Terra Incognita
Issue 24
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
March 2nd, 2008
1. The face of terror: John Dugard is an unassuming man. A South African born human rights specialist for the U.N. He is also the lynchpin of the terroristic-legalistic post-humanism that excuses and encourages murder through a process that should be called ‘terrorism of the mind’ and should be as much a focus of the war on terror as the actual terrorists themselves.
2. Victims until victory: Islam is a religion of victims. From Kashmir to Kosovo and the Palestinian territories the Muslim is the whining victim. Yet in each place he has slowly slaughtered all the minorities. Islam is a study in the rule that the victim can be the victor in the 20th century.
3. Oh Look! Another Immoral Muslim king! : In Indonesia there is a Muslim hereditary king. Like all Muslim kings he has multiple wives and mistresses. Yet Islam and Islamism preaches that the West is immoral. But who is more immoral?
4. Did the Victorians bring modest clothing to India? : Indian leftists accuse the Europeans of bring ‘moralistic’ Christian values to India and changing the way Indians dress. But long before Europe arrived the Muslims had already shrouded the women of India in headscarves and secluded them in Purdah.
The face of terror
Seth J. Frantzman
February 27th, 2008
In 1941 the U.S government produced a series of films entitled ‘Why we fight’. These were modest propaganda films intended to explain the history of the present conflict that would come to be called World War Two. In one of the films it showed pictures of Hitler, Mussolini and the Japanese leader. The narrator reminded the viewer “know these faces, if you ever meet them, don’t hesitate.” The implication was simple. If you meet them, shoot them down.
What is the face of the enemy today. Is it Bin Laden? Is it the terrorist with his bomb and his khaffiya? That is the prosaic answer. But perhaps the face of that person we are requested to know is closer to home. Perhaps he goes by the name Prof. John Dugard and he lectures in international law at Leiden University in the Netherlands. How is it possible that a simple European man with a droopy un-tanned face could be the face to know? How could it be that he would be the enemy and not the terrorists themselves sitting in the Hindu Kush plotting the next attach? How could it be that he is more dangerous than the terrorists training today in Pakistan?
John Dugard is not an ordinary man. He is an enabler. His biography would not reveal this. He was born in Fort Beaufort in the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa in 1936. He attended University at Stellenbosch in South Africa. He was a professor of law from 1975 to 1976 at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. Despite being a loyal servant of Apartheid he became an expert on international law. Evidently his background in Afrikaans enabled him to move to Leiden in the Netherlands as a professor after working as a visiting lecturer in International law at University’s such as Berkeley, New South Wales and Princeton.
His publishing record would not indicate any involvement in extremist or fascist activity. His publications have quite modest titles such as International Law: A South African Perspective and Human Rights and the South African Legal Order . But everything changed in 1997 when he took up a position with the UN international law commission. He then became a Judge at the International Court of Justice. Since 2001 he has served as Special Rapporteur to the UN Commission on Human Rights on violation of Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. It is after his conversion from mild-mannered professor to servant of the UN that he apparently took up extremist tendencies. He suffers from what is known as Desmund Tutu syndrome. This disease mostly affects South Africans. It mostly means that he and others like him have decided that their experience living in a system of Apartheid and their ‘atonement’ for it by speaking around the world on ‘international law’ gives them the right to arbitrate the disputes of others and tell others how to live.
As the permanent representative from the UN to investigate Israeli violations of Human Rights he began to meet with known terrorists in Hamas, Fatah, the Al-Aqsa Martyr’s Brigades, the Popular Resistance Committees and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. But his extremism did not finally become apparent until February of 2008 when he issued a report detailing the following:
“common sense ... dictates that a distinction must be drawn between acts of mindless terror, such as acts committed by Al-Qaida, and acts committed [by the Palestinians] in the course of a war of national liberation against colonialism, apartheid or military occupation…While Palestinian terrorist acts are to be deplored, they must be understood as being a painful but inevitable consequence of colonialism, apartheid or occupation…As long as there is occupation, there will be terrorism…Acts of terror against military occupation must be seen in historical context…This is why every effort should be made to bring the occupation to a speedy end. Until this is done, peace cannot be expected, and violence will continue.”
His comments are worth reading again in order to fully digest what the mild mannered European professor is suggesting. He argues that during a war of ‘national liberation’ it is ‘inevitable’ that there will be terrorism. In his estimation any perceived ‘occupation’ can be legally confronted by terrorism according to international law.
Let us take this to the logical conclusion. Tim McVeigh felt that the ATF or bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, the agency responsible for the 80 deaths of Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas, was a manifestation of occupation. In his war against this federal agency Mr. McVeigh blew up a federal building in Oklahoma, killing 150 people. McVeigh was thus waging a legal and completely understandable war against the ‘occupation’. The KKK also waged a war against what it perceived to be ‘occupation’ of the white man’s South by Northern carpetbaggers and their legions of freed slaves. Thus the KKK can be seen as an “inevitable consequence” of the “colonialism” that the American South was submitted to after the Civil War. So we must take the KKK off our list of things that are negative. It wasn’t a terrorist organization after all. It was a band of freedom fighters. It was a merry band of ‘white knights’ as they called themselves.
