Terra Incognita 54 Addiction, Nudity, the white man and Jewish charities

Terra Incognita
Issue 54
“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”

A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel

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

September 27th, 2008

1) Nudity and 'expression': Why is it the only way people in our secular culture can express themselves, especially women, is to do something in the nude? Whether it is Amanda Beard, the female Olympic swimming champion posing nude and declaring it to be the high point of her life or PETA’s endless nude female antics such as the ‘State of the Union undress’ or someone named ‘Earth Friend Gen’ who skates nude in Seattle, we suffer a daily barrage of nudity in the name of originality. Yet its not original. Everything in our society is vulgar, sexual and nude. It would be original if women could express themselves by keeping their clothes on in front of the camera, not removing them.

2) Addicted: Our media, and by extension our society, suffers from an addiction to Semites. Not just any old Semites, but those called ‘Israelis’ and ‘Palestinians’. The most minor, insignificant events in Israel and the Palestinian territories make it to the front or second pages of major newspapers and media outlets such as the New York Times, the Economist or the BBC. Whether is the dead baby girl, Rose, or the pipe bomb at Prof. Sternhell’s house or some Palestinian homosexuals or Fulbright scholars denied exit visas. The only way to cure an addiction is to quit it, cold turkey. We need a hiatus from coverage of the Israelis and Palestinians. The Middle East conflict is the greatest drug known to mankind.

3) Can Islam Save the White Man? Racist as it sounds, the decline of the ‘white man’ is one of the great themes of the 20th century. Through discussions of ‘white privilege’, affirmative action, the disappearance from education of the oft-called ‘dead white man’s history’ and the concentration on multi-culturalism and diversity, the white man has lost his power both in terms of the historical narrative and under the law. But with the rise of Islam and it becoming the ‘most favored minority’ the white man has a new chance to redeem himself and celebrate imperialism, slavery and god. All he has to do is convert to Islam and he can once again glory in his past and be loved at home. He can even dust off those old KKK robes because now blowing up gays, Jews and blacks isn’t racist, its just the act of a militant with a legitimate grievance such as ‘occupation’.




4) The Jewish Charity: Helping Arabs: The chancellor of the Conservative Jewish movement in the U.S recently declared that “The time has come for Israel to imagine a role in the Jewish state not only for Jews, but for non-Jews as well…Zionist theoreticians spoke mainly about Jews and I think that it is time to go beyond that in the name of a Jewish state, and create a role for minorities in the Jewish state.” This has become the mantra among almost all well known Jewish charities in the world, from the JDC to the New Israel Fund. For them the most important community in Israel is the Arabs. Leave it to Jews to create a country and then discover that the most important people in that country are a people that already have 22 other countries that they dominate. How did Jews manage to create a national movement and then decide that the most important part of that national movement is not helping the 13 million Jews in the world but making sure the 250 million Arabs and 1.3 billion Muslims feel good about themselves and have enough charity?

Nudity and 'expression'
Seth J. Frantzman
September 22nd, 2008

Why is it the only way people in our secular culture can express themselves, especially women, is to do something in the nude? Whether it is the photographer who has thousands of naked people on bicycles or operas and theatre with nudes or PETA's nude campaign against eating meat everything in our culture boils down to one thing: if you are naked you are 'expressing' yourself. This is one of the great lies of modernity. It conflates nudity in public, something that is not the norm, with the idea that the very existence of something that is not normal means it is therefore an act of intelligence that means something. Think of the State of the Union Undress that PETA carried out and broadcasted live for all to download. This was supposed to be ohhh-so-original. It, of course, featured a large breasted white college age woman, probably a 'feminist'. Who else would strip naked and call it 'expression'. But that is our culture. That is our society, that is the cesspool we are forced to live in. People conflate nudity with being 'counter culture' because they claim that 'conservative' Christians are against nudity and thus in order to fight 'fundamentalists' one must be nude. One saw the same thing in an often told story about the campaign of Pym Fortuyn in Holland before he was gunned down. He was the openly gay flamboyant man who ran for office opposing the creeping Islamization of his country. He was killed in 2002 by an animal rights activist-turned assassin. But before he was killed he was often out campaigning. At one point a woman supposedly addressed him from below his balcony pointing at her partially exposed chest saying "this is why I support you, for my right to dress like this." Here we see once again the confusion of two things. The main reason to fight against the Islamization in society is not to protect the ability of western women to go about nude in public. If that’s the only thing one finds troubling about Islam then we must seriously consider why we oppose Islamization of society. The opposite of the Burka is not the nude person.

In a recent case a woman was skating nude in Portland, Oregon. The newspaper article relates that "The skater, Gennifer Moss, aka Earth Friend Gen, asked organizers for permission this summer to skate naked in the city of Ashland's Fourth of July parade." On September 18th the New York Times included the article 'Nudity and opera stars: how much is too much?' The article sums up the issue; " Nudity is coming to opera. In recent years, with all the talk from general managers, stage directors and go-for-broke singers about making opera as dramatically visceral an art form as theater, film and modern dance, traditional boundaries of decorum have been broken. Opera productions have increasingly showcased risk-taking and good-looking singers in bold, sexy and explicit productions." The article goes on to explain " And yes, during her uninhibited and kinetically choreographed performance of the "Dance of the Seven Veils," she shed item after item of a Marlene Dietrich-like white tuxedo costume until, in an exultant - and brief - final flourish, she twirled around half-crazed and totally naked." See, the nudity is really about pushing those 'traditional boundaries' and it is 'bold.'
But the author of this piece also admits the truth: " There is no question that in many plays explicit nude scenes have been used to compensate for shallow writing or simply to lure people into seats…. choreographers have to be careful not to use naked dancers to inject an easy jolt of eroticism into a mediocre piece… the director teases you with glimpses of flesh." In the end the truth is that the nudity is not pertinent or central to the show and yet it exists merely to 'push boundaries' and put the audience in their seats. But it's all under the guise of being original. Every film today includes nudity, mostly by women, and yet we are still expected to believe that all the sex and soft-core porn encountered in our daily lives in magazines, movies and TV is really so 'original'. It would be more original if the opera forced the audience to be naked while the performers were clothed. But true originality and boldness always escapes the vapid modern culture of our time that seeks base originality and fake 'boundary breaking' in order to make us believe that we are intellectuals. But you can't get away from the nudity. Every book of art and photography is full of it. Every art school has nude models, almost all women of course. And why are they all women? Would not sketching a nude man develop the artist as much as sketching some $10 an hour female college student who poses for this 'art'. We know, in our hearts, why it is only women. Because all the quest for the 'breaking of boundaries' and 'originality' and 'art' is a lie. It is a lie because it is primarily only about a society in which a woman's only way of 'expressing herself' is to be nude. And we create this make believe whereby this is some 'value' which we must fight for lest Islam deny our women this 'right'. The banal society of 'open minded' women 'expressing themselves' by being naked has infected everyone to such an extent that there are few women in any professions who don't feel that in the end their real value must be in posing for people to look at them nude. Whether it is the Australian women's national soccer team, which posed for a nude calendar, or Amanda Beard, the U.S Olympic swimmer who said, after winning her Olympic medal and deciding to pose nude, that the offer to pose nude was the 'high point' in her life. Or all the movies glorifying the 'independence' and 'originality' of some strip tease, whether it was the film 'Striptease', or 'Closer' or 'Showgirls' or 'Dancing at the Blue Iguana' or 'Mrs. Henderson presents'. Because in our society a woman who achieves a gold medal, well that’s not so important, but if she can be in Playboy, or perhaps be a model, that is the high point in her life. Of course it is. What else would one expect from a 'feminist' society? But how did Israel try to convince people that it was a 'cool' country a year or so ago? It took a bunch of its female IDF soldiers and let them volunteer to pose partially nude for Maxim magazine. Because that is the message that needs to be sent to female soldiers: being a soldier is not an important job, but if you can show off your body for men, now that’s an important job.

That’s our liberal society. It’s the society we are all so proud of. But what is there to be proud of? A fake society of people who convince themselves that nudity in opera is 'breaking boundaries' and that skating nude is some form of 'expression' and the being a stripper is a form of 'independence' and that posing nude for Playboy is a higher calling than the Olympics or being on the national soccer team. And its all in the form of smarmy people calling it 'original' and 'brave' and 'bold' and 'sensational'. But its not sensational. Its not sensational at all. Every halfway decent looking woman in America has been photographed nude somewhere, most likely on spring break, dancing in a wet t-shirt contest for a free T-shirt. There is nothing original in any of it. It would be original if a woman could go through her life without being an exhibitionist and without convincing herself that she is 'breaking' some 'boundary' by being nude and stripping on a bar for a bunch of drunk men. After all, the only real test of all of it is to ask, 'do men do it?' If the answer is no then there is nothing original in a woman doing it. And don't say its because the males lack good bodies, because there is no doubt that Michael Phelps has as sculpted a body as Ms. Beard, the only difference is that he doesn't see his highest point in life as posing nude for a bunch of salivating men and women. Imagine what we would say, and how we would laugh, if Mr. Phelps was asked to pose nude for a gay men's magazine and he described this as being his proudest moment in his life. And then imagine why we didn't have the same disbelief at Ms. Beard's statement and all the baggage and idiocy it carries with it for women in the West.




Addicted
Seth J. Frantzman
September 8th, 2008

The world suffers from an addiction. It is an addiction to Semites. Not all Semites. Just those Semites called ‘Israelis and Palestinians’. The Economist and the BBC are two good bellweathers of this addiction. They are both read throughout the world and both present international coverage. For the September 6th edition of the Economist if one examines the coverage of the Middle East and Africa (an area with some 60 countries) one finds that two of the stories, out of five, are about Israel and the West Bank. One is about how Israel is trying to court tourists through presenting itself “hip, cool, cultured, fun and creative.’ Then it is time for ‘The Villagers hemmed in: The Israelis secruity barrier continues to threaten Palestinian livelihoods.’ But, lest one were to think that Israel only shows up under reporting about the region it exists in, we find that in the book review section there is also a review of a book about Israel and Iran. Week in and week out it is the same story. Book reviews are more often then not about Israel and the Palestinians, whether it is another Palestinian memoir, or a book about the ‘ruined’ landscape of Palestine or ‘Israeli fiction’, Israel and the Palestinians are always there. A whole world of books must be pushed aside so that the addiction can be met, just as someone will sell their house and throw away their fammily for their addiction to heroin or cocaine. In the ‘Middle East and Africa’ section genocides and famines are ignored so that people can learn about the plight of one homosexual Palestinian who can’t come to Israel or a few Gaza students who can’t leave to study in the U.S. On August 9th it was ‘Israel: Gang warfare, in the courts’ and a story on which American president would be best for the ‘Arab’ which is to say ‘Palestinians.’ On August 30th it was “The Gaza Strip: Ceasefire plus blockade.’

