Terra Incognita
Issue 43
“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
July 15th, 2008
1) The Most irresponsible people in the world: After the press published a forged Iranian photo that purported to show four missiles being fired into the air there was very little in the way of apology for helping to fool the public. The Press blamed the Iranians but refused to take responsibility for passing on the propaganda.
2) Where did all the jobs go? Two hundred years ago most people worked at occupation that required the use of hands. Today’s job market has replaced these employments with a variety of service type occupations. Not only are people alienated from work today but even the leading members of society are telling students that they shouldn’t get real jobs, they should instead be working as ‘community activists’ and in related noncupations.
3) Biting the Hand that feeds: the path of the immigrant and the terrorist: Home grown terrorism is produced because of an extreme sense of arrogance and entitlement on the part of some Muslim immigrants and their descendants. This arrogance must be met with brute strength. However history gives us a lesson of what appeasement encourages; the story of Emma Goldman’s experience in America between 1890 and 1919 should be a cautionary one.
The Most irresponsible people in the world
Seth J. Frantzman
July 11th, 2008
On July 9th, 2008 a photo made its way around the world. Agence France Presse, like other news organizations, had wanted ‘art’ to illustrate the Iranian army’s firing of a number of missiles. These were missile tests by Iran designed to show the world that should a war break out with the U.S or Israel that Iran’s missiles would threaten the entire region. Grainy video-stills of the missile test were originally all the media had to work with until a photo appeared on the website of the Sepah News, the media arm Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. Without further ado Agence France Presse lifted the photo and distributed it around the world. It made the front pages of The Los Angeles Times, The Financial Times, The Chicago Tribune and several other newspapers as well as on BBC News, MSNBC, Yahoo! News, NYTimes.com.
The picture shows four missiles shooting upwards from the desert with smoke filling the desert landscape from their launches. Then on Thursday, June 10th, a new photo appeared from the Associated Press. It showed the exact same image, except there were three missiles being launched. Where a fourth missile had appeared in the first photo, the second photo contained a truck mounted with a missile. Upon closer examination y independent individual it became clear that the first photo had been clearly retouched and parts of two of the other missile launches cut and pasted to make it appear a fourth missile had launched. Defence analyst Mark Fitzpatrick of the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies told AFP: "It very much does appear that Iran doctored the photo to cover up what apparently was a misfiring of one of the missiles.
"The whole purpose of this testing was to send a signal so Iran both exaggerated the capabilities of the missile in their prose and apparently doctored the photos as well." Most news organizations reported the faking of the image. The New York Times did the best job (http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/07/10/in-an-iranian-image-a-missile-too-many/index.html?hp) by showing the two images side by side with circles indicating which parts had been cut and pasted to create the fake image. Fox News put the image on its home page with a headline that “Photo of launched Iranian missile appears to have been faked.” The BBC reported the matter as if it was a point of discussion with the headline “Iran ‘faked missile test image’”. The BBC said Iran was ‘accused’ of faking the image but that Iran claimed it had test fired ‘nine missiles’. The BBC then reported that “The BBC News website's picture editor, Phil Coomes, said: ‘Having examined the photograph from AFP, it can be seen that parts have been edited, with smoke trails and parts of the foreground being cloned.’”