The Nazis too were merely fighting against the occupation of their ancestral Aryan homeland. They were fighting the French for having colonized and occupied the Ruhr and Alsace-Lorraine. They were fighting the Poles for having taken Danzig. So it was a perfectly understandable war the Nazis were fighting. Perfectly just and legal.
But what of Mr. Milosevic? He too was fighting against the occupation of his own lands by the colonialistic UN and the western backed Croats, Bosnians and Kosovars. Where was the understanding for Milosevic? Where was Mr. Dugard to defend that war of national liberation?
Mr. Dugard and his ilk are a dangerous addition to the world. They may wear suits and ties and they may drive large SUVs but behind the charade lurks the face of Bin Laden. Behind the suit and the tie there is a terrorist bomb-belt. His weapons are not the Ak-47 though. His weapons are his words and the excuses they convey for the terrorist. His weapon is international law and excusing the murder of civilians.
People like Mr. Dugard are dangerous. They are dangerous because they do not understand their own ideas. They do not understand that there may one day be a blowback against people like them. The world tires of having its foremost intellectuals tell average people that those people deserve to die at the hands of terrorists because the terrorists perceive those people to be ‘occupying’ them. What of the average person and his desire to live his life? The American constitution guarantees that person the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. There is no caveat. There is no ‘but’. This is an absolute right. It is a natural right. People are born with this right. The terrorist denies a person this right. When the terrorist bomb blows up a bus or rips apart a restaurant it takes away the rights of people. It denies them their right to their life. The terrorist claims he is fighting a perceived wrong doing. But perception is at the heart of the justification of terrorism.
Perhaps we look at it another way. The UN is currently in occupation of numerous countries in the world. It occupies Haiti. It occupies parts of the Sudan. It occupies East Timor. It occupies parts of the Congo. It occupies Kosovo and Bosnia. It occupies parts of Israel and the Palestinian territories. It is inevitable given this UN occupation that people will eventually resort to terrorism in order to free themselves from the UN. The UN is, in effect, an occupation force of the world. The International Criminal Court occupies the entire world because it claims to have jurisdiction over the entire world and yet the world never consented to give it that jurisdiction and there is no check and balance upon it. So if the UN and the ICC are in fact occupation forces of the entire world than anyone in the world may fight that occupation.
Let us think of the role of Jean Paul Marat during the French Revolution. In the spring of 1793 the orator, journalist, Swiss-born physician became one of the leading men of the Revolution. He inveighed against the ‘enemies of the revolution’ and excused the Jacobin Reign of Terror in which the sans-culottes of Paris and their collaborators in the government killed as many as 40,000 people. Marat encouraged the Terror and excused the excesses of the Jacobin Montagnards. On July 13th, 1793 a woman entered his house where he was taking a bath. She drew a knife and stabbed him in the chest. As he died she proclaimed that she had “killed one man to save 100,000.” He died in the bathtub in his own blood. At his funeral the eulogy invoked the name of Christ, as Desmund Tutu is apt to do “Like Jesus, Marat loved ardently the people, and only them. Like Jesus, Marat hated kings, nobles, priests, rogues and, like Jesus, he never stopped fighting against these plagues of the people”
What would John Dugard’s opinion be? Surely the French felt ‘occupied’ by the royal family and thus the excesses of the Jacobins and the revolution can be understandable as the “inevitable [outcome of] occupation…As long as there is occupation, there will be terrorism. Acts of terror against military occupation must be seen in historical context.” So Mr. Dugard is a modern day Marat, a justifier of terrorism and murder and genocide as long as it is practiced under the guise or in the name of fighting occupation. One just wonders if Mr. Dugard has a bathtub. One just wonders if the justification of terrorism and the excusal of the murder of decent people, people with a right to liberty and happiness and life, will ever result in justice being done to those who have collaborated intellectually for so long with those who murder and genocide others. The deaths of innocent civilians do not keep Mr. Dugard up at night. That is the true perversion and the true curse of modern day intellectualism. The ability to sentence entire nations of people to death because those people are accused by other people of occupation is something that only intellectuals in the west are capable of. It is something that only bourgeoisie leftists are capable of. The value of human life, each individual life, has been forgotten in the circles of international law and intellectualism. There is never a time when the taking of a life is justified by an esoteric notion like ‘occupation’ The fact that people like Mr. Dugard have justified the taking of such lives, lives like mine, lives like yours, means he has declared war on humanity. The war on terror is not only against those who practice terrorism of the bomb but also against those who practice terrorism of the mind and Mr. Dugard is equivalent to Bin Laden in this respect. His is no different for he enables Bin Laden and justifies his actions.
Victims until victory
Seth J. Frantzman
February 25th, 2008
In the International Herald Tribune Philip Bowring wrote on February 18th in an article entitled 'what about all the other Kosovos': "None of this is to argue that minority rights do not matter - that China can suppress Tibet and (Turkic) Xinjiang, that Russia can brutalize Chechnya, that Thailand can submit its Malay/Muslim minority to alien laws and language, and so on." While his article addressed the question of whether the international community would continue chopping up nations the way it did Serbia, it is this quote that must make one stop and think. Why are Muslims such perfect victims everywhere (the suppression Mr. Bowring mentions in Xinjiang, Chechnya and Thailand all have to do with Muslims being victims)? How are they victims when it is they who are responsible for the majority of the killing in the world and it is their terrorist bombings that kill thousands a year and it is they who ethnically-cleanse their countries and it is they who suppress minorities?