The addiction manifests itself in the same manner on the BBC. The BBC not only reports the most minor incidents that take place in Israel and the Palestinian areas but manages to report the most insugnificant things about Palestinians elsewhere. For instance, while millions of Iraqis struggle for daily subsistence, we must learn that Iceland is taking in a few Palestinian refugee families from Iraq (“Iraq Palestinians head to Iceland: 30 Palestinians living in…”. That’s surely more important than all of Iraq. And on September 7th there were two photo essays on Palestinians. One on Palestinian schools in East Jerusalem (“when it comes to education, East Jerusalem remains a class apart.”) and another on one Palestinian’s journey from his home in Ramallah to the Temple Mount to pray for Ramadan. Surely his journey is more interesting than some Muslim African who has come all the way from Zanzibar. And surely those four schools in East Jerusalem are more important than the million other schools scattered throughout the Middle East. But the next day, September 8th, the photo essay was on, what a surprise, ‘Soldiering on: Mahmud Abbas on the frustrations of seeking Peace.’ And on September 10th what is the story on the side of the BBC webpage, the feature? ‘US Artiste says he was made to dance at Israeli airport.’ But that is what addiction does. The drug becomes everything and the world around the drug addict slowly fades away. Everything becomes about the next high and how one will get there.

The fact that the international sections of most newspapers and news programs, especially when it comes to the Middle East, tell only the story of Israel and the Palestinians shows the degree to which the West is truly addicted to this story. It needs its daily dose of it. Even when there is no news the teams of reporters stationed in Jerusalem as sent to find or manufacture a story. They find a few Arabs living in a house somewhere and create some story about them. They tramp out to the West Bank and find some bedouins in a hovel and create a story. Everyday the addict must find his high, he needs his fix, and in today’s western world that fix is called ‘Israel and the Palestinians’.

But how does one stop an addiction? What is the cure? Lest man overdose from his obsession with these people in the Middle East, he should first try to quit. The way to quit an addiction is to go cold turkey, to stop entirely. One must wake up and read the Economist and the BBC and not find any stories about the ‘conflict’ or the ‘Palestinians’ or ‘Israel’. Surely it will be hard for a few days because the media doesn’t know how to report about other places. But the media might discover that there are hundreds of millions of people out there that have been ignored, because the addiction has made it so man cannot see them. Addicts who come out of their addiction speak of that first time walking down the street without being high and seeing the beauty of the world. That world, so often ignored, can be seen again by the media. Will the readers miss the stories about that single Palestinian homosexual or those three Gaza students or that one Jerusalemite Arab family being evicted. Yes, they too will miss the addiction, the need to find fault in a country so far away at the expense of the injustices taking place around them daily. It will be hardest in Europe where a generation has been raised on the addiction, sort of like children of women addicted to crack. This generation of Europeans knows only about the lives of those two Palestinian students or that one homosexual Palestinian in Ramallah, they will be fascinated the first time they realize that right in their own backyard, in London or Paris, that, loe and behold, there are poor people denied visas to study abroad and people being evicted and homosexual men being beaten up because they live in a poor Muslim neighbourhood.

The greatest thing to see, if the world can cure itself of its addiction, is to see how people will pick up a newspaper and read a story about the injustice in their own society and realize that they have been addicted, for so long, to hearing about how evil another society is, that they have ignored the things that have festered beneath their very eyes.

Can the world and the media cure itself of its addiction? Can it provide coverage of the world and not include those words “Israel” and “the conflict” and “the Palestinians”? Can the media truly cut itself off from showing more and more pictures of ‘Arab children’ and ‘Palestinian women’ and ‘Mahmud, an elderly Palestinian man’? Probably the addiction cannot be beaten. It is so integral to our lives, so many have grown up with it, that it will probably be impossible to live without. It is the greatest drug known to mankind: ‘The Arab-Israeli conflict’.



Can Islam save the white man?
Seth J. Frantzman
September 8th, 2008

In the aftermath of the 1960s the white man has become a less than popular species. Whether it is the rise of feminism and African-American studies or post-colonialism, moral relativism and post-modernism the role of the white man in the West has been in a steady decline. From affirmitive action to multi-culturalism and diversity he is no longer the top of the roost. Whether it is critiques of ‘white privildge’ or the condemnation of history as ‘dead white men’ the role of the white man and his history and the Christian religion has been increasingly marginalized.

But is there a way to redeem the white man? Could Islam grant him a path to renewed dominance and approval? In a controversial episode that gained some media attention in 2007 there was a story of a Muslim mosque in Texas and how the local bigoted intolerant Christian white townspeople decided to start holding pig races near it. The controversy was that Muslims find pigs offensive. The television crew went down to Texas to find the victimized Muslims who were being discriminated against by intolerant white trash. They found the Muslim leader of the mosque. He was a convert. He was originally an overweight white redneck. But now he was a Muslim. He spoke with the same Texas twang. But now he had a 20 year old Morrocan wife who was completely obedient and covered up. He still enjoyed shooting his rifle. He apparently obstained from drinking but everything else in his life remained the same. Here was the overweight white hick, usually portrayed as a racist chauvinist, but now he had become the victim and a member of America’s Most Favored Minority (MFM), Islam.

It didn’t take him much. He said some simple declaration such as ‘La La Il Allah, Muhamed Resu Allah’ and he was suddenly a victim. Suddenly at airports if he was searched he was a victim. Suddenly if he wanted to marry a girl half his age it was part of his culture and if he wanted to marry a few women he was no longer a ‘Mormon polygamist’ but a wonderful exotic Muslim. Suddenly if he spoke like a chauvinist about women staying at home people listened and called it ‘culture’. Suddenly if he hated abortion he wasn’t a ‘right wing Republic fundamentalist’ but a man practicing his culture. Now if his wife averted her eyes and was never seen it was part of their culture and exotic tradition. Now this white man was a professional victim, an interesting wonderful minority whose values would be respected at his school if, for instance, he didn’t want the Holocaust or homosexuality taught to his children. Suddenly if he had faith and spoke about God people listened and wanted to learn more. Suddenly if he showed up at a dinner party hosted by wealthy liberals in the city he wasn’t an unwanted ‘racist’ but a wonderful exotic piece of diversity. But he hadn’t changed. He had just said a few words.

After the white man converts to Islam all those pieces of history that were formerly not interesting suddenly become interesting. While Jefferson’s slave owning might be reviled, if instead he wants to uphold the slave owning of his white ancestors in Arabia than it is exotic and wonderful. While if he wanted to relish in the story of slave traders bringing slaves from Ghana to the Americas in the 19th century he would be called ‘racist’, if he instead wanted to relish in the story of white Muslim slavers bringing Africans from Zanzibar to Yemen it would be called ‘fascinating’. Suddenly worshipping leaders who had multiple wives and were deeply religious was interesting. Suddenly telling heroic stories of battles wasn’t ‘militaristic’ but part of his culture and ‘tradition’. And if he was sort of racist, calling blacks ‘Kaffir’ or ‘Abd’ (slave) it wasn’t ‘racist’ but also part of his ‘culture’ because Kaffir means ‘infidel’ and everyone knows that there is no racism in Islam. If he supported the genocide in Darfur by the white Arabs suddenly it wasn’t racist because as every good liberal knows the conflict in Darfur isn’t about ‘race’, its about resources and its due to ‘global warming’. Suddenly if he supported the Aprtheid regimes in the Gulf Arab states where the countries are governed by a white Arab elite and immigrants make up the vast majority of the people and the labourers, it wasn’t considered Apartheid but a glittering wonder called ‘Dubai’, a respectable place to vacation. And if in his culture there was unequal distribution of wealth their was no critque by leftist socialists but it was held up instead as a success of ‘Arab socialism’. If women had no rights it was not a cause for feminism but a cause for celebration and feminists even donned headscarves out of respect for his ‘culture’. If he hated gays it wasn’t called ‘intolerance’ but instead it was called ‘cultural’. If he stoned women to death for adultery or cut off the heads of criminals it was also cultural. If he hated ‘witches’ and hit his children it was his ‘culture’. If he loved the death penalty it was applauded by leftists as part of his ‘culture’. Suddenly secular society wanted to help him celebrate his holidays which became the most interesting exotic things because they had names like Ramadan and Eid. Now instead of people scoffing at the miracles of Jesus they were interested in how the Jesus was a prophet. Suddenly his art, under the guise of Islamic art, and his civilization, under the guise of Islamic civilization were wonderful. Now imperialism was wonderful and when he regalled people with the tales of ‘Muslim Spain’ or the ‘Ottoman’ and ‘Mughal Empires,’ people were enthralled about the empire. Now when he called Jews ‘dogs’ it was part of his culture and people wanted to learn more.

The savior of the white race can be found in Islam. While the KKK is considered a terrorist organization so long as it calls itself Christian if it were to call itself ‘Al Jihad al Quds’ it could wear the same white hoods and have the same meetings and then its cross burning and bombings of black churches and lynchings would’nt be racist terrorism but rather a ‘militant’ Jihad and any attempt to suppress it would be said to lead to a ‘cycle of violence’ and be ‘playing into its hands’.