What is fascinating here is the degree to which the major news organizations were not only duped but upon being duped did not apologize for their irresponsibility but instead made it seem like this was a controversy. This is typical of the way the media operates in the modern world. Instead of getting a handle on the most mediocre of technologies, such as photoshop, and examining pictures before they are published, the media publishes image with reckless disregard and then complains that by some odd circumstance the image was faked without acknowledging the media’s own role in distributing the mockery. There is a famous saying that ‘extraordinary claims’ need ‘extraordinary evidence’. But the media version of this is that extraordinary claims just need a quote or a picture from someone else and they become ‘true’ enough to go on the front page. It is not the first time the media has been duped and played a role in its duping. The media does not simply report the news, it ‘manufactures’ the news in the Chomsky sense by creating stories and following stories that it deems important to the readers. Thus the media needs the most gruesome and interesting details for those stories. This was the case with Mohammed al-Dura, a Palestinian boy who apparently died of gunshot wounds on September 30th, 2000. Talal Abu Rahma, a Palestinian journalist, filmed 27 minutes of coverage of a gunbattle between Israelis and Palestinians on that day in Gaza. 59 second of his film was shown on television and it showed a father and his child in the midst of the gunfight, unable to escape. The Palestinian journalist claimed the Israelis shot the child. Charles Enderlin of France 2, the channel’s bureau chief provided a voice over for the video in which he claimed that the Palestinian boy had been the “target of fire coming from the Israeli position.” Enderlin had not been present at the gun battle. The father of the boy became a convincing victim, declaring to the media that the world should avenge his boy’s death by harming Israel and that his boy was a ‘martyr for Al-Aqsa’ The Muslim world printed postage stamps of the death of the boy and assaults on Jews in the western world followed. It subsequently turned out much of Enderlin’s story was caught up in lies. He lied when he said the boy’s death had been captured on camera but was too emotional to show on France 2. In actuality the boy’s death was not depicted. It turned out some of the footage showed other Palestinian boys playing dead for the camera. In the end the media had not only been duped by its Palestinian reporter and hs sympathies but had in fact created a nice propoganda film designed to sow hatred and anger. During the Second Lebanon War Adnan Hajj, a local Lebanese man with his sympathies for Hizbullah, took a photo of smoke billowing out of Beirut after an Israeli bombing raid. Hajj sold his photos to Reuters which released them to the world, which displayed them unquestionably. It turned out the photos were amateurish fakes in which one piece of smoke had been cut and pasted dozens of times to make the bombing appear worse than it was. Reuters appologized for the ‘inconvenience’.
In all these cases we see a reckless disregard for the truth and a lack of responsibility. The news organizations simply appear incapable of even examining the photos they use in the most marginal way. Their excuse will be that they are given hundreds of thousand sof photos and they receive them from trusted sources, such as Reuters and the AFP and therefore cannot be responsible for examining them all. Under their contract with Reuters they except that the due diligence has already been done. But when these mistakes happen again and again one would think that the media would employ someone to examine the photos for evidence of simple fakery (the images by Hajj and from Sepah could be created by anyone using the most simple devices in Microsoft’s Paint, they don’t even require the expertise of Photoshop and the deceoption is so easy to spot that average people have been the one’s blowing the wistles on the photos, not media watchdogs.) One would assume that the media might have at least a modicum of prudence when it comes to trusting images from ‘freelance’ Arab Muslim Shiite photographers in Lebanon during a war with Israel or from the website of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. The media, in a clear mark of irresponsibility, does not bother to check the source. Yet the same media, and especially the BBC, always puts quotes around any stories that eminate from event he highest levels of government in England, Washington or Tel Aviv. Thus when the American government claims something it appears in quotes. Death tolls often appear in quotes. But an image does not appear in quotes, nor does its caption. There is the typical saying that a ‘picture is worth a thousand words’. Since the BBC puts so many of its words in quotes one would think that it would have the common decency to put images it displays in quotes or at least explain the source of the material. To b lindly pass off the propoganda of the Revolutionary Guards of Iran makes the BBC, in effect, a subsidiary of the Iranian regime. This is, in fact, what has taken place. The media is, for all intents and purposes, part of the propoganda efforts of various Middle Eastern potentates and terrorists. Its lack of responsibility means that it is used by terrorists to get their message out and inflate their claims and fake their ‘suffering’. The media always plays the victim in this, acting as it it was given fake material. But who is the victim? If a person buys rotten fruit that is obviously rotten is he truly being ‘tricked’. As a famous Muslim imam in Australia asked ‘if someone leaves meat outside and another person takes it, who is to blame, the person who left the meat out or the person who took it?’ It is unlawful and irresponsible for someone to manipulate images. But given the fact that so many images are maniupated the media should doubly examine any image coming from the Middle East, especially during a time of conflict, as to its authenticity. If one buys rotten produce again and again from the same market at some point they themselves are at fault. If they buy the rotten produce and then give it away to others, as the AFP and Reuters do with these forged and altered images, then they are passing on the rotten fruit and they are at fault for not inspecting it. This is the situation we are dealing with. It is a situation of the utmost in irresponsible behaviour and it means that when dealing with the Middle East and reporting on Muslim countries ones should not only stop trusting the stories eminating from the media but should also no longer trust any of the images. The pictures are no longer worth a thousand words. They are worth nothing.