Mr. Bowring was taken in like so many others. Listen to the words he uses to describe the situation in southern Thailand. He described Thai Buddhist culture as "alien laws and language." Thus the Muslims, the people who colonized half the known world and invaded and slaughtered and enslaved and genocided so many civilizations become the 'indigenous' people in southern Thailand while the Thai Buddhists become the 'aliens' in their own country 'submitting' the victimized Muslims to their rule. How is it possible that the actual indigenous people, whether it is Hindu India or Buddhist Thailand or Christian Europe are always accused of pushing laws upon the Muslims, who are, after all, the invaders and the colonizers.
The unique way in which Muslims become victims is fascinating in the extreme. Muslims succeed in each instance because they are able to convince people that they are being abused. In a sense people are suckered into believing the propaganda of Islam. Whether it is Bosnia or Chechnya or Nigeria or Kashmir or southern Thailand the world somehow, time and again, thinks the Muslims are the victims. Every single one of these 'hot spots' has one thing in common: they exist because Muslims cannot live amicably with other people. Muslims insist on special laws for themselves. They insist on running everything. They insist on autonomy. Even when they are granted everything they want they insist then on killing all the non-Muslims in their areas and then they insist on having their own states.
Kashmir is an excellent example. In 1941 it was 15% Hindu ( as many as 450,000 Hindus out of 4 million people) with smaller Sikh and Buddhist minorities. It was around 75% Muslim. In 1947 it was governed by a Sikh and it had a significant Hindu minority. But Islam began to chip away at it. First it was invaded by Pakistan after India and Pakistan were granted independence. Pakistan took a small part of it. By 1990 some 500,000 Kashmiri Hindus (known as Kashmiri Pandits) had been driven out by the Muslims who were demanding independence. Today Kashmir is 95% Muslim (Only 10,000 Hindus remain in Kashmir. The Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir is two states actually, Kashmir is 95% Muslim and Jammu is 70% Muslim. Ladakh, a Buddhist part of Jammu and Kashmir, is only 44% Muslim). Today the international community and the Muslim states demand that Kashmir, like Kosovo, be granted a plebiscite which will inevitably mean independence.
The demographic change in Kosovo is not so different. In 1900 it was 50% Serb with Gorani (a Slavic Muslim group), Gypsy and Jewish minorities as well as Albanians. By 1948 it was 67% Albanian Muslim and by 1971 it was 73% Albanian. In 1971 it included some 15,000 Gypsys. In 1981 it was 77% Albanian Muslim. By the end of the Nato bombing it was between 90-95% Albanian and a third of the Serb population and almost all the other minority groups had been thrown out. It was precisely the same story as Kashmir. Yet in both cases the Muslim was the victim. How can one be a victim when they have killed and cleansed all their neighbors? How are they a 'victim' when it is they who are the perpetrators of hatred and murder? It is an interesting kind of victimization. That the Jews were the victims of the Holocaust is obvious just from the bare statistics. In a country like Poland where there had once been 3 million Jews there were only 100,000 or less in 1945. That the Armenians were the victims of genocide is obvious because there are no longer any Armenians in Turkey (there had been a million or more in 1914) and their population did not increase significantly elsewhere between 1915 and 1920. But if the Jews had come out of the Holocaust with an additional 13 million people and today the Jews made up 50% of Poland would we call the Jews victims?
The genius of Islam is to always find a way to play the victim on the one hand and murder people with the other. Muslims are expert practitioners wherever they reside. The ability of Muslims to be victims transcends race. Black Muslims in Nigeria, Asian Muslims in Thailand, Indian Muslims in India, Arab Muslims in Israel and white Muslims in Albania are all experts at the same game. The game is played quite simply. The Muslim women wear headscarves and cry and wail in public. Muslim children are always smiling and playing. Muslim men are romantic or they are heroic freedom fighters. Old Muslim men are always sipping coffee and smoking a sheesha. This is the kaleidoscope of Islam as portrayed in the media. It is the side of Islam everyone is supposed to see. The media conveys the victimhood. But Islam always keeps a card up its sleeve in case these stereotypes don't work to convince people that Muslims are victims and innocent. If Islam truly needs people to feel sorry for it then it will stage a mass refugee movement. This was the case in Kosovo during the Nato Bombing. In order to convince the world that the Albanians were being 'cleansed' they all ran away and became refugees. When the world wasn't watching those same 'refugees' came back and slaughtered all the minorities in Kosovo, throwing out Gorani, Serbs and Gypsys. Nato was told to allow the pillaging of Christian monasteries under the pretext that Muslims needed to get 'revenge'.
