Terra Incognita
Issue 23
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
February 24th, 2008
The Human Rights of murder: Egypt has killed a dozen Africans over the last six months. Their crime was attempting to cross into Israel. They were shot in the back. The BBC does not report it. The Red Cross and the UN say nothing. Human Rights Watch protests the ‘excessive force’ employed by the Egyptians. Those who justify and excuse such murders, it is as if they themselves committed them. The souls of those murdered Africans should forever haunt the NGOs that have ignored and justified their murder.
Is the British Legal system and British Media the most arrogant in the world? The British legal system allows for the prosecution of war criminals anywhere in the world. Recently it was revealed the British sent anti-terrorism police to arrest an Israeli general at Heathrow. But why have the British never prosecuted their own war criminals such as Bloody Sunday’s General Jackson or Michael O’ Dwyer who was responsible for the Amritsar massacre?
Sarkozy's Jewish children: Sarkozy has proposed that every French child should learn the story of one of the 11,000 French Jewish children killed by the Nazis. Leftists are outraged. But the reason the French shouldn’t be burdened with this is not because it is traumatic. The French children should play the role of Europeans in the Holocaust in class. Most of them should turn their backs, some should work for the Red Cross, some should collaborate and then they should all come to hate Israel and blame it for their problems. Why should European children pretend to be Jews? They weren’t Jews in 1942. They aren’t Jews today.
The problematic conservative bogeyman: Movies often portray a future dominated by a totalitarian Stalinist ‘right wing’ government. Whether it is the remake of Richard III or Children of Men the future is decidedly right wing and militaristic. But there is a problem with the most recent portrayals of this right-wing ‘conservative Christian’ other. Why do the liberals in the future always team up with the Muslims?
The Human Rights of murder
February 22nd, 2008
Seth J. Frantzman
On February 21st, 2008 it was reported that Amnesty International had urged Egypt to ‘probe’ shootings of Africans by Egyptian police near the Israeli border. Amnesty International objected to the ‘excessive force’ used by Egypt. I wonder if Ermeniry Khasheef thought it was excessive force when he felt the bullet enter his back? I wonder if, as he lay dying on the border with Israel, he thought to himself “this is excessive, they should’nt have shot me in the back.” I wonder if he thought about the white woman 1,500 miles away in a cushy office in New York City who would describe his death as ‘excessive’. The Talmud enjoins us that ‘he who saves one life it is as if he saves the whole world.’ But there is a little known addendum to that passage, a minhag, or tradition, kept by some Jews that holds that “the person who excuses the murder of another, it is as if he committed the murder.” The Amnesty International employee who turned Mr. Khasheef’s death into ‘excessive force’, it is as if she committed the murder.
How many murders has Amnesty International committed? On January 19th a man from the Ivory Coast (we do not know his name but we do know he was black and therefore not worth as much as a wealthy BMW driving amnesty international worker) bled to death after being shot by an Egyptian soldier while trying to cross into Israel. On the 30th of January two other people bled to death after being shot by Egyptian police while trying to cross into Israel. We do not know their names, only that they were a 22 year old man and an 18 year old woman whose only crime was wishing for a better life in Israel. On February 16th an Eritrean woman named Mervat Mer Hatover was gunned down by Egyptian soldiers in front of her two children while trying to cross into Israel. Her daughters, eight and ten, are no doubt being sold into sexual slavery somewhere in Egypt. On February 24th it was reported that another Eritrean woman was gunned down by the Egyptian police while trying to ‘illegally’ cross into Israel. Needless to say the BBC has not reported one of these murders at the hands of the Egyptian police.
The ground literally cries out for justice. It does not cry out merely against the Egyptians. It cries out against Amnesty International. It cries out against Human Rights Watch. It cries out against the United Nations. It cries out against the Red Cross. It cries out against every single wealthy leftist and liberal. The dead reach out and say “why do you forsake me?” Why does the liberal forsake them? Why is it merely ‘excessive force’ when they die? The EU and the UN are today calling on Israel to lift the siege of Gaza, accusing Israel of using colelctive punishment and declaring that there is no military solution to the 7,500 rockets that have landed on the Israeli town of Sderot. Amnesty Internation proudly boasts four ‘Campaigns’ that are the hallmarks of its activism. These are: ‘Control Arms’, ‘Counter Terror with Justice’, ‘Irrepressible Info’ and ‘Stop Violence Against Women’. Amnesty’s biggest campaign is on behalf of terrorists through its campaign against the “The so-called ‘war on terror’ has led to an erosion of a whole host of human rights.”
This is our world. It is a world where you can shoot a man in the back. You can gun down a woman in front of her children. You can beat them and kill them and shoot them so long as you call them Kaffir or Nigger or African. That is the world. It is a world where you can’t lay siege to a place that has fired 7,000 rockets at you. It is a world where you can’t fight a war against terror. It is a world where there is no military solution to murder. It is a world run by Nazis, leftists and Islamists. What other kind of world could produce this? What other kind of world would look at Mr. Ermeniry Khasheef and say “this is some excessive force here”. Excessive? I hope one day the West sees this kind of excessive force on its door step. I hope one day the people at Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, the Red Cross, the U.N and the EU pay for their crimes against Humanity. Those who sit by and watch as a crime is committed and do nothing, they are as responsible as the criminal himself. They are accessories to the crime. Human rights organizations were there as Mervat Mer Hatover lay dying with her children looking on. They were there. Perhaps they were not there physically. But they were there. They can hide behind their expensive oak desks and their BMW cars and their carbon offsets and their yoga and their summer homes in the hamptons, but wherever they go Mrs. Hatover and Mr. Khasheef will always be there, haunting them, until the day they die.
Is the British Legal system and British Media the most arrogant in the world?
February 19th, 2008
Seth J. Frantzman
It was recently revealed that the British police who attempted to arrest Israeli general Doron Almog decided not to board his El Al flight at Heathrow for fear it might cause an armed standoff with Israeli security on the plane. The arrest warrant for Almog had been issued after a complaint by a British pro-Palestinian group and its legal firm, Hickman and Rose, no doubt a Jewish firm. British law allows for the prosecution of anyone in the world by a British court if someone complains that a person abroad has committed a ‘war crime’ against some other person abroad (not to be outdone, the Italian courts have recently indicted 250 South Americans for involvement with Operation Condor, despite the fact that no Italians were victims). Thus the jurisdiction of British courts is in fact the whole world.
It is rare that British courts have acted on their power. One Afghan warlord was prosecuted recently for ‘war crimes’ against other Aghans committed in the 1990s. The plaintiff in the case was a supposed victim of the Afghan who had moved to London. The warlord happened to also reside in London and was thus liable to prosecution. The British courts have decided that the world cannot police itself and that the British legal system must be responsible for determining what constitutes a ‘war crime’ and for finding all the war criminals in the world and bringing them to justice.
John O' Connor, a former head of Scotland Yard, reacting to the fact that Israeli General Almog had been able to fly back to Israel after being tipped off he might be arrested told BBC One's Breakfast programme "All they needed to do was to stop the plane from taking off and negotiate through the Foreign Office." He said he felt the arrest had been "written off", putting "British justice is in the dock." Detective Superintendent John MacBrayne, a senior British counter-terrorism officer who was responsible for the operation to apprehend Almog, could not get confirmation that his team had the right to board the plane.
This story reveals two things. First, it reveals that the British consider Israeli generals a greater terrorist threat that Islamists. Second, it reveals that the British have created the most arrogant legal system in the world. Not one British general or army officer has ever been brought to justice for the numerous massacres and war crimes carried out by British arms over the years. General Reginald Dyer, the man who ordered the Amritsar massacre in 1919, retired to England as a hero of Empire and died in 1921, apparently guilty over the whole episode. His superior, Governor of the Punjab, Michael O’Dwyer, was also feted as a hero and was only felled in Caxton Hall in London by a Sikh bullet to the head in 1940 (much like Indira would die in 1984 at the hands of her Sikh bodyguards for her role in Operation Blue Star). The British public had forgotten him by that time, the Sikhs evidently had not. O’Dwyer was never prosecuted for the war crime of Amritsar in which between 379 and 1,000 Indian civilians were killed.
During the Mau Mau uprising between 1952 and 1960 in Kenya some 20,000 Kenyans were killed by the British army, white Kenyan settlers and Kenyan loyalists, and a total of 6,000 Human rights violations were recorded, including rapes, castration, deadly whippings and 800 hangings by the British government. Not one British government officer, soldier, general or civilian governor was ever prosecuted. Leading figures such as Ian Henderson, Evelyn Baring and General George Erskine were never brought to justice for their war crimes.
During the Malayan Emergency of 1948-1960 a total of 7,000 Chinese Malayans were killed in a campaign against Communist guerillas in the country. In one massacre known as Batang Kali a total of 26 unarmed civilians were killed by Scots Guardsmen. None of the British commanders, such as Harold Briggs, Henry Gurney, Gerald Templer (coiner of the term ‘hearts and minds’) and Henry Wells was ever charged with war crimes.
In Northern Ireland during the troubles a total of 1,857 civilians were killed between 1968 and 1998. Of these the British security forces killed 368 and Loyalists killed 1,020. In Derry in 1972 a total of 26 Irish civilians were shot and killed by the British parachute Regiment. The commanders of the regiment, Derek Wilford and Mike Jackson were never charged. In fact Mike Jackson was promoted to General and was posted to Nato and was then a commander of Nato forces in Bosnia and of the Kfor Nato forces that occupied Kosovo in 1999.
Israeli general Almog was charged by the British with the ‘war crime’ of destroying 50 Palestinian homes during an operation against Palestinian terrorists. In Kenya the British relocated a million Kikuyu people to over 800 villages under a ‘villigazation program’. In Malaysia a total of 400,000 ethnic Chinese were relocated under the Briggs plan to ‘New villages’. The destruction of Banang Kali was one such incidence of a Chinese village destroyed and its inhabitants killed.
So why is it that over the years not one member of the British army has ever been indicted for their role in massacres and war crimes? Whether it was the bombing of civilian areas in Egypt during the Suez Crises of 1956 or Bloody Sunday there has never been an instance of a British soldier charged in a court of law in England for war crimes. Yet the British felt they had a right to charge General Almog. The British felt no compunction about occupying half the world with their empire. They felt no compunction about setting up the concentration camps in South Africa in the Boer war in which 30,000 women and children died. They felt no compunction about destroying ten thousand Boer farms in the war and removing the entire Boer population of the Free State and Transvaal to concentration camps during the war. No compunction whatsoever. They felt no compunction about their role in Kenya or Malaysia. Worst of all the British promoted men in involved in Bloody Sunday. And yet we see the British police sending anti-terrorism units against General Almog and claiming it was a malfunction of “British justice” that Almog was not arrested. The British should be ashamed of themselves and their court system. They should be ashamed that today England practices the same arrogant colonialism it has always practiced with a different standard for others than for British citizens. General Jackson should be arrested and brought to justice for his role in Bloody Sunday. But he will not be. In England there is one rule for English people and another rule for the rest of the world. The British media arrogantly feels it has a right to judge the world. This is why the British use their BBC to condemn every country in the world, while it never condemns the British. They condemned Israel when civilians were killed during the Intifada but when the British police murdered an innocent Brazilian immigrant in the wake of the London bombings there was no apology. The police were not relieved of their jobs. That was it. It seems the only way one can get justice when it comes to the British is to treat them the way Udham Singh treated Michael O’Dwyer. Singh was hung in England in 1940 for the ‘crime’ of killing O’Dwyer. But was it a crime? The British legal system would not bring Dwyer to justice, just as it would not bring Briggs or Jackson to justice. The same British legal system that today sends anti-terrorism squads to arrest Israeli generals would not arrest a British governor who ordered the killing of a 1,000 civilians. It would have been good had the British tried to storm an El Al plane. Perhaps they would have learned a little about fighting terrorism when they came face to face with General Almog who, in contrast to the British police who came to arrest him, has actually fought terrorism. The British legal system is the most arrogant people in the world. It is the epitome of the lie that is western civilization. It is the epitome of moral-relativism and multiculturalism. There are no British war criminals because like a liberal they judge others by different standards than they judge themselves. Thus an Israeli is held to a high standard. A British soldier can kill and rape and maim and depopulate and terrorize millions of people and there will never be any justice. Then years later the BBC will describe how Kenya has sunk into ‘chaos’ and British human rights campaigners will travel to Kenya to protest ethnic-cleansing. Who began the ethnic-cleansing in Kenya? Who settled the Kikuyus where they live today? Who was it that helped set tribe against tribe. Who was it that enrolled Luo’s in certain occupations and Kambas in other occupations? It couldn’t have been the British and their removal of a million Kikuyus between 1952 and 1960. That certainly couldn’t have anything to do with what is happening in Kenya. General Jackson, who shot down the Irish protestors, was all too happy to complain about ‘ethnic-cleansing’ in Bosnia and talk about ‘genocide’ in Kosovo. Perhaps he knew something about it from his role in Northern Ireland. The very people responsible for massacres are the ones that point the fingers at others. The majority of Germans say on surveys that there is no ‘moral’ difference between Israel and Nazism. The British ethnically-cleanse an African state, help set up a fascist racist state in Southeast Asia by cleansing Chinese people, send a war criminal to run Kosovo and then they sent anti-terrorism squads to arrest Israeli generals whose job it is to fight terrorism. Forgive me if I feel like I have more in common with Udham Singh than with the British legal system and the arrogant British media.
Sarkozy's Jewish children
February 17th, 2008
Seth J. Frantzman
Sarkozy has proposed a new education tool for use in teaching the Holocaust. He believes each French child should learn the life story of one of the 11,000 French Jewish children murdered by the Nazis during the Holocaust. His suggestion has caused outbursts of anger in France, mostly among the left, teacher's unions and historians, and even Jews. Descriptions of his proposal noted that he "wrapped his plan in the cloak of religion, blaming the wars and violence of the last century on an absence of God." Psychiatrists, who are known to be stable people, said his plan "unfairly burdens" the children and might saddle them with the "guilt of their forefathers" although it is not clear their forefathers ever expressed guilt for collaborating with the Nazis, but no matter. Activists were angry that Sarkozy had violated the supposed separation between church and state and the Republican ideal in France, apparently by daring to suggest that Jews were the main victims of the Holocaust. Historians described his move as a "manipulation of the past", although how the past is being manipulated is not clear. A Jewish survivor known as Simone Veil screamed "My blood turned to ice" when she heard the comment and noted "this history is too heavy to carry." Perhaps she was referring to herself rather than the children, or perhaps she was suggesting that the history of terrible things ought to be forgotten lest it frighten people in the present. According to accounts he "enraged politicians on the left, the biggest high school teachers' union and some historians [by asking that students] read a handwritten letter by a 17 year old who knew he was going to executed by the Nazis for his resistance activities." Evidently the French left didn't want students to recall that some of their countrymen hadn't collaborated. But others were simply angry that the Jews were getting the spotlight. Noting that the Holocaust is already studied as a "crime against humanity" some historians claim that if students had to learn the story of France's Jewish child victims then "you'd have to do it with the victims of slavery or the wars of religion."
The reaction of Jews is no doubt surprising. Jewish activists in Australia have been at the forefront of getting the Australian government to personally apologize to the Aborigines. Jewish leaders have claimed that every Australian must feel guilty for the crimes perpetrated against the Aboriginals. It is odd that in one country Jews demand that every person have guilt over something that most of their ancestors had nothing to do with and in another country where many people did collaborate just 60 years ago the Jews would like there to be no guilt.
The reaction of the left is hard to fathom, although not so hard given the fact that the left has become so right wing and Islamist of late. Why exactly the left thinks it is so terrible that children might learn about the child victims of the Nazis is not clear, although perhaps the left would be more happy if children were forced to play the role of a Palestinian child waiting at a check point. Perhaps the left in France is like the left in England and is worried Muslim students will be 'offended' to learn about the Holocaust, or perhaps they are like the left in Sweden where the picture of the Star of David patches Jews were forced to wear in the Holocaust was removed from text books lest Muslim students become 'offended' by the site of the star of David, the symbol of Zionism.
Sarkozy's idea isn't wrong for any of the reasons above. It is wrong for another reason. French students shouldn't have to learn the story of the Jews. French students should have to play the role of Europeans. They should read the diaries of the Red Cross workers who visited Thereisenstadt and never condemned Nazism. They should read the story of the British general who rounded up Jews of German citizenship, the few that remained, after the liberation of Germany and put them in Displaced Persons camps as 'enemy nationals' alongside former SS members and forced the Jews to do manual labour behind the same barbed wire the Nazis had kept them in. Perhaps they can read the minutes of the immigration boards in Australia and Canada where more Germans were allowed to immigrate after the Holocaust than Jews, so that in affect more Nazis were encouraged to settle in the West than victims of the Nazis. Perhaps the children can simply read the story of all the people of Europe who did so little to help the Jews. Better yet, the Europeans can simulate the Holocaust in France. They can take out 2 students from each class. Those students can symbolize the Jews. The rest of the class will be told to turn their backs while the Jews are taken away. The class will obey, like the French did. One French kid will also be taken out to symbolize the smaller fraction of French people who fought in the resistance or joined De Gaulle. Then three of the female French students will be taken out to represent the French women who became willing mistresses of the Nazis and who went to Germany to frolic with their Aryan playmates. Then the class will be asked to turn back around and forget what happened. For the rest of the year the two Jewish students will be put in a corner and they will represent the state of Israel. For the rest of the year, while the students forget the French role in the Holocaust, the French students will throw paper and insults at the 'Zionists' who are in Israel and condemn Israel as a 'Nazi-apartheid state'. That would pretty much teach the children the role of France and Europe in the Holocaust.
That should have been Sarkozy's recommendation. Let the children learn what it means to be a European. Don't lie to the children and let them pretend they are Jews. The Europeans are not Jews. Europeans are hypocrites. Europeans are arrogant. Europeans are self-centered. Europeans hate America and Israel. Europeans love Islam. Europeans work for the UN. Europeans are racist. But Europeans are not Jews. They made that clear between 1939 and 1945.
The problematic conservative bogeyman
Seth J. Frantzman
February 20th, 2008
According to the film V for Vandetta a viscous conservative religious party takes over England and uses a government sponsored terrorist act as an excuse to crack down on civil liberties and transform England into a 1984-like mind controlling totalitarian system. Like other recent films such as Children of Men and Land of the Blind and older films such as Brazil this portrays a world in which 'terrorism' may mean freedom fighting and in which the government is brutal, terroristic and dishonest.
According to one reviewer; "the film dares to ask serious questions about the nature and role of violence as a form of dissent…. The makers of this film goes to great lengths to describe throughout the film just how Sutler [the dictator] and his Norsefire (with its iconic Nazi-like symbols and fundamentalist Christian thinking) party rose to power in the UK… it was the population --- whose desire to remain safe and have a semblance of peace --- gave up more and more of their basic liberties and rights for a return to order."
The true uniqueness of V is that it includes not only the typical 1984 like persona of the 'leader' and his all controlling news programs that are fake, but it also explains to us what the coming regime of totalitarianism is likely to do away with its power. With many allegories and allusions to 9/11 and 'terrorism' and 'regimes that change the meanings of words such as 'righteous' and 'faith' and Abu Ghraib, the film tries to convince the audience that it should be fearful of both the United States Government's War on Terror and the increasing use of surveillance (CCTV) in England. While all this may be well and true what is most interesting is the way the film depicts what the 'bad' regime of the "conservative" movement would do away with. Among those arrested are homosexuals and readers of the Koran. In fact the film gives us a view into the life of one such subversive in the film. He is a comedian and runs a comedy show. But he is illicitly a free thinker. He has the Koran on a pedestal in a secret back room and tells the main character he "loves its poetry". He is also homosexual. The film insinuates that there is a very close relationship between the suppression of gay rights and Islamophobia. The film further draws the line linking gays and Muslims to animal rights activists and all the other anarchists and student protesters and writers and intellectuals swept up by the totalitarian government. Thus the message is clear: there is an alliance of gay and Muslims and intellectuals against the evil bogeyman of the right wing conservative Christian.