Where did all the jobs go?
July 8th, 2008
Seth J. Frantzman
In 1714 the following jobs were the occupations of the residents of Bradford, England. Three percent were owners of land. 14 percent were 'landless labour'. Three percent were involved in coal mining. 23 percent were involved in textiles. 19 percent made their daily bread in 'clothing and footwear'. Five percent worked in 'food and drink'. 9 percent were employed in building. 12 percent worked in 'minor trades and industries'. Seven percent worked in 'services'. Three percent were in the professions. 1 percent were 'gentry' and 1 percent were in the militia. In nearby villages the main occupations were coalmining, landless labour and work in the textile industry. In nearby Scotland a list of 'old occupations' contains many interesting, and forgotten, jobs. There was the 'beadman' (Bedeswoman and Beildsman as well) or licensed beggars. There was the 'Alewife' or woman who ran a pub. There were 'Berlin Blackers' who applied black varnish to iron tools. There was the Chapman who dealt goods from his donkey cart by traveling from village to village. There were Byremen who looked after cows. There were Cork Cutters who cut cork imported from Portugal. There was the Cowan (and Dyker) who built dry stone walls. There was a Fethelar or town fiddler. There was the Ghillie or 'highland guard of wild game'. There was a Moneyer, the man who made coins. There was the Rope spinner or maker of rope and the Rove Carrier who moved fibres and flax before spinning. There was the Sprigger who made fine linen. There was the Thong Maker who made leather whips and other leather goods. There was a Walkser whose job was to wet cloth and step on it in order to thicken and clean it. There was also the Wadsetter or holder of a mortgage.
Today's human looks with disdain on these jobs and celebrates the fact that either they no longer exist, machines do them or 'other people' do them. In the Western countries and other wealthy states these jobs have been exported overseas or they have been usurped by machines. Such were the results of industrialization, globalization and the increasing abilities of assembly line robots to do intricate work.
There was a time when most people did labour with their hands. But there have been at least two generations, if not three or four, that have separated us from our forbears. Such mundane textile jobs and farm labour is something so remote that most could not imagine it. But society increases daily with more and more people as populations grow (except in Europe). So as these 'old' occupations have disappeared new occupations have had to replace them. Most people, even in this technologically advanced society, must work in order to survive. But given the flaccid nature of people and the fact that so few of them are capable of doing work with their hands any longer society has had to increase the number of jobs that do not require much work. In order to do this we have created a generation of people employed in what was then called 'services'.
One example of these new kind of jobs that have come to replace the 'Walkser' and the 'Dyker' are jobs described as "Community and External Affairs and Business diversity." This was the description of Michelle Obama's job at a hospital for which she was paid $275,000 a year. Michelle Obama might be the posterchild of a generation for whome work is an abstract theoretical concept. Michelle may have grown up in a modest home but she aspired to higher things. She got into Princeton and spent her time there complaining about how racist it was (although the fact that she was allowed to go there seems to belie this claim). She became wealthy through working a variety of non-jobs, non-occupations, for which no work was required and no results could be provided. After all, how does someone measure 'community outreach' for a hospital? People are dying everyday, they must go to the hospital. Does one need to outreach to them?
In the end Michelle became a bandleader of the movement against occupation. She has publicly stated to college students that they should not "go into corporate America." Yet at the same time she claims that "Barack Obama will require you to work." But what will this 'work' look like? This work is entirely predicated on the idea that things that are not real occupations can be subsumed under the idea of what 'work' is and then meaningless labels can be dished out to this years college students so that they will all work as 'grant writers' or 'community representatives' or 'organizers' or some other noncupation. In fact that is what these jobs are, they are the opposite of an occupation, they are noncupations.
