Terra Incognita
Issue 28
“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
March 29th, 2008
1) Terrorism and wife beating: A terrorist who supposedly seeks revenge is gunning down students when he is shot at by a police officer. Instead of confronting the police officer, the way the protagonist in Scarface confronts his enemies, he proceeds to kill more unarmed teenagers. Terrorism and wife-beating occur together in societies because both are products of a cowardly male culture where the men enjoy beating those who are defenseless rather than fighting those who can fight back.
2) The Journey: The life story of Adam Pearlman and Joseph Cohen, now known as Adam Yehiye Gadahn and Yousef al-Khattab tells of two men, one raised a hippie, the other in a religious school, both of whome converted to Islam and became Islamists. But their journey is no surprise in a western world in which secular-leftism has few values and offers an empty shell in which Islam hands out Korans at peace rallies to leftists seeking ‘the answer’. It is a dangerous journey as are all journeys to extremism, and it is becoming more common.
3) Strange Religion: A report on the underbelly of Reform Judaism Why do Reform-Rabbis-to-be define their religion primarily in opposition to Orthodox Judaism. Why do they debate the existence of God on Channukah and brag about eating pork on Purim? Most important of all, why do they name their schools after Leo Beack, a rabbi who collaborated with Nazis? Is reform Judaism, in its worst sense, just the creation of a ‘religion’ where scholarship represents the new religious laws, professors represent the new priests and social justice (Tikkun Olam) the new value system?
4) The Black hole: How many women vanish each year into Islam and the brothels of the west? Islam represents a black hole of women. In the universe of humans the only place where women do not exist is Islam, hidden behind black sheets and their heads covered, they cease to exist in society. They are murdered at will for ‘transgressions of family honor’. But is Islam the only black hole in the universe of man? The western treatment of women is not surprisingly different when one considers the stories about the treatment of trafficked sex workers in Europe. There are a million of them and they too have fallen into a black hole from which nothing emerges.
Terrorism and wife beating
Seth J. Frantzman
March 21, 2008
In the recent terror attack on the Merkaz haRav Yeshiva a police officer approached the building and was shot at by the terrorist. But the terrorist did not try to kill the policeman. Instead he went farther into the Yeshiva and proceeded to search for more teenagers to shoot. In the last scene of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid the two protagonists are stuck in a church surrounded by the Bolivian army. They come out with guns blazing and are subsequently shot down. Think of the difference between Butch Cassidy, or for that matter Billy the Kid, and the Muslim Arab terrorist.
When a Muslim woman is raped Islamic law calls for her to be stoned to death for ‘adultery’ unless she can bring four male witnesses to testify that she was raped and not sleeping around.
Muslim men are specifically commanded in the Koran to beat their wives. Wife beating is common across the Muslim world and leading Imams give treatises on the ‘proper’ way to beat one’s wife.
Is there a connection between terrorism and wife beating? Is there a connection between those who like to kill civilians, rather than fighting as equals, and those who beat their wives? The kind of people who like to beat women, the kind of people who like to bully people are the same kind of people who will choose to kill civilians rather than kill armed police. The scene in Unforgiven is perhaps instructive of the American cultural attitude to shooting civilians. In the final scene Clint Eastwood shoots down the owner of Greeley’s tavern. The Sheriff says to Clint “You just shot an unarmed man.” In order to excuse his behavior Clint says “Well he should have armed himself, if he’s gonna decorate his saloon with my friends body”, alluding to the fact that Clint’s friend, played by Morgan Freeman, had been whipped to death by the Sheriff and left in a casket at the door of the tavern. There are further allusions to the unacceptability of killing the defenseless in that timeless classic. In one scene a prostitute says to Clint “He said you were William Money out of Missouri. He told how to dynamited the railroad in sixty-five killing women and children.” In another scene we see Clint trying to get on his horse, which refuses to let him, and Clint tells his son “This horse is getting back at me for what I did in the old days. I used to beat a horse like this for no reason. Your mother, bless her soul, cured me of those ways.” The movie is, in short, a lesson in the American attitude towards harming the weak whether they be horses, women, children or unarmed civilians. There is nothing more American than the cowboy and there is nothing more honorable and manly than the idea of the American West. The fact that the cowboy and all the gangs of the old west, such as Billy the Kid and his Regulators in the Lincoln County war, or the James gang or Wyatt Earb, were only honorable so long as they didn’t kill civilians is clear from the genre and the old penny novels that told of their exploits. Even modern American gangsters as depicted in Godfather and Scarface refrain from murdering women and children and civilians if they are to remain acceptable to the audience.
The Muslims always speak of revenge, it is a favorite pastime of the Islamic genre. Muslim theologians always tell enraptured westerners that war is illegal in Islam and then mention the caveat that actually only defensive war is permissible in Islam. Thus for the Muslim to gun down a room full of civilians or fly a plane into a building first requires that he claim he is either acting in self-defense or that he has been wronged, however tangentially, by those he is killing. For the Muslim terrorism is the typical way of fighting war, murdering civilians is part of the bread and butter of Islamic history and collective punishment is the only type of warfare the Muslim knows. There simply is no concept of the idea of the civilian in Islamic theology or Islamic history. Every Islamic army, from the Mughals to the Ottomans, slaughtered civilians and took slaves. That was how Islam has always fought wars against ‘infidels’ and ‘kaffirs’.
The irony that wife beating and honor killings are common to Islam but uncommon in the West, particularly in America, is merely a corollary to the Islamic method of war. Let us return to Unforgiven. In the film the story surrounds the old gunman William Money who is tagging along on a mission of revenge. A prostitute has been cut up by one of her clients and now the other prostitutes have pooled their money to pay for the man that cut her to be killed. Thus Clint Eastwood is on a mission to defend a woman. Think of the difference in the Islamic view of he women. Prostitution in Islam is punishable by death. Thus for a man to beat and cut a prostitute is no offence since she ‘deserves it’. But in the American genre a man who beats a prostitute is a coward and his punishment should be death. That is a pretty strong punishment but as one of the protagonists in Unforgiven duly notes before he shoots down one of the offenders “You shouldn’t of cut up no woman.” That is the essence of the American view. It is encapsulated in the Godfather when Sonny’s sister is beaten by her husband and Sonny beats his brother-in-law within an inch of his life for having beat his sister. It happens again and Sonny rushes off once again to kill his brother-in-law, only to be killed in an ambush on the way, thus leaving the audience wondering if revenge will ever come. But revenge does come when Vito Corleone, Sonny’s brother, becomes head of the family and shoots down his own sister’s husband, Carlo. Carlo’s death, so long in coming, is relished by the audience, not merely because Carlo has been implicated in the death of Sonny, but primarily because Carlo is a cowardly wife-beater who deserves to be killed by a man of honor like Vito. This is the epic moral lesson. It is an American lesson. A man who beats his wife is not a man, he is a coward and every American genre is replete with stories of wife-beaters getting what they deserve.
Terrorism and wife-beating are like cousins. A culture which produces terrorists also produces cowardly men who beat their wives. What is more cowardly than terrorism. Bill Maher, the American liberal and previously host of Politically Incorrect (now host of Real Time) was fired from his show after Sept. 11th when he said “in comparison [to the 9/11 hijackers], the U.S. government has acted like cowards because it has previously launched missiles at targets thousands of miles away in contrast to those who flew airplanes into buildings.” Maher is confused about what is ‘cowardly’ because Maher’s dialectic of liberalism is not American, it is mostly an Islamic viewpoint of what is ‘heroic’ because American culture has never praised as heroes those who murder civilians. The fact that the 9/11 hijackers objectified women by being regulars at strip clubs only shows the truly cowardly nature of their endeavor.
Those who write about terrorism usually fail to distinguish this central characteristic. They lump together terrorists who fought against the military with terrorists who kill mostly civilians. People pretend they are the same. Thus the Jewish Zealots of 70 A.D are usually credited with being the first “terrorists”. But the Zealots killed Roman soldiers. This is what always marks the difference between the cowardly culture, the culture of the wife beater, the culture of the terrorist, and a culture of honor. An honorable culture defends a raped woman, an honorable culture does not beat women, an honorable culture produces men who prefer to fight people of equal or greater strength. An honorable culture has outlaws who are more honorable than the soldiers in a cowardly culture. This Butch Cassidy was more honorable in his life than any leaders of any Muslim country or any Muslim soldier or any Palestinian ‘militant’. That is the degree to which America is more honorable. When the criminals have more honor and decency, when even the criminal prefers to fight man to man rather than killing the weak, then you know a culture has honor. One cannot find that honor in the Muslim world. One finds terrorists who even use women to murder, knowing that the woman has been brainwashed and the woman has been abused her whole life she is then strapped with a bomb and told to kill herself. The cowardly Muslim culture uses mentally disabled people to carry out attacks. This is why Bin Laden will never die fighting, he won’t die like Butch Cassidy.
The Journey
Seth J. Frantzman
March 26th, 2008
They make the journey. It starts slowly. It begins with their first protest. Their first peace rally. It begins with the first time they say “I hate” and put some group such as ‘republicans’ or ‘conservatives’ or ‘Christians’ or ‘Jerry Fallwell’ after those words. Then it leads them to religion. It leads them to ‘the answer’. That leads them to a sense of belonging. That leads them to wishing death upon those who hate their new found group. That is the journey. Radicalism and hate are journeys. They are journeys many people make.
Some journeys are short. A man grows up with some heritage, such as being Irish-Catholic and later he puts a bumper sticker on his car that says ‘FBI-Full Blooded Irish’ and he celebrates St. Patrick’s day. He doesn’t run guns for the IRA. He doesn’t attack random Englishmen. He is merely in touch with himself.
The most dangerous radical is the person who is the empty hole. A person born with no identity whose parents give them no sense of heritage. He is an empty vessel waiting to be filled. But he is not the only dangerous person. The other dangerous person is someone who grows up with too much heritage, too much patriotism, too many rules and inside too small a box. His radicalism can increase quickly, and it can switch from whatever his original birth-heritage was to some other heritage without the bat of an eye.
Many people are increasingly making the journey. It is like the journey Henry David Thoreau made or the one made by Edward Abbey. But the journey today increasingly takes the most disturbing turns, it turns away from decency, from a pure interest in a genuine attachment to something, a love for something, and transforms itself into a massive and terrible hate for so many things.
Joseph Cohen and Adam Pearlman made the journey. Now they are known as Yousef al-Khattab and Adam Yahiye Gadahn. Both Jews. One raised in the Yeshiva in New York and the other with his hippie parents in California. Both exemplary figures of the new world. One a conservative with a heritage, the other the typical liberal bourgouise with the blank slate. But were they so different than Josef Stalin and Vladimir Lenin? One the seminary boy, the other the nerdy intellectual. They took the journey too. Joseph (Cohen, not Stalin) now runs RevolutionMuslim.com an Islamist hate site, and Adam is Osama Bin Laden’s Communications director.
They are not the only ones who make the journey. Many lesser people make it. There is the Belgium woman who became a suicide bomber in Iraq. There is the German woman who traveled to Bosnia with her Egyptian Husband to join the Jihad against Serbia. She watched him behead Serbs. They made the journey. They covered their hair and adopted new Muslim names.
One sees today that the journey is being aided and abetted by Islamic recruiting at peace rallies. At every anti-war rally there are ‘welcome to Islam’ booths where free Korans are handed out. The secular liberal hippie women who abhor marriage, defend abortion, hate the death penalty and sunbathe nude will pick up the ‘glorious’ Koran and suddenly be quoting the ‘tales of the Prophet’. The journey begins.
Liberalistic-secularism or Post-Humanism has always been part of a religion that spawns hatred, fascism, social engineering, social chaos, the destruction of society, the undermining of decency and the spreading of racism, guile and deception. The religion of the extreme-left has a most potent brand of hatred. Again and again one will see the same liberals who denounce ‘Christian fundamentalism’ at home embrace Islam abroad. They embrace all the values abroad that they hate at home. They embrace the death penalty and the headscarf, the family, values, modesty. They embrace Kings and militarism.
The only thing that can be said about leftism for sure is that it has none of the values it once did but that it lives on the fumes of its heritage. Leftists repeat the same old stories about being ‘freedom riders’ and fighting for ‘gay rights’ and ‘women’s rights’ and against ‘racism’. They speak of social justice and equality and a color-blind society. They speak out on censorship and the media. But this is hollow rhetoric. There is no left. It is dead. The left, the secular-progressive movement, liberalism, it is all dead. It is a hollow shell that offers its adherents only conversion to Islam and the journey to hatred. It is but a conduit. It exists merely as a dialectic that helps people gravitate to radicalism. People enter the dialectic the way one enters a giant empty building. They enter it but they never leave. The only exit is to Islam. It is like the closet in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe except this closet of liberalism takes in gays and feminists and transports them to another world where only holy warriors of Islam come out, marching in lockstep. The journey is the most dangerous thing.
Strange Religion: a report on up and coming reform Rabbis
March 22nd, 2008
Seth J. Frantzman
Imagine a religion where the chief priests don’t believe in god, don’t believe in customs or tradition, forsake the land of their forefathers, don’t adhere by the dietary laws of their own faith, spend most of their time complaining about other people in their religion and tell people the main message of their faith is ‘social justice’ and ‘community’. Such a religion would simply be the outward manifestation of a community of secular-progressives. Except in this case its not. In this case it called ‘reform Judaism.’
According to the bylaws of the reform movement, since it is governed more by a modern legalized secularized system than by the traditions and rulings of elders, the Reform Rabbi does not have to believe in god. He may marry people who are not Jewish. He doesn’t have to wear a Yarmulke. He brags about his contempt for kashrut, the Jewish dietary law. But what is most fascinating about the reform movement is that is spend so much time insulting Orthodox Judaism, as if it very existence is predicated upon the hatred for the ‘other’, the Orthodox.
The up and coming reform Rabbi says things like: “they [the Orthodox Chabad] call the Rebbe the messiah, is that Judaism, they are not Jewish…Chabad has gone to all the realms of the earth, to the most obscure places to mission to Jews, the major failing of the reform movement is that it doesn’t do that, we are behind in not going to these communities and Chabad has gotten the drop on us…When a woman is beaten by her husband and she goes to an Orthodox Rabbi the rabbi will say ‘that’s no big deal’. Is that Judaism?”
It is extraordinary the degree to which ‘what is Judaism’ for a reform Jew is predicated simply on what Orthodox Jews do. The Orthodox put on Tefillin and Kippahs and only eat Kosher food so the reform person doesn’t. That’s an odd way to organize a religion, to base it simply on doing the opposite of what those you hate do. The hatred for Orthodox Jews is deep among Reform Jews. They ascribe all sorts of devilish behavior to them. They accuse them of denying the Holocaust and wife beating. What is most fascinating is that when the Reform Jew is questioned about his evidence for the fact that wife-beating is wide-spread in the Orthodox community he cites the fact that “I volunteered in an Orthodox battered women’s shelter.” This is the evidence. But in secular society there are battered women’s shelter. That doesn’t lead us to conclude that secular society believes wife beating is acceptable, in fact it is the evidence that the society abhors wife beating and thus establishes a shelter for the victims. It is odd how the reform rabbi-in-training takes every instance of a crime committed by an Orthodox Jew and ascribes the action to every Jew, stereotyping and judging the entire community by the actions of one person. Thus if an Orthodox Jew throws a rock at a car on Shabbat the reform rabbi says “they are all intolerant.” If an Orthodox Jew protests against a gay pride rally then the reform rabbi-to-be says “they are all hateful”. We can see in the labeling of the Orthodox as “racist” and “hateful” and “intolerant” that these words are the new words ascribed to those things that are to be hated. This is an irony. The irony is that in today’s progressive world the way in which to castigate a group and make it evil in the eyes of people is to say that the group is ‘hateful’ or ‘racist’. In a sense the reform movement is at the forefront of always condemning people as ‘hateful’ merely so that people can feel good about hating those people for being hateful. The reform-rabbi-to-be has no qualms about his depth of hatred and intolerance and mythmaking and stereotyping of Orthodox Jews, because the only way to hate someone if you are a liberal is to call those people ‘racist’ and ‘hateful’, thus making their very existence abhorrent to society (one can see this in the labeling of Serbs as “racist”, thus excusing the Nato bombing of Serb civilians, since those deemed to be ‘racist’ deserve extermination at the hands of the liberal-secular society.)
The reform movement of Judaism seems to exist on three pillars. The first pillar is identifying itself in opposition to Orthodox Judaism. The second pillar is assimilation and the third pillar is ‘social justice’ or what they call ‘Tikun Olam’. If one asks a reform-rabbi-to-be whether he has read the Bible or studied Kabbalah he will reply that he is only interested in studying it “in a scholarly manner”. Thus reform rabbis who graduate from rabbinical school are not really spiritual leaders or priests as exist in other religions, but actually scholars. So one might say that the fourth pillar of Reform Judaism is that of academia. It is not so much a religion as a gathering of academics. It is, in this sense, the highest form of the pragmatic scientific revolution in western civilization. Its high priest is not a priest but a scholar. Thus it has raised scholarship to the height of religion, saying or admitting in essence, that today’s scholars are to society as the priests of old were. This is quite a revolution for it admits that religion in its traditional form can be replaced so long as the new fad of scholarship, the new fetish of secular people, can be said to be religious. Thus a scholarly journal can carry the weight that a religious scroll used to. One can replace Magillat Esther or the Book of Job with the Journal for the Study of Religion or the Journal of Greek Studies.
Such a staid society. A society that raises its dead scholars to the status of high priests and gods. But it is merely replacing the old structures with new ones.
