Terra Incognita 46 Africa's leadership, terror and rape

Terra Incognita
Issue 46
“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”

A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel

Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/

August 5th, 2008


1) Africa's third generation: The first generation of Africa’s leadership was dominated by ‘national resistance’ leaders who were larger than life. The second generation was dominated by coup leaders and thugs. Now, with the third generation of leaders we can see that there are very real currents of strength and far sighted leadership in Africa. Ironically those strengths have had to grow up in the shadow of increasing dependence on international aid, Islamism and genocide. But a common thread runs through many of these leaders. They all met while they were young men in Tanzania and they are united the personality of Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni.

2) Because it Exists: With the recent terrorist bombings in India it turns out the death toll in that country is second only to Iraq. When one considers all the people who would be alive today were it not for the cowardly acts of terrorists one realizes that one things unites this disease that targets civilians: Islam. This is apparent, but it is worthwhile to remember and steel ourselves based on this fact.

3) Coerced sex, the IDF and the dark side of feminism: Recent allegations against a Hebrew University of Jerusalem professor of Sociology and Anthropology tell of a man who harassed, preyed and raped female doctoral students that he was supposed to be advising. Furthermore this intellectual was an outspoken critic of the Israeli army and its ‘militarization’ of Israeli society. One of his students even wrote a thesis on the absence of military rape in the Israeli army and how this means the Israeli army is ‘racist’ because it rarely rapes Arab women. It appears as if this thesis was written to justify the professors sexual deviancy and that the student was insinuating that rape was some sort of positive act. But there is more to this. A recent book by The Feminist Press tells a romantic tale of a young girl being sexually assaulted by her female teacher. Perhaps there is more rotten in feminism and sociology than just this lone professor.









Africa's third generation
Seth J. Frantzman
July 31st, 2008

Yoweri Museveni, Morgan Tsvangirai, Laurent Kabila, Paul Kagame, John Garang, Jonas Savimbi, and Meles Zenawi represent the third generation of African leadership since independence. They not only represent this third generation but they also represent the best of this generation. In contrast to them are the genocidal and thuggish likes of Robert Mugabe, Omar Hassan al Bashir (who is an Arab and not actually African) and Jacob Zuma. Their decency has been matched by their failures and untimely deaths. Whereas Kagame, Zenawi and Museveni have all found their way to power, Savimbi and Garang are dead and the future of Tsvangirai remains uncertain. While earlier generations of African leaders built their power based on opposition to colonialism or the establishment of elaborate Kleptocracies and while other African leaders have lived at the foot of international 'aid' workers and the UN these men have time and again shown not only their independence but their desire to put their nations before themselves and before the likes of 'international' organizations. Yet these men remain uncelebrated and un-recognized. With the exception of a few books, such as Emma's War and The Land of a Thousand Wars, these men barely figure in any stories on Africa. Except for every five years when Zimbabwe elections feature the head bashing and corruption we have come to expect from Zimbabwe we do not hear the name Tsvangirai.

Why are these men the 'third generation'? Jonas Savimbi was born in 1934 while Kagame was born in 1957. What unites these men is that they were not recognized as being part of the hagiographic generation of Kwame Nkrumah (born 1909) Leopold Senghor (born 1906), Sekou Toure (Guinea), Jomo Kenyatta (born 1894), Kenneth Kaunda (born 1924), Julius Nyerere (born 1922), Patrice Lumumba (born 1925) or Haile Selassie (born 1892) who came of age in time to lead their countries to independence in or around 1960 (except Ethiopia, which was already independent). This was the first generation of African leadership. It was known for having won independence from Europe and for its brotherly affections. It was the generation of the 'African Unity' speeches and it laid the foundations for African countries where non-intervention would be the name of the game and party politics would play little role. The second generation of African leadership was the generation of the coups and dictatorships. These 'big men' of Africa, such as Mobutu Sese Seko (Congo), Idi Amin (Uganda), Milton Obote (Uganda), Jean-Bedel Bokassa, Gafar Nimeiry (Sudan), Jerry Rawlings (Ghana), Omar Bongo (Gabon), Muhammad Siad Barre (Somalia), Samuel Doe (Liberia), Charles Taylor (Liberia), Olesugun Obasanjo (Nigeria), Moussa Traore (Mali), France-Albert Rene (Comorros), Juvenal Habyarimana (Rwanda), Gnassingbe Eyadema (Togo) and Teodora Nguema (Equatorial Guinea) were known for their brutality, longevity and murderous instincts. The 'era of the coup' between 1963 and 1981 saw no less than thirty coups. Some were run by mercenaries such as 'Mad' Mike Hoare and Bob Denard (who led four such coups in the Comoros, his last in 1995). Jerry Rawlings led Ghana at three separate occasions.