It was inevitable that technology would produce this. Movies about the future made between the 1950s and the present have always shown a future where no one works. People are always portrayed walking around in similar track suits but they never seem to have jobs. If they have occupations it is as some sort of officer or deckhand on a star cruiser. In Aliens the movie the directors created a universe that involved futuristic soldiers, but no one had an occupation outside of the military. What jobs were there in Star Wars. There were all the imperial soldiers of Darth Vader and the people who drove his star ships around. Luke Skywalker's uncle was a farmer. But those were basically the only occupations shown in the film. People can't imagine occupations in the future because we have witnessed to many honest occupations fall by the wayside. We imagine a future in which no one works.
The present state of society, in which people hold jobs that are not real occupations and in which few if any people use their hands during work (except to type), has created all the need for 'meaning' in life. People even volunteer to do old occupations so as to find themselves. They believe that through a few weeks of 'work' they will suddenly have an awakening. The need for all this meaning in life may stem from a lack of actual skills in life but the remedy, psychologists, psychiatrists and 'meditation' does not seem to bring people any closer to knowing what work once was. People in movies speak of owning farms and living off the land but most are ill-equipped to do so. The stories of people like Chris Mcandlis in Into the Wild appeal to people because they wish they too could abandon all to live in a pre-modern state of being.
The romanticism of the late 19th and early 20th century, both among the Communists and Fascists, saw nations of people working together to build themselves up. These mass ideologies or 'Sacred Causes' tried to re-envision a nation of romantic workers and peasants, all happily working as cogs in the machine. Both the Germans and the Soviets romanticized the countryside and each had their ideologies of 'returning to the soil'. In Russia it was the peasant commune and in Germany it was 'blood and soil'. Either way it was a reaction to modernity which saw ever more people crammed into cities and the land turning fallow as the agricultural people left it to find work in factories. This was a harbinger of doom for folk tradition. But the solution found in Nazism and Communism was mass industrialization. There was to be no true return to the land. Attempts were made to colonize vast swaths of hitherto useless land as shown in David Blackbourn's excellent study Conquest of Nature. In essence, however, this was the irony of these mass movements based on a romantic notion of nature: there was no return, merely a conquest of nature and a slow destruction of it.
In the Democratic west the conquest of nature proceeded apace with a conquest of the soul that was the result of a lack of occupations being open to the youth. There simply are no more jobs. They have all disappeared. The fact that the best and brightest in the West abhor the 'corporation' and blame all of societies ills on it merely shows the degree to which the wool has been pulled over our eyes. Corporate life holds some of the last actual occupations that are left over from the ancient world. It still has some attachment to the idea of work as a way of life and as an ethos. While small businesses are rightly celebrated as a wonderful part of society few people aspire to work in small businesses. People aspire to the nameless occupations where the real money is. Since people can pull down huge salaries such as $275,000 a year for working as a 'community relations consultant' there is no reason to aspire to having a real occupation.
Everyday there are fewer and fewer occupations. There are fewer and fewer skills. Everyday people become more and more separated from any sense of their surrounding environment. Karl Marx spoke of factory workers being alienated from their labour but today’s people are alienated from humanity. They are alienated from the environment. They are alienated from nature. They are mindless automatons who have no real skills and cannot even explain what it is they actually do for a 'living'.
Biting the Hand that feeds: the path of the immigrant and the terrorist
July 2nd, 2008
Seth J. Frantzman
There was, we are told, a time when the immigrant arrived and paid homage to his new land. He was proud of his new nation. His new country offered him the freedoms and opportunity so sorely lacking in his home country. In some periods the immigrant has lived up this image. In some periods he has become patriotic and he has assimilated and he has even become part of the mainstream culture of his new country. After a few generations his descendants even forget their foreign roots, such has been their assimilation. Sometimes he has preserved his culture and made it part of the culture of his adopted country.