This is where one should stop and ponder. How did Islam become the ally of the liberal? Why is the 'right wing' condemned for being religious and totalitarian while the gay man is supposedly enchanted by the 'poetry' of the Koran? Why has leftist society gone so far as to believe that the enemy of its enemy is necessarily its friend? Why has the leftist, who is so disdainful of religion and faith, so taken with Islam, so much so that he lumps it in with gays and Noam Chomsky like intellectuals so that it forms part of his liberal pantheon?
Homosexuals may love the Koran. That is certainly their decision. It is a ludicrous decision. For a homosexual to love the 'poetry' of the Koran would be the same as a Jew loving the 'poetry' of Mien Kampf. Make no mistake, Mien Kampf surely sounds nice in the original German, but just because something seems 'exotic' doesn’t mean it necessarily deserves to be loved and held up as some sort of romantic subversive text. The Koran is not subversive. The Koran IS the very thing that movies like this portray as the ultimate totalitarian state. TO find a state that closely resembles 1984 one must only look to places such as Saudi Arabia and Iran. Only in the Islamic world are their totalitarian states whose brutal suppression of thought and freedom are on parallel with the nightmares envisioned in V.
This is the problem with the dialectic of leftist thought. It has always required an other. It has always required a foil or a straw man with which to fight. Since the 1930s that foil has been 'right wing totalitarians' and since the 1960s it has been 'conservative right wing Christians'. But the leftist zeal for hating religion suddenly stopped in 2001 when the left came to believe that it and Islam were on the same side against George Bush and his 'right wing Christians'.
This is the major blinder of the left. Just because Islam hates Christianity and leftists hate 'right wing Christians' doesn't mean that the crusade against Christians and conservatives is logically made up of an alliance of gays, liberals and Muslims. The gay and the Muslim are antithetical to one another. Why should a gay man wax eloquent about the poetry of the Koran, the same 'exotic' poetry that forms the basis of the Iranian regime's legal system and causes gays to be sentenced to death. In Iran they whip people for using drugs, they hang them, they stone them to death of adultery, they imprison them for being alone with a member of the opposite sex who is not part of the family. If one wants to find that regime which should be the real bogeyman of liberalism they need look no further than Tehran. Yet Here we are with the greatest intellectual pashas in the west, our Brahmins, inviting the likes of Ahamadinjed to speak at our Ivory tower in Columbia. The Iranian justice minister, Hussein Elham recently noted that "freedom of speech should not be used as a cover for attacking moral or religious values." This is the same man who sat proudly at Iran's Holocaust denial conference. His President went to Columbia at the invitation of the liberals and under the guise of freedom of speech he declared that there were no homosexuals in Iran. And yet it is Iran that leftists look to as inspiration, as something subversive and romantic. This is the great irony of leftism. In its embrace of the Koran and the idea that gay men should proudly display that book of hatred on their walls the left has lost all its wits.
The left has done it before. In 1932 a group of leftists who hated the United States went to Stalin's Russia to see the socialist utopia in action. Stalin, suspicious of these free thinkers, had them arrested and sent to Siberia where most died labouring to build Socialism. As they were worked to death one wonders if they say the irony that the regime of their dreams was killing them while in America people were free to do as they pleased. In 1980 in Iran leftist feminists celebrated the revolution against the 'fascist' Shah. They applauded as the Ayatollahs assumed power and as they preached war against the 'Great Satan'. One day a bunch of leftist women went out to protest the imposition of the Chador on women. These leftist female protesters were shot and beaten. The leftists never protested again. Throughout the 20th century leftists fell in love with movements that opposed the host country of the leftist. Always the leftist embraced any country that has hated the United States or any system of government that has opposed the U.S. But the leftist has never stopped and asked himself if the enemy of his enemy is really his friend. The leftist has never realized that by embracing Communism and Islamism he is embracing the very thing he claims to abhor, a totalitarian mind controlling ideology. In his zeal and hatred for a phantom conservative Christian fundamentalist bogeyman the leftist time and again deceives himself into fighting on the side of the very totalitarian fundamentalism he claims to oppose. That is why a leftist who preaches against the evils of religion and hates conservative Christians can call the Koran 'beautiful' and not skip a beat. But one wonders why that gay leftist depicted in the film wasn't so enthralled with the poetry of Psalms or the Prophet Isaiah. After all, the Bible also contains poetry? If Muslims read the Bible would gays find it exotic? If Christian women wore Burkas would leftists find them exotic? It wasn’t so long ago that all the women of Europe covered their heads. Pictures from the late 1940s reveal that. Yet the descendants of those very same women find the head scarf so exotic and yet they think their own heritage boring. If Muslims were white hicks like the KKK or Tim Mcveigh, both of whome used religion as an excuse to hate, would the leftists finally call them terrorists?
Sunday, February 24, 2008
Sunday, February 17, 2008
Terra Incognita 22 Heidegger, Modernity and Naipaul
Terra Incognita
Issue 22
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
February 17th, 2008
Roots in hate: Liberalism’s dark roots in the Nazi past of Heidegger: The shadow of the Nazi philosopher Martin Heidegger is long. He influenced the leading French philosopher Derrida and also Jewish thinkers such as Hannah Arendt. Today his philosophy is behind post-modernism and moral-relativism. Thus the dialectic of Nazism has finally caught up with us. Perhaps I was not incorrect in noting once that Nazism was a possible highest form of western civilization in a world gone wrong.
Modernity and history: The recent calls by progressives for Jews and Serbs and others to abandon their archaic history and monuments and join the rest of the world merely shows the degree to which the decision to abandon one’s history marks the final conversion to modernity. The two are at odds. One cannot have modernity and history. One must choose.
The life of an Arab in Israel: From Zochrot to Deir Yassin Remembered the history of Palestinians and groups dedicated to them in Israel are run by Jews and financed by Jewish philanthropies such as the Abraham fund. Jewish think tanks such as the Van Leer institute devote almost all their resources to studying Arabs and Muslims. If leftist Jews had it there way 13 million Jews would be engaged in learning the history and supporting the causes of 250 million Arabs and 1.3 billion Muslims. Those think tanks have wreaked untold havoc. There is a direct relationship between investment in coexistence and the amount of hatred that exists: the more money that goes in the more hate that comes out.
The genius of V.S Naipaul: Despite his reputation as something of a arrogant curmudgeon the brilliant writer V.S Naipaul has offered many important insights throughout his career. He dared to poke at India when others marveled at it. He dared to condemn Africa when others cheered for independence. He dared to confront Black Power and the leftist whites who loved it. He dared to confront Islam. The man towers over the second half of the 20th century and yet few realize the depth of his view and the uniqueness of his critique.
Roots in hate: Liberalism’s dark roots in the Nazi past of Heidegger
February 15th, 2008
Seth J. Frantzman
In the recently published book Liberal Fascism the author argues that many of the roots of modern socialist thought are in fact not dissimilar than the policies of Nazism. Take anti-smoking laws for example. These were first pioneered by the Nazi regime because Hitler was a fanatic vegan who wanted all things to be ‘clean’ and there is nothing more unclean than a smoker eating a steak. Nazi Germany was at the forefront of anti-gun laws and gun registration, a fact often quoted by members of the NRA. But if it turns out that some of the sources of our modern laws happen to find place in Nazism it is perhaps more surprising that sources of our modern thought find sources in Nazism. It is as if we were conquered through the back door.
Nazism was thoroughly thrashed in 1945. So how did its demon raise its head through academia and social theory? Keith Windschuttle, author of The Killing of History notes that Foucault, Derrida and Lacan, three French philosophers’ “intellectual mentor [was] the German existentialist philosopher Martin Heidegger, had been an anti-Semite, a Nazi informer on academic colleagues in the 1930s, and a financial member of the Nazi party from 1933 to 1945. While Foucault and Derrida thought his work pointed in radical directions, Heidegger himself continued to believe until his death in 1976 that his philosophy confirmed the ‘inner truth and greatness’ of the Nazi movement.” This is the same Heidegger that the Jewish philosopher and writer Hannah Arendt had an affair with, even after she was forced to flee Nazi Germany because of the rise of Nazism. Arendt even went so far as to testify on his behalf at his trial after the war. But Hannah Arendt was not the only Jew to become a passionate defender of Heidegger. Many of his defenders and apologists have been Jewish and the latest manuscript in the works on him is a passionate defense of him by a Jew.
What is surprising is not merely that Heidegger was able to pull the wool over the eyes of left wing Jews but that his theories influenced Derrida and Foucault who themselves have influenced sociology and social theory throughout the West. The impact of this line of narrative, this dialectic of Nazism if you will, is vast. Foucault was a key western supporter of the Islamist revolution in Iran. In the book Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, Janat Afary and Kevin Anderson show how was deeply taken with Islamism and he journeyed to Iran numerous times to support the Ayatollah. Foucault, the writer on feminism, was in Iran to see the women’s rights activists shot, raped and murdered at the hands of Islamism and he barely winced. According to the author he finally blinked when he was at the home of an Iranian exile, a secular activist made homeless by Foucault’s revolution, and the French philosopher inquired how Islam dealt with people “whom society calls abnormal.” The wife of the Iranian friend of Foucault pointed to the Koran and said “death.” According to Ehsan Naraghi, the Iranian secularist who hosted Foucault, “he was upset and left that night…he believed Islam approved of homosexuality…Two or three weeks after the revolution, when Khalkhali hanged several homosexuals, my wife said to me ‘give me the address of this friend of yours so I could tell him that the idealistic society where you thought homosexuality would be approved is this!” It was too late, Foucault was already off to San Francisco where he would be one of the first well known people to contract AIDS and die subsequently. He was a homosexual and his revolution in Iran had turned out differently than he had predicted. But he told no one of what he had learned. To his dying day he believed Islam was the ideal system of life and that it was a utopian society unlike the West he loathed so much.
The inspiration that Derrida and others drew from Heidegger was that Heidegger was a hater of modernity. Like the Nazis he desired to return to the authentic nation and his ideas were no doubt wrapped up in all the ‘Blood and Soil’ pseudo-science of Nazism. Like the Palestinian writers and Arab Christian theologians such as Naim Ateek, Mitri Rahab and Elias Chacour who declare “we belong to the land”, there was a deep seated nationalism behind Heidegger’s thought. How exactly leftist scholarship was able to adopt this theory is quite fascinating.
In order for leftism to adopt the ideas of the right it had first to fashion them so it could understand them. Thus Derrida understood Heidegger as not a nationalist who loved the soil but as a critiquer of modernity who was not conservative but rather believed there was no ‘truth’ because modernity was not progressive. Thus the ‘progress’ of Europe could be condemned from this standpoint. How exactly the same people are able to campaign for ‘human rights’ and international law is not exactly clear given that these are also inventions of modernity. Since no value system is ‘better’ than any other the heresy of Heidegger among the liberals is that it provides the basis for multi-culturalism, post-modernism and moral-relativism, the three pillars of liberalism’s belief system.
What is most fascinating is to explore the degree to which Heidegger is connected through this narrative to the Islamism and the Iranian revolution. In his recent treatise entitled Jihad and Jew Hatred the German writer Matthias Kuentzel argues that Islamism’s anti-Semitism is deeply rooted in its connections to Nazism through such men as Hajj Amin al Husayni. But what if the connection was not merely on the political level or on the level of ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’ under which the first copies of Mien Kampf were printed in Arabic? What if the roots of Islamism and support for it and the current fetish leftist thought has for Islam is actually rooted in Nazi philosophy?
Heidegger influenced Foucault and Foucault felt the utopian society was the Islamic one. Is it a coincidence that Islam and Nazi ideology were seen as utopian by two of the most prominent thinkers of the 20th century? Foucault and Derrida had a great and destructive influence on much of the modern academy. Thus it may be no surprise that 9/11 found a field eagerly awaiting fertilization with Islamic ideas. Jewish thinkers are not immune. The Jewish activist turned anti-Israel writer, Avraham Burg, has argued that Europe needs to be ‘impregnated’ with Islam. He is not alone among the Jewish writers who have been deeply influenced by Islam and who have romanticized the Islamic past in places like Muslim Spain.
Nazism and its philosophy were able to infect western social theory and through the theory it was able to bring the most prominent leftist theorists over to Nazism. Thus where Nazism failed to destroy western civilization, Islamism will follow and it will have the devotion of many western social theorists in the process. If the narrative has skipped the way in which social theory in the west was first wrapped up in Communism it is only because Communism is dead. The fetish for Islam is merely the latest manifestation of the 1970s and 1980s support of Communism as utopia. For the western leftist the ‘other’ is always superior to the self. Today’s other is Islam and Islam is therefore the ideal.
Modernity and history
Seth J. Frantzman
Feb 14, 2008
The way in which intellectuals proudly proclaim that nations such as Israel and Serbia must give up the historical centres of their national heritage reflects the way in which brutal modernity expects the modern nation state to adapt. This is evident in Israel in the difference between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Jerusalem reveres its stones. All of its buildings, save a few, are built out of Jerusalem stone. It has its holy sites and its prophet’s tombs. It has its graveyards of the judges and kings of Israel. It has the anger and passions of history affecting the present. For the commentator this is savage and barbaric, although he will not use such words. He will say it is archaic or that it is intolerant, the new code words for the barbarian.
Modernity’s answer is Tel Aviv. Modern and built from concrete, built according to socialist utilitarian models. Although it suffers from the most extreme urban decay, so that parts of it look like one of this futuristic films where there is no one left on earth and a man is walking in a deserted city, people celebrate it as a ‘World Heritage Site’ called the ‘White City’. There is nothing white about it. Surely though modernity offers more. Indeed. It offers us Berlin. It offers us all the new fangled cities that have obliterated the past completely. It offers what the Soviets offered and what Mao offered. It offers people without history. It offers the destruction of the monasteries and bulldozing of graveyards and churches and old parts of town. Most places in the world have witnessed this. In Egypt they have covered over the ancient Jewish cemeteries lest someone recall that Jews once lived there. In Afghanistan they blew up the Bamiyan Buddhas, lest people recall that Buddhism was once the religion of Central Asia.
Modernity is the concept that history must not influence the present. Modernity’s ultimate goal is the diverse city full of people who have no heritage. Although the west preaches multi-culturalism and diversity it also preaches assimilation and the melting pot. Prime Minister Erdogan, the chief of Turkey, has called assimilation a ‘crime against humanity’. Although his message is quite extreme, he is hitting the nail on the head. Assimilation is a crime in his terms because it erases the past.
Even in Barbados the radio station reminds us that ‘a people without a culture are but a shell’. Reagan noted once that ‘If we stop being a Nation Under God we will truly be a nation gone under.’ This is the essence. When the newspaper commentators noted that the Serbs must abandon their history in order to live peacefully in the present they were implicitly acknowledging that history is a burden on modernity and that it is the cause of all sorts of violence and thus peace and tolerance only come with the abandonment of culture and history and religion. Christopher Hitchens’ ‘God is not Great: how religion ruins everything’ is the manifesto of modernity.
Although there is no evidence that modern people who lack history are any less violent than people who cling to their history, it is apparent that the struggle is indeed between history and modernity.
The life of an Arab in Israel
February 13th, 2008
Seth J. Frantzman
Where does an Arab go to learn about his history? There is the Jewish organization Zochrot to teach him about the Nakba and show him the locations of old Arab villages. Where does he go when he wants to build a new town or when he illegally builds a house without a permit and doesn’t pay taxes? There is the Jewish organization Planners for Planning rights. Where does he go when he is sick? There is the Jewish organization ‘Doctors without Borders’ for him. Where does he go when he wants to share his art work? There are Jews at the Tate gallery ready to host special art exhibitions for Arabs of Israel. Where does he go when he doesn’t want Jews to live near him? There is the Jewish organization SPNI to testify in court that the Jewish homes in question are ruining the environment. Where does he go when he wants to live near Jews? There is the Jewish village Neve Shalom built specially for Arabs where they can live in ‘coexistence’ with Jews and pay no taxes because those taxes are paid by a charity thanking them for being involved in ‘coexistence’. In addition there are other non-profits whose sole interest is to fund coexistence villages. Where does he go when he needs a sewer treatment plant for his village? A German company provides one for free. Where does he go when he doesn’t want to work? He runs for the Knesset and attends the funerals of terrorists like George Habash and Yasser Arafat and donates money through Jewish friends like Noam Chomsky and Norman Finkelstein to Hizbullah. Where does he go when he wants to learn how evil Israel is? He reads books by Jews like Joel Kovine and Ilan Pappe and he joins Jewish organizations like ‘Deir Yassin Remembered’ and the Union for Peace and Justice in the Middle East which is run by a Jew named Noah Haiduc. Where does he go when he needs civil rights or he wants to complain? There are the Jewish organizations Peace Now, B’Tselem and ACRI for him. Where does he go when he needs free legal representation? There are Jewish legal organizations supporting Arab rights that will give him free legal advice. Where does he go when he wants prostitutes? There are Jewish women in Tel Aviv who ‘feel sorry for Arabs because they can’t go out with their own women’ for him.
Where does an Arab go when he needs help with the environment for his home town? There is the Abraham Fund and numerous other Jewish charities to help him. What if he wants to learn about his society? There is the Van Leer institutes 'Center for the study of Israeli Arab society. Within that Jewish funded organization there is a fellowship for Young Arab Scholars, A forum on Israeli Arabs, an Israeli Arab Society yearbook. There is also a 'joint' venture of the Van Leer Institute and the Commission on the Jewish people of the United Jewish Appeal whose goal is
"improve the conditions of Arab society in Israel. A three-pronged approach will be employed. Firstly, research will be commissioned in key areas of concern and position papers published. These will be of professional use to government policymakers and decision-makers, the business sector, civil society NGOs and foundations. Secondly, research findings will be put on the public agenda by means of conferences, a public awareness campaign and dialogue with government officials and civil society players. Thirdly, a strategy document recommending modes of effective intervention for NGOs and foundations will be drafted and updated each year."
The director of this program which is run by Jewish philanthropies and Jewish institutes is none other than an Arab by the name of Dr. Khalid Abu Asbah and his assistant Asmahan Masry-Herzalla. Lest one think that this is all the Van leer Institute does under its auspices of the study of Civil Society in Israel, one is mistaken. Outside of Civil Society, which in Israel apparently only consists of Arabs, there is the Van Leer Institute's program on 'Israelis-Palestinians, Mediterranean cooperation.' The program speaks about 'mutual responsibility' but this is belied by the fact that the only responsibility for the program seems to come from Jewish funding. Among the program the institute works on is 'saving the Arab market of Jaffa' which it informs the reader was recently purchased by Jewish philanthropists so Arabs could benefit. The institute also monitors the police in Jaffa, lest they run amok in racism against the Arabs. Under the auspices of 'Mixed Cities-trapped communities' the organizations analyzed " the connections between national identity, urban space and gender relations in ethnically divided areas, specifically in mixed Palestinian-Israeli towns. " It also authored "An Israeli City or A City in Israel? Questions of Identity, Meaning and Power" which no doubt makes the reader wonder New York is an 'American City' or a 'City in America'.
The institute also makes sure to have their very own Israeli-Palestinian Dialogue center and programming. They work together on the environment and run programs with the Al Quds University center for the study of peace. The program funds lectures on Islam which are not doubt enlightening. It is important, the institute points out, that the world's 13 million Jews help pay for lectures about Islam, because the 1.3 billion Muslims certainly can't afford to fund such lectures. But the institute feels that Jews need more than to simply understand Islam. There are special programs on " Learning the meaning of being a refugee" Getting to know the other, The Territories – Land of Our Forefathers or a Godforsaken Land?, National Conflict: Can It Be Resolved? The Irish and Israeli Cases. All of it is coordinated under the auspicious, perhaps not surprising, of a Jewish woman (Sarah Lazar) and an Arab man (Faris Aruri).
But surely that’s not enough. A new Jewish female hire at the JDC, one of the world's largest Jewish philanthropies, asked her boss during her orientation "are we doing enough for the Arabs" which apparently meant 'are 13 million Jews doing enough for 250 million Arabs' to which the reply was "no we are not." No doubt Jews have never done enough for the Arabs, except convert to Islam and die.