Jonas Savimbi deserved to be honored for his long struggle against Communism in Angola. His career began quite differently. In the 1960s he was an anti-Portuguese guerilla fighter in Angola. While he first found favor with the Marxist MPLA in his struggle against colonial rule he eventually realized that his Ovimbundu tribe which dominated the central plateau of the country would lose out to the Marxists and northern tribes that would come to dominate the post-colonial government. Realizing that the Communists would roll over his tiny guerilla force he sought help wherever he could find it, in South Africa, where the Vorster administration supported him, to the U.S where Ronald Reagan, Jack Abramoff and the Heritage foundation became his benefactors. A man of extraordinary intelligence, he spoke seven languages, he was never able to achieve power in his native country. His base in central Angola became a mecca for anti-communism where he hosted Adolfo Colero, the anti-Sandinista fighter in Nicaragua, and Abdurahim Wardak of Afghanistan. But the late 80s saw his financing dry up and with the fall of communism he was no longer a right wing cause celebre. He lost a run-off election for president (that he claimed was rigged) in 1992 after a cease fire. Ten years later he was killed in action by Angolan troops and, some claim, by his former allies, South African and Israeli mercenaries. Whatever the case he was killed and buried in his home town of Moxico. His message, " I am against nationalization; it is a disease which saps the strength of a national economy" should ring throughout Africa where socialism and international aid have sapped the life of one country after another. What is most remarkable is that he spent 42 years in the bush fighting the Portuguese, Cubans and the Angolan government.

Laurent Kabila was also not cut from a capitalist mold. He was born to the Luba tribe in the Congo and left early in life to study political philosophy in France. He was a chief minister for a short time in Katanga, the former breakaway province that had been led by Moise Tshombe. In 1965 he crossed into Tanzania with a rebel group of former Lumumbist communist fighters and was joined by Che Guevara who had been exiled from the Cuban revolution by Fidel. The two attempted, along with a number of dark skinned Cubans, specially selected for their black skin so they wouldn't give themselves away, to invade Congo and fight Mobutu Sese Seko. The 'revolution' was a failure and Kabila was portrayed by Che as a laggard and a drunk out for money and diamonds. But Kabila didn't give in and for almost thirty years he hung on in the province of South Kivu, fighting Mobuto's dictatorship. Over the years he befriended Yoweri Museveni in Uganda where he also met Paul Kagame. In 1988 Kabila disappeared and many believed he was dead until he re-surfaced in 1996 leading a band of Tutsis fighting against Hutu genocidaires who had fled to Congo in the wake of their failed genocide in Rwanda. The spillover from Rwanda ignited a full scale war where Kabili allied himself with Kagame's Rwanda and together they overthrew Mobutu. Oddly enough this most be one of the few examples in history of one of the smallest countries in the world overthrowing one of the largest (Alexander of Macedon destroying Persia is the other example). In 2001, after having run the Congo during a time of crises and continuing war he was shot by one of his own assistants and his son took charge of the country. Kabila, like Savimbi, deserves consideration because he was friends with other eminent African leaders of the period and because of his tenacity in the face of dictatorship.