But there is another type of immigrant. There is another type of person out there. This person, who is present in ever greater numbers in society, has disdain for his new country. (his disdain however is matched by the disdain which citizens today hold for their own countries as well) He has a deep hatred and contempt for it. The more he becomes familiar with it the more he is exposed to the new culture the more he hates it. As states are ever more giving to immigrants, granting them ever more freedoms, they become ever more immodest in their treatment of their adopted countries. As society comes to appreciate diversity, multiculturalism and tolerance more and more there is an ever greater attempt to worship the culture of the immigrant, the ‘other’, and to encourage him to maintain his values. This, in itself, is not a terrible thing except for the fact that increasingly cultures of intolerance are encouraged and multi-culturalism is used as an excuse for supporting hatred. There is an ever greater attempt, on the part of the immigrant and the mutli-culturalists, to isolate the immigrant in a certain place next to his kin. Then the immigrant, angry at what he now considers his low station in life, explodes with rage over some perceived offense.
Take two cases in Europe as examples. In Scotland in June of 2008 the police department distributed fliers advertising a non-emergency number on them. To draw attention to the cards that were mailed to residents and given to shopkeepers to display a small 6 month old puppy named ‘Rebel’ was pictured on the cover next to a policeman’s cap. Soon newspaper articles were appearing saying that the cards were offensive. Pray tell who was offended? It turns out Muslims find dogs offensive because they are unclean. Of course, the postcards were not actual dogs, just pictures of them. Muslims don’t like dogs, perhaps the way normal people don’t like pictures of shit (one should note here that in the Koran dogs are compared to Jews and pigs, so one might assume that a picture of a Jew on a postcard would have been equally offensive. But there are few Jews in the Scottish police force whose faces merit being put on postcards.) When one puts themselves in the Muslim’s position, as we are all apt to do in our modern leftist multi-cultural society, we think of ourselves living as immigrants in some place like Taiwan and receiving a postcard with a picture of a pile of shit on it and being ‘offended’. But would we react with rage and anger and demand, as the Muslim councilor of Dundee(Scotland), Mohammed Asif did, that the dog cards be withdrawn and apologies issued? No. As good tolerant multi-cultural people we would accept that this is the Taiwanese culture (it is not, by the way). If we were more intelligent and honorable we might realize that as immigrants we should respect the culture of the people whose country we had immigrated to. But the response of the Scottish police department was to note that they had not intended to cause offense. Rather than asking why people, immigrants in fact, dared to be offended the police made the ridiculous choice to claim they didn’t mean to cause offense.
In Italy the rural village schools have had crosses in them since people can remember. When a Muslim moved to one such community and found out about the crosses he immediately demanded that they be removed because his children should not have to go to school and see them. They were ‘offensive’. Such was this Muslim’s arrogance and inhospitable way of living with his adopted country that he sued Italy over the crosses. The court, in its rare display of intelligence and strength, noted that the Christian religion was an integral part of Italian culture and that there was no compelling reason to remove the cross.
Here are two cases of the way of the immigrant. In ever increasing numbers the modern Muslim immigrant does not move to a country and respect its values and culture. Muslims always claim that indeed they merely want to be left alone to their own traditions and that they respect the traditions of others. But the truth is far from this. Muslim immigrants do not respect the local cultures they find themselves in. A Muslim will move from his country, where the Koran is displayed in every school, to a small town in Europe and complain that a cross is displayed in the local school. He will never learn anything about the culture of his new country and will demand that wherever he goes that the people adapt to him. In the U.K for instance one school forced all the pupils to pray to Allah and the girls to cover their hair so as to ‘learn about Islam’ and in another school the Holocaust was stricken from the curriculum because Muslims would be ‘offended’ by learning about Jewish suffering. One should not have to have immigrants that act in this manner. One should certainly not have to apologize to them because they are offended by something that the local people have always been doing or are offended by something that local people like. Yet everywhere today people are adjusting to immigrants rather than demanding that immigrants adjust. There is a short answer that every immigrant and his descendants need to learn. ‘If you don’t like it go back to your country.’ This is the only answer that any local police department or school anywhere should ever give to a Muslim who complains. Is there pork on the menu at the local schools? If the Muslims don’t like it they have a school to go to: in Saudi Arabia or any other of the 40 Muslim countries in the world where Islam is the official religion. (in contrast to Islam, Jews have long adjusted to the pork consuming habits of locals in places like the American South). Muslim don’t like dogs. Then they should not move to countries where the people like dogs. Yet the liberal is of the opinion that should a Muslim appear in an apartment building than people should suddenly be careful about letting their dogs out, lest the dog cause offence. In Minnesota the local taxi companies no longer allow dogs in the taxis because the Muslim drivers took offense to them. In Singapore the same response was given to Muslims. It is a worldwide phenomenon. Wherever Muslims are a minority they get what they want. Wherever they are a majority they get what they want. When police use dogs against criminals we now hear that the dogs might offend the criminal Muslims. There is one response: if you don’t like dogs, if you find them unclean, then don’t be a criminal and don’t attract the attention of the police. The Palestinians who complain about the Israeli use of dogs can learn from this: stop throwing rocks at the police and the dogs will stop being used. If the Muslim criminals suddenly decide that being put in a prison is ‘offensive’ and ‘against the Koran’ will the state suddenly decide to have special places for Muslim criminals?