The Abraham fund website is perhaps a study in these themes. It presents five faces. There is the 'Black Man', who is frowning, as black men in posters paid for by philanthropists are apt to do, unless they are children. There is the 'white woman' who is smiling, as white woman are apt to do. There is the 'mixed race individual woman' who is smiling as mixed race women that appear in advertising are apt to do. Then there is the oddly place 'ugly white woman' who is biting her lip. Lastly there is the romantic 'Arab man' complete with headdress and small beard. He can't have too big a beard lest he seem like a threatening terrorist. He looks more like a character our of Lawrence of Arabia. Below the nice photo-montage of racial harmony is the all important link to 'Equality' which portrays the stereotypical Arab woman complete with all encompassing white headscarf. Next to her is the 'western woman' with her lily white face and cropped 'lesbian-cut' hair.
Lest someone get the wrong idea that the Abraham Fund, which bills itself as a philanthropy helping 'all the children of Abraham', is helping anyone but Arabs and Muslims the webpage tells the full story. There is educated for headscarfed Arab women (a side note here: in order for philanthropies to prove they are helping Arabs they make sure to photograph Arab women with headscarfs on, otherwise one might think they were just dark haired women. One wonders how philanthropies 'prove' they are helping Irish women? Do they make them wear four-leafed clovers? It is one reason Christian Arab women never appear in the brochures or websites when people are talking about Arabs. They don't wear headscarfs.) So the Abraham fund does it all. An American Jewish philanthropy, it promotes Arab language instruction and Arab history in Jewish schools and it promotes equal opportunities for Arabs in government jobs among other things. While it might seem strange to some that American Jews feel their money should go toward Arabs in Israel rather than say Jews in America or Arabs in America or starving black children, it makes perfect sense. This is American Jewries new crusade. This is the new 'thing' among the Jews of America. Having won out on civil rights, gay rights, women's rights and a variety of other causes in the U.S the American Jewish secular left has now turned its attention to the Arabs of Israel. These Arabs are the new 'blacks' because they lack civil rights (supposedly) and they are 'oppressed'. So they need their own Jewish freedom riders. Like good colonizers the American Jews are running around Arab villages in the Galilee coaching soccer teams, building schools and helping to clean up the environment.
It all reminds me of a time I was in Mexico with a bunch of my fellow leftist Americans. We were doing a 'home-stay' in Carbo, a piss-poor town in Sanora, not far from Hermosillo. The town had an exchange program with my private boarding school. So for two weeks a year poor Mexicans in cowboy boots and tight jeans came to Arizona and lived the life of an American high school student: clandestine drinking, drug use, whoring and complaining. For two weeks a year Americans went down to Mexico and lived the life of the Mexican student: drinking, whoring and making tortillas. But at the end of our trip the white woman who ran our program decided we needed to do something philanthropic. While the Mexicans might have liked a new truck or a trip across the border in the bottom of our van, she decided we needed to clean up Mexico. So we set about picking up trash in a field near the school. We picked up trash, old cans, paper, napkins, plastic wrappers and even bones of a dead cow. The Mexican students laughed at us, never comprehending why we would pick up trash that they were just going to throw back in the same place the next day. We surely thought we had been coexisting or learning tolerance. An odd kind of tolerance when one goes and tells others how to live, but tolerance none the less. We packed into our van afterward and waved to our new friends Lupita and Jose, and drove away. No doubt if we had made a brochure we could have put old Memo with his cowboy hat on it and one of our young nubile white high school girls as well to publicize the good deeds we had done in solving Mexico's problems while creating tolerance. We had 'roughed it' and lived the way of the poor Mexican. We were tolerant.
Liberalism can be found in many things. It is sort of the god of small things. A newspaper article lauding the 'Freedom fighter turned president of Kosovo' or an article from the BBC about 'living with Hamas's rocket squads' or an article from the Tribune where the Jewish reported Allisa Rubin headlines "Iraqi insurgents 'poison' minds of Iraqi youth", the poison in quotations because the author feels that Al Quieda's use of children and mentally handicapped female suicide bombers is either a myth or heroic or an act of 'freedom fighting'. Liberalism is everywhere.
Liberalism has its institutes and its fund and its ridiculous brochures and it likes to have studies and conferences. But one should study liberalism. One should come to understand what it really is. To see it at its most ridiculous all one has to do is examine the foolish naiveté and simplistic idiocy of websites and programs run by the Van Leer institute and the Abraham Fund.
I will make a wager. The amount of money invested in 'coexistence' in Israel doubles every two years. In 1948 there was no such money being invested. That is a fact. Today the amounts run into the tens of millions. The amount of people, most white people from the west and Jews from west, involved in 'coexistence' is in the tens of thousands. The number of Israelis and Palestinians is quite small. 15 students here, 5 students there. There are probably more programs like Seeds of Peace than there are students that actually attend them.
The wager is this. I would bet that the more money invested in coexistence the less coexistence there is. The more American Jews came tramping down the tarmac at Ben Gurion Airport with suitcases full of cash to promote 'coexistence' the more hatred there will be. Why is this? This is part of the paradox of 'peace studies' and liberalism. The more peace studies there is, and there are at least a dozen departments across Israel and the Palestinian territories, the less peace there is.
Perhaps people forget. The American Department of Defense used to be called the War Department. Its name was changed to include the moniker 'defense' like it was in every other country out of the notion that 'war department' seemed too warlike. This was a handy play on words but oddly enough it has not made people more peaceful. Departments of Defense go to war just as much as War departments.
Liberalism spreads hate like the plague, always feigning innocence after the genocide takes place that it helped cause. After years of telling Hutus they were underprivileged and calling them a 'minority' (which they weren't) the same liberals than played with the words 'act of genocide' to describe what took place. After years of cajoling the Iranian people and comparing the Shah's Savak secret police to the Gestapo the Liberals like Michel Foucault were surprised to find that their Iranian revolution didn't produce rights for gays or women, but instead resulted in religious fascism. But Foucault was off in San Francisco dying of aids and wallowing in his own self hatred by then, too sick to notice the catastrophe he had cheered for. Liberals like Bernard Shaw shook hands with Stalin and yukked it up while millions Ukrainians died in a famine. All in the name, as Barak Obama puts it, of 'talking' and 'listening' to the other. We must 'talk' to Iran, that’s the Obama message. We always have to talk to the genocidaires. Bill Marr orders us to leave Iraq and Saudi Arabia and says "that’s why they hate us, because we had bases in Saudi Arabia," perhaps forgetting that it was the Saudis who begged us to put those bases there to defend them against Saddam in 1990. No matter. That is 'why they hate us'.
We cannot have peace because liberalism will not let it happen. The amount of money invested in peace studies and coexistence will not allow peace because then there will be no need for 'peace studies' and 'coexistence'.
There are two problems with the liberal argument. Liberals like to tell us about how the Noble native-Americans lived in a utopian peaceful world. But if they did so how were they able to manage without billions of dollars in aid and millions in Jewish philanthropic dollars telling them how to make peace? How did they survive without it? How could they have been peaceful without first attending the AL Quds University and its department of Peace Study. Oddly enough most suicide bombers seem to have studied 'peace studies'. The terrorist thug in charge of Kosovo whose nickname was the 'snake' trained in the department of International Relations in Switzerland. I guess he learned all about coexistence and peace.
Another problem is the liberal attempt to compare the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to the Irish troubles. Perhaps liberals missed something. The pashas are Van Leer instruct the Israeli state to release all Palestinian prisoners on the 'model' of the 'Good Friday Agreement'. Perhaps the liberals have forgotten something. In Ireland the IRA stopped murdering civilians. Did the liberal forget this essential ingredient to peace? Both sides have to stop killing eachother. You can't have a ceasefire while one side keeps fighting. That’s not a ceasefire, that’s called surrender.
How much of Palestinian history has been created and written by Jews? How much of the creation of the Palestinians and the fostering of their hatred has been fanned and encouraged by Jews, Jewish organizations, Jewish intellectuals and Jewish groups? Whether it is the Neturei Karta or the extreme left there are always Jews to support Islamic terrorism and create myths about Islamic tolerance. There are Jews to memorialize the Palestinian past and force the JNF to post signs showing where Arab villages were. There are Jewish architectural organizations who sole job is to memorialize Arab houses. There are Jewish musicians like Berenboim who give free concerts only for Arabs. There are Jews who were ethnically cleansed from Hebron and Arab countries who sole concern is the well being of Arabs and making sure Arabs in Hebron have as much property as possible. There are Jews to write Arab history books about the Nakba for Arab children to read. How much of the hatred learned by Arabs through books and the media is funded by Jews. How many Jewish organizations like the Abraham fund encourage honor killings and Shariah law and meet only with right wing extremist Islamist Muslims and support only Islamic foundations and Islamist schools. How much of Palestinian hatred is simply a creation, funded wholeheartedly by Jewish money and created by Jewish intellectuals? Is it a surprise that the one Arab people who happen to live in the Jewish state are described by Jewish professors like Sandra Sufian as the ‘indigenous’ people of Israel, implying obviously that the Jews are not indigenous, that Jews are the only people in the world who are not indigenous to anything? Is it a surprise that most Palestinian history has been written by Jews and that in the West Palestinians are the most popular people in history books and the most well funded people per capita in the world and the only people who are described as ‘refugees’ four generations after becoming refugees. Is it a surprise that from architects to journalists there are Jewish groups working for the Palestinian cause as Jews work for no other causes, as if the Palestinians were, in a sense, Jews. Is it a surprise that Jews have taken up the cause of the people who have killed and suppressed Jews for more than a thousand years, that Jews would support the people that built a mosque atop their temple and built minarets in their quarter and made them wash streets on Shabbat and rioted and slaughtered them every few years and forced them to live in ghettos and wear special clothes and forbid them to ride horses and raped and slaughtered them and called them ‘dog’ and ‘pig’ and sold them as slaves and charged them a special tax merely to survive. Is it a surprise that these people would become the people whose history interests Jews the most and that that the majority of students studying Arabic at any school are Jewish and that the majority of students who volunteer to work for the peace corps in Muslim countries are Jewish and that the only question asked during an orientation at the JDC, a Jewish organization, is ‘Are we doing enough o help the Arabs?” Is it a surprise that the people who love Martin Heidegger, the Nazi philosopher and lover of Hannah Arendt, the most are Jews, not Germans. Is it a surprise that at his trial the person who defended him was a Jew, Ms. Arendt, who was forced to flee Nazi Germany only to return to defend its chief philosopher when gentiles wanted to put him in prison. So is it a surprise that Jews are the greatest scholars of Palestinian history?
Since all of the money donated by secular Jews goes to help 1.3 billion Muslims and 250 million Arabs one must admire the poorest of the Jewish people: the religious Jews. They don't donate money to the 'other' and they don't teach 'coexistence'. They get on without it, which is forever disturbing to leftists. How could people live in the world without waiting patiently in anticipation for the next report from the Van Leer Institute? The religious Jewish women cover their hair, but their style of headscarfs don't appeal to the photographers of brochures and websites. Perhaps the Jewish headcovering isn't exotic enough or it doesn’t restrict the movement of the face enough and press up against the neck causing the face to puff up and causing the mouth to frown. The Jews aren’t exotic enough. In the old days when the world discovered Jews living in 'exotic places' like Yemen everyone loved them. Then they brought them to Israel and suddenly those Jews because boring. Although they were pour and wretched and the women were dark and swarthy there was no longer any interest in them. The only thing that has saved Jewish philanthropy from not only giving money to Arabs is the discovery that there were black Jews in Ethiopia and thus some Jewish philanthropies still adorn their posters with the token black Jew, his big smile and his little kids saying to the secular Jew "save me like all the other black people that need saving." It’s a pretty sad cynical world that operates on such things, that loves such causes and flagellates itself in such a way all the while thinking it is so open minded and tolerant. Show me an open mind and I'll show you a racist. There are no better racists than those who proclaim themselves open minded.
The genius of V.S Naipaul
Seth J. Frantzman
February 10th, 2008
It is surprising that Naipaul was successful in the literary field and that many people who should scoff at his notions had they heard them at a dinner party are Naipaul enthusiasts. His luck at breaking through and the acclaim he has received is well deserved. But it is not his writing that deserves acclaim, it is his honesty and the fact that he dared to take on all of the liberal romanticizing inherent in the western view of the 'other'.
Naipaul was a perfect vehicle for this. No matter how many people wanted to call him 'racist' for his descriptions of Africa, India and the Muslim world they held their tongues, knowing that Mr. Naipaul himself was one of the 'exotic coloured people of the third world.'
Naipaul's genius in having taken in so many people is that he wove in charming stories about his Indian-Caribbean heritage, A House for Mr. Biswas(1961), Miguel Street(1959) alongside barbaric stories of honesty such as Michael X and the Black Power Killings in The Writer and the World(2002), Guerillas(1975), Beyond Belief(1998), In A Free State(1971) and Tell me Who to Kill(in a Flag on the Island 1967). He tackled such subjects as African tribalism, post-colonial failure, the charade of Black Power movements, the subtle racism of white women in their romanticizing of the other, the problems of interracial marriage and self hate and the problems of India.
Widely resented as a curmudgeon, along the lines of Paul Theroux, Mr. Naipaul's reputation has survived. In three separate books on India (A Wounded Civiliation 1977, A Million Mutinies Now 1992, An Area of Darkness 1964) he described his own civilization as both wounded by Islamic colonialism and beset by massive poverty and savagery. On Africa he painted a bleak picture of barbarism lurking just beneath the surface, something that has come to light in recent civil strife in Nigeria, Liberia, Kenya and Rwanda, but something that most choose to ignore in the Post-Indepedendence haze of celebration. But his most incisive critique was for Islam when he visited the non-Arab countries which had chosen the Islamic path, or whose path had been brutally chosen for them; Malaysia, Iran, Pakistan and Indonesia. He found Islamism in the 1980s and 1990s, long before most westerners were aware of it, and he found the vicious hatred and intolerance inherent in Islam, something most refuse to accept.
In examinations of his own island he dared to speak out against the Black Power movement of the 1960s and 1970s. He found in it the chauvinistic racism that it supposedly opposed. In his picture of Jimmy Ahmed and Michael X, the latter a real person, he found ex-pimps and rapists masquerading as civil rights leaders, engaging in murder and orgies with visiting journalists who showered them with praise. Only Naipaul could show the picture of these awe-struck 'white hipsters' being raped by the very people they loved. Only Naipaul could dare to poke fun and laugh at the white patrons of Michael X's 'Black House' in England where he received money from rich whites to live in a house "where black people would live together communally". Only white people would provide money for non-whites to live together as if funding an experiment. He hid deep within the pages of a collection of short stories called The Writer and His World(2002) a story about races and expectations in Trinidad in which he surveyed the expectations of local whites, blacks and Indians. He found that the whites expected the least: a good life working in their father's firm, hard work and reward in the form of a settled and clean life. The Indians wanted only slightly more. The blacks, by contrast, dreamed of success in sports and music and dreamed of one day ruling empires and all sorts of megalomania. Naipaul's diagnosis was simple: the affects of unreasonable expectations were the sole reason that success followed those whites and Indians who dreamed of simpler things that were attainable. Naipaul set out his view that it was no surprise that the blacks would grow up to resent Indian success and he thus came to understand the Black Power movement; since fantasies did not meet reality they were seduced by the inherently racist black conscious movement that swept the Caribbean. Some even converted to Islam. No other writer could have gotten away with such a critique.
Naipaul's luck was to have been born in 1932 and graduated from Oxford in 1954. The son of a dirt poor peasant Hindu family he rose to the highest levels of literary society in the English speaking world. But through and through he remained attached to his native soil. His interest in India derived from his ancestry and the yearning of so many Indians abroad for the 'motherland' and the recognition, once the romance has worn off, that the motherland is not as it was supposed to have been. His interest in Africa derived from his experience living on an island that was half black and thus descended from slaves. His interest in Islam derived no doubt from his experiences with Muslim Indians in Trinidad and the hatred and intolerance he no doubt found among them. His luck was to have been coming of age as a writer the very time when independence was achieved across the Caribbean and Africa. But his virtue was in noticing that all the independence-hoopla masked a very damaged and viciousness lurking just behind the screen set up by the independence movements and the colonial departure. As people celebrated the stirrings of nationalism, racism and tribalism were not far behind. Naipaul was presence in diagnosing this and in later diagnosing the coming Islamist threat.
He remains one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. It is a surprise he was able to achieve such a status after having confronted so many controversial subject and given a genuine response to them in a fair and honest way that would have earned others the name 'racist' (One should not forget that when writing about Guyana in The Middle Passage (1962) he noted that there was a group of famed former runaway slaves who had built a society which he described along the lines of "the laziest in the world…they are reputed to do no work except that which is necessary to the bare minimum of survival.")
Issue 22
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
February 17th, 2008
Roots in hate: Liberalism’s dark roots in the Nazi past of Heidegger: The shadow of the Nazi philosopher Martin Heidegger is long. He influenced the leading French philosopher Derrida and also Jewish thinkers such as Hannah Arendt. Today his philosophy is behind post-modernism and moral-relativism. Thus the dialectic of Nazism has finally caught up with us. Perhaps I was not incorrect in noting once that Nazism was a possible highest form of western civilization in a world gone wrong.
Modernity and history: The recent calls by progressives for Jews and Serbs and others to abandon their archaic history and monuments and join the rest of the world merely shows the degree to which the decision to abandon one’s history marks the final conversion to modernity. The two are at odds. One cannot have modernity and history. One must choose.
The life of an Arab in Israel: From Zochrot to Deir Yassin Remembered the history of Palestinians and groups dedicated to them in Israel are run by Jews and financed by Jewish philanthropies such as the Abraham fund. Jewish think tanks such as the Van Leer institute devote almost all their resources to studying Arabs and Muslims. If leftist Jews had it there way 13 million Jews would be engaged in learning the history and supporting the causes of 250 million Arabs and 1.3 billion Muslims. Those think tanks have wreaked untold havoc. There is a direct relationship between investment in coexistence and the amount of hatred that exists: the more money that goes in the more hate that comes out.
The genius of V.S Naipaul: Despite his reputation as something of a arrogant curmudgeon the brilliant writer V.S Naipaul has offered many important insights throughout his career. He dared to poke at India when others marveled at it. He dared to condemn Africa when others cheered for independence. He dared to confront Black Power and the leftist whites who loved it. He dared to confront Islam. The man towers over the second half of the 20th century and yet few realize the depth of his view and the uniqueness of his critique.
Roots in hate: Liberalism’s dark roots in the Nazi past of Heidegger
February 15th, 2008
Seth J. Frantzman
In the recently published book Liberal Fascism the author argues that many of the roots of modern socialist thought are in fact not dissimilar than the policies of Nazism. Take anti-smoking laws for example. These were first pioneered by the Nazi regime because Hitler was a fanatic vegan who wanted all things to be ‘clean’ and there is nothing more unclean than a smoker eating a steak. Nazi Germany was at the forefront of anti-gun laws and gun registration, a fact often quoted by members of the NRA. But if it turns out that some of the sources of our modern laws happen to find place in Nazism it is perhaps more surprising that sources of our modern thought find sources in Nazism. It is as if we were conquered through the back door.
Nazism was thoroughly thrashed in 1945. So how did its demon raise its head through academia and social theory? Keith Windschuttle, author of The Killing of History notes that Foucault, Derrida and Lacan, three French philosophers’ “intellectual mentor [was] the German existentialist philosopher Martin Heidegger, had been an anti-Semite, a Nazi informer on academic colleagues in the 1930s, and a financial member of the Nazi party from 1933 to 1945. While Foucault and Derrida thought his work pointed in radical directions, Heidegger himself continued to believe until his death in 1976 that his philosophy confirmed the ‘inner truth and greatness’ of the Nazi movement.” This is the same Heidegger that the Jewish philosopher and writer Hannah Arendt had an affair with, even after she was forced to flee Nazi Germany because of the rise of Nazism. Arendt even went so far as to testify on his behalf at his trial after the war. But Hannah Arendt was not the only Jew to become a passionate defender of Heidegger. Many of his defenders and apologists have been Jewish and the latest manuscript in the works on him is a passionate defense of him by a Jew.