If you want to hate abortion and gays and have four wives and beat them and love slavery and imperialism there is nothing wrong with it so long as you call yourself Muslim. Its only a matter of time before affirmitive action is given to Muslims and unlike with making one’s skin black (a process that is near to impossible) the white man can easily take advantage of this affirmitive action. Whites found it hard to take advantage of becoming gay in order to gain victimhood and MFM status. Between 1990 and 2001 when the gay minority were supreme most whites felt that changing one’s sexual orientation was a hard bridge to cross just to become a victim in the eyes of the media. But the gays are old school now. They are has-beens. Who cares about the gays? Their ‘civil rights’ used to be very important and for a few years we all had to hear about their ‘struggle’ against oppression and learn the story of Matthew Shephard and ‘sexual orientation’ got written into those things one could not discriminate against and they were quite popular on campuses with ‘national coming out day’ and gay parades and ‘drag day’. But the era of the Gays is over. The era of the blacks is at an end as well. Since 2001 we have been living in the era of Islam. But this is all good news for the white man. He has weathered the storm. Forty years or so of learning about African-American rights, women’s rights and gay rights are at an end. Slavery, imperialism, child rape, wife-beating, chauvinism, the death penalty, religion. Its back! All you have to do is the following (from About.com):
Quietly, to yourself, make the intention to embrace Islam as your faith.
Say the following words with clarity of intention, firm faith and belief:
Say: "Ash-hadu an la ilaha Ill Allah." (I bear witness that there is no diety but Allah.)
Say: "Wa ash-hadu ana Muhammad ar-rasullallah." (And I bear witness that Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah.)
Take a shower, symbolically cleansing yourself of your past life.
Learn how to pray and practice Islam in your daily life.
Continue to learn, study, and grow in your new faith
So, white man, are you ready to become a minority again after all these years of being in the dog house? Are you ready for the wine drinking arrogant leftist to love you again? Are you ready for people to want to learn about your culture again? Are tired of being called a ‘hick, redneck, white, hillbilly racist?’ Do you want to hate black people and gays and abortion and have it be considered exotic and ‘cultural’? Do you want to blow up abortion clinics, gay bars and federal buildings and have people call you a ‘militant’? Do you want to hate the Jews and deny the Holocaust and have people love you for it?

Well pick up a gun, cover up your bible with the cover of a Koran and lets be Muslims! Now you can be a victim and your history can be revered and they won’t ever tell you about ‘white privildge’ again. Islam is the way for the white man, it is the path to his redemption.

The Jewish Charity: Helping Arabs
September 22nd, 2008
Seth J. Frantzman

Increasingly the Jewish charity has gone the way of all western charities: helping the other. It is no surprise that this has happaned, perhaps it is suprising it took so long. The primary concern of Jews, especially Jews living in the West, is to help the other. This idea of ‘Tikkun Olam’ has taken the form, especially since the Holocaust, of helping non-Jewish minorities throughout the world and making their causes a ‘Jewish cause’. The rational for this obsession with ‘the other’ is usually the idea that ‘since Jews suffered as a minority, we have a duty to help minorities.’ This mass psychosis primarily affects Jews (Greeks and Armenians living in their diasporas, by contrast, are not infected with this obsession to the same degree).

Causes to which Jews have attached themselves, such as the Civil Rights Movement in the U.S or the Sudanese genocide, have had nothing to do with Jews. But it was perhaps inevitable that Jewish charities would finally realize that the Jewish state, Israel, has minorities that need Jewish emotional attention. It has been argued elsewhere that this new ‘discovery’ of the Arab minority in Israel constitutes the discovery of New Jews, the creation of a Palestinian-Arab-Jew narrative. The basis of most Jewish causes has historically been about creating the idea in people’s minds that some minority group is ‘like the Jews.’ During the Rwandan genocide the Tutsis became the ‘Jews’. The Black minority in the U.S were the ‘Jews’ of the U.S and their discrimination was ‘the same’ as that suffered by Jews in Europe (even down to the claim that ‘since the blacks were slaves’ they are ‘like’ the Jewish slaves of Egypt.) The Sudanese genocide activists suddenly discover that there are ‘new Jews’ in the Sudan. The narrative that creates ‘Jews’ throughout the world is perhaps inevitable since there are no longer any Jewish minorities to defend. The Jews of Europe have become wealthy, assimilated and European. They are now considered ‘white’. When, from time to time, they suffer hate crimes they get some attention, but primarily they have become indistinguishable, so far as Jewish causes are concerned, from the rest of the Europeans. Jews used to be interested in the plight of Jews from Arab countries but these Jews no longer exist and the only thing that can be done is to read more books such as ‘Last Days of Babylon’ and ‘The Man in the white searskin suit’ and romantisize their lives.

So without Jewish minorities to defend in the world and with less and less people in the world who are candidates for being ‘the New Jews’ it is inevitable that the Arabs of Israel would become the ‘New Jews’. It is alarming the degree to which this thinking has penetrated every large Jewish charity. At the JDC headquarters in Jerusalem every other wall is festooned either with pictures of historic JDC operations, pictures of the most blond haired Ashkenazi Jews with some random Ethiopian Jew (the classic ‘coexistence photo), or Arabs. The only photos that depict modern ‘problems’ are the ones dealing with Arabs because besides the ‘coexistence’ photos the others are merely historic. The message is clear. The new Operation Magic Carpet, the New Russian Jews, the new Concentration Camp survivors that must be saved are the Arabs of Israel. There are the typical photos of the Arab women in their headscarves, since one might mistake photos of Arab men for Moroccan Jews, only photos of Arab women with headscarves convey that ‘I am a poor Arab victim, help me’ sensation. But the photos in the JDC HQ aren’t for outsiders to see, it is for local JDC workers to see and absorb. “The New Jews are the Palestinian Arab minority of Israel, they must be saved and it is our job, as Jews, who suffered as minorities in foreign lands, to save them.”

New Jewish charities devoted solely to Arabs pop up everyday. This isn’t about ‘Jews Against Israeli Apartheid’ charities or ‘Not in Our Name’ charities that aid Palestinian nationalism in the West Bank, this is about bonifide charities run by Jews for Arabs in Israel. The New Israel Fund and the Children of Abraham Foundation are the best examples. But what is even more surprising is the degree to which main stream Jewish organizations, councils, agencies, synagouges and think-tanks have decided that the “most important” issue facing the Jewish people and Israel is how to help the Israeli Arabs. It began a year ago with a trip by Jewish leaders to Israel to visit only Arab localities such as Umm El Fahm and to address only Arab issues. While one might have expected such bias from Europeans it was shocking to see it from Jews. That was followed by studies and speeches at places such as the Hartmann institute in Jerusalem claiming that Israel must find a ‘place’ for Arabs in its ‘culture’. This is part of the new rhetoric whereby cultural space is not developed by the culture itself but where the ‘majority’ culture must create the culture of the minority. It is part of the new dialectic of ‘dominant’ and ‘minority’ groups where the minority is seen as so pathetic and dependent that his culture must be created by the majority, it must be studied by the majority and in the end its entire ethos and history must be created by the majority. This was already the case in Israel where 90% of the scholarship devoted to Arabs was written by Jews and much of Palestinian history, especially the most extreme-Arab nationalist part of it, was already written by Jews. Now the message was that the Arab needed his special ‘space’ in society. Who must create the Arab space? Not the Arab, that would be too much to expect, after all he has already created a space for himself in 22 countries, so he does not have the strength to create space for himself in one more.

So on September 20th the Jewish Theological Seminary hosted a conference entitled "Why Israeli Arab issues are so important to Israel's future as a Jewish state." The conference was due to the decision by the Gilboa Regional Council of Israel to award the Gilboa Award for Tolerance and Co-Existence to the Inter-Agency Task Force, composed of 80 Diaspora organizations, including the JTS. A foolish gentile might not understand how this came to be. He might ask how it is possible that the most important issue for the one Jewish state was how to make it more Arab when there were already 22 Arab states. But gentiles don’t understand Jewish logic. So Arnold Eisen, the chancellor of JTS must explain it to them. He said on September 22nd, 2008: “The time has come for Israel to imagine a role in the Jewish state not only for Jews, but for non-Jews as well…I want a Zionism that does not depend on negation of the Diaspora, that is not messianic, that imagines a place for non-Jews in the Jewish state…Zionist theoreticians spoke mainly about Jews and I think that it is time to go beyond that in the name of a Jewish state, and create a role for minorities in the Jewish state…The more that Israeli Arabs see opportunities and see themselves integrated - not assimilated, not disappearing - in the workplace, in housing, in education, in services, the more they will be able to imagine a Jewish state that is more than just a Nakba [‘disaster’] for them….We would just like to help our Israeli brothers get out of the morass.”
See, the main message of Judaism is not about God or Jews or anything like that. Its ‘Tikkun Olam’ or ‘healing the world.’ The main message of Israel has nothing to do with Jews or Zionism, its about Arabs and Arab nationalism and making sure Arabs don’t assimilate. Its about making sure that the existence of a Jewish state isn’t a ‘disaster’ for them and in order to make them stop calling the existence of a Jewish state a ‘disaster’ that state must become Arab. Zionism shouldn’t be about creating a Jewish state (which is what the term actually means) but it should be about helping diaspora Jewry become stronger. Zionism shouldn’t speak about the Messiah because although this word is integral to Jewish tradition it should be thrown out because it implies that Jews might actually live in the land of Israel and that can’t make any sense once Zionism is about the Diaspora and Israel is an Arab state. Zionism, in fact, needs to be about making an Arab Nationalist state, or at least a state modeled on Lebanon, where all the communities are recognized, integrated and coexist.
One wonders what level of education a person must have in order to come up with such a complicated logic that reverses everything in it so that the opposite of what should be becomes the norm. We see this in other western narratives where ‘peace’ has become Nazism and ‘justice’ has become genocide but one might have expected at least a modicum of logic from the JTS. It is, after all, ‘conservative’ Judaism. But conservative can also mean liberal. Anything is possible (the more so now that the U.S Treasury Department in the U.S is on a drunken binge to buy every failing company in sight). So the main message of Zionism is Arabism. The most important issue for Israel is Arabs. The most important issue for Arabs is Arabs. Everything is in line. But perhaps Mr. Eisen is just confused. He said in the same speech, after describing his ‘Zionism’ as being a form of Arab Nationalism that: “I remember in the early days of the conflict my cousin in Afula had her car stoned on her way to work. And I was living in Palo Alto [in California] and no one was stoning my car. I was in a better position to imagine a scenario where Arabs and Jews can live peacefully together.” Perhaps he was driving in a different California, perhaps one in space, than everyone else. He couldn’t have avoided the fact that in 1992 there were the Los Angelos riots. And what year was there also the First Intifada? 1992. Hmmm. Perhaps Mr. Eisen neglected to notice that a few car windows were also smashed in those riots. So perhaps its time he take his head out of the sand and realize that in his own backyard is a big festering racial problem.
How come Jews are the only ones who see the main message of their national movement being to help the other, so that 13 million Jewish people must help 250 million, lest those 250 million and their 22 countries and their religion that has 1.3 billion adherents lose hope and suffer from an inferiority complex. How come the ‘most important issue facing Saudi Arabia’ isn’t its 2 million foreign workers and the ‘most important issue facing Egyptian Nationalism’ isn’t how to empower the Copts and the most important virtue of Islam isn’t ‘helping the world’? But there are Jews who don’t follow the line of reasoning of Eisen. They are called Orthodox which seems a better word for ‘conservative Judaism’ than conservative Judaism. Because Conservative Judaism today is really Arab Nationalism, sort of like European secularism is really Islam. What a wonderful world.