In its hatred of Chabad, its condemnation of all the messiah craze and its anger that Chabad has ‘gotten the drop on them’ by having Rabbis who are willing to go to hardship postings while reform rabbis prefer the comfort of the U.S and the nearby college campus and the BMW. The reform movement frames the competition between it and Chabad as an epic struggle for the heart and soul of Judaism. It reminds one of the opening back-story for the film Gods and Generals in which the narrator says, of the U.S Civil War, that ‘One side fought for heaven here on hearth and one side fought for heaven up above’. It is a timeless tale. Prince Lazar of the Serbs also choose heaven up above. Reform Judaism appeals to the creation of heaven on earth, the social justice and ‘Tikkun Olam’ it always speaks of. But is that an appeal to a forlorn Jew in a far off place in Siberia? Is it appealing to have a wealthy Jew from New York who owns a BMW but does not wear a Kippah come up and say “listen Mr. Jew, you should join the Reform movement because then you can give charity to your Russian neighbors and you can bring social justice to them.” When the Jew asks “what does the reform movement stand for and believe in?” The ‘Rabbi’ says “we don’t ask you to believe in god or wear a Yarmulke, we think you should not be like those Orthodox Jews who beat their wives and worship a false messiah. You as a Jew need to fight for the rights of minorities and for social justice.” The forlorn Jew must surely think to himself “I am the minority, what about my social justice? Why do these people want me to join their movement just to help others? Their movement asks me to condemn Orthodox Jews who I have never met. It thus asks me to join a movement that is based on helping non-Jews and opposing Jews, so why does it call itself Jewish?” Imagine the day he is confronted by a humble religious Orthodox Rabbi from Brooklyn and the Rabbi says “I want to re-connect you to your tradition, to your forefathers and the laws they followed, I want to teach you about our religion and how it makes us special, I want to offer you charity in the form of community and a love for your people and teach you about our holy books and our thousands of years of tradition.” Now this, the forlorn Jew must say is something that offers him fulfillment and passion and emotion, love and spirituality and tradition and heritage. Is it a wonder that given the two arguments that the majority of these Jews in far off places have chosen the path of Chabad and not the path of Reform? They see the secular Jews who come to visit them from the west and they see that all the secular Jews do is preach hatred for other Jews and compassion for non-Jews. They see wealthy secular Jewish women who are full of self hate and who speak only about ‘Palestinian Rights’ but don’t seem to care about the local Jews, unless it is to take pictures of them as one takes pictures in a museum. It is no surprise that Jews in the former Soviet Union who were crushed by an atheist country and forced to assimilate would embrace a Judaism that offers them a reconnection to a lost and brutalized past rather than a Judaism that offers them self-hate and more assimilation. In short, Reform Judaism offers them what the Soviet State offered them, which is not Judaism, but secularism. They already have the empty promise of secularism and they are already unfulfilled in life. People naturally desire passion and emotion from their religious leaders. They don’t need a ‘rabbi’ to play the academic to them, the already have professors to do that.
To watch the reform-rabbi-to-be studying in Israel and saying “I would never move to Israel and I don’t think there is anything special about Israel and Jerusalem for the Jewish people.” Then why does he study here? To watch him say “I would never want to serve in the Israeli army because I might be called on to do things that are immoral.” But isn’t that a truly moral choice, to do something where one might be morally challenged and one must exercise character and say ‘I will not do this’ rather than to slink away and say ‘I don’t ever want to have to stand up for my morality’. The reform-rabbi-to-be has a Chanukah dinner where she makes fun of the blessings as she recites them. Why recite blessings if one can’t take them seriously, why do religious things if one has no reverence for them? The reform rabbis to be then have a dinner, on Chanukah of all holidays, where they debate the existence of god and whether a ‘rabbi’ should have to believe in god. Then on Purim the reform-rabbi-to-be comes to dinner on Shabbat and spends his time proudly telling people how he hates Kashrut, how he eats non-Kosher food, how he hates religious Jews and how they all beat their wives and how he would never come to Israel (although he is in Israel while he says this) and how he would never wear a headcovering. It is as if for a Reform Rabbi every Jewish holiday is an excuse to bash on Judaism and preach hate against religious Jews (always with the excuse that “I hate those religious Jews because they are so intolerant”-a funny way to justify intolerance).
The tragedies of the Reform movement are so many. It names its schools, institutes and colleges after Leo Baeck, a collaborationist Rabbi who denied the Nazi genocide at the height of the Holocaust and worked for the Nazi Judenrat at Theresienstadt concentration camp. The crimes of Leo Baeck are massive. An assimilationist he argued that Jews should give up their ways while all the while he shunned the OstJuden refugees who arrived in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s. He was the head of the German Jewish community before the rise of the Nazis and then became head of a puppet Jewish organization set up by the Nazis called the Reichsvereinigung. Baeck made sure not to protest the Nazi crimes of Kristelnacht for fears of offending the Nazi government and he claimed that to protest would make the Jews seem ‘disloyal’ to the German Nazi state. When he was deported to Theresienstadt he worked in the camp’s Jewish administration and he made sure not to pass on reports of the Holocaust to other Jews or help alert the world’s attention. This was collaboration of the highest order, the Nazis could not have been more blessed with a malleable Jewish leader such as Baeck who was willing to help that at their every turn in order to make the Jews go quietly to their deaths. After the war the collaborator was a hero of ‘progressive’ Judaism. This shows the degree to which modern day Reform Judaism is actually enthused with the idea and worship of collaboration. It is no surprise that the Leo Baeck Institute is the world’s leading place of study on German Jewry and praises the German Jewry as a model of civilization, a model that encourages quiet and collaboration in the face of genocide. It is the Baeck legacy that has Holocaust scholars blaming the ‘function’ of the Nazi state rather than the Nazi leadership for the Holocaust. As one Reform-Rabbi-to-be said “Hitler never encouraged the Holocaust and nor was it something he planned…it was Never part of Hitler’s plan until the war had broken out.” Only reform Judaism could whitewash Nazism and make the Holocaust merely ‘function’ of the state. Only reform Judaism could produce the likes of Martin Buber who opposed the execution of the Nazi Adolph Eichmann and Dr. Judah Magnes who opposed the creation of the State of Israel. It is ironic that Reform Jews condemn Orthodox Jews for not showing enough attention to the Holocaust when it is Reform Jewish scholarship that has downplayed the uniqueness of the Holocaust and it was Reform Judaism that produced the greatest Jewish collaboration with the Nazis.
Reform Judaism is a failure as movement and as an ideology. Its only legacy is that it is tied deeply to the ideology of post-humanism. Its obsession with scholarship, its rejection of any idea of faith, its hatred for others, its rejection of the idea of land and nation, its obsession with creating a religion whose sole reason to exist is to help others is a hallmark of the left. Reform Judaism is not so much a religion as an ideology, the ultimate expression of modernism, a religion based on the new sciences of multi-culturalism and the ‘other’. It thus proves, ipso facto, that man desires religion. He can replace god with ‘social justice’ but always man seeks some overarching system of belief. Reform Judaism is a system of belief, a very strange one indeed.
The Black hole: Women in the west and east
March 25th, 2008
Seth J. Frantzman
Originally I wanted to write this about the way in which Islam is a black hole of women, a thing that swallows them up, uses them to create as many children as possible, enslaves them behind burkas and then disposes of them like dogs. I wanted to write about the way in which the western woman, the woman born in a 'free' country was enticed into this slavery. But then I began reading about all the human trafficking in Europe, the more than a million prostitutes who work across Europe, half of whome are trafficked. Then I realized that the black hole is not merely Islam. The black hole is in Europe as well. Previously this newsletter has shown that Islam and liberalism treat women in precisely the same manner: both ideologies create a male-centered world in which the entire life of the women exists to please the man, but now we can see that it is not merely in the realm of male-centeredness that Islam and liberalism are primarily the same thing, Islam and liberalism are also responsible for the virtual enslavement and disappearance of women because both see women primarily as a beast, an object, to be exploited and raped by society and then disposed of.
The stories speak for themselves. Two Bulgarian girls, one 16 and the other 19, brought to Italy to work in a Circus, forced to lay nude with snakes and swim with piranhas. Enslaved by the circus and not allowed to leave the premises of it. A 16 year old girl from "Eastern Europe" in Italy forced to be a prostitute, denied an abortion by her European slavers and forced to prostitute herself into sixth months of pregnancy. 800 people arrested in a human trafficking ring in Italy, forty-five female slaves freed by the police. Dr Viorel Gorceag, who works at a shelter for victims of trafficking in Chisinau, says more than 90% of these women need medical and psychological treatment. "There was a case, a girl coming from Italy where she was used to make porno movies." There is Elena, from Moldova, forced to work as a whore in Bologna. "A lot of the victims are lured into it by deceptive advertisements that promise them work. Typically, once they answer these ads, they are fooled, they go off with the traffickers and once they get into a foreign country their papers are taken away and essentially they become slaves." Europeans use words like 'supplier' to describe countries from where the women come. "On 4 October 2002 a man brought me from Romania to Italy," says Helena, a slight 17-year-old, with an empty expression and bruises on her arms and chest which she tries to cover as she talks to me. "He told me I had a job as a cleaner but he shut me in a house and took my passport. "Then he and others beat me and raped me until I agreed to work on the streets. They said if I didn't do it they would kill my family." A woman in Moldova named Ana's daughter was forced to spend three years working as a prostitute in Bosnia - a virtual prisoner of a man known as Rocky. She was repeatedly beaten and raped. Now back in Moldova, she is frightened to leave her parents' house. It is no surprise this took place in Bosnia, the 'model state' that Nato and the EU created as its latest colonial experiment. Who were the clients to rape this girl? Like the clients in Prague and in Macedonia and the people who book themselves on the sex-tours of Asia and Africa it was Europeans. Those readers of Voltaire and Goethe, they were the clients. Those coffee house intellectuals. This is the European 'civilization'. Such a 'civilization' it is.
But what about in the exotic east? There the stories are surprisingly similar. We read in Haaretz on March 27th that Bedouin men who live in tin shacks have a surfeit of women. Its not that their society is the gift of a lucky gender imbalance. Siah Altori, a Bedouin man of 57 explains "we have more women than men, especially because many are marrying Russian women." Who else would it be? Russian women, who wear G-strings and tight shorts and halter tops in Russia are happy to trade them in for the all encompassing Muslim female outfit, they are happy to trade them in to share their 57 year old husband with three other women. But these Russian women are traveling the same road that millions of Russian women have traveled before. If Russian women slave-prostitutes were given the vote in the Arab world one might find that there are as many Russian women in the Arab world between 13 and 25 as there are in Russia. They have taken over Turkey in order to pleasure the men there who had hitherto been forced to make due with one women per man. They have swamped the UAE and Israel. There are many in Dubai that the one's with AIDS are taken out to the desert and shot (a mass grave of a hundred of them was recently found) in the head, lest the poor Arab and European men who live in Dubai get Aids from them. They work as slaves in bondage 'dungeons' where men pay to torture them within an inch of their lives. In the Gaza strip after the Hamas take over the Russian embassy evacuated a few hundred Russian women whose prostitution business had suddenly become untenable. Then there is the case of Ms. Dombayev a Russian women who married a friendly Arab man from Ramla who subsequently tried to kill her. In Rahat the Bedouin town has been swamped with Russian women, so much so that the Bedouin women protested that their Arab men no longer wanted them. Tens of thousands have been brought though the Negev by Bedouin who try out the goods before delivering them. The women are raped in the desert before being turned over to slavers in Israel where they are then sold at public auction. But it doesn't dull their senses. One Russian prostitute interviewed in Tel Aviv said she "felt sorry" for her Arab clients because "they can't find girl in their home village." It must be terrible for the Arab man, he puts his women in a headscarf and don't let he rout of the house after 8pm and then complains he can't find any women so he is 'forced' to go to prostitutes. In the end its all a black hole. The millions of western and Hindu women who marry into Islam every year and convert and on the headscarf disappear from society. They no longer exist. They become baby-making machines whose sole job in life is to be on their backs, giving their husbands pleasure and producing his Muslim children. Non-Muslim women go into the black hole but only Muslim men come out.
The Europeans speak of the 'supply' and demand that Moldova do more to keep its 13 year olds at home. In Turkey they 'hate' Russian women because the women have brought immorality to their country. But these Muslims and Europeans seem to be missing the other-side of the economic curve. When there is supply there is also demand. One does not exist without the other. There would be no prostitution if there was no one going to prostitutes. The truth is that the demand in Europe and the Muslim world necessitates the supply. In the old days the Muslim world settled for a supply of western women kidnapped in Muslim slave raids on Italy, Tartar raids on Ukraine and Georgia and Arab slavers in Zanzibar. In the 'good old days' before the British navy dismantled the East African slave trade, many of the sex-slaves in the Islamic world were Black women from Ethiopia, Sudan and Tanzania. What would a society look like where the men were not all panting for prostitutes. Imagine a society without moralistic Muslim men and coffee house liberals, all of whome need the very whores they condemn so vehemently. Demand. That is what Europe and the Muslim world have in common. A demand for flesh for sale. In Europe they boast of their legalized prostitution in Amsterdam, Germany and Italy. The are proud of their liberal policies towards it. Only the German men are displeased because underage prostitution is still not allowed and they must cross the border to Czech republic to get their teenage girls. Demand. They demand it. They thirst for it. Such is the thing that Europeans and Muslims can agree on: we need women as commodities. We cannot survive without it. The western liberal speaks of his 'women's rights' and the Muslim speaks of his 'morality' and the Muslim condemns the west for its 'decadence' and the Westerner condemns Islam for its 'oppression of women'. But the two are sides of the same coin. They condemn what they are. Muslim society is the most immoral society on the face of the earth. It is also the most decadent. Western society oppresses women to the same degree that the Islamic society does, except in the west that suppression takes varied forms.
Samuel P. Huntington spoke of a 'clash of civilization' but when the clash is between Islam and Europe there isn't much to fight about. Both civilizations live on the backs of women or rather they keep women on their backs so that the men may enjoy themselves. There is no clash. There is a collaboration. Europe serves as the conduit to bring the women to the Islamic countries so that Muslims can enjoy European flesh and Muslim men (such as Sheikh Hamza of Finsbury Mosque in London) work as pimps and bouncers in brothels throughout Europe. The two Muslim states created by the EU/Nato/UN colonization force in Bosnia and Kosovo are the central dispatches in the flesh slave trade of women. These two fleshpots are the central black holes of women. There is no comparable black hole in China or India or the United States.
Saturday, March 29, 2008
Saturday, March 15, 2008
Terra Incognita 26 Jewish tourism, mexican racism and canaanism
Terra Incognita
Issue 26
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
March 15th, 2008
1) Immoral Tourism and post-humanism: There is a strange phenomenon in the west whereby the most leftist and ‘progressive’ people romanticize and go as tourists to the most barbaric countries run by the worst tyrants. Is tourism a unique fetish? What is most surprising is to find Jewish tourists in places like Iran, Yemen and Syria, places that not only abuse Jews today but have historically ethnically-cleansed and enslaved Jews.
2) Those pesky Mexicans and their racism: Bill Maher recently interviewed some Mexicans and pushed them to admit that they don’t vote for Obama because he is black. The insinuation is that Mexicans or ‘Latinos and Hispanics’ are making American politics about race. How dare they! Perhaps everyone didn’t notice when 90% of blacks in Mississippi voted for Obama and 72% of whites voted for Clinton in the Democratic primary.
3) What are we thinking? About terrorism for instance: We must remind ourselves again and again what popular culture and the intellectual elites are saying about the ‘root causes’ of terrorism. New studies and commentary claims it is not only a waste of money to wage a ‘war on terror’ but that we should do whatever terrorists demand of us in order to ‘take the wing out of their arguments’. Why can’t we ever tell the truth about terrorism? It is a war crime. It is murder. It is wrong. It must stop. Those who champion it and those who excuse it are collaborators with the terrorist themselves.
4) Two views: Meron Benvinisti Canaanism and Avraham Burg's Sabbatean ideology: The Zionist heresy known as Canaanism has an interesting pedigree: it was once ultra-nationalist and is now ultra-leftist. The Jewish cult of ‘Tikkun Olam’ as expressed by Avraham Burg’s extremist anti-Israel attitude also has an interesting pedigree; the false messiah Shabbatai Tzvi. The twin evils of these mutli-cultural heresies are not simply about strange minority opinions among Jews, they are also symbolic of the very same self-hating, world-loving ideologies found in the West.
Immoral Tourism and post-humanism
March 12th, 2008
Seth J. Frantzman
If Nazi Germany had won and still existed would Jews visit it as tourists? Would they hide their Stars of David under their shirts (or better yet, leave them at home), and deny their religion in order to see the ‘cultural’ sites of Germany and its beautiful castles and the Rhine. Sounds ridiculous. Jewish tourists in Nazi Germany? Jews would never do that. Jews boycotted Nazi Germany, didn’t they? Those were the Jews of the 1930s. Today’s modern, especially American, leftist wealthy culturally awakened progressive Jew wants to be a tourist everywhere. He yearns for the romance of Yemen or Iran or Syria. In fact he or she, more commonly it is she, brags about their love of Yemen or Syria. They extol the virtues of going. Some have even gone and they regale people with tales of how they had to get a new passport to obscure the Israeli stamps on their old one, or how they lied about the origins of their family or family name in order to pretend that Gutessman was a ‘German’ and not a ‘Jewish’ name. They brag about how they left behind their Israeli passport and traveled under their other citizenship to see the country that their Israeli cousins can’t travel too. They sweat with glee as they tell about their time studying Arabic in Yemen or their desert travels across Algeria.
Everything is romantic to the wealthy secular western Jewish traveler. Malaysia. Qatar. Even Sudan. There is no place that is off limits or deserves a boycott, except maybe Burma, which incidentally lets Jews and Israelis travel there (all the more reason to boycott it perhaps in the mind of the leftist Jew).
In the 1980s Jews were at the forefront of the boycott of South Africa. Jews wouldn’t dare travel to South Africa. They were ashamed to have friends who did. The Jewish reason for not going to South Africa was simple: Blacks were being denied their rights. Blacks were denied property. Blacks had been thrown off their land and denied their property and history. It was immoral to go.
What is most fascinating is that when it comes to countries that have murdered Jews, taken their property, expelled them, raped them, enslaved them and gassed them, that Jews have no problem traveling there. There was a generation of Jews who wouldn’t buy German cars and who would never travel to Germany and who abhorred hearing German. No more. The languages of choice for the modern leftist secular Jew are German and Arabic. For the yuppie Jew the car of choice is the BMW.