What is surprising is not merely that Heidegger was able to pull the wool over the eyes of left wing Jews but that his theories influenced Derrida and Foucault who themselves have influenced sociology and social theory throughout the West. The impact of this line of narrative, this dialectic of Nazism if you will, is vast. Foucault was a key western supporter of the Islamist revolution in Iran. In the book Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, Janat Afary and Kevin Anderson show how was deeply taken with Islamism and he journeyed to Iran numerous times to support the Ayatollah. Foucault, the writer on feminism, was in Iran to see the women’s rights activists shot, raped and murdered at the hands of Islamism and he barely winced. According to the author he finally blinked when he was at the home of an Iranian exile, a secular activist made homeless by Foucault’s revolution, and the French philosopher inquired how Islam dealt with people “whom society calls abnormal.” The wife of the Iranian friend of Foucault pointed to the Koran and said “death.” According to Ehsan Naraghi, the Iranian secularist who hosted Foucault, “he was upset and left that night…he believed Islam approved of homosexuality…Two or three weeks after the revolution, when Khalkhali hanged several homosexuals, my wife said to me ‘give me the address of this friend of yours so I could tell him that the idealistic society where you thought homosexuality would be approved is this!” It was too late, Foucault was already off to San Francisco where he would be one of the first well known people to contract AIDS and die subsequently. He was a homosexual and his revolution in Iran had turned out differently than he had predicted. But he told no one of what he had learned. To his dying day he believed Islam was the ideal system of life and that it was a utopian society unlike the West he loathed so much.
The inspiration that Derrida and others drew from Heidegger was that Heidegger was a hater of modernity. Like the Nazis he desired to return to the authentic nation and his ideas were no doubt wrapped up in all the ‘Blood and Soil’ pseudo-science of Nazism. Like the Palestinian writers and Arab Christian theologians such as Naim Ateek, Mitri Rahab and Elias Chacour who declare “we belong to the land”, there was a deep seated nationalism behind Heidegger’s thought. How exactly leftist scholarship was able to adopt this theory is quite fascinating.
In order for leftism to adopt the ideas of the right it had first to fashion them so it could understand them. Thus Derrida understood Heidegger as not a nationalist who loved the soil but as a critiquer of modernity who was not conservative but rather believed there was no ‘truth’ because modernity was not progressive. Thus the ‘progress’ of Europe could be condemned from this standpoint. How exactly the same people are able to campaign for ‘human rights’ and international law is not exactly clear given that these are also inventions of modernity. Since no value system is ‘better’ than any other the heresy of Heidegger among the liberals is that it provides the basis for multi-culturalism, post-modernism and moral-relativism, the three pillars of liberalism’s belief system.
What is most fascinating is to explore the degree to which Heidegger is connected through this narrative to the Islamism and the Iranian revolution. In his recent treatise entitled Jihad and Jew Hatred the German writer Matthias Kuentzel argues that Islamism’s anti-Semitism is deeply rooted in its connections to Nazism through such men as Hajj Amin al Husayni. But what if the connection was not merely on the political level or on the level of ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’ under which the first copies of Mien Kampf were printed in Arabic? What if the roots of Islamism and support for it and the current fetish leftist thought has for Islam is actually rooted in Nazi philosophy?
Heidegger influenced Foucault and Foucault felt the utopian society was the Islamic one. Is it a coincidence that Islam and Nazi ideology were seen as utopian by two of the most prominent thinkers of the 20th century? Foucault and Derrida had a great and destructive influence on much of the modern academy. Thus it may be no surprise that 9/11 found a field eagerly awaiting fertilization with Islamic ideas. Jewish thinkers are not immune. The Jewish activist turned anti-Israel writer, Avraham Burg, has argued that Europe needs to be ‘impregnated’ with Islam. He is not alone among the Jewish writers who have been deeply influenced by Islam and who have romanticized the Islamic past in places like Muslim Spain.
Nazism and its philosophy were able to infect western social theory and through the theory it was able to bring the most prominent leftist theorists over to Nazism. Thus where Nazism failed to destroy western civilization, Islamism will follow and it will have the devotion of many western social theorists in the process. If the narrative has skipped the way in which social theory in the west was first wrapped up in Communism it is only because Communism is dead. The fetish for Islam is merely the latest manifestation of the 1970s and 1980s support of Communism as utopia. For the western leftist the ‘other’ is always superior to the self. Today’s other is Islam and Islam is therefore the ideal.
Modernity and history
Seth J. Frantzman
Feb 14, 2008
The way in which intellectuals proudly proclaim that nations such as Israel and Serbia must give up the historical centres of their national heritage reflects the way in which brutal modernity expects the modern nation state to adapt. This is evident in Israel in the difference between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Jerusalem reveres its stones. All of its buildings, save a few, are built out of Jerusalem stone. It has its holy sites and its prophet’s tombs. It has its graveyards of the judges and kings of Israel. It has the anger and passions of history affecting the present. For the commentator this is savage and barbaric, although he will not use such words. He will say it is archaic or that it is intolerant, the new code words for the barbarian.
Modernity’s answer is Tel Aviv. Modern and built from concrete, built according to socialist utilitarian models. Although it suffers from the most extreme urban decay, so that parts of it look like one of this futuristic films where there is no one left on earth and a man is walking in a deserted city, people celebrate it as a ‘World Heritage Site’ called the ‘White City’. There is nothing white about it. Surely though modernity offers more. Indeed. It offers us Berlin. It offers us all the new fangled cities that have obliterated the past completely. It offers what the Soviets offered and what Mao offered. It offers people without history. It offers the destruction of the monasteries and bulldozing of graveyards and churches and old parts of town. Most places in the world have witnessed this. In Egypt they have covered over the ancient Jewish cemeteries lest someone recall that Jews once lived there. In Afghanistan they blew up the Bamiyan Buddhas, lest people recall that Buddhism was once the religion of Central Asia.
Modernity is the concept that history must not influence the present. Modernity’s ultimate goal is the diverse city full of people who have no heritage. Although the west preaches multi-culturalism and diversity it also preaches assimilation and the melting pot. Prime Minister Erdogan, the chief of Turkey, has called assimilation a ‘crime against humanity’. Although his message is quite extreme, he is hitting the nail on the head. Assimilation is a crime in his terms because it erases the past.
Even in Barbados the radio station reminds us that ‘a people without a culture are but a shell’. Reagan noted once that ‘If we stop being a Nation Under God we will truly be a nation gone under.’ This is the essence. When the newspaper commentators noted that the Serbs must abandon their history in order to live peacefully in the present they were implicitly acknowledging that history is a burden on modernity and that it is the cause of all sorts of violence and thus peace and tolerance only come with the abandonment of culture and history and religion. Christopher Hitchens’ ‘God is not Great: how religion ruins everything’ is the manifesto of modernity.
Although there is no evidence that modern people who lack history are any less violent than people who cling to their history, it is apparent that the struggle is indeed between history and modernity.
The life of an Arab in Israel
February 13th, 2008
Seth J. Frantzman
Where does an Arab go to learn about his history? There is the Jewish organization Zochrot to teach him about the Nakba and show him the locations of old Arab villages. Where does he go when he wants to build a new town or when he illegally builds a house without a permit and doesn’t pay taxes? There is the Jewish organization Planners for Planning rights. Where does he go when he is sick? There is the Jewish organization ‘Doctors without Borders’ for him. Where does he go when he wants to share his art work? There are Jews at the Tate gallery ready to host special art exhibitions for Arabs of Israel. Where does he go when he doesn’t want Jews to live near him? There is the Jewish organization SPNI to testify in court that the Jewish homes in question are ruining the environment. Where does he go when he wants to live near Jews? There is the Jewish village Neve Shalom built specially for Arabs where they can live in ‘coexistence’ with Jews and pay no taxes because those taxes are paid by a charity thanking them for being involved in ‘coexistence’. In addition there are other non-profits whose sole interest is to fund coexistence villages. Where does he go when he needs a sewer treatment plant for his village? A German company provides one for free. Where does he go when he doesn’t want to work? He runs for the Knesset and attends the funerals of terrorists like George Habash and Yasser Arafat and donates money through Jewish friends like Noam Chomsky and Norman Finkelstein to Hizbullah. Where does he go when he wants to learn how evil Israel is? He reads books by Jews like Joel Kovine and Ilan Pappe and he joins Jewish organizations like ‘Deir Yassin Remembered’ and the Union for Peace and Justice in the Middle East which is run by a Jew named Noah Haiduc. Where does he go when he needs civil rights or he wants to complain? There are the Jewish organizations Peace Now, B’Tselem and ACRI for him. Where does he go when he needs free legal representation? There are Jewish legal organizations supporting Arab rights that will give him free legal advice. Where does he go when he wants prostitutes? There are Jewish women in Tel Aviv who ‘feel sorry for Arabs because they can’t go out with their own women’ for him.
Where does an Arab go when he needs help with the environment for his home town? There is the Abraham Fund and numerous other Jewish charities to help him. What if he wants to learn about his society? There is the Van Leer institutes 'Center for the study of Israeli Arab society. Within that Jewish funded organization there is a fellowship for Young Arab Scholars, A forum on Israeli Arabs, an Israeli Arab Society yearbook. There is also a 'joint' venture of the Van Leer Institute and the Commission on the Jewish people of the United Jewish Appeal whose goal is
"improve the conditions of Arab society in Israel. A three-pronged approach will be employed. Firstly, research will be commissioned in key areas of concern and position papers published. These will be of professional use to government policymakers and decision-makers, the business sector, civil society NGOs and foundations. Secondly, research findings will be put on the public agenda by means of conferences, a public awareness campaign and dialogue with government officials and civil society players. Thirdly, a strategy document recommending modes of effective intervention for NGOs and foundations will be drafted and updated each year."
The director of this program which is run by Jewish philanthropies and Jewish institutes is none other than an Arab by the name of Dr. Khalid Abu Asbah and his assistant Asmahan Masry-Herzalla. Lest one think that this is all the Van leer Institute does under its auspices of the study of Civil Society in Israel, one is mistaken. Outside of Civil Society, which in Israel apparently only consists of Arabs, there is the Van Leer Institute's program on 'Israelis-Palestinians, Mediterranean cooperation.' The program speaks about 'mutual responsibility' but this is belied by the fact that the only responsibility for the program seems to come from Jewish funding. Among the program the institute works on is 'saving the Arab market of Jaffa' which it informs the reader was recently purchased by Jewish philanthropists so Arabs could benefit. The institute also monitors the police in Jaffa, lest they run amok in racism against the Arabs. Under the auspices of 'Mixed Cities-trapped communities' the organizations analyzed " the connections between national identity, urban space and gender relations in ethnically divided areas, specifically in mixed Palestinian-Israeli towns. " It also authored "An Israeli City or A City in Israel? Questions of Identity, Meaning and Power" which no doubt makes the reader wonder New York is an 'American City' or a 'City in America'.
The institute also makes sure to have their very own Israeli-Palestinian Dialogue center and programming. They work together on the environment and run programs with the Al Quds University center for the study of peace. The program funds lectures on Islam which are not doubt enlightening. It is important, the institute points out, that the world's 13 million Jews help pay for lectures about Islam, because the 1.3 billion Muslims certainly can't afford to fund such lectures. But the institute feels that Jews need more than to simply understand Islam. There are special programs on " Learning the meaning of being a refugee" Getting to know the other, The Territories – Land of Our Forefathers or a Godforsaken Land?, National Conflict: Can It Be Resolved? The Irish and Israeli Cases. All of it is coordinated under the auspicious, perhaps not surprising, of a Jewish woman (Sarah Lazar) and an Arab man (Faris Aruri).
But surely that’s not enough. A new Jewish female hire at the JDC, one of the world's largest Jewish philanthropies, asked her boss during her orientation "are we doing enough for the Arabs" which apparently meant 'are 13 million Jews doing enough for 250 million Arabs' to which the reply was "no we are not." No doubt Jews have never done enough for the Arabs, except convert to Islam and die.
The Abraham fund website is perhaps a study in these themes. It presents five faces. There is the 'Black Man', who is frowning, as black men in posters paid for by philanthropists are apt to do, unless they are children. There is the 'white woman' who is smiling, as white woman are apt to do. There is the 'mixed race individual woman' who is smiling as mixed race women that appear in advertising are apt to do. Then there is the oddly place 'ugly white woman' who is biting her lip. Lastly there is the romantic 'Arab man' complete with headdress and small beard. He can't have too big a beard lest he seem like a threatening terrorist. He looks more like a character our of Lawrence of Arabia. Below the nice photo-montage of racial harmony is the all important link to 'Equality' which portrays the stereotypical Arab woman complete with all encompassing white headscarf. Next to her is the 'western woman' with her lily white face and cropped 'lesbian-cut' hair.
Lest someone get the wrong idea that the Abraham Fund, which bills itself as a philanthropy helping 'all the children of Abraham', is helping anyone but Arabs and Muslims the webpage tells the full story. There is educated for headscarfed Arab women (a side note here: in order for philanthropies to prove they are helping Arabs they make sure to photograph Arab women with headscarfs on, otherwise one might think they were just dark haired women. One wonders how philanthropies 'prove' they are helping Irish women? Do they make them wear four-leafed clovers? It is one reason Christian Arab women never appear in the brochures or websites when people are talking about Arabs. They don't wear headscarfs.) So the Abraham fund does it all. An American Jewish philanthropy, it promotes Arab language instruction and Arab history in Jewish schools and it promotes equal opportunities for Arabs in government jobs among other things. While it might seem strange to some that American Jews feel their money should go toward Arabs in Israel rather than say Jews in America or Arabs in America or starving black children, it makes perfect sense. This is American Jewries new crusade. This is the new 'thing' among the Jews of America. Having won out on civil rights, gay rights, women's rights and a variety of other causes in the U.S the American Jewish secular left has now turned its attention to the Arabs of Israel. These Arabs are the new 'blacks' because they lack civil rights (supposedly) and they are 'oppressed'. So they need their own Jewish freedom riders. Like good colonizers the American Jews are running around Arab villages in the Galilee coaching soccer teams, building schools and helping to clean up the environment.
It all reminds me of a time I was in Mexico with a bunch of my fellow leftist Americans. We were doing a 'home-stay' in Carbo, a piss-poor town in Sanora, not far from Hermosillo. The town had an exchange program with my private boarding school. So for two weeks a year poor Mexicans in cowboy boots and tight jeans came to Arizona and lived the life of an American high school student: clandestine drinking, drug use, whoring and complaining. For two weeks a year Americans went down to Mexico and lived the life of the Mexican student: drinking, whoring and making tortillas. But at the end of our trip the white woman who ran our program decided we needed to do something philanthropic. While the Mexicans might have liked a new truck or a trip across the border in the bottom of our van, she decided we needed to clean up Mexico. So we set about picking up trash in a field near the school. We picked up trash, old cans, paper, napkins, plastic wrappers and even bones of a dead cow. The Mexican students laughed at us, never comprehending why we would pick up trash that they were just going to throw back in the same place the next day. We surely thought we had been coexisting or learning tolerance. An odd kind of tolerance when one goes and tells others how to live, but tolerance none the less. We packed into our van afterward and waved to our new friends Lupita and Jose, and drove away. No doubt if we had made a brochure we could have put old Memo with his cowboy hat on it and one of our young nubile white high school girls as well to publicize the good deeds we had done in solving Mexico's problems while creating tolerance. We had 'roughed it' and lived the way of the poor Mexican. We were tolerant.
Liberalism can be found in many things. It is sort of the god of small things. A newspaper article lauding the 'Freedom fighter turned president of Kosovo' or an article from the BBC about 'living with Hamas's rocket squads' or an article from the Tribune where the Jewish reported Allisa Rubin headlines "Iraqi insurgents 'poison' minds of Iraqi youth", the poison in quotations because the author feels that Al Quieda's use of children and mentally handicapped female suicide bombers is either a myth or heroic or an act of 'freedom fighting'. Liberalism is everywhere.
Liberalism has its institutes and its fund and its ridiculous brochures and it likes to have studies and conferences. But one should study liberalism. One should come to understand what it really is. To see it at its most ridiculous all one has to do is examine the foolish naiveté and simplistic idiocy of websites and programs run by the Van Leer institute and the Abraham Fund.
I will make a wager. The amount of money invested in 'coexistence' in Israel doubles every two years. In 1948 there was no such money being invested. That is a fact. Today the amounts run into the tens of millions. The amount of people, most white people from the west and Jews from west, involved in 'coexistence' is in the tens of thousands. The number of Israelis and Palestinians is quite small. 15 students here, 5 students there. There are probably more programs like Seeds of Peace than there are students that actually attend them.
The wager is this. I would bet that the more money invested in coexistence the less coexistence there is. The more American Jews came tramping down the tarmac at Ben Gurion Airport with suitcases full of cash to promote 'coexistence' the more hatred there will be. Why is this? This is part of the paradox of 'peace studies' and liberalism. The more peace studies there is, and there are at least a dozen departments across Israel and the Palestinian territories, the less peace there is.
Perhaps people forget. The American Department of Defense used to be called the War Department. Its name was changed to include the moniker 'defense' like it was in every other country out of the notion that 'war department' seemed too warlike. This was a handy play on words but oddly enough it has not made people more peaceful. Departments of Defense go to war just as much as War departments.
Liberalism spreads hate like the plague, always feigning innocence after the genocide takes place that it helped cause. After years of telling Hutus they were underprivileged and calling them a 'minority' (which they weren't) the same liberals than played with the words 'act of genocide' to describe what took place. After years of cajoling the Iranian people and comparing the Shah's Savak secret police to the Gestapo the Liberals like Michel Foucault were surprised to find that their Iranian revolution didn't produce rights for gays or women, but instead resulted in religious fascism. But Foucault was off in San Francisco dying of aids and wallowing in his own self hatred by then, too sick to notice the catastrophe he had cheered for. Liberals like Bernard Shaw shook hands with Stalin and yukked it up while millions Ukrainians died in a famine. All in the name, as Barak Obama puts it, of 'talking' and 'listening' to the other. We must 'talk' to Iran, that’s the Obama message. We always have to talk to the genocidaires. Bill Marr orders us to leave Iraq and Saudi Arabia and says "that’s why they hate us, because we had bases in Saudi Arabia," perhaps forgetting that it was the Saudis who begged us to put those bases there to defend them against Saddam in 1990. No matter. That is 'why they hate us'.
We cannot have peace because liberalism will not let it happen. The amount of money invested in peace studies and coexistence will not allow peace because then there will be no need for 'peace studies' and 'coexistence'.
There are two problems with the liberal argument. Liberals like to tell us about how the Noble native-Americans lived in a utopian peaceful world. But if they did so how were they able to manage without billions of dollars in aid and millions in Jewish philanthropic dollars telling them how to make peace? How did they survive without it? How could they have been peaceful without first attending the AL Quds University and its department of Peace Study. Oddly enough most suicide bombers seem to have studied 'peace studies'. The terrorist thug in charge of Kosovo whose nickname was the 'snake' trained in the department of International Relations in Switzerland. I guess he learned all about coexistence and peace.
Another problem is the liberal attempt to compare the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to the Irish troubles. Perhaps liberals missed something. The pashas are Van Leer instruct the Israeli state to release all Palestinian prisoners on the 'model' of the 'Good Friday Agreement'. Perhaps the liberals have forgotten something. In Ireland the IRA stopped murdering civilians. Did the liberal forget this essential ingredient to peace? Both sides have to stop killing eachother. You can't have a ceasefire while one side keeps fighting. That’s not a ceasefire, that’s called surrender.