The path of the arrogant immigrant and the terrorist are implacably linked. Not all immigrants are terrorists. But an ever increasing number of Muslim immigrants are terrorists. The reason they become terrorists is because of their notion that society should always change to suit them. The two recent terror attacks carried out in Jerusalem were carried out by Arab workers hired by Israelis. The hiring of the Arabs caused them to become terrorists. This may seem like a strange logic. How can hiring someone cause them to become a terrorist? Aren’t we all told that terror is the result of poverty and unemployed ‘angry’ youth, thus hiring them would cause them to be thankful? The terrorists didn’t become terrorists because they lost their jobs either. This is not a matter of people ‘going postal’ and gunning down their co-workers and bosses. The reason hiring people can turn them into terrorists is because it makes them familiar. Their familiarity breeds their contempt and soon one finds that their anger and ‘rage’ boils over and because they are now working in an environment around the ‘other’ they not have the possibility to challenge that ‘rage’ and ‘resentment’ into an act of murder. Were they merely peasants working in their own society their rage and anger would lie undirected. But the Arabs hired in East Jerusalem who come to work in West Jerusalem become terrorists more and more. They are all ticking bombs. Jews say “we hire them because they are cheap labor.” But is it worth an extra few dollars saved a day when compared with the people murdered by the, for all intents and purposes, immigrant workers? No human is worth a small amount of cost savings. The Israeli employers are never targeted (as mentioned before, the terrorist is not ‘going postal’ but directing his anger against the ‘other’ around him, rather than against his employer and fellow employees). Instead the result of hiring East Jerusalem Arabs is the deaths of innocent bystanders, murdered because someone decided to save some money. In the case of the Merkaz Ha Rav Yeshiva shooting the terrorist had been a driver for the Yeshiva. For years he earned a living from Jews. Then one day he killed them. The July 2nd, 2008 attack was carried out by a gainfully employed bulldozer driver. The Arab man was entrusted with great responsibility to drive a bulldozer and he made a living doing it. Then he murdered people.
Dealing with terrorism that comes from Muslim immigrants is a process of waiting. It is a process of waiting for the ‘next one’ to have his ‘rage’. It is always being at the mercy of people. One has to be nice to them every day, never knowing when ‘today might be the day’ that they decide to transform from a worker to a terrorist. The media and the police paint a picture where there is ‘nothing that can be done’. One is always supposed to wait for the next one. Imagine such a society. A society waiting to die. In Europe it is always a matter of waiting until the Muslim immigrants (or his descendants) feel that ‘today is the day to be offended and have a riot’. The solution, so we are told, is to be one step ahead of them. Dealing with immigrant rage is a process of making sure beforehand not to offend the special people who take offense. Dealing with terrorism from ‘within’ is a matter of having actionable intelligence and arresting the terrorist just before he has his ‘special day’.