Why is tourism such an idol? Why is tourism above all things in life? Is the modern fetish, the singular most important and unique thing to our culture, the idea of tourism? Someone will deny their own brother in order to be a tourist. That is most fascinating. If a western secular Jew has a brother who is Israeli the non-Israeli brother will travel to a country where her own brother is not permitted to go, all in order to bow down to the god of tourism. Someone will deny their family and their heritage, all for the sake of tourism. They will bow down to the god of tourism and deny the existence of the god of their people in order to do so. They will learn to recite the prayers of others. They will do whatever is necessary in order to be a tourist.
Black people didn’t go to South Africa because they didn’t like the way South Africa treated blacks. Arabs and Muslims will not visit Israel because they don’t like the way Israel treats the Palestinians. They won’t buy Danish food because of some cartoons. Yet Jews will go to Iran despite the Holocaust cartoon contest Iran hosted. Even though Jews were expelled from Yemen they will gladly journey to Yemen. There is no line that a country can cross in terms of its treatment of Jews that will cause Jews not to go to that country. In Syria Jews are in a modern day ghetto and forbidden to leave the country. Yet Jews will go to Syria and admire the mosques and not speak to one Jew, lest someone suspect them of being Jewish.
It would be a strange world if Jews said they would never travel to countries where Israelis were not permitted to travel. It would be a strange world if Jews refused to travel to a country where they would be killed for wearing a kippah (skullcap). It would be a strange world if Jews would not travel to a country where they would be murdered for wearing a Star of David publicly. It would be a strange world where Jews would not travel to a country where Jews were not permitted.
The more a country hates Jews the more leftist-secular-Jews want to go there. If a country stones homosexuals and forbids women to show their hair one will find that many of the people who desire to go to that country are Jewish westerners. There are some Jews who will not go. Those Jews are called religious Jews. Sometimes they are called ‘Orthodox’ or Hasidim or ‘ultra-Orthodox’ or ‘Haredi’. Those are the Jews who don’t eat pork and wear black hats. They don’t go. We call them ‘religious extremists’. But perhaps we should call them ‘human rights activists’. The very fact that the religious Jews will not go to Syria or Yemen shows that they, inadvertently, are boycotting those hateful, racist countries who have never acknowledged their mistreatment of Jews. Those countries which do not even include their Jewish history in their text books. One will not find the religious Jews there.
The next time one meets a Jew who is packing their bags for Yemen or Iran or Saudi or Syria they should be asked “if black people were not allowed to go to that country would you still go?” The inevitable answer would be “no! I would never go to a racist country that doesn’t allow black people.” The curse of black people has been their skin color, which prevented them from being tourists in the 1950s American south or in South Africa in the 1980s. But that curse is also a blessing. It prevented blacks from putting tourism before their race, before their history and their own family. The Nazis tried to do the same thing with Jews. They forced them to wear Stars of David and they branded them with bar-codes. The problem is the Star of David can always be hidden away at a convenient time. Responsible Jews should live as if the Star of David is engrained on the skin, the way black skin is to a black person. If Jews lived that way and stopped visiting fascist-racist tyrannical and hateful countries like Iran, Syria and Yemen then Jews would be more responsible tourists.
The modern secular western Jew would have been a tourist in Nazi Germany. They would have told their friends, in the most high minded way, how “Germany’s government doesn’t represent its people…one shouldn’t blame all the people for the dictatorship….its racist to categorize and judge all the people based on the laws enacted by a minority… how can one deny the rich culture just because the modern regime is not up to standard.” They would have boarded Lufthansa and made sure to memorize ‘Deutschland, Deutschland Uber Alles.” It is, after all, so romantic. La La Illa Allah…
Those pesky Mexicans and their racism
March 12th, 2008
Seth J. Frantzman
As 72% of white voters voted for Hilary Clinton in the Mississippi Democratic primary and 90% of blacks voted for Obama we were all reminded of the real culprit making race an issue in the Democratic primaries: the Latino vote. That is the motif. We all know how the Latinos refuse to vote for Obama. Its not the first time the Latinos made the democratic party racist. In the California election in which Schwarzenegger beat Bustamante the Latino democratic nominee drove blacks away from the poles. Despite media coverage in that election that claimed “Bustamante busts a move” and accused Schwarzenegger of harassing girls when he was in his 20s, the Mexican nominee harmed the Democratic chances at the governorship by driving away the black vote, and some of the white vote too.
This is the problem with Mexicans. Thirty years ago there was no ‘Latino problem’ in America. Race politics was quite simple. In the American South the blacks and whites voted for opposite parties. Until the 1960s the Blacks voted Republican. Then the whites started voting Republican and the Blacks all became Democrats.
The trouble with Mexicans was illustrated b Bill Maher when he went to interview some about why they weren’t choosing Barak Obama as their candidate. They wouldn’t admit their racism so Maher had to bring it out by talking about boxing. While asking one overweight Mexican man why he cheered on Oscar De La Hoya rather than his black contended the Mexican dared to admit “you gotta go with our own.” So there it was. The Mexicans. The pesky Mexicans who had been pouring into America had brought their racism with them. They were causing all sorts of problems.
Its not just in electoral campaigns that Mexicans cause problems. Look what they have done to Affirmative Action and the U.S census. When it turned out that Mexicans were the largest minority group in many states, eclipsing blacks, the affirmative action pashas realized that Mexicans would soon demand to be admitted in larger numbers to the work force and jobs through affirmative action. Mexicans would now deserve all the freebies that blacks had been receiving. Liberals were unhappy. Mexicans were succeeding at a much faster pace than blacks. Despite bilingual education, designed to keep Mexicans speaking Spanish so they couldn’t compete with whites, the Mexicans were breaking out of their ghettos. So the liberal race theorists in America designed a way to end the Mexican problem once and for all. Mexicans were re-classified as ‘white’ and a new ‘ethnic’ definition was added to the race matrix in America. Now people could be ‘white-Hispanic’ or ‘black-Hispanic’. At one fell swoop Mexicans disappeared. There were no Latinos. There are only blacks and whites in America. America’s race pashas must have studied at the best race theory schools in Apartheid South Africa in order to come up with a way to re-classify Mexicans as ‘white’. But White race theorist leftists had done it before. They had been reclassifying people as white for a hundred years. Jews had become ‘white’. Italians had become ‘white’. Indians from India. Asians. Everyone was being pushed into whiteness to preserve the black minority in America. Because America has two races: whites and blacks (after Sept. 11 one should also add Muslims to that matrix).
Bill Maher was pressing the Mexicans to admit to their racism. “Just admit you, you don’t like him (Obama) because he’s black.” One wonders how many leftist wealthy whites who support Obama will admit that they support him Because he is black (when Geraldine Ferraro raised that point she was called a ‘racist’). But no matter. It’s the Mexicans who are racist. Pesky Mexicans vote for their own people. Pesky Mexicans are religious and believe in family values. Pesky Mexicans succeed to quickly. Pesky Mexicans work for less wages than unionized whites.
What are we thinking? About terrorism for instance.
March 10th, 2008
Seth J. Frantzman
A recent study b the Copenhagen Consensus supposedly showed conclusive evidence that, economically speaking, spending money to combat terrorism was always a waste. They claimed that the U.S had spent between $65 and $200 billion a year on fighting terror (the larger amount includes the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan) but that terror attacks only reduce GDP by around $17 billion a year. Thus it is a waste of money to spend anything over $17 billion on fighting terror, since the actual cost of terror is negligible.
This is a most Western way to look at war. It is the most ‘logical’ way to look at it. The British government’s of Stanley Baldwin and Chamberlain also preferred to look at war from an economic standpoint. The refused to increase spending on the British military until the late 1930s. The preferred ‘peace in our time’. They did everything to achieve it, lest the English economy be harmed b war. One must recall that Chamberlain’s appeasement came out of a liberal economic mindset that desired peace so that business could thrive.
While the ‘study’ may indeed show that the ‘cost’ of the London bombings or the Madrid bombings was only a small amount of money they seem to ignore two important facts. The human cost of terror is much greater than the economic cost. In America our constitution claims we have a right to ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’. Terrorism denies people that right. Fighting crime is usually more costly than the crime itself. A mugging may only cost the victim a hundred dollars in stolen cash. Having a policeman drive out to take down the report costs more. Does that mean we shouldn’t bother to try to stop muggings?
An article in the Economist reviews a book by Michael Burleigh and claims that “America’s notion of a ‘war on terror’, he rightly says is a nonsense. Terrorism is a tactic, not an entity; in the Second World War the allies didn’t declare war on the Blitzkrieg but on Germany.” That is true. But the entity behind terrorism today is called Islam. Leftists should be happy with the term ‘war on terror’ because it means we don’t have to tell the truth; the war on terror is a war on Islamism, just as the Second World War was a war on Nazism, and it is a war on Islam, just as the Second World War was a war on Germany.
Gideon Levy, the perennial sniveling extreme-leftist writer for Haaretz had to write an editorial about the massacre of 8 Jewish students at the Meraz Ha Rav Yeshiva in Jerusalem on March 6th. But he couldn’t condemn the murders outright. Instead he noted that “the killing at the yeshiva is heartrending. No one deserved it. The innocents in Gaza and the victims at Meraz Ha Rav in Jerusalem were all an unnecessary sacrifice…their families and those around them will probably adopt even more radical positions now, and so we will be led into another round of endless bloodshed.” This quote illustrates the notion of terrorism as always being part of a ‘cycle’. It always has ‘context’. There was one difference between the students at the yeshiva and the people in Gaza. The people in Gaza shoot rockets at civilians. The students at the yeshiva study the Bible. The families in Gaza are already radical.
Bernd Debusmann, a writer for the Herald Tribune wrote an article on March 8th entitled ‘Hypocrisy never makes for good foreign policy.’ He notes “the grievances that bin Laden laid out in precise detail, which were adopted by the followers he inspired. They were: the U.S presence in the Arabian peninsula; unqualified support for Israel; U.S support for states oppressing Muslims, especially China, India and Russia; U.S exploitation of Muslim oil; U.S support and financing of authoritarian Arab regimes. There is no reason to believe that the U.S is about to change the foreign policies that motivate Muslim extremists in a region…where man believe that the ‘war on terror’ is really a war on Islam…The [American presidential] candidates differ over when and how to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but none of them has given any indication of policies that would taken the air out of the arguments that Al Qaeda and lie-minded groups have used to attract recruits.’” This is the classic argument of the appeasement minded left. Their ‘solution’ to terrorism is to do whatever the terrorist wants. It’s a brilliant solution but it doesn’t work historically. Hitler only wanted a world free of Jews, Gypsys, Slavs and Blacks. Where were the liberals to tell us that it would have been better to simply change our policy and stop ‘offending’ Hitler. We could have ‘taken the air out of the arguments’ of Hitler b helping him build his gas chambers. We could have given Hawaii to the Japanese. What of the KKK? They only wanted segregation in the American South. We could have ‘taken the air out of the arguments’ of the KKK by keeping blacks out of schools and denying them the right to vote? Why is the leftist response to bulling thugs always to do whatever the thugs want?
This was not the historical message of the left. In the old days when attempts to register blacks to vote was met by terrorism or when abortion clinics were bombed the left always told us we had to stand strong in the face of intimidation. In the 1930s the leftists went to Spain to fight against fascism. What happened in the last 30 years? Why does the new intellectual leftist simply accept whatever the terrorist says at face value? Mr. Debusmann shows how ignorant he is by accepting these arguments. He claims that America supports China, Russia and India in its “oppressing” of Muslims. What is he talking about? America was always the ally of Pakistan against India. America’s greatest economic rival in the world is China, lest we forget that before 9/11 everyone was talking about ‘China rising’ and the ‘coming war with China’. America never supported Russia in Chechnya, on the contrary the U.S was at the forefront of condemning Russia’s treatment of Chechnya. What is Debusmann talking about when he condemns America for her “exploitation of Muslim oil.” What? Who is exploiting who? America pays through the nose for oil, making Islamist Arabs richer by the day and propping up the most backwards archaic Islamist regime in the region; Saudi Arabia. What of U.S “support for authoritarian Arab regimes.” Is Dubusmann suggesting that Islam would be more friendly if the U.S allied itself with the Muslim Brotherhood, Iran, Hamas and Hizbullah? America might as well have allied itself with Bin Laden. Perhaps Dubusmann forgets that the U.S tried that. In the 1980s the closest allies of the U.S were the Islamists in Afghanistan and Zia’s Pakistan, not to mentioned Saudi Arabia. By Debusmann’s logic the U.S should have supported Nazism because that would have meant less antagonism between Nazism and America and thus the Nazis would not have hated America and thus America could have joined the Nazis to conquer the world. That is the modern day liberal response: if you can’t beat them, join them.
Perhaps liberalism forgets that the history of America has always been built on bucking the trend. America was a republic when the Europeans were monarchies. America had no colonies when the Europeans were carving up the world. America was not seduced by the extremism of Communism or Nazism, the way the Europeans were. One suspects that Mr. Bernd Debusmann is a European. He would have preferred America had walked the European line. George Washington could have been the first American king. America could have joined in Imperialism and taken a few African colonies. America could have joined the European alliances and gone to war in 1914. America could have gone Nazi and rounded up and killed all its minorities. Then America could have repented and become Communist and turned all its workers into slaves. Then America could have become an ally of Islamism and helped it to take over the world and destroy ancient civilizations like China and India. One suspects that had America followed the course of Mr. Debusmann then there would have been no Herald Tribune for him to write in. There would be no place for his editorial. Mr. Debusmann would have been born in a Gulag and his parents would have perished in the American Holocaust. Mr. Debusmann would have been forcibly converted to Islam and he would know nothing outside the Koran.
Leftists need to be reminded again and again that just because people hate you doesn’t make them right. Just because people are willing to kill for their beliefs does not make their beliefs more correct. Just because people condemn you for something doesn’t mean they are correct. Our world too often equates the willingness of people to die for a cause with the justness of that cause. The world needs to be reminded that the Tibetans don’t blow themselves up. Yet their claim to statehood and the oppression of them is no less than the Muslims in Xinjiang province of China who Mr. Debusmann accuses America of conniving in the suppression of. I’ll take the Tibetans any day over the Islamists. If the world had more Tibetans it might have less terrorism and more bloodshed. Liberals and leftists need to work to free the silent resisters, like the Tibetans, those who don’t kill for their beliefs, and give less attention to those who murder civilians in their quest for ‘justice’. Perhaps if the world ignored the fake grievances of Muslims it would indeed tae the wind out of the sails of Islamism.
Two views: Meron Benvinisti Canaanism and Avraham Burg's Sabbatean ideology
Seth J. Frantzman
Sunday March 9th, 2008
An introduction to the political philosophy known as Canaanism posits that they "sought to create in Israel a new people, they mandated the dissociation of Israelis from Judaism and the history of Judaism. In their stead they placed the culture and history of the Ancient Near East, which they considered the true historical reference." In the 1940s a whole slew of Zionists became converted to this movement. Prominent poets, intellectuals and artists such as Yonatan Ratosh (Uriel Heilperin), Edya Horon, Yitzhak Danziger, Banjamin Tammuz, Amos Keynan, Aharon Amir and Uzzi Ornan were involved (Uzi Ornan and Yonatan Ratosh were brothers who both changed their names). Some of the intellectual detritus of this movement include Uri Avnery, the extreme leftist(he recently paid for an advertisement that screamed: “The boycott of Aljazeera [by the Israeli government] will harm the State of Israel, because it puts us in line with the worst oppressive regimes in the region and in the world”), who was a one time right wing Irgun member. Meron Benvenisti, one time deputy mayor of Jerusalem, and author of Son of the Cypresses is also an intellectual descendant. A.B. Yehushua, the famed Israeli writer, is as well.
According to Ron Kuzar the Canaanism movement was in fact originally right wing. It desired to make anew nation and was wrapped up in the 'blood and coil' antics of the 1930s. Since Jews were living all over the world it proposed the creation of a new Israeli Hebrew Canaanite nation, a re-birth of the ancient milieu that existed three thousand years ago in the land of Israel (for them the Land of Kedem). Kuzar notes that many of the Canaanists were members of right wing movements such as the Irgun and Lehi. However the creation o the Arab refugee problem and the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza after 1967 created severe problems n their belief system. Since they believed that ancient Israel was not 'Jewish' but rather part of the ancient Canaanite-Hebrew nation that existed in the Levant they rejected the idea that the Arabs and Jews should be separate or different. They harkened back to Ben-Gurion's early prognosis in 1950 that the Arabs would convert to Judaism and assimilate. However they wished that the Palestinians and Jews would all convert to Canaanism and become one people. The movement was atheistic, paganistic in the extreme and even adopted fake Canaanite rituals and used Ugarit.
In may of 2006 the Israeli writer A.B. Yehoshua journeyed to America to speak at a symposium and during his speech he declared that only Israel and not Judaism can save the Jewish people. Yehushua based his argument primarily on the fact that Hebrew was a unifying language for Jews in Israel and was thus a platform for the saving of the Jewish people. This harkened back to the Canaanist worship of Hebrew as a defining part of their new national identity. After all, Canaanism expressed itself primarily in poetry and Hebrew writing and its leaders were the strongest lovers of Hebrew and desired a Hebrew national revival. Yehushua argued that the Jewish religious identity had to be removed from the Jewish national identity, and in the national identity the Jews could only survive in Israel, and as a nation, they could call themselves whatever they wanted, Canaan, if they pleased. One commentator of Yehushua's speech noted that "Mr. Yehoshua believes there is a precedent for this solution in the First Temple period, when some “children of Israel” worshipped foreign gods and yet were considered part of the Jewish national entity.
This approach, it is important to stress, does not dismiss Jewish religion, but it does suggest that we will see a new kind of Jewish religion…On the other hand, Jewish nationalism in the State of Israel will attract members of other religions, and both Christians and Moslems will be fully integrated into the Jewish nation." In a critique of Yehushua's comments Union of Reform Judaism President Rabbi Eric Yoffie further noted that "But I do not believe that secular Judaism can be passed on to the next generation. And there is nothing in all of Jewish history to suggest that a Jewish community anywhere, including in the Land of Israel, can sustain itself without God and Torah. Torah-free civilizations have no staying power."
