Terra Incognita
Issue 58
“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
October 28th, 2008
1) To genocide or not to genocide? Is it better for a country to commit genocide or not to commit genocide? On the fact of it a stupid question. But history has shown that those countries that commit genocide end up better off, financially and in the eyes of the international community, than those that do not. Just look at the fate of the Jews, the Serbs, the Armenians and the Tutsis. And compare their fate to those of the Germans and the Turks. Who is wealthier today, the son of a Holocaust survivor or the son of a member of the Vichy regime, the son of a Croatian Ustache or the son of a Serbian partisan?
2) How much freedom for a woman? A recent ruling by a feminist Tel Aviv judge regarding accused pimps was fascinating. She claimed the prostituted women, who had been locked indoors and forced to have sex with a dozen men a day, had ‘freedom of movement’ because the pimps took them to the gynecologist, the beach and the supermarket from time to time. Furthermore the judge claimed it was acceptable for the pimps to be angry when the slaves refused to work on their periods. Why does feminism produce such women that excuse slavery and the evils of human trafficking? Why does secular society degrade women so?
3) A poor old man dies so a wealthy man may live, or a tale of two Amoses: A 21 year old Palestinian recently fought the battle of a lifetime against an 86 year old Jewish oppressor. In his militant freedom struggle he overcame the spry man and stabbed him. Now the son of the old man, oddly named Amos Oz, must bury his dad. But there is another Amos Oz in Israel, a wealthy Amos Oz whose father did not die at the hand of a terrorist, yet he is an Oz who has, from time to time, supported the Palestinians and their ‘struggle’. So why does the wealthy one get to spend the last days with his elderly father, but the poor Amos must never gets to say goodbye? Why does a secular society reward one man and give so little to the other. The 86 year old man served the state his whole life and was relegated to a bare mention in the newspaper. But the wealthy Amos gets human rights awards. Why the injustice?
To genocide or not to genocide?
October 21st, 2008
Seth J. Frantzman
In the world there exist two types of countries: those that have committed genocides and the ethnic-cleansing of minorities in the last 100 years and those that have not. The question is whether or not it has been better from a historical and modern perspective, and even a moral perspective, to commit genocide or not. Judging by the way in which the former genocidaires have been treated by the international community, by leftist activists and by the academy one can only judge that it has been better to commit genocide and those countries that have not done so have lost out in a variety of ways. Those people who have been the victims of genocide have lost out the most for they have not only been victims but they have also then become, according to the modern western narrative, the ‘new Nazis’.
Let us consider just a few cases. The Jews suffered the Holocaust, but today’s Jewish state is considered a Nazi country by those progressive voices in the West. Europeans and westerners volunteer throughout the Palestinian territories. Yet their ancestors never volunteered to help Jews. Their moral judgement is clear: the Jews are the Nazis. The actual Nazi country, Germany, todays sends millions of Euros in donations to various ‘human rights’ organizations that condemn Israel as ‘fascist’ and ‘apartheid’ and compare its policies to those of Nazi Germany. Germans volunteer in organizations that help build homes for Palestinians. Yet Germans did not rebuild the homes of the Jews who were destroyed in Europe. Today’s Germany is a model European democracy, a wealthy country full of technology and industry. Yet its victims are today ‘Nazis’. Other countries in Europe are no different. The children of French members of the Vichy regime are today able to pose as progressive leftistis and journey to help Palestinians or burn the Israeli flag at their campuses in France.
But the irony of Israel protrayed as a ‘Nazi’ country by good western wealthy leftist intellectuals and Germany portrayed as a model country is not the only example of where those who commit the genocide have been rewarded while the victims have been termed the ‘new Nazis’. The Serbs were, after the Jews and Russians, the main victims of the Nazis. Ten percent of their people were murdered. And yet today Serbia is the pariah and Germany is at the heart of the EU. Serbia must beg to join even as Germans serve in Bosnia and Albania and help continue the ethnic-cleansing of Serbs that was begun by the German allied Ustace Croatian regime. Croatia, a Nazi ally who was the only country in Europe to run its own concentration camp and murder it own Jews without SS help, is a European tourist destination and a ‘good’ country. It is wealthy and clean and celebrated internationally. Yet the victims of its home grown Nazi Ustache regime, the Serbs, are not only considered ‘the new Nazis’, but it is Serbs who sit in the dock at the European run International Court of Justice. In the 1990s the Croats continued their cleansing and murder of Serbs throughout Croatia, reducing them to a mere 2% of the population from some 20%, while the West, including Germany and former collaborationist regimes, helped them. Thus the former Nazis helped continue their legacy of murder and all the while the press and academics and ‘good leftists’ termed the Serbs the ‘new Nazis’. Had Serbis chosen differently in 1941 and sided with the Nazis they would have been better off today.
But its not the only example. Turkey committed the Armenian Genocide. Today Armenia is a small poor landlocked country whose women are sold as sex slaves in Turkey and across the Middle East and Europe. Turkey, the genocidal regime, is a modern western state who may be granted entrance to the EU. It is in Nato. It is wealthy and considered a ‘good’ country. To even mention the Armenian genocide in Turkey is illegal, let alone to question the fate of the Ponitc Greeks or the other Greek minorities destroyed in 1922 when Turkey expelled them in the ‘population exchange’. Yet Turkey has not stopped there. After its invasion of Cyrpus in the 1970s it cleansed the Greek inhabitants of its part of that island and settled Turks in their place. And today the EU and leftist Cypriots back a plan to allow the Turks to return to Greek Cyprus but not trhe Greeks to return to their former homes. In Rhodes, Crete and other Greek islands the memory of the Turks is preserved in their minarets and mosques and small Muslim communities remain. Yet in places such as Smyrna (Izmir) the Greek churches are gone and their crosses destroyed. Yet in Rhodes a Swedish politician is present researching ‘human rights’ for the local Muslim community which has recently been allowed to raise a giant minaret above the old city’s skyline, a minaret that not coincidentally towers over the local Greek-Orthodox church (just as in Ottoman times when it was illegal for a Christian structure to be taller than a Muslim minaret). Leftist researchers such as Ruth Mandel have been convinced by the Turkish lobby in the U.S which supports pro-Turkish scholarship in the U.S to term the Greeks an ‘invented’ people whose identity only exists ‘against the Turkish Other.’ The genocidal regime becomes the positive ‘other’ and those that were colonized, the Greeks, are said to have no culture. So those who cleansed the Greeks are wealthy and clean and the Greeks must build mosques for them, while in Turkey there is no reciprocal action of preserving the Christian heritage of Anatolia.
Everywhere in the world it has been the same. The Cambodian genocidaires were never prosecuted and they were in fact supported by western leftists who claimed the gneocide had been inflated by ‘right wing anti-communists.’ In Rwanda during the 1994 genocide the French and the world press was tricked the world for months into beleiving that it was the French allied Hutus who were the victims rather than the perpetrators. Westerners, unable to distinguish one black tribe from another, despite their obvious differences, simply believed the reports. Only later when the UN troops under French guidance were actually encouraged to intervene to prevent a ‘Tutsi genocide of Hutus’ did they realize it was 800,000 Tutsis who had been murdered, rather than the other way around. The Hutu genocidaires escaped to the Congo where the UN settled them in refugee camps. They were allowed to rearm and subsequently started another mini-genocide against Tutsi tribesmen in the Congo. When those Tutsis subsequently formed their own army under General Nkunda the International Court of Justice in Europe and the UN accused him of ‘war crimes.’ The big Hutu leaders were allowed to settle in the West, in Europe and in the USA. Meanwhile in Rwanda the UN and France has attempted to accuse the Tutusi leadership and its president Paul Kagame of ‘war crimes’ during the genocide. Not one Hutu has ever been put on trial by the West.
During the Indian partition of 1948 the Pakistani Muslims cleansed all the Hindus and Sikhs from what is now Pakistan. Yet India allowed millions of Muslims to remain so that they now form 20% of India. Today all the human rights organizations and other NGOs such as Minority Rights International only care about the Muslims in India. They are said to be poor and discriminated against. In Pakistan there are no Hindus to discriminate against because they are all gone. In Singapore one must also read about discrimination against the Malay Muslim minority, yet in neighbouring Malaysia the Chinese minority suffers official discrimination under the country’s ‘Malays First’ law which gives the majority preference in jobs and education. No NGO or human rights organization has ever voiced any interest in this.
The world and its victims have learned the hard way, it is always better to genocide than to be genocided. It is better to cleanse than to be cleansed. The world community appears to voice its opposition to genocide and ethnic-cleansing and ‘war crimes’. But history shows us something different. Every country that has successfully done away with its minorities has suceeded in the end in becoming wealthy and accepted. Saudi Arabia and Iran, countries that suppress non-Muslims and in one case won’t even allow them to drive on certain roads or construct houses of worship, are darlings of the international community with sympathizers throughout the world, especially at the highest levels of western educational institutions. Their ideologies of Islamism are widely loved in the west with philosophers such as the late Michael Faucault embracing them and modern oped writers such as Bradley Burston declaring ‘this year, this Jew is supporting Jihad’. Of course this Jihad is positive, it is an ‘inner struggle’ and one that does not permit the “murder of women, children or the elderly.” Of course it does permit their enslavement and the murder of the men, but no matter. It is better to Jihad than not to Jihad. It is better to be Islamist Iran than those who oppose Islamist Iran. It is better to be Saudi than to be those who are the victims of Saudi. It is better to be Turkey than Armenia and Croatia than Serbia, at least if one measures ‘better’ by wealth, tourism and international acceptance and historical narrative. The European, whose ancestors collaborated, tells the Serbs to forget the 14th century and join the 21st. But can they join the 21st before they receive an apology for what was done to them in the 20th. No. The message is always: forget the past. Europeans want us to forget the past, because it is one filled with their misdeeds. They want a present where the Jews and Serbs are the ‘Nazis’ and a German or Frenchmen or Englishwoman can be a Protest Tourist in Hebron helping with the Palestinian olive harvest.
Every nation and people should learn from history. Genocide is preferable. Jihad is preferable. Minorities are the shackles around a nation’s neck. They are forever used to condemn the nation. Those countries that successfully did away with their minorities, as almost all Muslim countries have done, are more successful, wealthy, and loved in the international arena. For those that say ‘never again’ and ‘now we have learned from our past’ one must only look to Sudan for the evidence of this lie. Here is a nation where the genocide continues. And yet the world does nothing. Sudan is widely loved in its region. It is even invited to help with such conferences as the Durban conference against racism and invited to join the UN Human Rights Council. Is it better to be Sudan or Israel? Sudan receives the oil revenues and as the Economist informs us, the per capita income of Arab Khartoum is quite high. Europeans even go their to volunteer, not to help the black victims of the genocide, but to give the wealthy Arabs a free education. Has a European ever volunteered in Israel to help a victim of terror? Except for those few reviled European evangelicals, those ‘kooks’, No.
One can learn from this story that the pragmatic thing to do is to always be the first to genocide, the first to cleanse. One should have collaborated with the Nazis, those nations that did so are today ten times wealthier today than those that did not. Those that did are members of the EU, those that resisted are not. The western academy tells us today to join the Jihad. But morally we know that the blood of the Nazis and their European collaborators can never be removed. The blood of the Jihad never comes off. The soul of the nations that engage in such behavoir can never be cleansed: secularism soon follows and with it low birth rates and decline of civilization. The victory of Nazism is only temporary. It has resulted in the creation of ‘New Jews’ in Europe, the Muslim immigrants who raise minarets above European cities. The genocider wants us to forget history. Of course. Those descendants of SS officers would prefer we concentrate on destroyed Palestinian homes rather than the former Jewish homes that their families today reside in. Is it a coincidence that all the victims of Nazism have become the ‘new Nazis’. Surely not. What is more perverse than for the Nazi to transfer the guilt to his victims, turning them into the perpetrators? But the evidence that this model of liberalism and secularism, this model of genocide does not work, is the Muslim immigration to Europe. For in seeking to transform the victims into the Nazis and the Nazis into respectible members of modern society the Europeans have inadvertently made themselves wealthy and their victims poor, but now that promises to backfire as that wealth has attracted other genocidaires, the best experts at genocide: Islamism and Jihad. So the best thing for Armenia, Serbia and Israel and other victims, such as the Hindus, to do is to watch as the two genocidal peoples work things out among themselves. They say ‘forget the past’. But they are deep in the past and it is catching up day by day. Those Europeans who see the actual history and see the Jews, Serbs and Armenians as victims, are the same ones who see the threat of Islamism and are the same ones who see the evils of Nazism and collaboration. But those Europeans are few, just as it was only a few who saw that the Tutsis were the victims and the Hutus the murders. To remove the scourge of collaboration with genocide, the first thing is to remove the UN and the ICJ, two organizations who collaborated with genocide and were built on its gas chambers. Removing these shackles, placed around humanity, may not be possible, for it goes hand in hand with removing the dictatotrship of moral relativism and ‘human rights’ (which always seems to support the murder of people or nationalism and terrorism) activists and ‘anti-racism’ (which, in the case of the Durban conference, is usually racist) activists that plague society.
How much freedom for a woman?
October 22nd, 2008
Seth J. Frantzman
How much freedom does a woman deserve under the law? According to Dalia Ganot, a Tel Aviv District Court justice in Israel, a woman has freedom of movement if she is taken, from time to time by a man, to the gynecologist and the supermarket, as well as the beach. And Ms. Ganot is a feminist. So is her friend Shelly Timan, another retired judge who said that Ganot "showed courage" in defining a woman's right to freedom of movement this way. Ganot had been asked to rule on whether a series of suspected pimps and human traffickers had imprisoned women. Ganot went so far as to justify the beating of the prostitutes by the pimps, noting that "its only natural for a pimp to be angry when his prostitutes refuse to work during their period." This is feminism. It is the true face of a feminist society. It is the face of a western liberal leftist society. Only a leftist secular society could produce this. If we have been tricked into believing that it is only in Islamic society that judges justify the beating of women and women have few rights we are wrong. Our society, our cesspool that we dwell in day in and day out, is no different and it is substantially worse because it is built upon the lies and hypocrisy of liberalism.
Feminism is primarily responsible for having created a situation where women are chattel, objects, sexual objects to be bought and sold in the market place like meat. Feminism and liberal female academics have been the primary supporters of Islamism in Saudi Arabia and Iran and the primary defenders of Islam's treatment of women. From Ilya Greenberg to Karen Armstrong it is women who support Islamism and the imposition of Shariah law. In Islamic societies it is women who justify the worst treatments of women. Ayan Hirsi Ali's Infidel describes her upbringing at the hands of her religious mother, a black Somali woman who enjoyed being called 'slave' (abd) and 'nigger'(Kaffir) by the Saudis in whose country Hirsi Ali was raised, a woman who beat her daughter and was all the while inspired by Islam to do so. So Hisri's mother, an Islamist who enjoyed her status as a second class black woman in Saudi, also was a feminist. Her treatment of her daughter was no different than the treatment feminism has metted out to our daughters in the West, in terms of feminism’s Romanization of Islam and justification of prostitution. It is feminism that has told us strippers are 'independent women' and that porn is 'sex work.' It is not men who have done this. It is female judges who give out lax punishments to rapists, not male judges. It is female lawyers who usually represent rapists and human traffickers, disproportionately more than male lawyers.
Why does feminism lead to the imprisonment of women? We must only look to the Soviet system to see the underlying reasons. The Soviet Union was the most progressive state in terms of women's rights. Women were given abortion and rights to divorce in the USSR long before they were given these rights in the West. Women rose to positions of power in all ranks of the Soviet system. And yet when the Soviet system collapsed it took only a few months before the women of that former empire began to flood the world, like a tidal wave, as prostitutes. Soon they were being bought and sold at human auctions from the UAE to Japan and South Africa. Tens of millions of these women disappeared into the machine of sex slavery. Each one did so under the nose of feminism. Each woman that disappeared into the sex prisons of the UAE or Israel or Prague had an education. Each was independent. Each chose her fate. Perhaps she claimed after that she was duped by an add promising work as a 'nurse' or a 'model' or 'house cleaner'. But can an educated woman truly claim this after all of her female friends have also disappeared and never been heard from again. At what point on her route to slavery does she realize she has been duped. Is it when the first male trafficker takes her passport? Is it when she is first raped on board some unnamed ship? Is it when she is sold the first time to Bedouin traffickers? Is it when she is made to clean a toilet with her tongue by her first pimp? At what point does the former leftist socialist woman say to herself "oh, whoops, feminism didn't provide me with freedom?" Or is it when she is finally laid to rest in an unmarked grave in some foreign land, after being raped and whipped and beaten until her fragile body can take it no longer, when she has Aids and is 24 and thus ‘too old’? Is it when she appears before her first female liberal feminist judge, such as Ganot and is told that a trip to the gynecologist once a month for her abortion so that her pimp doesn't have to deal with an unwanted pregnancy (reproductive rights) is freedom of movement? When is it that liberalism and its offspring, our society of whores and pimps, first realizes the lie jammed down our throats?
Western society provides women with nothing. Oh, yes, some of them have jobs and an education. Some of them appear to rise high in society. But a society built on the graves of millions of prostituted enslaved women is not a society to be proud of. Any society built on the body of slaves is a society that deserves to be crushed under the weight of history. Do we seriously believe our society, our 'culture', is so different than that of the Old South? Their slave auctions were in the open for all to see. At least they were honest about their sin. Our society has its slaves and they are hidden from society and we kid ourselves that it is part of an 'underground' 'illegal' 'black market'. But it is not illegal. Pimps do not receive prison sentences. They receive bail by female feminist judges who have decided that a woman should be beaten when she does not want to have sex with 13 men a day when she is on her period. Our feminist judges tell us that a woman's worth, her freedom, amounts to a trip once a week from her dank prison cell to a beach, chaperoned by her pimp. A plague is on our house. It is a plague of liberalism that has crushed our souls and those souls of our women, enslaving them and turning them into beasts to be bought and sold. The fact that our society does not bring swift and painful justice to the pimps marks our society as unjust. The fact that women are kept enslaved in brothels, with no lives, no natural light, no freedom, nothing, should keep us up at night. No institution of slavery has ever been so disgusting and degrading to society, and never in human history has a liberal leftist society ignored such an evil to such a degree.