Terra Incognita 52 The need for racism, critique and Jewish self hate

Terra Incognita
Issue 52
“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”

A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel

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

September 15th, 2008

1) The need for racism: The idea of racism is so integral to America that one cannot live without it. Even as actual racism declines we find that discussing racism in society grows. Now America is being asked if it is ready to make up for the ‘original sin’ of slavery and finally elect a ‘black man’ president. America isn’t ready to elect a black man because Obama is not black and because electing him has nothing to do with erasing the sin of slavery, his ancestors are from Kenya, not Ghana. Anyone who confuses a West African state with one in East Africa and votes for Obama out of a desire to ‘erase the sin of slavery’ is as much a racist as those who will vote against Mr. Obama because he is ‘black’ and both do a great disservice to the black nation in America. Moreover the need for racism perpetuates not only the existence of organizations that ‘fight racism’ but also perpetuates the myth that any black person who succeeds in a marginal way can rest on his or her laurels of ‘overcoming great racist obstacles.’

2) The Culture of Critique: a Critique of Critique: When did the notion that ‘critique’ is an essential element of society come into vogue? Why is it considered such an integral part of society? We must dare to imagine a society where its greatest ‘intellectuals’ are not those who hate the very society that gives them the right to hate it. We must imagine a society whose ‘foundation’ not self hatred.

3) The Two Societies: John Edwards spoke of two societies, one of the wealthy and the other of the poor. But he missed the real two societies; the one who hates itself and gets wealthy off of critiquing itself and the other that must work to defend society and serve it and be responsible to it. This is no more clear than in the hatred that some academics have for the military and ‘militarization’. Whose sword do they think is responsible for their academic freedom? How many academics, after all, have ever given up their lives for that academic freedom that they use to bash the very society that grants it to them.

4) Pretentious and self important: In a recent article Lily Galilee claimed that Israel had created a ‘third front’ in the Russia-Georgia conflict. Roger Cohen demanded in a recent editorial in the New York Times that Jews stop ‘scaremongering’ about Barak Obama. Why is it those who hate Israel and the Jews also ascribe tremendous power to them. Moreover why is it Jews do this so often? Greeks who hate being Greek and hate Greece don’t ascribe tremendous power to a Greek lobby. Self-hating Germans don’t accuse Germany of creating a ‘third front’ in the war between Georgia and Russia. It is primarily a Jewish phenomenon whereby self-hating Jews believe Jews are all powerful. Is their manipulation merely part of their charade to get themselves noticed as “I am a Jew who critiques Jews” or is it part of a wider phenomenon?




The need for Racism
Seth J. Frantzman
August 27th, 2008

Roger Cohen's latest piece in the New York Times is entitled 'Out of Africa' and begins with his journey to Elmina in Ghana to see a former headquarters of the slave trade in West Africa. Cohen tells the readers that more American kids "should be wrested from their computer screens" to see this other side of American history. Then, Cohen tells us, they might ask about this election year "is America really ready to elect a black man?" This, Cohen tells us, is the 'historic' nature of the Obama candidacy. Cohen reminds us that Obama's 'color' "remains problematic" for "blue collar America." Cohen answers his own question at the end of his editorial. America is ready to elect a black man. Is Cohen kidding himself? He has indulged in the usual decision to play the race scientist with Mr. Obama. Ghana may very well have some meaning for many blacks in the U.S, those descendants of slaves. But Obama isn't one of these blacks. Obama is a descendant of a very free African Kenyan man who very freely met and produced off-spring with a very free American woman. Obama's black ancestors never even came to America. The only ancestors Obama has in the United States are whites. Is America ready to elect a black man? Cohen thinks that he is asking this about Obama. Cohen even thinks he can trick us into believing that Obama's 'color' is too much for middle America and thus any failure of Obama at the polls represents America's racism and the inability of America to 'elect a black man.' Its part of the classic charade that the Obama candidacy is built on. This charade is primarily one created by blacks and leftists. Leftist whites like Mr. Cohen feel good about themselves for supporting Obama. They claim they are 'breaking the glass ceiling' and that they are 'ready to elect a black man' as if this is some sort of badge of honour. But they have deluded themselves, to the extent that they are going to Ghana to see the slave pens and telling themselves that they are finally doing justice to those slaves by voting for Obama. Obama has no connection to slavery. Voting for him isn't redeeming America from her 'original sin' as Cohen terms it. The ridiculous assertion that Obama is black is one of the greatest charades ever foisted upon America. It is based on the false racism of liberalism that claims even the most minute amount of 'African-American ancestry' makes a person black. This racial science is not so far removed from the old racism of the 'three-fifths compromise' where three-fifths of the blacks of the South were counted as being full humans for the purposes of the U.S census. This old idea that the race of someone is determined based partly on skin color and partly on the fact that if a person has some percentage of non-white ancestry that they are immediately categorized as being 'non-white' is based on racial pseudo-science, only slightly removed from the 'Grandfather Laws' of Nazism. It is people like Mr. Cohen who may be ready to 'elect a black man' but can't seem to see past race to elect anyone, which in itself is as much a sin than not voting for someone based on their skin color. Some of the Native tribes have decided to do the opposite of the liberal. They have classified as Native-American only those who are one quarter or one half or more Native. Thus their racial logic is that some miniscule amount of Navajo or Apache blood isn't enough for tribal membership.

But the real question that should be posed to those like Mr. Cohen is: "If Obama were running for the presidency of Botswana would you ask 'is Botswana ready to elect a white man?" After all, when the situation is reversed, is Mr. Obama considered a white man in his home nation of Kenya? Its an interesting question. The current leader of Barbados, a bonifide populist and man of the people from the Barbados Democratic Party, is about as white as one can get and yet he has condemned his much darker skinned opponent of being a member of the 'party of the white man', the Barbados Labour Party. Maybe they've figured it out in Barbados. Its not the color of your skin, brother, it’s the content of your character.

But in general the problem is that Americans need racism. They need it because without it they cannot survive. The media and intellectuals need it. The poor need it. Blacks need it for without it they cannot make excuses about themselves and the 'obstacles' they supposedly are always 'overcoming'. Godfrey Mwakikagile of the NAACP is an expert on this need for racism. He cites the fact that "According to the National Opinion Research Center, a majority of white Americans still believe that blacks and Hispanics are less intelligent." (Asians think that white people are stupid, but for some reason that isn't keeping the white man down, or is it? Europeans think overweight white American tourists are dumb but I doubt anyone would describe this as a form of 'racism'). Mwakikagile claims "Although racism still is a serious problem in the United States today, it is not an insurmountable obstacle in all cases." This implies that generally speaking it is an 'insurmountable' obstacle. Roger Wilkins of the NAACP notes that "This is a racist society, and it will be for a long time to come." According to the United Church of Christ: "Racism permeates most of our institutions....(I don't suppose they meant this to imply that their church's institutions are racist, but rather that most institutions are racist)" According to renowned sociologist Dr. Kenneth B. Clark, "the United States will never rid itself of racism." Professor Harold Cruse, of the University of Michigan, shares the same view: "The United States cannot and never will solve the race problem unless Americans change the economic, political, cultural, and administrative social organization of this country in various sectors...." The United States seems to have achieved exactly what the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders "ominously
warned about following the sixties' riots: Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, and one white - separate and unequal....Race prejudice has shaped our history." In addition Mwakikagile notes "This relationship has been profoundly affected by what many blacks consider to be indifference towards their plight and wellbeing
in a white-dominated society which still remains racist; and sometimes outright hostility towards them by a [Republican] party that is seen as a bastion of white supremacy." In addition he asks " Is racism no longer a serious problem in the American society? Are race relations really that good, so good that racism no longer plays a major role in the lives of black people as many black conservatives contend?" This litany of claims describing the unending racism and insurmountable odds facing Blacks in America might make one wonder 'why do they stay in American when they could just go somewhere else where this obstacle would disappear?' But the truth is that Blacks have never wanted to leave America, especially the practitioners of the NAACP 'racism is everywhere' bogeyman because if leftist liberal blacks who thrive on racism left to a place like Africa they would no longer have the excuse of racism to describe the failures in their community and the support from whites like Mr. Cohen to indulge their fantasies of 'overcoming obstacles.'

The narrative that blacks and leftist liberal whites have created of a society where everything is racist and the black cannot ever escape his skin color is one that sets up most blacks to fail and sets up a small minority to make modest achievements and then claim they have 'succeeded' because they have 'overcome racism'. Without this ever- present racism the accomplishments of most blacks would pall in comparison to their percentage in society. But the 'society is racist' narrative allows for modest successes to be seen as 'great' achievements. The success of one black at some profession where blacks traditionally do not succeed, such as landing on the moon or becoming a college professor or a famous lawyer, is seen as some great achievement. Think of the success of Tiger Woods, Colon Powell or Barak Obama and consider the disproportionate cheering one hears about how they 'broke the glass ceiling'. Not that they have not achieved, they have, but the belief that they 'overcame great odds' to get there makes their success all the more profound. If we were to recall that all of them did not have the traditional 'African-American' upbringing and that all of them are children of mixed race ancestry we might pause and wonder 'is someone using half black people's achievements to tarnish an entire race?' Actually if we were to survey their achievements we would find that these were not the blacks who sat up late at night listening to the 'you can't get ahead' mantras of the NAACP. Their mixed upbringing certainly helped free them from the ghetto of 'America is a racist society with insurmountable obstacles.'

But there is something else to consider here. If people were to find that America was not racist then suddenly we wouldn't need organizations like the NAACP. Just as 'peace' organizations frequently support violence and hatred because they need it to create violence so as to justify their existence the race-complainers need racism in order to survive. Take away 'racism' and the wind comes out of their sails. There is no greater beneficiary of the 'America is a racist society and always will be' thesis than the NAACP and those that make a living describing how racist everything is. Mr. Mwakikagile would have a hard time of it in Africa because he wouldn't have anything to write about. Of course we know what he would write. He would claim that African countries can't succeed because of the evils of a 'racist' world and the 'legacy of colonialism'.