Meron Benvenisti's Canaanism is altogether more strange. He did his studies on the Crusaders and eventually came to link the activities of the modern Israeli state with those of the crusaders. He also connected Israeli treatment of the Palestinians with the British treatment of the Boers in the Boer War, perhaps ignoring that in that very savage war some 30,000 women and children had died. He also claimed that after disengagement Israel was responsible for creating 'Bantustans' on the Apartheid model in Israel. But he also became a passionate lover of the land of Israel, in its Palestinian-Canaanite form. He wrote a book describing the Sacred Landscape and 'buried history of the Holy Land since 1948' which spoke about the former Arab villages of the country. He became a passionate supporter of the bi-national solution. But in his book Son of the Cypresses he argued that it was only in the land that Israelis could find a connection to nationhood. Like Canaanism he believed strictly in the creation of a new national identity and he grafted on the ideas of Martin Buber, Judah Magnes (a reform Jewish rabbi) and the Brit Shalom movement onto it so that this new identity would be bi-national, composed of Jews and Arabs morphing into one country, perhaps ignoring he fact that there are 250 million Arabs and only 13 million Jews (It is perhaps ironic that when Jews have a state that many of their intellectuals desire that they should be amalgamated into a much larger nation and thus disappear, just as those same ideologues in the west argued for assimilation as a solution to the 'Jewish problem').
Canaanism was a failure. It was so right wing that it eventually became extreme-left wing and the practical outcome of its 'solution' would be the immediate disappearance of the Jewish people into an Arab morass. Canaanism would turn the Jews into the Copts, Berbers, Assyrians, Yazidis, Zaroastrians, Alewites, Mandaeans or Maronites. All of these people accepted forms of assimilation and binationalism and all of them have either disappeared or are on the verge of disappearing or being completely pushed aside.
Avrahahm Berg has wracked up a lot of 'formers' in his life. He is a former member of the Knesset. He is a former speaker of the Knesset. He is a former leader of the Labor party in Israel. He is a former president of the Jewish Agency. He is a former Israeli. He recently published a book entitled Defeating Hitler which he originally wanted to title Hitler Won in which he prophesized the destruction of Israel and made many other outlandish claims. He declared foremost that he was a Jew and that Zionism is the instrument that tries to make Jews into Israelis. He noted that he was first and foremost a human being. He noted in an interview that 'It can't work anymore. To define the State of Israel as a Jewish state is the key to its end. A Jewish state is explosive. It's dynamite" For Burg Israel's law of return was the "mirror image of Hitler" which must be ironic given the fact that he worked for an organization whose main goal was carrying out that law by bring Jews to Israel. Burg argues that the Jewish agency should help Arabs, who according to most Jewish philanthropists are the 'indigenous' people of Israel, Israel's own native-Americans. Burg noted that "Ahad Ha'am made the charge against Herzl that his whole Zionism had its source in anti-Semitism. He thought of something else, of Israel as a spiritual center - the Ahad Ha'am line has not died, and now its time has come. Our confrontational Zionism vis-a-vis the world is disastrous." He also noted that "Today that is not enough for me. In my situation today, I am beyond Israeli. Of the three identities that form me - human, Jewish and Israeli - I feel that the Israeli element deprives the other two." For Burg Israel is a brutish imperialistic, "Zionist ghetto." But Burg went further and declared that Israel was in essence a Zionist-Nazi state and that he had "discovered the layer of not everything being lost. And I discovered my father as a representative of German Jewry that was ahead of its time." For him the Jews had become the new Nazis: ""It is not an exact science, but I will describe to you some of the elements that go into the stew: a great sense of national insult; a feeling that the world has rejected us; unexplained losses in wars. And, as a result, the centrality of militarism in our identity. The place of reserve officers in society. The number of armed Israelis in the streets. Where is this swarm of armed people going? The expressions hurled publicly: 'Arabs out.'.. And I hear voices coming out of Sderot .... We will destroy and kill and expel. And there is a transferist discourse in the government (note here how the people of Sderot, the 17,000 victims of more than 7,000 rocket attacks are the ones accused of being Nazis, even though the community is composed of elderly Mizrahi and Russian Jews"
"It is not by chance that I make the comparison with Germany, because our feeling that we are obliged to live by the sword stems from Germany."
For Burg the EU is the Third temple. He describes it as "the European Union as a biblical utopia. I don't know how long it will hold together, but it is amazing. It is completely Jewish."
Burg's identity is that of the romantic Yekkee, the German Jew before the Holocaust. One interviewer noted when speaking to him that; 'You describe a thousand wonderful years of German Jewry. In large measure you view German Jewry as a model." Furthermore he argues that the only 'real' Jews are those in the Diaspora: "The tribes become a people outside the borders. The Torah is given outside the borders. As Israelis and Zionists, we ignored this completely. We rejected the Diaspora. But I maintain that just as there was something astonishing about German Jewry, in America, too, they also created the potential for something astonishing. They created a situation in which the goy can be my father and my mother and my son and my partner. The goy there is not hostile but embracing. And as a result, what emerges is a Jewish experience of integration, not separation. Not segregation."
"There is no important Jewish writing in Israel…The Israeli is a half-Jew…whole Jewish existence of two thousand years…I am a citizen of the world. This is my hierarchy of identities: citizen of the world, afterward Jew and only after that Israeli. I feel a weighty responsibility for the peace of the world…I am European.. In my eyes, Gandhi is as Jewish as there is. He embodies a very ancient Jewish approach. Like Yochanan ben Zakkai, who asked for Yavneh and its sages. Not Jerusalem, not the Temple, not sovereignty: Yavneh and its sages."(Interview with Ari Shavit, June 10th, 2007, Haaretz.)
We see in the words of Avraham Burg another side, another ideology, that exists among Jews. It is the ideology of the German-Jews, the anti-state citizen of the world European ideology. It is the ideology of Gandhi. It is the ideology of self hate. The ideology of the German-Jewish romanticism is quite deep in Israel. It began, of course, with the German Jewish refugees who poured into Palestine in the 1930s, fleeing Hitler. They used Palestine as a place of refuge. But they were self serving. Their intellectual ancestors were not so different in their opportunism. The ancestor of some of the intellectuals of German Jewry was Shabbatai Tzvi, the false messiah.
Shabbatai Tzvi was born in 1626 in Smyrna, in modern day Turkey. He was influenced by millenarian ideas that were swirling about at the time. In his twenties he revealed himself to some people as the Messiah. He wandered around the Ottoman world from Smyrna to Salonika, visiting with Ashkenazim and Sephardim. Shabbatai Tzvi became ingratiated with Nathan of Gaza, another believer in the coming end of days. His popularity soured in the rest of Europe and Jews in Amsterdam and Hamburg took up his banner. He was eventually imprisoned by the Ottomans in 1666 and he converted to Islam. His followers also converted and many of them came to live in Salonika where they became a sort of Muslim Morrano group known as Donmeh (The secularizing Turk known as Ataturk was rumored to be among their descendants). In Northern Europe where the Ashkenazim lived his ideas had a different affect. The affects of the disillusion spread far and wide and may have influenced the early Hasidic movement in the 18th century. He even had a link to Spinoza through the likes of Benjamin Musaphia and Heinrich Oldenburg. Some of those who came to believe in him became known as Sabbateans and have been linked to Reform Judaism by Gershom Scholem who claimed they may have been among its founders.
But if the Sabbateans desired to assimilate to Europe they also came to believe that Tikkun Olam or 'to heal the world' was a central tenant of Judaism. We see that this obsession with 'healing the world' and the desire to take it on one's shoulders is present in the ideology of Avraham Burg. Burg is thus a direct intellectual descendant of Shabbatai Tzvi.
When one examines the two movements together one can see that desire by Tzvi's followers to integrate into the Islamic milieu is found among the Canaanists while the obsession with Tikkun Olam and Europe is found among Burg and his ilk such as Amos Elon and the German-Jewish cult of Yekkee romantics who claim that German Jewry represented a utopia, a high point of Western civilization alongside Weimer Germany and its weak and pathetic political institutions.
What is most interesting is that whereas Burg sees the ideal Jew as the Diaspora Jew, fully committed to being a 'citizen of the world' and he sees the fulfillment of Judaism only outside Israel, Canaanism desires to be rid of Judaism and sees the fulfillment of the Jewish nation only in Israel with the abandonment of Judaism. The two are not mutually exclusive. Judaism can exist fully outside Israel while in Israel a new Hebrew-Canaanite nation is being born. The Yekkes can have their cake and eat it too. They can worship Tikkun Olam while at the same time tearing down the institutions of the state. These are fascinating ideologies and they say much about the world today. Canaanism is the Jewish version of multi-cultural post-modernism. It argues for the creation of new nations not based on those of old, and it is both pagan and interested in the melting pot of diversity. It takes its model from America and claims that American literature as a genre is like Hebrew literature, it is the genuine output of a new nation. The Burgists and their Tikkun Olam represent the other side of the mutli-cultural post-human society. They represent the worship of the other and the desire to only learn about others and the belief that perfection is always in the 'utopia' of the other. Thus, within Judaism, is the very same ideological pulling and conflict one finds in the west, a tugging on both ends that seeks to undermine and destroy both religion and nation.
Issue 26
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
March 15th, 2008
1) Immoral Tourism and post-humanism: There is a strange phenomenon in the west whereby the most leftist and ‘progressive’ people romanticize and go as tourists to the most barbaric countries run by the worst tyrants. Is tourism a unique fetish? What is most surprising is to find Jewish tourists in places like Iran, Yemen and Syria, places that not only abuse Jews today but have historically ethnically-cleansed and enslaved Jews.
2) Those pesky Mexicans and their racism: Bill Maher recently interviewed some Mexicans and pushed them to admit that they don’t vote for Obama because he is black. The insinuation is that Mexicans or ‘Latinos and Hispanics’ are making American politics about race. How dare they! Perhaps everyone didn’t notice when 90% of blacks in Mississippi voted for Obama and 72% of whites voted for Clinton in the Democratic primary.
3) What are we thinking? About terrorism for instance: We must remind ourselves again and again what popular culture and the intellectual elites are saying about the ‘root causes’ of terrorism. New studies and commentary claims it is not only a waste of money to wage a ‘war on terror’ but that we should do whatever terrorists demand of us in order to ‘take the wing out of their arguments’. Why can’t we ever tell the truth about terrorism? It is a war crime. It is murder. It is wrong. It must stop. Those who champion it and those who excuse it are collaborators with the terrorist themselves.
4) Two views: Meron Benvinisti Canaanism and Avraham Burg's Sabbatean ideology: The Zionist heresy known as Canaanism has an interesting pedigree: it was once ultra-nationalist and is now ultra-leftist. The Jewish cult of ‘Tikkun Olam’ as expressed by Avraham Burg’s extremist anti-Israel attitude also has an interesting pedigree; the false messiah Shabbatai Tzvi. The twin evils of these mutli-cultural heresies are not simply about strange minority opinions among Jews, they are also symbolic of the very same self-hating, world-loving ideologies found in the West.
Immoral Tourism and post-humanism
March 12th, 2008
Seth J. Frantzman
If Nazi Germany had won and still existed would Jews visit it as tourists? Would they hide their Stars of David under their shirts (or better yet, leave them at home), and deny their religion in order to see the ‘cultural’ sites of Germany and its beautiful castles and the Rhine. Sounds ridiculous. Jewish tourists in Nazi Germany? Jews would never do that. Jews boycotted Nazi Germany, didn’t they? Those were the Jews of the 1930s. Today’s modern, especially American, leftist wealthy culturally awakened progressive Jew wants to be a tourist everywhere. He yearns for the romance of Yemen or Iran or Syria. In fact he or she, more commonly it is she, brags about their love of Yemen or Syria. They extol the virtues of going. Some have even gone and they regale people with tales of how they had to get a new passport to obscure the Israeli stamps on their old one, or how they lied about the origins of their family or family name in order to pretend that Gutessman was a ‘German’ and not a ‘Jewish’ name. They brag about how they left behind their Israeli passport and traveled under their other citizenship to see the country that their Israeli cousins can’t travel too. They sweat with glee as they tell about their time studying Arabic in Yemen or their desert travels across Algeria.
Everything is romantic to the wealthy secular western Jewish traveler. Malaysia. Qatar. Even Sudan. There is no place that is off limits or deserves a boycott, except maybe Burma, which incidentally lets Jews and Israelis travel there (all the more reason to boycott it perhaps in the mind of the leftist Jew).
In the 1980s Jews were at the forefront of the boycott of South Africa. Jews wouldn’t dare travel to South Africa. They were ashamed to have friends who did. The Jewish reason for not going to South Africa was simple: Blacks were being denied their rights. Blacks were denied property. Blacks had been thrown off their land and denied their property and history. It was immoral to go.
What is most fascinating is that when it comes to countries that have murdered Jews, taken their property, expelled them, raped them, enslaved them and gassed them, that Jews have no problem traveling there. There was a generation of Jews who wouldn’t buy German cars and who would never travel to Germany and who abhorred hearing German. No more. The languages of choice for the modern leftist secular Jew are German and Arabic. For the yuppie Jew the car of choice is the BMW.
Why is tourism such an idol? Why is tourism above all things in life? Is the modern fetish, the singular most important and unique thing to our culture, the idea of tourism? Someone will deny their own brother in order to be a tourist. That is most fascinating. If a western secular Jew has a brother who is Israeli the non-Israeli brother will travel to a country where her own brother is not permitted to go, all in order to bow down to the god of tourism. Someone will deny their family and their heritage, all for the sake of tourism. They will bow down to the god of tourism and deny the existence of the god of their people in order to do so. They will learn to recite the prayers of others. They will do whatever is necessary in order to be a tourist.
Black people didn’t go to South Africa because they didn’t like the way South Africa treated blacks. Arabs and Muslims will not visit Israel because they don’t like the way Israel treats the Palestinians. They won’t buy Danish food because of some cartoons. Yet Jews will go to Iran despite the Holocaust cartoon contest Iran hosted. Even though Jews were expelled from Yemen they will gladly journey to Yemen. There is no line that a country can cross in terms of its treatment of Jews that will cause Jews not to go to that country. In Syria Jews are in a modern day ghetto and forbidden to leave the country. Yet Jews will go to Syria and admire the mosques and not speak to one Jew, lest someone suspect them of being Jewish.
It would be a strange world if Jews said they would never travel to countries where Israelis were not permitted to travel. It would be a strange world if Jews refused to travel to a country where they would be killed for wearing a kippah (skullcap). It would be a strange world if Jews would not travel to a country where they would be murdered for wearing a Star of David publicly. It would be a strange world where Jews would not travel to a country where Jews were not permitted.
The more a country hates Jews the more leftist-secular-Jews want to go there. If a country stones homosexuals and forbids women to show their hair one will find that many of the people who desire to go to that country are Jewish westerners. There are some Jews who will not go. Those Jews are called religious Jews. Sometimes they are called ‘Orthodox’ or Hasidim or ‘ultra-Orthodox’ or ‘Haredi’. Those are the Jews who don’t eat pork and wear black hats. They don’t go. We call them ‘religious extremists’. But perhaps we should call them ‘human rights activists’. The very fact that the religious Jews will not go to Syria or Yemen shows that they, inadvertently, are boycotting those hateful, racist countries who have never acknowledged their mistreatment of Jews. Those countries which do not even include their Jewish history in their text books. One will not find the religious Jews there.
The next time one meets a Jew who is packing their bags for Yemen or Iran or Saudi or Syria they should be asked “if black people were not allowed to go to that country would you still go?” The inevitable answer would be “no! I would never go to a racist country that doesn’t allow black people.” The curse of black people has been their skin color, which prevented them from being tourists in the 1950s American south or in South Africa in the 1980s. But that curse is also a blessing. It prevented blacks from putting tourism before their race, before their history and their own family. The Nazis tried to do the same thing with Jews. They forced them to wear Stars of David and they branded them with bar-codes. The problem is the Star of David can always be hidden away at a convenient time. Responsible Jews should live as if the Star of David is engrained on the skin, the way black skin is to a black person. If Jews lived that way and stopped visiting fascist-racist tyrannical and hateful countries like Iran, Syria and Yemen then Jews would be more responsible tourists.
The modern secular western Jew would have been a tourist in Nazi Germany. They would have told their friends, in the most high minded way, how “Germany’s government doesn’t represent its people…one shouldn’t blame all the people for the dictatorship….its racist to categorize and judge all the people based on the laws enacted by a minority… how can one deny the rich culture just because the modern regime is not up to standard.” They would have boarded Lufthansa and made sure to memorize ‘Deutschland, Deutschland Uber Alles.” It is, after all, so romantic. La La Illa Allah…
Those pesky Mexicans and their racism
March 12th, 2008
Seth J. Frantzman
As 72% of white voters voted for Hilary Clinton in the Mississippi Democratic primary and 90% of blacks voted for Obama we were all reminded of the real culprit making race an issue in the Democratic primaries: the Latino vote. That is the motif. We all know how the Latinos refuse to vote for Obama. Its not the first time the Latinos made the democratic party racist. In the California election in which Schwarzenegger beat Bustamante the Latino democratic nominee drove blacks away from the poles. Despite media coverage in that election that claimed “Bustamante busts a move” and accused Schwarzenegger of harassing girls when he was in his 20s, the Mexican nominee harmed the Democratic chances at the governorship by driving away the black vote, and some of the white vote too.
This is the problem with Mexicans. Thirty years ago there was no ‘Latino problem’ in America. Race politics was quite simple. In the American South the blacks and whites voted for opposite parties. Until the 1960s the Blacks voted Republican. Then the whites started voting Republican and the Blacks all became Democrats.
The trouble with Mexicans was illustrated b Bill Maher when he went to interview some about why they weren’t choosing Barak Obama as their candidate. They wouldn’t admit their racism so Maher had to bring it out by talking about boxing. While asking one overweight Mexican man why he cheered on Oscar De La Hoya rather than his black contended the Mexican dared to admit “you gotta go with our own.” So there it was. The Mexicans. The pesky Mexicans who had been pouring into America had brought their racism with them. They were causing all sorts of problems.