John Garang was born to a poor family of Dinka tribesman in south Sudan. An orphan he almost became a child soldier in 1962 during the First Sudanese Civil War. In 1969 he earned a B.A from Grinnel college in Iowa. Like Kabila he found himself in Tanzania as a student and made the acquaintance of Yoweri Museveni. In the 1970s Garang became a Sudanese soldier in an amalgamated Sudanese army that included southerners and northerners. He was sent to Fort Benning where he completed an infantry officers training course. Later he received a Phd at Iowa State. By 1983 he had become the head of the Sudanese army's staff college at Omdurman. In 1983 Garang went to South Sudan to mediate between rebels and the army and, in a premeditated move, deserted the army with some of his closest lieutenants and went over the rebel army. He traveled to Ethiopia where he was able to built his force into the Sudanese People's Liberation Army which opposed the Islamification of the country. Soon support was pouring in from Ethiopia and Uganda, run by Garang's allies Museveni and Ethiopia. He fought the Islamist government to a standstill, using tactics and organization no doubt learned in the U.S at Fort Benning. By 2005 he had succeeded in winning his southern Sudanese people, mostly Christian African tribesman, the rights to a referendum and he allowed to join the government where he was sworn in as vice-president. In July of that year, returning from a meeting with his friend Museveni, his helicopter crashed and he died. His widow vowed to continue his struggle to free his countrymen from Islamist Arab domination; "In our culture we say, if you kill the lion, you see what the lioness will do."

Paul Kagame was born to a Tutsi family in Rwanda. Two years after his birth a Hutu rebellion led to the deaths of 150,000 people, mostly Tutsis and his family was forced to flee to Uganda. In 1979 he joined the Ugandan National Resistance Army under Yoweri Museveni which was fighting to overthrow the dictator, Milton Obote. In 1986 when Museveni finally took control of Uganda, Kagame became a founder of the Rwandan patriotic Front (RPF). In 1990 he went to the U.S for advanced military training at Fort Leavenworth and in that same year the RPF invaded Rwanda to liberate it from Hutu domination. When the leader of the RPF was killed in battle Kagame assumed leadership of the rebellion. In 1994 the Rwandan genocide began and it was only the existence and intervention of Kagame's rebels that saved the Tutsis from total annihilation. But over the years Kagame had run afoul of the French who had been propping up the genocidal Hutu regime. Because a white Frenchman had died aboard a plane carrying the president of Rwanda, Juvanel Habyarimana, the incident that set the genocide in motion, the French government attempted to indict Kagame, accusing him of ordering the downing of the plane. But Kagame has stood firmly against this 'international' arrest warrant issued by the French (whose government, it must be recalled, supported the genocide in Rwanda). For standing up to genocide and the French Kagame must be recognized a great leader.

Meles Zenawi was born in the Tigray province of Ethiopia and after completing school at the prestigious General Wingate school in Addis Ababa he joined the Tigrayan Peoples' liberation army. His rebel army fought against the Communist dictatorship of Mengitsu Haile Miriam until Miriam's Derg regime was overthrown in 1991. When Zenawi's EPRDF, an amalgamation of anti-Communist forces, came to power in 1995 he was supported by the U.S and the State Departments chief of African affairs, Herman Cohen. Since coming to power Zenawi's problems have focused on ethnic-insurgencies (Ogaden, Gambella), a long war with Eritrea and language policy (he has championed language federalism so that each tribe is educated in its mother-tongue). In December of 2006 an Islamist rebellion in Somalia declared a Jihad against Christian Orthodox Ethiopia. Muslim volunteers poured into Somalia with the hopes of raping and murdering their way through Ethiopian villages. They were met instead by Zenawi's decision to send the Ethiopian army, one of Africa's largest, against them. In a week of fighting the Islamic Courts Union, the Islamist party, was swept from Somalia. Zenawi was been a champion of non-Muslim rights elsewhere, such as in Sudan and he is the only pillar standing in the way of Islam in the horn of Africa. When Saudi Arabia demanded that a Mosque be built in a traditional Christian holy city in Ethiopia the Ethiopians responded that a church must first be built in Mecca. For fighting Islamism and preserving an ancient civilization Zenawi must be considered one of Africa's greatest modern day leaders.

