.
The Press cannot help but to lie and manufacture history, since that is its job. One should not read any news publication without first asking "what is the narrative frame we are being asked to view these events through?" "Who is the author and what is his or her point of view?" Every news article should be read twice with these questions in mind. One should pay careful attention to any pictures that accompany the article to see how they may portray the people mentioned.
Lets do a simple analysis of a news article the BBC published on December 10th, 2007 entitled "In Pictures: West Bank Bedouin cling to traditions amid settlement pressure." According to the report 50,000 Bedouin live in the West Bank and 'Life has always been tough for these nomadic Arab tribes, but they now face a great challenge from the Israeli authorities settling Israeli citizens in the area." The author has already set the scene for us. There is already a good and an evil. The good or rather the victim, is the Bedouin. The evil is the Israeli. But now a face must go with the good. It is the face of Shaeb Hadolim, a 61 year old man who was "forced from Beersheba in 1948 by Jewish fighters." Now we begin to see more of the story. A wonderful picture of the saddened and poverty stricken victim, Mr. Hadolim, accompanies the article. He wears his traditional exotic Khaffiyeh or Arab headdress like Lawrence of Arabia, evoking our sympathy and our love of the 'other.' The heading of this section was 'flight'. The heading of the next section is "squeezed" and we see how in 1981 an Israeli "settlement" was built beside Mr. Hadolim's "home". Recall that in the first section these Bedouin were described as "nomads". The article explains that the Israeli settlements are "illegal under almost every interpretation of international law" and that they "squeeze" Mr. Hadolim off his land. The next section entitled 'Permission denied" explains that Mr. Hadolim once had an easy time building his encampment but now he cannot obtain permission. The next section of the article shows the Jew, Mr. Ron Tsorel, who lives in the settlement and says "God gave us the land." The Jew wears western clothing like any person in London might and sits in his well watered suburban yard. His is the wealthy oppressor. Whereas the camera angle on Mr. Hadolim was strait towards him, showing him as an equal to the reader, the camera angle portraying the Israeli Jew shows him towering over us with a smug nasty expression on his face. The next section is entitled "survival" and shows an Arab woman in all black bending over but not facing the camera. The BBC surely knows it would offend Arab sensibilities to show the women's face, so he complies. The article describes how there is not electricity for the Bedouin family and how they must live on handouts. Next we see a picture of the happy Bedouin children, smiling little girls, which make us more sympathetic. The last section is described as "until death" and includes a quote to this affect from Mr. Hadolim. He is at once heroic and a victim.
But what isn't included in this little vignette of good and evil of power versus weakness of government versus individual of Jew versus Arab? First of all Mr. Hadolim was only 2 years old when he was "forced" from Beersheba. Second of all why was he, a nomad' forced from a settled town? Neither one of these 'facts' seems very strong. Next one should ask about the way in which Mr. Hadolim and his family obtained the land that he was subsequently "squeezed" from. Did he pay for it or did he just build a camp there that consisted of a camel hair Bedouin tent? And what is the nature of the "home" that this man is being squeezed from if we were informed earlier that he was a "nomad." And what of the other 54,999 Bedouin who live in the West Bank? The article insinuates that they are all being thrown off their land by Israel. What percentage of them live next to settlements that were established after the Bedouin had already built encampments? Furthermore the article insinuates that the Bedouin "cling to traditions amid settlement pressure." What does this mean? It means the settlements are taking away their tradition of nomadism? But would'nt nomadism solve the problem depicted in this story? If Mr. Hadolim was a real nomad then would'nt he move from place to place every year, like the Bedouin used to do and then the existence of a small settlement wouldn't make no difference to him. What percent of the lands of the West Bank are taken up by Israeli settlements? In addition what percentage are taken up by settled Arab villages? What percentage does that leave Mr. Hadolim to use as his nomadic grazing land?
The entire story is a fabrication anyway. A close examination of the pictures show that the settlement has no impact on the lifestyle of Mr. Hadolim and the Israeli army does not demolish structures on the West Bank, unless they are used by terrorists or if they are illegally built Jewish outposts. Israel doesn't engage in town planning for Arabs in the West Bank, which is evident to anyone who uses Google Earth to examine the Arab settlement pattern in the West Bank. In addition Israel doesn't interfere with the Bedouin of the West Bank, who small in number, poor and who take no interest in the political situation. The only time Bedouins in the west bank run afoul of Israel is when they engage in smuggling of weapons. For the most part they were unaffected by the second intifada and by all the Arab-Israeli wars.
The news story fabricated an event and a conflict where none exists. But the news story has nothing to do with Bedouin. It has everything to do with the Jews and Israel and the settlements and the interest of the BBC to find a reason to portray Israel in a negative light. The BBC uses the story of this Bedouin to do so. The pictures serve as a perfect frame for the argument and they help convince the reader of what is right and what is wrong. This article is a perfect example of what journalism is.
From describing the murder of Hindus at the hands of a Muslim mob in India as "100 Hindus were immolated" so as to make it seem that they died by mistake while claiming that the Hindu Governor of Gujarat was responsible for the deaths of Muslims killed in retaliation, to describing the Balkan conflict in 1998 as "Milosevic's war against the Albanian people" without mentioning the activities of the KLA or the Nato bombing campaign, the media is one massive instrument in the hands of elites who seek to distort history and make the public believe certain things.
What would it be like if the media and its journalists didn't have an opinion? Imagine a story about the West Bank Bedouin that was just a factual story about them, without some massive political agenda where they were being used as pawns to portray someone else in a bad light. Imagine if journalists didn't have to use words like 'soulless' as if they were writing a fiction novel rather than doing the news. Journalism is a dishonorable profession that uses the perception of honesty and fairness to hide its insidious motives and very extreme viewpoints. British journalists especially should never be trusted, they seem to believe that the roll of the media is only to convince people of things, rather than to inform people and it is why one will never find a news story that comes out of Britain that is unbiased, factual and does not express an obvious opinion or frame the story in some sort of 'good versus evil' scenario.
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