Its not just in electoral campaigns that Mexicans cause problems. Look what they have done to Affirmative Action and the U.S census. When it turned out that Mexicans were the largest minority group in many states, eclipsing blacks, the affirmative action pashas realized that Mexicans would soon demand to be admitted in larger numbers to the work force and jobs through affirmative action. Mexicans would now deserve all the freebies that blacks had been receiving. Liberals were unhappy. Mexicans were succeeding at a much faster pace than blacks. Despite bilingual education, designed to keep Mexicans speaking Spanish so they couldn’t compete with whites, the Mexicans were breaking out of their ghettos. So the liberal race theorists in America designed a way to end the Mexican problem once and for all. Mexicans were re-classified as ‘white’ and a new ‘ethnic’ definition was added to the race matrix in America. Now people could be ‘white-Hispanic’ or ‘black-Hispanic’. At one fell swoop Mexicans disappeared. There were no Latinos. There are only blacks and whites in America. America’s race pashas must have studied at the best race theory schools in Apartheid South Africa in order to come up with a way to re-classify Mexicans as ‘white’. But White race theorist leftists had done it before. They had been reclassifying people as white for a hundred years. Jews had become ‘white’. Italians had become ‘white’. Indians from India. Asians. Everyone was being pushed into whiteness to preserve the black minority in America. Because America has two races: whites and blacks (after Sept. 11 one should also add Muslims to that matrix).
Bill Maher was pressing the Mexicans to admit to their racism. “Just admit you, you don’t like him (Obama) because he’s black.” One wonders how many leftist wealthy whites who support Obama will admit that they support him Because he is black (when Geraldine Ferraro raised that point she was called a ‘racist’). But no matter. It’s the Mexicans who are racist. Pesky Mexicans vote for their own people. Pesky Mexicans are religious and believe in family values. Pesky Mexicans succeed to quickly. Pesky Mexicans work for less wages than unionized whites.
What are we thinking? About terrorism for instance.
March 10th, 2008
Seth J. Frantzman
A recent study b the Copenhagen Consensus supposedly showed conclusive evidence that, economically speaking, spending money to combat terrorism was always a waste. They claimed that the U.S had spent between $65 and $200 billion a year on fighting terror (the larger amount includes the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan) but that terror attacks only reduce GDP by around $17 billion a year. Thus it is a waste of money to spend anything over $17 billion on fighting terror, since the actual cost of terror is negligible.
This is a most Western way to look at war. It is the most ‘logical’ way to look at it. The British government’s of Stanley Baldwin and Chamberlain also preferred to look at war from an economic standpoint. The refused to increase spending on the British military until the late 1930s. The preferred ‘peace in our time’. They did everything to achieve it, lest the English economy be harmed b war. One must recall that Chamberlain’s appeasement came out of a liberal economic mindset that desired peace so that business could thrive.
While the ‘study’ may indeed show that the ‘cost’ of the London bombings or the Madrid bombings was only a small amount of money they seem to ignore two important facts. The human cost of terror is much greater than the economic cost. In America our constitution claims we have a right to ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’. Terrorism denies people that right. Fighting crime is usually more costly than the crime itself. A mugging may only cost the victim a hundred dollars in stolen cash. Having a policeman drive out to take down the report costs more. Does that mean we shouldn’t bother to try to stop muggings?
An article in the Economist reviews a book by Michael Burleigh and claims that “America’s notion of a ‘war on terror’, he rightly says is a nonsense. Terrorism is a tactic, not an entity; in the Second World War the allies didn’t declare war on the Blitzkrieg but on Germany.” That is true. But the entity behind terrorism today is called Islam. Leftists should be happy with the term ‘war on terror’ because it means we don’t have to tell the truth; the war on terror is a war on Islamism, just as the Second World War was a war on Nazism, and it is a war on Islam, just as the Second World War was a war on Germany.
Gideon Levy, the perennial sniveling extreme-leftist writer for Haaretz had to write an editorial about the massacre of 8 Jewish students at the Meraz Ha Rav Yeshiva in Jerusalem on March 6th. But he couldn’t condemn the murders outright. Instead he noted that “the killing at the yeshiva is heartrending. No one deserved it. The innocents in Gaza and the victims at Meraz Ha Rav in Jerusalem were all an unnecessary sacrifice…their families and those around them will probably adopt even more radical positions now, and so we will be led into another round of endless bloodshed.” This quote illustrates the notion of terrorism as always being part of a ‘cycle’. It always has ‘context’. There was one difference between the students at the yeshiva and the people in Gaza. The people in Gaza shoot rockets at civilians. The students at the yeshiva study the Bible. The families in Gaza are already radical.
Bernd Debusmann, a writer for the Herald Tribune wrote an article on March 8th entitled ‘Hypocrisy never makes for good foreign policy.’ He notes “the grievances that bin Laden laid out in precise detail, which were adopted by the followers he inspired. They were: the U.S presence in the Arabian peninsula; unqualified support for Israel; U.S support for states oppressing Muslims, especially China, India and Russia; U.S exploitation of Muslim oil; U.S support and financing of authoritarian Arab regimes. There is no reason to believe that the U.S is about to change the foreign policies that motivate Muslim extremists in a region…where man believe that the ‘war on terror’ is really a war on Islam…The [American presidential] candidates differ over when and how to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but none of them has given any indication of policies that would taken the air out of the arguments that Al Qaeda and lie-minded groups have used to attract recruits.’” This is the classic argument of the appeasement minded left. Their ‘solution’ to terrorism is to do whatever the terrorist wants. It’s a brilliant solution but it doesn’t work historically. Hitler only wanted a world free of Jews, Gypsys, Slavs and Blacks. Where were the liberals to tell us that it would have been better to simply change our policy and stop ‘offending’ Hitler. We could have ‘taken the air out of the arguments’ of Hitler b helping him build his gas chambers. We could have given Hawaii to the Japanese. What of the KKK? They only wanted segregation in the American South. We could have ‘taken the air out of the arguments’ of the KKK by keeping blacks out of schools and denying them the right to vote? Why is the leftist response to bulling thugs always to do whatever the thugs want?
This was not the historical message of the left. In the old days when attempts to register blacks to vote was met by terrorism or when abortion clinics were bombed the left always told us we had to stand strong in the face of intimidation. In the 1930s the leftists went to Spain to fight against fascism. What happened in the last 30 years? Why does the new intellectual leftist simply accept whatever the terrorist says at face value? Mr. Debusmann shows how ignorant he is by accepting these arguments. He claims that America supports China, Russia and India in its “oppressing” of Muslims. What is he talking about? America was always the ally of Pakistan against India. America’s greatest economic rival in the world is China, lest we forget that before 9/11 everyone was talking about ‘China rising’ and the ‘coming war with China’. America never supported Russia in Chechnya, on the contrary the U.S was at the forefront of condemning Russia’s treatment of Chechnya. What is Debusmann talking about when he condemns America for her “exploitation of Muslim oil.” What? Who is exploiting who? America pays through the nose for oil, making Islamist Arabs richer by the day and propping up the most backwards archaic Islamist regime in the region; Saudi Arabia. What of U.S “support for authoritarian Arab regimes.” Is Dubusmann suggesting that Islam would be more friendly if the U.S allied itself with the Muslim Brotherhood, Iran, Hamas and Hizbullah? America might as well have allied itself with Bin Laden. Perhaps Dubusmann forgets that the U.S tried that. In the 1980s the closest allies of the U.S were the Islamists in Afghanistan and Zia’s Pakistan, not to mentioned Saudi Arabia. By Debusmann’s logic the U.S should have supported Nazism because that would have meant less antagonism between Nazism and America and thus the Nazis would not have hated America and thus America could have joined the Nazis to conquer the world. That is the modern day liberal response: if you can’t beat them, join them.
Perhaps liberalism forgets that the history of America has always been built on bucking the trend. America was a republic when the Europeans were monarchies. America had no colonies when the Europeans were carving up the world. America was not seduced by the extremism of Communism or Nazism, the way the Europeans were. One suspects that Mr. Bernd Debusmann is a European. He would have preferred America had walked the European line. George Washington could have been the first American king. America could have joined in Imperialism and taken a few African colonies. America could have joined the European alliances and gone to war in 1914. America could have gone Nazi and rounded up and killed all its minorities. Then America could have repented and become Communist and turned all its workers into slaves. Then America could have become an ally of Islamism and helped it to take over the world and destroy ancient civilizations like China and India. One suspects that had America followed the course of Mr. Debusmann then there would have been no Herald Tribune for him to write in. There would be no place for his editorial. Mr. Debusmann would have been born in a Gulag and his parents would have perished in the American Holocaust. Mr. Debusmann would have been forcibly converted to Islam and he would know nothing outside the Koran.
Leftists need to be reminded again and again that just because people hate you doesn’t make them right. Just because people are willing to kill for their beliefs does not make their beliefs more correct. Just because people condemn you for something doesn’t mean they are correct. Our world too often equates the willingness of people to die for a cause with the justness of that cause. The world needs to be reminded that the Tibetans don’t blow themselves up. Yet their claim to statehood and the oppression of them is no less than the Muslims in Xinjiang province of China who Mr. Debusmann accuses America of conniving in the suppression of. I’ll take the Tibetans any day over the Islamists. If the world had more Tibetans it might have less terrorism and more bloodshed. Liberals and leftists need to work to free the silent resisters, like the Tibetans, those who don’t kill for their beliefs, and give less attention to those who murder civilians in their quest for ‘justice’. Perhaps if the world ignored the fake grievances of Muslims it would indeed tae the wind out of the sails of Islamism.
Two views: Meron Benvinisti Canaanism and Avraham Burg's Sabbatean ideology
Seth J. Frantzman
Sunday March 9th, 2008
An introduction to the political philosophy known as Canaanism posits that they "sought to create in Israel a new people, they mandated the dissociation of Israelis from Judaism and the history of Judaism. In their stead they placed the culture and history of the Ancient Near East, which they considered the true historical reference." In the 1940s a whole slew of Zionists became converted to this movement. Prominent poets, intellectuals and artists such as Yonatan Ratosh (Uriel Heilperin), Edya Horon, Yitzhak Danziger, Banjamin Tammuz, Amos Keynan, Aharon Amir and Uzzi Ornan were involved (Uzi Ornan and Yonatan Ratosh were brothers who both changed their names). Some of the intellectual detritus of this movement include Uri Avnery, the extreme leftist(he recently paid for an advertisement that screamed: “The boycott of Aljazeera [by the Israeli government] will harm the State of Israel, because it puts us in line with the worst oppressive regimes in the region and in the world”), who was a one time right wing Irgun member. Meron Benvenisti, one time deputy mayor of Jerusalem, and author of Son of the Cypresses is also an intellectual descendant. A.B. Yehushua, the famed Israeli writer, is as well.
According to Ron Kuzar the Canaanism movement was in fact originally right wing. It desired to make anew nation and was wrapped up in the 'blood and coil' antics of the 1930s. Since Jews were living all over the world it proposed the creation of a new Israeli Hebrew Canaanite nation, a re-birth of the ancient milieu that existed three thousand years ago in the land of Israel (for them the Land of Kedem). Kuzar notes that many of the Canaanists were members of right wing movements such as the Irgun and Lehi. However the creation o the Arab refugee problem and the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza after 1967 created severe problems n their belief system. Since they believed that ancient Israel was not 'Jewish' but rather part of the ancient Canaanite-Hebrew nation that existed in the Levant they rejected the idea that the Arabs and Jews should be separate or different. They harkened back to Ben-Gurion's early prognosis in 1950 that the Arabs would convert to Judaism and assimilate. However they wished that the Palestinians and Jews would all convert to Canaanism and become one people. The movement was atheistic, paganistic in the extreme and even adopted fake Canaanite rituals and used Ugarit.
In may of 2006 the Israeli writer A.B. Yehoshua journeyed to America to speak at a symposium and during his speech he declared that only Israel and not Judaism can save the Jewish people. Yehushua based his argument primarily on the fact that Hebrew was a unifying language for Jews in Israel and was thus a platform for the saving of the Jewish people. This harkened back to the Canaanist worship of Hebrew as a defining part of their new national identity. After all, Canaanism expressed itself primarily in poetry and Hebrew writing and its leaders were the strongest lovers of Hebrew and desired a Hebrew national revival. Yehushua argued that the Jewish religious identity had to be removed from the Jewish national identity, and in the national identity the Jews could only survive in Israel, and as a nation, they could call themselves whatever they wanted, Canaan, if they pleased. One commentator of Yehushua's speech noted that "Mr. Yehoshua believes there is a precedent for this solution in the First Temple period, when some “children of Israel” worshipped foreign gods and yet were considered part of the Jewish national entity.
This approach, it is important to stress, does not dismiss Jewish religion, but it does suggest that we will see a new kind of Jewish religion…On the other hand, Jewish nationalism in the State of Israel will attract members of other religions, and both Christians and Moslems will be fully integrated into the Jewish nation." In a critique of Yehushua's comments Union of Reform Judaism President Rabbi Eric Yoffie further noted that "But I do not believe that secular Judaism can be passed on to the next generation. And there is nothing in all of Jewish history to suggest that a Jewish community anywhere, including in the Land of Israel, can sustain itself without God and Torah. Torah-free civilizations have no staying power."
Meron Benvenisti's Canaanism is altogether more strange. He did his studies on the Crusaders and eventually came to link the activities of the modern Israeli state with those of the crusaders. He also connected Israeli treatment of the Palestinians with the British treatment of the Boers in the Boer War, perhaps ignoring that in that very savage war some 30,000 women and children had died. He also claimed that after disengagement Israel was responsible for creating 'Bantustans' on the Apartheid model in Israel. But he also became a passionate lover of the land of Israel, in its Palestinian-Canaanite form. He wrote a book describing the Sacred Landscape and 'buried history of the Holy Land since 1948' which spoke about the former Arab villages of the country. He became a passionate supporter of the bi-national solution. But in his book Son of the Cypresses he argued that it was only in the land that Israelis could find a connection to nationhood. Like Canaanism he believed strictly in the creation of a new national identity and he grafted on the ideas of Martin Buber, Judah Magnes (a reform Jewish rabbi) and the Brit Shalom movement onto it so that this new identity would be bi-national, composed of Jews and Arabs morphing into one country, perhaps ignoring he fact that there are 250 million Arabs and only 13 million Jews (It is perhaps ironic that when Jews have a state that many of their intellectuals desire that they should be amalgamated into a much larger nation and thus disappear, just as those same ideologues in the west argued for assimilation as a solution to the 'Jewish problem').
Canaanism was a failure. It was so right wing that it eventually became extreme-left wing and the practical outcome of its 'solution' would be the immediate disappearance of the Jewish people into an Arab morass. Canaanism would turn the Jews into the Copts, Berbers, Assyrians, Yazidis, Zaroastrians, Alewites, Mandaeans or Maronites. All of these people accepted forms of assimilation and binationalism and all of them have either disappeared or are on the verge of disappearing or being completely pushed aside.
Avrahahm Berg has wracked up a lot of 'formers' in his life. He is a former member of the Knesset. He is a former speaker of the Knesset. He is a former leader of the Labor party in Israel. He is a former president of the Jewish Agency. He is a former Israeli. He recently published a book entitled Defeating Hitler which he originally wanted to title Hitler Won in which he prophesized the destruction of Israel and made many other outlandish claims. He declared foremost that he was a Jew and that Zionism is the instrument that tries to make Jews into Israelis. He noted that he was first and foremost a human being. He noted in an interview that 'It can't work anymore. To define the State of Israel as a Jewish state is the key to its end. A Jewish state is explosive. It's dynamite" For Burg Israel's law of return was the "mirror image of Hitler" which must be ironic given the fact that he worked for an organization whose main goal was carrying out that law by bring Jews to Israel. Burg argues that the Jewish agency should help Arabs, who according to most Jewish philanthropists are the 'indigenous' people of Israel, Israel's own native-Americans. Burg noted that "Ahad Ha'am made the charge against Herzl that his whole Zionism had its source in anti-Semitism. He thought of something else, of Israel as a spiritual center - the Ahad Ha'am line has not died, and now its time has come. Our confrontational Zionism vis-a-vis the world is disastrous." He also noted that "Today that is not enough for me. In my situation today, I am beyond Israeli. Of the three identities that form me - human, Jewish and Israeli - I feel that the Israeli element deprives the other two." For Burg Israel is a brutish imperialistic, "Zionist ghetto." But Burg went further and declared that Israel was in essence a Zionist-Nazi state and that he had "discovered the layer of not everything being lost. And I discovered my father as a representative of German Jewry that was ahead of its time." For him the Jews had become the new Nazis: ""It is not an exact science, but I will describe to you some of the elements that go into the stew: a great sense of national insult; a feeling that the world has rejected us; unexplained losses in wars. And, as a result, the centrality of militarism in our identity. The place of reserve officers in society. The number of armed Israelis in the streets. Where is this swarm of armed people going? The expressions hurled publicly: 'Arabs out.'.. And I hear voices coming out of Sderot .... We will destroy and kill and expel. And there is a transferist discourse in the government (note here how the people of Sderot, the 17,000 victims of more than 7,000 rocket attacks are the ones accused of being Nazis, even though the community is composed of elderly Mizrahi and Russian Jews"
"It is not by chance that I make the comparison with Germany, because our feeling that we are obliged to live by the sword stems from Germany."
For Burg the EU is the Third temple. He describes it as "the European Union as a biblical utopia. I don't know how long it will hold together, but it is amazing. It is completely Jewish."
Burg's identity is that of the romantic Yekkee, the German Jew before the Holocaust. One interviewer noted when speaking to him that; 'You describe a thousand wonderful years of German Jewry. In large measure you view German Jewry as a model." Furthermore he argues that the only 'real' Jews are those in the Diaspora: "The tribes become a people outside the borders. The Torah is given outside the borders. As Israelis and Zionists, we ignored this completely. We rejected the Diaspora. But I maintain that just as there was something astonishing about German Jewry, in America, too, they also created the potential for something astonishing. They created a situation in which the goy can be my father and my mother and my son and my partner. The goy there is not hostile but embracing. And as a result, what emerges is a Jewish experience of integration, not separation. Not segregation."
"There is no important Jewish writing in Israel…The Israeli is a half-Jew…whole Jewish existence of two thousand years…I am a citizen of the world. This is my hierarchy of identities: citizen of the world, afterward Jew and only after that Israeli. I feel a weighty responsibility for the peace of the world…I am European.. In my eyes, Gandhi is as Jewish as there is. He embodies a very ancient Jewish approach. Like Yochanan ben Zakkai, who asked for Yavneh and its sages. Not Jerusalem, not the Temple, not sovereignty: Yavneh and its sages."(Interview with Ari Shavit, June 10th, 2007, Haaretz.)