The dialectic of 'revenge' is always fascinating. A recent study at the University of Toronto has concluded that Muslim suicide bombers are motivated not by religion but 'really' by revenge. They desire to take revenge either for their wounded pride or for being 'humiliated' and 'occupied' or for being 'poor' or for some perceived wrongdoing. Thus when the Pope called Islam 'intolerant', Islam immediately went out and murdered a priest in Turkey and a nun in Somalia. This was 'revenge'. But the Muslim concept of revenge is sort of like the Muslim concept of 'peace' and 'justice'. Peace in Islam does not translate into English as 'peace' but rather as 'genocide'. How is this possible? Islam divides the world into 'Dar al Islam'(the world of peace) and 'Dar al Harb' (the world of war). Islam believes that the Dar al Islam must be increased by Jihadists (holy warriors), Shahids (martyrs) and Ghazis (holy warriors). Only when the world of war has been destroyed will the world of peace be achieved. Thus 'peace' really means a world where everyone is Muslim. The fact that non-Muslims are said to live in a 'world of war' is not because they are warlike but because it is legal for Muslims to kill them because Islam is always at war with non-Muslims. This simple fact means that when Muslims says 'Salaam Aleichem' (Peace unto you) to a non-Muslim they are actually asking the non-Muslim to convert to Islam. Salaam and Islam are two sides of the same coin. They both mean 'peace' but they only mean 'peace' in the context that everyone is Muslim.
The Islamic concept of revenge is like the Islamic concept of peace. Muslims are always getting 'revenge' and Muslims always say they are fighting a 'defensive war'. Thus when Islam killed all the minorities in Kashmir and expelled almost all the minorities in Kosovo it was acting in 'self-defense'. But this was the same 'self-defense' that Islam was acting in when it killed the catholic priest in Turkey. It was taking 'revenge' for the comments of the Pope. But does one murder someone in revenge for the comments of someone else? In Islam one does. Thus the concept of revenge, which in the west means taking an eye for an eye against someone, has no parallel in Islam (In the West the idea of revenge is best illustrated in Shakespearean stories such as Hamlet and Titus. The Count of Monte Christo and the Godfather are also illustrations).
The tactics of Islam, the images of Islam, all is perfectly orchestrated to fill the minds of the west with lies. It is all orchestrated to take people in. Take the Druze women who call across to their 'families' in Syria using bullhorns from the Golan. They are 'victims' because the border divides them. Is it a coincidence that the same charade takes place in Kashmir where Muslim women call across the border to their 'families'. But this is a charade. There are no divided Muslim families. They don't have to use bull-horns to communicate. There are phones and email and letters. There are other methods. The bullhorn and the overweight Muslim woman holding it are part of an advertising campaign. It is like the starving African child. It is a stereotype designed, like the Nike swoosh, to invoke something within those seeing it. When the cameras are turned off the bullhorns are taken away and the overweight Muslim women and their headscarfs waddle back to their homes and are locked in their rooms.
But the charade always works. Think of how Mr. Bowring has been taken in with regards to Southern Thailand. Southern Thailand was invaded by Islam. Islamic birthrates caused the demographics to change, as they did in Kosovo and Kashmir. Then the Muslims demanded autonomy and they demanded to be allowed secede and join Malaysia. In Malaysia they knew that Islam is the official religion and that affirmative action is granted to the Muslim majority. Thailand said no. So Islam began the ethnic-cleansing and slaughter and terrorism against the Buddhists in Southern Thailand. Between 2001 and 2006 a total of 3,000 Buddhists were killed (similar numbers of non-Muslims were killed in the Phillipines by Muslim terrorists). Monks were specifically targeted. Islam usually targets religion, despite the argument at the University of Toronto that religion does not motivate terrorism and despite Islam's claims that it is respectful of other religions. Just as Hindu pilgrims on their way to Armanath cave are killed each year by Muslim militants.
The story of Armanath cave should be told by the locals themselves. The Hindutva news analysis of Hindutva.org cannot be replicated in such an honest way by this author:
"Only Counter Terrorism can wipe out the scourge of Theology-inspired Terrorism
Since they have chosen to behave like beasts, we have two options:
1. To treat snake bite and snake-venom with an antidote i.e. to go on the defensive by deploying more troops at the scene of the crime.
2. The second option is to solve the problem of snake bite and snake venom with a stick and smash the snake's head, i.e. to go on the offensive.
Many readers will find this option repugnant, since they would be civilized folks. But here we are dealing with mindless beasts which is what the theology-inspired terrorists are….Many will censure us for even mentioning this hypothetical possibility. Many others will tell us that two wrongs do not make a right and that violence can be stopped only with non-violence. But for us this advice is like telling a man facing a man-eater tiger to be patient and not violently counter the tiger's moves to eat him up! Despite saying all this, we know that from across the civilized globe, many of us fall for the outcry to 'stop violence'; that is made by former terrorists and aggressors like Yasser Arafat and Pervez Musharraf, we should ask ourselves "Who started the violence in Gaza, West Bank, Chechnya, Kashmir, Kargil, Nairobi, Dar-e-salaam, Malaku, Mindanao, etc.?" Those who started the violence and are perpetrating it will have to pay for it with their lives. Only when this happens can the perpetrators of this cult of violence be brought to their knees. And only then can this cycle of terror stop."
The BJP in India understand the problem and they understand that the 'cycle' of violence, like the idea that Muslims act out of a need for revenge, is a scam. But it does not solve the question of how the Muslim always becomes the victim.
Every situation involving Islam is the same. In Israel the Muezzin plays the Muslim call to prayer at higher decibels when it is near a Jewish area. In Himalayan India Muslim mosques are specially located next to Buddhist temples so that the muezzin can overpower the sound of the Buddhists ringing their bells. In other Muslim countries it is forbidden for Christians to ring bells, lest the Muslims be 'offended'.