Remember always the name of Judge Dalia Ganot and her collaborator Shelly Timan. Remember her statement: "none of the complainants was forced to have sex either for free…and no evidence was brought from which one can infer the existence of supervision or control over the movements of the plaintiffs or the scope of their work…the two complainants seemed to have freedom of movement, one of the defendants took them to the gynecologist and the supermarket as well as the beach and superland." Remember the name always. Remember always what our society did to its women when we had the chance to have a just and equal society. Remember what liberalism wrought. When liberalism and secularism are dying and people are saying 'oh, women have less rights, oh we have less rights', remember that we stood always on top of the cesspool of prostitution and looked the other way and that we allowed laws to give the pimps their freedom and we told a woman it was enough freedom for her to have her trip to the abortion clinic once every few months, lest the clients be forced to use condoms, and to go to the supermarket. Damn our society. Damn it to hell. Those trafficked women live in hell. We deserve to be there to. And Dalia Ganot deserves it more than all of us. And the pimps deserve to burn for all eternity.
A poor old man dies so a wealthy man may live, or a tale of two Amoses
Seth J. Frantzman
October 24th, 2008
Today millions of wealthy leftists sleep soundly. They sleep soundly because they are not Avraham Ozeri. Dov Henin is not dead. Ran Cohen is not dead. Noam Chomsky is not dead. Bradley Burston is not dead. No. Wealthy people don’t die in terrorist attacks. They never do. They never die at the hands of those they support. A Norman Finkselstein has never died in a terror attack. Even during the times of Nazi Germany the wealthy people did not die in the death camps. They escaped to the west. The poor die in genocides and terror attacks, after the wealthy have helped fan the flames that create those genocides. So who fanned the flames of Mohammed Almadan? Was it Amos Oz? Ozeri’s son was, oddly enough, named Amos Oz. But he wasn’t the wealthy, internaltionally loved Amoz Oz, the candidate for the Nobel Prize. He was a poor Amos Oz. the kind of Amoz Oz who doesn’t matter. The kind of Amoz Oz who dies in the terror attack. Not the kind who gets wealthy writing about the tragic lives of the terror and the ‘other’. One Amos Oz has European friends who toast him at a nice wince leuncheon. Another loses his father to a terrorist. One Amos drives one of his numerous cars to the beach to enjoy the sunset. Another buries his father. One Amos lives in a wealthy gated community. Another Amos lives in a cramped apartment. One Amos travels the world, wining and dining with other wealthy members of his class, enjoying his accolades. The other Amos bring flowers to his dad’s grave.
Why does one Amos get so much and the other gets so little in life? Why does one Amos get to see their parents one last time before they die and the other does not. Why does one Amos weep at his father’s grave and the other enjoys wine and brie at the same time with men named Jack and Felix and Charles from England and Germany? Why does one Amos get a ‘human rights medal’ and the other Amos gets nothing? Why does society reward one Amos and the other Amos gets a dead relative in a simple wood box? Why does democracy give one Amos accolades and wealth and the other Amos gets nothing but tragedy? Why is there so little justice for one and so much wealth for the other? Why does our liberal leftist secular democracy celebrate one and ignore the other?
Ozeri did much for the state of Israel. He served in the pre-state underground. He fought in the war of independence. He worked as a customs official. He worked for the Jewish agency. He dedicated much to society. But he was given nothing in return. When a 21 year old wealthy Palestinian Muslim Arab decided to stab him the police did nothing to prevent it. They “called for backup” while an old man died. Ozeri died. But Amos Oz lives on, toasting himself and enjoying the high life. Ozeri was poor and forced to settle in a ‘border’ community abandoned by the state: “Meanwhile, these Arab kids come into the neighborhood all the time, in groups of two or three or four," Ozeri continued. "I don't believe that [the attacker] was alone. Just the other night a car full of them ran through two red lights in a row, and I was shocked to see how careless they were for our safety here. They're always coming into Gilo and causing problems.” So one man, who served his countyr got nothing in return. Another man, the wealthy intellectual, gets everything. Democracy. Secularism. Liberalism. Those are the things that caused the death of Ozeri. They are the things that caused the disparities between one Amos Oz and another. They are the things that reward one Amos Oz and not another. Why should one celebrate a society that rewards a wealthy man who does nothing, but who takes everything? Why should society reward the author Amos Oz and not the civilian Amos Oz? Because that is a western society. The west has not sympathy for the dead, dying and murdered. They are called “little Eichmans” by the college professors paid by the state in a western nation. But the college professor gets his gated community, his fancy cars, his wealthy life style, and he is celebrated. And the poor man dies. He serves his country for nothing. When will the poor wake up and realize serving the nation is useles. They get nothing but scorn. Call me a little Eichmann? Fine. Society does not deserve such ‘Eichmans.’ Society never deserved Ozeri. He deserved better than to die in such a cowardly manner. But today the politicians clamour and show fake anger. But Amos Oz, the wealthy one, will not be at his funeral. Oz will be enjoying his wine and brie, like every other wealthy person unaffected by terror. One can only hope that one day terror will affect every member of society, especially the leftist Europeans who so love and support the terror directed at the world’s nations by Islamism, an ism coddled and loved in Europe, its incubator. Everyday throughout the world the poor die so the wealthy may live, so the leftist wealthy may suck the blood of the nation and offer self hate against it. From India to Thailand and Israel. The world suffers under the burden of the internal and external enemy.
Monday, October 27, 2008
Terra Incognita 57 Democracy, coexistence and indigenous
Terra Incognita
Issue 57
“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
October 21st, 2008
1) The Trouble with democracy: When I was a young man I saw a bumper sticker that said “I love my country but hate my government.” That was in the 1980s. Today it seems the main message of democracy is ‘I hate my country and I hate my government.’
2) Coexistence: The myth There are riots between Jews and Arabs in the Israeli town of Acre. Already the chorus of voices has told us that "for years the people of this mixed city coexisted." Now we hear that a 'spark' has set off an 'explosion' of ethnic violence. We have heard this before. We heard it about Rwanda, about Lebanon and the Balkans and about India in 1948. Coexistence is a myth. It is one of the great myths that western liberalism has created. There has never been coexistence and there never will be. Coexistence can only exist between communities when they respect one another and both live in a state of honour. But this is rarely, if ever, the case.
3) The indigenous lives of Jesus and Mohammed” A new study of American elementary school text books by the Institute for Jewish and Community Research has found that the history of ancient and modern Israel has been politicized by modern interpretations of the ‘conflict’ in the Middle East Thus in numerous text books Jesus has become an indigenous ‘young Palestinian. This new revelation that Jesus has become an indigenous Palestinian reminds us of Jane Kramer’s April 2008 article entitled ‘The Petition’ in the New Yorker in which she claimed that the history of Israel is really one of “1400 years of indigenous Islam.” But without there first being Jews in the land of Israel there could have been no Christianity and no Temple Mount on which to built the Muslim Dome of the Rock.
The Trouble with democracy
Seth J. Frantzman
October 13th, 2008
When I was a young man I saw a bumper sticker that said “I love my country but hate my government.” That was in the 1980s. Today it seems the main message of democracy is ‘I hate my country and I hate my government.’ This dangerous hatred is not only reminiscent of what put the nails in the coffin of Liberal Democracy in the 1920s and 1930s but is also surprising because today it is the wealthy elites, those who benefit the most from the country, who hate it the most and it is the poor who receive so little from democracy that support their country.
I was at a recent theatre production in Israel and I saw a wealthy leftist young man with a Pro-Palestinian khaffiya around his neck. He was attending a theatre production in one of the wealthiest parts of Israel and was approvingly surrounded by wealthy people. He had numerous friends and they all seemed to enjoy his company. Juxtaposed to him was a middle aged man who was working as a guard at the production, someone who was obviously poor and forced to work on a Friday night. Here was the wealthy leftist supporting terrorism being protected by the poor member of society who might have to give his life to defend against that very terrorism.
In another incident in Israel we see that there is Prof. Sternhell who preaches that Israeli democracy is ‘threatened’ by the ‘fascist right.’ During the second Intifada he even gave instructions on who Palestinian terrorists should murder, calling on them to target male settlers. Those same male settlers are drafted into the Israeli army and are called upon to man the checkpoints and do the operations directed at stopping the terrorists who might target Israeli civilians, including Prof. Sternhell. Here is another example of a wealthy intellectual, paid by the state, who advocates the murder of other members of the state, especially those who are asked to risk their lives to protect him.
Then there is William Ayers, the American terrorist, now a college professor. He was from a wealthy background and he dedicated his young years to murdering his fellow Americans. He was never apologetic but because of his wealth and connections he was never sent to prison for his terrorism and now he is rewarded by society by becoming a wealthy professor at an American University. Those wounded by his terror groups activities, by contrast, receive nothing and come primarily from the lower classes.
The trouble with democracy is that today it produces a society where those who benefit from the most from freedom use that freedom to advocate the murder of those who have the least. In a democracy with free speech the wealthy members use that free speech to advocate not only the destruction of the very system from which they feed but also advocate the murder of other members of society.
What if democracy produced people who refused to protect these individuals? What if, when the student with the pro-terrorist khaffiya showed up the guard on duty simply left his post. Abraham, in his dispute with God regarding the destruction of Sodom and Gemmorah pleaded with God not to destroy the cities if 10 innocent individuals could be found. But in our society we see that since society does not reject the wealthy terror supporters that there is no reason that society deserves to be protected. If the wealthy want to enjoy their theatre productions and their wine bars and their universities they should protect themselves. The poor should not be called upon to protect those who advocate their death. Intellectuals like to support terrorism. There is no reason that the armed forces should waste time protecting such a society where the tax dollars of the soldiers are used to pay the salaries of professors who instruct and encourage the terrorists on how to murder those soldiers. The trouble with democracy is that in the name of ‘free speech’ it allows people in society to advocate the murder other members of that society, and it allows those who benefit the most to advocate those who have the least, it allows those who never work to advocate the murder of those forced to work in them most dangerous occupations. A soldier or a security guard should never again be forced to lay down his life so that a wealthy person can enjoy his ‘free speech’. A Khaffiya wearing college student who has never worked a day in his life should not be allowed to joke and relax in a safe atmosphere while some poor old man must guard the door. Democracy is not a system that guarantees the freedom of anyone so long that those that are free refuse to reject those that advocate the death of the simple members of society. So long as democracy allows its elites to encourage the death of the poor then there can be no sympathy for democracy, it is a failed system for it produces elites who hate the very society whose blood they suck. Those that opposed democracy in the 1930s were correct for they saw that democracy allowed for the existence of Communist parties, governed primarily by wealthy intellectuals, who advocated on behalf of terrorism and the murder of other members of society. The trouble with democracy is that it is naturally suicidal and is unable to protect itself from pernicious ideologies, terrorism, and communal hatreds. Those that support democracy say that it is far from perfect but that it is better than other forms of government. But when democracy reaches the point where the state is forced to support those who support the murder of other members of society can we truly say it is the best? When a state pays one man who calls on a second man to murder another is it truly better? When the wealthy members of the democracy justify the murder of the poor based on some ideology, is it truly better?
Coexistence: The myth
Seth J. Frantzman
October 12th, 2008
There are riots between Jews and Arabs in the Israeli town of Acre. Already the chorus of voices has told us that "for years the people of this mixed city coexisted." Now we hear that a 'spark' has set off an 'explosion' of ethnic violence. We have heard this before. We heard it about Rwanda, about Lebanon and the Balkans and about India in 1948. Coexistence is a myth. It is one of the great myths that western liberalism has created. There has never been coexistence and there never will be. There is only individual coexistence. Communal coexistence does not exist.
If, after the Holocaust or in the midst of it, someone had said 'the Germans and Jews coexisted for years before a spark set off the genocide' would it seem logical? Everyone knows that the roots of the Holocaust do not spring out of some 'spark' but out of a deep history that involved Martin Luther's anti-Semitism and the rise of pseudo-scientific racism in the 19th century. The Holocaust was an exception but it does not therefore suggest that the two communities were at peace before.
The myth of coexistence takes itself from the belief that the opposite of ethnic riots and killing must be that the two communities lived in 'peace'. But this is predicated on the false idea that just because nothing is happening that therefore things are peaceful. The evidence that the great communal conflict in India in 1948, in which all the Sikhs and most of the Hindus were cleansed from the newly created state of Pakistan and many millions of Muslims fled India. Hundreds of thousands were massacred. History books tell us that it was partition that created this mass slaughter. Like the Holocaust this is partly a correct explanation. The massacre of 1948 was a unique event. Yet books and articles often go further and tell us that these three communities (Hindu, Muslim and Sikh) coexisted before 1948. The idea is that simply because before the partition they didn't routinely massacre one another they must have lived in perfect harmony. Stories such as these usually involve some individual evidence of someone named Mahmud and some other person named Vikram and how they were friends and shopped at each others' stores and that their children played together. But these strange stories of individual coexistence always ignore the reality behind them. If someone were to tell us that Thomas Jefferson's family coexisted with the Hemmings family would we believe it? If someone told a story of idyllic coexistence between the white family of Jefferson and how their children played with the children of the Hemmings' we might almost be lulled into a false scenario of 'coexistence since time immemorial'. But if we were subsequently informed that Jefferson's family owned the Hemmings we would view this quite differently. Now if we return to the story of the hypothetical Vikram and Mahmud and their idyllic coexistence in India we must recognize that throughout the history of Muslim India the relationship between Vikram and Mahmud was one of slave and master, one of the Dhimmi and the ruler, one of 'Infidel' or kaffir and of believer.
In the West people spin tales of coexistence that appear, more than the story of Vikram and Mahmud, to be plausible. In the West where the secular nation has no identity and every man is equal before the law we seem to have created situations where genuine coexistence can flourish. Under these circumstances every wealthy and middle class bourgeoisie tells stories of their coexistence. The stories always begin in a like manner: "my Asian friend" or "my Indian friend" or "my Muslim friend." In order to reinforce an ideology of coexistence the elite culture creates movies and books about it. In a sense the idea is that if mass society can see two peoples coexisting on screen then they can imagine it in real life. So we have movies of Jews marrying gentiles (Dieu est grand, je suis toute petite), Indians dating whites (Namesake), blacks dating whites (Save the Last Dance) and whatever else our culture can come up with to convince us that coexistence is possible. But the theory is always the same: if we can show individual coexistence then we can create it in society. But coexistence in society always exists on a superficial level, usually between elites and usually involving some sort of lie where one party is involved only because they want to talk about 'coexisting' and the other party is involved for some other reason. In the end coexistence becomes some sort of peep show or zoo where people are shown little scenes of coexistence. Little of it is ever genuine or decent.
Take the recent Israeli film, For my father which tells the story of a Palestinian terrorist meeting and having sex with a wealthy Jewish woman while waiting to carry out his terrorism in Tel Aviv. This perverted drama is only acceptable in a society where people have no taste and where the vulgarity of modernity has mixed with the religion of coexistence to create a monster. Like the strange naziploitation movies of the 1970s such as Salon Kitty (1979), Ilsa She Wolf of the SS (1975), Beast in Heat (SS Hell Camp, 1977), which were made in Italy and the U.S and released in Germany as well, we have here an example of a people seeking coexistence with those who will kill them. It would be like having a movie about a KKK member who falls in love with a black girl hours before he is supposed to fire bomb her church and burn a cross on her parents lawn. And yet the public craves this to the same degree that Max Mosley, Formula One's CEO and a descendent and the Fascist Oswald Mosley, apparently craved being dressed as a prisoner in a 'concentration camp' and beaten by prostitutes he had hired to play 'concentration camp guards'.
Coexistence in the Middle East is one of the great myths. In Iraq we are told that the Christians and Sunnis, Kurds and Shias all 'coexisted' under Saddam and that the American invasion set off 'ancient rivalries'. Ancient rivalries? Coexisted under Saddam? Its like saying that the Poles and Ukrainians 'coexisted' under Nazism. Its easy to coexist when the Nazi jackboot is on your head. The same myth is peddled about the Copts in Egypt. From the BBC to Lonely Planet the public is offered up the official government line that Copts, the Christian minority in Egypt, and Muslims get along perfectly. The BBC adds this tag line to most articles dealing with Copts in Egypt "Christians account for up to 10 percent of Egypt’s population and relations with the Muslim majority are usually harmonious. But disputes over land, religious buildings or inter-marriage sometimes lead to violence." And yet year after year they are murdered raped and killed. Each time it is an excuse. It is a 'deranged man' who stabs them outside their churches (2006). Or it is a riot because of some pay they are staging 'offends' Muslims (October, 2005). Or it is some riot (1999). Or the excuse is that a Muslim harassed a Christian woman or a woman converted to Islam (October, 2008) or a woman sold property to a Muslim (October 2008). Investigating the 'incidents' is not possible anyway because the media and public are barred from most Coptic villages or mixed towns that are outside the tourist circuit.