We see in the words of Avraham Burg another side, another ideology, that exists among Jews. It is the ideology of the German-Jews, the anti-state citizen of the world European ideology. It is the ideology of Gandhi. It is the ideology of self hate. The ideology of the German-Jewish romanticism is quite deep in Israel. It began, of course, with the German Jewish refugees who poured into Palestine in the 1930s, fleeing Hitler. They used Palestine as a place of refuge. But they were self serving. Their intellectual ancestors were not so different in their opportunism. The ancestor of some of the intellectuals of German Jewry was Shabbatai Tzvi, the false messiah.
Shabbatai Tzvi was born in 1626 in Smyrna, in modern day Turkey. He was influenced by millenarian ideas that were swirling about at the time. In his twenties he revealed himself to some people as the Messiah. He wandered around the Ottoman world from Smyrna to Salonika, visiting with Ashkenazim and Sephardim. Shabbatai Tzvi became ingratiated with Nathan of Gaza, another believer in the coming end of days. His popularity soured in the rest of Europe and Jews in Amsterdam and Hamburg took up his banner. He was eventually imprisoned by the Ottomans in 1666 and he converted to Islam. His followers also converted and many of them came to live in Salonika where they became a sort of Muslim Morrano group known as Donmeh (The secularizing Turk known as Ataturk was rumored to be among their descendants). In Northern Europe where the Ashkenazim lived his ideas had a different affect. The affects of the disillusion spread far and wide and may have influenced the early Hasidic movement in the 18th century. He even had a link to Spinoza through the likes of Benjamin Musaphia and Heinrich Oldenburg. Some of those who came to believe in him became known as Sabbateans and have been linked to Reform Judaism by Gershom Scholem who claimed they may have been among its founders.
But if the Sabbateans desired to assimilate to Europe they also came to believe that Tikkun Olam or 'to heal the world' was a central tenant of Judaism. We see that this obsession with 'healing the world' and the desire to take it on one's shoulders is present in the ideology of Avraham Burg. Burg is thus a direct intellectual descendant of Shabbatai Tzvi.
When one examines the two movements together one can see that desire by Tzvi's followers to integrate into the Islamic milieu is found among the Canaanists while the obsession with Tikkun Olam and Europe is found among Burg and his ilk such as Amos Elon and the German-Jewish cult of Yekkee romantics who claim that German Jewry represented a utopia, a high point of Western civilization alongside Weimer Germany and its weak and pathetic political institutions.
What is most interesting is that whereas Burg sees the ideal Jew as the Diaspora Jew, fully committed to being a 'citizen of the world' and he sees the fulfillment of Judaism only outside Israel, Canaanism desires to be rid of Judaism and sees the fulfillment of the Jewish nation only in Israel with the abandonment of Judaism. The two are not mutually exclusive. Judaism can exist fully outside Israel while in Israel a new Hebrew-Canaanite nation is being born. The Yekkes can have their cake and eat it too. They can worship Tikkun Olam while at the same time tearing down the institutions of the state. These are fascinating ideologies and they say much about the world today. Canaanism is the Jewish version of multi-cultural post-modernism. It argues for the creation of new nations not based on those of old, and it is both pagan and interested in the melting pot of diversity. It takes its model from America and claims that American literature as a genre is like Hebrew literature, it is the genuine output of a new nation. The Burgists and their Tikkun Olam represent the other side of the mutli-cultural post-human society. They represent the worship of the other and the desire to only learn about others and the belief that perfection is always in the 'utopia' of the other. Thus, within Judaism, is the very same ideological pulling and conflict one finds in the west, a tugging on both ends that seeks to undermine and destroy both religion and nation.
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
Terra Incognita 25 terrorism, white women, NGOs
Terra Incognita
Issue 25
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
March 9th, 2008
1) The real life of a terrorist: The terrorist who killed 8 people in Jerusalem this wee came from a middle class family. He received his welfare and his jobs, just as his family did, from Jewish Israelis. So what ‘caused’ him to become a terrorist? He had no checkpoints to go through. What does his life say about the media, Islam and Arab society and the way they fan the flames of terror?
2) The path of the white woman: becoming the other: Two recent memoirs by western women have turned out to be frauds. One pretended she was a Jewish Holocaust survivor and the other pretended she was half Native American and the member of a gang. What does this say about the yearning of western women to become the other?
3) The NGO civilization: Further developing the theme of the New International Class we must examine one of the main cultic centers of our civilization: the NGO. A thousand years from now when Archeologists and Anthropologists learn about us the will learn that our civilization was the NGO civilization and that the idea of the NGO so consumed us that it eventually strangled us to death and we produced nothing but more and more charitable organizations.
The real life of a terrorist
Seth J. Frantzman
March 9th, 2008
After the Jerusalem terror attack of March 6th we are once again given an insight into the life of the terrorist. He was not a Palestinian refugee and nor did he come from a refugee camp. He came from a large home in Jebel Mukabar, an Arab suburb of Jerusalem that sits near the U.N headquarters. After the 1967 war when East Jerusalem was annexed to Israel the residents of this neighborhood received Israeli I.D and were thus granted the rights of Israelis. They took the rights but did not take the responsibilities. They obviously never served in the Israeli army, didn't pay taxes or ever identify with their new country.
Ala Abu Dhaim's family was middle class. His father, Hisham, worked as an engineer for the Jerusalem Municipality. He worked with Jews at the municipality and received a large paycheck from Israel every month. Abu Dhaim was 25. He may have attended coexistence programs like Seeds of Peace as a teenager. He certainly received U.N aid and his schooling and his religious studies were all paid for by western charities. When he wanted to learn the history of the Palestinian people he merely had to open his school textbooks which were paid for by western aid. When he wanted to attend a philharmonic or listen to chamber music the American consulate in Jerusalem was there, hosting free events for Arabs. Abu Dhaim took a job driving for a well known Jerusalem Yeshiva named Merkaz ha Rav. He received his paycheck every month from this Jewish religious institution. Everyday no doubt he coexisted with the Jews that he worked for. As he went home on an Israeli bus he performed the time honored tradition of all Arabs who ride buses in Jerusalem: he listened to his Arab music from a cell phone without ear phones, making sure that everyone else on the bus had to listen to it. This was his way of asserting himself. If he had to work for the Jews all day then they would have to listen to his music on their ride home.
He arranged to be married to a girl much younger than him ho was a virgin. Abu Dhaim was not a virgin. He had been with a number of foreign western women, the kind who think Arabs are 'romantic'. Not long before his wedding he was watching TV. He could have been watching Al-Jazeera or the BBC. Both of them would have showed him the same images from the week of March 1st. They would have talked about the 'war crimes' in the Gaza strip. They would have shown the ubiquitous crying Arab children and women. They would have shown the mourners. They would have conveyed the same message: Israel has killed 120 people, most of whome are children, in the Gaza strip. He would have taken in the images. He would have gone to a protest rally by Damascus gate. Here he would have listened to hate speeches given by Arab leaders from Israel and the Palestinian territories. He would have made arrangements to get a rifle. At 3pm he would have made his way to West Jerusalem where the Jews live. His Israeli I.D card made his travel easier. He would have returned to the Yeshiva where he had worked. He knew there was no security guard. He would have pulled the rifle from the bag in which he had concealed it and he would have started shooting. In his mind he was getting revenge. He was also becoming a martyr by defending the Palestinian Muslim people. Hamas and Islamic Jihad, his favored terror groups, would have provided him with some of his ideology. However primarily his ideology was formed by watching the BBC and CNN and Al-Jazeera. They had informed him about the 'numerous child deaths' in Gaza. He would have heard how the U.N the day before had claimed "Gaza's situation is the worst since 1967 with 80% of the people living below the poverty line and similar percentages unemployed…" He would have felt no compassion as he shot down the Jews. He was using collective punishment against them. The Jews he was shooting were 15 and 16 year olds mostly. But Abu Dhaim knew he didn't stand a chance against the Israeli army. He had to kill civilians because they were an easy target that does not fight back. In his mind all Jews deserved punishment for what had been done in Gaza. If he had been watching Israeli TV the day before he could have caught a glimpse of a protest rally in the Israeli-Arab town of Umm Al Fahm in which Israeli-Arab members of parliament from all the Arab political parties in Israel condemned Israel and called her actions those of a Zionazi. He surely would have read Al-Quds daily and learned how Mahmud Abbas had accused Israel of engaging in "the real Holocaust" in Gaza.
After Abu Dhaim had killed 8 students the BBC would describe his act as an 'infiltration' and an 'attack on the spiritual center of Zionism'. The press learned quickly that Merkaz Ha Rav Yeshiva was a religious-nationalist Yeshiva at which the sons of settlers learned Torah. The press would indicate that the settlers who attended Merkaz Ha Rav deserved what they got in some ways. The BBC would claim that many of those who studied at Merkaz Ha Rav 'seminary' were soldiers or were destined to serve as soldiers. Thus killing them was not terrorism or a war crime or collective punishment, it was merely self-defense and the action of a 'militant insurgent'.
Soon after Abu Dhaim's family heard of his death they declared him a 'martyr' and erected a mourning tent. Arabs from all over Jerusalem came to pay their respects. All the Palestinian terror groups praised his actions. In Gaza the people celebrated and Hamas distributed candy to the children to mark the successful 'revenge' attack (We are always reminded b the media and leftists that Hamas is the legitimate elected government and that it is ‘hypocrisy’ to boycott the Palestinian Hamas leadership. But just because people are elected doesn’t mean the should be respected and talked to. Europeans boycotted Jorg Haider’s Austrian government because it was seen as racist. No one condemned that). Immediately the press made sure to emphasize that the 'real' victims of Abu Dhaim's attack were the Arabs. One article declared "Jerusalem Arabs fear Israeli retaliation." The BBC carried a headline entitled "Ripple Effect: Fallout from Jerusalem Seminary Attack." In another article a picture of a smiling Ala Abu Dhaim accompanied an article that described the Yeshiva as a "settler stronghold…The BBC's Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen says that the school was no ordinary seminary. It was the ideological cradle of the settler movement in the West Bank, which could be the reason it was targeted. Many of its students are on special courses that combine religious study with service in combat units in the Israeli army. " The BBC made sure to downplay the attack, noting that "Assuming that the attacker was not just an enraged individual…The attack on the Yeshiva is a grim development in the litany of violence. " The BBC's main concern was that "Anyone counting on progress on the peace front this year looks to be betting against the prevailing trend. " In an article by Jonathan Marcus the BBC made sure to once again remind readers that the victims deserved what they got: "The Merkaz Herav Yeshiva - a Jewish religious seminary - is the place from where the religious-inspired Jewish settlement movement in the West Bank sprang." No where did the BBC mention that the victims were mostly teenagers, which are referred to as 'children' by the BBC when they Palestinians who die at the hands of Israelis. But there was no BBC headline reading "8 children die in Palestinian attack on Jewish seminary". Jews are never 'children'.
Hamas made sure to praise the attack: ""This is a normal response to all the Israel occupation, commission and aggression, and they [have] committed massacres inside the Gaza and West Bank - about 128 [people were] killed, 30 of them children and infants."
In East Jerusalem the Arabs were once again victims. Hisham Shkirat of Jebel Mukaber, after joining the Abu Dhaim family in mourning, noted that "this attack has caused hue damage to the Arabs in Jerusalem." Majdi Shweiki, an Arab teacher from Silwan, noted that "I hope Israel does not resort to collective punishment following this attack." The Mukhtar, or village elder, of Jebel Mukaber noted that ” Most of the young men here work in Israel…Some of them have already been told not to return to work and this is very worrying. We hope that Israelis will refrain from collective punishment." Shweiki excused the attack by noting that "Abdu Dhaim was affected by the things he watched on TV." An Arab Lawyer from Beit Hanina noted that Israel might revoke the IDs of Arabs in East Jerusalem and that this would have "serious repercussions" and that those Arabs who might then lose their 'right' Israeli national insurance, free health care and education would become radicalized. "when you deny people their rights, they will resort to violence."
In Jebel Mukaber people remembered Ala as a private quiet person. He was "very religious". Abu Dhaim's family congratulated their dead relative saying "We have nothing to apologize for…Ala did what he did because of the Israeli atrocities against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. This was a heroic operation that was carried out against radical Jews, some of them members of the Israeli security forces."
There is much to learn from the story of Ala Abu Dhaim. What is most fascinating is to see that all of the common conceptions about terror are completely wrong. Dhaim was not a victim. He was not a refugee. He was not impoverished or out of work. He was not caught up in the 'cycle' of violence in the sense that none of his family members had died at the hands of Israel. This was a man who benefited from Israel. He received his free education and his welfare from Israel. He received his job from Jews. So did his father.
The cause of Abu Dhaim's hatred and his acts was not just his religion. The spark that set him off was the media. It was the BBC. It was also the U.N and its report about Gaza. It was the Jewish human rights organization B'Tselem that had announced that half the casualties in Gaza were 'children' (without any proof B'Tselem made this declaration two days before Abu Dhaim's massacre. A full list of the dead Arabs in Gaza has never been released, just as a list of the '1,000' Lebanese killed in the second Lebanon war was never made public). The west had a role in Abu Dhaim's decision. So did the Arab Members of Knesset in Israel who had accused Israel of 'acts of genocide' in Gaza. Mahmud Abbas and Al Quds daily had a role to play. So did Al-Jazeera.
Noam Chomsky speaks about how the media 'manufactures consent'. In the case of Abu Dhaim the media, particularly the BBC, manufactured a terrorist. The media always claims that terrorists 'use' the media in order to draw attention to their cause. But in fact it is the media that creates terrorism by drawing too much attention to certain causes.
The story of Abu Dhaim not only sheds light on the manufacturing of terrorism by the media and the anti-democratic incitement of Arab politicians, it also shows the way in which terrorism 'works'. The main 'victims' of Abu Dhaim's attack, according to the media, were not the 8 people he killed, but rather the 220,000 Arabs of East Jerusalem who now may suffer 'collective punishment.' One must note that the media never used the word 'collective punishment' in reference to the acts of the 'insurgent' and 'infiltrator' Abu Dhaim. In fact the media implicitly accepted Abu Dhaim's terrorist act as legitimate by connecting the students at Merkaz ha Rav with the settler movement. The media excused the collective punishment of them.
Furthermore what is interesting is to see how this story sheds light on how Arabs and Muslims think. An Arab and a Muslim never has sympathy for the victims of a terrorist attack. In fact when a Muslim Arab terrorist kills people it is the Arab Muslim who then becomes the 'real' victim. This was the case after 9/11. In Tucson Arizona at the University of Arizona the president of the University, Peter Likins, didn't mourn for the 3,000 Americans, he spent Sept. 12th begging the Arab students not to be afraid and begging them not to return to their home countries. He wrote an editorial in the Daily Wildcat, the campus newspaper, on Sept. 13th in which he praised all the Arab Muslim students as 'jewels' of the campus and he joined anti-racism rallies by the Muslim Students association and spoke at the Pakistani students association. Thus the 'real' victims of 9/11 were Muslims, not Americans, because after 9/11 everyone was afraid that Islam would be 'misinterpreted' or that Muslims would face discrimination and 'racism'. This is why Islamophobia is the new cause celebre among leftists. Muslims have replaced Blacks, gays and Mexicans as the new victim.
After Timothy McVeigh blew up the Oklahoma Federal Building people were not worried that backwoods right wing white militia types would be discriminated again. No one claimed that the Michigan Militia was the 'real' victim of the Oklahoma bombing. But when it comes to Arabs the world is always upside down. Thus the village elders of Jebel Mukaber were not concerned that 8 Jews were dead but rather that their village would suffer. Yet they didn't ask the family of Abu Dhaim to remove the mourning tent to the 'martyr (Shahid)' from their house. Even the Jordanian government had good enough sense to do that. Jordan ordered the destruction of any tents set up for mourning Abu Dhaim in Jordan. It turns out Dhaim had some relatives there and they wanted to mourn and fly Hamas flags. Jordan put a stop to that. In Israel the security minister Avi Dichter noted that it would be improper for Israel to make the mourning and celebrations illegal, because Israel had not made it illegal for Jews to mourn Baruch Goldstein, the Jew who killed 29 Arabs in a mosque in Hebron in the 1990s. But perhaps the actions of Baruch Goldstein shed light on this. After his act almost all Jews felt sorry for the Arab victims. Jews didn't claim that the 'real' victims were Jews because now Jews might suffer 'collective punishment' for the acts of Goldstein.
The most interesting reaction to the crime of Abu Dhaim was the East Jerusalem Arabs who immediately forecasted the idea that Israel would revoke their citizenship. They immediately made veiled threats, claiming that their would be 'repercussions'. They sounded the horn of John Dugard when they noted the depriving them of their 'right' to an Israeli I.D would force them to become terrorists. There is one problem with their argument. Abu Dhaim was deprived of nothing. He was a terrorist. Revoking I.Ds and putting people under siege doesn't make them terrorists. They are already terrorists. Revoking their I.Ds and putting them under siege may make them angry and frustrated terrorists, but it doesn't make them terrorists. Democracy, jobs, welfare and the media may make people terrorists.
The path of the white woman: becoming the other
Seth J. Frantzman
March 6th, 2008
In the past two weeks two well known books that were poised to be best sellers have been yanked from the shelves and exposed as frauds. The first was by Misha Defonseca and was titled Misha: Memoir of the Holocaust Years. It turns out her real name was Monique De Wael and that her parents had indeed been killed by the Nazis, but that she was not Jewish nor had she lived with wolves, been in the Warsaw Ghetto or killed a Nazi. Upon coming forward she claimed that she "always felt Jewish" and that she wanted to tell the stories of what Jews had faced in the Holocaust.
But then a week later in March of 2008 Margaret B. Jones admitted that her memoir, Love and Consequences about growing up with gangs in South-central L.A was a fraud. It turns out her real name was Margaret Seltzer of Sherman Oaks and that rather than being 'half white, half native-American' she was all white and she had attended an elite prep school rather than living on the street s at 13 and being given her first gun at 14 and running with the Bloods gang. When Seltzer admitted her tale was false she claimed that she was only writing the book as an 'activist' and that since she had worked as a social worker with urban blacks she feel their stories needed to be told and that she was the vehicle to tell them. She claimed 'I just felt there was good I could do and that there was no other way that someone would listen to it."