How much of Palestinian history has been created and written by Jews? How much of the creation of the Palestinians and the fostering of their hatred has been fanned and encouraged by Jews, Jewish organizations, Jewish intellectuals and Jewish groups? Whether it is the Neturei Karta or the extreme left there are always Jews to support Islamic terrorism and create myths about Islamic tolerance. There are Jews to memorialize the Palestinian past and force the JNF to post signs showing where Arab villages were. There are Jewish architectural organizations who sole job is to memorialize Arab houses. There are Jewish musicians like Berenboim who give free concerts only for Arabs. There are Jews who were ethnically cleansed from Hebron and Arab countries who sole concern is the well being of Arabs and making sure Arabs in Hebron have as much property as possible. There are Jews to write Arab history books about the Nakba for Arab children to read. How much of the hatred learned by Arabs through books and the media is funded by Jews. How many Jewish organizations like the Abraham fund encourage honor killings and Shariah law and meet only with right wing extremist Islamist Muslims and support only Islamic foundations and Islamist schools. How much of Palestinian hatred is simply a creation, funded wholeheartedly by Jewish money and created by Jewish intellectuals? Is it a surprise that the one Arab people who happen to live in the Jewish state are described by Jewish professors like Sandra Sufian as the ‘indigenous’ people of Israel, implying obviously that the Jews are not indigenous, that Jews are the only people in the world who are not indigenous to anything? Is it a surprise that most Palestinian history has been written by Jews and that in the West Palestinians are the most popular people in history books and the most well funded people per capita in the world and the only people who are described as ‘refugees’ four generations after becoming refugees. Is it a surprise that from architects to journalists there are Jewish groups working for the Palestinian cause as Jews work for no other causes, as if the Palestinians were, in a sense, Jews. Is it a surprise that Jews have taken up the cause of the people who have killed and suppressed Jews for more than a thousand years, that Jews would support the people that built a mosque atop their temple and built minarets in their quarter and made them wash streets on Shabbat and rioted and slaughtered them every few years and forced them to live in ghettos and wear special clothes and forbid them to ride horses and raped and slaughtered them and called them ‘dog’ and ‘pig’ and sold them as slaves and charged them a special tax merely to survive. Is it a surprise that these people would become the people whose history interests Jews the most and that that the majority of students studying Arabic at any school are Jewish and that the majority of students who volunteer to work for the peace corps in Muslim countries are Jewish and that the only question asked during an orientation at the JDC, a Jewish organization, is ‘Are we doing enough o help the Arabs?” Is it a surprise that the people who love Martin Heidegger, the Nazi philosopher and lover of Hannah Arendt, the most are Jews, not Germans. Is it a surprise that at his trial the person who defended him was a Jew, Ms. Arendt, who was forced to flee Nazi Germany only to return to defend its chief philosopher when gentiles wanted to put him in prison. So is it a surprise that Jews are the greatest scholars of Palestinian history?
Since all of the money donated by secular Jews goes to help 1.3 billion Muslims and 250 million Arabs one must admire the poorest of the Jewish people: the religious Jews. They don't donate money to the 'other' and they don't teach 'coexistence'. They get on without it, which is forever disturbing to leftists. How could people live in the world without waiting patiently in anticipation for the next report from the Van Leer Institute? The religious Jewish women cover their hair, but their style of headscarfs don't appeal to the photographers of brochures and websites. Perhaps the Jewish headcovering isn't exotic enough or it doesn’t restrict the movement of the face enough and press up against the neck causing the face to puff up and causing the mouth to frown. The Jews aren’t exotic enough. In the old days when the world discovered Jews living in 'exotic places' like Yemen everyone loved them. Then they brought them to Israel and suddenly those Jews because boring. Although they were pour and wretched and the women were dark and swarthy there was no longer any interest in them. The only thing that has saved Jewish philanthropy from not only giving money to Arabs is the discovery that there were black Jews in Ethiopia and thus some Jewish philanthropies still adorn their posters with the token black Jew, his big smile and his little kids saying to the secular Jew "save me like all the other black people that need saving." It’s a pretty sad cynical world that operates on such things, that loves such causes and flagellates itself in such a way all the while thinking it is so open minded and tolerant. Show me an open mind and I'll show you a racist. There are no better racists than those who proclaim themselves open minded.
The genius of V.S Naipaul
Seth J. Frantzman
February 10th, 2008
It is surprising that Naipaul was successful in the literary field and that many people who should scoff at his notions had they heard them at a dinner party are Naipaul enthusiasts. His luck at breaking through and the acclaim he has received is well deserved. But it is not his writing that deserves acclaim, it is his honesty and the fact that he dared to take on all of the liberal romanticizing inherent in the western view of the 'other'.
Naipaul was a perfect vehicle for this. No matter how many people wanted to call him 'racist' for his descriptions of Africa, India and the Muslim world they held their tongues, knowing that Mr. Naipaul himself was one of the 'exotic coloured people of the third world.'
Naipaul's genius in having taken in so many people is that he wove in charming stories about his Indian-Caribbean heritage, A House for Mr. Biswas(1961), Miguel Street(1959) alongside barbaric stories of honesty such as Michael X and the Black Power Killings in The Writer and the World(2002), Guerillas(1975), Beyond Belief(1998), In A Free State(1971) and Tell me Who to Kill(in a Flag on the Island 1967). He tackled such subjects as African tribalism, post-colonial failure, the charade of Black Power movements, the subtle racism of white women in their romanticizing of the other, the problems of interracial marriage and self hate and the problems of India.
Widely resented as a curmudgeon, along the lines of Paul Theroux, Mr. Naipaul's reputation has survived. In three separate books on India (A Wounded Civiliation 1977, A Million Mutinies Now 1992, An Area of Darkness 1964) he described his own civilization as both wounded by Islamic colonialism and beset by massive poverty and savagery. On Africa he painted a bleak picture of barbarism lurking just beneath the surface, something that has come to light in recent civil strife in Nigeria, Liberia, Kenya and Rwanda, but something that most choose to ignore in the Post-Indepedendence haze of celebration. But his most incisive critique was for Islam when he visited the non-Arab countries which had chosen the Islamic path, or whose path had been brutally chosen for them; Malaysia, Iran, Pakistan and Indonesia. He found Islamism in the 1980s and 1990s, long before most westerners were aware of it, and he found the vicious hatred and intolerance inherent in Islam, something most refuse to accept.
In examinations of his own island he dared to speak out against the Black Power movement of the 1960s and 1970s. He found in it the chauvinistic racism that it supposedly opposed. In his picture of Jimmy Ahmed and Michael X, the latter a real person, he found ex-pimps and rapists masquerading as civil rights leaders, engaging in murder and orgies with visiting journalists who showered them with praise. Only Naipaul could show the picture of these awe-struck 'white hipsters' being raped by the very people they loved. Only Naipaul could dare to poke fun and laugh at the white patrons of Michael X's 'Black House' in England where he received money from rich whites to live in a house "where black people would live together communally". Only white people would provide money for non-whites to live together as if funding an experiment. He hid deep within the pages of a collection of short stories called The Writer and His World(2002) a story about races and expectations in Trinidad in which he surveyed the expectations of local whites, blacks and Indians. He found that the whites expected the least: a good life working in their father's firm, hard work and reward in the form of a settled and clean life. The Indians wanted only slightly more. The blacks, by contrast, dreamed of success in sports and music and dreamed of one day ruling empires and all sorts of megalomania. Naipaul's diagnosis was simple: the affects of unreasonable expectations were the sole reason that success followed those whites and Indians who dreamed of simpler things that were attainable. Naipaul set out his view that it was no surprise that the blacks would grow up to resent Indian success and he thus came to understand the Black Power movement; since fantasies did not meet reality they were seduced by the inherently racist black conscious movement that swept the Caribbean. Some even converted to Islam. No other writer could have gotten away with such a critique.
Naipaul's luck was to have been born in 1932 and graduated from Oxford in 1954. The son of a dirt poor peasant Hindu family he rose to the highest levels of literary society in the English speaking world. But through and through he remained attached to his native soil. His interest in India derived from his ancestry and the yearning of so many Indians abroad for the 'motherland' and the recognition, once the romance has worn off, that the motherland is not as it was supposed to have been. His interest in Africa derived from his experience living on an island that was half black and thus descended from slaves. His interest in Islam derived no doubt from his experiences with Muslim Indians in Trinidad and the hatred and intolerance he no doubt found among them. His luck was to have been coming of age as a writer the very time when independence was achieved across the Caribbean and Africa. But his virtue was in noticing that all the independence-hoopla masked a very damaged and viciousness lurking just behind the screen set up by the independence movements and the colonial departure. As people celebrated the stirrings of nationalism, racism and tribalism were not far behind. Naipaul was presence in diagnosing this and in later diagnosing the coming Islamist threat.
He remains one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. It is a surprise he was able to achieve such a status after having confronted so many controversial subject and given a genuine response to them in a fair and honest way that would have earned others the name 'racist' (One should not forget that when writing about Guyana in The Middle Passage (1962) he noted that there was a group of famed former runaway slaves who had built a society which he described along the lines of "the laziest in the world…they are reputed to do no work except that which is necessary to the bare minimum of survival.")
Saturday, February 9, 2008
Terra Incognita 21 Starbucks, Serbia, Democracy and Indigenous
Terra Incognita
Issue 20
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
February 9th, 2008
Starbucks, apartheid and the liberal: Starbucks has separate seating for men and women in Saudi Arabia and enforces the seating by calling on the religious police to remove those who transgress the ‘culture’ of Saudi Arabia. The Archbishop of England wants us to introduce Shariah law and declares “an approach to law which simply said-there’s one law for everybody-I think that’s a bit of a danger.” Why does today’s liberal support such apartheid?
The myth of the indigenous and the origins of racism: Recently scholars have decided to label the Palestinians the ‘indigenous’ people of Israel. How did they become indigenous? The myth of ‘indigenous’ people is connected to the Blood and Soil parties of pre-Nazi Germany and they gave rise to myth of the Aryan nation. While there are truly ‘indigenous’ people in the Americas and Australia, it is a myth that people in Asia or Europe are ‘indigenous’ and any insinuation of such a thing inevitably implies other people are not indigenous and thus are not authentic or genuine and therefore, as in Rwanda, deserve to be killed. That is a dangerous things for Scholars to insinuate and they should be ashamed of themselves.
How did real events become 'national myths' or why we should be proud to call ourselves Serbs: The world is waiting in anticipation for Kosovo independence. The same world declares Serbia’s attachment to Kosovo a ‘national myth’ and describes it as a ‘seminal narrative’ of the Serbs and Europeans ask “are [Serbs] at least ready to abandon their sacred myth?” While we condemn the Serbs for loving their history we might not have noticed that their history also includes fighting the Nazis. The Serbs were one of the few European people to have done so. Europeans call Serbian history a myth because Europeans dare not confront the fact that most European countries collaborated with Nazism. They would like to forget that past. The Serbs like to remember it, and the Serbs should be proud to do so.
The Paradox of Democracy: Democracy creates the very seeds of its own destruction. From Weimer Germany to Bhutto’s Pakistan the weaker democratic regimes have tolerated and fostered anti-democratic forces. When the time has come to confront them it has been to late. Is this a paradox for democracy? What can one do when the enemies of democracy use the democratic system in order to destroy it?
Starbucks, apartheid and the liberal
Seth J. Frantzman
February 8th, 2008
In the 1980s the liberals boycotted companies that did business in Apartheid South Africa. We all celebrated that. We thought it was so important to show businesses that doing business with racism would have consequences. But that was the 1980s, when Republicans still believed in balancing the budget and liberals still believed in democracy and civil rights.
All that has changed now. The liberal has undergone a transformation. While he claims to detest religion he fawns and becomes misty-eyed when some lets the words ‘Mohammed the prophet’ roll off the tongue. Liberals like Archbishop Rowan Williams have proclaimed Shariah law the answer to England’s problems. But the greatest liberal sin is that it countenances the evils in Saudi Arabia and supports companies that do business there and in the Gulf and in Iran.
Starbucks is one such company. Starbucks runs coffee shops in Saudi Arabia and Jews are not allowed to purchase coffee in them. Its not really that Jews aren’t allowed, but since Jews and Christians are not allowed in Saudi Arabia, for all intents and purposes Starbucks does not let Jews purchase its coffee. Starbucks makes sure to conform to Saudi Nazi law and segregates its restaurant. Men in one section. Women in another. ‘Families’ in another. This is the Starbucks way. As Brandom Borrman, a company spokesman notes, “Starbucks takes pride in respecting different cultures, and as a global company with locations in 44 countries, we recognize that religious customs, social norms and laws will vary among the communities where we work”
On February 4th an American woman of Jordanian extraction who wears “an abaya and a headscarf, like most Saudi women, out of cultural respect” was arrested for sitting in the family section of Starbucks with a man who was not her husband. She was bundled into a taxi and taken to prison by the Commission for Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, a 10,000-strong police force charged with enforcing dress codes, and sex segregation.
No liberal will protest this. Human Rights Watch will not protest it. The U.N will say nothing. Amnesty International will say nothing. The Liberal will do nothing. No one will boycott Saudi Arabia or Starbucks or anything because of this. That is the world we live in. Those liberals who protested on behalf of the rights of Blacks in the American South and those liberals who boycotted South Africa and those liberals who boycott Israel will not lift a finger in this case. Why? This is the new religion of the liberal. “cultural respect”. “religious customs, social norms.” This is how the liberal lives his life. It is how the west lives its life.
I would have liked to have seen such a world confronted with Nazism. The liberals like to write books like IBM and the Holocaust. I had one such liberal roommate who, after reading that book, complained and complained in the most shrill way that IBM and ‘American corporations’ had been in bed with the Nazis. Except for Henry Ford however American corporations didn’t believe in Nazi ideas on race. American companies like IBM were in Germany to do business, sort of like Starbucks in Saudi. American companies accepted Nazi law out of a similar respect for “culture” and “social norms.” So why do the liberals judge them so harshly? Why did the liberals judge companies that did business in Apartheid South Africa so harshly? They were respecting the “culture” of South Africa and the “social norms.” What is the problem with such social norms. Blacks and whites ought not to be together, after all different cultures think differently. So if some cultures think that blacks and whites should develop separately what is wrong with that? Women and men ought not to sit together, after all some men are offended by the presence of menstruating women. So what is wrong with that? Some people abhor the presence of Jews, with their long noses, hunched backs. Why should Jews and gentiles mix? Certainly there should be a separate place for both. Separate lines, separate eating areas. What is wrong with a culture that thinks Jews and women and blacks and gays should have their separate area, or should simply not exist?
I don’t have to answer these questions. I am not a liberal. We conservatives were called ‘racist’ because we didn’t boycott South Africa. We were all called ‘racists’ because our corporations worked in Nazi Germany before the war. But who is more racist; the conservative who went to war against Nazi Germany or the liberal who countenances the evils of Saudi Arabia and supports them under the guise of ‘culture’? Who is more racist, the conservative who, in his heart opposed the regime of South Africa but didn’t boycott companies that did business there or the liberal who wholeheartedly supports cultural relativism and supports Saudi Arabia.
The world has indeed reversed itself. Liberals call themselves progressive and open minded and yet they shop at Starbucks and they say Saudi has a right to do as it wants because it has a different ‘culture’. Conservative Foxnews runs stories daily about the discrimination inherent to Islam. The story about Starbucks cannot be found at the BBC or CNN websites. Instead the BBC includes a lively point by point explanation of why Islamic Law will be a benefit to England and why it is truly a legal system of ‘equality’ that guarantees “women rights”. The same good liberal Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, who supports Gay marriage and calls Israel an ‘apartheid state’ is the same one who says “an approach to law which simply said-there’s one law for everybody-I think that’s a bit of a danger”. Yes Mr. Williams, that was the same argument used by the Apartheid government of South Africa. It is funny to see what liberalism has become. Thank you, Mr. Williams, for articulating in such a concise manner the new message of liberalism and ‘progressives’. We conservatives beg to differ, we beg to think that, yes, one legal system under which all are equal before the law, is preferable to a different system for blacks and women and gays and Muslims. Such a legal system was enshrined in the Declaration of American Independence in which the it was noted that “All men are created equal, endowed by their creator with certain inaliable rights.” One would have never imagined that the people who would come and take those rights from us would be the left and the ‘open minded progressives’.
Who is the liberal today? Who is the progressive? Why is it open minded to accept Nazism?
The myth of the indigenous and the origins of racism
Seth J. Frantzman
February 2nd, 2007
The use of the word indigenous has become more common, but lest we be fooled by this new word, we should realize it is merely a semantic device of the liberal, one whose origins are in racist ideology and one that is used today to sow hatred and division in the world.
The idea of the indigenous, which translates as “originating and living or occurring naturally in an area or environment” or as “innate, intrinsic,” is not new. According to Wikipedia “the term indigenous peoples has no universal, standard or fixed definition, but can be used about any ethnic group who inhabit the geographic region with which they have the earliest historical connection.” Furthermore the adjective indigenous has the common meaning of ‘having originated in and being produced, growing, living, or occurring naturally in a particular region or environment’. Therefore, in a purely adjectival sense any given people, ethnic group or community may be described as being indigenous in reference to some particular region or location. However some scholars have decided that ‘indigenous’ like ‘racism’ has more to do with power than fact. One defines ‘indigenous’ as “a politically underprivileged group, who share a similar ethnic identity different to the nation in power, and who have been an ethnic entity in the locality before the present ruling nation took over power” (Greller, 1997). There have been international conventions on indigenous people including a famous declaration on the rights of the indigenous in 1957 and a Convention concerning indigenous and tribal peoples in 1989. This latest one noted that:
“(b) peoples in independent countries who are regarded as indigenous on account of their descent from the populations which inhabited the country, or a geographical region to which the country belongs, at the time of conquest or colonisation or the establishment of present state boundaries and who, irrespective of their legal status, retain some or all of their own social, economic, cultural and political institutions.
2. Self-identification as indigenous or tribal shall be regarded as a fundamental criterion for determining the groups to which the provisions of this Convention apply.”
Thus the U.N, which runs these ‘conventions’ on indigenous people basicaly sums up the problem with a note that ‘self-idenitification’ is enough for a group to be ‘indigenous. Since this is not a very useful definition we should move foreard and see how scholars have decided to use the term. Professor Sandra Sufian, author of a book on land reclaimation in Israel entited ‘Healing the Land’ noted in a description of her book that: she addressed “contested questions of social organization and the effects of land reclamation upon the indigenous Palestinian population ."(The book implies that the Zionists were ‘racist’ in trying to cure Malaria and rid the land of malarial swamps that affected both Jews and Arabs. Ironically the author does not condemn the Turks for similar attempts at land reclamation or those attempts made by the Lebanese Arab land owning Sursuq family. To Sufian the Sursuqs were more ‘indigenous’ than the Jews.) When this author confronted the ‘scholar’ about her use of the word ‘indigenous’ and pointed out that the Palestinians are no more indigenous to Israel than the Jews are to Spain or the Afrikaners to South Africa and that no scholar claims Arabs are indigenous to Egypt, Iraq or Sudan, places they arrived in at the same time as they arrived in Israel she replied that:
“I use the term indigenous in the book to refer to those populationsthat were born and lived in the land of Palestine (i.e. the Arabpopulation and those Jews born in Palestine), not those that immigrated(the majority of Jews belonging to the Zionist movement). This is thedistinction that most scholars that I know of who work on Israel/Palestinemake.”
Thus we see that indigenous is not so much a term with a scientific definition but rather a political semantical tool used by ‘scholars’ and liberals and leftists in order to impugn and discredit certain people and encourage other people to claim that they are ‘authentic’ and thus encourage violence and genocide between groups of people. What is most fascinating is the current leftist obsession with defining those they support as ‘indigenous’ and those they hate as ‘foreign interlopers’ is merely a repetition of something that has taken place before.
Beginning in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The Land and Soil and Blood and Soil parties that came into being in Europe and elsewhere in the west between 1850 and 1950 were responsible for the racist hatred that led to the Second World War. R Walter Darre who was born in 1895 to a German father and Swedish mother became the main ideologue behind the German idea of Blut und-Boden or ‘blood and soil’. The argument was that the Aryan Germans were the natural and authentic inhabitants of Germany, the indigenous people, and that they were fighting unnatural elements such as Jews. They used pseudo-science to prove this. In a supreme irony modern leftists have tried to use DNA tests to prove that Palestinians are related to the Canaanites, thus repeating this pseudo-science-racism.
What is most fascinating is if one considers the way in which Germans romanticized the Native Americans such as Tecumseh and used them as part of their Nazi ideology of ‘blood and soil’ one sees a direct link to the racism inherent in applying the word indigenous in an injudicious manner.
It was not so long ago that the only people known as indigenous were the ‘First Peoples’ of Canada, the Native Americans of the United States and the Aboriginals of Australia. Later the term spread to include many native groups in South America. In a sense any group that Toynbee might have considered a ‘fossil’ was included in this list i.e. people who were original to the land. Archeology theoretically proves that the Native American tribes such as the Apache are direct descendants of the original people to inhabit the Americas. They are thus indigenous. The same is true of the Inuit and the Aborigines.