We need racism. It is the thing that keeps our society together. Without racism we wouldn't have all the clichés. We wouldn't have much to talk about in the media. We wouldn't have Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. How could we survive without the Rainbow Coalition? How could we survive without the census having to revise its definition to turn Hispanics into 'Black Hispanics' and 'White Hispanics' in order to preserve the old racial order of 'white' and 'black' so that a state like Arizona could still be comfortably white, rather than Hispanic. Thus we wouldn't be able to keep repeating the myth to ourselves that 'minorities can't get ahead, just look at the blacks'. Because if we admitted that Hispanics are a separate group than we might have to admit that they succeed at a faster rate than blacks (in all fields from college graduation to teen pregnancy rates to small business ownership) and we would have to conclude either that black failure is due to a culture of failure or that Hispanics have conspired with whites to keep blacks down (not a completely far fetched idea since most Hispanics are more racist than whites and Hispanics don't have 'white guilt', yet). Without racism we couldn't blame the complete breakdown in society and civilization that took place in New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina on 'racism', we might have to face the fact that it had more to do with the drunken Cajun swamp culture than it did with a racist hurricane. Society needs racism and it needs blacks. It needs blacks to such an extent that it creates black 'African-Americans' where they don't exist. Thus Barak Obama's story gets traced back to Ghana's slave coast, even though he's from Kenya. Obama's half white mocha skin becomes 'colorful' and we are asked if we are 'ready to elect a black man'. We aren’t ready to elect a black man because Obama isn't black. We aren’t ready to elect a black man because America is a deeply racist country where no black person can succeed and America will always be a racist country, after all, without racism who would we blame for all our problems? Who would want to believe that blacks are incarcerated at a massively high rate because they are disproportionately criminals due to living in cities (by contrast southern rural blacks are not incarcerated to such an extent) and that welfare has destroyed the black nation so that it lives off handouts, and that 70% of black children are born out of wedlock for reasons that have nothing to do with slavery. We need that racism. It is like a drug. Its an addiction. We need it because we couldn't live without it. Its not the actual racism we need. No one needs lynchings and hate crimes. It’s the idea of racism we need. We need the idea. We need it lurking behind every door and every corner. We need it seeping through the walls of every institution and every business. We can't live without it.



The Culture of Critique: a Critique of Critique
Seth J. Frantzman
September 5th, 2008

We have come to regard it as integral to our society and our culture. We have come to regard the existence of a class (nee caste) of professional critiquers as an essential and important part of our present democracy. Yet this was not always the way. People have led themselves to believe it was. People have come to view criticism as part of the democratic ethos but they have confused the criticism that takes place between different political parties and the free speech that ensures people may speak their minds, with the rise of a culture of critique, an institution of critique. This is not so different than what happened in Mexico with the rise of the PRI (Partido Revolutionary Institutional-Institutional Revolutional Party). The PRI was the party that arose after the Mexican revolution and Civil war in the first quarter of the 20th century. But once arisen it became the dominant political ethos, an institution of revolution. But there can be no institution of revolution. Revolution is not something that continues forever. Mao in China also tried to institute a continuing revolution and this led to the chaos of the Cultural Revolution and the destruction, through a loss of education, of an entire generation of Chinese. But where Mao actually attempted to create a second revolution and failed, the PRI became redundant and died the death it deserved at the hands of Vicente Fox, the first none PRI candidate to win the presidency of Mexico since the revolution.

We have come, in the democracy, to accept the idea that we must defend people’s right to critique. The state has come to believe that it must even pay, through the public university system, for people to hate the very thing that they live under the protection of. Thus in departments of sociology throughout the U.S and elsewhere the academic who lives off the largesse trains generation after generation of students to walk in lockstep at the opportunity to critique their state. It is their ‘obligation’. As the sociologist says “social science without the state is useless, the state without social science is ruthless.” The implication is that the two things need eachother and cannot exist without eachother. In the animal world this is called a ‘symbiotic relationship’. Some examples of these relationships include oxpeckers and rhinoceroses and sharks and remora fish. But not all symbiotic relationships are beneficial to both parties. In the case of the remora fish they use the shark for transportation and protection and feed off food dropped by the shark. But the shark doesn’t gain anything in return. This type of relationship is called commensialism. The host gains nothing but is not hurt by the relationship. But there is another type of symbiotic relationship that is more pernicious. This is called parasitism. In this type of relationship one member is harmed while the other gains. However if the host were to die the parasite may also die so it is not necessarily in the parasites interest to kill the host, although sometimes this may be the result of a long term relationship. Sometimes parasitism can seem harmless. The cuckoo bird, for instance, deposits its eggs in the nests of other birds and uses them to raise the eggs. Flees are a form of parasite as is the cuscuta plant which lives on trees and benefits from them, slowly killing them. Accordingly “by debilitating the host plant, dodder (cuscuta) decreases the ability of plants to resist virus diseases, and dodder can also spread plant diseases from one host to another if it is attached to more than one plant.”
During the late 19th and into the 20th century there was a fad of applying biological terms to human behavior. The concept of the ‘symbiotic relationship’ was first used in 1879 by the German myscologist, Heinrich Anton de Bary. The word ‘antisemitism’ may have been used as early as 1860 but is generally dated from an 1873 use by Wilhelm Marr. It was not long before antisemites began to see Jews as ‘parasites’ living off the European ‘host’. During the first fifty years of the Soviet Union ‘Parasitism’ became a criminal offense. Those who ‘did not work’ were accused of being parasites. Usually this was applied to intellectuals who fell out of favor. The accusation that they ‘did no work’ was only partially true, given the fact that other Soviet intellectuals were applauded for doing correct work. Joseph Brodsky, a Soviet poet, was one of those sentenced as for being a ‘parasite’. But the term has also been applied by some economists, such as Milton Friedman, to classes of people that live off society through welfare, those ‘freeloaders’ who do not work and yet receive money from the state.

Those who love critique except the fact that they are in a symbiotic relationship with the state. But let us reconsider for a second the role of the critiquer in society. Let us step outside our preconceived view that ‘we need them’ and examine exactl what they are. We are often told that as a democratic society if we change too much to fight our enemies that we will ‘become like them’ and then we will have lost the war anyway. This is part of the ‘we must not change our way of life because if we do they have won’ mentality. Such was the mentality in Rome when the legions, primarily recruited from semi-barbarian tribes and working as mercenaries, were sent to the front so that the citizens could imbibe their spirits in peace. So we must examine the life of the critiquer and his role and ponder for a second the degree to which our society deserves to be preserved.

Shai Kremer is a Israeli-American. In 2006 he got an urgent call from Kathy Ryan, photo editor of The New York Times Magainze. He was in France, relaxing. She called him and asked if he would photograph the Lebanon war. He purchased a flak jacket, received $10,000 for a few weeks work (“the pay was double because after all I was sent on a mission to a high risk country”) and went to Israel. He was chosen for the job because he was a landscape photographer who had ‘worked’ for seven years photographing the Israel Defense Forces and its affect on the landscape. He had photographed such original scenes as footprints in the sand or a pretty landscape photographed from inside an ‘abandoned Syrian building’. The choice to send Kremer was predicated on the idea that “before the war 90 percent of the [Israeli] people were in favor of it [the war]. This is something psychotic. This is a society whose language is violence.” The final article was written by another Jew named Benranrd Henri-Levy entited ‘my views of Israel’ and a photo book was compiled entitled ‘Infected Landscape.’ Original photos were included such as a ‘flock of white birds’ which for Kremer “symbolize the Israelis flocking towards militarism and power.” Kremer believed “beauty is a critical tool…terror and beauty are, in fact, the same thing.” Kremer’s biography was one of one success after another, from the Camera Obscura school in Tel Aviv to the School of Visual Arts in New York and then it was on to exhibitions at the Art+Commerce agency and connections with prominent New York galleries such as those owned by Julie Saul and Robert Koch. He “earns his living from his creative work.” He sells his photos for $7,000 to $14,000. The Metropolitan Museum of Art has purchased one of his prints. Kremer’s works which present Israel as a Nazi-militaristic society have been purchased by, who would have guessed, the Israel Museum and Tel Aviv Museum because Jews have an insatiable apetite for art the portrays them as Nazis. He is the first Israeli to have the Metropolitan purchase one os his photos. Of course, he doesn’t like Israel and has earned his money and reputation through hating it and painting it as a Nazi society, but no matter, after all Einstein’s fame as a physicist surely reflects well on Germany despite the fact that he left it and gave up his citizenship. But Kremer is not finished yet. He notes that he enjos the “genre of photographing landscapes as a reflection of the bullying character of society.” But while Kremer finds that those in the country he hates, Israel, enjoy paying him $7,000 for a mundane photo that the U.S museums “have not been doing their job propertly in recent years” because there is “actually no demand for political works.” When Kremer began a project entitled “Arhcitecture of Fear” by taking photos of security arrangements in New York after 9/11, including newly erected concrete barriers, he found that the police asked him what he was doing so often that he gave up on the project. All he wanted to do was show how concrete barricades developed to prevnet car bombers having easy access to masses of people constituted an ‘architecture of fear.’ Kremer no longer believes in a “system that uses force as a method.” In Israel he sneaks into military bases, such as the Tze’elim base in the Negev, on the Sabbath when there is no training for create photographs that will show Israel at its worst. When he is stopped by the police he contrives a story about being in the IDF and how he was wounded and he had come as a photographer to ‘heal the wounds.’ Like every good Jew in Israel he has come to the ‘shocking’ conclusion that a village he visited in the Golan “artificial village that was built on an abandoned Arab village. It was already a rotten landscape and it makes me crazy I didn’t realize that [when I first visited it].” [Note: in point of fact the village he mentions was not an ‘abandoned Arab village’ despite the romantic connotations this narrative carries with it, but was a Syrian military base that was used by Israel as a training facility after its conquest in 1967. Its more romantic to imagine that it was ‘really’ an Arab village beforehand and that its refugees sit ‘just across the border’, seeing their former homes. Furthermore if Israel wanted to build an Arab village for training why would it build it on top of an existing abandoned Arab village? Would’nt it just use the former village?] Kremer is also interested in launching a new project to “photograph remains of past empires that once ruled Palestine…I want to show that violence does not work…people call me a Palestinian-that is part of the price I pay. [as opposed to the price others pay for his dull photos?]” Although Kremer lives off the photos he takes in Israel he notes that “you can’t make a living here from photography [although he seems to make quite a good living by selling pictures that tarnish Israel to wealthy Americans so they can discuss ‘violence and the landscape’]. Also my partner would not be prepared to raise a child in Israel-its too dangerous.”