Now the coexistence myth is being peddled about the Israeli town of Acre. On Yom Kippur 2008 a Muslim man drove his car around Jewish neighborhoods of Acre with his music blasting. This is a holiday where Jews, even secular ones, refrain from driving and are generally fasting and quiet. Jews, responding to the offensive behavior, stoned the Muslim man's car after he would not leave. The BBC would have us believe differently "an Israeli-Arab man was assaulted for driving his car during the Jewish Yom Kippur holy day." The New York Times tells us “[a city that has been a] national symbol of coexistence [was ruined]. The troubles started Wednesday night…an Arab resident of Acre, Tawfiq Jammal, drove with his son into an increasingly religious Jewish neighborhood to pick up his daughter from her fiancé’s apartment in a mainly Jewish block.” So it is the ‘religious’ Jews who harmed this innocent Arab. There is no investigation as to whether his daughter was really there or if he could have avoided the religious area or why he played loud music. The Times explains “after leaving the car the Jamals were chased by a stone-throwing mob..Arab residents heard Jamal had been killed …and set out to take revenge.” See the Arabs are the victims, even though only Jewish property, shops and cars were destroyed the first night of rioting, it was all a misunderstanding, and it is the ‘stone-throwing’ Jewish ‘mob’ that is clearly more blood thirsty. The Arabs only wanted some revenge. But the BBC gets the second event correct: "Hundreds of Arabs took to the streets damaging shops and vehicles after the car driver, Tawfik Jamal, was assaulted by a group of Jewish youths." So this attack on an Arab was the 'spark'. Just like the 'spark' that set off the First and second Intifada. Or the 'spark' that set off the 'Paris Intifada' in 2005 when Muslim rioters torched thousands of cars over a two week period after two Muslim 'youths' were electrocuted, by climbing into a power station, while running from police. But newspaper articles reveal deeper truths. One Jewish woman interviewed in Haaretz said she didn't want the Arabs living next to her anymore because they "take all our daughters." Although people tell tales of coexistence and weave myths about the mixed cities in Israel, such as Lod, Ramla, Haifa, Tel Aviv-Jaffo, Nazareth-Nazareth alit and Acre, every average person knows the truth. There is no coexistence. There are two communities. One community is the victim of the other. One community robs the other. One community rapes the other. One community blares its music intentionally on the others holidays. One community teaches hate about the other in its schools and calls the other 'Kaffir'. One community whines about racism. One community believes it is discriminated against and because of this receives all the benefits of various 'coexistence projects'. One community has its mosques which blare their 'call to prayer' five times at day beginning at 4 am.
Coexistence is a myth preached by wealthy people who do not coexist. Those who speak the most about coexistence never have to live with it. Those who talk about coexistence in Egypt or among the communities in new York or Acre never live face to face with the 'other'. They live in wealthy gated communities and expound about the importance of coexistence and a non-racial society of colour blindness. They are the ones who make the movies describes thus: "For My Father brings a suicide bomber and a Jewess together." It is the wealthy elites who want us to accept this coexistence: the coexistence between the Nazi Jackboot and the Jew. But we do not want to coexist as slaves. A free man coexists on his own terms. He does not tolerate another man driving through his community playing music on his holiest day. He does not tolerate his daughters being raped. Coexistence only exists when both communities have honour and respect, not when one community murders and rapes the other. But the true myth of coexistence is that the lower classes are forever part of a scientific experiment conducted by the wealthy elites. This experiment at social engineering is called coexistence. Blacks and whites, Jews and Arabs, Muslims and non-Muslims, Serbs and Croats, Hutus and Tutsis, are put together, forced to live side by side like rats in a medical test facility so that some wealthy social engineer can see what happens. The real hatred should be directed not merely against the community of other who suppresses and rapes and disrespects us but also against the wealthy elites who treat us as if we are some sort of social experiment. The hatred should be directed and the rioters stone thrown also at the media who treat us like animals and against the Europeans who come to 'monitor' us and the UN who 'supervises' us and against the sociologists and anthropologists and intellectuals who come to 'observe' us and the philanthropists who come to create their fake coexistence projects that ignore the truth. Until those who preach coexistence actually live it they should be forbidden to preach it. Wealthy Europeans who never saw a person outside their own little group should not be allowed to go to Africa and tell Hutus and Tutsis how to live. A Tutsi knows how his people were raped and murdered by machetes supplied by the French to the Hutus in 1994. He need not be told to coexist next to those who gang raped his sister. If he chooses to coexist it should be on his terms and not those of some outsider. Likewise the Serbs who were slaughter, first my the Muslims, and then by the Nazis did not deserve to be told to coexist next to their former colonizers and genociders, the Bosnians and Croats. If the Serbs desired, after 700 years, to retain some of their honour, that should have been their prerogative. They didn't want to live next to their former masters anymore than the southern blacks desired to live under theirs. And yet they were told by the German peacekeepers: forget your stupid old history and join modernity. Easy for the Germans to say: they already killed off all their minorities. And that is what coexistence is usually about. Its about former Nazis such as Kurt Waldheim running the UN and telling us how to 'coexist'. He learned about coexistence in the Balkans, putting Jews in the gas vans and murdering them. Its about the Saudis telling Europeans how to coexist with their burgeoning Muslim populations, telling them, and Greece and Ethiopia, to build mosques for their Muslims. Saudi, a country where non-Muslims cannot drive in Mecca and where no houses of worship, except those of Islam, are allowed.
Everyday brings new revelations about the riots in Acre that shed light on the true nature of coexistence. The Arab driver who ‘sparked’ the riots by driving offensively through a Jewish neighbourhood on the most holy day in the Jewish calendar was actually the head of a ‘coexistence’ project. We have learned that Jewish funding has been poured into Acre over the years to support coexistence, from the likes of the Abraham Fund and the Jewish Agency. Numerous schools with names like ‘Shalom’ teach coexistence in mixed class rooms. In addition millions has been invested, only in the Arab part of the city, on various coexistence projects, such as theatres and class rooms. Each year an annual ‘coexistence’ Fringe festival comes to Acre, ironically it was scheduled for the week after the riots and has since been cancelled, and the performers perform only in the Arab part of the city bringing money only to Arab vendors and businesses. So why did all the investment in coexistence lead to an Arab mob preparing to assault Jews even before the ‘spark’ set them off? Why did they have their home made axes ready? Why was hate speech and incitement broadcast from the mosque in Acre ordering the Arab mobs to sack the Jewish business district? Where was all the coexistence? Where were all the Arab graduates of these coexistence programs to tell the mob to stop? Why was the entire riot sparked by an Arab who ran a coexistence center? We know why. Coexistence only teaches hate. Coexistence programming in Acre, funded by leftist Jews who hired right wing Muslim Arabs to do the programming, taught only hatred. Only wealthy leftist self hating Jews participated from the Jewish side and each in turn wore his Khaffiya and made sure to denounce Zionism at every opportunity and call Jews ‘Nazis’ and ‘colonizers’. Each Coexistence program spoke only about Arab victimhood and nationalism and taught Arabs about the ‘Nakhba’ and ‘Jewish racism’ and ‘discrimination’. Thus coexistence programming was a platform to teach hate, Islamism and nationalism. This is how coexistence always is. Neville Chamberlain also brought coexistence to Europe with the Munich agreement of 1938. This is the model of coexistence that we are always forced to bow down to. It is a model that encourages hatred and religion and fascism among one group and encourages the other to be self hating.
Liberals say that by canceling the Acre ‘coexistence festival’ that society and ‘culture’ are ‘surrendering to forces of evil.’ Leftists say the city is “held hostage” by extremists and ‘thugs’ on ‘both sides’. There is the Ayalim association of coexistence groups in Acre and its Jewish director, Danny Gliksberg. The violence, for this captain of coexistence is “anther reason to work harder.” But lets listen to testimony of how coexistence works, of what happens when wealthy American Jews and other do gooders dump their money in ‘coexistence’ programs: Silvi Vaknin is a poor Jewish resident of Acre. She just wanted to enjoy the most holy day of her calendar in peace and quiet when “there was a group of hundreds outside, mostly masked, from young men to older women, a number of young men climbed on my husband’s car and destroyed it. A hail of stones was throne at the yard. We turned out the light and went into the reinforced room. Eight of us, my family and our guests, in that room all night...I felt so insulted. They hurt me and my home on the Jewish people’s holiest day.” But remember, always remember, the reaction of the wealthy captains of coexistence who live in gated communities elsewhere. There reaction, and that of the media, is to condemn the mayor of Acre for canceling the coexistence festival and their reaction is to want to ‘work harder’ to help Arabs in the Arab section of Acre and bring more programs for those who were the leaders of the violence. But listen to the testimony of another poor resident of Acre, listen to them describe how wealthy people have created coexistence: “when I leave the house kids from the Arab school say insulting things. When I mention to the young men that they’re blocking my parking space they say ‘Yallah, shut up, you’re temporary here.’” That’s how a 60 year old grandmother experiences the coexistence that wealthy leftist Jews brought to Acre.
Will we give in to the power of the intellectual and his Nazi and Saudi friends who tell us how to coexist. Or will we struggle against each tentacle of this Octopus with all our strength? Those poorer Jews who today throw rocks in self defense in Acre are not the worst members of society, but rather the best for they are standing up for their honour which for too long was crushed under the boot of the intellectuals, Islamic hatred and the philanthropists. They are merely trying to remove part of that boot and remove the myth of coexistence from their throats, where culture has placed it. Coexistence is the true threat to the existence of all people. It is the precursor to genocide everywhere. Whether it was ‘coexistence’ in the Balkans, or in Lebanon, or Sudan, or 1920s Germany or Cambodia or Rwanda, it always produced the same thing. When a wealthy person comes to a poor community with the intention of opening a ‘coexistence center’ he should be chased out and beaten. The social engineering forced down our throats by intellectuals, who have been behind every genocide of the 20th century, needs to be opposed with every ounce of our strength. If rich wealthy people want to coexist they deserve to be settled as a buffer in places like Acre and Rwanda between the two peoples who exist there together. Until the rich intellectual leftist builds his home and subjects his property to destruction at the hands of mobs and until his daughters are raped and he must listen all night to the sounds emanating from the mosque and the music played intentionally on religious holidays to offend others, he and his money should be kept out and his nefarious role in society must be deracinated. There is no genocide without intellectualism and wealth. Every single genocide, from the Armenians to the Blacks of the Sudan has been caused by racial and social engineering, pseudo-scientific intellectualism, liberalism, leftist anthropologists, western elitists, the media and, today, post-colonialism. Coexistence is the code word for genocide and it is the precursor to it.
The indigenous lives of Jesus and Mohammed
Seth J. Frantzman
October 14th, 2008
A new study of American elementary school text books by the Institute for Jewish and Community Research has found that the history of ancient and modern Israel has been politicized by modern interpretations of the ‘conflict’ in the Middle East (Haviv Rettig ‘U.S Textbooks misrepresent Jews, Israel’ Sept. 25, 2008). Thus in numerous text books Jesus has become an indigenous ‘young Palestinian.’ In addition modern textbooks present the story of Islam as if it were a true story, discussing the ‘Prophet Mohammed’ and his life story. Whereas the story of the Jews is always prefaced with ‘Jews believe’, the story of Mohammed is presented as if were lifted from a classic Saudi Arabian religious textbook, which it probably was. This new revelation that Jesus has become an indigenous Palestinian reminds us of Jane Kramer’s April 2008 article entitled ‘The Petition’ in the New Yorker in which she claimed that the history of Israel is really one of “1400 years of indigenous Islam.”
But if Jesus is a Palestinian and Islam is indigenous to the land of Israel then who are the Jews? The problem with raising up Jesus as a ‘Palestinian’ and creating an indigenous notion of Islam and the Arab connection to the land of Israel is that it ignores the very reason that Islam and Christianity have a connection to the land in the first place. If Jesus was really an indigenous Palestinian Arab then shouldn’t he have been born in Arabia, since there were no Palestinian Arabs in Palestine in 30 A.D? But Jesus wasn’t born in Arabia. He was born in Bethlehem to a Jewish family from Nazareth. If Jesus was a Palestinian Arab then what was he doing in Jerusalem ‘cleansing the Temple’? He was in Jerusalem because he was a Jew and there was a Jewish temple there. But the Palestinian Jesus wouldn’t have needed to go to Jerusalem, for as an indigenous Palestinian living in a land that has no Jewish history there would have been no Jewish Temple. School children who are taught to believe that Jesus was a ‘young Palestinian’ are thus subconsciously forced to believe that he was ‘killed by the Jews’ just as the modern young Palestinians are being ‘killed by the Jews.’ But any Christian whose children are taught this anti-Semitic nonsense must find the rest of the Christian bible hard to fathom, with all its Jewish references, quotes from the prophets and attempts to reform the Jewish tradition.
But the claim that Islam is indigenous to Israel is as perplexing as the notion of a Palestinian Jesus. No Muslim confuses himself by believing Mohammed was a ‘Palestinian’ because the center of Islam is Mecca, not Jerusalem. But every Muslim knows that Mohammed chose Mecca after first considering Jerusalem, and turning away from Jerusalem because the Jews rejected Mohammed, something they are forever cursed for time and again in the Koran. But the notion of the indigenous Palestinian Islam stems from the Temple Mount’ Dome of the Rock where anti-Israel Muslim rhetoric now claims no Temple ever existed. But if there was no Temple and no Jews then why did Mohammed make a ‘night journey’ to the ‘far mosque’ of Jerusalem. As with the Palestinian Jesus, without the Jews there would be no reason for Mohammed to be in Jerusalem, for it would not have been a holy city. Muslims that confuse this history and claim that Mohammed journeyed to Jerusalem because it was already holy to Christianity then forget that it was only holy to Christianity because Jesus the Jew had gone their to cleanse the Temple. Elementary students who are today being brainwashed to believe in an indigenous Islam in Palestine and a Palestinian Jesus are being done a great disservice by those who predicate the teaching of history on the present. People reject the existence of Israel and thus want to reject the history of Jews in the Holy Land. But by deracinating the Jews they forget that Christianity and Islam have no connection to Jerusalem or the land. There can be no Palestinian Jesus without first having a Jewish Jesus and there can be no Dome of the Rock without first having a Jewish Temple Mount or ‘far mosque’ to build it upon.
Issue 57
“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
October 21st, 2008
1) The Trouble with democracy: When I was a young man I saw a bumper sticker that said “I love my country but hate my government.” That was in the 1980s. Today it seems the main message of democracy is ‘I hate my country and I hate my government.’
2) Coexistence: The myth There are riots between Jews and Arabs in the Israeli town of Acre. Already the chorus of voices has told us that "for years the people of this mixed city coexisted." Now we hear that a 'spark' has set off an 'explosion' of ethnic violence. We have heard this before. We heard it about Rwanda, about Lebanon and the Balkans and about India in 1948. Coexistence is a myth. It is one of the great myths that western liberalism has created. There has never been coexistence and there never will be. Coexistence can only exist between communities when they respect one another and both live in a state of honour. But this is rarely, if ever, the case.
3) The indigenous lives of Jesus and Mohammed” A new study of American elementary school text books by the Institute for Jewish and Community Research has found that the history of ancient and modern Israel has been politicized by modern interpretations of the ‘conflict’ in the Middle East Thus in numerous text books Jesus has become an indigenous ‘young Palestinian. This new revelation that Jesus has become an indigenous Palestinian reminds us of Jane Kramer’s April 2008 article entitled ‘The Petition’ in the New Yorker in which she claimed that the history of Israel is really one of “1400 years of indigenous Islam.” But without there first being Jews in the land of Israel there could have been no Christianity and no Temple Mount on which to built the Muslim Dome of the Rock.
The Trouble with democracy
Seth J. Frantzman
October 13th, 2008
When I was a young man I saw a bumper sticker that said “I love my country but hate my government.” That was in the 1980s. Today it seems the main message of democracy is ‘I hate my country and I hate my government.’ This dangerous hatred is not only reminiscent of what put the nails in the coffin of Liberal Democracy in the 1920s and 1930s but is also surprising because today it is the wealthy elites, those who benefit the most from the country, who hate it the most and it is the poor who receive so little from democracy that support their country.
I was at a recent theatre production in Israel and I saw a wealthy leftist young man with a Pro-Palestinian khaffiya around his neck. He was attending a theatre production in one of the wealthiest parts of Israel and was approvingly surrounded by wealthy people. He had numerous friends and they all seemed to enjoy his company. Juxtaposed to him was a middle aged man who was working as a guard at the production, someone who was obviously poor and forced to work on a Friday night. Here was the wealthy leftist supporting terrorism being protected by the poor member of society who might have to give his life to defend against that very terrorism.
In another incident in Israel we see that there is Prof. Sternhell who preaches that Israeli democracy is ‘threatened’ by the ‘fascist right.’ During the second Intifada he even gave instructions on who Palestinian terrorists should murder, calling on them to target male settlers. Those same male settlers are drafted into the Israeli army and are called upon to man the checkpoints and do the operations directed at stopping the terrorists who might target Israeli civilians, including Prof. Sternhell. Here is another example of a wealthy intellectual, paid by the state, who advocates the murder of other members of the state, especially those who are asked to risk their lives to protect him.
Then there is William Ayers, the American terrorist, now a college professor. He was from a wealthy background and he dedicated his young years to murdering his fellow Americans. He was never apologetic but because of his wealth and connections he was never sent to prison for his terrorism and now he is rewarded by society by becoming a wealthy professor at an American University. Those wounded by his terror groups activities, by contrast, receive nothing and come primarily from the lower classes.
The trouble with democracy is that today it produces a society where those who benefit from the most from freedom use that freedom to advocate the murder of those who have the least. In a democracy with free speech the wealthy members use that free speech to advocate not only the destruction of the very system from which they feed but also advocate the murder of other members of society.