But for the rest of the world, including Africa, vast migrations, war and genocide have left few traces of the ‘original’ people. Jared Diamond has shown how even places such as Africa have experienced great migrations of people such as the Bantu. With the exception of groups like the Basques there are few people today living where they have lived for five to ten thousand years.
The imposition of the semantical use of ‘indigenous’ upon people who are not indigenous in any way is a scholarly way to revive the old Nazi theories of blood and soil. There is absolutely no other way of understanding why scholars would label Palestinians as ‘indigenous’ and not do the same for all the other people in the world. The Palestinians are as ‘indigenous’ as the Turks are to Turkey, which is to say neither is indigenous. The great irony is that scholars would purposely label Palestinians indigenous in order to discredit Jewish attachment to the Holy Land and thus imply that Jews are not ‘indigenous’. Is it a surprise that modern western scholars would create the same myths as the Nazis regarding the Jews? Is it a surprise that scholars would be at the forefront of pseudo-scientific DNA tests, trying to ‘prove’ that the Palestinians are descended from the Canaanites and trying to ‘prove’ that the Jews are not ethnically homogenous and thus not descendants of the Israelites and thus the Jews, in the best Hitlerite understanding of the term, are a rootless, wandering people without a land. It is no surprise. Perverted Scholarship was at the forefront of Nazism. Nazism had many academic intellectuals who believed wholeheartedly in it. From Heidegger to Rosenberg it was chock full of intellectuals and professors. It had its scientists and social theorists. That is what Nazism was: it was a racialist cleansing based on scholarly theories about cleanliness applied to the nation as a whole. Today’s scholarships also leads us in this direction. By labeling certain people ‘indigenous’ it implies those people have greater rights than others and that they are an ‘authentic’ nation, unlike a ‘proposition’ nation in the words of Darre. The authentic people thus have a right to murder and slaughter the ‘foreigners’ and the ‘colonizers’. Europeans love their race theories. They love to go around the world looking for ‘authentic’ tribes. People have pointed out how European anthropologists have done the same with Bedouin and Gypsys. Scholars label some Bedouin ‘authentic’ while others are not ‘true’ Bedouin. They label some Gypsys as ‘true’ Gypsys. This is a scholarly charade. It is a dangerous charade for scholars to pretend to know what is ‘authentic’ when dealing with a country like Rwanda. When one labels the Hutus as ‘authentic’ possessors of the land or as ‘indigenous’ and says the Tutsis are ‘foreigners’ then suddenly it gives the Hutus the intellectual and scholarly excuse to commit genocide. This is precisely what happened in 1994 in Rwanda. This was scholarship and anthropology in its highest form. The same anthropological pseudo-science employed by the Nazis.
People do not like to think that their professors are Nazis. Professors like to use the word ‘Nazi’ about politicians and the military but most students would never countenance the idea that their professors are at the forefront of racialism and Nazi race theories. But today’s professors, especially in some of the social sciences, are in fact delving into this field. Their decision to begin labeling people ‘indigenous’ based solely on politics is a Nazi-like decision. The decision by Prof. Sufian to claim that the only people ‘indigenous’ to Israel were those people born in the country before 1917 or 1948 is a precise replication of the Vichy law that declared half the Jews of France to be ‘foreign immigrants’. In 1940 when the Nazis asked for the lists of French Jews, the Vichy regime retroactively declared that Jews who had not been French citizens since the early 1930s were not ‘French’ and thus were not ‘indigenous to France’ and thus could be deported to the gas chambers. Is it a surprise that today’s intellectual apes the Vichy? Scholarship can be a dangerous thing. In the wrong hands it is loaded with many vicious, racist and discriminatory statements that should be critiqued. When a scholar says “this is the distinction that most scholars that I know of who work on Israel/Palestinemake” one should be very weary. There is no such thing as ‘most’ scholars. There is no such thing as a distinction. The distinctions made today by scholars are those that will tomorrow be used as excuses for genocide.
How did real events become 'national myths' or why we should be proud to call ourselves Serbs.
Seth J. Frantzman
February 2nd, 2007
The headline at Haaretz on February 2nd read 'Serbs vote on a national myth'. The article refers to the vote in Serbia that is overshadowed by the coming declaration of independence by Kosovo and its Albanian chauvinist-terrorist government. The 'myth' refers to the battle of Kosovo Polje, the historic battlefield where the ancient state of Serbia met its fate against the Ottoman Turkish hordes. On that day in 1389 the Serbian forces under Tzar Lazer faced 40,000 Ottoman soldiers under the command of Murad I. That Lazar and and Murad died is a fact. That the Serbs lost is a fact. That it was a Serb nobleman named Milos Obilic who killed the Ottoman Sultan is widely accepted. That Lazar spoke to an angel before the battle and the angel gave him a choice of heaven on earth or heaven up above is part of the 'myth'. But just because stories regarding supernatural events surrounding a historical incident doesn't make the incident itself less genuine. This is the confusion that revisionist historians who glory in tearing down 'national myths' revel in. They seek to impugn history by taking every event that people hold dear and condemning the event based solely on the fact that people hold it dear.
Jesus is derided as fake when his existence is most likely a fact. That he was not the son of a virgin or that he did not bring people back from the dead might be said to be part of a Jesus 'myth'. But once again we see that people seek to castigate Jesus the fact simply because un-provable events surround his existence. That Joseph Smith was a real person is a fact. That he founded the Mormon church is a fact. That he found secret tablets buried in a forest and that an angel named Moroni helped in translated that is part of the Mormon theology and is thus part of a 'myth'.
Our modern historians seek to take all things that have attached themselves to historical memories and destroy them. The historical ride of Paul Revere, which actually took place, is derided as a myth. But the only thing mythical about it is that he may not have been the only rider who warned the colonists of the British troop movements. That there was a Boston Massacre is a fact. That only six men died is also a fact.
But why is the mythmaking of others not subjected to the same skepticism by western revisionists? The Albanians of Kosovo also have their national myths. Why are their elections not derided as being based on 'myth' and their history not impugned by claims that it is based on 'myth'. Much of the national histories of the Palestinians, black South Africans, Albanians and Irish is based on myth. The histories of Israel, England, the Afrikaners and Serbs are not more myth ridden than others. Yet we have come to accept that where the Palestinian history is genuinely made up of massacres and suppression the Israeli history is primarily a 'Zionist legend' or 'myth'. Tom Segev speaks of the 'myth' of 1948. The myth he refers to is the Israeli war of independence when a small band of well trained Jewish militias drove out the Arab armies. The 'myth' is that they were a small band and that they were a militia and that the Arab forces constituted armies. History has supposedly shown us that the Jewish forces were not as outgunned as originally thought and that despite the potential of the Arab countries to recruit men their armies were actually quite puny. But it doesn't mean 1948 is a myth. If it is a myth for anyone it is the Palestinians who have turned it into a national tragedy in which they all became refugees. They have turned Deir Yassin into their Boston Massacre or their Kosovo Polje if you will. Yet we do not often hear that the Palestinian elections are based on a national myth. Why? When they vote about the 'right of return' are they not voting on a myth?
Every western history is today directed at 'exploding' national myths. The Magna Carta is derided as a bourgeoisie scam. Greek democracy is shown to be undemocratic. The battle of Tours is said to have made Europe intolerant rather than having saved it from the Islamic hordes. The Barbarians who opposed Rome are said to be more civilized than the Romans. Surely historians have claimed the English defeat of the Spanish Armada is a myth. Oddly enough this epic encounter hasn't become a myth, perhaps because most English today have forgotten about it. But the ingredients of mythmaking were there: A gargantuan fleet of warships funded by the Pope and led by the greatest generals of the greatest power in Europe, Spain. All thrown against a tiny Protestant kingdom led by a weak and feeble woman whose country could barely muster a few regiments of foot soldiers to defend the island. And yet after days of skirmishing with English pirates turned admirals, the Spanish fleet was dashed by a storm and destroyed. That’s a myth people could be proud of. Except there is one problem. Its not a myth. It actually happened. The only part that is mythical is the fact that the queen was not weak and feeble, despite the fact that she herself claimed she was when addressing the troops on the cliffs of Dover ("I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too, and think foul scorn that Parma or Spain, or any prince of Europe, should dare to invade the borders of my realm… we shall shortly have a famous victory over those enemies of my God, of my kingdom, and of my people."). 360 years later the magazine Punch would depict Churchill as a latter-day Francis Drake playing bowls while awaiting the signal that the Nazi menace had launched the invasion of England. Were it not for the recordings of his famous broadcasts we might be convinced by some historian that Winston was but a myth.
Leftists and academics speak of myths because they themselves do not believe. Their lack of faith in God has meant that they find all things to be as the Bible is to them. While academics speak proudly of the 'prophet' Mohammed and lavishly tell the tales of mythical aspects of Islamic history such as the 'Golden Age of Muslim Spain' they do not wax so eloquently about our own history or heritage. It is strange that a lack of faith in God causes a person to deride facts so easily. The secular critique in faith is that it is full of superstition. They claim that science in the answer. But if they were so devoted to science, rather than fiction, then why would they pervert history and pervert even language by calling genocide 'peace' and calling murder 'justice'? This is the enigma of liberalism. Whereas it claims to seek truth it admits readily that there is no truth and that all things are 'relative' and in doing so it makes myths of new things and derides the old things as 'myths'. But which is more of a myth: Kosovo Polje or claim that terrorists are really 'militants' and 'freedom fighters'. Which myth has been responsible for more deaths: the story of the Angel Moroni or the claim that terrorism is caused by poverty? I'll take Moroni over terrorism any day of the week, even if it is improbable that an angel's name would rhyme with a type of lunch meat.
The condescension liberals use to describe other people is fascinating. Haaretz writer Assaf Uni describes how Serbia's "seminal narrative" was "enhanced by the Serbian Orthodox Church, perhaps forgetting that the seminal 'narrative' of every religion and people has been 'enhanced' which is what makes it a myth in the first place. The very use of the word 'narrative' to describe history is the liberal way of implying that there is no truth. Its odd the liberals don't speak of a 'John Kennedy' narrative when speaking about the 1960s or a 'black civil rights narrative' when speaking about the civil rights movement. If there is no truth perhaps John Kennedy is still alive, along with Elvis, rather than living on a dead man hovering over American politics alongside his utopian myth called Camelot. Uni asks whether the Serbs "are at least ready to abandon their sacred myth." One wonders why liberals won't abandon theirs? When liberals abandon their myths, for instance about American genocide of Native Americans, or their narratives about Kennedy, perhaps conservatives could be encouraged to compromise. Another arrogant liberal, Edward P. Joseph of the notes in his article in the Herald Tribune that "Serbia has lost years of productive activity while mired in anachronistic debates, most related to Kosovo. The Serbian electorate is now as concerned about historic budget slashing as it is about ancient history, but it too is marked by bouts of irrationality." He ponders whether the Serbs ready "to rid the country of its nationalistic shackles and to join the community of democracies that still stand ready to welcome them." What lies and hypocrisy. The liberal first condemns Serbian democracy for being democratic, in the sense that Serbs dare to have elections and debate things close to their heart. Perhaps Serbs wonder why in the United States democracy takes the form of one upsminship on who opposes abortion more. The condemnation of Serbia for being concerned about its 'ancient history' is interesting coming from Europeans. Perhaps if England is prepared to give up London or France would like to surrender Paris then the Europeans can tell Serbia to give up part of her country. Its odd that almost a million American died to save the Union and yet American leftists are happy to ask other countries to divide themselves and split themselves apart. And those same leftists dare to eulogize Lincoln. They should be mourning Jefferson Davis given their penchant for partitions and breakaway republics and succession. But the greatest hypocrisy is that the left is ordering Serbia to be more democratic while the same left is in love with Shariah law and Saudi Arabia. Why does the culture of moral-relativism not apply to Serbia. Perhaps its form of government and its elections are part of its 'culture'. What will it gain by joining the 'community' of western democracies who so undemocratically bombed the Serbian people and slaughtered Serb civilians and countenanced the ethnic-cleansing of Serbs? I would not join such a club. The western democracies, the same countries that gave in to Hitler and cheered him while the Serbs were going into the hills to form partisan bands in 1940. It is the west that should be joining Serbia, not the other way around. But the west is always quick to forgive former Nazis, in fact the west elects them to run the U.N, but the west will never forgive a country like Serbia that is proud of having fought the Nazis and proud of having fought the imperialist Turks.
In 1389 the Serb militants and freedom fights, unhappy about the poverty that would be accorded them under Ottoman colonialism and not wishing to be enslaved by Islam rose in battle against the cursed foe. Their prince accepted a kingdom in heaven as opposed to one on earth and his men were slaughtered. The Ottoman Sultan, far away from his debauched Harem that included princesses from Europe and other female slaves, was cut down by a Serbian sword and thus prevented from raping and enslaving anymore Slavs. Serbia lived under Ottoman colonial rule for more than 400 years. That liberals would still like it to be occupied by Islamic imperialism is no surprise. But like the blacks of Southern Sudan the Serbs preferred independence to slavery. Their sin was that they chose to assert themselves when Europeans had tired of the 'old ways' of nationalism. Thus while Europe had cleansed itself so perfectly of minorities like the hated Jews, the Serbs who dared protect their homes in Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo were condemned as the new 'Nazis' and like the Jews they were relegated to the 'past'. In the words of Toynbee, they were a 'fossil' civilization. And fossils belong in museums, alongside myths.
The Paradox of Democracy
Seth J. Frantzman
February 2nd, 2008.
The paradox of democracy is that the greater freedom you grant people the more they hate you. In short, if you want to keep people loyal you should use a firm hand with them and make dissent punishable by death. Iranians are fanatically loyal. The Russians were loyal to Stalin. The Germans were loyal to Hitler. People loved the Shah, until he started to let them protest. The people loved Franco. All dictators are widely adored, until they start to let the people run wild, or as the British said of the empire ‘run amok’. After the velvet revolutions everyone always said how they had always ‘secretly’ hated the dictators such as Ceacescu, but in reality they loved him.
Why does this paradox exist? Why do states that grant women equal rights and the greatest freedoms find that many of those women prefer to be sold as sex slaves to brothels in foreign countries than remain in their own country? Why do they find that those women prefer a Muslim husband in Saudi and prefer loyalty to some other country such as Cuba, than their own? Why does one always find that regimes that allow the greatest openness, such as the Wiemer republic, engender their own destruction because the people hate and critique them the most? Why are the most extreme democracies with the most freedoms inherently weak and self hating?
Why do the great critiquers always come from democracies while dictatorships rarely produce them? The answer is simple: democracy is not conducive to loyalty and success. The Roman Republic was a failure. It is no surprise the Roman Empire was more successful and lasted longer and controlled more people. All democracies have proven to be failures. The current fad of democracy in Europe, Africa, Latin America and the far east merely bares this truth out. They will all fail in good time. They will be done in by their low birthrates, immigration, intellectuals and extreme freedoms that encourage people to hate the very thing that gives them the right to hate. This is the paradox of democracy; the right to hate. Democracy and its freedoms implicitly encourage people to tolerate the intolerant and to allow those who would subvert democracy to preach the very subversion of the system that allows them to preach thus. This is the evil, the cancer, the sickness, and the undoing, the lies at the heart of all freedoms: the desire to be rid of those freedoms. The dogmatism found among those ‘liberals’ in the west, the ardent desire to hate so many things, their mass protests against benign things such as Globalization, and the way in which they march in lock step merely shows the degree to which ‘liberalism’ and its supposed support of Democracy is merely a mask for the pursuit of dictatorship and the denial of freedom, the very freedom that allowed it to gain popularity in the first place. This is always the conundrum of the dictatorship and the democrat. The greatest dictatorships are always derived from those movements who first gained popularity under a regime that granted them freedom. Communism and Nazism were both the products of a free society that allowed these movements to prosper on the streets, in the halls of power and in the academy. The direct result of such movements is always the most extreme curtailment of freedom. The same was true of the Islamist regime that took power in Iran in 1979, it was engendered when the state allowed the smallest bit of freedom. The creation of Fidel Castro’s monstrous regime in Cuba and the regime of Hugo Chavez all stem from the previous regimes’ tolerance of freedom. Fugencio Batista, reviled by leftists and liberals and democrats, was far more democratic than Castro’s regime. The Batista ‘dictatorship’ lasted a mere ten years, Castro’s has lasted almost 50. This is what freedom produces: dictatorship. Freedom also produces the admiration for dictatorship. Leftists the world over campaigned for democracy while at the same time supporting Communism, Castro and Communist parties, showing the direct link between the support for democracy and the support for its overthrow go hand in hand, for only in a democracy can the seeds be lain for the communist, fascist or Islamist seizure of government. The present support after 2001 for ‘democracy’ in the Muslim world has shown, once again, that democracy results in the coming to power of those who would destroy democracy. Thus the creation of a democratic system in Lebanon, the Palestinian territories, Iraq and Egypt will eventually result in a similar Castro-like dictatorship that will be far more brutal than those that proceeded it. Thus the relative ‘freedom’ of the Mubarek-Abbas-Siniora-Maliki regimes will result in the barbarism of a Saudi-Taliban style Islamist regime. Lest one forget how the Taliban emerged from the rubble of ‘democracy’. Lest one forget that the most brutal regime in Pakistan’s history, that of Zia al Huq, came about because of Bhutto’s liberalization. Nawaz Sharif resulted in the emergence of Musharref and Musharref’s eventual liberalization has already resulted in the death of Benezir Bhutto.
Shall we play the record again? On January 30th, 2008 the Jerusalem Post published a lengthy letter to the editor from a Saudi woman by the name of H.A. She had disguised her name lest she be beheaded for having relations with the Zionist entity. She takes great pride in her country “I want to point out this is the land that Islam was introduced in; the land the prophet was born in, the same land that contains Mecca and Medina, two of the holiest sites in Islam. It makes sense not to allow another religion to be practiced in such a sacred place.” She takes great pride in her ‘religion’; “While it is true that men can marry up to four women, there are still consequences that comes with it. First, this is a part of our religion which gives no one the right to mock us about it.” She takes great pride in her country’s education system: “AS FOR OUR education, it is well on its way to becoming one of the best in the world.” She takes great pride in the clothing women wear in her ‘religion’: “Yes I do wear an abaya, but we do not necessarily have to cover our hair or faces; again this is a personal and cultural choice…, abayas are not a big deal to us, we actually embrace it and design lovely abayas that portray our personalities.” She takes great pride in her ‘freedom’: “Our way is our choice. Nothing is forced upon us.” She takes great pride in everything to do with her life and her country: “I am happy in Saudi. My life is not any different that it was in the United States. One day my country will rise and shine above all, and I am sure when that happens the world will suddenly want to befriend us.” This woman is evidently a very educated woman in her country and she is surely an example of an ‘empowered’ woman. She lives in the most repressive dictatorship in the world, one in which she, as a woman, may not even drive a car, and one in which she, as a woman, may not leave the country without the permission of her husband or male guardian. Yes she has pride in it. In the freedom loving west you would be hard pressed to find an empowered feminist woman who is well educated and who loves the west in the same manner this woman loves her country. Most well educated western women hate their countries, protest against them and are full of nothing but critique for their own religion, heritage, leaders, form of government, and history.
This is the paradox. Give people freedom and they hate you for it. Teach the slaves to read and they will read Locke and they will come to demand freedom and then they will kill you for it. Nat Turner learned to read. Spartacus no doubt was exposed to education and so was the leader of the great slave rebellion on Barbados in the 19th century. Teach the poor to resent their lives, as Marx did, and they will come for you in the night.
Empowerment seems like it merely teaches people to down tools and take off their chains. But in truth empowerment and freedom is merely a tool for the destruction of freedom. Who led the American revolution? It was not the uneducated poor. It was not the slaves and the native Americans. It was the wealthiest, most well educated men who resented, in truth, those freedoms granted to them by the crown. They demanded more freedoms. In truth the American revolution is one of the few examples where the ends were not worse than the means. The means is freedom. Often the end is tyranny. John Wilkes Booth believed as much when he shot Lincoln. It was precisely the freedom granted by Lincoln that allowed men like Booth to survive the Civil War.