Let us think about the journey of the Kremer and his caste. Born in one country. Leaves that country. Gets wealthy taking photos to show how evil his former country is. Lives in New York and whines about abandoned Arab villages in Israel, not noticing that New York was built on the land of the Deleware Indians who had some 80 settlement sites beneath what is now New York. But sometimes the wealth one gains from selling photos to make people hate one country can obscure the fact that the indignation one has at one place could also be true elsewhere. But its like the militarism of Israel. There are no photographers making a living by photographing ‘violence and the landscape’ in Egypt or Lebanon. That is because Arab Muslims don’t visit photo galleries and wax poetic about ‘art’ and ‘violence and the landscape’ and obscure notions such as flock of bird representing ‘people flocking towards power’. Or perhaps it is because Arab Muslims don’t see anything shameful about the military and power and they don’t therefore want to purchase photos that insult their military.

The life story of the professional critiquer can be seen through the story of Kremer. It is a story of wealth and privildge, of doing what one wants when they want and of having others listen to them and say ‘how profound.’ It is a story of hatred, for the whole basis of his work was his hiring by another professional critiquer for an assignment to show how ‘psychotic’ another society is. The life of the Kremer is about notions such as ‘violence is not the way’ and ‘power is not the way’. It is a vision of peace. It is a story about wanting to photograph and make fun of the affect of terror. Thus a concrete barrier intended to stop car bombs becomes a representative of ‘fear’ and Kremer wears a flak jacket at all times in a country he was born and grew up in, while the normal citizenry go around without such protection, and he, of course, could not raise children in a country he was born in because it is ‘too dangerous’. Too dangerous? Is that not a statement of ‘fear’. Perhaps it should be photographed. Of course Kremer doesn’t need a concrete barrier to protect him or security at his bus stop. He doesn’t ride buses. But he does wear his little flak jacket.

Every bit of the Kremer story drips with the culture of critique. The culture that laughs at those killed by terrorists and those who die in war. One of Kremer ‘original’ photos shows an Israel tank next to a cemetary. We understand the ‘deep’ symbolism that ‘operates on many levels’. A photo of a pile of dung next to a rifle might also convey a similar ‘deep message’. Photographs are only as ‘deep’ and ‘profound’ as bourgouise people find them. The culture of critique always speaks about ‘peace’ and ‘militarism’. It always lives off society, becomes wealthy from the very thing it hates. It is odd that the very nation that Mr. Kremer thinks is ‘flocking’ towards militarism has such time to purchase his photos and place them in museums. With all the militarism and the ‘culture of fear’ where is the time for visiting the museum and paying $7,000 for a picture. Did the Spartans have museums? Of course that is part of the charade of calling a culture ‘militaristic’. The very fact that the Kremer exists and that he wanders around a country taking pictures that he will later sell back to it in order to convey how evil it is shows that his very premise is wrong. But no matter. Part of the culture of critique has nothing to do with reality. It has everything to do with critique and making outlandish grandiose ‘profound’ statements and having others ponder them.

Can one step outside our culture and wonder why we have to have the critique. Why does society have to have the critique? We claim that it is integral to our society. But is it? Is it really integral that in the U.S and Israel the lower classes are expected to shoulder the burden of fighting so that wealthy bourgouise people who do not work can sit around at art galleries and declare how their society is ‘militaristic’ and has an ‘archicture of fear’. The very same bourgouise who make sure their communities are gated and guarded and the same ones who go shopping at stores with security and keep their substantial financial resources in banks with security are, of course, the ones who condemn the ‘architecture of fear’. The very people who complain about a ‘psychotic culture of militarism’ are the very same ones who need the military to protect their wealthy way of life, their life of critique. Take the example of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, perched overlooking the Old City of Jerusalem in the midst of Arab East Jerusalem. For years the hallowed halls of the University complained about the ‘Nazi like’ nature of the state that paid for its to exist. When, in 1948, Arabs murdered dozens of employees of the nearby Hadassah hospital who was it that died defending them? It was, of course, the very military that the professors condemn. And as the soldiers lay dying the professors, safe behind the military’s barbed wire and sandbags, went on with its vitriolic hatred of the sate. In July of 2002 a terrorist blew up a bomb at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, killing nine students. Of course the very professors, such as Baruch Kimmerling, who accused Israel of genocide [in his terms, ‘Politicide’] against the Palestinians, was unscathed by the attack, enjoying the salary given him by the very ‘nazi’ government he hated. In order to ensure the continued safety of the students and the faculty the University set up an elaborate network of security check to prevent another attack. And what was the reaction of the academics. Dr. Guy Steclov complained that the local Arabs from a nearby village could no longer access the banks at the university. Others claimed the university was being ‘militarized’.

Why does society have to have the caste of critiquers? Why does it need them? They have become institutional and we can’t imagine living without them. But we could live without them. We don’t have to have museums and universities. We don’t have to have art galleries. We don’t need coffee houses. We don’t need any of the things that the culture of critique uses in order to cast aspersions on society. What does the culture of critique do after it has so critiqued society that the society wilts and dies? After the culture of critique was done eating away at the Weimer Republic from the inside, condemning it for everything, and the rise of Nazism resulted, where did the wealthy critiquers go. They fled. They waited and let other young men go and die from foreign countries, go and fight the Nazi menace, and then when it was over they went back to Germany or they remained abroad. The critiquers and all the others went on with their lives. They had helped bring about the destruction of Wiemer through their endless complaining about it and when it died they did not reap what they had sown, they used their ample resources to flee.

Will their come a time when they can no longer flee? Will there come a time when the Kremers of the world can no longer flee from their birth country to another country once they are finished scurging their own country? One of the added benefits of the victory of Islam in the world will be the end of the notion that society needs critique. While there are many terrible things that will result from the victory of Islam, it is clear that one of its benefits will be that there will no longer exist a society where one half of the society must go and fight and die and work to secure and make safe the other half of society. Roger Cohen writes in his September 3rd column for the New York Times ‘How Home became a Homeland.’ He notes, “but, its good to be home even if it’s a ‘homeland’ now.” Those like Mr. Cohen, another member of the caste of Critique, object to the term homeland because as a wealthy bourgouise urban dweller they can’t imagine what a homeland would be because they don’t have one. For them there is no home worth defending, no small stretch of grass, no small hilloc, no tree, worth fighting for. There are always other houses and other grassy patches and trees. One need not be attached to one. When danger arrives one simply moves on and critiques those who stayed and claims they are ‘militaristic’ and ‘living in an architecture of fear’. Others die so that the Caste of Critique can have its freedom and it is this caste that drills into our head the notion that they are an integral part of society and they train us in our universities to believe that critque is an essential part of culture, because they need us to buy into their culture of critique, both with our wallets so they can become wealthy, and also with our tolerance of their hatred. But what if we woke up one day and refused to defend them. What if we woke up and said. No. You will fly at your own airports without the benefit of airport security. You will send your children to a school without any sort of security. The police will not answer the calls to your home or your gated community. Israel can do the same thing. It can stop wasting money and resources to protect the neighbourhoods, the wealthy ones, where those who critique congregate. Security should be reserved for those who want it and for those who sacrifice for it. A parasite tells the host that the host needs it. But very few symbiotic relationships are actually symbiotic, they don’t provide both lifeforms with life. One receives the benefit and the other does not. In our society the critiquers receive the benefit. The host does not. The host is full up with the poor and wretched who labour everyday at their security jobs and receive nothing but grief in return. So lay down your guns. Lay down your security wands. Walk away! The proffesors at the University think that the security is part of a culture of fear and that it might even be ‘racist’. So walk away. They don’t need the security. Mr. Roger Cohen doesn’t like his homeland. Then he doesn’t deserve it.

I am rather fond of my land, even if it something I have only fleetingly posessed in my life. Our modern culture has been infected with the notion that integral to our democracy is the need to have those within its umbrella that hate and deride it and scoff at those who protect it. Never in history have so many people lived in a society, enjoyed its benefits and at the same time hated those people called upon to defend that society. The same people who complain about security after 9/11 are the same ones who complain that the government should have prevented 9/11. Why? Why should the government have prevented it. Would’nt that be a rush to militarism? Would that constitute a culture of ‘fear’.

We must be willing to imagine a society that does not require, as part of its central ethos, the need to hate the very society that allows you to hate it. We need to imagine a society where the poorest members of society are not expected to go and die so that the wealthiest members of society may enjoy the privildge to hate that society and scoff at those ‘militaristic’ people called on to defend it. John Edwards spoke of two Americas. He was right. There is an America made up of those who serve it and are responsible towards it. There is another America made up of those who hate it and use the security given them by the first ones to hate it. In the old days the wealthy bourgouise elites believed they literally grew out of the land. The nobles of England were England. There was no difference between State, land and man (nee nation). But todays elite is rootless. It has no attachment to state and land. It has an attachment only to critique. We live in a complete reverse of the previosu society. Today’s society expects the poor ‘salt of the earth’ to go and die for a cocuntry that they can berely appreciate, that gives them so little and of which they see so little, so that another caste can enjoy the entire country and enjoy all it has to offer and live off it, suck its blood, until there is no more and move on. A parasite is a small thing, such as a mite or a misquito. Man does not always squash it because man knows it will not kill him. But a million mosquito bites can kill him. The lumbering giant cannot reverse itself easily. But it can choose to do away with the parasite and smash it so that it never gets up. It is a choice our nations deserve to consider. We can live in a different world. We do not have to have an entire caste, a whole way of life, living in our midst, living off our society and yet condemning that society as evil. Every western democratic nation and those that aspire to be loved by the West suffer in this way. From Russia to Serbia to India and Europe, everywhere people want to be more western they equate it with having more hatred and critique for society. When the Arab Christians of British Mandatory Palestine decided that being more western was a goal the first thing they did was stop going to church and become Communists. There are no more Arab Christians now. Critique, self-hate and championing the cause of Islam and ‘socialism’ killed them, along with the low birthrates they also embraced. Who in India hates the existence of India the most? Not the Muslims but the wealthy Hindu intellectuals. Every single one condemns Hindu India and blames it for the terrorism that daily kills the poor of India. Safe in their houses in the wealthiest district it is Hindu intellectuals who champion the cause of Islamic terrorism and who spit on the graves of poor Hindus. Who can stand up to such a society? Who can stand up when the elite in society live of the society and help to murder the very society they live of? When man lives on his knees and his lord helps those who desire to violate him and murder him who does the peasant go to for protection? When his own lord deserts him and champions the cause of the bandits where does the peasant turn? He is expected to lay down and die so that his Lord can make profound statement about how “poverty creates terrorism.”


