Terra Incognita 23 Egypt, British Law, Sarkozy

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?