Although these two women appear to share little in common; they are of different generations, the fact is that they represent a very real trend among western whites and their stories are symbolic of the cultural oblivion that whites in the west find themselves.
It is common for white women, and to a lesser extent men, to feel a yearning void in themselves and to fill it through the mock adoption of the other. Whether it is wearing a headscarf in Morocco or hanging a photo of Malcolm X on the wall the path and response is the same.
Adopting the culture of the other is not unique to the last fifty years. Sir Richard Burton donned Muslim dress and visited Mecca. Lawrence of Arabia and John Bagot Glubb both were enamored with the Arabs and their culture. Many of the American 'mountain men' went native in the American west and many of them intermarried with native-Americans. But the modern phenomenon is different. The logic behind these women's decision was not adventure and glory as it was with Lawrence or Burton and neither is it out of necessity as it was with the mountain men.
Fraud is not unique to the last twenty years either. For as long as there has been writing there have been tales of people pretending to be others. Assuming the personalities, habits, cultures, families and histories of other people is not unique. But in most cases those committing this fraud, even if their conversion was sincere, did so out of necessity or out of greed and the desire for advancement. Thus the three 'false Dmitriys' who appeared in Russia in the first years of the seventeenth century, one of which actually became Tsar for a year, all were impersonating the son of Ivan the terrible who had disappeared in 1591. They did so not in order to become the other or because they were necessarily self-loathing towards their own culture, but rather because they wished to assume power and the impersonation gave them a path. Tales such as the Prince and the Pauper and Trading Places have hallmarks of this in them, even if the roles are reversed.
After the revolutions of the 1960s the white people of the west became enamored with the poor. This process began in the late 19th century with the first communistic and socialist clubs where western intellectuals sat around and glamorized the 'workers'. All the talk of a 'dictatorship of the proletariat' was carried on by people who were decidedly bourgeoisie in their background. From Lenin to Castro they were all sons of school teachers, lawyers or other members of the middling and upper classes. Some were even nobility. The romance of the working man and his building muscles can be found even in the writings of the right, such as Ayn Rand's portrayal of Howard Roark, the patrician architect who takes up working with his hands and smashing stones when his ideals are not met. In Atlas Shrugged she expands the motif to include an entire village of former tycoons who are now all happily involved in their genuine capitalist pursuits, even if that means they must each work the land and sell things for a pittance, just so long as there is no governmental intervention. The Nazistic motif of the 'authentic' man who is in touch with his blood and soil is a further digressment of this theme.
But as the western world became enamored with the 'simple downtrodden wretched' person it began to lose touch with its own soul and heritage. In a quest for 'genuine' and 'authentic' experiences' the westerner came to believe, in the 1970s, that those experiences could only be found among the other. Thus the white woman abhors 'poor white trash' but romanticizes the blacks and Mexicans of the 'ghetto'. The legions of words employed to denigrate poor whites is quite astounding: hicks, red-necks, hay-seeds, white trash, hillbilly, bumpkin, yokel, boor and corn-fed to name a few. Thus the genuine nature of all the poor lost its romance in the 1970s and was replaced by a more specific romance that focused on certain groups of poverty stricken 'authentic' people who became known as 'the other'.
But what encourages people to actually become the other? What encourages someone to work for three years on a memoir that tells the story of a different life than their own. What encourages someone who has an obvious writing ability to create a fictionalized memoir when they could have created a non-fiction biography of a real person. The two themes of these white women were that they both wanted to expose the suffering of the other group and that they felt they had identified with this group to the extent that only they could communicate it through an extensive lie.
The phenomenon is fascinating.
The NGO civilization
Seth J. Frantzman
March 5th, 2008
“I trusted white men.” This was the statement made by an orphan who had been at an orphanage in Jari in northeastern Ethiopia run by the a Swiss NGO Terre Des Hommes. But Terre Des Hommes provided more than just care for the orphans. It also provided sexual abuse. David Christie, a well paid SUV driving white man from Europe, raped and abused the children. The NGO covered up the abuse. When Jill and Gary Campbell, two British teachers at the orphanage, dared to complain the media they were sued by the NGO and now face a six month prison sentence for defamation. According to another wealthy white man employed by the NGO named Colin Tucker, “we asked them to stop defaming us and they said no. Then the court asked them to stop defaming us and they said no again.” Christie changed his name to David Allen and went to work for another NGO named Acbar in Pakistan and then showed up in Zambia with more European NGO money to open another school for children so he could rape them. The British courts refused to prosecute him, claiming his crimes had taken place too long ago in 1997. The Ethiopian government dared to confront the NGO and put Mr. Christie on trial and sentenced him to nine years hard labour. Meanwhile the Swiss NGO’s Mr. Tucker noted that the “foundations” primary goal was the “rehabilitation of the children” and was asking for money from donors to help the NGO care for the victims of Mr. Christie.
We have come to think of the existence of NGOs as simply part of our world but in fact they are indicative of our civilization. People like Mr. Tucker are the essence of our modern ‘progressive’ way of life. They are born into wealthy European families. They drive SUVs or BMWs. They live their entire life without every using their hands to do work. They live off either government money or the money of donors. They sue and have put in prison anyone who tries to expose their crimes. They employ criminals, kidnap children and then raise money to help the victims of their own crimes.
Every NGO is involved in these types of activities. The French organization known as Zoe’s Ark kidnapped ‘orphans’ in order to send them to Europe. But when the native country tries to bring the white employees of these NGOs to justice they are suddenly pressured by the European governments, usually former colonial, powers to release the NGO workers.
This is the hallmark of our civilization. It is the relic that will be left behind. When archeologists examine what was unique about our civilization they will remark about the existence of the NGO culture. They will note its origins in old charitable societies of the 19th century. They will note how those organizations, like the Red Cross, expanded beyond their mandates to become virtual governments. They will learn about how there came a point in European history where every white person was employed by an NGO and every white person considered it their duty to ‘save’ Africa, so long as they got a large salary and an SUV.
Our culture’s primary interest is charity. Our entire life is made up of donors and charities and philanthropy and NGOs. In Europe it is all that exists. There are an army of millions of Europeans roaming the globe who work for these NGOs. They fill up all the five star hotels in Africa. They all profess themselves experts on this such as irrigation and farming, having never set foot in a field, having never dug a well or hoed a field.
The latest fad of the NGO civilization is forcing Africans to farm using ‘organic methods’. Robert Paarlberg, author of Starved for Science: How Biotechnology is being kept out of Africa, and a professor at Wellesley college notes that his students are involved with NGOs whose sole goal is to make it so African foodstuffs cannot be exported to Europe and America unless the Africans use organically certified methods. In order for them to be ‘certified’ a white man must go and check up on them. He notes that Europeans didn’t pull themselves out of poverty through the type of farming now being forced upon Africa by the BMW driving environmentalists of the West. He also notes that the simple African farmer in the bush is living an purely organic life, one that no westerner would ever stoop to and one that doesn’t need certification.
Gregg Mills, a Johannesburg based writer, has noted in his November 2nd, 2007 essay ‘The new imperialists’ how NGO workers in Kigali in Rwanda bet on “which NGO landcruiser will be the next to pull into the parking lot.” Graham Hancock in Lords of Poverty: the Power, prestige and corruption of International Aid goes one further in his condemnation of the evils of the NGOs in Africa.
A recent letter to the editor in the Herald Tribune by Kathleen Cravero, the assistant secretary general of UNDP, noted that Security Council resolution 1325 had condemned rape. She claimed that “the UN system in the Congo and East Timor has made progress against all odds.” It is interesting that those same UN workers in the Congo are the ones who have been charged numerous times with raping women and trading food aid for sexual favors. When the Congo dared to try and put the UN workers on trial the UN transferred them out of the country and under UN law all UN workers must be prosecuted for their crimes in their home countries. Needless to say, the UN workers were never put on trial, just as Mr. Christie was not brought to justice in England. In Kosovo the KFOR troops, EU workers, Nato personnel and UN workers transformed the nearby towns in Macedonia into the sexual slavery capital of Europe and Kosovo became the trafficking in women capital of Europe. Undercover documentaries of sex slavery in Macedonia showed that almost all the women, who were mostly teenage Moldovans and Ukrainians, had been forcibly raped by international aid workers who frequented the brothels. As part of their ‘seasoning’ the girls were sold at open slave auctions and forced to link toilets clean. All of it courtesy of funding by the UN and various NGOs. None of the NGO workers, all wealthy Europeans, were ever put on trial. The UN’s security council resolution against rape should have simply condemned the UN for its role in mass rape in the world which seems to follow every place the UN has a presence.
The NGO civilization is a passing phenomenon. How long can a culture survive in which its primary interest is the misery of others and sucking the blood, in the form of money, from the wealthiest members of its own society. How long can a society survive when few if any of its sons and daughters want to grow up and work in industry or agriculture, but instead want to drive SUVs in Africa and hope for the chance to go on a sex tour of Djibuti? We already see the result. Europeans are now paying to have surrogate Indian women conceive their children. The potential mother is chosen online and the order form is processed for as much as $25,000 and the a baby is delivered to the European 9 months later. A photo of the Indian mother shows them, their eyes downcast, with surgical masks over their faces. They look semi-Islamic, all covered up in the hospital garb. The look in their eyes can only remind the viewer of the downcast eyes of Muslim women in their veils or of Moldovan prostitutes in Kosovo. And what is the difference. It is all part of the European worldview: the Muslim woman, the prostitute in the window in Amsterdam and the Indian woman giving birth to baby-to-order.
The NGO civilization will die. It will die out soon. The ‘progress’ that Europe touts itself as having, its clean air and organic food, the bullying nature of the EU which has destroyed local traditions and crushed local foods, such as those special cheeses that are aged in the ground in Italy, or the Rumanian custom of slaughtering pigs on the holidays. He only thing the world can do to save itself from the menacing shackles of the NGO is to make it illegal for Europeans to travel to their countries. If Africa was off limits to Europeans the SUVs and the arrogant English ‘volunteers’ like David Christie would disappear. Rape and child molestation might not disappear. But the existence of the European and his NGO, his ridiculous lifestyle of living off the blood of others and feasting of the misery of others, would dry up. The only way to save Europe from itself is to ban the travel of Europeans in the world. Tourism, the most western of inventions, should also be banned, lest it entice people to think they need to ‘save’ the poor children they come across. Their should be a hiatus on the legality of travel for Europeans. They should be forced to remain in Europe. Their is plenty to tour there. The immigration of people from Africa and elsewhere to Europe can also be curtailed. It will be a good trade-off. No more poor wretched welfare loving immigrants for Europe and no more misery loving Europeans for Africa. What a trade. Let the wretched stay in Africa and let the wretched lovers stay in Europe. Let the Africans eat their organic food that they have grown naturally for thousands of years without certification and let the Europeans eat their fake organic food that is certified but that comes from factory farms.
Issue 25
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
March 9th, 2008
1) The real life of a terrorist: The terrorist who killed 8 people in Jerusalem this wee came from a middle class family. He received his welfare and his jobs, just as his family did, from Jewish Israelis. So what ‘caused’ him to become a terrorist? He had no checkpoints to go through. What does his life say about the media, Islam and Arab society and the way they fan the flames of terror?
2) The path of the white woman: becoming the other: Two recent memoirs by western women have turned out to be frauds. One pretended she was a Jewish Holocaust survivor and the other pretended she was half Native American and the member of a gang. What does this say about the yearning of western women to become the other?
3) The NGO civilization: Further developing the theme of the New International Class we must examine one of the main cultic centers of our civilization: the NGO. A thousand years from now when Archeologists and Anthropologists learn about us the will learn that our civilization was the NGO civilization and that the idea of the NGO so consumed us that it eventually strangled us to death and we produced nothing but more and more charitable organizations.
The real life of a terrorist
Seth J. Frantzman
March 9th, 2008
After the Jerusalem terror attack of March 6th we are once again given an insight into the life of the terrorist. He was not a Palestinian refugee and nor did he come from a refugee camp. He came from a large home in Jebel Mukabar, an Arab suburb of Jerusalem that sits near the U.N headquarters. After the 1967 war when East Jerusalem was annexed to Israel the residents of this neighborhood received Israeli I.D and were thus granted the rights of Israelis. They took the rights but did not take the responsibilities. They obviously never served in the Israeli army, didn't pay taxes or ever identify with their new country.
Ala Abu Dhaim's family was middle class. His father, Hisham, worked as an engineer for the Jerusalem Municipality. He worked with Jews at the municipality and received a large paycheck from Israel every month. Abu Dhaim was 25. He may have attended coexistence programs like Seeds of Peace as a teenager. He certainly received U.N aid and his schooling and his religious studies were all paid for by western charities. When he wanted to learn the history of the Palestinian people he merely had to open his school textbooks which were paid for by western aid. When he wanted to attend a philharmonic or listen to chamber music the American consulate in Jerusalem was there, hosting free events for Arabs. Abu Dhaim took a job driving for a well known Jerusalem Yeshiva named Merkaz ha Rav. He received his paycheck every month from this Jewish religious institution. Everyday no doubt he coexisted with the Jews that he worked for. As he went home on an Israeli bus he performed the time honored tradition of all Arabs who ride buses in Jerusalem: he listened to his Arab music from a cell phone without ear phones, making sure that everyone else on the bus had to listen to it. This was his way of asserting himself. If he had to work for the Jews all day then they would have to listen to his music on their ride home.
He arranged to be married to a girl much younger than him ho was a virgin. Abu Dhaim was not a virgin. He had been with a number of foreign western women, the kind who think Arabs are 'romantic'. Not long before his wedding he was watching TV. He could have been watching Al-Jazeera or the BBC. Both of them would have showed him the same images from the week of March 1st. They would have talked about the 'war crimes' in the Gaza strip. They would have shown the ubiquitous crying Arab children and women. They would have shown the mourners. They would have conveyed the same message: Israel has killed 120 people, most of whome are children, in the Gaza strip. He would have taken in the images. He would have gone to a protest rally by Damascus gate. Here he would have listened to hate speeches given by Arab leaders from Israel and the Palestinian territories. He would have made arrangements to get a rifle. At 3pm he would have made his way to West Jerusalem where the Jews live. His Israeli I.D card made his travel easier. He would have returned to the Yeshiva where he had worked. He knew there was no security guard. He would have pulled the rifle from the bag in which he had concealed it and he would have started shooting. In his mind he was getting revenge. He was also becoming a martyr by defending the Palestinian Muslim people. Hamas and Islamic Jihad, his favored terror groups, would have provided him with some of his ideology. However primarily his ideology was formed by watching the BBC and CNN and Al-Jazeera. They had informed him about the 'numerous child deaths' in Gaza. He would have heard how the U.N the day before had claimed "Gaza's situation is the worst since 1967 with 80% of the people living below the poverty line and similar percentages unemployed…" He would have felt no compassion as he shot down the Jews. He was using collective punishment against them. The Jews he was shooting were 15 and 16 year olds mostly. But Abu Dhaim knew he didn't stand a chance against the Israeli army. He had to kill civilians because they were an easy target that does not fight back. In his mind all Jews deserved punishment for what had been done in Gaza. If he had been watching Israeli TV the day before he could have caught a glimpse of a protest rally in the Israeli-Arab town of Umm Al Fahm in which Israeli-Arab members of parliament from all the Arab political parties in Israel condemned Israel and called her actions those of a Zionazi. He surely would have read Al-Quds daily and learned how Mahmud Abbas had accused Israel of engaging in "the real Holocaust" in Gaza.
After Abu Dhaim had killed 8 students the BBC would describe his act as an 'infiltration' and an 'attack on the spiritual center of Zionism'. The press learned quickly that Merkaz Ha Rav Yeshiva was a religious-nationalist Yeshiva at which the sons of settlers learned Torah. The press would indicate that the settlers who attended Merkaz Ha Rav deserved what they got in some ways. The BBC would claim that many of those who studied at Merkaz Ha Rav 'seminary' were soldiers or were destined to serve as soldiers. Thus killing them was not terrorism or a war crime or collective punishment, it was merely self-defense and the action of a 'militant insurgent'.
Soon after Abu Dhaim's family heard of his death they declared him a 'martyr' and erected a mourning tent. Arabs from all over Jerusalem came to pay their respects. All the Palestinian terror groups praised his actions. In Gaza the people celebrated and Hamas distributed candy to the children to mark the successful 'revenge' attack (We are always reminded b the media and leftists that Hamas is the legitimate elected government and that it is ‘hypocrisy’ to boycott the Palestinian Hamas leadership. But just because people are elected doesn’t mean the should be respected and talked to. Europeans boycotted Jorg Haider’s Austrian government because it was seen as racist. No one condemned that). Immediately the press made sure to emphasize that the 'real' victims of Abu Dhaim's attack were the Arabs. One article declared "Jerusalem Arabs fear Israeli retaliation." The BBC carried a headline entitled "Ripple Effect: Fallout from Jerusalem Seminary Attack." In another article a picture of a smiling Ala Abu Dhaim accompanied an article that described the Yeshiva as a "settler stronghold…The BBC's Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen says that the school was no ordinary seminary. It was the ideological cradle of the settler movement in the West Bank, which could be the reason it was targeted. Many of its students are on special courses that combine religious study with service in combat units in the Israeli army. " The BBC made sure to downplay the attack, noting that "Assuming that the attacker was not just an enraged individual…The attack on the Yeshiva is a grim development in the litany of violence. " The BBC's main concern was that "Anyone counting on progress on the peace front this year looks to be betting against the prevailing trend. " In an article by Jonathan Marcus the BBC made sure to once again remind readers that the victims deserved what they got: "The Merkaz Herav Yeshiva - a Jewish religious seminary - is the place from where the religious-inspired Jewish settlement movement in the West Bank sprang." No where did the BBC mention that the victims were mostly teenagers, which are referred to as 'children' by the BBC when they Palestinians who die at the hands of Israelis. But there was no BBC headline reading "8 children die in Palestinian attack on Jewish seminary". Jews are never 'children'.