Every situation involving Islam is the same. Islam colonized Zanzibar and shipped five million black slaves from East Africa to Arabia. Yet in 1961 when the local blacks rose in rebellion the Arab Muslims of Zanzibar cried out that they were the 'victims'. In Nigeria Shariah law is practiced in northern Nigeria and every year Churches are burnt down. Yet the media changes these stories and calls them 'communal riots'. But is it a riot when only one side is the victim? When Nigeria tried to exterminate the Christians of the Delta in the Biafran war it was termed a war over the succession of Biafra, but it was actually a war whereby Islam helped murder Christians. The west is so taken in with the idea that only Muslims can be victims that it never noticed the genocide in southern Sudan and only began to notice when the genocide spread to the Muslims of Darfur (it turns out that Islam's treatment of fellow Muslims is not widely different than its treatment of non-Muslims: Kurds, blacks and Shias are also victimized by Sunni Arabs and Turks.)
Every situation involving Islam is the same. Indonesia massacred a half million Chinese in 1965. We called this 'anti-communism' at the time. But it was genocide by Muslim Indonesia against Chinese people. What happened in East Timor? It was another attempt at genocide by Muslim Indonesians perpetrated against the Catholic majority in East Timor. What happened in Malaysia in the 1950s? The Malaya Emergency was labeled 'anti-communism'. But what transpired? The West collaborated with genocidal Malay Muslims against the Chinese minority. What happened in Lebanon in the 1980s? We called it a war of 'Left wing Palestinian and Shia and Druze and Sunni militias' against the 'right wing fascist Maronite Phalange'. But what really took place? A quarter million Christians were driven from their homes by Muslims. We labeled them 'left' and 'right' in order to hide what had taken place. What happened in Cyprus in the 1970s. The Muslims cried 'victim' and Turkey invaded the island. The end result was the cleansing of Christian Cypriots from Northern Cyprus. Today the peace negotiations between the two sides are predicated on a return of Muslim Cypriots to the south. There will be no return of the Christians because Christians never return to a Muslim country (Just as there is no discussion of the Jewish refugees from Muslim lands). Every country in which Muslims live has witnessed the exact same thing in the last century. When Muslims have been the clear perpetrators of genocide they have changed the terms of the genocide so that it becomes a 'civil war' or 'anti-communism'. But there is one common denominator all over the world. Muslims always win. They always win demographically and geographically. There is never, or at least very rarely, a roll back of Islam. Even when it looks like there is, it is an illusion. The birth of India and Israel in 1948 seemed to be examples of historic non-Muslim groups being allowed to live in their native land again. But 60 years later the Muslims make up 20% of each country. In each country they have become more extreme. In each country they do not serve in the army. In each country they hate the state and their politicians hate their own country. In both countries their demographic increase is among the highest in the world, while the native Hindu and Jewish growth is smaller. In each country they demand and receive autonomy and special rights and special Islamic courts so as to enforce their Islamic law and force their women to stay at home and have as many children as possible. Is it a surprise that the BJP and the Hindutva movement has started to realize that it has a soul mate in Zionism and that the right wing in Europe has come to embrace Israel?
There are a few other examples where it appeared that Islam was 'rolled back'. Bulgaria has attempted over the years to rid itself of the former Turkish Muslim colonists who live in their midst. They have been unsuccessful. The most prominent building in Sofia is the old Mosque and the Muslims proudly pray there. Greece thought it got rid of its Muslims in 1922 during the population transfer with Turkey. But the Muslims are back, demanding a new mosque be built in Athens. In Spain they thought they were rid of the Muslims in 1492, but Islam is back demanding rights now to use old mosques. Islam has successfully carved out two new states in Europe in the last ten years: Bosnia and Kosovo. It has taken over Lebanon and has colonized Chechnya. It has taken over Western China. It has taken over the southern Philippines and southern Thailand. It is on the way towards taking over Ethiopia if Ethiopia is not careful.
Islam is everywhere. In Barbados, an island full of cheerful blacks and white tourists, the only people with frowns on their faces are the Muslims. They are there and their women are auspiciously covered, unlike all the other women on the island. In Botswana the Muslims have a giant mosque opposite the University with a giant green sign that improbably declares, "Welcome to Islam welcomes you." There is not a country one can go to, barely, that does not have a new giant mosque complete with domineering hate spewing minarets in the works. From Myanmar to Bangkok to Munich the minaret is being raised high above the local churches and temples.
There is only one known instance in history in which non-Muslims were able to roll back Muslim rule completely. This was on the islands of Juani and Mafia, part of the Mafia island archipelago off the coast of Tanzania. In 1588 and again in 1829 groups of Sakalava cannibals came from Madagascar and ate the Muslim slave traders and took the survivors into slavery. It must have been strange for an Arab slave trader living in Kilwa town on Mafia to see the cannibals coming to eat him. Surrounded by his harem of African slaves he must have wondered why there was no BBC or UN or Red Cross or international media to feel sorry for him. There would be no Arab children playing in the yard or overweight Arab women with bullhorns or any wailing at funerals to photograph. He was grilled and eaten. His children were sold into slavery. There was no one to document it. There were no refugees. It was a Tuesday. And the Muslims never returned.