So how to understand this? A dictatorship educates people like H.A in Saudi and they become rapid nationalists. A religion that denies women basic rights and subjugates them finds that the greatest defenders of that religion, known as Islam, are women. Muslim women in Europe, where they are free supposedly to do as they please, choose the headscarf and their own subjugation as a way to define themselves and a way to show pride in their religion. Western women, granted the same freedoms, choose to work as strip clubs and pose nude as a way to express themselves and they speak of how ‘empowering’ it is to be ‘masters of our own bodies’. This is the paradox. Give the dog food everyday at a given time and the dog is obedient. Feed the dog irregularly and give it the freedom to play with other dogs and to hunt its own food and it will come one day and gore its owner. This is, in affect, the parable told by Orwell in Animal Farm, although he did not realize it. The farmer in the story is only thrown out of his farm because he has been lax with his beasts, rather than harsh.
The moral of story is too fold. Dictatorships result from the granting of too much freedom. Dictatorships ensure their own survival because they create a slavish devotion to themselves and a burgeoning patriotism among their citizens. Attack a dictatorships such as Stalin’s Russia or Islamist Iran and the people, no matter how suppressed, will rally to the flag. Attack a democracy, as Hizbullah did to Israel or Bin Laden did to America, and the democracy will doubt itself and hate itself and many of its members will have understanding and support for the enemy.
America has waged two world wars in defense of democracy. It successfully defeated the German monarchy and the Nazi dictatorship. The result of those wars has been the theory that a democracy, despite its self critique, is better prepared and more flexible when fighting wars against dictatorships. It is not given to self delusion and it prevails on the battlefield when the chips are down. Israel is the ‘evidence’ for this equation. It has beaten back Arab dictatorships again and again.
But some forget that America did not wage war without first taking its gloves off. It rounded up Japanese and German nationals. It imprisoned them. Had they rebelled they would have been shot. Had they tried to make common cause with the enemy they would have been shot. Yet today given our present degree of freedom, must of our national consciousness makes common cause with the enemy. Our greatest celebrities, wealthiest people and tallest intellectuals make common cause with the enemy. The enemy is Islam. Make no mistake. That is what the entire world struggles against. There is no coexistence between Islam and the World. There cannot be. Wherever there is Islam there is dictatorship and rape and genocide. Wherever there are non-Muslims there is diversity, democracy and tolerance. That is what the world is made up of. There is Saudi Arabia and there is America. These are the twin poles that are emerging in our world. We deny it. We pull the wool over our eyes. The American President visits the den of Satan in Riyadh. The question is: has our freedom crippled us to the degree that we can no longer even see the enemy? This is not like other wars of the 20th century where armies fought and there were borders. This is a war between two ideologies. On the one hand there is an ideology of hate. An ideology that seeks to conquer the world and make all of us slaves. It seeks to force us to submit to a false god, a god of hatred and a god of genocide. It seeks to make us love a book which tells the story of a child molester, a slaver, a rapist and a murderer who encouraged his followers to wage unending war against others in order to take their women and booty. On the other hand there are the free peoples of earth. These are all the people who do not adhere to this religion called ‘Islam’. There are no ways of being a member of both. Just as there is no way to be a communist and a democrat and there is no way to be a Nazi and a democrat, there is no way to be a Muslim and a member of the world at the same time.
So while the American president cavorts in the pleasure palaces of Saudi, while he is served water by slaves of the Saudi regime, we ask ourselves: which is better, democracy or dictatorship? Do we need a dictatorship in the west in order to foster patriotism and love for our country? Do we need a dictatorship in order that our leaders will no longer sip from the blood stained chalice of the Saudis? What will it take before our politicians stop demanding we ‘talk to Syria and Iran’. There is no talking to be done. We did not talk with Hitler and we all know what talking to Staling got us. FDR talked to Stalin and he sold the souls of the people of Eastern Europe to him in exchange for ‘peace’. It was peace at too high a price, just as Czechoslovakia was peace at too high a price in 1938.
The same liberals in the west who damned the United States for defending dictators like Pinochet, Saddam and the Shah are the same ones who demand we ‘talk’ to Iran and Syria. Why? Why are their good dictators and bad dictators? Why are their Batistas and Castros?
Issue 20
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
February 9th, 2008
Starbucks, apartheid and the liberal: Starbucks has separate seating for men and women in Saudi Arabia and enforces the seating by calling on the religious police to remove those who transgress the ‘culture’ of Saudi Arabia. The Archbishop of England wants us to introduce Shariah law and declares “an approach to law which simply said-there’s one law for everybody-I think that’s a bit of a danger.” Why does today’s liberal support such apartheid?
The myth of the indigenous and the origins of racism: Recently scholars have decided to label the Palestinians the ‘indigenous’ people of Israel. How did they become indigenous? The myth of ‘indigenous’ people is connected to the Blood and Soil parties of pre-Nazi Germany and they gave rise to myth of the Aryan nation. While there are truly ‘indigenous’ people in the Americas and Australia, it is a myth that people in Asia or Europe are ‘indigenous’ and any insinuation of such a thing inevitably implies other people are not indigenous and thus are not authentic or genuine and therefore, as in Rwanda, deserve to be killed. That is a dangerous things for Scholars to insinuate and they should be ashamed of themselves.
How did real events become 'national myths' or why we should be proud to call ourselves Serbs: The world is waiting in anticipation for Kosovo independence. The same world declares Serbia’s attachment to Kosovo a ‘national myth’ and describes it as a ‘seminal narrative’ of the Serbs and Europeans ask “are [Serbs] at least ready to abandon their sacred myth?” While we condemn the Serbs for loving their history we might not have noticed that their history also includes fighting the Nazis. The Serbs were one of the few European people to have done so. Europeans call Serbian history a myth because Europeans dare not confront the fact that most European countries collaborated with Nazism. They would like to forget that past. The Serbs like to remember it, and the Serbs should be proud to do so.
The Paradox of Democracy: Democracy creates the very seeds of its own destruction. From Weimer Germany to Bhutto’s Pakistan the weaker democratic regimes have tolerated and fostered anti-democratic forces. When the time has come to confront them it has been to late. Is this a paradox for democracy? What can one do when the enemies of democracy use the democratic system in order to destroy it?
Starbucks, apartheid and the liberal
Seth J. Frantzman
February 8th, 2008
In the 1980s the liberals boycotted companies that did business in Apartheid South Africa. We all celebrated that. We thought it was so important to show businesses that doing business with racism would have consequences. But that was the 1980s, when Republicans still believed in balancing the budget and liberals still believed in democracy and civil rights.
All that has changed now. The liberal has undergone a transformation. While he claims to detest religion he fawns and becomes misty-eyed when some lets the words ‘Mohammed the prophet’ roll off the tongue. Liberals like Archbishop Rowan Williams have proclaimed Shariah law the answer to England’s problems. But the greatest liberal sin is that it countenances the evils in Saudi Arabia and supports companies that do business there and in the Gulf and in Iran.
Starbucks is one such company. Starbucks runs coffee shops in Saudi Arabia and Jews are not allowed to purchase coffee in them. Its not really that Jews aren’t allowed, but since Jews and Christians are not allowed in Saudi Arabia, for all intents and purposes Starbucks does not let Jews purchase its coffee. Starbucks makes sure to conform to Saudi Nazi law and segregates its restaurant. Men in one section. Women in another. ‘Families’ in another. This is the Starbucks way. As Brandom Borrman, a company spokesman notes, “Starbucks takes pride in respecting different cultures, and as a global company with locations in 44 countries, we recognize that religious customs, social norms and laws will vary among the communities where we work”
On February 4th an American woman of Jordanian extraction who wears “an abaya and a headscarf, like most Saudi women, out of cultural respect” was arrested for sitting in the family section of Starbucks with a man who was not her husband. She was bundled into a taxi and taken to prison by the Commission for Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, a 10,000-strong police force charged with enforcing dress codes, and sex segregation.
No liberal will protest this. Human Rights Watch will not protest it. The U.N will say nothing. Amnesty International will say nothing. The Liberal will do nothing. No one will boycott Saudi Arabia or Starbucks or anything because of this. That is the world we live in. Those liberals who protested on behalf of the rights of Blacks in the American South and those liberals who boycotted South Africa and those liberals who boycott Israel will not lift a finger in this case. Why? This is the new religion of the liberal. “cultural respect”. “religious customs, social norms.” This is how the liberal lives his life. It is how the west lives its life.
I would have liked to have seen such a world confronted with Nazism. The liberals like to write books like IBM and the Holocaust. I had one such liberal roommate who, after reading that book, complained and complained in the most shrill way that IBM and ‘American corporations’ had been in bed with the Nazis. Except for Henry Ford however American corporations didn’t believe in Nazi ideas on race. American companies like IBM were in Germany to do business, sort of like Starbucks in Saudi. American companies accepted Nazi law out of a similar respect for “culture” and “social norms.” So why do the liberals judge them so harshly? Why did the liberals judge companies that did business in Apartheid South Africa so harshly? They were respecting the “culture” of South Africa and the “social norms.” What is the problem with such social norms. Blacks and whites ought not to be together, after all different cultures think differently. So if some cultures think that blacks and whites should develop separately what is wrong with that? Women and men ought not to sit together, after all some men are offended by the presence of menstruating women. So what is wrong with that? Some people abhor the presence of Jews, with their long noses, hunched backs. Why should Jews and gentiles mix? Certainly there should be a separate place for both. Separate lines, separate eating areas. What is wrong with a culture that thinks Jews and women and blacks and gays should have their separate area, or should simply not exist?
I don’t have to answer these questions. I am not a liberal. We conservatives were called ‘racist’ because we didn’t boycott South Africa. We were all called ‘racists’ because our corporations worked in Nazi Germany before the war. But who is more racist; the conservative who went to war against Nazi Germany or the liberal who countenances the evils of Saudi Arabia and supports them under the guise of ‘culture’? Who is more racist, the conservative who, in his heart opposed the regime of South Africa but didn’t boycott companies that did business there or the liberal who wholeheartedly supports cultural relativism and supports Saudi Arabia.
The world has indeed reversed itself. Liberals call themselves progressive and open minded and yet they shop at Starbucks and they say Saudi has a right to do as it wants because it has a different ‘culture’. Conservative Foxnews runs stories daily about the discrimination inherent to Islam. The story about Starbucks cannot be found at the BBC or CNN websites. Instead the BBC includes a lively point by point explanation of why Islamic Law will be a benefit to England and why it is truly a legal system of ‘equality’ that guarantees “women rights”. The same good liberal Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, who supports Gay marriage and calls Israel an ‘apartheid state’ is the same one who says “an approach to law which simply said-there’s one law for everybody-I think that’s a bit of a danger”. Yes Mr. Williams, that was the same argument used by the Apartheid government of South Africa. It is funny to see what liberalism has become. Thank you, Mr. Williams, for articulating in such a concise manner the new message of liberalism and ‘progressives’. We conservatives beg to differ, we beg to think that, yes, one legal system under which all are equal before the law, is preferable to a different system for blacks and women and gays and Muslims. Such a legal system was enshrined in the Declaration of American Independence in which the it was noted that “All men are created equal, endowed by their creator with certain inaliable rights.” One would have never imagined that the people who would come and take those rights from us would be the left and the ‘open minded progressives’.
Who is the liberal today? Who is the progressive? Why is it open minded to accept Nazism?
The myth of the indigenous and the origins of racism
Seth J. Frantzman
February 2nd, 2007
The use of the word indigenous has become more common, but lest we be fooled by this new word, we should realize it is merely a semantic device of the liberal, one whose origins are in racist ideology and one that is used today to sow hatred and division in the world.
The idea of the indigenous, which translates as “originating and living or occurring naturally in an area or environment” or as “innate, intrinsic,” is not new. According to Wikipedia “the term indigenous peoples has no universal, standard or fixed definition, but can be used about any ethnic group who inhabit the geographic region with which they have the earliest historical connection.” Furthermore the adjective indigenous has the common meaning of ‘having originated in and being produced, growing, living, or occurring naturally in a particular region or environment’. Therefore, in a purely adjectival sense any given people, ethnic group or community may be described as being indigenous in reference to some particular region or location. However some scholars have decided that ‘indigenous’ like ‘racism’ has more to do with power than fact. One defines ‘indigenous’ as “a politically underprivileged group, who share a similar ethnic identity different to the nation in power, and who have been an ethnic entity in the locality before the present ruling nation took over power” (Greller, 1997). There have been international conventions on indigenous people including a famous declaration on the rights of the indigenous in 1957 and a Convention concerning indigenous and tribal peoples in 1989. This latest one noted that:
“(b) peoples in independent countries who are regarded as indigenous on account of their descent from the populations which inhabited the country, or a geographical region to which the country belongs, at the time of conquest or colonisation or the establishment of present state boundaries and who, irrespective of their legal status, retain some or all of their own social, economic, cultural and political institutions.
2. Self-identification as indigenous or tribal shall be regarded as a fundamental criterion for determining the groups to which the provisions of this Convention apply.”
Thus the U.N, which runs these ‘conventions’ on indigenous people basicaly sums up the problem with a note that ‘self-idenitification’ is enough for a group to be ‘indigenous. Since this is not a very useful definition we should move foreard and see how scholars have decided to use the term. Professor Sandra Sufian, author of a book on land reclaimation in Israel entited ‘Healing the Land’ noted in a description of her book that: she addressed “contested questions of social organization and the effects of land reclamation upon the indigenous Palestinian population ."(The book implies that the Zionists were ‘racist’ in trying to cure Malaria and rid the land of malarial swamps that affected both Jews and Arabs. Ironically the author does not condemn the Turks for similar attempts at land reclamation or those attempts made by the Lebanese Arab land owning Sursuq family. To Sufian the Sursuqs were more ‘indigenous’ than the Jews.) When this author confronted the ‘scholar’ about her use of the word ‘indigenous’ and pointed out that the Palestinians are no more indigenous to Israel than the Jews are to Spain or the Afrikaners to South Africa and that no scholar claims Arabs are indigenous to Egypt, Iraq or Sudan, places they arrived in at the same time as they arrived in Israel she replied that:
“I use the term indigenous in the book to refer to those populationsthat were born and lived in the land of Palestine (i.e. the Arabpopulation and those Jews born in Palestine), not those that immigrated(the majority of Jews belonging to the Zionist movement). This is thedistinction that most scholars that I know of who work on Israel/Palestinemake.”
Thus we see that indigenous is not so much a term with a scientific definition but rather a political semantical tool used by ‘scholars’ and liberals and leftists in order to impugn and discredit certain people and encourage other people to claim that they are ‘authentic’ and thus encourage violence and genocide between groups of people. What is most fascinating is the current leftist obsession with defining those they support as ‘indigenous’ and those they hate as ‘foreign interlopers’ is merely a repetition of something that has taken place before.
Beginning in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The Land and Soil and Blood and Soil parties that came into being in Europe and elsewhere in the west between 1850 and 1950 were responsible for the racist hatred that led to the Second World War. R Walter Darre who was born in 1895 to a German father and Swedish mother became the main ideologue behind the German idea of Blut und-Boden or ‘blood and soil’. The argument was that the Aryan Germans were the natural and authentic inhabitants of Germany, the indigenous people, and that they were fighting unnatural elements such as Jews. They used pseudo-science to prove this. In a supreme irony modern leftists have tried to use DNA tests to prove that Palestinians are related to the Canaanites, thus repeating this pseudo-science-racism.
What is most fascinating is if one considers the way in which Germans romanticized the Native Americans such as Tecumseh and used them as part of their Nazi ideology of ‘blood and soil’ one sees a direct link to the racism inherent in applying the word indigenous in an injudicious manner.
It was not so long ago that the only people known as indigenous were the ‘First Peoples’ of Canada, the Native Americans of the United States and the Aboriginals of Australia. Later the term spread to include many native groups in South America. In a sense any group that Toynbee might have considered a ‘fossil’ was included in this list i.e. people who were original to the land. Archeology theoretically proves that the Native American tribes such as the Apache are direct descendants of the original people to inhabit the Americas. They are thus indigenous. The same is true of the Inuit and the Aborigines.
But for the rest of the world, including Africa, vast migrations, war and genocide have left few traces of the ‘original’ people. Jared Diamond has shown how even places such as Africa have experienced great migrations of people such as the Bantu. With the exception of groups like the Basques there are few people today living where they have lived for five to ten thousand years.
The imposition of the semantical use of ‘indigenous’ upon people who are not indigenous in any way is a scholarly way to revive the old Nazi theories of blood and soil. There is absolutely no other way of understanding why scholars would label Palestinians as ‘indigenous’ and not do the same for all the other people in the world. The Palestinians are as ‘indigenous’ as the Turks are to Turkey, which is to say neither is indigenous. The great irony is that scholars would purposely label Palestinians indigenous in order to discredit Jewish attachment to the Holy Land and thus imply that Jews are not ‘indigenous’. Is it a surprise that modern western scholars would create the same myths as the Nazis regarding the Jews? Is it a surprise that scholars would be at the forefront of pseudo-scientific DNA tests, trying to ‘prove’ that the Palestinians are descended from the Canaanites and trying to ‘prove’ that the Jews are not ethnically homogenous and thus not descendants of the Israelites and thus the Jews, in the best Hitlerite understanding of the term, are a rootless, wandering people without a land. It is no surprise. Perverted Scholarship was at the forefront of Nazism. Nazism had many academic intellectuals who believed wholeheartedly in it. From Heidegger to Rosenberg it was chock full of intellectuals and professors. It had its scientists and social theorists. That is what Nazism was: it was a racialist cleansing based on scholarly theories about cleanliness applied to the nation as a whole. Today’s scholarships also leads us in this direction. By labeling certain people ‘indigenous’ it implies those people have greater rights than others and that they are an ‘authentic’ nation, unlike a ‘proposition’ nation in the words of Darre. The authentic people thus have a right to murder and slaughter the ‘foreigners’ and the ‘colonizers’. Europeans love their race theories. They love to go around the world looking for ‘authentic’ tribes. People have pointed out how European anthropologists have done the same with Bedouin and Gypsys. Scholars label some Bedouin ‘authentic’ while others are not ‘true’ Bedouin. They label some Gypsys as ‘true’ Gypsys. This is a scholarly charade. It is a dangerous charade for scholars to pretend to know what is ‘authentic’ when dealing with a country like Rwanda. When one labels the Hutus as ‘authentic’ possessors of the land or as ‘indigenous’ and says the Tutsis are ‘foreigners’ then suddenly it gives the Hutus the intellectual and scholarly excuse to commit genocide. This is precisely what happened in 1994 in Rwanda. This was scholarship and anthropology in its highest form. The same anthropological pseudo-science employed by the Nazis.
People do not like to think that their professors are Nazis. Professors like to use the word ‘Nazi’ about politicians and the military but most students would never countenance the idea that their professors are at the forefront of racialism and Nazi race theories. But today’s professors, especially in some of the social sciences, are in fact delving into this field. Their decision to begin labeling people ‘indigenous’ based solely on politics is a Nazi-like decision. The decision by Prof. Sufian to claim that the only people ‘indigenous’ to Israel were those people born in the country before 1917 or 1948 is a precise replication of the Vichy law that declared half the Jews of France to be ‘foreign immigrants’. In 1940 when the Nazis asked for the lists of French Jews, the Vichy regime retroactively declared that Jews who had not been French citizens since the early 1930s were not ‘French’ and thus were not ‘indigenous to France’ and thus could be deported to the gas chambers. Is it a surprise that today’s intellectual apes the Vichy? Scholarship can be a dangerous thing. In the wrong hands it is loaded with many vicious, racist and discriminatory statements that should be critiqued. When a scholar says “this is the distinction that most scholars that I know of who work on Israel/Palestinemake” one should be very weary. There is no such thing as ‘most’ scholars. There is no such thing as a distinction. The distinctions made today by scholars are those that will tomorrow be used as excuses for genocide.
How did real events become 'national myths' or why we should be proud to call ourselves Serbs.