Morgan Tsvangarai was the eldest of nine children born to a Shona family in Zimbabwe. His father was a carpenter. At a young age he was a supporter of the Zanu-PF, Robert Mugabe's party. He eventually became involved in the trade union movement, rising to leadership in the mine workers union and Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions. As a Trade Union man he expected the Mugabe's socialism would bring benefits to the working people but he found that year after year Zimbabwe was sinking lower and lower and inflation was rising and a country that had been an exporter of food under Ian Douglass Smith's white regime was now a net importer living on constant shortages. When he distanced his union movement from the government Mugabe responded by sending men to Tsvangarai's house with orders to throw him from the window. Tsvangarai's ample weight apparently prevented them from doing so and he survived. He became even more disgusted by the Gukurahundi operations carried out in Matabeleland in the 1980s in which tens of thousands of Joshua Nkomo's supporters were killed. In 1991 he founded the Movement for Democratic Change under which he has campaigned ever since. For opposing the government he was arrested in 2000, 2003 and 2007. In 2007 he was severely beaten. When campaigning for the presidency in 2008 he was arrested again. When hundreds of his followers were killed in run off elections in 2008 he quit the election fearing that worse violence would follow. For his decency and standing up to a ruthless dictatorship Tsvangirai deserves great respect.



For his role in supporting and influencing Kabila, Garang and Kagame, Yoweri Museveni must be considered one of the most important leaders in Africa since the 1980s. He is largely unrecognized and unknown. Museveni was born in western Uganda to the Nyankole tribe. His name means 'son of a man from the seventh' a reference to being related to men who served in the Seventh Battalion of the King's African Rifles, a British formation. He became a born again Christian at a young age and in Tanzania at school he became a 'revolutionary'. He traveled to Mozambique where he received training from the FRELIMO movement. He was a great devotee of the ideas of Franz Fanon. Museveni returned to Uganda to serve as an intelligence officer for the government Milton Obote until it was overthrown by Idi Amin in 1971. He supported an invasion of Uganda by Lango and Acholi tribesmen (who were suppressed by Amin) allied with Obote in 1972 but the invasion crumbled. Soon after Museveni formed FRONASA or the Front for National Salvation. After Amin invaded Tanzania in 1978 Museveni joined with other rebels and the Tanzanian army to overthrow Africa's most brutal dictator in 1979. But there was a falling out with Obote when he returned to power and Museveni went to southern Ugandan and began a rebellion among the Bantu speakers of that part of the country. By 1985 some 100,000-300,000 people had been killed by the Obote regime which was racking up a genocide rate close to that of Amin. In 1986 Mobuto and allies of Idi Amin sent trainers to help the Ugandan army, now led by Tito Okelli, against Museveni. But the alliance of murderers and dictators could not prevent the fall of Uganda's capital in 1986. Museveni set himself to playing power politics in the region. He supported Kagame and helped end the genocide in Rwanda and then helped end the dictatorship of Mobutu. In the Sudan he supported the south's liberation from Islamism (in retaliation Sudan supported the Lord's Resistance Army, an Acholi supported extremist movement whose leader Joseph Kony believes himself to be gods messenger on earth. Tito Okelli had been an Acholi). Museveni's most successful battle was not against Islamism or Kleptocracy but against AIDS. In the 1980s Uganda had one of the highest infection rates in Africa. Museveni's solution was to support the ABC program of Abstinance, Be faithful and use Condoms.

Museveni is the most important African leader of today and yet, oddly, he is neither well known nor respected outside the circles who know him. This is not a surprise in a world where the heroes of the youth are Che Guevara and Fidel Castro, the one a rich argentinian who viewed revolution as tourism and the other a dictator who created a family run country in Cuba. The leftists cheered Lumumba and Nkrumah. They have forgotten about Africa's leaders today in their zeal to return to Africa through aid programs that attempt to re-colonize the continent through dependency. If Africa were able to produce more Savimbis and Garangs there is no doubt it would be a far more self-sufficient place. But the plague or thuggishness, Islamism and foreign aid workers holds back Africa, killing its soul slowly. Everyday more beautiful African women don the headscarf, wrapping their faces tightly lest men be offended by their hair and everyday more Africans are lined up to take their handouts from the likes of 'Save the Childen' under the moniker that African's certainly can't grow anything themselves. What unites Savimbi, Garang and the others mentioned here is their relentless drive for self improvement and self sacrifice. Foreign aid did not touch these men. When they wanted to meet foreigners it was on their own terms, while studying at Fort Benning or elsewhere.