The Two Societies: the university and the security services
Seth J. Frantzman
September 8th, 2008

During the U.S Civil War 620,000 men were killed over a five year period. It was one of the most momentous struggles in American history. Many are familiar with the fact that during the Civil War the draft was instituted and that in the northern states it was possible for men of means to buy their way out of serving in the Federal army. In contrast in the American South the wealthy men of substance volunteered to fight and die. Many of us are familiar with the fact that wealthy men were able to avoid fighting and dying in the Civil War in this manner. We accept or we condemn this fact. But few of us are under the impression that these people who avoided service, and thus avoided risking their lives, are equal to those who served. In the aftermath of the war society rightly granted certain dispensations to those who had served and revered them as the heroes of their time.

Many are familiar with the 'greatest generation' that fought in the Second World War. This generation of Americans, like that of 1860, went to fight in a cause that was greater than themselves. Many did not return and even more that did return came home wounded. After the war the G.I. Bill provided these men with the ability to go to college. Thus society showed its thanks. Few people are under the impression that those that went to defeat Nazism and the Japanese Empire are equal to those who remained behind. Most concede, by calling it the 'greatest generation' that those who went were more important than those remained. Even General Marshal understood this when he desired to lead the Normandy invasion himself, acknowledging that his role at home, as the highest ranking military man next to FDR, was less than the actual commander leading, what Eisenhower termed, the 'Crusade in Europe.'

Today however our democratic societies have come to look on those in the military with contempt, hatred and disdain. Whether it is towns trying to forbid the military from recruiting or colleges doing the same or people spitting on soldiers, we have developed, since the 1960s, into a society that is suspicious and hateful towards the military. At home that contempt for those who bear arms is also directed at other pieces of authority, such as the police.

In other democracies the trend is similar. Gideon Levy, writing in Haaretz on September 8th, 2008 in 'The Shin Bet's academic freedom' condemns the fact that Israeli universities provide degrees to soldiers in uniform. He claims that the Hebrew University is ranked in the top 100 universities in the world precisely because its rector, Haim Rabinowitz, has recently cancelled a program that provides degrees to Shin bet (secret service) agents through a special study program. For Levy this means that soldiers are therefore subject to the "same laws as any other student." He condemns the "twisted thought process" that claims members of the security forces deserve "the right to special academic conditions." He points out the programs he condemns, such as a course at Haifa University that gives pilots a B.A after just a year of study. He compares these pilots to "cleansing staff who sweep out the lecture halls" and notes that they do not receive "special academic conditions." Levy calls it a 'curse' that soldiers have received these special rights. He says "the idea that members of the security forces are entitled to more-not just exaggerated and scandalous pay, discounts for those in uniform at steak houses, but also at the ivory towers. They don't deserve special treatment." He scoffs at the idea of soldiers at the university rubbing "shoulders with an environment that is generally very foreign to them: the intellectual milieu…they will read and write and-who knows-maybe they will also think and ask questions. The experience will surely broaden their horizons, which sometimes resemble the narrow barracks in which they serve." Levy calls for "no separate groups with special conditions and most of all no shortened programs…the universities must not allow themselves to be conscripted into safe guarding Israel's security…it contradicts their academic and intellectual existence…a civil society striving for economic and intellectual growth must be weaned from its worship of those in uniform…[to the military:] your contribution is no more important than that of other members of the population."

When Levy compares the men in uniform to the cleaning staff and notes that the university should not be 'conscripted' into providing any special programs for the military and its veterans he seems to forget two essential things. The cleaning staff do not risk their lives everyday when they come to work. It reminds me of the scene in The Right Stuff when the wife of a test pilot talks about her girlfriends whose husband's work on wallstreet, "how they would've felt if every time their husband went in to make a deal, there was a one in four chance he wouldn't come out of that meeting." Mr. Levy also misses a second point: who does he think defends the ivory tower and his own right to write what he pleases? When people speak of the idea that the military contradicts "academic and intellectual existence" they seem to forget that in all cases in the world it has been force of arms that have allowed for this academic and intellectual existence. When people speak of a "civil society [that] must be weaned from its worship of the uniform" they forget that it is the uniformed men and women who stand at the frontiers guaranteeing that civil society. When the frontiers collapse, as they did in the Roman Empire or in ancient Greece and the military units evaporate, who guarantees the security of the ivory tower? The ivory tower is not merely a metaphor for the university. It is also the very idea of the gilded halls where the men in ancient times met to discuss philosophy and science. But when there were no more men left to defend those institutions these philosophers were swept away as well and all that was left was the ruins, the columns and marble arches, with no civil society and no learned men and women.

A society that hates the men under arms and makes sport of them and jeers at them as if they are foolish thugs, and refuses to give them any benefits for risking their lives will one day find that those men and women in the armed services no longer want to serve. If the men had returned from the Second World War to a society that had contempt for them and spat on them and refused to give them the G.I Bill so that they could receive a top level education after having fought for their country, would they have been productive members of society? What kind of America would it have been if the 9 million men who returned from the war had been cast aside like a dustbin, left uneducated and told that they might have a job sweeping the streets. Would that 'greatest generation' that had liberated the people of Europe taken kindly to an intellectual society that despised them so?

John Edwards spoke of 'two Americas' during his campaign for the U.S presidency, the wealthy one and the poor one. But he missed something. In Israel there is a similar matter of 'two Israels'. There is the Israel that does its duty and receives little pay for years of national service and expects that at some point it will receive the meekest of rewards. There is also the Israel that condemns and hates the other Israel, the Israel that scoffs at them, calls them narrow minded and declares that all in society should be equal. But equality under the law is different from equality before the state's institutions. When the state calls upon its men and women to serve, and if needs be die, those called upon deserve recompense from the state. If that comes in the form of discounts and decent pay and a good education at a top ranked university that is only fair. To claim that the university owes them nothing, to claim that the ivory tower exists in a vacuum may sound nice today, but one day that vacuum may be rudely punctured, as it was by the July 2002 terrorist attack at Hebrew university. Then suddenly the civil society begs for protection. Perhaps one day it will find that the 'other Israel' it has so often critiqued and cast into the dustbin will no longer provide that protection. Then perhaps the university will no longer be 'conscripted' to the uniform and will be fully weaned from the security services. But like a baby weaned and left without the protection of the mother and the father, where will the child seek protection in a brutish world? Who will it conscript to defend itself? Will Gideon Levy man the security check at the entrance to Hebrew University? Will the Arab students at Hebrew University who glory in their right to wear a khaffiya to class, and pray in a special area and pass out anti-Israel fliers from a booth defend the university? Who will strap on the shield and risk his life? We are not all equal members of society and we do not all obey the same laws. Some are called upon to risk all by the state and others are not. To pretend that the two are the same is to do the greatest injustice to those who paid the ultimate price and never even had the chance at a university education, let alone one that allowed them to protect, serve and be educated at the same time.


Pretentious and self important
Seth J. Frantzman
September 4th, 2008

In an article published in late August 2008, Lily Galilee, the self appointed writer on Russian affairs in Israel, wrote in 'Clumsiness in the Caucuses' in Haaretz that Israel had needlessly inserted herself into the Russian-Georgian war and she asked "the question is, why does Israel have to turn itself into a third side [in the conflict]?" As evidence that Israel created a 'third side' to the conflict Ms. Galilee describes attempts by the Kadima political party to strike up a relationship with Putin's political party. Galilee writes that "this was only a specific case of clumsy Israeli machinations in a complex geopolitical situation." She discusses how Israel helped trained the Georgian army and how Israel was using a "double standard, one completely different than that used in judging America" in regards to Russia, although she can't seem to explain to the readers what the 'double standard' is. Next she claims that because a few Russian speaking members of the Israeli Knesset also belong to the World Congress of Russian Jewry (WCRJ) and that when that Congress issued a statement condemning Georgia's 'genocide' that therefore the Russian speaking Israeli Knesset members were caught in a 'conflict of interest'. Galilee asks "does the Knesset really believe the Georgians committed genocide?" Galilee concludes by noting "there is a bit of confusion here, which results from both loftiness and clumsiness."

This article serves as a reminder of the way in which the actions of a few Jews often are interpreted as being part of the actions of the entire Jewish community. But while many would say such connections often involve 'anti-Semitism' the actual fact of the matter is that more often than not it is actually Jews who make outlandish connections between a few of their brethren and the actions of the whole nation. Lily Galilee is a Jew and an intellectual Jew at that. She claims to understand Russian Jewry and its diaspora in Israel. She writes on it weekly so she must have some idea what she is talking about. Yet let us return to the article. Israelis did help train some units of the Georgian army. These were private Israeli contractors who were hired by Georgia, and the IDF approved them going to Georgia. But this is not exactly the same as saying Israel dispatched a military mission to Georgia and trained its entire army, unit by unit. Next we hear that Israel is meddling in Russia because one Israeli political party, Kadima, reached out to Putin's party in an attempt to win over Russian Jewish voters in Israel. This hardly constitutes Israeli policy. Then Galilee describes how the WCRJ made a statement supporting Russia and she then condemns the Russian speaking members of the Israeli Knesset for belonging to this organization and then makes the connection that therefore the entire Knesset must have supported the state of the WCRJ. She thus takes the statement of one prominent Russian Jew and then connecting him to a few Jews in Israel claims the entire Knesset supports that statement. That’s three degrees of separation all rolled into one.

But Galilee's attempt to claim that Israel created a 'third side' in the conflict between Russia and Georgia says everything about the odd Jewish trait of creating the most outlandish assertions about the importance of Jews and Jewish actions from the most simple, and often unrelated, events. Could it happen anywhere else? Would a leftist journalist in Greece or Pakistan have created some giant complicated, ill-formed, idea that their countries represented a 'third side' in the war between Russia and Georgia and then claim that their country and its people were wrong for doing so? Leftist anti-Israeli Jews such as Lily Galilee need to create these complicated conspiratorial views in order to condemn their own people, the Jews, in a similar manner as anti-semites do, ascribing all sort of power to a small group of individuals. But what is most astonishing is the degree to which this kind of high rhetoric claiming that 'the Jews' have all sorts of importance is found so often among Jews and especially among those Jews who want to critique their own people. Nothing would make leftist anti-Israel Jews more happy than to come up with some conflated worldview that claims the Russia-Georgia war was somehow started by Israel and that perhaps the American neo-cons, who everyone knows are Jewish, were involved as well and perhaps AIPAC was too. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion might have been a Tsarist forgery but if they had to be re-written today there is no doubt who would write them, a Jew.