There are two stories worth relating that bear on this subject. In December of 1919 Emma Goldman and 200 other foreign born extremists were rousted from their beds on Ellis island and put aboard a ship. Goldman stood defiant, saying she was ‘proud of the honor of being deported from the United States.’ She had been born in Kovno in 1869 in Lithuania to an Orthodox Jewish family. They moved from there to Konigsberg (now Kaliningrad) and to St. Petersburg. Fleeing Anti-semitism the family booked ship for the United States, where they arrived in 1885. It did not take long before the teenage immigrant became involved in radical politics. During the Homestead strike she and Alexander Berkman (a wealthy Russian born Jew who immigrated to the U.S at the age of 17 in 1887) resolved to murder the owner of a steel plant named Henry Frick. Berkman, the immigrant, first tried to build a small bomb and then bought a gun which he used to shoot Frick three time. He was beaten unconscious by the very workers he was trying to ‘liberate’. Imagine the arrogance here: a country gives these people a new lease on life, free from the anti-semitism of the Old Country, and they decide to murder people in their new country. Goldman became more extreme, ordering her followers in 1893 to “take everything by force…demonstrate before the palaces of the rich…demand work.” She was arrested for inciting a riot and then threw a glass of water at the judge, such was her respect for the institutions of her new land. When a son of Polish immigrants and an Anarchist named Leon Czolgosz murdered President Mckinley the U.S finally began to understand the danger and arrogance of foreign extremists. But America was a patient nation and it did not deport Emma or her colleagues. Instead they had the freedom to found their ‘Free Speech League’ to support the entry of more anarchists into the country and their newspaper ‘Mother Earth’ which showed anti-American drawings on its cover, one of which depicted a man jabbing the American flag down another mans throat entitled ‘Patriotism in Action’. In 1917 when America joined the Great War and when average Americans went to serve their country the immigrant Goldman helped form a No Conscription League that was composed of ‘internationalists’ who refused to fight the ‘capitalists war’. It may have been no surprise the immigrants didn’t want to fight the war, after all, it was not their country. Had they been back home in their homelands they would, of course, had no choice. Emma had great arrogance in her fight against entry into the First World War she declared America “must first make democracy safe in America. How else is the world to take America seriously, when democracy at home is daily being outraged, free speech suppressed, peaceable assemblies broken up by overbearing and brutal gangsters in uniform.” Oddly Ms. Goldman did not recall that since 1890 she had engaged in the most radical forms of free speech and yet been allowed to remain in her new nation. But she, of course, had no appreciation for America for having allowed her to immigrate. Instead she bit the hand that fed her. When Communism triumphed in Russia after the Revolution she declared that it offered “the most fundamental, far-reaching and all-embracing principles of human freedom and of economic well-being.” But Emma, who hated America so much, did not return home to her mother country. It was America that finally returned her home. It put her and many of her fellow haters who hated their new country, on a boat and shipped them back. But Communism didn’t turn out to be the utopia she thought it would. The Communists viewed freedom of speech as a ‘bourquiese supersition’. Other countrites took her in: Lativa, England and Canada. When she was finally allowed to return to the U.S in 1934, albeit only to lecture on drama and her autobiography, she was, ironically, critisized in the Communist press. During the Spanish Civil War she was a supporter of the Anarchists that fought on the side of the ‘Republic’ (the wonderful anarchists did great open minded things in Barcelona, such as destroying Gaudi’s sketches for the completion of the Sagrada Familia). In 1939, on the eve of the Second World War, she was residing in England and could not help but to, once again, insult her host country, calling it “more fascist than the fascists.” In yet another irony for the immigrant Goldman it would be hundreds of thousands of those ‘fascist’ Englishmen who would die opposing Hitler whose Nazis would completely exterminate the Jews of Kovno, her birthplace. Goldman opposed any fight against Nazism, noting that “I would not support a war against them [Germany and Italy] and for the democracies which, in the last analysis, are only Fascist in disguise.” The Democracies had taken in this immigrant again and again and again and never received one word of priase. Emma died in 1940. She probably deserved to have been killed earlier in her beloved Communist Soviet Union. She probably deserved to die by the hands of her beloved Nazis who she would not have fought. But Communism and Nazism eluded her. She lived at the dole and favor of the capitalist democracies she hated so much, going from one to another to spit on them.