One cannot know the future of Africa but one can see in the failed aid paradigms that liberalism has planned for Africa a paradigm that many would like to wish upon us all; poverty for the majority and wealth for a small elite that tells everyone else how to live. We must all fight against such soul-destroying policies in our own country with the same degree of self-sacrifice that these profiles in courage fought.





Because it Exists
Seth J. Frantzman
August 1, 2008

Between January 2004 and Mmarch 2007 a total of 3,674 people died from terrorism in India. Why were these thousands of lives snuffed out? The existence of Muslims is the answer. In the book, Because They Hate, Brigitte Gabriele, a Lebanese Christian, described how Islamic terrorism ruined Lebanon. The simple fact is that everywhere in the world terrorism is due to the existence of Muslims. If you were to rank countries by the percentage of Muslims in them you would find that the amount of terrorism increases as the percent increases until that percent reaches 60% and then, with Muslims controlling the country, there is no need for terrorism. Than the gears of Islamification began to turn. First the genocide begins, as we have seen in Sudan. Once the non-Muslims are genocides and ethnically cleansed (as was the case with the birth of Pakistan when all the Sikhs and most of the Hindus were forced to leave the country) the remaining minorities are allowed to remain in the cities, discrminated against and marginalized they are allowed to exist as slaves to the state. They become then like the Copts in Egypt or the Jews of Iran, people who are forced, by fear of retaliation, to become nationalists and preach love for their nation. Slowly they dwindle and die out and whenever war comes to the cocuntry they are used as scapegoats and thi extermination is completed, as was the case in Iraq with the Assyrian Christians in the 1930s and the Chaldean Christians after 2003.

The existence of Islam is what causes terrorism and murder. Nations that do not have Muslims, such as Iceland or New Zealand or Uruguay, do not have terrorism. Historically this has not always been the case. Communists were terrorists. The Irish and the Tamils were terrorists. But there is a difference between the isolated acts of Hindu Tamil terrorism and Irish terrorism. These ethnic-terrorist movements, like the Basques, were isolated. Irish people were not terrorists everywhere, only in Northern Ireland. Basques only live in Spain and France. Tamils only live in southern India and Sri Lanka. The Communist terror and Anarachist terror that swept the world from the late 19th century to the late 20th century is the closest thing we have as a comparison with the existence of Islam. Communism plagued the entire world and wherever there were communists there was terrorism. As with Islam the progression of Communism followed similar patterns. It began with terrorism by upper class ‘revolutionaries’. Once Communism was able to take control of the state the terrorism ended and the genocide and ‘class war’ began until the enitre country was communist. Thus Communism and Islam was linked in this way. However Communism was an ideology. Islam is a religion. Communism was easily defeated once it petrefied into the state system. The defeat of Communist states led immediately to the freedom of the people and thir drifting away from Communism. But Islam is not like this. Destroying Muslim governments doesn’t change the ideology of the people. In fact Islam is at its most dangerous, murderous and vibrant outside of Islamic countries.

How can a world exist with Muslims in it? How can countries be forced to tolerate the existence of Islam? Why must people live with Islam? This is a question that few dare ask but it is an important question. If Islam had no existed in Indai there would have be 3,600 more people alive in India. There would be tens of thousands more alive in New York, the Phillipines, Israel, England and Spain. In the Sudan more than 150,000 people would be alive.

Coerced sex, the IDF and the dark side of feminism
Seth J. Frantzman
August 1, 2008