Oh Look! Another Immoral Muslim king!
February 17th, 2008
Seth J. Frantzman
After September 11th there was a lot of talk about 'why they hate us.' Although I preferred the more logical, 'why we should hate them' banter, I nevertheless listened to all the arguments. Dinesh D’Souza, formerly an intelligent conservative commentator of Indian birth claimed that they hated us because of Liberalism. His logic went something like this: Liberalism and its imposition of gay rights is making Muslims angry because they perceive us as immoral. If only Muslims knew we were moral God-fearing Americans, just like them, they would love us. His was the old 1980s lingo when American conservatives like Joan Herring teemed up with Islamists to fight the Athiestic commie (See Charlie Wilson's War). Then there were the liberals who told us that Islam hated us because of our foreign policy and because we had tried to impose our culture on them. These people were the ones that would end up arguing, as the Archbishop of Canterbury does, that we should have Shariah law in our countries in order to accommodate Islam. For them multi-culturalism means different laws for everyone. Thus when a Muslim woman appears in court to testify in a murder case her testimony will be worth half a mans because the court will revert to Islamic jurisprudence when a Muslim is on trial. So the liberal response was: we should become like them so that they will love us even if it means abandoning the queers and the Jews and blacks in Darfur. Whatever it takes to be loved. The patriotic conservative who wasn't taken in with De Souza's theories realized that actually what was at stake was our way of life and that if Islam hated us than that was Islam's problem. The pragmatic leftist realized the same thing, namely that Islam's intolerance was its own problem.
Somehow along the way we seem to have lost our minds. We always assumed that Islam hated us because of our tolerance. We assumed Islam hated us because of our gays. We assumed Islam hated us because our women were scantily clad. But no one ever sat back and looked at the totality of evidence.
Evidence stares us in the face everyday. The king of the Sultanate of Surakarta in Indonesia had six mistresses and 35 children. The Sultan of Brunei imports Playboy models to cavort with. In the book Nine Parts of Desire the author reveals how Saudi Princes import Swedish prostitutes to strip for them. Muslims were renowned for their 'exotic' Harems in the 19th century. Some contained hundreds of women, virgins imported as teenage slaves from Africa, Ukraine, India and Greece. Musa Bakir, the French Muslim man accused of involvement with the latest finance scandal in Paris is shown in bathing trunks, his nude chest to the camera. His sister goes home early for curfew and covers her hair. The 9/11 hijackers all visited strip clubs. Libyan diplomats were reputed to spend tens of thousands of dollars at strip clubs in South Africa when there for a conference. Pakistan Muslim soldiers in the Congo raped native teenage girls. Britney Spears and the late princess Diana had Muslim boyfriends, whose sisters no doubt are not allowed the playboy lifestyle of the men in the family. Sir Harold Goldsmith's daughter married a Pakistani soccer player complaining that her girlfriends "thought all there was to life was dancing." She converted to Islam and covered her hair. Her husband got a mistress soon after while she stayed at home to pop out some children. A Muslim housekeeper who had 8 children complains to my friend that all his wife does is complain that she can never leave the house. I saw him at a bar yesterday with a western women. The prostitutes in Tel Aviv are reported to 'feel sorry for Muslim men because they can't go out with girls in their villages'. Meanwhile in the Muslim town of Ramla 9 women have been killed in the same family in three years because they violated their family honor. Their brothers were off sleeping with prostitutes and came home afterword to murder their own sisters for violating an honor code. When Sir Ronald Storrs came to Jerusalem's the British Military governor in 1918 he cleaned out the brothel district the Turks had created so that Muslim men could enjoy themselves. He found their Syrian Christian women imported so that the local Muslims could have their pleasure district. It was no different than the pleasure district found in Lahore or in Cairo, stocked with non-Muslim prostitutes. 5,000 Eastern European women are trafficked every year through Egypt on their way to Israel and raped along the way by the Muslim Bedouin. Tens of thousands more are trafficked to Kuwait and the UAE to be raped. The not long dead King Faud of Saudi Arabia was said to be 'progressive' by the economist because he journeyed to Lebanon and could be "found at the club with two Lebanese beauties on his arm." He already had four wives at home.
The greatest myth perpetrated in the wake of 9/11 was the myth of moral Islam fighting against an immoral west. The Muslims concocted the myth too. They spoke of a decadent west. Abdul Hamza, the radical Islamist preacher, complained that the lax English lifestyle was corrupting Muslims, that English women and alcohol were ruining the Muslim men. He must have had first hand experience. He had worked as a bouncer at a strip club. Egyptian men always complain that after a sojourn in the west they come home to find that their women do not want to have sex in the nude. The women no doubt wonder where the men learned to have sex in the nude. They learned it from western women. No western women ever thinks of the hypocrisy when she dates a Muslim man, she never thinks that the same man puts his sister in a headscarf and would murder her if she went out of the house. She never thinks that her children will be in that headscarf and like so many women in Israel she will be murdered by her husband or locked inside the house once she is married to her 'exotic Arab'. Exotic indeed.