Emma and her immigrant friends were very much like the Muslim immigrants of today. Everyone who opposes Islamism should realize this is not the first time the West has had to encounter immigrant terrorists who used the West’s good graces and tolerance against it. Emma’s life is the model for the Muslim terrorist. Her arrogance and her hatred of the very countries that took her in are no different than that of the modern terrorist. The West did not defeat the Emma Goldmans. The West was weak and flacid in the face of them as well. The decision to finally deport her in 1919 should have been made in 1890. She should have deported after the first negative, hateful, extremist word she uttered. Immigrants need to learn a lesson. Free speech does not apply to them. The freedoms that westerners have do not apply to foreigners. Free speech must be earned and appreciated. Westerners have died in numerous wars for their freedoms. Usually they have fought those wars against the very nations from which the immigrants come.
I recall a very personal story that is representative of the attitude of the hateful immigrant and the terrorist. I was the president of a small home owners association (HOA) for a development community in Arizona. We had 200 similar looking houses and very harsh codes of conduct for the residents. The properties had to be kept clean and tidy. Trash bins had to be removed from the street after collection. There were two residents of the community, a husband and wife, who ceaselessly complained against their neighbours. They complained over the most miniscule things, such as a neighbour having a light in the backyard that was ‘too bright’. According to these complainers the role of the HOA should be to force ‘compliance’ upon these other residents. But the infractions were mostly in the heads of the complainers, there was no reason to enforce outlandish complaints. In the end I had to confront these people and I demanded of them “if you hate having neighbours so much why did you move into such a close knit community” (in truth I gave them a greater tungue lashing). These people had no answer except to threaten to sue the HOA for not enforcing the ‘rules’. These complainers were like the immigrant-terrorist. They had moved into a community that had an established way of life. It was their choice to move to this new community. Soon after arriving, rather than assimilating and learning about the values of the community, they took it upon themselves to try to force the entire community to bend to their minority viewpoint. Others might have met this complaining with action and apologies and forced innocent people to change their lives so as not to offend the new arrivals. But the proper response, the one I gave, was to fight this complaining with fire. Complaining must be smashed before it grows. People that complain must be taught a lesson. They must be opposed at every crossroads. There must be no appeasing or bending to their will. People who take offense must be opposed through the use of greater offense. Otherwise such things get out of control. Then, all of a sudden, the complainer has his ‘rage’ and ‘anger’ and ‘resentment’. Unless the rules are laid down immediately and with extreme strength then they will always be broken. Had Emma Goldman been deported in 1890 she would have been taught a lesson. She would have lived out her life in Luthuania and died at the hands of Stalin or Hitler. That would have been her path and a path well deserved given the amount of hatred that dwelled within her. By the same token Muslim immigrants who do not appreciate the hospitality of Europe should be sent home. Europeans are always worried that Muslims might be ‘tortured’ if deported. But if a few were deported and subsequently tortured and flayed alive perhaps the rest would stop complaining about a puppy on a postcard or a small cross in a school and realize that such things were trivial compared with the treatment metted out to them in their home country. Should they prefer the home country, they should be welcome to it and they should deported, immediately. Tolerance is a goal. A society should be tolerant. But it should not have to be tolerant of intolerance. It should not have to be tolerant of the rights of immigrants. Immigrants have no rights. Their rights are in their home country. They should fulfill their responsibility as immigrants first and then, and only then, obtain the rights of their new country. They should have to prove themselves. There should be zero tolerance for their hatred, their endless complaining and their ‘taking offense’. Terrorism is the result of a weak policy. It is the result of allowing Muslim Arabs or Emma Goldmans, to come to a country, enjoy its fruits and then spit on it. Hatred eminating from the mouth must be met with the fist. People want to call a country ‘fascist’ then they should learn what fascism is. Emma Goldman deserved fascism. She deserved it so much and yet she never received it. Her whole life she spit on the soil of others by insulting them. She called everyone ‘fascist’ and yet she never received fascism. She deserved it. Today’s terrorists-in-waiting deserve it. They deserve the very thing they think they are receiving. If they find the puppy offensive they deserve to be truly offended, perhaps through an annual ‘running of the pigs’ through their communities. Then, suddenly, the puppy postcard might seem like a welcome reprive. Strength against immigration. Strength in the face of arrogance. Strength in the face of complaints. Strength in the face of terror. Only when a society learns to project strength against the most minor things will it use it against the larger things. Otherwise it is just limping along claiming that ‘one day we will respond.’
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment