Terra Incognita 51 'The Women's Issue'

Terra Incognita
Issue 51
“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”

A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel

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

September 7th, 2008

1) Unbelievable: The media and Sarah Palin: The reaction to John McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin as a running mate has been unbelievable. Maureen Dowd and Larry Derfner have been noting that she was not properly vetted and that women should give up their jobs to raise their children. Bill Maher has called her a ‘stewardess.’ It is as if the selection of a conservative woman to run for vice-president is so shocking that it turns leftists into conservatives, only conservative in the sense that they now think she should be at home with her children and that her ‘unwed teenage pregnant daughter’ is a great blot on American morals.

2) Of Sunglasses and Veils: Muslim woman, in their most extreme form, only show their eyes through a small slit in their veil. Western woman, in their most extreme form, frequently show most of their bodies except for their eyes, which they obscure with sunglasses. What comparison can be drawn from this? What does this say about the role of women in the West and women in Islamic societies and their perception of themselves and the way others perceive them?

3) Thoughts on the war on Islam: Two short paragraphs asking important questions about the struggle between the secular democracies and Islamism.

4) A woman in Gaza: Lauren Booth: Tony Blair’s sister-in-law is ‘stranded’ in the Gaza strip. She has been on all the international media complaining that her human rights are being violated. She demands that Israel, a country she hates, allow her transit through. Israel should demand that if it has to take in Lauren Booth, which it does not want, then Europe should take in all those boat loads of Africans who daily try to make it to Europe and end up ‘stranded’. A thousand of those Africans must surely be worth one Lauren Booth.








Unbelievable: The media and Sarah Palin
Seth J. Frantzman
September 3rd, 2008

The front page article of the New York Times for September 3rd read 'Palin revives battle over working mothers: with five children, can she do the job?' This insulting headline crowned a week of intense media scrutiny of John McCain's pick for his vice-presidential running mate. The coverage began with claims that she was inexperienced and therefore would de-fang the McCain claim that Barack was inexperienced. Then came the 'breaking news' that Palin's 17 year-old daughter was pregnant. This story received three of the 'top ten must read stories' at CNN.com on September 1st. CNN and the Times both asked if the McCain campaign had 'vetted' Mrs. Palin enough. Then came the 'news' that the Palin campaign had supposedly 'come forward' with the information about her daughter in order to stymie rumors that her recently born down-syndrome child was actually the child of her 17-year old daughter. Then there was Barack Obama's odd decision to claim that by managing his own campaign staff of over a thousand people he was actually more experienced than Mrs. Palin who, before she became governor of Alaska, had run a small town. Now we are hearing about how 'working moms' and 'soccer moms' and 'single mothers' are all being asked if Palin is up for the job, given the hard job of raising her five children. As the New York Times put it, "Hillary Rodham Clinton and Geraldine Ferraro ran for president and vice-president when their children were grown." The media has tried to portray its intense coverage of Palin's daughter's pregnancy by claiming that both Palin and McCain have fought against federal funding for teen pregnancy education and have favored abstinence education in schools, programs that supposedly have been shown to have no affect on rates of teen pregnancy. The insinuation seems to be that had McCain only supported some more federal largesse for 'teen pregnancy education' then Bristol Palin, the daughter of Sarah, might have used condoms when she had sex. Of course the media has also pointed out that since Sarah Palin is against abortion and is a conservative that Bristol will indeed need to have the child and get married, lest her mother be labeled a hypocrite. If Bristol were the daughter of, say John Edwards, then she could have aborted that fetus long ago and we would never have heard about it. So Bristol will pay for the Pro-life 'sins' of the mother.

But through all this no one has seemed to question why the 'news' about McCain's VP's daughter's pregnancy is newsworthy. Furthermore no one seems to have noticed a whole slew of other contradictions in the coverage. First of all there is the problem of the media blaming the supposed sins of the daughter on the mother. Since, in normal circumstances, it isn't news worthy that a 17 year old girl gets pregnant it must be news worthy because her mother is running for vice-president. But is the pregnancy of the daughter of a vice-presidential candidate really news? Not unless the implication is that somehow the mother is at fault or that somehow the pregnancy is 'immoral' because the girl in question is unmarried. In fact this is precisely how the 'progressive' media has portrayed the situation. From the Times to CNN we have heard that the girl in question is 'unmarried'. So this is the real sin. She's not a Muslim and she wasn't sold into married at 6 years old. If she were a Muslim, like Obama's ancestors, then we wouldn't be so concerned because she would only by following tradition? In the old days of American politics, in the 1950s and early 1960s, a number of male vice-presidential candidates were disqualified because they had been divorced. But when Edward Kennedy ran for the democratic nomination in 1980 the fact that he had been involved in the killing of a woman in 1969 didn't seem to be so problematic and when he spoke at the 2008 democratic convention this fact seemed to have disappeared completely.

What is most fascinating about the obsession with Mrs. Palin's daughter is the similar lack of interest in the family of Joe Biden (or John McCain for that matter). In truth the media's treatment of Biden's family has been more logical. Who cares about the family of the president? It was not so long ago in American politics that there used to be a truism: "There were two friends. One joined the navy and went to sea, the other became vice-president, neither were ever heard from again." Who recalls the vice-presidential candidate of Michael Dukakis or Bob Dole. Who was Jimmy Carter's vice-president? Who was Richard Nixon's first VP? When Barry Goldwater went down to defeat in 1964 who was the VP he had selected and who was LBJ's VP the same year? Not clear. Not clear because no one ever heard of them again. Today's vice-presidents have perhaps been more famous and notorious, whether it is Al Gore's globetrotting or Dick Cheney's antics, they don't seem to fade away. But the media seems to be alleging that Mrs. Palin needs to be ready to fill the presidential shoes at any moment, the way Dan Quayle and Geraldine Ferraro evidently were. Thus Mrs. Palin's experience has been held up against Barack Obama's as if she is, in fact, the nominee. Thus Obama wasted a speech claiming he had more experience than her and the governor of Hawaii claimed that Palin had more experience than Obama. But doesn't this say worse things about Obama than Palin? It seems to me that we are measuring the democratic presidential nominee against the Republican vice-presidential nominee. Why? If the idea is to average the ages of Biden and Obama and the experience of both of them and compare this to the averages of McCain and Palin than the media seems to be telling us that they are all equals. Obama is weak where Biden is strong and McCain is strong where Palin is weak. So if our presidency in the U.S worked the way the Roman army used to function, with two commander in chiefs who would switch command every other day, than this would be quite logical. Except that’s not how it works.

The vice-president is a marginal un-important character, usually a vote-getter from a single state who is added to the ticket to balance the nominee. In rare instances they get to fill the big man's shoes and from Milliard Filmore to Harry Truman, LBJ and Gerald Ford they have done a pretty good job. Although Ford replaced Nixon's original vice-president, Spiro Agnew, a former Baltimore mayor, who resigned his office in 1973 on charges of tax evasion and money laundering, having become the first Greek-American to rise that high in American politics only to prove why Americans have so often not elected Greeks to high level office.

What is the greatest mystery about the assault on Palin is the way in which traditionally heroically leftist things have now become the very things leftist harp on. Thus the whole mythology about the 'single working unwed working soccer mom', who was such a staple of leftist hysterics, the very model of the hard strong American woman, is now suddenly no longer so romantic, when it’s a conservative Republican anti-abortion gun owner who seems to embody these traits (except she's not single or unwed). So why does the New York Times ask us if she can 'do the job'? What job? The 'job' of vice-president. Being vice-president entails what exactly? The 'job' that is insinuated is evidently being president. But does the Times forget that Palin is not alone in this endeavor. Palin has a husband, does she not? But she is portrayed as if she were a single mother juggling five three year old children and a job. In fact the job she is interviewing for, vice-president, seems to be quite a break from being governor, a job she has handled pretty well with five children and having been pregnant. Its odd. The left is quite happy to celebrate 'working mothers' and 'stay at home dads', so long as they fit into some sort of Dickensian John Edwards 'other world' where they are poor and wretched. There seems to be an added insinuation with Palin that her down syndrome child will take too much time away from her duties. John Roberts of CNN noted that "The role of Vice President, it seems to me, would take up an awful lot of her time, and it raises the issue of how much time will she have to dedicate to her newborn child?" This is an interesting twist on the usual heroics we hear about families raising disabled children. Usually these families are painted as the paragons of greatness for taking on the hardships associated with mentally handicapped children. Now we hear from various sources that the down syndrome child is a real noose around the neck for Palin. Susan Reimer of the Baltimore Sun wrote on September 1st, 2008 that she was being "pandered to…you want to look good to evangelicals? Choose a running mate with a Down Syndrome child." Others have noted that in nine out of ten cases Down Syndrome children are simply aborted when the prospective mothers find out. Our society doesn't want those types of children, sort of like how people used to put inter-racial kids, like Mr. Obama, up for adoption.

So there we have it. Palin is an immoral mother because her daughter is pregnant out of wedlock. She is pandering to religious people by having Down Syndrome children. She can't possibly be vice-president because she has too many children and it would be best if she would stay at home with them. We have truly become an Islamic society, or at least our leftist-progressive side has. How exactly the rightist conservative elements in our society have ended up on the side of a female vice-president and her pregnant teenage daughter speaks volumes about the great changes that have taken place in the culture of American politics and will continue to take place as liberalism continues down its road to Islamification.

Then there has been the recent article by Larry Derfner in the Jerusalem Post in September 3rd, 2008 entitled ‘Rattling the Cage: Go Home Mrs. Palin’. Derfner is the Post’s token leftist whose articles generally support the Palestinians. But in this article he tells us all that Mrs. Palin is a lesson in the ‘equality of women’. He says it is not ‘the issue’ whether or not a woman can be as good a president as a man (recall, once again that Mrs. Palin was actually chosen for VP, not President) but that ‘child-rearing’ is the issue. He notes that ‘biology, evolution, pregnancy and childbirth just naturally make motherhood a bigger deal than fatherhood.’ So Mr. Derfner, the leftist, is out to give us a lesson in reproduction. Its odd that when the same Mr. Derfner writes about the lot of Haredi (religious) Jewish women that he is none too kind to their lifestyle where child-rearing and motherhood certainly go hand in hand. Derfner concludes by asking “And while she's doing [the job of Vice-president], who the hell is supposed to play mother to those two extraordinarily needy kids? Mr. Palin? Even if he were the best father in the world, he'd be completely out of his depth. Even if he were married to a woman who didn't work and could be with the kids full-time, he would still, by rights, be thinking about whether he could take time off his job to be at home with the family more. But I wouldn't expect him to quit his job when he's got a wife who can quit hers, as huge and important a job as hers may be.” This must be read again. It must be read again and again with the full knowledge of the narrative from whence this writer comes. He is from the ‘women’s equality’, ‘gay rights’, liberal narrative of society. And yet, on the issue of Mrs. Palin, he has become a chauvinist conservative, a real man ‘from the 1950s.’ What is one to make of it. Is the Republican choice of a woman so disturbing that it turns liberals into conservatives? Who would have guessed.
But Mr. Derfner is not the only one. In two columns Maureen Dowd, a consummate feminist and extreme-leftist writing for the New York Times also took up a similar tune. She describes the Palin family as a ‘soap opera’ (one created, by the way, by those who continue to care so much about something so un-important), and describes Mrs. Palin as ‘Trophy Vice’ and accuses her of being involved in a scandal called ‘Brocken-watergate’. She describes ‘titillating details’ spilling out of the Palins. And she wonders “how she [Palin] will juggle it all.” But Mrs. Dowd’s oddest insinuation is that McCain had sent the “vetters to Alaska afterward.” She notes later that “when you make a gimmicky pick of an unknown without proper vetting” you are bound to have to hold a press conference explaining the scandals. Dowd then protects herself from criticism by noting that “when you use sexism as an across-the-board shield for any legitimate question, you only hurt women.” But this writer isn’t whining sexism. This writer is simply wondering how Mrs. Dowd and all the other leftist-feminists suddenly came to talk about how women can’t ‘juggle it all’ and suddenly note that motherhood is more important than fatherhood and note that teen pregnancy and unwed mothers are somehow immoral. Afterall by claiming that McCain didn’t do ‘proper’ vetting Ms. Dowd is insinuating that having a teenage daughter who is pregnant should disqualify someone for the post of vice-president. Perhaps in the 1950s, or 1850s, but one wouldn’t expect that to be the case today. Would they? God forbid if Mrs. Palin had been divorced or if her own son was a ‘bastard’ child. Mrs. Dowd claims that these are ‘legitimate’ questions. But when did it become legitimate to assault someone and call them into judgment based on the actions of their children? And she’s only running for vice-president, unless everyone seems to have forgotten, a post normally wrapped in mystery and obscurity and which is rarely needed. And was Palin an ‘unknown’? She was well known in her own state, surely more well known than numerous other vice-presidential nominees. And if anyone had bothered to do some digging they would have realized that six months ago there was an attempt by ‘draft Sarah Palin’ supporters to get John McCain to notice her. The videos can still be seen on youtube.com.

If the Palins had truly wanted to preserve themselves from this nonsense they would have done what the Clinton's rightly did, tell the media that if they messed with their children that they would never have an interview again and that the media was out of place for daring to ask questions about the private lives of children. The Clintons despite all their transgressions and sleaze, did that one honorable thing. They made it very clear that while their personal lives might be torn apart and examined that the life of their daughter was not to be made light of. The media respected Chelsea's privacy. Why the media can't do the same for others is not clear.

In September of 2008, responding to the choice of Sarah Palin, Bill Maher, a TV show host did an impersonation; "I, John McCain, am the only one standing between the blood thirsty Al Qaidas and you, but if I die this stewardess [Mrs. Palin] can handle it." I've met John McCain and Mr. Maher is no John McCain.



Of Sunglasses and Veils
Seth J. Frantzman
September 1st, 2008

Why is it that western women cover their eyes through large black sunglasses but show off the rest of their bodies through low cut shirts and g-strings and yet the Muslim woman covers her entire body but only shows here eyes? Is it because our culture in the West considers the eyes immodest while Islam views the entire female body as immodest? No. The reason that western women cover their eyes with large sun-glasses, even when it is not sunny out, is because the eyes represent a glance at the soul and at thought. To look into someone’s eyes is to see what they are thinking and see their humanity. Secularism produces, in its most extreme form, inhumanity. This is why strippers, prostitutes and porn stars will all take off all their clothes but never look someone in the eye. The Western woman is primarily an object. All the talk of feminism about the ‘objectification’ of women is primarily a scam because since the rise of feminism one finds that every single magazine and television show directed at women is primarily directed at helping them become ‘better in bed’ and ‘how to please your man’ and ‘want to become America’s next top model’. Secular-feminism primarily creates a class of women who only care about how they look. The development of ‘eating disorders’ is directly linked to the liberation of women in the West and the rise of feminism. There were no ‘eating disorders’ in 1850. Women ate what they wanted and didn’t spend every meal pining over getting fat and staring at themselves in the mirror and complaining incessantly that ‘I am too fat’. Yet in the post-feminist secular world of the West every women, except for a very few, spend most of their time worrying about what clothes to wear and whether or not they are ‘too fat’. So while the women worships her body and judges her worth based on her appearance the only thing she dares cover up is her eyes, since it is the only thing left to cover up once her breasts and buttocks and belly and arms and legs are exposed for all to see. She covers up this last thing, the eyes, knowing that no male in society could possibly care what she thinks. It is why women, in conversation with men, typically try to make themselves seem stupid and flirtatious, because they know that in our modern society no man would ever want an educated woman.
But the Muslim woman, oddly enough, does the opposite, by default. Since her culture hates women and treats them like beasts of burden and turns them into large walking tents, the only thing that is left is a small slit for her eyes, although in some Muslim cultures even that must be obscured from view by a screen or mesh. The Muslim woman lives in a society where the men force her to wear an all black cloth covering her and that shows none of her shape, and the men then call her a ‘black moving object’ and owing to the fact that she is imprisoned either in the home or in her ‘black moving object’ the men in her society, the very ones that put her in this thing, then go about with foreign women, because the Islamic society encourages men to do and dress as they please while all obligations of morality are on the woman. Thus the women goes about as a large sack, in the hot of summer wearing layers upon heavy layers of clothing. In the Islamic society a women is a beast of burden, expected to carry around the children and the food and do the household chores and in the poorer countries, to do much of the manual labour, especially in the fields. The life of her male counterpart is primarily made up of sitting in coffeeshops and doing nothing, sort of like European male culture. But the Muslim woman needs her eyes to see, lest she stumble and fall down and roll down a hill, so she has a small slit for them, the only part of her humanity that is left, the only thing that allows one to know that beneath all that black linen there is a female human lurking, fifty percent of society. When one looks into the eyes of the Muslim women they get back the same blank stare that one gets from the sunglasses of the western woman. Thus the sunglasses may obscure that one piece of the western woman one may not see but in the same manner the Muslim woman who is permitted this tiny transgression of showing her eyes and eye-lashes, shows her bit of humanity, and yet in both cases there is very little humanity.
The Muslim woman, in her most extreme form, has a lot in life not so different than that of the Western woman. Both live in a man-centered world. The Muslim world is the slave of the male. Everything she does in life is for the man. She wakes before he does to make his food and she has his children and never speaks to other men for him and when he wants a nice young wife she is cast away and she accepts it. She raises his children and then she departs the world. The Greek men said of women “One lays with them only two times in life, when they lay them on the bed during the wedding night and when they lay them in their grave.” As in Egypt they say of the woman “she leaves the house only three times in life, to wed her husband, to see the funeral of her father and when she goes to the grave.’ Such the lot of the most extreme form of secularism, the Greek Athenian civilization and the most extreme form of religion, relegates the woman to a subsidiary, beast-like, role that gives her no interest in the world. The Greek males so hated and disdained the woman that they never spent time with them or saw them as human. The Muslim so despises the woman that he clothes her all black and then teases her for being a ‘black moving object’. Such is the Muslim way. Such is the Western way. The Western woman prunes and tears at her skin and all day worries about what men think of her, all day on display for the male, much as she wishes she could be as ‘America’s next top model’. For the highest career path in the western woman’s life is to be a model. What is a model? It is a walking clothes hanger, a thing that does not speak or think, but just goes back and forth so that others may examine it. The highest career path, and it is a career path that increasingly most western woman would put above all the others, is to be a beast, a thing, an object that moves. What does this remind us of? An object that moves is a western woman, a model. A black moving object is a Muslim woman. There is simply no substantial difference. Photographers think they are being original in places when they can capture the ‘contrast’ between the Muslim woman and the Western woman. They photograph some woman in Istanbul, all covered in black, next to a shop selling thongs on white mannequins and people look and they say ‘how original’. Intellectuals say ‘what a difference in cultures’. But there is no difference. Just because one moving object wears a black cloak and the other wears a black thong, just because one shows its eyes and the other obscures them, does not make them different. Each is a slave. Each is a slave to men and to an ideology, a culture that looks down upon the existence of half of humanity. Should one lay down his life for ‘America’s next top model’? Should one care to defend a culture that has rotted to such an extent that it has educated an entire generation of women to want to be moving objects, beasts that wear clothes so that men will find them appealing? No. Such a culture is not worth defending. It is such a culture that deserve only its own demise for it is such a traitor to its own stupid protestations and infantile claims about itself that it cannot be judged to deserve to exist. One cannot say that there is absolutely any reason to fight for the ‘freedom’ of western women. They are not free. They are docile, submissive creatures that no longer think and no longer value thought as a process integral to their lives. When Islamism takes over Europe one won’t see a substantial change in the European western woman. What difference does it make if Heidi Klum is wearing a black thong and going around topless or if she is wearing a burka. She is the same vacuous un-thinking person whose entire life is crafted to make men enjoy what they are seeing. Who cares if men in the world desire to see nude women on the streets or desire to see them all covered up and only nude in the bedroom. The desire of the male is primarily the same in each culture. The irresponsible culture of the Muslim male, who wears shorts and enjoys his lie and travels and goes to night clubs is not substantially different than the life of the western male who travels and enjoys night clubs. Who cares what role women play in each society, for in each society they do what the men would have them do. In one they cover themselves up, less they ‘dishonour’ the man and in the other they show everything off so that the man can enjoy them, the way he enjoys a large hamburger or a beer. Men in one culture choose their wife as one chooses a meal at a fast food restaurant where they can order up to four meals at a time and when they are done with them they cast them aside for a younger fresher one. Of course their wives must be virgins. They, of course, don’t need to be. Men in the other culture order prostitutes to their rooms, marry women and discard them, ‘trading up’ for younger ones whenever things suit them. Oh, but in one culture the women don’t have children and have abortions and in another the women have nine children. What is the essential difference? In one culture the woman has abortions so that the man does not have to be responsible for children, and how many western men are responsible for children, while in the Muslim culture the woman has her children so as to perpetuate the male line.

One should condemn the West to the childless, model-loving, sex slave trade death that it deserves. If one wants to see the future of western civilization they have only to go to a country like the Ukraine. Here feminism and secularism reigned supreme. But where are the fruits of it today? There are no women in the Ukraine between the ages of 13 and 27, they are all working as models in Milan or locked in brothels from the UAE to Japan, servicing a dozen men a day so that other men can get wealthy off their work. Marx spoke of an ‘alienation’ of labour and loe and behold Communism created the ultimate alienation, a woman’s body bought and sold at market so that another man may profit off her and discard her, as one does trash. What of the men in Ukraine? Hard working, responsible and honourable are they? No. They sell their women into slavery and are mostly alcoholics. Such is the result of a few generations of secular extremism. When a society no longer has women one cannot say that it should be defended because it cannot even reproduce.




Thoughts on the war on Islam
Seth J. Frantzman
September 3rd, 2008

If the U.S had fought the Nazis under the same circumstances that it fights Islam would it have won? If the highest intellectuals in the West had claimed that the rise of Nazism was ‘blowback’ and our Universities had forced our students to learn about Nazism and its ‘culture’ and ‘traditions’ and our students had been taught German and made to memorize ‘sieg heil’ the way our students learn Arabic and are taught the Fatiha or conversion statement in Islam as a prerequisite would we have triumphed? Would we have triumphed if we had not dared that the war against Germany was a war against Nazism and instead declared simply that ‘Hitler gives Nazism a bad name’ and ‘the terrorist is not representative of Nazism’ and ‘Nazism is a religion of peace’. Would we have won the war on Germany if we had not bombed them during Christmas for fear of ‘offending’ them the way we don’t bomb Muslims on Ramadan, lest they be offended, while they themselves step up their attacks during Ramadan? Would we have won if our women had been enamored of Nazism and believed it a romantic-exotic other? Would we have won the war on Nazism if we had complied with the wishes of Nazis living in our own countries and made sure that our food products, our laws and our schools all didn’t ‘offend’ them. Would we have won the war on Nazism if our religious leaders had said that ‘Nazi law (i.e. the Nuremburg Laws)’ should be enacted in our own society to regulate the civil family law of Germans, the way the Archbishop of Canterbury expects that Shariah law should be erected in our own society? There is no doubt we would not have won. People claim that technology can win the war and mass production of weapons and a large army on terror the way it triumphed against Nazism but they neglect to realize that during the war on Nazism the public at home and the intellectuals supported the war. Today’s wealthy intellectuals and academics in our own society do not support our country, neither does our media.

When you see a scantily dressed Russian or Pilipino woman dating a Muslim Arab it makes one wonder why it is that in our own secular society the women who are the most ‘open minded’ always choose the most conservative men in the society of the other. Why is it that the secular western woman will never object to dating the man in the society of the ‘other’ whose sister is not allowed out of the house after 6pm and whose expects women in his own society to cover their hair lest they be described as ‘immoral’? It points to the true fate of secularism. Secularism provides women with freedom, especially sexual freedom. Those women who are the most sexually ‘free’ are the ones who always choose to date men outside their western-secular society and they usually choose men from conservative societies. Thus the freedom of the west inevitably leads to the absorption of western women into other societies. Thus the western woman who has an abortion and works at a strip club and wears a thong at the beach and doesn’t want children is the same women who puts on the headscarf and the veil for her Muslim boyfriend and then has eight children. The same women in the West who refuses to cook or clean the house or do any of those ‘traditional’ female chores is the same women that happily does them in the name of the culture of the ‘other’. This is why secularism is doomed to failure. It is a religion that encourages people to hate themselves, encourages women, especially, to hate their own society and encourages people to enslave themselves to the culture of the ‘other’.



A woman in Gaza: Lauren Booth
Seth J. Frantzman
September 4th, 2008

In the 19th century when a British citizen got in trouble in a foreign land Lord Palmerston would send the Royal Navy, and maybe he was right to do so. These were British citizens, sometimes acting in a private capacity or in a government role or as missionaries who were came under assault from time to time. When private organizations such as the Palestine Exploration Fund came were assaulted there was an understanding that the might of the British empire supported them. But generally these British citizens acted responsibly. They obeyed local laws and tried, in general, to respect local customs, to the point that they perhaps adopted those customs too much with character such as T.E Lawrence and Sir Richard Burton virtually becoming natives to the extent that their compatriots no longer recognized them.

Lauren Booth, the sister-in-law of former Prime Minister, is a British citizen. But she isn’t cut from the 19th century mold. She is a wealthy British woman who does not have an occupation. She is a full time ‘activist’. As a wealthy European she believed that the law does not apply to her, or rather that she doesn’t have to obey the laws of the countries she goes to. She is part of a rash of Europeans who have gotten themselves in trouble recently for going to countries and needlessly flouting local laws. One is reminded of the two British citizens facing six years in prison for having sex on a beach in the United Arab Emirates or the European who was briefly jailed in Thailand for insulting the king or the numerous Europeans on trial in Vietnam and elsewhere for having sex with children. Europeans seem to have a sense that while they love and adore ‘multi-culturalism’ at home that when they abroad they can go to any country and live as they do in Europe. Rather than refusing to go to countries that do not have laws that they respect, and thereby denying backward nations such as Dubai their tourist dollars, they choose to romanticize those countries until suddenly they find themselves in prison. Then it is all about ‘international law’ and ‘human rights’.

Lauren Booth is an activist and a former contestant on the aptly named ITV reality show ‘I’m a Celebrity, Get me Out of here!’ She was born in 1967 and has ‘worked’ part time as a celebrity commentator and ‘journalist’. On August 23rd, 2008 she broke international law and sailed illegally to the Gaza strip with 46 mostly European ‘Free Gaza’ activists. She wanted to raise awareness about the ‘plight’ of the Gazan people. When the rest of her wealthy activist friends departed and left the Gaza strip on August 28th she and ten others choose to stay in Gaza and live with the ‘people’ and fight for their ‘rights’. But after a few days the heat became to much. The lack of alcoholic beverages, night clubs and other accoutrements of modernity, such as air conditioning, caused her to decide to leave. In fact the rest of her activist friends who had remained had already begun to flee the Strip like rats fleeing a sinking ship. Jeff Halper, the Israeli professor who had accompanied the protest boat entered Israel and was arrested by Israeli authorities. But when Ms. Booth, who hates Israel, tried to enter Israel she was denied entry. When she tried to enter Egypt it turned out the Egyptians didn’t want her either. She got out her satellite phone and began calling the international media claiming her ‘human rights’ were being violated under ‘international law’. The Manchester Guardian has tried to dramatize her story by showing her on the beach in Gaza ‘making contact with the outside world’. Its as if she is in space and her ‘transmissions’ are of the utmost importance.

The truth of the matter is she is a spoiled European who chose to break the law and is suffering for it. Israel warned the protestors that it was illegal for them to enter Gaza. They went anyway and Israel was nice enough to let them leave. She chose not to leave the way she had come and instead to take advantage of Israel. But why should Israel be forced to take in a wealthy European woman and her satellite phone just because she found living in Gaza not as interesting as she previously thought. She was all tough talk when she chose to stay behind, speaking of working ‘human rights’. But three days was too much. The truth is there is nothing to feel sorry for when a wealthy European becomes ‘stranded’ in a place they chose to go to illegally. It is interesting that the world media, including the New York Times has given this coverage. She was interviewed on NPR. The same media doesn’t seem to give the same coverage to each and every African immigrant who becomes ‘stranded’ when they try to illegally enter Europe and end up in a camp for illegal immigrants. It seems that when it comes to boat loads of black wretched Africans coming to Europe that there are no complaints when they are rounded up and deported. But when it is a wealthy blondish European women who chooses to break the law then suddenly ‘high level diplomatic channels’ must get to work. Israel should demand that if it is to allow Ms. Booth in then Europe should take in the thousands of African refugees who have arrived in Israel recently on their way to Europe. After all, one wealthy European woman must be equal to a thousand blacks. She certainly is when it comes to media attention.