What if democracy produced people who refused to protect these individuals? What if, when the student with the pro-terrorist khaffiya showed up the guard on duty simply left his post. Abraham, in his dispute with God regarding the destruction of Sodom and Gemmorah pleaded with God not to destroy the cities if 10 innocent individuals could be found. But in our society we see that since society does not reject the wealthy terror supporters that there is no reason that society deserves to be protected. If the wealthy want to enjoy their theatre productions and their wine bars and their universities they should protect themselves. The poor should not be called upon to protect those who advocate their death. Intellectuals like to support terrorism. There is no reason that the armed forces should waste time protecting such a society where the tax dollars of the soldiers are used to pay the salaries of professors who instruct and encourage the terrorists on how to murder those soldiers. The trouble with democracy is that in the name of ‘free speech’ it allows people in society to advocate the murder other members of that society, and it allows those who benefit the most to advocate those who have the least, it allows those who never work to advocate the murder of those forced to work in them most dangerous occupations. A soldier or a security guard should never again be forced to lay down his life so that a wealthy person can enjoy his ‘free speech’. A Khaffiya wearing college student who has never worked a day in his life should not be allowed to joke and relax in a safe atmosphere while some poor old man must guard the door. Democracy is not a system that guarantees the freedom of anyone so long that those that are free refuse to reject those that advocate the death of the simple members of society. So long as democracy allows its elites to encourage the death of the poor then there can be no sympathy for democracy, it is a failed system for it produces elites who hate the very society whose blood they suck. Those that opposed democracy in the 1930s were correct for they saw that democracy allowed for the existence of Communist parties, governed primarily by wealthy intellectuals, who advocated on behalf of terrorism and the murder of other members of society. The trouble with democracy is that it is naturally suicidal and is unable to protect itself from pernicious ideologies, terrorism, and communal hatreds. Those that support democracy say that it is far from perfect but that it is better than other forms of government. But when democracy reaches the point where the state is forced to support those who support the murder of other members of society can we truly say it is the best? When a state pays one man who calls on a second man to murder another is it truly better? When the wealthy members of the democracy justify the murder of the poor based on some ideology, is it truly better?
Coexistence: The myth
Seth J. Frantzman
October 12th, 2008
There are riots between Jews and Arabs in the Israeli town of Acre. Already the chorus of voices has told us that "for years the people of this mixed city coexisted." Now we hear that a 'spark' has set off an 'explosion' of ethnic violence. We have heard this before. We heard it about Rwanda, about Lebanon and the Balkans and about India in 1948. Coexistence is a myth. It is one of the great myths that western liberalism has created. There has never been coexistence and there never will be. There is only individual coexistence. Communal coexistence does not exist.
If, after the Holocaust or in the midst of it, someone had said 'the Germans and Jews coexisted for years before a spark set off the genocide' would it seem logical? Everyone knows that the roots of the Holocaust do not spring out of some 'spark' but out of a deep history that involved Martin Luther's anti-Semitism and the rise of pseudo-scientific racism in the 19th century. The Holocaust was an exception but it does not therefore suggest that the two communities were at peace before.
The myth of coexistence takes itself from the belief that the opposite of ethnic riots and killing must be that the two communities lived in 'peace'. But this is predicated on the false idea that just because nothing is happening that therefore things are peaceful. The evidence that the great communal conflict in India in 1948, in which all the Sikhs and most of the Hindus were cleansed from the newly created state of Pakistan and many millions of Muslims fled India. Hundreds of thousands were massacred. History books tell us that it was partition that created this mass slaughter. Like the Holocaust this is partly a correct explanation. The massacre of 1948 was a unique event. Yet books and articles often go further and tell us that these three communities (Hindu, Muslim and Sikh) coexisted before 1948. The idea is that simply because before the partition they didn't routinely massacre one another they must have lived in perfect harmony. Stories such as these usually involve some individual evidence of someone named Mahmud and some other person named Vikram and how they were friends and shopped at each others' stores and that their children played together. But these strange stories of individual coexistence always ignore the reality behind them. If someone were to tell us that Thomas Jefferson's family coexisted with the Hemmings family would we believe it? If someone told a story of idyllic coexistence between the white family of Jefferson and how their children played with the children of the Hemmings' we might almost be lulled into a false scenario of 'coexistence since time immemorial'. But if we were subsequently informed that Jefferson's family owned the Hemmings we would view this quite differently. Now if we return to the story of the hypothetical Vikram and Mahmud and their idyllic coexistence in India we must recognize that throughout the history of Muslim India the relationship between Vikram and Mahmud was one of slave and master, one of the Dhimmi and the ruler, one of 'Infidel' or kaffir and of believer.
In the West people spin tales of coexistence that appear, more than the story of Vikram and Mahmud, to be plausible. In the West where the secular nation has no identity and every man is equal before the law we seem to have created situations where genuine coexistence can flourish. Under these circumstances every wealthy and middle class bourgeoisie tells stories of their coexistence. The stories always begin in a like manner: "my Asian friend" or "my Indian friend" or "my Muslim friend." In order to reinforce an ideology of coexistence the elite culture creates movies and books about it. In a sense the idea is that if mass society can see two peoples coexisting on screen then they can imagine it in real life. So we have movies of Jews marrying gentiles (Dieu est grand, je suis toute petite), Indians dating whites (Namesake), blacks dating whites (Save the Last Dance) and whatever else our culture can come up with to convince us that coexistence is possible. But the theory is always the same: if we can show individual coexistence then we can create it in society. But coexistence in society always exists on a superficial level, usually between elites and usually involving some sort of lie where one party is involved only because they want to talk about 'coexisting' and the other party is involved for some other reason. In the end coexistence becomes some sort of peep show or zoo where people are shown little scenes of coexistence. Little of it is ever genuine or decent.
Take the recent Israeli film, For my father which tells the story of a Palestinian terrorist meeting and having sex with a wealthy Jewish woman while waiting to carry out his terrorism in Tel Aviv. This perverted drama is only acceptable in a society where people have no taste and where the vulgarity of modernity has mixed with the religion of coexistence to create a monster. Like the strange naziploitation movies of the 1970s such as Salon Kitty (1979), Ilsa She Wolf of the SS (1975), Beast in Heat (SS Hell Camp, 1977), which were made in Italy and the U.S and released in Germany as well, we have here an example of a people seeking coexistence with those who will kill them. It would be like having a movie about a KKK member who falls in love with a black girl hours before he is supposed to fire bomb her church and burn a cross on her parents lawn. And yet the public craves this to the same degree that Max Mosley, Formula One's CEO and a descendent and the Fascist Oswald Mosley, apparently craved being dressed as a prisoner in a 'concentration camp' and beaten by prostitutes he had hired to play 'concentration camp guards'.
Coexistence in the Middle East is one of the great myths. In Iraq we are told that the Christians and Sunnis, Kurds and Shias all 'coexisted' under Saddam and that the American invasion set off 'ancient rivalries'. Ancient rivalries? Coexisted under Saddam? Its like saying that the Poles and Ukrainians 'coexisted' under Nazism. Its easy to coexist when the Nazi jackboot is on your head. The same myth is peddled about the Copts in Egypt. From the BBC to Lonely Planet the public is offered up the official government line that Copts, the Christian minority in Egypt, and Muslims get along perfectly. The BBC adds this tag line to most articles dealing with Copts in Egypt "Christians account for up to 10 percent of Egypt’s population and relations with the Muslim majority are usually harmonious. But disputes over land, religious buildings or inter-marriage sometimes lead to violence." And yet year after year they are murdered raped and killed. Each time it is an excuse. It is a 'deranged man' who stabs them outside their churches (2006). Or it is a riot because of some pay they are staging 'offends' Muslims (October, 2005). Or it is some riot (1999). Or the excuse is that a Muslim harassed a Christian woman or a woman converted to Islam (October, 2008) or a woman sold property to a Muslim (October 2008). Investigating the 'incidents' is not possible anyway because the media and public are barred from most Coptic villages or mixed towns that are outside the tourist circuit.
Now the coexistence myth is being peddled about the Israeli town of Acre. On Yom Kippur 2008 a Muslim man drove his car around Jewish neighborhoods of Acre with his music blasting. This is a holiday where Jews, even secular ones, refrain from driving and are generally fasting and quiet. Jews, responding to the offensive behavior, stoned the Muslim man's car after he would not leave. The BBC would have us believe differently "an Israeli-Arab man was assaulted for driving his car during the Jewish Yom Kippur holy day." The New York Times tells us “[a city that has been a] national symbol of coexistence [was ruined]. The troubles started Wednesday night…an Arab resident of Acre, Tawfiq Jammal, drove with his son into an increasingly religious Jewish neighborhood to pick up his daughter from her fiancé’s apartment in a mainly Jewish block.” So it is the ‘religious’ Jews who harmed this innocent Arab. There is no investigation as to whether his daughter was really there or if he could have avoided the religious area or why he played loud music. The Times explains “after leaving the car the Jamals were chased by a stone-throwing mob..Arab residents heard Jamal had been killed …and set out to take revenge.” See the Arabs are the victims, even though only Jewish property, shops and cars were destroyed the first night of rioting, it was all a misunderstanding, and it is the ‘stone-throwing’ Jewish ‘mob’ that is clearly more blood thirsty. The Arabs only wanted some revenge. But the BBC gets the second event correct: "Hundreds of Arabs took to the streets damaging shops and vehicles after the car driver, Tawfik Jamal, was assaulted by a group of Jewish youths." So this attack on an Arab was the 'spark'. Just like the 'spark' that set off the First and second Intifada. Or the 'spark' that set off the 'Paris Intifada' in 2005 when Muslim rioters torched thousands of cars over a two week period after two Muslim 'youths' were electrocuted, by climbing into a power station, while running from police. But newspaper articles reveal deeper truths. One Jewish woman interviewed in Haaretz said she didn't want the Arabs living next to her anymore because they "take all our daughters." Although people tell tales of coexistence and weave myths about the mixed cities in Israel, such as Lod, Ramla, Haifa, Tel Aviv-Jaffo, Nazareth-Nazareth alit and Acre, every average person knows the truth. There is no coexistence. There are two communities. One community is the victim of the other. One community robs the other. One community rapes the other. One community blares its music intentionally on the others holidays. One community teaches hate about the other in its schools and calls the other 'Kaffir'. One community whines about racism. One community believes it is discriminated against and because of this receives all the benefits of various 'coexistence projects'. One community has its mosques which blare their 'call to prayer' five times at day beginning at 4 am.
Coexistence is a myth preached by wealthy people who do not coexist. Those who speak the most about coexistence never have to live with it. Those who talk about coexistence in Egypt or among the communities in new York or Acre never live face to face with the 'other'. They live in wealthy gated communities and expound about the importance of coexistence and a non-racial society of colour blindness. They are the ones who make the movies describes thus: "For My Father brings a suicide bomber and a Jewess together." It is the wealthy elites who want us to accept this coexistence: the coexistence between the Nazi Jackboot and the Jew. But we do not want to coexist as slaves. A free man coexists on his own terms. He does not tolerate another man driving through his community playing music on his holiest day. He does not tolerate his daughters being raped. Coexistence only exists when both communities have honour and respect, not when one community murders and rapes the other. But the true myth of coexistence is that the lower classes are forever part of a scientific experiment conducted by the wealthy elites. This experiment at social engineering is called coexistence. Blacks and whites, Jews and Arabs, Muslims and non-Muslims, Serbs and Croats, Hutus and Tutsis, are put together, forced to live side by side like rats in a medical test facility so that some wealthy social engineer can see what happens. The real hatred should be directed not merely against the community of other who suppresses and rapes and disrespects us but also against the wealthy elites who treat us as if we are some sort of social experiment. The hatred should be directed and the rioters stone thrown also at the media who treat us like animals and against the Europeans who come to 'monitor' us and the UN who 'supervises' us and against the sociologists and anthropologists and intellectuals who come to 'observe' us and the philanthropists who come to create their fake coexistence projects that ignore the truth. Until those who preach coexistence actually live it they should be forbidden to preach it. Wealthy Europeans who never saw a person outside their own little group should not be allowed to go to Africa and tell Hutus and Tutsis how to live. A Tutsi knows how his people were raped and murdered by machetes supplied by the French to the Hutus in 1994. He need not be told to coexist next to those who gang raped his sister. If he chooses to coexist it should be on his terms and not those of some outsider. Likewise the Serbs who were slaughter, first my the Muslims, and then by the Nazis did not deserve to be told to coexist next to their former colonizers and genociders, the Bosnians and Croats. If the Serbs desired, after 700 years, to retain some of their honour, that should have been their prerogative. They didn't want to live next to their former masters anymore than the southern blacks desired to live under theirs. And yet they were told by the German peacekeepers: forget your stupid old history and join modernity. Easy for the Germans to say: they already killed off all their minorities. And that is what coexistence is usually about. Its about former Nazis such as Kurt Waldheim running the UN and telling us how to 'coexist'. He learned about coexistence in the Balkans, putting Jews in the gas vans and murdering them. Its about the Saudis telling Europeans how to coexist with their burgeoning Muslim populations, telling them, and Greece and Ethiopia, to build mosques for their Muslims. Saudi, a country where non-Muslims cannot drive in Mecca and where no houses of worship, except those of Islam, are allowed.
Everyday brings new revelations about the riots in Acre that shed light on the true nature of coexistence. The Arab driver who ‘sparked’ the riots by driving offensively through a Jewish neighbourhood on the most holy day in the Jewish calendar was actually the head of a ‘coexistence’ project. We have learned that Jewish funding has been poured into Acre over the years to support coexistence, from the likes of the Abraham Fund and the Jewish Agency. Numerous schools with names like ‘Shalom’ teach coexistence in mixed class rooms. In addition millions has been invested, only in the Arab part of the city, on various coexistence projects, such as theatres and class rooms. Each year an annual ‘coexistence’ Fringe festival comes to Acre, ironically it was scheduled for the week after the riots and has since been cancelled, and the performers perform only in the Arab part of the city bringing money only to Arab vendors and businesses. So why did all the investment in coexistence lead to an Arab mob preparing to assault Jews even before the ‘spark’ set them off? Why did they have their home made axes ready? Why was hate speech and incitement broadcast from the mosque in Acre ordering the Arab mobs to sack the Jewish business district? Where was all the coexistence? Where were all the Arab graduates of these coexistence programs to tell the mob to stop? Why was the entire riot sparked by an Arab who ran a coexistence center? We know why. Coexistence only teaches hate. Coexistence programming in Acre, funded by leftist Jews who hired right wing Muslim Arabs to do the programming, taught only hatred. Only wealthy leftist self hating Jews participated from the Jewish side and each in turn wore his Khaffiya and made sure to denounce Zionism at every opportunity and call Jews ‘Nazis’ and ‘colonizers’. Each Coexistence program spoke only about Arab victimhood and nationalism and taught Arabs about the ‘Nakhba’ and ‘Jewish racism’ and ‘discrimination’. Thus coexistence programming was a platform to teach hate, Islamism and nationalism. This is how coexistence always is. Neville Chamberlain also brought coexistence to Europe with the Munich agreement of 1938. This is the model of coexistence that we are always forced to bow down to. It is a model that encourages hatred and religion and fascism among one group and encourages the other to be self hating.
Liberals say that by canceling the Acre ‘coexistence festival’ that society and ‘culture’ are ‘surrendering to forces of evil.’ Leftists say the city is “held hostage” by extremists and ‘thugs’ on ‘both sides’. There is the Ayalim association of coexistence groups in Acre and its Jewish director, Danny Gliksberg. The violence, for this captain of coexistence is “anther reason to work harder.” But lets listen to testimony of how coexistence works, of what happens when wealthy American Jews and other do gooders dump their money in ‘coexistence’ programs: Silvi Vaknin is a poor Jewish resident of Acre. She just wanted to enjoy the most holy day of her calendar in peace and quiet when “there was a group of hundreds outside, mostly masked, from young men to older women, a number of young men climbed on my husband’s car and destroyed it. A hail of stones was throne at the yard. We turned out the light and went into the reinforced room. Eight of us, my family and our guests, in that room all night...I felt so insulted. They hurt me and my home on the Jewish people’s holiest day.” But remember, always remember, the reaction of the wealthy captains of coexistence who live in gated communities elsewhere. There reaction, and that of the media, is to condemn the mayor of Acre for canceling the coexistence festival and their reaction is to want to ‘work harder’ to help Arabs in the Arab section of Acre and bring more programs for those who were the leaders of the violence. But listen to the testimony of another poor resident of Acre, listen to them describe how wealthy people have created coexistence: “when I leave the house kids from the Arab school say insulting things. When I mention to the young men that they’re blocking my parking space they say ‘Yallah, shut up, you’re temporary here.’” That’s how a 60 year old grandmother experiences the coexistence that wealthy leftist Jews brought to Acre.
Will we give in to the power of the intellectual and his Nazi and Saudi friends who tell us how to coexist. Or will we struggle against each tentacle of this Octopus with all our strength? Those poorer Jews who today throw rocks in self defense in Acre are not the worst members of society, but rather the best for they are standing up for their honour which for too long was crushed under the boot of the intellectuals, Islamic hatred and the philanthropists. They are merely trying to remove part of that boot and remove the myth of coexistence from their throats, where culture has placed it. Coexistence is the true threat to the existence of all people. It is the precursor to genocide everywhere. Whether it was ‘coexistence’ in the Balkans, or in Lebanon, or Sudan, or 1920s Germany or Cambodia or Rwanda, it always produced the same thing. When a wealthy person comes to a poor community with the intention of opening a ‘coexistence center’ he should be chased out and beaten. The social engineering forced down our throats by intellectuals, who have been behind every genocide of the 20th century, needs to be opposed with every ounce of our strength. If rich wealthy people want to coexist they deserve to be settled as a buffer in places like Acre and Rwanda between the two peoples who exist there together. Until the rich intellectual leftist builds his home and subjects his property to destruction at the hands of mobs and until his daughters are raped and he must listen all night to the sounds emanating from the mosque and the music played intentionally on religious holidays to offend others, he and his money should be kept out and his nefarious role in society must be deracinated. There is no genocide without intellectualism and wealth. Every single genocide, from the Armenians to the Blacks of the Sudan has been caused by racial and social engineering, pseudo-scientific intellectualism, liberalism, leftist anthropologists, western elitists, the media and, today, post-colonialism. Coexistence is the code word for genocide and it is the precursor to it.
The indigenous lives of Jesus and Mohammed
Seth J. Frantzman
October 14th, 2008
A new study of American elementary school text books by the Institute for Jewish and Community Research has found that the history of ancient and modern Israel has been politicized by modern interpretations of the ‘conflict’ in the Middle East (Haviv Rettig ‘U.S Textbooks misrepresent Jews, Israel’ Sept. 25, 2008). Thus in numerous text books Jesus has become an indigenous ‘young Palestinian.’ In addition modern textbooks present the story of Islam as if it were a true story, discussing the ‘Prophet Mohammed’ and his life story. Whereas the story of the Jews is always prefaced with ‘Jews believe’, the story of Mohammed is presented as if were lifted from a classic Saudi Arabian religious textbook, which it probably was. This new revelation that Jesus has become an indigenous Palestinian reminds us of Jane Kramer’s April 2008 article entitled ‘The Petition’ in the New Yorker in which she claimed that the history of Israel is really one of “1400 years of indigenous Islam.”
But if Jesus is a Palestinian and Islam is indigenous to the land of Israel then who are the Jews? The problem with raising up Jesus as a ‘Palestinian’ and creating an indigenous notion of Islam and the Arab connection to the land of Israel is that it ignores the very reason that Islam and Christianity have a connection to the land in the first place. If Jesus was really an indigenous Palestinian Arab then shouldn’t he have been born in Arabia, since there were no Palestinian Arabs in Palestine in 30 A.D? But Jesus wasn’t born in Arabia. He was born in Bethlehem to a Jewish family from Nazareth. If Jesus was a Palestinian Arab then what was he doing in Jerusalem ‘cleansing the Temple’? He was in Jerusalem because he was a Jew and there was a Jewish temple there. But the Palestinian Jesus wouldn’t have needed to go to Jerusalem, for as an indigenous Palestinian living in a land that has no Jewish history there would have been no Jewish Temple. School children who are taught to believe that Jesus was a ‘young Palestinian’ are thus subconsciously forced to believe that he was ‘killed by the Jews’ just as the modern young Palestinians are being ‘killed by the Jews.’ But any Christian whose children are taught this anti-Semitic nonsense must find the rest of the Christian bible hard to fathom, with all its Jewish references, quotes from the prophets and attempts to reform the Jewish tradition.
But the claim that Islam is indigenous to Israel is as perplexing as the notion of a Palestinian Jesus. No Muslim confuses himself by believing Mohammed was a ‘Palestinian’ because the center of Islam is Mecca, not Jerusalem. But every Muslim knows that Mohammed chose Mecca after first considering Jerusalem, and turning away from Jerusalem because the Jews rejected Mohammed, something they are forever cursed for time and again in the Koran. But the notion of the indigenous Palestinian Islam stems from the Temple Mount’ Dome of the Rock where anti-Israel Muslim rhetoric now claims no Temple ever existed. But if there was no Temple and no Jews then why did Mohammed make a ‘night journey’ to the ‘far mosque’ of Jerusalem. As with the Palestinian Jesus, without the Jews there would be no reason for Mohammed to be in Jerusalem, for it would not have been a holy city. Muslims that confuse this history and claim that Mohammed journeyed to Jerusalem because it was already holy to Christianity then forget that it was only holy to Christianity because Jesus the Jew had gone their to cleanse the Temple. Elementary students who are today being brainwashed to believe in an indigenous Islam in Palestine and a Palestinian Jesus are being done a great disservice by those who predicate the teaching of history on the present. People reject the existence of Israel and thus want to reject the history of Jews in the Holy Land. But by deracinating the Jews they forget that Christianity and Islam have no connection to Jerusalem or the land. There can be no Palestinian Jesus without first having a Jewish Jesus and there can be no Dome of the Rock without first having a Jewish Temple Mount or ‘far mosque’ to build it upon.
Terra Incognita 56 Financial Crises, sexual harrassment and TR
Terra Incognita
Issue 56
“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
October 13th, 2008
1) Present at the creation, of the 2008 financial crises: From 2002 to 2004 I was a drug pusher. Not the illicit kind like cocaine. I pushed the legal kind, mortgages, a drug that is no less addictive. A chronicle of my experiences in the mortgage industry and my reflections on who else is to blame for the problems.
2) Hypocrisy and terror: A series of recent stories about sexual harassment in Egypt and Egyptian workers in Dubai shed light on the true story of Islamic immorality and its role in terrorism.
3) Misreading Teddy Roosevelt: A recent article claimed that John McCain was a dangerous new Teddy Roosevelt. But the writer seems to have misread the message of TR and also missed his great contributions to the United States. TR believed in ‘walking softly and carrying a big stick.’ American foreign policy could well learn from this. If John McCain were a new TR he would offer us much, condemning him for being one shows our narrow minded view of history.
Present at the creation, of the 2008 financial crises
October 6th, 2008
Seth J. Frantzman
From 2002 to 2004 I was a drug pusher. Not the illicit kind like cocaine and meth. I pushed the legal kind, mortgages, a drug that is no less addictive. I began as a telemarketer, convincing people to refinance their homes, and graduated to processing those loans and finally selling borrowers loans to buy homes. Along the way I obtained a real estate license and was exposed to that side of the business as well. I was a minor cog in a large organism, a great industry which helped people purchase homes and take equity out of those homes. Today the world’s financial markets are in crises because of these type of activities. For two years I worked in one of the hottest real estate markets in the United States, in Tucson Arizona.
Now the politicians are blaming everyone but themselves for the financial crises. They have lashed out at the ‘fat cats’ and the ‘speculators’. On October 6th disgraced Lehman Brothers CEO Richard Fuld testified before congress about the financial crises, which is now being blamed, partly on the failure of his firm, which filed for Chapter 11 on September 15th, 2008.
In September of 2007 I had an argument with my father about whether or not the dream of every American to own a home is a positive part of the American ethos. I felt at the time, as I still do, that there is nothing more essential to the American tradition than the personal responsibility derived from the ownership of one’s own land. This was an ethos that Thomas Jefferson articulated when he described an Agrarian American nation, who he idealized as a nation of smallholders. Farmers were the “chosen people” of God, a term he used in his Notes on the State of Virginia, published in 1781. Jefferson noted that “those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue. [In contrast] Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition.” Home ownership was ingrained in the tradition even in the earliest days of the American frontier when people escaped the claustrophobia of the east coast to search for their own plots of land. The movement of Americans away from the east coast and towards home ownership has continued to this day and has peaked in places such as Tucson and Prescott Arizona, where rapidly growing cities have opened up formerly dead land to home ownership through the creation of new sub-divisions.
But along the way something happened. Jefferson’s ideal of the personally responsible small holder gave way to the credit addicted home owner of the 1990s and 2000s. By the time that I took a job at Allied Home Mortgage people were taking on 105% loan to value mortgages in order to get into their homes. These mortgages, which sometimes included second and third mortgages as well as seller carry backs covered the closing costs of the borrower so that he was actually paid to get into his new home. These closing costs could be quite substantial and were part of the elaborate system whereby purchasing a home becomes a sort of trough for pigs to feast on. With the endless mantra that “homes appreciate at 12% a year” the borrower was not only encouraged to take on a huge loan-to-value but also to refinance his home as soon as rates dropped. Sometimes people were refinancing two or three times in a ten year period, and this in a state where the average person sold their home every five years. The Jefferson fantasy of a nation of farmers owning their own land certainly could not have included a nation of people living on credit and selling their homes every 5 years, homes whose debt they hadn’t paid down more than a few percent by the time they sold them and due to refinancing probably owed more than they had originally purchased them for. But nevertheless these borrowers were addicted to the drug of ‘equity’. Even if they weren’t saddled with two or three mortgages on the same home and they weren’t refinancing they were taking out ‘home equity loans’, using the home “like a credit card” but one in which the “you only pay 5% interest on.”
Recent revelations show that AIG sold billions of dollars in Credit Default Swaps, a sort of insurance that allowed banks to collect if the loans they guaranteed went bad, out of a London business unit, putting themselves in the hock for more billions in payouts when loans went bad. This shows how the mortgage crises spread like a virus beyond the banking industry. Other revelations show that Daniel Mudd, the CEO of Fannie Mae, was encouraged by Congress and by his own instincts to take on ever more risky loans, providing more and more liquidity to the market to sell more and more loans for which there was little collateral. During his questioning by Congress, Lehman CEO Fuld was accused of being a ‘thief’ for having bundled mortgages that were originated at values above those of the homes they were tied to and thus helped create a mess when those borrowers defaulted. Fuld correctly noted “I don’t know why anyone would knowingly originate a mortgage for more than the value of the home.” But what the questioning revealed was how little congress understands how the mortgage industry works. The very fact that a U.S congressman thought that the CEO of Lehman Brothers was responsible for the fact that loans were given for homes where the value was below the amount of the loan goes to show how removed congressmen must be from the entire industry.
So let’s recall exactly how the system actually works. The process begins with a person who wants to buy a home. He locates a realtor. The realtor tells him that investing in a home is better than renting because the home will appreciate at 12% a year and that mortgage payments are about the same as renting, meaning you make money every year rather than “flushing it down the drain.” The buyer finds a home and makes an offer. The realtor usually runs ‘comps’ for the home before the offer is made. This print out compares other homes that are similar that have recently sold and shows the average price per square foot. This supposedly tells the buyer whether he is making a sound decision. In reality in a wild real estate market where realtors charge 7% commissions this helps to cause the price of homes to rise a minimum of 7% everytime they are sold (because the seller must cover the costs of the realtor), the cost of the home does not always reflect its ‘value’. So the buyer makes an offer and it is accepted by the seller. It is not in the realtors best interest to delay the sale so he works with the listing agent, or sometimes as the only agent on the purchase to facilitate a quick sale. But the buyer must be approved for a mortgage. Sometimes he has been ‘pre-approved’ for a loan. In this case he has already been guided to a mortgage banker. He might be a very sound borrower. In this case the loan he will receive cannot have monthly payments (principle, interest, taxes and insurance payments are bundled together into one monthly payment) that exceed around 35% of his monthly income. But increasingly between 2002 and 2007 borrowers were invited to get involved in more and more exotic products. Sometimes they were encouraged to be involve in ‘interest only’ loans where they only pay interest in the hopes that the house will appreciate so much there is no reason to pay down the principle. Sometimes they chose an ‘Option ARM’ or adjustable rate mortgage where they could choose to pay interest only or principle and interest or payoff the loan in 15 rather than 30 years. Some of these loans adjusted after three or five years, but some even more exotic products allowed the bank to actually increase the principle if the loan adjusted and the borrower only paid the interest. Some of the loans, especially those going to less than perfect credit borrowers included ‘pre-payment penalties’ so that the borrower, who already has bad credit, was given a high interest rate, some 2-5% above the regular one, and then not allowed to pay off the loan in less than five years or so or incur a penalty. In this case the bank thought it was locking in this higher interest rate for these years, but in actuality the bad credit borrower was now forced to pay more and the risk f default increased exponentially. From the bank’s point of view this made sense since the borrower was a higher risk. The borrower could also choose, sometimes, from ‘low doc’ or ‘no doc’ loans and ‘stated income’ loans. In these cases, usually if the borrower had decent credit, he was trusted to state his income (rather than supply tax returns, bank statements and pay stubs) and accept a slightly higher rate for this privilege. Truly risky borrowers were saddled with multiple loans. One bank would provide a loan for some 90% of the value of the home, protecting itself against the higher chance of default by the untrustworthy borrower. Then a second lender would cover another 7% of the value of the home for a higher interest rate, taking on more risk in exchange for more interest. Then a third loan might be tacked on, perhaps by the home seller, as a form of ‘carry back’ loan for another 5%, covering the closing costs of the borrower so that he would actually get some cash back at closing,. But this third loan might be at 12% interest or some outrageous figure. Saddled with three loans for some 102% of the value of the home the bad credit borrower now had an incentive to make his credit worse by defaulting on all three loans. But no matter, he was assured by the realtor that the home would appreciate by 12% in the first year. So for a $100,000 home, although he owed $102,000, it would be worth $112,000 after the first year. When he couldn’t make his payments he could always sell the home, paying the same realtor 7% or $8,500, meaning that he would receive a profit of $1,500 after the first year, having invested not one cent.
My former employer, Washington Mutual, ran itself to the brink of Bankruptcy because of its wild mortgage ways. Allied Home Mortgage, another employer, was sued by countless borrowers who felt they were fleeced in their refinancing. They were told they were lowering their payments, which was true, but they didn’t realize that they were losing thousands of dollars in equity through refinancing.
In this crises one cannot ignore the role of all the other people who benefited from the mortgage binge. Appraisers were at the trough as well. In the cases where houses turned out to be worth less than their perceived values it seems the appraisers were encouraged to stretch their values and underwriters and loan processors never caught on or were in ot it because they too got paid for each loan originated. When Congress claimed that investment banks like Lehman brothers ‘stole’ from Americans by reselling these mortgages they seemed to have missed this entire industry of appraising. There were also ‘home inspectors’ at the trough. This group of people is probably the largest part of the home purchasing scam. They write large reports about the home, claiming to have ‘inspected it’ but they admit they are not experts in plumbing, structural integrity or wiring and that should the buyer truly want to check any of the things in the ‘home inspection’ that they should hire a professional. This is a point realtors also stress. They aren’t responsible in any way for telling how much a home is worth or how much it will appreciate because they are not professionals, but this doesn’t bar them from telling borrowers all sorts of thing. One must not forget that the title company, home warranty seller, termite inspector and numerous other people are at the trough before the home purchase is closed. Literally thousands of dollars are churned out of each home purchase, some from the borrower and some from the seller. When its all over the value of the home is not only increased 7% to cover the realtor fees but also another 3-5% to cover the costs of the mortgage and the other people involved. No wonder homes ‘appreciate’ at 12% a year. That represents precisely the percent of the value of the home that goes into the trough during a closing.
A lot of people got fat during the housing bubble. It wasn’t just Lehman executives. Congress wants a quick fix and an easy scapegoat. But from the highest pashas in Congress who should have pushed better oversight of Fannie and Freddie, down to the borrowers who defaulted, many people were to blame. It wasn’t merely the American dream of home ownership that has been harmed. It is an entire way of life that was built on credit. This is a recent phenomenon. While it may appear that numerous Americans have ‘fulfilled’ the dream of home ownership, the fact that so few of them have paid their homes down means that America may be farther from the Jeffersonian dream today than it ever has been. All the drugs that Fannie Mae peddled over the years, including the scams known as FHA loans and HUD homes and ‘Affordable Housing’ or the scam called ‘ACORN’ provided millions of people with homes who never worked for them and never intended to work to pay them off. The idea that “low income” borrowers deserved to have all the mortgage rules bended for them so that they ended up with monthly payments that equaled some 65% of their monthly income was a recipe for default. And yet, in the name of good intentions, billions of dollars was pumped into the mortgage industry so that ‘low income’ borrowers could have these ‘affordable’ loans.
Only when the addiction to credit is cured can Americans get back to the business of living the Jeffersonian ideal.
Hypocrisy and terror
Seth J. Frantzman
October 13th, 2008
Two stories appeared in the Associated Press on October 5th, 2008. The first concerned a riot in the Egyptian town el Tayaba which was sparked after Muslims were accused of sexually harassing a Christian woman. The next story concerned a concert in Kuwait by an Egyptian singer in which a female spectator rushed the stage and kissed a male performer. The concert was ended because it "defied the conservative traditions" of Kuwait. These stories are related not merely because they both include Egyptian protagonists. They are related because they deal with the common misconception and myth that the world has had to deal with in the wake of September 11th, the idea that the clash of civilizations between Islam and the West is in any way due to the West's 'opulence' and 'immorality' and the Muslim world's 'morality' and 'modesty'. The complaints by the Islamist radicals that they oppose the West because it brings 'immorality' and 'sexuality' to their culture is as much a myth as the idea that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is to blame for inflaming Islamism. Many people have accepted this myth. Fareed Zakaria in an article published in Newsweek after 9/11 noted, among other reasons, that it was because “we are rich and they envy us.” This is part of the 'western opulence causes Muslim terror' myth. In his recent book, The Enemy At Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11, Dinesh D'Souza, an American conservative, argues that “a decadent American culture angers and repulses traditional societies, especially those in the Islamic world that are being overwhelmed with this culture.”
The best place to observe the degree to which this is a myth is in the Persian Gulf Arab states, not only Kuwait, but especially in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. A recent article in the New York Times entitled 'Young and Arab in land of Mosques and Bars' (Sept. 23, 20098) by Michael Slackman described the story of Rami Galal, Ayman Ibrahim and Hamza Abu Zanad, the former two of Egypt and the latter of Jordan respectively. Galal enjoys drinking alcohol and has a Russian prostitute as a girlfriend. Slackman paints a picture of a Dubai as a utopia; “a vision of what the rest of the Arab world could become-tolerance for cultural diversity…diversity, tolerance end opportunity help breed moderation.” Slackman neglects to mention that 80 percent of the country are immigrants or expats and that none of them or their children have a right to vote. The only other nation where we can recall such a situation was apartheid south Africa where 20% had rights and 80% did not. But no matter, Dubai is a vision of the future. Zanad also describes his life in Dubai as a sort of fantasy world’ “fancy cars…you can have prostitutes.”
Galal and Zanad come from cultures where people are from a “traditional, observant household, where family honor is linked to obeying social norms and respecting religious values.” Both Ibrahim and Galal are engaged to married. And yet they frequent the 'Rattlesnake Bar and Grill' where “many single women line up like merchandise by the front door.” The bar is packed with “single men and prostitutes.” But after a night at the bar with the prostitutes Galal flies home to Egypt where he fasts for Ramadan.
The United States did not bring hypocrisy to the Arab Muslim world. Hypocrisy has always been integral to the culture of the Middle East. Since the 7th century and before it has had this contrast between the Harem, of nude dancing girls to service man’s every sexual desire, and women covered from head to toe in the Abbaya or Chador or veil. In Iran where it is forbidden for men and women who are not related to be in the same room alone the prostitutes engage in 'muta marriage' or short term marriage for the duration of the encounter.
Hypocrisy and terror have gone hand in hand in the past. Many leading communists who also doubled as terrorists spoke about a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ but were themselves men of substance and wealth. While they used terror as a weapon to achieve their goals and while they murdered ‘rich bourgeoisie landlords’ they themselves came from leading families and when they finally gained power they surrounded themselves with wealth, feasts, palaces, fancy cars, private planes and posh residences.
We cannot ignore the hypocrisy that dominates in the Arab Muslim world. This hypocrisy has been noted in a variety of texts dealing with the most ‘fundamentalist’ of Muslim regimes: Saudi Arabia. In this regime it is not only typical for men to take four wives but also for them to continually trade up so that the most recent wife is a young woman, even as the man approaches his later years, not so different than the practice in the West where men take ‘trophy wives’. There may be many things that divide the West and Islamic civilization, but wealth, opulence and sexual promiscuity, among men, are not among them. The story of Rami Galal and Ayman Ibrahim only serve to highlight this truth; both men were engaged to be married when they went to Dubai to enjoy their time with prostitutes and bar hopping. It’s not sexuality that brought on 9/11. Those on the right and left, from Dinesh D’Souza to Noam Chomsky are wrong on this point. The West didn’t ‘break down’ the bonds of family in the Muslim world. What bonds that existed were long ago shattered by the practice of polygamy and the harem. The West has only brought such sexuality into the open rather than containing it in a bubble of hypocrisy, as exists in Dubai.
Misreading Teddy Roosevelt
Seth J. Frantzman
October 6th, 2008
On October 3rd an article by Bernd Debusmann appeared in the International Herald Tribune entitled 'McCain Foreign Policy'. He criticized the attempt by John McCain to portray himself as a new incarnation of Teddy Roosevelt’s foreign policy. He portrayed TR as an American buy, remembered mostly for colonizing Latin America. Debusmann complained about McCain’s idea of a League of Democracies and noted that in a recent poll 22,000 people around the world choose Obama over McCain in saying that Obama would “improve” U.S foreign policy. But he neglected to mention that TR was also a well known 'Trust Buster' who helped break up the major U.S corporate monopolies such as Standard Oil. He neglected to mention the central theme of the Roosevelt Corollary of the Monroe Doctrine: It was designed to end European intervention in the affairs of American States, not merely to project American power. In fact the TR corollary was designed to prevent the threatened invasion of several Latin American nations by the UK and Germany due to those nations' inability to pay their international debts to European power. Debusmann forgets that when TR was president in 1904 that the European powers controlled much of the world under the colonial yoke, not America. In fact he seems to have forgotten completely the context of TR and his presidency and his revolutionary ideas about conserving the natural environment and breaking up corporate monopolies. TR was president when America played virtually no role on the world stage and he was one of the first U.S presidents to travel abroad. Debusmann ascribes the America of 2004 to the America of 1904 without noting the great changes in power in the world that have taken place. TR’s notion of 'speak softly and carry a big stick' is in essence the opposite of the Bush foreign policy, something you also neglect to mention and seem to misunderstand. Speaking softly is the opposite of what the U.S does today. If McCain were to actually follow that policy it would represent a great departure from the Bush doctrine. Debusmann confuses the notion of the League of Democracies by claiming, through the words of others, that it is "designed to exclude and probably gang up on all the countries we don't like." Debusmann notes that it might "undermine the United Nations." But he seems to forget that the rise of democracy has been a major theme of the 20th century which has resulted in democratization of South America, Africa and Asia. How exactly a league of democracies 'gangs up' on countries 'we don't like' is beyond me. The world has ganged up on dictatorships such as Burma and Zimbabwe for a long time and one doesn’t see Debusmann defending Burma based on this fact. Since when did democracy become such a negative word? One finds it strange that Debusmann frames the Russia-Georgia role as one in which Russia "struck back" at Georgia as if it were Russia that was a victim of this war rather than the country using disproportionate force. When the U.S invaded Afghanistan or Israel invaded Lebanon, did Debusmann describe these actions as 'striking back'. Why is it when Russia behaves the way the U.S or Israel does its actions are not framed in the same way? When did it become "impetuous" for an elected American politician to offer support to a small democratic country such as Georgia? When the EU offered support I doubt you described it as "impetuous." Offering support for small countries being invaded by their large neighbours should be a positive thing, not a negative.
Lastly Debusmann notes that, based on recent poll in 22 countries that people feel an Obama presidency will "improve [US] foreign relations" with people in the world. But unfortunately Europeans and other foreigners don't vote in American elections. In 1939 most Europeans, who had marched blindly to the fascist lock-step, would have also said that FDR was not 'improving U.S relations' with the continent. Surely, if polled, most of those under the Stalinist boot in 1950 would have said that JFK was not "improving foreign relations" with the USSR. Just because the world's people don't like the American president doesn't mean he is wrong. In the past the world has frequently been wrong, more times than it has been right. Had we Americans followed the way of the European we would have been brutal colonialists at the time of TR, then good monarchists, then Nazis and then Stalinists.
But in the end the editorial proves the degree to which people have completely lost sight of important values in world affairs. Democracy is a positive notion, not a negative. Defending the rights of small nations is a positive notion, not a negative. Walking softly and carrying a big stick is a positive foreign policy. It is better than speaking loudly and carrying a small stick, which seems to be what many world leaders are good at these days. Busting trusts and conserving national treasures such as Yellowstone national park are positive features of the TR legacy, not negatives. For Americans to vote their own interests, in a country that numbers 310 million people, the most diverse country in the world, is a unique and positive feature of one of the world's oldest democracies. For Americans to follow the will of the people of France, Saudi Arabia, Russia and China is not positive. Those people have already had their say on their leaders, or perhaps a lack of say given their undemocratic systems. That is fine. But we Americans also deserve to have our own form of government with out own unique president. We don't need to be a carbon copy of the world, a world that has so often done the most terrible things to its people. The modern intellectual damns America and scoffs at the legacy of TR. But TR was a better man than George Bush and Barack Obama. Those that have forgotten his unique legacy and his many achievements are doomed, unfortunately, to repeat the mistakes that were made before and after him. 20 percent of the world's people think American foreign relations will change for the better under McCain. In the last semi-democratic elections under Hitler it was also just 20 percent of the people who opposed him. But those 20 percent were right. Sometimes the majority is wrong.
Issue 56
“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
October 13th, 2008
1) Present at the creation, of the 2008 financial crises: From 2002 to 2004 I was a drug pusher. Not the illicit kind like cocaine. I pushed the legal kind, mortgages, a drug that is no less addictive. A chronicle of my experiences in the mortgage industry and my reflections on who else is to blame for the problems.
2) Hypocrisy and terror: A series of recent stories about sexual harassment in Egypt and Egyptian workers in Dubai shed light on the true story of Islamic immorality and its role in terrorism.
3) Misreading Teddy Roosevelt: A recent article claimed that John McCain was a dangerous new Teddy Roosevelt. But the writer seems to have misread the message of TR and also missed his great contributions to the United States. TR believed in ‘walking softly and carrying a big stick.’ American foreign policy could well learn from this. If John McCain were a new TR he would offer us much, condemning him for being one shows our narrow minded view of history.
Present at the creation, of the 2008 financial crises
October 6th, 2008
Seth J. Frantzman
From 2002 to 2004 I was a drug pusher. Not the illicit kind like cocaine and meth. I pushed the legal kind, mortgages, a drug that is no less addictive. I began as a telemarketer, convincing people to refinance their homes, and graduated to processing those loans and finally selling borrowers loans to buy homes. Along the way I obtained a real estate license and was exposed to that side of the business as well. I was a minor cog in a large organism, a great industry which helped people purchase homes and take equity out of those homes. Today the world’s financial markets are in crises because of these type of activities. For two years I worked in one of the hottest real estate markets in the United States, in Tucson Arizona.
Now the politicians are blaming everyone but themselves for the financial crises. They have lashed out at the ‘fat cats’ and the ‘speculators’. On October 6th disgraced Lehman Brothers CEO Richard Fuld testified before congress about the financial crises, which is now being blamed, partly on the failure of his firm, which filed for Chapter 11 on September 15th, 2008.
In September of 2007 I had an argument with my father about whether or not the dream of every American to own a home is a positive part of the American ethos. I felt at the time, as I still do, that there is nothing more essential to the American tradition than the personal responsibility derived from the ownership of one’s own land. This was an ethos that Thomas Jefferson articulated when he described an Agrarian American nation, who he idealized as a nation of smallholders. Farmers were the “chosen people” of God, a term he used in his Notes on the State of Virginia, published in 1781. Jefferson noted that “those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue. [In contrast] Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition.” Home ownership was ingrained in the tradition even in the earliest days of the American frontier when people escaped the claustrophobia of the east coast to search for their own plots of land. The movement of Americans away from the east coast and towards home ownership has continued to this day and has peaked in places such as Tucson and Prescott Arizona, where rapidly growing cities have opened up formerly dead land to home ownership through the creation of new sub-divisions.
But along the way something happened. Jefferson’s ideal of the personally responsible small holder gave way to the credit addicted home owner of the 1990s and 2000s. By the time that I took a job at Allied Home Mortgage people were taking on 105% loan to value mortgages in order to get into their homes. These mortgages, which sometimes included second and third mortgages as well as seller carry backs covered the closing costs of the borrower so that he was actually paid to get into his new home. These closing costs could be quite substantial and were part of the elaborate system whereby purchasing a home becomes a sort of trough for pigs to feast on. With the endless mantra that “homes appreciate at 12% a year” the borrower was not only encouraged to take on a huge loan-to-value but also to refinance his home as soon as rates dropped. Sometimes people were refinancing two or three times in a ten year period, and this in a state where the average person sold their home every five years. The Jefferson fantasy of a nation of farmers owning their own land certainly could not have included a nation of people living on credit and selling their homes every 5 years, homes whose debt they hadn’t paid down more than a few percent by the time they sold them and due to refinancing probably owed more than they had originally purchased them for. But nevertheless these borrowers were addicted to the drug of ‘equity’. Even if they weren’t saddled with two or three mortgages on the same home and they weren’t refinancing they were taking out ‘home equity loans’, using the home “like a credit card” but one in which the “you only pay 5% interest on.”
Recent revelations show that AIG sold billions of dollars in Credit Default Swaps, a sort of insurance that allowed banks to collect if the loans they guaranteed went bad, out of a London business unit, putting themselves in the hock for more billions in payouts when loans went bad. This shows how the mortgage crises spread like a virus beyond the banking industry. Other revelations show that Daniel Mudd, the CEO of Fannie Mae, was encouraged by Congress and by his own instincts to take on ever more risky loans, providing more and more liquidity to the market to sell more and more loans for which there was little collateral. During his questioning by Congress, Lehman CEO Fuld was accused of being a ‘thief’ for having bundled mortgages that were originated at values above those of the homes they were tied to and thus helped create a mess when those borrowers defaulted. Fuld correctly noted “I don’t know why anyone would knowingly originate a mortgage for more than the value of the home.” But what the questioning revealed was how little congress understands how the mortgage industry works. The very fact that a U.S congressman thought that the CEO of Lehman Brothers was responsible for the fact that loans were given for homes where the value was below the amount of the loan goes to show how removed congressmen must be from the entire industry.
So let’s recall exactly how the system actually works. The process begins with a person who wants to buy a home. He locates a realtor. The realtor tells him that investing in a home is better than renting because the home will appreciate at 12% a year and that mortgage payments are about the same as renting, meaning you make money every year rather than “flushing it down the drain.” The buyer finds a home and makes an offer. The realtor usually runs ‘comps’ for the home before the offer is made. This print out compares other homes that are similar that have recently sold and shows the average price per square foot. This supposedly tells the buyer whether he is making a sound decision. In reality in a wild real estate market where realtors charge 7% commissions this helps to cause the price of homes to rise a minimum of 7% everytime they are sold (because the seller must cover the costs of the realtor), the cost of the home does not always reflect its ‘value’. So the buyer makes an offer and it is accepted by the seller. It is not in the realtors best interest to delay the sale so he works with the listing agent, or sometimes as the only agent on the purchase to facilitate a quick sale. But the buyer must be approved for a mortgage. Sometimes he has been ‘pre-approved’ for a loan. In this case he has already been guided to a mortgage banker. He might be a very sound borrower. In this case the loan he will receive cannot have monthly payments (principle, interest, taxes and insurance payments are bundled together into one monthly payment) that exceed around 35% of his monthly income. But increasingly between 2002 and 2007 borrowers were invited to get involved in more and more exotic products. Sometimes they were encouraged to be involve in ‘interest only’ loans where they only pay interest in the hopes that the house will appreciate so much there is no reason to pay down the principle. Sometimes they chose an ‘Option ARM’ or adjustable rate mortgage where they could choose to pay interest only or principle and interest or payoff the loan in 15 rather than 30 years. Some of these loans adjusted after three or five years, but some even more exotic products allowed the bank to actually increase the principle if the loan adjusted and the borrower only paid the interest. Some of the loans, especially those going to less than perfect credit borrowers included ‘pre-payment penalties’ so that the borrower, who already has bad credit, was given a high interest rate, some 2-5% above the regular one, and then not allowed to pay off the loan in less than five years or so or incur a penalty. In this case the bank thought it was locking in this higher interest rate for these years, but in actuality the bad credit borrower was now forced to pay more and the risk f default increased exponentially. From the bank’s point of view this made sense since the borrower was a higher risk. The borrower could also choose, sometimes, from ‘low doc’ or ‘no doc’ loans and ‘stated income’ loans. In these cases, usually if the borrower had decent credit, he was trusted to state his income (rather than supply tax returns, bank statements and pay stubs) and accept a slightly higher rate for this privilege. Truly risky borrowers were saddled with multiple loans. One bank would provide a loan for some 90% of the value of the home, protecting itself against the higher chance of default by the untrustworthy borrower. Then a second lender would cover another 7% of the value of the home for a higher interest rate, taking on more risk in exchange for more interest. Then a third loan might be tacked on, perhaps by the home seller, as a form of ‘carry back’ loan for another 5%, covering the closing costs of the borrower so that he would actually get some cash back at closing,. But this third loan might be at 12% interest or some outrageous figure. Saddled with three loans for some 102% of the value of the home the bad credit borrower now had an incentive to make his credit worse by defaulting on all three loans. But no matter, he was assured by the realtor that the home would appreciate by 12% in the first year. So for a $100,000 home, although he owed $102,000, it would be worth $112,000 after the first year. When he couldn’t make his payments he could always sell the home, paying the same realtor 7% or $8,500, meaning that he would receive a profit of $1,500 after the first year, having invested not one cent.
My former employer, Washington Mutual, ran itself to the brink of Bankruptcy because of its wild mortgage ways. Allied Home Mortgage, another employer, was sued by countless borrowers who felt they were fleeced in their refinancing. They were told they were lowering their payments, which was true, but they didn’t realize that they were losing thousands of dollars in equity through refinancing.
In this crises one cannot ignore the role of all the other people who benefited from the mortgage binge. Appraisers were at the trough as well. In the cases where houses turned out to be worth less than their perceived values it seems the appraisers were encouraged to stretch their values and underwriters and loan processors never caught on or were in ot it because they too got paid for each loan originated. When Congress claimed that investment banks like Lehman brothers ‘stole’ from Americans by reselling these mortgages they seemed to have missed this entire industry of appraising. There were also ‘home inspectors’ at the trough. This group of people is probably the largest part of the home purchasing scam. They write large reports about the home, claiming to have ‘inspected it’ but they admit they are not experts in plumbing, structural integrity or wiring and that should the buyer truly want to check any of the things in the ‘home inspection’ that they should hire a professional. This is a point realtors also stress. They aren’t responsible in any way for telling how much a home is worth or how much it will appreciate because they are not professionals, but this doesn’t bar them from telling borrowers all sorts of thing. One must not forget that the title company, home warranty seller, termite inspector and numerous other people are at the trough before the home purchase is closed. Literally thousands of dollars are churned out of each home purchase, some from the borrower and some from the seller. When its all over the value of the home is not only increased 7% to cover the realtor fees but also another 3-5% to cover the costs of the mortgage and the other people involved. No wonder homes ‘appreciate’ at 12% a year. That represents precisely the percent of the value of the home that goes into the trough during a closing.
A lot of people got fat during the housing bubble. It wasn’t just Lehman executives. Congress wants a quick fix and an easy scapegoat. But from the highest pashas in Congress who should have pushed better oversight of Fannie and Freddie, down to the borrowers who defaulted, many people were to blame. It wasn’t merely the American dream of home ownership that has been harmed. It is an entire way of life that was built on credit. This is a recent phenomenon. While it may appear that numerous Americans have ‘fulfilled’ the dream of home ownership, the fact that so few of them have paid their homes down means that America may be farther from the Jeffersonian dream today than it ever has been. All the drugs that Fannie Mae peddled over the years, including the scams known as FHA loans and HUD homes and ‘Affordable Housing’ or the scam called ‘ACORN’ provided millions of people with homes who never worked for them and never intended to work to pay them off. The idea that “low income” borrowers deserved to have all the mortgage rules bended for them so that they ended up with monthly payments that equaled some 65% of their monthly income was a recipe for default. And yet, in the name of good intentions, billions of dollars was pumped into the mortgage industry so that ‘low income’ borrowers could have these ‘affordable’ loans.
Only when the addiction to credit is cured can Americans get back to the business of living the Jeffersonian ideal.
Hypocrisy and terror
Seth J. Frantzman
October 13th, 2008
Two stories appeared in the Associated Press on October 5th, 2008. The first concerned a riot in the Egyptian town el Tayaba which was sparked after Muslims were accused of sexually harassing a Christian woman. The next story concerned a concert in Kuwait by an Egyptian singer in which a female spectator rushed the stage and kissed a male performer. The concert was ended because it "defied the conservative traditions" of Kuwait. These stories are related not merely because they both include Egyptian protagonists. They are related because they deal with the common misconception and myth that the world has had to deal with in the wake of September 11th, the idea that the clash of civilizations between Islam and the West is in any way due to the West's 'opulence' and 'immorality' and the Muslim world's 'morality' and 'modesty'. The complaints by the Islamist radicals that they oppose the West because it brings 'immorality' and 'sexuality' to their culture is as much a myth as the idea that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is to blame for inflaming Islamism. Many people have accepted this myth. Fareed Zakaria in an article published in Newsweek after 9/11 noted, among other reasons, that it was because “we are rich and they envy us.” This is part of the 'western opulence causes Muslim terror' myth. In his recent book, The Enemy At Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11, Dinesh D'Souza, an American conservative, argues that “a decadent American culture angers and repulses traditional societies, especially those in the Islamic world that are being overwhelmed with this culture.”
The best place to observe the degree to which this is a myth is in the Persian Gulf Arab states, not only Kuwait, but especially in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. A recent article in the New York Times entitled 'Young and Arab in land of Mosques and Bars' (Sept. 23, 20098) by Michael Slackman described the story of Rami Galal, Ayman Ibrahim and Hamza Abu Zanad, the former two of Egypt and the latter of Jordan respectively. Galal enjoys drinking alcohol and has a Russian prostitute as a girlfriend. Slackman paints a picture of a Dubai as a utopia; “a vision of what the rest of the Arab world could become-tolerance for cultural diversity…diversity, tolerance end opportunity help breed moderation.” Slackman neglects to mention that 80 percent of the country are immigrants or expats and that none of them or their children have a right to vote. The only other nation where we can recall such a situation was apartheid south Africa where 20% had rights and 80% did not. But no matter, Dubai is a vision of the future. Zanad also describes his life in Dubai as a sort of fantasy world’ “fancy cars…you can have prostitutes.”
Galal and Zanad come from cultures where people are from a “traditional, observant household, where family honor is linked to obeying social norms and respecting religious values.” Both Ibrahim and Galal are engaged to married. And yet they frequent the 'Rattlesnake Bar and Grill' where “many single women line up like merchandise by the front door.” The bar is packed with “single men and prostitutes.” But after a night at the bar with the prostitutes Galal flies home to Egypt where he fasts for Ramadan.
The United States did not bring hypocrisy to the Arab Muslim world. Hypocrisy has always been integral to the culture of the Middle East. Since the 7th century and before it has had this contrast between the Harem, of nude dancing girls to service man’s every sexual desire, and women covered from head to toe in the Abbaya or Chador or veil. In Iran where it is forbidden for men and women who are not related to be in the same room alone the prostitutes engage in 'muta marriage' or short term marriage for the duration of the encounter.
Hypocrisy and terror have gone hand in hand in the past. Many leading communists who also doubled as terrorists spoke about a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ but were themselves men of substance and wealth. While they used terror as a weapon to achieve their goals and while they murdered ‘rich bourgeoisie landlords’ they themselves came from leading families and when they finally gained power they surrounded themselves with wealth, feasts, palaces, fancy cars, private planes and posh residences.
We cannot ignore the hypocrisy that dominates in the Arab Muslim world. This hypocrisy has been noted in a variety of texts dealing with the most ‘fundamentalist’ of Muslim regimes: Saudi Arabia. In this regime it is not only typical for men to take four wives but also for them to continually trade up so that the most recent wife is a young woman, even as the man approaches his later years, not so different than the practice in the West where men take ‘trophy wives’. There may be many things that divide the West and Islamic civilization, but wealth, opulence and sexual promiscuity, among men, are not among them. The story of Rami Galal and Ayman Ibrahim only serve to highlight this truth; both men were engaged to be married when they went to Dubai to enjoy their time with prostitutes and bar hopping. It’s not sexuality that brought on 9/11. Those on the right and left, from Dinesh D’Souza to Noam Chomsky are wrong on this point. The West didn’t ‘break down’ the bonds of family in the Muslim world. What bonds that existed were long ago shattered by the practice of polygamy and the harem. The West has only brought such sexuality into the open rather than containing it in a bubble of hypocrisy, as exists in Dubai.
Misreading Teddy Roosevelt
Seth J. Frantzman
October 6th, 2008
On October 3rd an article by Bernd Debusmann appeared in the International Herald Tribune entitled 'McCain Foreign Policy'. He criticized the attempt by John McCain to portray himself as a new incarnation of Teddy Roosevelt’s foreign policy. He portrayed TR as an American buy, remembered mostly for colonizing Latin America. Debusmann complained about McCain’s idea of a League of Democracies and noted that in a recent poll 22,000 people around the world choose Obama over McCain in saying that Obama would “improve” U.S foreign policy. But he neglected to mention that TR was also a well known 'Trust Buster' who helped break up the major U.S corporate monopolies such as Standard Oil. He neglected to mention the central theme of the Roosevelt Corollary of the Monroe Doctrine: It was designed to end European intervention in the affairs of American States, not merely to project American power. In fact the TR corollary was designed to prevent the threatened invasion of several Latin American nations by the UK and Germany due to those nations' inability to pay their international debts to European power. Debusmann forgets that when TR was president in 1904 that the European powers controlled much of the world under the colonial yoke, not America. In fact he seems to have forgotten completely the context of TR and his presidency and his revolutionary ideas about conserving the natural environment and breaking up corporate monopolies. TR was president when America played virtually no role on the world stage and he was one of the first U.S presidents to travel abroad. Debusmann ascribes the America of 2004 to the America of 1904 without noting the great changes in power in the world that have taken place. TR’s notion of 'speak softly and carry a big stick' is in essence the opposite of the Bush foreign policy, something you also neglect to mention and seem to misunderstand. Speaking softly is the opposite of what the U.S does today. If McCain were to actually follow that policy it would represent a great departure from the Bush doctrine. Debusmann confuses the notion of the League of Democracies by claiming, through the words of others, that it is "designed to exclude and probably gang up on all the countries we don't like." Debusmann notes that it might "undermine the United Nations." But he seems to forget that the rise of democracy has been a major theme of the 20th century which has resulted in democratization of South America, Africa and Asia. How exactly a league of democracies 'gangs up' on countries 'we don't like' is beyond me. The world has ganged up on dictatorships such as Burma and Zimbabwe for a long time and one doesn’t see Debusmann defending Burma based on this fact. Since when did democracy become such a negative word? One finds it strange that Debusmann frames the Russia-Georgia role as one in which Russia "struck back" at Georgia as if it were Russia that was a victim of this war rather than the country using disproportionate force. When the U.S invaded Afghanistan or Israel invaded Lebanon, did Debusmann describe these actions as 'striking back'. Why is it when Russia behaves the way the U.S or Israel does its actions are not framed in the same way? When did it become "impetuous" for an elected American politician to offer support to a small democratic country such as Georgia? When the EU offered support I doubt you described it as "impetuous." Offering support for small countries being invaded by their large neighbours should be a positive thing, not a negative.
Lastly Debusmann notes that, based on recent poll in 22 countries that people feel an Obama presidency will "improve [US] foreign relations" with people in the world. But unfortunately Europeans and other foreigners don't vote in American elections. In 1939 most Europeans, who had marched blindly to the fascist lock-step, would have also said that FDR was not 'improving U.S relations' with the continent. Surely, if polled, most of those under the Stalinist boot in 1950 would have said that JFK was not "improving foreign relations" with the USSR. Just because the world's people don't like the American president doesn't mean he is wrong. In the past the world has frequently been wrong, more times than it has been right. Had we Americans followed the way of the European we would have been brutal colonialists at the time of TR, then good monarchists, then Nazis and then Stalinists.
But in the end the editorial proves the degree to which people have completely lost sight of important values in world affairs. Democracy is a positive notion, not a negative. Defending the rights of small nations is a positive notion, not a negative. Walking softly and carrying a big stick is a positive foreign policy. It is better than speaking loudly and carrying a small stick, which seems to be what many world leaders are good at these days. Busting trusts and conserving national treasures such as Yellowstone national park are positive features of the TR legacy, not negatives. For Americans to vote their own interests, in a country that numbers 310 million people, the most diverse country in the world, is a unique and positive feature of one of the world's oldest democracies. For Americans to follow the will of the people of France, Saudi Arabia, Russia and China is not positive. Those people have already had their say on their leaders, or perhaps a lack of say given their undemocratic systems. That is fine. But we Americans also deserve to have our own form of government with out own unique president. We don't need to be a carbon copy of the world, a world that has so often done the most terrible things to its people. The modern intellectual damns America and scoffs at the legacy of TR. But TR was a better man than George Bush and Barack Obama. Those that have forgotten his unique legacy and his many achievements are doomed, unfortunately, to repeat the mistakes that were made before and after him. 20 percent of the world's people think American foreign relations will change for the better under McCain. In the last semi-democratic elections under Hitler it was also just 20 percent of the people who opposed him. But those 20 percent were right. Sometimes the majority is wrong.
Terra Incognita 55 Invisible hand, Sternhell's terror and homogeneity
Terra Incognita
Issue 55
“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
October 6th, 2008
1) The Other invisible hand: As the financial crises grows in the U.S world leaders and public figures have condemned the ‘fat cats’ on ‘wall street’ and the ‘speculators’ who have supposedly caused the crises. This need to have a scapegoat, an ‘invisible’ hand of, of some hook-nosed speculator operating behind the scenes is typical. But it is also incorrect.
2) A terror excuser gets some terror: In a recent attack in Israel a pipe bomb was placed outside the home of a well known professor named Zeev Sternhell. On the face of it this attack against an expert on fascism and a holocaust survivor is disturbing. However when one considers the fact that this same professor justified the murder of Jewish ‘settlers’ beyond the Green Line and also encouraged Palestinian terrorists in choosing their targets one must see the irony that an expert on fascism was himself a fascist and that a supporter of terror received some terror. Far from being a ‘threat to democracy’ as the press has labeled the attack on Sternhell, one should instead see his irresponsible statements as an intellectual threat to democracy. No intellectual, whose salary is paid by the government, should justify the murder of civilians.
3) Live and pray with your own people? You deserve racism: In a recent discussion about attacks on Jews in France a leader of the group, SOS-Racisme, claimed that the Jews “live only with your own kind, you build yourself in opposition to the territory next door, in opposition to those who do not have the same origin.” So it turns out the Jews deserve to be assaulted. Is it an irony that a group that opposes racism also excuses racism and is itself racist. No. This is a central theme of the modern leftist-intellectual world. The Jews live and pray together today as they did in 1939. Perhaps they deserved the Holocaust? Such is the leftist European perverted view of the world.
The Other invisible hand
Seth J. Frantzman
September 25th, 2008
Adam Smith spoke of the invisible hand which guides the markets. This shows itself in economics and capitalism. It also shows itself in the idea of market efficiency. The hidden hand is the opposite of the government hand, it is supposed to make markets work better without the need for socialism and nationalization. But now, with the U.S economy in crises, the government has been on a binge of regulatory and governmental fixes. First there was the government intervention to help the sale of Bear Stearns to JP Morgan. Then there was the nationalization of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac which were Government Sponsored Entities in the first place. But the decision by the federal government to intervene in the collapse of AIG was truly 'un-American' in the words of Senator Jim Bunning, Republican of Kentucky. The government has also stepped up other unorthodox strategies, including forbidding short selling of some financial securities and also considering regulating the pay executives receive, if those executives intend for their companies to take part in the bailout. As it stands today, September 25th, the Treasury Secretary, in collaboration with the chairman of the Federal Reserve, is seeking some $700 billion to save the U.S economy from disaster. Bush reiterated this when he said "our entire economy is in danger." Specialists claim it is the worst disaster since the great crash of 1929 or the crises of 1907. Of course, we won't know until its over.
On September 24th, 2008 world leaders addressed the United Nations general assembly in new York. Several of hem blamed 'speculators' for the financial mess. President Abdoulaye Wade of Senegal noted that "we are once again the victims of speculation. This speculation puts the developed world in danger." President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva of brazil claimed that speculators were causing the "anguish of entire peoples." Evo Morales of Peru went further and claimed that the "capitalist system is the worst enemy of humanity." It is interesting, and predictable, how soon after a financial crises develops that the hidden hand of the 'speculator' will be blamed. The speculator, the dark hook-nosed, secretive, greedy, hunch-backed, thing that lurks around Wall Street and ruins financial markets. It goes by other names as well. Sometimes it is the 'fat cats' that are to blame. What is surprising is the degree to which intelligent humans, those who are responsible for running whole countries and thus, in theory should understand financial and economic systems, are so easily convinced to blame some secretive cabal of 'speculators' for a massive crises. It points to the human need, in democracy and dictatorship, to blame something for the problems, because people have a hard time ascribing blame to themselves or to things that actually deserve to be blamed.
It would be too hard for a world leader to see that the housing crises has been a slippery slope that began with some predatory mortgages and housing price shortfalls, resulting in the non-payment of mortgages, which resulted in the collapse or near collapse of sub-prime mortgage lenders in the U.S and U.K and that this led to further harm coming to regular mortgages, many of which were held by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. This led to the loss of money by investment banks such as Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers who had bet the wrong way on numerous financial instruments. At the same time a crises in the credit markets, rising inflation, the extreme rise in oil prices (from $30 to $150 over a year period) led to the seizing up of the credit markets and meant that there was less money for firms such as Bear and Lehman went they went back to the trough to re-capitalize themselves. Their declining stock prices made them seem unstable and they were sold or collapsed. Meanwhile AIG, which had held huge positions in Credit Default Swaps and other financial insurance securities that had never been completely tested in a crises found itself on the wrong end of insuring the wrong thing. But AIG was 'to big to fail' since its failure would spread to other things, so the government stepped in to prevent its collapse and now the government demands to be given the right to inject a massive amount of capital into the market to shore up the bad mortgages, helping to free up credit and insure that these 'toxic' assets held by so many firms will be backed by the power of the U.S treasury, allowing banks to go back to business as usual.
This complicated explanation couldn't be true. We must use Occams razor and see that the simplest explanation is the best. It is the speculator that is to blame. This shadowy figure is the one that drives the stock prices down and he collaborates with the 'short seller' who makes money as the stock collapses and together they suck the blood of the American tax payer. Yes. This is obvious. It’s the corporate fat cat and his huge salary that is to blame. But Humans and world leaders need some\thing simple to blame. Because of this they need the scapegoat, the other 'invisible hand' that is behind their economic problems. The Soviets blamed the 'wreckers' and 'parasites' who 'did no work'. Hitler had the Jews. Everyone needs someone. Or maybe its some other amorphous thing that’s to blame, such as 'globalization' and the WTO and the 'World Bank.' It must be.
It couldn't be John Mitchel and Ann Sawyer and their sub-prime mortgage in Mesa Arizona and their non-payment of that mortgage that has steamrolled, along with a million other people behind on their payments to cause this hiccup in the financial markets. It couldn't be complicated and misunderstood things such as Credit Default Swaps (CDS) which Warren Buffet described as hazardous because: "unless derivatives contracts are collateralized or guaranteed, their ultimate value also depends on the creditworthiness of the counterparties to them. In the meantime, though, before a contract is settled, the counterparties record profits and losses -often huge in amount- in their current earnings statements without so much as a penny changing hands. The range of derivatives contracts is limited only by the imagination of man (or sometimes, so it seems, madmen)." Simply put, CDS can amplify risks in the end, even though they seem to have insured against defaults. Too complicated. Its easier to blame the 'speculator'.
A terror excuser gets some terror
September 27th, 2008
Seth J. Frantzman
The wounding of Prof. Sternhell in a pipe bomb attack and the hyper-reaction of the media and politicians in Israel reminds us of a number of myths associated with terrorism, the right wing and fascism. It reminds us that the life, or in this case the leg, of one leftist professor is more important than hundreds or thousands of the lives of other civilians murdered in terror attacks, not to mention the tens of thousands wounded in them. It reminds us of the typical misuse of the word ‘fascism’ now being applied to ‘Jewish fascism’ (In Paxton’s Fascism he too describes Jewish ‘fascism’ and in Short’s Pol Pot he also mentions Jewish fascism) and, of course, not to Palestinian fascism. It reminds us of the odd association that eftists ascribe to the connections between ‘the right’ and ‘violence’, when in fact history has shown that political violence is no more a province of the right than the left and is probably more associated with the left. It reminds us of the apoplectic warnings, so typical of percocious Israel, about the ‘danger to democracy’, something that ignores the historica destruction of other democracies and seems to ignore the fact that many more people have already died from terror in Israel without there being a ‘danger to democracy’ (the assumption also is that the right poses a ‘danger to democracy’ whereas the left does not, something that is aso not historicaly accurate). Finally this story reminds us of the fact that professors who preach in support of terror and excuse it and justify it and even, in Sternhell’s case, tell the terrorists who to concentrate their murder on, sometimes, in a great twist of irony, pay for their words by learning about the very terrorism they supported.
On September 25th, 2008 there appeared in Haaretz, the leading intelectual newspaper in Israel an oped by the veteran extreme-leftist Gideon Levy entitled ‘culture criminals.’ In this article he bemoaned, correctly, the vulgarization of television shows in Israel. But he juxtaposed the modern programming with his vision of what television should consist of. It should be ‘challenging’ and ‘subversive’. In addition he describes the Jews in Israel as containing a ‘minority, with economic and other means.’ This minority the “good, rather average Israeli, who watched ‘Waltz with Bashir’ and ‘The Band’s Visit’, who goes to the theater and museums.” Levy was describing a wealthy bourgouise leftist whose idea of an ‘Israeli movie’ is only one that is about Arabs (Waltz with Bashir is about Lebanon and Bands Visit is about Egyptians, in both the Israeli is merely the foil). The ‘good Israel’ is the wealthy one. He described what this column has described before, the two societies, one consisting of the ‘good wealthy leftist’ who cares only for the other and the other society which consists of the poor savage intolerant majority which deserves to die in terror attacks.