Seth J. Frantzman
February 2nd, 2007
The headline at Haaretz on February 2nd read 'Serbs vote on a national myth'. The article refers to the vote in Serbia that is overshadowed by the coming declaration of independence by Kosovo and its Albanian chauvinist-terrorist government. The 'myth' refers to the battle of Kosovo Polje, the historic battlefield where the ancient state of Serbia met its fate against the Ottoman Turkish hordes. On that day in 1389 the Serbian forces under Tzar Lazer faced 40,000 Ottoman soldiers under the command of Murad I. That Lazar and and Murad died is a fact. That the Serbs lost is a fact. That it was a Serb nobleman named Milos Obilic who killed the Ottoman Sultan is widely accepted. That Lazar spoke to an angel before the battle and the angel gave him a choice of heaven on earth or heaven up above is part of the 'myth'. But just because stories regarding supernatural events surrounding a historical incident doesn't make the incident itself less genuine. This is the confusion that revisionist historians who glory in tearing down 'national myths' revel in. They seek to impugn history by taking every event that people hold dear and condemning the event based solely on the fact that people hold it dear.
Jesus is derided as fake when his existence is most likely a fact. That he was not the son of a virgin or that he did not bring people back from the dead might be said to be part of a Jesus 'myth'. But once again we see that people seek to castigate Jesus the fact simply because un-provable events surround his existence. That Joseph Smith was a real person is a fact. That he founded the Mormon church is a fact. That he found secret tablets buried in a forest and that an angel named Moroni helped in translated that is part of the Mormon theology and is thus part of a 'myth'.
Our modern historians seek to take all things that have attached themselves to historical memories and destroy them. The historical ride of Paul Revere, which actually took place, is derided as a myth. But the only thing mythical about it is that he may not have been the only rider who warned the colonists of the British troop movements. That there was a Boston Massacre is a fact. That only six men died is also a fact.
But why is the mythmaking of others not subjected to the same skepticism by western revisionists? The Albanians of Kosovo also have their national myths. Why are their elections not derided as being based on 'myth' and their history not impugned by claims that it is based on 'myth'. Much of the national histories of the Palestinians, black South Africans, Albanians and Irish is based on myth. The histories of Israel, England, the Afrikaners and Serbs are not more myth ridden than others. Yet we have come to accept that where the Palestinian history is genuinely made up of massacres and suppression the Israeli history is primarily a 'Zionist legend' or 'myth'. Tom Segev speaks of the 'myth' of 1948. The myth he refers to is the Israeli war of independence when a small band of well trained Jewish militias drove out the Arab armies. The 'myth' is that they were a small band and that they were a militia and that the Arab forces constituted armies. History has supposedly shown us that the Jewish forces were not as outgunned as originally thought and that despite the potential of the Arab countries to recruit men their armies were actually quite puny. But it doesn't mean 1948 is a myth. If it is a myth for anyone it is the Palestinians who have turned it into a national tragedy in which they all became refugees. They have turned Deir Yassin into their Boston Massacre or their Kosovo Polje if you will. Yet we do not often hear that the Palestinian elections are based on a national myth. Why? When they vote about the 'right of return' are they not voting on a myth?
Every western history is today directed at 'exploding' national myths. The Magna Carta is derided as a bourgeoisie scam. Greek democracy is shown to be undemocratic. The battle of Tours is said to have made Europe intolerant rather than having saved it from the Islamic hordes. The Barbarians who opposed Rome are said to be more civilized than the Romans. Surely historians have claimed the English defeat of the Spanish Armada is a myth. Oddly enough this epic encounter hasn't become a myth, perhaps because most English today have forgotten about it. But the ingredients of mythmaking were there: A gargantuan fleet of warships funded by the Pope and led by the greatest generals of the greatest power in Europe, Spain. All thrown against a tiny Protestant kingdom led by a weak and feeble woman whose country could barely muster a few regiments of foot soldiers to defend the island. And yet after days of skirmishing with English pirates turned admirals, the Spanish fleet was dashed by a storm and destroyed. That’s a myth people could be proud of. Except there is one problem. Its not a myth. It actually happened. The only part that is mythical is the fact that the queen was not weak and feeble, despite the fact that she herself claimed she was when addressing the troops on the cliffs of Dover ("I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too, and think foul scorn that Parma or Spain, or any prince of Europe, should dare to invade the borders of my realm… we shall shortly have a famous victory over those enemies of my God, of my kingdom, and of my people."). 360 years later the magazine Punch would depict Churchill as a latter-day Francis Drake playing bowls while awaiting the signal that the Nazi menace had launched the invasion of England. Were it not for the recordings of his famous broadcasts we might be convinced by some historian that Winston was but a myth.
Leftists and academics speak of myths because they themselves do not believe. Their lack of faith in God has meant that they find all things to be as the Bible is to them. While academics speak proudly of the 'prophet' Mohammed and lavishly tell the tales of mythical aspects of Islamic history such as the 'Golden Age of Muslim Spain' they do not wax so eloquently about our own history or heritage. It is strange that a lack of faith in God causes a person to deride facts so easily. The secular critique in faith is that it is full of superstition. They claim that science in the answer. But if they were so devoted to science, rather than fiction, then why would they pervert history and pervert even language by calling genocide 'peace' and calling murder 'justice'? This is the enigma of liberalism. Whereas it claims to seek truth it admits readily that there is no truth and that all things are 'relative' and in doing so it makes myths of new things and derides the old things as 'myths'. But which is more of a myth: Kosovo Polje or claim that terrorists are really 'militants' and 'freedom fighters'. Which myth has been responsible for more deaths: the story of the Angel Moroni or the claim that terrorism is caused by poverty? I'll take Moroni over terrorism any day of the week, even if it is improbable that an angel's name would rhyme with a type of lunch meat.
The condescension liberals use to describe other people is fascinating. Haaretz writer Assaf Uni describes how Serbia's "seminal narrative" was "enhanced by the Serbian Orthodox Church, perhaps forgetting that the seminal 'narrative' of every religion and people has been 'enhanced' which is what makes it a myth in the first place. The very use of the word 'narrative' to describe history is the liberal way of implying that there is no truth. Its odd the liberals don't speak of a 'John Kennedy' narrative when speaking about the 1960s or a 'black civil rights narrative' when speaking about the civil rights movement. If there is no truth perhaps John Kennedy is still alive, along with Elvis, rather than living on a dead man hovering over American politics alongside his utopian myth called Camelot. Uni asks whether the Serbs "are at least ready to abandon their sacred myth." One wonders why liberals won't abandon theirs? When liberals abandon their myths, for instance about American genocide of Native Americans, or their narratives about Kennedy, perhaps conservatives could be encouraged to compromise. Another arrogant liberal, Edward P. Joseph of the notes in his article in the Herald Tribune that "Serbia has lost years of productive activity while mired in anachronistic debates, most related to Kosovo. The Serbian electorate is now as concerned about historic budget slashing as it is about ancient history, but it too is marked by bouts of irrationality." He ponders whether the Serbs ready "to rid the country of its nationalistic shackles and to join the community of democracies that still stand ready to welcome them." What lies and hypocrisy. The liberal first condemns Serbian democracy for being democratic, in the sense that Serbs dare to have elections and debate things close to their heart. Perhaps Serbs wonder why in the United States democracy takes the form of one upsminship on who opposes abortion more. The condemnation of Serbia for being concerned about its 'ancient history' is interesting coming from Europeans. Perhaps if England is prepared to give up London or France would like to surrender Paris then the Europeans can tell Serbia to give up part of her country. Its odd that almost a million American died to save the Union and yet American leftists are happy to ask other countries to divide themselves and split themselves apart. And those same leftists dare to eulogize Lincoln. They should be mourning Jefferson Davis given their penchant for partitions and breakaway republics and succession. But the greatest hypocrisy is that the left is ordering Serbia to be more democratic while the same left is in love with Shariah law and Saudi Arabia. Why does the culture of moral-relativism not apply to Serbia. Perhaps its form of government and its elections are part of its 'culture'. What will it gain by joining the 'community' of western democracies who so undemocratically bombed the Serbian people and slaughtered Serb civilians and countenanced the ethnic-cleansing of Serbs? I would not join such a club. The western democracies, the same countries that gave in to Hitler and cheered him while the Serbs were going into the hills to form partisan bands in 1940. It is the west that should be joining Serbia, not the other way around. But the west is always quick to forgive former Nazis, in fact the west elects them to run the U.N, but the west will never forgive a country like Serbia that is proud of having fought the Nazis and proud of having fought the imperialist Turks.
In 1389 the Serb militants and freedom fights, unhappy about the poverty that would be accorded them under Ottoman colonialism and not wishing to be enslaved by Islam rose in battle against the cursed foe. Their prince accepted a kingdom in heaven as opposed to one on earth and his men were slaughtered. The Ottoman Sultan, far away from his debauched Harem that included princesses from Europe and other female slaves, was cut down by a Serbian sword and thus prevented from raping and enslaving anymore Slavs. Serbia lived under Ottoman colonial rule for more than 400 years. That liberals would still like it to be occupied by Islamic imperialism is no surprise. But like the blacks of Southern Sudan the Serbs preferred independence to slavery. Their sin was that they chose to assert themselves when Europeans had tired of the 'old ways' of nationalism. Thus while Europe had cleansed itself so perfectly of minorities like the hated Jews, the Serbs who dared protect their homes in Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo were condemned as the new 'Nazis' and like the Jews they were relegated to the 'past'. In the words of Toynbee, they were a 'fossil' civilization. And fossils belong in museums, alongside myths.
The Paradox of Democracy
Seth J. Frantzman
February 2nd, 2008.
The paradox of democracy is that the greater freedom you grant people the more they hate you. In short, if you want to keep people loyal you should use a firm hand with them and make dissent punishable by death. Iranians are fanatically loyal. The Russians were loyal to Stalin. The Germans were loyal to Hitler. People loved the Shah, until he started to let them protest. The people loved Franco. All dictators are widely adored, until they start to let the people run wild, or as the British said of the empire ‘run amok’. After the velvet revolutions everyone always said how they had always ‘secretly’ hated the dictators such as Ceacescu, but in reality they loved him.
Why does this paradox exist? Why do states that grant women equal rights and the greatest freedoms find that many of those women prefer to be sold as sex slaves to brothels in foreign countries than remain in their own country? Why do they find that those women prefer a Muslim husband in Saudi and prefer loyalty to some other country such as Cuba, than their own? Why does one always find that regimes that allow the greatest openness, such as the Wiemer republic, engender their own destruction because the people hate and critique them the most? Why are the most extreme democracies with the most freedoms inherently weak and self hating?
Why do the great critiquers always come from democracies while dictatorships rarely produce them? The answer is simple: democracy is not conducive to loyalty and success. The Roman Republic was a failure. It is no surprise the Roman Empire was more successful and lasted longer and controlled more people. All democracies have proven to be failures. The current fad of democracy in Europe, Africa, Latin America and the far east merely bares this truth out. They will all fail in good time. They will be done in by their low birthrates, immigration, intellectuals and extreme freedoms that encourage people to hate the very thing that gives them the right to hate. This is the paradox of democracy; the right to hate. Democracy and its freedoms implicitly encourage people to tolerate the intolerant and to allow those who would subvert democracy to preach the very subversion of the system that allows them to preach thus. This is the evil, the cancer, the sickness, and the undoing, the lies at the heart of all freedoms: the desire to be rid of those freedoms. The dogmatism found among those ‘liberals’ in the west, the ardent desire to hate so many things, their mass protests against benign things such as Globalization, and the way in which they march in lock step merely shows the degree to which ‘liberalism’ and its supposed support of Democracy is merely a mask for the pursuit of dictatorship and the denial of freedom, the very freedom that allowed it to gain popularity in the first place. This is always the conundrum of the dictatorship and the democrat. The greatest dictatorships are always derived from those movements who first gained popularity under a regime that granted them freedom. Communism and Nazism were both the products of a free society that allowed these movements to prosper on the streets, in the halls of power and in the academy. The direct result of such movements is always the most extreme curtailment of freedom. The same was true of the Islamist regime that took power in Iran in 1979, it was engendered when the state allowed the smallest bit of freedom. The creation of Fidel Castro’s monstrous regime in Cuba and the regime of Hugo Chavez all stem from the previous regimes’ tolerance of freedom. Fugencio Batista, reviled by leftists and liberals and democrats, was far more democratic than Castro’s regime. The Batista ‘dictatorship’ lasted a mere ten years, Castro’s has lasted almost 50. This is what freedom produces: dictatorship. Freedom also produces the admiration for dictatorship. Leftists the world over campaigned for democracy while at the same time supporting Communism, Castro and Communist parties, showing the direct link between the support for democracy and the support for its overthrow go hand in hand, for only in a democracy can the seeds be lain for the communist, fascist or Islamist seizure of government. The present support after 2001 for ‘democracy’ in the Muslim world has shown, once again, that democracy results in the coming to power of those who would destroy democracy. Thus the creation of a democratic system in Lebanon, the Palestinian territories, Iraq and Egypt will eventually result in a similar Castro-like dictatorship that will be far more brutal than those that proceeded it. Thus the relative ‘freedom’ of the Mubarek-Abbas-Siniora-Maliki regimes will result in the barbarism of a Saudi-Taliban style Islamist regime. Lest one forget how the Taliban emerged from the rubble of ‘democracy’. Lest one forget that the most brutal regime in Pakistan’s history, that of Zia al Huq, came about because of Bhutto’s liberalization. Nawaz Sharif resulted in the emergence of Musharref and Musharref’s eventual liberalization has already resulted in the death of Benezir Bhutto.
Shall we play the record again? On January 30th, 2008 the Jerusalem Post published a lengthy letter to the editor from a Saudi woman by the name of H.A. She had disguised her name lest she be beheaded for having relations with the Zionist entity. She takes great pride in her country “I want to point out this is the land that Islam was introduced in; the land the prophet was born in, the same land that contains Mecca and Medina, two of the holiest sites in Islam. It makes sense not to allow another religion to be practiced in such a sacred place.” She takes great pride in her ‘religion’; “While it is true that men can marry up to four women, there are still consequences that comes with it. First, this is a part of our religion which gives no one the right to mock us about it.” She takes great pride in her country’s education system: “AS FOR OUR education, it is well on its way to becoming one of the best in the world.” She takes great pride in the clothing women wear in her ‘religion’: “Yes I do wear an abaya, but we do not necessarily have to cover our hair or faces; again this is a personal and cultural choice…, abayas are not a big deal to us, we actually embrace it and design lovely abayas that portray our personalities.” She takes great pride in her ‘freedom’: “Our way is our choice. Nothing is forced upon us.” She takes great pride in everything to do with her life and her country: “I am happy in Saudi. My life is not any different that it was in the United States. One day my country will rise and shine above all, and I am sure when that happens the world will suddenly want to befriend us.” This woman is evidently a very educated woman in her country and she is surely an example of an ‘empowered’ woman. She lives in the most repressive dictatorship in the world, one in which she, as a woman, may not even drive a car, and one in which she, as a woman, may not leave the country without the permission of her husband or male guardian. Yes she has pride in it. In the freedom loving west you would be hard pressed to find an empowered feminist woman who is well educated and who loves the west in the same manner this woman loves her country. Most well educated western women hate their countries, protest against them and are full of nothing but critique for their own religion, heritage, leaders, form of government, and history.
This is the paradox. Give people freedom and they hate you for it. Teach the slaves to read and they will read Locke and they will come to demand freedom and then they will kill you for it. Nat Turner learned to read. Spartacus no doubt was exposed to education and so was the leader of the great slave rebellion on Barbados in the 19th century. Teach the poor to resent their lives, as Marx did, and they will come for you in the night.
Empowerment seems like it merely teaches people to down tools and take off their chains. But in truth empowerment and freedom is merely a tool for the destruction of freedom. Who led the American revolution? It was not the uneducated poor. It was not the slaves and the native Americans. It was the wealthiest, most well educated men who resented, in truth, those freedoms granted to them by the crown. They demanded more freedoms. In truth the American revolution is one of the few examples where the ends were not worse than the means. The means is freedom. Often the end is tyranny. John Wilkes Booth believed as much when he shot Lincoln. It was precisely the freedom granted by Lincoln that allowed men like Booth to survive the Civil War.
So how to understand this? A dictatorship educates people like H.A in Saudi and they become rapid nationalists. A religion that denies women basic rights and subjugates them finds that the greatest defenders of that religion, known as Islam, are women. Muslim women in Europe, where they are free supposedly to do as they please, choose the headscarf and their own subjugation as a way to define themselves and a way to show pride in their religion. Western women, granted the same freedoms, choose to work as strip clubs and pose nude as a way to express themselves and they speak of how ‘empowering’ it is to be ‘masters of our own bodies’. This is the paradox. Give the dog food everyday at a given time and the dog is obedient. Feed the dog irregularly and give it the freedom to play with other dogs and to hunt its own food and it will come one day and gore its owner. This is, in affect, the parable told by Orwell in Animal Farm, although he did not realize it. The farmer in the story is only thrown out of his farm because he has been lax with his beasts, rather than harsh.
The moral of story is too fold. Dictatorships result from the granting of too much freedom. Dictatorships ensure their own survival because they create a slavish devotion to themselves and a burgeoning patriotism among their citizens. Attack a dictatorships such as Stalin’s Russia or Islamist Iran and the people, no matter how suppressed, will rally to the flag. Attack a democracy, as Hizbullah did to Israel or Bin Laden did to America, and the democracy will doubt itself and hate itself and many of its members will have understanding and support for the enemy.
America has waged two world wars in defense of democracy. It successfully defeated the German monarchy and the Nazi dictatorship. The result of those wars has been the theory that a democracy, despite its self critique, is better prepared and more flexible when fighting wars against dictatorships. It is not given to self delusion and it prevails on the battlefield when the chips are down. Israel is the ‘evidence’ for this equation. It has beaten back Arab dictatorships again and again.
But some forget that America did not wage war without first taking its gloves off. It rounded up Japanese and German nationals. It imprisoned them. Had they rebelled they would have been shot. Had they tried to make common cause with the enemy they would have been shot. Yet today given our present degree of freedom, must of our national consciousness makes common cause with the enemy. Our greatest celebrities, wealthiest people and tallest intellectuals make common cause with the enemy. The enemy is Islam. Make no mistake. That is what the entire world struggles against. There is no coexistence between Islam and the World. There cannot be. Wherever there is Islam there is dictatorship and rape and genocide. Wherever there are non-Muslims there is diversity, democracy and tolerance. That is what the world is made up of. There is Saudi Arabia and there is America. These are the twin poles that are emerging in our world. We deny it. We pull the wool over our eyes. The American President visits the den of Satan in Riyadh. The question is: has our freedom crippled us to the degree that we can no longer even see the enemy? This is not like other wars of the 20th century where armies fought and there were borders. This is a war between two ideologies. On the one hand there is an ideology of hate. An ideology that seeks to conquer the world and make all of us slaves. It seeks to force us to submit to a false god, a god of hatred and a god of genocide. It seeks to make us love a book which tells the story of a child molester, a slaver, a rapist and a murderer who encouraged his followers to wage unending war against others in order to take their women and booty. On the other hand there are the free peoples of earth. These are all the people who do not adhere to this religion called ‘Islam’. There are no ways of being a member of both. Just as there is no way to be a communist and a democrat and there is no way to be a Nazi and a democrat, there is no way to be a Muslim and a member of the world at the same time.
So while the American president cavorts in the pleasure palaces of Saudi, while he is served water by slaves of the Saudi regime, we ask ourselves: which is better, democracy or dictatorship? Do we need a dictatorship in the west in order to foster patriotism and love for our country? Do we need a dictatorship in order that our leaders will no longer sip from the blood stained chalice of the Saudis? What will it take before our politicians stop demanding we ‘talk to Syria and Iran’. There is no talking to be done. We did not talk with Hitler and we all know what talking to Staling got us. FDR talked to Stalin and he sold the souls of the people of Eastern Europe to him in exchange for ‘peace’. It was peace at too high a price, just as Czechoslovakia was peace at too high a price in 1938.
The same liberals in the west who damned the United States for defending dictators like Pinochet, Saddam and the Shah are the same ones who demand we ‘talk’ to Iran and Syria. Why? Why are their good dictators and bad dictators? Why are their Batistas and Castros?
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