On July 30th, 2008 it was revealed that Israeli police had opened an investigation of Eyal Ben-Ari a professor of Sociology and Anthropology at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. It turned out this profeesor was alleged to have been forcing his female doctoral students who he was advising to have sex with him over a fifteen year period. In addition he is accused of misappropriating funds for research to buy these students gifts, including, allegedly, a vibrator. Those students that kept their honor and did not comply with this predator’s wishes were denied funding and “treated miserably and quickly dropped as advisees.” But what is most jarring about this case is that Mr. Eyal Ben-Ari was a respected feminist, a known critic of the ‘militarization’ of Israeli society and a harsh critic of the IDF. He was also the advisor for Tal Nitzan, a graduate student in anthropology who wrote a thesis six months ago that received high marks and awards from the department. In her thesis entitled ‘Controlled occupation: the rarity of Military Rape in the Israeli Palestinian Conflict’, Nitzan claimed that the absence of ‘military rape’ in the IDF reflected Israel society’s racism because Israelis were conditioned to view Arab women as so inhuman that they refused even to rape them while on duty in the Palestinian territories. Hebrew University’s Shaine Center listed the thesis among its top works as a Shaine Working Paper no. 12. There is no evidence that Nitzan was one of the many female victims of the predator, Ben-Ari, but if she were it might lead to an interesting conclusion. If Nitsan was being sexually assaulted by her advisor, Ben-Ari, then she may have reasoned that this represented his acknowledgement of her ‘humanity’ because he had ‘selected her’ as being pretty enough to rape. This may have led to the conclusion that because Israeli soldiers did not behave as Ben-Ari did, raping their way through the territories, that they were thus not recognizing the humanity of the Arab women. Using the Nitsan thesis one might also conclude that because Ben-Ari is only accused of sexually abusing his female Jewish students that he is a racist because he didn’t also assault Arab women.
But the most disturbing part of the entire story is the way Feminism hangs over it. Ben-Ari and Nitsan were believers in the fact that the Israeli military, and military in general, is a patriarchal, chauvinistic negative culture. This culture is in direct contrast to the enlightened and progressive culture found at the university. Yet it turns out that raping and sexual assault were not taking place in the barracks but in the very hallowed halls of the ivory tower, right at the center of feminism, sociology and anthropology at Hebrew University. Further more the rumors were there. According to the Jerusalem Post, “Sociology Department chair Prof. Zali Gurevitch told The Jerusalem Post Thursday that the first rumors had reached his ears some time ago.” This is the same Zali Gurevitch that defended the thesis of Nitsan in January of 2008. Now here we see that while the pashas of feminism at Hebrew University were busy critiquing the military they were ignoring the stench of sexual depravity and indecency under their very noses where legions of women were being subjected to the most degrading and disgusting predatory male lurking in the halls of the academy and wrapping himself in the mantle of feminism and progressive thought. The best female minds in sociology and anthropology were being subjected to gratuitous sexual perversion by those same people who dared preach about the immoral chauvinism and ‘militarism’ that supposedly infected Israeli society.
This is not a coincidence. The fact that Ben-Ari was a leading light in the critique of the IDF and that one of his students claimed the IDF’s lack of rape meant it was racist while all the while the real raping and sexual harrasment was taking place at the universty in an open manner where many were aware of it is not a coincidence. It points to the heart of a disturbing feature of modern feminism. A recently published book, Dearest Anne: A Tale of Impossible Love by Judith Katzir, tells the story of Rivi and her love affair with Michaela. According to a review by Rifka Dzodin “Katzir galmorizes the student-teacher affair…[it] seems more like some sort of sodt-core porn male fantasy than a tale worthy of being published by The Feminist Press.” The Feminist Press is located at the City Univeristy of New York. The connection between the Ben-Ari case, Tal Nitsan’s thesis and Katzir’s book is very real. It points to a disturbing trend in feminism that seems to have romantisized and at the very least tolerates the subjugation of women in a sexual manner, especially between teacher and students or between soldiers and civilians.

How did this happen? How did Feminism and the university come to tolerate the most inappropriate of behaviors and the assault on female students. How did we come to the point where our best and brightest female students are subjected to forced sexual intercourse by those preaching that society is being ‘militarized’? Society that has abandoned the ‘old’ moralities seesm to not understand right and wrong. Such a society then fosters a university environment where, absent of the notion of right and wrong, turns a blind eye to rape and harrassment of the most vile nature. Such a society finds it can be seduced by the idea that ‘absence of rape’ is evidence of racism. This is a tragedy, not only for the university environment but for feminism as well. The fact that Ben-Ari was not ferretted out of his office of immorality sooner points to a moral failure. Sociologists and feminists have much soul searching to do. At the very least this should cast doubt on extremist work such as Nitsan’s ‘rarity of military rape’ thesis.