Said Qutb also blamed the west for being immoral. He claimed to have been sexually assaulted by a garrulous American woman while on a boat coming to Egypt. If the story is true he must have been the only prude that Islam ever produced and in his prudish male modesty he was surely more western than Islamic.
It is a myth Muslims tell themselves. They tell themselves they are moral and that the west is immoral. But their concept of morality is a strange one. For them the west is immoral precisely because western men and women are equal in their sexual affairs. That western men and women go swimming is immoral. In Islam only men go swimming because only men may walk around in shorts or a bathing suit. Muslim women are permitted to go to the beach with the children but only to go in the water while wearing a full length coat and headscarf. It is quite a sight to see Muslim women bathing while Muslim men are off staring at women in bikinis and chatting up western women. Islam claims the west is immoral because women have the same sexual mores as men and because western men don't murder their own sisters. As the Australian Islamist preacher put it when asked if it was a crime for Muslim men to rape Australian women : "Women that expose themselves are like exposed meat. If you leave meat outside and someone takes it, who is to blame, you or the one who took it. It is the same with women who expose themselves. If they do so and men are enticed, who is at fault?" This is the Muslim interpretation of morality and responsibility. Responsibility always lies with women in Islam. If a woman is raped she must have four witnesses to prove her rape otherwise she is stoned for adultery or murdered for violating the family honor. There is no punishment for the male. Islam is in a sense a religion of rapists. It is not ironic that Muslims are always so worried that their own women will be spied upon or raped. Women are covered head to toe in clothing, irregardless of the climate, in Central Asia women used to have to wear horsehair blankets over themselves, so that they could barely move about. Women are locked at home and in Egypt a saying goes that a women should only leave the house three times in life: for marriage, to attend her parents' funerals and when she dies (a twist on the Greek saying that a man lies with his wife but twice: on the wedding night and when he lies her in the grave). In Egypt Muslim men are often found peering out their window trying to get a glimpse of their Coptic Christian neighbor's undressing. In the Old city of Jerusalem after Muslim prayers the Muslim men grope the Christian Arab women. This is Islam. From an Islamic point of view it is logical: women should not be out unaccompanied by a male relative (In Saudi women can't drive or leave the country or travel without permission), and thus a woman by herself is a prostitute.
Islam speaks of conquering the world and turning it into Dar al Islam, the world of peace or the world of Islam. But one wonders, with Islamic traditions of Polygamy, where will Muslims get all the women they need to stock their harems? Who will be the dancing girls and the whores and the strippers? Islam needs non-Muslim women for these 'art' forms. This is why in Lahore and Egypt before the 20th century, and in Lahore to this day, a special caste of dancing girls was bred to please Muslim men. That is Muslim morality: a society based on women locked in prison cells and other women who work as prostitutes. In the world Abdul Hamza and Bin laden that is the role of women: as the whore or the prisoner. It is no surprise that Bin Laden, while he complained of western immorality, happily raped women and took multiple wives.
When we speak of morality and Islam we do not speak of the same thing. By definition a religious Muslim cannot be moral in the western sense of the word. He cannot treat people equally for his religion tells him to hate and his religion tells him women are worth less than he and his religion compares women to slaves and dogs and Jews and pigs.
Think of the story of John Adams and his wife and how they wrote to eachother and how John viewed Abigail as his spiritual and intellectual equal. John Adams, President of the United States. A descendant of Puritans. A deeply religious man. He never committed adultery. He never raped. He never went to visit dancing girls. He didn't have a harem. He didn't import women for his pleasure. He didn't marry under age girls. He didn't pine after other women. He was a moral man. That is morality. The war against Islam has nothing to do with morality. The leftist secular society of the west is immoral. Its not homosexuality that makes it immoral. There is nothing immoral about homosexuals. I've met homosexuals and Muslims and I've never met a Muslim whose morality approached that of any gay man or woman. There is no comparison. To say, as De Souza does, that the gays are the problem, that the liberals make the Muslims hate us, is untrue. To say, as the liberal does, that we must give up and the gays so that we can coexist with the Muslims, is wrong. Better that the whole world was gay than the whole world Muslim. Oh, but there wouldn't be any more children if the world was all gay! But is it better to have a world in which half the humans, the female half, is circumcised, imprisoned like dogs, sold into marriage like chattel, raped, put in burkas and beaten and murdered by their own brothers? Better no world at all, no more generations of man, than the world of Islam. Certainly the existence of one gay man and all the immorality he could come up with is better than the existence of the sum total of the whole world of Islam. The Jews say that if you save one person it is as if you saved the world. But people should also say : If we had to destroy and put to the sword all the Muslims to save just one homosexual in Tehran from being stoned that would be worth it. There is nothing so close to hell on earth than the existence of Islam and its treatment of women and non-Muslims.
Did the Victorians bring modest clothing to India?
February 17th, 2008
Seth J. Frantzman
A recent article in the Herald Tribune celebrated a 'First among saris: a transsexual celebrity'. Celebrating gayness in another culture as only a westerner could (see for instance the author of Keep the River on your right who found homosexual natives wherever he happened to travel) the article waxed poetic about a man turned woman who will soon star on a TV show in Tamil Nadu and South India. The star, Ramesh Venkatesan (Ippadikku Rose on her show) claims that "America is very hypocritical when it comes to its stand on sexual minorities. Historically India was been very progressive about this until the British came and imposed a Victorian sense of morality, which still remains."
Its interesting that the west is blamed for making India modest. I have been to India. The things that are modest about India are varied and far between. Indian women dress with open backed traditional clothing. In restaurants the typical 'traditional' Indian woman always has her belly exposed or is dancing half nude for some Raja. But what of the other side? There are female only train cars lest the men harass the women. There are Muslim women clad all in black, only their eyes visible while their husbands wander along with typical western dress. The wealthy Indian women all dress like their western female counterparts with short skirts or tight pants and shirts. In music videos the women are always being splashed with water to make them sexy but at the same time the censor forbids kissing on TV or in film. Richard Gere, when he forcibly kissed Shilpa Shetty was almost imprisoned for the offensive act, not because it was forced, but because it was public. It wasn't so long ago the women in India jumped on their husbands funeral pyres. In some places arranged marriages still take place among 13 year old girls. If the girls are married at 13, and this is not a western cultural import, then where did they have all the time to get down and be immodest?
The world of India that the Victorians found in the 18th century and the one they came to dominate in the 19th and 20th was not a hedonistic progressive society. Yes, there were the legendary Indian hermaphrodites who wandered about in gangs, as they still do today, shaming those who didn't pay debts. There were half naked women, just as there used to be in Bali in the 19th century. There were 'dancing girls' just as there still is a Caste (kanjari) of them that live in Pakistan (romantisized as only a westerner could romanticize prostitution in The Dancing girls of Lahore: selling love and saving dreams in Pakistan's Pleasure distract. "The traditional 'Dancing Girls of Lahore' do not perceive of themselves as prostitutes, but as proud artists… Exotic, shocking, utterly alien to Western sensibilities" An imprecise name given the fact that it is only pleasurable for the male Muslim rapists who rape the underage girls, who no doubt do not think they live in a pleasure district. Perhaps Memoirs of a Geisha did it one better in romanticizing the same thing in Japan). There was child marriage at 12 and there was Sati. This was the world the British Victorians found.
To seriously believe the British made India modest is to ignore not only reality but also to skip 800 years of Indian history. Beginning in the 10th and 11th centuries Islamic Jihads led by such men as Mohammad bin Qasim, Ghaznavi, Ghauri, Abdali, Akbar, Babur and Aurangzeb were able to bring India under the Islamic boot. Thousands of Hindu temples were destroyed and more than a million Indians sold into slavery and transported to the west to feed the sexual desires and labour needs of the Turks, Persians and Arabs. The Muslims clothed the Indians in chadors and kept the women in Purdah (isolation in the house or Harem). Hindu women took to burning themselves on their husbands pyres lest they be sold into slavery by Muslims after their husbands died. Women disappeared from India and were locked inside. Islam created special districts where Indian slave girls were sold at market to the highest bidder and Islam cultivated a caste of dancing girls who would be bred only to give pleasure to the Mughal Muslim kings. This was the world of Islamic India and it was the world the British came upon. This was not India. This was a Muslim colony. The Indian women did not take up the British hoop skirt. British men enjoyed their dalliances with young Indian girls and boys, just as the Muslim colonizers had before. Sir Richard Francis Burton translated the Kama Sutra and reveled in the sexual playground called India. This was the way Islam and England treated India. There was no attempt by the British to impose morals on India, the Muslims had created a moral apartheid already and there were just enough dancing girls to go around.
If some Indians resisted, such as the Sikhs, or if some Indians simply ignored the new rule, such as the gangs known as the Thugees, it was just by chance. Were the Sikhs, the legendary fighters, preserving the immoral Muslim culture. The Sikhs displayed the opposite. Hardly 'progressive', they grew their beards long and their women were sufficiently covered, although not to the extremes of Muslim women. So where was this western attempt to destroy progressive India? Progressive, beautiful, diverse India was already crushed and destroyed in the 12-16th centuries by Islam. Islam already brought fascist morality to India.
Once India gained her independence it was hardly a hedonistic country. The main message of Gandhi, when he was parading about in Indian clothing and encouraging Indians to take up their own dress, was hardly immorality and progressive sexual mores. Gandhi was sexually confused anyway, writing an introduction to the Koran that he loved, refusing sex and yet involving himself in strange affairs with his European female admirers (Nehru's relationship with Mountbatten's wife was hardly unique in this respect). But the authentic Hindu India found among the BJP and RSS activists was hardly 'progressive' in the western sense of the word. No one has ever accused Vajpayee or Advani of being leaders in tolerance towards nude women on TV or any such thing. Hardly 'Victorian' the leaders of the Hindu party in India are not progressive but they are not aping the West either. They are essentially Indian.
Deep in the jungles of Madhya Pradesh there lies the famous Khajuraho temple complex. These are the famous 'Kama Sutra' temples that depict all manners of sexual enjoyment. But these temples were left and abandoned in the 8th century, just before the Muslim invasion. The fact that they survived the Muslim onslaught, unlike the other temples of North India, is due to the fact that they were hidden in a rural area. Their pagan greatness and their nude female statues remained. Who ruined progressive India? It is easy to blame it on the west, but the truth lies much deeper, it lies with the same people who are today knocking on Europe's doorstep and threatening to end progressive thought there.
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