Why does it happen? Why do those who are Jewish by ancestry, but not by belief or attachment, create strange hyperbolic views of their own people, ascribing all sorts of power to them so long as that power is nefarious. Do Greeks who hate being Greek create worldviews that have a 'Greek Lobby' controlling governments throughout the world?

In a February 11th, 2008 article in the New York Times entitled 'No Manchurian Candidate', Roger Cohen, a Jew, wrote that "Jews should get over the scaremongering: Obama is no Manchurian. Nor is he blind to
the fact that backing Israel is not enough if such U.S. backing provides carte blanche for the subjugation of another people." In his article he writes that the Jews, and particularly pro-Israel Jews, are wrong to question Obama's support of Israel. The Jews are "scaremongering" and the Jews are wrong to do so. One could understand if this were printed in the Phoenix Jewish News or some other marginal local Jewish paper or perhaps published in some local synagogues broadsheet. But why was this in the New York Times? Is it because the old anti-semitic adage is true, that it is the 'Jew York Times'? No. Its not because the Times is read by Jews or that it is run by Jews. It is because Roger Cohen, who evidently is not a great fan of his people or of Israel, thinks the Jews are extremely important and that if the Jews desert Obama than Obama will surely fail. After all, how can Obama become president if Jews, who make up only slightly more than 1% of the American population, don't vote for him? In fact what Cohen is asking, after admitting that "American Jews, particularly younger ones, are gravitating to Obama", is that right wing Jews stop "intimidating" Obama. Could anyone believe this narrative if it involved anyone else? If someone named Kazanzakis accused right wing Greeks of intimidating and scaremongering the Obama campaign would anyone really believe it and would it warrant being put in America's leading newspaper? The truth is that Mr. Cohen needs for his people, those he dislikes, to be of such great importance that they can be blamed for being involved in some nefarious machinations, much as they were in Georgia. That way the Jews are very important, in a bad way.

Why do they do it? Why do people like Lily Galilee and Roger Cohen, who have very little love for their own people, ascribe those people with all sorts of power? Why do they need there to be Jewish power in order for them to have something to complain about? Does it boil down to the fact that as Jews they know that they are perfectly placed to be paid by the media to critique Jews, and as Jews they can't be accused of anti-semitism, so they have found this niche in society and that by inflating the importance of Jews they therefore carve out a place for themselves in the intellectual world, as 'the Jew' who complains about Jews? This is usually how it begins. Whether it is Tony Judt or Noam Chomsky their essays on how evil Jews are is always prefaced by the notation that "As a Jew I feel it is my duty to confront my own people…"

Let them speak for themselves. Jacqueline Rose speaks to the Guardian about her new book, The Question of Zion and notes that it "draws tentative analogies between Israel's treatment of Palestinians and Nazi Germany's treatment of Jews" And why does Ms. Rose think that Israel is so important and that it is akin to Nazism in its threat to others? "I am Jewish and Israel/Palestine was part of my identity, growing up as the daughter of second-generation Holocaust survivors." As a Jew, Ms. Rose thinks that the Jews are incredibly important and they are therefore as important as one of the most important, at least in a negative way, movements of the 20th century, Nazism. So the Jews are the Nazis. Who else would be the Nazis? It couldn't be the Germans, since the Germans are no where near as important as the Jews. After all Germans make up the ancestry of some 30% or more of Americans and yet they don't seem to get editorials about their influence on his campaign in the New York Times or the role of Germany and its 80 million people in the Russia-Georgia war.

Jonathan Cook, who is not a Jew, has claimed on September 23rd, 2006 that "from the 'new anti-semitism' to nuclear Holocaust Israel is engineering the 'clash of civilizations'" He writes in the article that "The trajectory of a long-running campaign that gave birth this month to the preposterous all-party British parliamentary report into anti-Semitism in the UK can be traced back to intensive lobbying by the Israeli government that began more than four years ago, in early 2002." Where does this article appear? In the 'Radical press', a left wing organization, and at 'Counterpunch.org' home of the writers Noam Chomsky and Norman Finkelstein, both practitioners of 'it is my duty as a Jew.' But who else is a friend of Mr. Cook? None other than Jeff Halper, an American-born Israeli professor who wrote in the August 5th, 2008 edition of Counterpunch an article entitled "An Israeli Jew in Gaza." And why does Mr. Halper believe Jews are responsible for the 'Clash of civilizations' and 'the new anti-semitism'? Because "I, an Israeli Jew, felt compelled to join this voyage [to Gaza] to break the siege." See, Mr. Halper is a Jew.

Who else ascribes great powers to the Jews? There is Alan Hart, author of a biography of Arafat in 1984 entitled Terrorist or Peacemaker where he prefices the book with the statement calling on "the Jews" to give peace a chance. He speaks of the possibility of a "another great turning against the Jews." He claims, of course, like every good British leftist, to be against this. But on April 16th, 2007 he claimed in an article entitled 'If Alan Johnston [a BBC reporter kidnapped in Gaza by Palestinians and subsequently released after Hart wrote this] is dead, who, really, is responsible?' that "there is a case for saying that the party with the most to gain from Alan Johnston's disappearance was Israel. It would not be the first time that Israeli agents dressed up like Arabs to make a hit." But his most recent book Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, a book for peace, describes how the rise in anti-semitism is, of course, the fault of, who else, the Jews.

So when there was a conference entitled 'Against Zionism: Jewish Perspectives" Alan Hart was invited by his friends and the BBC to cover it. Prominent Jews were there to condemn the role of Israel in the world, including Israeli academic Uri Davis, Yacov Rabkin, Jeffrey Blankfort, Rabbi Ahron, Stanley Cohen, Les Levidow, John Rose, Roland Rance, Michael Warschawski and Rabbi Yisroel Dovid Weiss, all Jews. Afterword BBC coorespondent Alan Hart hosted the panel "Zionism; the Cancer at the heart of international affairs." The Socialist Worker was there to cover the proceedings, because there is nothing more socialist than calling something a 'cancer'. And who paid for the conference of Jews to condemn Zionism? The conference was supported by a number of organizations, including: Crescent International, Friends of al-Aqsa, Innovative Minds, Institute of Contemporary Islamic Thought, Islam Channel, Justice for Palestine Committee, Muslim Association of Britain, Muslim Directory, Muslim Weekly, Neturei Karta, Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign and The 1990 Trust.

There is nothing more popular for socialists and Islamists than to find Jews who will create some complicated all encompassing worldview where Jews play a central 'cancerous' role in international affairs. And there is not a short list of Jews happy to oblige the Muslims, the leftists and the Alan Harts. And each Jew begins his speech about the 'cancer' of Zionism which is at the 'center' of international affairs, with the proviso that "as a Jew."

Why do they do it? Why do Jews who hate themselves believe that the very thing they hate is so important, that it is of all encompassing importance, at one point running the world through a neo-con conspiracy, at the same time creating anti-semitism through its treatment of others, and also that it is, of course, similar in form to Nazism, Apartheid, the Crusades, the Inquisition, genocide, fascism and ethnic-cleansing.

This article would not be true to form if it were to claim that it is Jews who are primarily responsible for creating the hatred of Jews. They are not. Jews are best used as tools, as rhetorical devices, whether as themselves or by others, in order to fulfill the prophecy of others. Since non-Jews need there to be some sort of over-arching explanation for world events, because humans are naturally superstitious, the Jew plays that role. Some Jews are happy to play that role because they not only get wealthy playing it but they get to exaggerate not only their own importance but the importance of their people, the thing that they seem to hate and love at the same time.

]People speak of a coming Chinese Age when the world will be dominated by Asians. One can only hope that they will not be influenced by the same dementia that Islam and the West are and not have an inflated sense of Jewish importance in world affairs. What will all the Tony Judt's and Jeff Halpers do when no one cares that they are Jews anymore and no one needs them to come along as 'the Jew' in order to cloak the anti-semitism? What will the Lily Galilees and Roger Cohens do when there are no longer newspapers that want to print stories about a tiny insignificant people and people scoff at their notions that 'the Jews' are able to influence American elections and wars in Caucuses. The pretention to greatness. the obsession that Jews have with themselves and the need among those who hate Jews, but who nevertheless are Jewish, to constantly open every line at a cocktail party with 'as a Jew' will vanish. What will they do when the Chinaman says "what is a Jew?" That is, truly, the best retort to all this business of 'as a Jew'. "What is a Jew?" Can Roger Cohen and Lily Galilee tell us. Can Jonathan Cook and Alan Hart tell us. Can the Socialist Worker and the Institute of Contemporary Islamic Thought tell us. Can Tony Judt, Norman Finkjelstein and Noam Chomsky tell us. What is a Jew?

A Jew is an extremely important thing that is a cancer at the heart of world affairs, a Nazi, the creator of Aparthied, the instigator of the clash of civilization, the thing behind anti-semitism, the killer of Alan Johnston, and the controller of American foreign policy.

But what is anti-semitism and Nazism?

Anti-semitism is the hatred of the Jews and Nazism is the worst ideology in the world.

Why is Nazism the worst ideology in the world.

Because of the Holocaust.

What is the Holocaust?

It was the killing of 6 million Jews, which the Jews have tried, successfully, to dominate the narrative of and make into a specifically Jewish event and use as an excuse for a country

So the Jew is the Nazi and the creator of anti-semitism?

Yes.

So the Jew killed himself in the Holocaust using the very ideology that he himself created?

What, no, no, you've got it all wrong, the Jew kills the Palestinians like the Nazis did to the Jews because the Jew as a victim became the perpetrator, this is the great irony.

So if Nazism's greatest crime was to commit the Holocaust and the narrative of the Holocaust was subsequently taken over by the Jews and turned into a false Jewish narrative and then the Jews themselves became the Nazis and they create the anti-semitism, don't you see that the Jews are not really very important since they themselves have created this thing you condemn with such hyperbole? If they didn't really die in the Holocaust and it was subsequently hijacked by them then why do you, with the full knowledge of this Jewish conspiracy to use the Holocaust to gain sympathy, condemn the Jews as Nazis, since the only reason the Nazis are so nefarious is because of the false narrative of their Jew killing. And by claiming that you are a Jew and at the same time claiming that the main evil of the Holocaust was not the killing of the Jews, but the Jews themselves faked their own importance, then why should I care that you are a Jew.

But I'm a Jew and as a Jew I feel I must oppose the Jews.

But who cares about the Jews?

If only there were such a world where the leftist secular Jewish claim to fame was not 'as a Jew'.