Hamas made sure to praise the attack: ""This is a normal response to all the Israel occupation, commission and aggression, and they [have] committed massacres inside the Gaza and West Bank - about 128 [people were] killed, 30 of them children and infants."
In East Jerusalem the Arabs were once again victims. Hisham Shkirat of Jebel Mukaber, after joining the Abu Dhaim family in mourning, noted that "this attack has caused hue damage to the Arabs in Jerusalem." Majdi Shweiki, an Arab teacher from Silwan, noted that "I hope Israel does not resort to collective punishment following this attack." The Mukhtar, or village elder, of Jebel Mukaber noted that ” Most of the young men here work in Israel…Some of them have already been told not to return to work and this is very worrying. We hope that Israelis will refrain from collective punishment." Shweiki excused the attack by noting that "Abdu Dhaim was affected by the things he watched on TV." An Arab Lawyer from Beit Hanina noted that Israel might revoke the IDs of Arabs in East Jerusalem and that this would have "serious repercussions" and that those Arabs who might then lose their 'right' Israeli national insurance, free health care and education would become radicalized. "when you deny people their rights, they will resort to violence."
In Jebel Mukaber people remembered Ala as a private quiet person. He was "very religious". Abu Dhaim's family congratulated their dead relative saying "We have nothing to apologize for…Ala did what he did because of the Israeli atrocities against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. This was a heroic operation that was carried out against radical Jews, some of them members of the Israeli security forces."
There is much to learn from the story of Ala Abu Dhaim. What is most fascinating is to see that all of the common conceptions about terror are completely wrong. Dhaim was not a victim. He was not a refugee. He was not impoverished or out of work. He was not caught up in the 'cycle' of violence in the sense that none of his family members had died at the hands of Israel. This was a man who benefited from Israel. He received his free education and his welfare from Israel. He received his job from Jews. So did his father.
The cause of Abu Dhaim's hatred and his acts was not just his religion. The spark that set him off was the media. It was the BBC. It was also the U.N and its report about Gaza. It was the Jewish human rights organization B'Tselem that had announced that half the casualties in Gaza were 'children' (without any proof B'Tselem made this declaration two days before Abu Dhaim's massacre. A full list of the dead Arabs in Gaza has never been released, just as a list of the '1,000' Lebanese killed in the second Lebanon war was never made public). The west had a role in Abu Dhaim's decision. So did the Arab Members of Knesset in Israel who had accused Israel of 'acts of genocide' in Gaza. Mahmud Abbas and Al Quds daily had a role to play. So did Al-Jazeera.
Noam Chomsky speaks about how the media 'manufactures consent'. In the case of Abu Dhaim the media, particularly the BBC, manufactured a terrorist. The media always claims that terrorists 'use' the media in order to draw attention to their cause. But in fact it is the media that creates terrorism by drawing too much attention to certain causes.
The story of Abu Dhaim not only sheds light on the manufacturing of terrorism by the media and the anti-democratic incitement of Arab politicians, it also shows the way in which terrorism 'works'. The main 'victims' of Abu Dhaim's attack, according to the media, were not the 8 people he killed, but rather the 220,000 Arabs of East Jerusalem who now may suffer 'collective punishment.' One must note that the media never used the word 'collective punishment' in reference to the acts of the 'insurgent' and 'infiltrator' Abu Dhaim. In fact the media implicitly accepted Abu Dhaim's terrorist act as legitimate by connecting the students at Merkaz ha Rav with the settler movement. The media excused the collective punishment of them.
Furthermore what is interesting is to see how this story sheds light on how Arabs and Muslims think. An Arab and a Muslim never has sympathy for the victims of a terrorist attack. In fact when a Muslim Arab terrorist kills people it is the Arab Muslim who then becomes the 'real' victim. This was the case after 9/11. In Tucson Arizona at the University of Arizona the president of the University, Peter Likins, didn't mourn for the 3,000 Americans, he spent Sept. 12th begging the Arab students not to be afraid and begging them not to return to their home countries. He wrote an editorial in the Daily Wildcat, the campus newspaper, on Sept. 13th in which he praised all the Arab Muslim students as 'jewels' of the campus and he joined anti-racism rallies by the Muslim Students association and spoke at the Pakistani students association. Thus the 'real' victims of 9/11 were Muslims, not Americans, because after 9/11 everyone was afraid that Islam would be 'misinterpreted' or that Muslims would face discrimination and 'racism'. This is why Islamophobia is the new cause celebre among leftists. Muslims have replaced Blacks, gays and Mexicans as the new victim.
After Timothy McVeigh blew up the Oklahoma Federal Building people were not worried that backwoods right wing white militia types would be discriminated again. No one claimed that the Michigan Militia was the 'real' victim of the Oklahoma bombing. But when it comes to Arabs the world is always upside down. Thus the village elders of Jebel Mukaber were not concerned that 8 Jews were dead but rather that their village would suffer. Yet they didn't ask the family of Abu Dhaim to remove the mourning tent to the 'martyr (Shahid)' from their house. Even the Jordanian government had good enough sense to do that. Jordan ordered the destruction of any tents set up for mourning Abu Dhaim in Jordan. It turns out Dhaim had some relatives there and they wanted to mourn and fly Hamas flags. Jordan put a stop to that. In Israel the security minister Avi Dichter noted that it would be improper for Israel to make the mourning and celebrations illegal, because Israel had not made it illegal for Jews to mourn Baruch Goldstein, the Jew who killed 29 Arabs in a mosque in Hebron in the 1990s. But perhaps the actions of Baruch Goldstein shed light on this. After his act almost all Jews felt sorry for the Arab victims. Jews didn't claim that the 'real' victims were Jews because now Jews might suffer 'collective punishment' for the acts of Goldstein.
The most interesting reaction to the crime of Abu Dhaim was the East Jerusalem Arabs who immediately forecasted the idea that Israel would revoke their citizenship. They immediately made veiled threats, claiming that their would be 'repercussions'. They sounded the horn of John Dugard when they noted the depriving them of their 'right' to an Israeli I.D would force them to become terrorists. There is one problem with their argument. Abu Dhaim was deprived of nothing. He was a terrorist. Revoking I.Ds and putting people under siege doesn't make them terrorists. They are already terrorists. Revoking their I.Ds and putting them under siege may make them angry and frustrated terrorists, but it doesn't make them terrorists. Democracy, jobs, welfare and the media may make people terrorists.
The path of the white woman: becoming the other
Seth J. Frantzman
March 6th, 2008
In the past two weeks two well known books that were poised to be best sellers have been yanked from the shelves and exposed as frauds. The first was by Misha Defonseca and was titled Misha: Memoir of the Holocaust Years. It turns out her real name was Monique De Wael and that her parents had indeed been killed by the Nazis, but that she was not Jewish nor had she lived with wolves, been in the Warsaw Ghetto or killed a Nazi. Upon coming forward she claimed that she "always felt Jewish" and that she wanted to tell the stories of what Jews had faced in the Holocaust.
But then a week later in March of 2008 Margaret B. Jones admitted that her memoir, Love and Consequences about growing up with gangs in South-central L.A was a fraud. It turns out her real name was Margaret Seltzer of Sherman Oaks and that rather than being 'half white, half native-American' she was all white and she had attended an elite prep school rather than living on the street s at 13 and being given her first gun at 14 and running with the Bloods gang. When Seltzer admitted her tale was false she claimed that she was only writing the book as an 'activist' and that since she had worked as a social worker with urban blacks she feel their stories needed to be told and that she was the vehicle to tell them. She claimed 'I just felt there was good I could do and that there was no other way that someone would listen to it."
Although these two women appear to share little in common; they are of different generations, the fact is that they represent a very real trend among western whites and their stories are symbolic of the cultural oblivion that whites in the west find themselves.
It is common for white women, and to a lesser extent men, to feel a yearning void in themselves and to fill it through the mock adoption of the other. Whether it is wearing a headscarf in Morocco or hanging a photo of Malcolm X on the wall the path and response is the same.
Adopting the culture of the other is not unique to the last fifty years. Sir Richard Burton donned Muslim dress and visited Mecca. Lawrence of Arabia and John Bagot Glubb both were enamored with the Arabs and their culture. Many of the American 'mountain men' went native in the American west and many of them intermarried with native-Americans. But the modern phenomenon is different. The logic behind these women's decision was not adventure and glory as it was with Lawrence or Burton and neither is it out of necessity as it was with the mountain men.
Fraud is not unique to the last twenty years either. For as long as there has been writing there have been tales of people pretending to be others. Assuming the personalities, habits, cultures, families and histories of other people is not unique. But in most cases those committing this fraud, even if their conversion was sincere, did so out of necessity or out of greed and the desire for advancement. Thus the three 'false Dmitriys' who appeared in Russia in the first years of the seventeenth century, one of which actually became Tsar for a year, all were impersonating the son of Ivan the terrible who had disappeared in 1591. They did so not in order to become the other or because they were necessarily self-loathing towards their own culture, but rather because they wished to assume power and the impersonation gave them a path. Tales such as the Prince and the Pauper and Trading Places have hallmarks of this in them, even if the roles are reversed.
After the revolutions of the 1960s the white people of the west became enamored with the poor. This process began in the late 19th century with the first communistic and socialist clubs where western intellectuals sat around and glamorized the 'workers'. All the talk of a 'dictatorship of the proletariat' was carried on by people who were decidedly bourgeoisie in their background. From Lenin to Castro they were all sons of school teachers, lawyers or other members of the middling and upper classes. Some were even nobility. The romance of the working man and his building muscles can be found even in the writings of the right, such as Ayn Rand's portrayal of Howard Roark, the patrician architect who takes up working with his hands and smashing stones when his ideals are not met. In Atlas Shrugged she expands the motif to include an entire village of former tycoons who are now all happily involved in their genuine capitalist pursuits, even if that means they must each work the land and sell things for a pittance, just so long as there is no governmental intervention. The Nazistic motif of the 'authentic' man who is in touch with his blood and soil is a further digressment of this theme.
But as the western world became enamored with the 'simple downtrodden wretched' person it began to lose touch with its own soul and heritage. In a quest for 'genuine' and 'authentic' experiences' the westerner came to believe, in the 1970s, that those experiences could only be found among the other. Thus the white woman abhors 'poor white trash' but romanticizes the blacks and Mexicans of the 'ghetto'. The legions of words employed to denigrate poor whites is quite astounding: hicks, red-necks, hay-seeds, white trash, hillbilly, bumpkin, yokel, boor and corn-fed to name a few. Thus the genuine nature of all the poor lost its romance in the 1970s and was replaced by a more specific romance that focused on certain groups of poverty stricken 'authentic' people who became known as 'the other'.
But what encourages people to actually become the other? What encourages someone to work for three years on a memoir that tells the story of a different life than their own. What encourages someone who has an obvious writing ability to create a fictionalized memoir when they could have created a non-fiction biography of a real person. The two themes of these white women were that they both wanted to expose the suffering of the other group and that they felt they had identified with this group to the extent that only they could communicate it through an extensive lie.
The phenomenon is fascinating.
The NGO civilization
Seth J. Frantzman
March 5th, 2008
“I trusted white men.” This was the statement made by an orphan who had been at an orphanage in Jari in northeastern Ethiopia run by the a Swiss NGO Terre Des Hommes. But Terre Des Hommes provided more than just care for the orphans. It also provided sexual abuse. David Christie, a well paid SUV driving white man from Europe, raped and abused the children. The NGO covered up the abuse. When Jill and Gary Campbell, two British teachers at the orphanage, dared to complain the media they were sued by the NGO and now face a six month prison sentence for defamation. According to another wealthy white man employed by the NGO named Colin Tucker, “we asked them to stop defaming us and they said no. Then the court asked them to stop defaming us and they said no again.” Christie changed his name to David Allen and went to work for another NGO named Acbar in Pakistan and then showed up in Zambia with more European NGO money to open another school for children so he could rape them. The British courts refused to prosecute him, claiming his crimes had taken place too long ago in 1997. The Ethiopian government dared to confront the NGO and put Mr. Christie on trial and sentenced him to nine years hard labour. Meanwhile the Swiss NGO’s Mr. Tucker noted that the “foundations” primary goal was the “rehabilitation of the children” and was asking for money from donors to help the NGO care for the victims of Mr. Christie.
We have come to think of the existence of NGOs as simply part of our world but in fact they are indicative of our civilization. People like Mr. Tucker are the essence of our modern ‘progressive’ way of life. They are born into wealthy European families. They drive SUVs or BMWs. They live their entire life without every using their hands to do work. They live off either government money or the money of donors. They sue and have put in prison anyone who tries to expose their crimes. They employ criminals, kidnap children and then raise money to help the victims of their own crimes.
Every NGO is involved in these types of activities. The French organization known as Zoe’s Ark kidnapped ‘orphans’ in order to send them to Europe. But when the native country tries to bring the white employees of these NGOs to justice they are suddenly pressured by the European governments, usually former colonial, powers to release the NGO workers.
This is the hallmark of our civilization. It is the relic that will be left behind. When archeologists examine what was unique about our civilization they will remark about the existence of the NGO culture. They will note its origins in old charitable societies of the 19th century. They will note how those organizations, like the Red Cross, expanded beyond their mandates to become virtual governments. They will learn about how there came a point in European history where every white person was employed by an NGO and every white person considered it their duty to ‘save’ Africa, so long as they got a large salary and an SUV.
Our culture’s primary interest is charity. Our entire life is made up of donors and charities and philanthropy and NGOs. In Europe it is all that exists. There are an army of millions of Europeans roaming the globe who work for these NGOs. They fill up all the five star hotels in Africa. They all profess themselves experts on this such as irrigation and farming, having never set foot in a field, having never dug a well or hoed a field.
The latest fad of the NGO civilization is forcing Africans to farm using ‘organic methods’. Robert Paarlberg, author of Starved for Science: How Biotechnology is being kept out of Africa, and a professor at Wellesley college notes that his students are involved with NGOs whose sole goal is to make it so African foodstuffs cannot be exported to Europe and America unless the Africans use organically certified methods. In order for them to be ‘certified’ a white man must go and check up on them. He notes that Europeans didn’t pull themselves out of poverty through the type of farming now being forced upon Africa by the BMW driving environmentalists of the West. He also notes that the simple African farmer in the bush is living an purely organic life, one that no westerner would ever stoop to and one that doesn’t need certification.
Gregg Mills, a Johannesburg based writer, has noted in his November 2nd, 2007 essay ‘The new imperialists’ how NGO workers in Kigali in Rwanda bet on “which NGO landcruiser will be the next to pull into the parking lot.” Graham Hancock in Lords of Poverty: the Power, prestige and corruption of International Aid goes one further in his condemnation of the evils of the NGOs in Africa.
A recent letter to the editor in the Herald Tribune by Kathleen Cravero, the assistant secretary general of UNDP, noted that Security Council resolution 1325 had condemned rape. She claimed that “the UN system in the Congo and East Timor has made progress against all odds.” It is interesting that those same UN workers in the Congo are the ones who have been charged numerous times with raping women and trading food aid for sexual favors. When the Congo dared to try and put the UN workers on trial the UN transferred them out of the country and under UN law all UN workers must be prosecuted for their crimes in their home countries. Needless to say, the UN workers were never put on trial, just as Mr. Christie was not brought to justice in England. In Kosovo the KFOR troops, EU workers, Nato personnel and UN workers transformed the nearby towns in Macedonia into the sexual slavery capital of Europe and Kosovo became the trafficking in women capital of Europe. Undercover documentaries of sex slavery in Macedonia showed that almost all the women, who were mostly teenage Moldovans and Ukrainians, had been forcibly raped by international aid workers who frequented the brothels. As part of their ‘seasoning’ the girls were sold at open slave auctions and forced to link toilets clean. All of it courtesy of funding by the UN and various NGOs. None of the NGO workers, all wealthy Europeans, were ever put on trial. The UN’s security council resolution against rape should have simply condemned the UN for its role in mass rape in the world which seems to follow every place the UN has a presence.
The NGO civilization is a passing phenomenon. How long can a culture survive in which its primary interest is the misery of others and sucking the blood, in the form of money, from the wealthiest members of its own society. How long can a society survive when few if any of its sons and daughters want to grow up and work in industry or agriculture, but instead want to drive SUVs in Africa and hope for the chance to go on a sex tour of Djibuti? We already see the result. Europeans are now paying to have surrogate Indian women conceive their children. The potential mother is chosen online and the order form is processed for as much as $25,000 and the a baby is delivered to the European 9 months later. A photo of the Indian mother shows them, their eyes downcast, with surgical masks over their faces. They look semi-Islamic, all covered up in the hospital garb. The look in their eyes can only remind the viewer of the downcast eyes of Muslim women in their veils or of Moldovan prostitutes in Kosovo. And what is the difference. It is all part of the European worldview: the Muslim woman, the prostitute in the window in Amsterdam and the Indian woman giving birth to baby-to-order.
The NGO civilization will die. It will die out soon. The ‘progress’ that Europe touts itself as having, its clean air and organic food, the bullying nature of the EU which has destroyed local traditions and crushed local foods, such as those special cheeses that are aged in the ground in Italy, or the Rumanian custom of slaughtering pigs on the holidays. He only thing the world can do to save itself from the menacing shackles of the NGO is to make it illegal for Europeans to travel to their countries. If Africa was off limits to Europeans the SUVs and the arrogant English ‘volunteers’ like David Christie would disappear. Rape and child molestation might not disappear. But the existence of the European and his NGO, his ridiculous lifestyle of living off the blood of others and feasting of the misery of others, would dry up. The only way to save Europe from itself is to ban the travel of Europeans in the world. Tourism, the most western of inventions, should also be banned, lest it entice people to think they need to ‘save’ the poor children they come across. Their should be a hiatus on the legality of travel for Europeans. They should be forced to remain in Europe. Their is plenty to tour there. The immigration of people from Africa and elsewhere to Europe can also be curtailed. It will be a good trade-off. No more poor wretched welfare loving immigrants for Europe and no more misery loving Europeans for Africa. What a trade. Let the wretched stay in Africa and let the wretched lovers stay in Europe. Let the Africans eat their organic food that they have grown naturally for thousands of years without certification and let the Europeans eat their fake organic food that is certified but that comes from factory farms.
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