Prof. Zeev Sternhell was one of the ‘good’ Israelis. He was born to an affluent family in Poland in 1935. His father died of natural causes but his mother and sister were murdered by the Nazis in 1942. Sternhell survived through the help of a Polish officer and assuming the name Zbignew Oroloski and being baptized as a Catholic. He found his way to France after the war and in 1951 came to Israel, serving as a commander in the nascent Golani brigade. He studied history and political sceince at the Hebrew University, eventually obtaining a PhD in the 1970s. His research subject was the French extreme leftist turned fascist anti-semite, Maurice Barres. Sternhell has excelled over the years in taking his knowedge of the historica roots of Fascism and expanding them to include numerous other movements and ideologies in the past as well as brining them up to the present so that all sorts of people and movements in the modern era are termed by him to be ‘fascist’. Thus spiritualism became ‘fascist’ and so did the French philosopher Betrand de Jouvenal, who actually ended up suing Sternhell for defamation and winning in 1983 after Sternhell had accused him of having ‘fascist tendancies.’ This ‘creeping’ fascism is quite a common phenomenon among leftists who want to find fascists under every bedspread of mankind because ‘fascism’ like ‘racism’ is the ultimate slander of the late 20th and 21st centuries. Like many leftists he is oddly obsessed with the issue of ‘morality’, akin to Michael Walzer’s Just and Unjust Wars, in which morality, not usually an important value of the left, suddenly assumes astronomical importance. Towards this end Sternhell has ‘defined’ the history of Israel so that it has a ‘moral’ period that lasts up until 1948 and then an ‘immoral’ period after 1967 when, the Jewish people’s survival no longer at stake, the Jews had no right to fight a war which resulted in conquest. (Oddly enough the existence of other nations in the world is not predicated on the idea that just because they are not threatened with extinction they have no ‘moral right’ to exist. There are a billion Chinese people, but we do not say their country is ipso facto immoral simply because there are so many). Sternhell described 1967 as “the attempt to retain the conquests of 1967 had a strong flavor of imperial expansion.”
Over the years, apparently influenced by his interest in the roots of fascism, Sternhell became increasingly leftist. He voiced the unoriginal idea that the ‘occupation’ “Israel's ability to develop as a free and open society.” He was an enthusiastic supporter of the Oslo Accords, calling them a ‘true revolution’ but warning that “The only uncertain factor today is the moral and political price Israeli society will have to pay to overcome the resistance that the hard core of the settlers is bound to show to any just and reasonable solution.”
But then something else happaned. Sternhell, apparently because of the Second Intifada, became an excuser of terrorism. He spoke of the “legitimacy of armed resistance" by Palestinans.” He went further, on March 11th, 2001, and described how that resistance should be conducted; “the Palestinians would be wise to concentrate their struggle against the settlements, avoid harming women and children and strictly refrain from firing on Gilo, Naha Oz or Sderot; it would aso be smart to stop planting bombs to the west of the Green Line.” Thus the professor who researched fascism and accused others of being fascist and believed that Israel’s conquest was ‘immoral’ came to support and even give directions for the proper methods of a terror campaign. Eventually that terror campaign would cause the deaths of 800 Israelis and the woundings of thousands more. Is there anything more fascist than encouraging terrorism, even if one only encourages it against a certain segment of society, in this case the male ‘settlers’? But Israel rewarded the professor by giving him the Israe Prize, Israel’s most prestigious award, in February of 2008.
So on September 25th Prof. Sternhell was the victim of a pipe bomb attack at his Jerusalem home. He was sightly wounded, being released from hospital on two days later. But it did not stop the beginning of a great apoplexy . From his hospital bed he declared that “the very occurrence of the incident goes to illustrate the fragility of Israeli democracy, and the urgent need to defend it with determination and resolve.” Oddly enough, during the four years of the Second Intifada when 800 Israelis had died he had not mentioned this ‘determination and resolve’ with which the nation must be defended. Instead he had given instructions to the terrorists on the proper methods to carry out their campaign.
Sternhell has been a writer at Haaretz, so it was perhaps no surprise that their editorial line would rush to defend him. But the shear weight of the extremism found in Haaretz on September 26th, 2008 speaks volumes. The main editorial, of the newspaper itself, claimed that the there was no doubt as to the identity of the attackers and that Sternhell “was not another victim of some ‘wild weed’, but of Jewish fascism itself which continues to extend its roots.” It went on to ca for a “firm policy against extremist right-wing hooligans” and for the security “forces to treat Jewish terrorism as harshly as they treat Palestinian terrorism…today they [the Jewish fascists] are murdering members of the Israeli intelligentsia. Leniency toward violence is tantamount to cooperation with the terrorists.” Oddly enough the exact same editorial line just three days before in the wake of a Palestinian terror attack in which 19 Israeli soldiers were wounded, most worse than Sternhell, had excused the Palestinian terror and claimed it was due to the ‘occupation’, even though the terrorist was from Jerusalem, not the territories. Oddly enough Haaretz has never called for a firm policy against Arab terrorists, even though they have murdered thousands. It is interesting that it speaks of ‘leniency towards vioence’ because ‘tantamount to cooperation with terrorists.’ It is Prof. Sternhell who had a great deal of leniency towards Palestinian terrorism and spoke of its legitimacy. Why is one man’s terrorism so legitimate and another mans so wrong? Perhaps the settler ‘militant’ merely feels ‘occupied’ by wealthy professors such as Sternhell? Oddly enough a newspaper so quick to call Jews ‘fascist’ does not describe the Palestinian terrorists, of whatever pursuasian, ‘fascist’.
An editorial by Ari Shavit went further. He described Sternhell as “Israeliness at its finest” and accused the “evil hand” from the “sewers of darkness”, the “New Sicarii, the Jewish extremists of the Second Temple” raising their hand against Sternhell. Shavit used the word “it” to describe the Jewish terrorists. “Twenty five years after it threw a hand grenadte at Emil Grunzweig…the lunatic right has returned…thirteen years after it fired bullets into the back of Yitzhak Rabin…the lunatics…the zealots…Israeli fascism…a dark force of modern chauvinism…genuine traitors…the illigitimate stream on the right…the government has an obligation to act immediately and resolutely in order to dry up the swamps in which Jewish terror breeds.” Here we see the shrill left in its purest form, apparently frightened by an attack that strikes at ‘its’ core to the extent that it has transformed the right into a vicious beast. It is good to see it in writing, what every leftists truly thinks of those he hates, because the left speaks so often about ‘the other’, but it speaks from a deep knowledge of the other for it is the left whose hatred is a truly deep swamp, a real sewer. Once again we see the call for the government to eneact some ‘fascist’ policy no doubt, to ‘dry up the swamp’ of the right. It is odd that such language has never been used by the left to encourage the government of Israel to dry up the swamp of Palestinian terrorism.
Avner de Shalit’s editoral was more nuanced. He is the head of the Department of Political Science at Hebrew University. He spoke of a “society that on the one hand is frieghteningly violent” and of a right that is “directed against the ideological other.” He mentioned that the right turns those who oppose their Zionism into the opposite of the “good Jew.” He noted that “if it really was done by people from the right, as seems to be the case at the moment, it proves the extent to which the concepts Zionism and patriotism have become empty of content.” Oddly enough when one Muslim murders dozens of non-Muslims because of his own distorted Islamist religious beleifs the left does not extend his act to mean that Islam is “empty of content.”
But what is most interesting about Shalit’s column is his reference to the “good Jew.” This is the same terminology used by Gideon Levy, and yet in his sense he described the only good Jew as being a man such as Sternhell, a cultured wealthy intellectual. It is odd that the very same columns that discuss the evils of the right and its supposed hatred of the ‘other’ are the same ones that so quicky mutate their own language into a visceral hatred of the ‘other’, in this case the right. The right is a swamp that must be dried up, a root system that must be deracinated. It is the ‘it’, the beast from the darkness.
The extremism and speech about the ‘threat to democracy’ that eminated from the pipe bomb that harmed Prof. Sternhell is mostly due to the percousness of Israel and the fact that every tiny act becomes a ‘pogrom’ (the assault by Yitzhar residents on some Arabs or the supposed invasion of the monastery of St. John’s in the Desert come to mind), or ‘fascism’ or ‘apartheid’ or a ‘concentration camp.’ The imagery of Israel is always the Holocaust because, oddly enough, Jews seem incapable of distinugishing the difference between the deaths of 6 million and the wounding of one man.
But this idea of the ‘threat to democracy’ is far fetched. The real threat to democracy is not a lone pipe bombing. The real threat is what happaned before the fall of the Weimer Republic or the Spanish Republic. In Spain the armed gangs of different parties fought in the street. In Spain men of different political pursuasions were kidnapped and murdered. Assasinations occurred daily. In Spain the members of the parliament came to work armed. It is not so different elsewhere. In many democracies political violence is quite extreme. In the Phillipines and Kenya this is the case. In fact it is primarily only in Europe where it is less the case, and that is only recently. But political assasinations happen. Terrorism can destroy democracy, but only when it is on a large scale, as was the case with the Tupamarus in Uruguay in the 1970s. The threat to democracy emerges when the army is politisized, as happaned in Spain. It emerges when the rival political camps arm themselves. Israel is often beset with apocalyptic notions of a Civil War between right and left or between the government and the right or between a government coup of the right against the forces of democracy. But Israel is far from this at the present. Israelis speak of ‘violence’ in society and a ‘brutal’ society but it is primarily from ignorance that they speak. Really violence societies such as South Africa, Brazil or Mexico, or even the U.S, could teach them something.
Another great myth that has emerged after the assault on Prof. Sternhell is the claim that violence is somehow typical of the right and that ‘fascism’ is the only anti-democratic force in society. History tells a different story. Fascism emerged at a time of radical social movements, including anarchism and communism. All of the foes of fascism were anti-democratic. Those who pretend that fascism in Spain, Italy or Germany was what led to dictatorship have misread history. Fascism triumphed in these places only against rival forces that had no love for democracy. The alternative to Franco was not American democracy, it was a Stalinist government. In the end the death toll from fascism was comparitvely light compared to the overall death toll of that great leftist movement, Communism. It is true that Fascism was a part of Nazism and that Nazism resulted in the deaths of 6-7 million Jews and some 20 million other civilians. But even when this is added to the death tolls of Mussolini’s fascism, which numbered in a several hundred, and Franco, which numbered in the several thousands, the overall amount is smaller than what Communism wrought. Stalin alone killed twenty million, committing genocide aganst numerous peoples from the Ukainians to the Volga Germans. Mao killed tens of millions more in China. Pol Pot killed 1.7 million. Mugabe killed 20,000 Ndebele in the genocide known as ‘Gukurahindi.’ Mengistu Haile Mariam of Ethiopia killed hundreds of thousands. Castro killed thousands. There is simply no distinction between the crimes of Fascism and Nazism when they are compared to their cousins Socialism and Communism. These radical movements of modernity are bestial in their results. To claim that the right has a monopoly on political violence is tragicaly mistaken.
Prof. Sternhel crossed a line when he advocated for the murder of settlers by the fascist Palestinian terror groups. In fact he, a researcher of terrorism, became a sort of fascist when he did so. He convinced himself that those male Jews living beyond the green line were not people because they were ‘settlers’ and just as in every case where the ‘other’ is dehumanized with certain words, he himself dehumanized the settlers to the point where he could justify their murder. This was the height of irresponsibility. How can a professor whose salary is paid b the government advocate for the murder of other citizens? There are all shades of people who reside across the green line. Some may well be the religious extremists who Sternhell disagreed with and some ma have used violence of a type Sternhell would describe as fascist. But there are also those who moved because of economic reasons, some whose life stories, for instance immigrating from Ethiopia, are as deep and moving as Sternhell’s. And yet Sternhell would have them be gunned down or blown up simply because he can describe them as ‘fascist’ and ‘settler’ and thus unworthy of life. Is there anything more fascist than to advocate and excuse the murder of one’s fellow man. And that is what each an every settler is in the end: a human being. And Prof. Sternhell excused their murder. He should be ashamed.
I am of the right and I will always stand with it because I cannot stand with the left. I cannot stand with an ideology that is so hypocritical. I cannot stand with an ideology that is so full of hypochondriacts. I cannot stand next to those who will deracinate me or dry me up because someone else supposedly from my own political pursuasian has done something. I cannot ever stand on the left because the left is so extremist and hateful and intolerant.
I am of the right and I will always stand with it because I cannot stand with the left. I cannot stand with an ideology that is so hypocritical. I cannot stand with an ideology that is so full of hypochondriacts. I cannot stand next to those who will deracinate me or dry me up because someone else supposedly from my own political pursuasian has done something. I cannot ever stand on the left because the left is so extremist and hateful and intolerant. The left invented the theory of the other and yet it is so quick to find its own ‘other’ in those it hates on the right. Its other becomes the ‘fascist’ and the ‘racist’. And how often have I had to suffer these terms, to the degree that I have to come to the conclusion that it is better to be a fascist and a racist because such words have no meaning and are so often applied to those that are so decent. How often has the left turned everyone it disagrees with into a ‘racist’, for no reason, only to smear the person and harm them. John McCain has already become ‘hitler’ in the eyes of the left, just as all his predeccesors were ‘hitler’. But if they were all hitler than who was this ‘hitler’? We are all involved in pogroms and apartheid and crusading and imperialism and fascism and nazism and racism and ethnocentrism and ethnocracy to the degree that it is all one terrible web of epitaphs, constantly thrown by those who claim so often that one must not ‘judge the other’.
Live and pray with your own people? You deserve racism
Seth J. Frantzman
September 25th, 2008
Everyday the leftist-secular European divides himself from the rest of humanity more and more. The latest was a statement by Dominique Sopo, president of the group SOS-Racisme, which "works against discrimination." When asked about why there is violence and hatred between groups in the 19th Arrondissement of Paris, and why Jews in particular are targeted by anti-Semitic statements and violence he noted that Jews were leaving the public schools; "when you live only with your own kind, you build yourself in opposition to the territory next door, in opposition to those who do not have the same origin." So the new logic of those who oppose racism is quite simple: if you happen to live mostly next to people who are like you than you deserve racism. If you live in a multi-cultural area and your child suffers violence and discrimination at school and you therefore remove them from that school than you are "building yourself in opposition" to everyone else and you deserve racism. This is an interesting view of the reason for racism. It lays the onus for racism not on those who are racist and hateful but on the victims because the victim is to blame for "building himself in opposition." Its odd how this same logic, of those who deserve racism, only seems to apply selectively. In the U.S where there are African-American Student Centers and Hispanic Student Centers no one claims that by "building themselves in opposition" these groups deserve to be hated. If Muslims go to their Halal butcher and live in their own areas and build a giant mosque no one says they deserve to hated merely for living next to one another. But when it’s the Jews it's different. It's always different when it’s the Jews and Europeans. It's always different when it's people with names like Dominique and it's dealing with the Jews. That is the message Europe always gives us. There is 'racism' and then there is racism. When the victim is blamed for the racism against him because he has dared to try to protect his own children and he has dared to eat and drink and be merry with those who come from a similar background, when he is blamed for merely living next to those he knows or for loving his own family, when he is blamed for these things than he must struggle against those who would excuse his murder. He must struggle not only against those who hate him for his race and his religion but he must also raise a hand against those who call themselves anti-racists, against those from SOS-Racisme, and he must fight them to. When the anti-racist joins the racist to murder the minority, the minority must fight equally against both oppressors and in this world the anti-racist has proved himself, time and again, to be in league with the racist just as the secular-leftist is in league with the Islamist. There is not a day that goes by that one cannot say of Europe: it gets what it deserves. Dominique Sopo no doubt lives in a community with his own leftist bourgeoisie friends. He lives only with his own kind. We have a right to hate him and his kind. And we should allow that hate to strike him down when he enters our community, when he comes to tell us about 'racism' for it is he who has fanned the flames of the racism and excused it, just as bourgeoisie leftists always excuse the murder of innocent people. It will not always be this way. The BBC and SOS-Racisme and all these groups and those who are employed by them will pay for their support of terrorism and racism. One can feed a crocodile with the hopes that it will eat you last only for so long. Eventually it will eat you when you have run out of food to feed it. The leftist European thought he could feed the Jews, Serbs and other decent people of the world to the crocodile, but it is the European who will be eaten.
Issue 55
“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
October 6th, 2008
1) The Other invisible hand: As the financial crises grows in the U.S world leaders and public figures have condemned the ‘fat cats’ on ‘wall street’ and the ‘speculators’ who have supposedly caused the crises. This need to have a scapegoat, an ‘invisible’ hand of, of some hook-nosed speculator operating behind the scenes is typical. But it is also incorrect.
2) A terror excuser gets some terror: In a recent attack in Israel a pipe bomb was placed outside the home of a well known professor named Zeev Sternhell. On the face of it this attack against an expert on fascism and a holocaust survivor is disturbing. However when one considers the fact that this same professor justified the murder of Jewish ‘settlers’ beyond the Green Line and also encouraged Palestinian terrorists in choosing their targets one must see the irony that an expert on fascism was himself a fascist and that a supporter of terror received some terror. Far from being a ‘threat to democracy’ as the press has labeled the attack on Sternhell, one should instead see his irresponsible statements as an intellectual threat to democracy. No intellectual, whose salary is paid by the government, should justify the murder of civilians.
3) Live and pray with your own people? You deserve racism: In a recent discussion about attacks on Jews in France a leader of the group, SOS-Racisme, claimed that the Jews “live only with your own kind, you build yourself in opposition to the territory next door, in opposition to those who do not have the same origin.” So it turns out the Jews deserve to be assaulted. Is it an irony that a group that opposes racism also excuses racism and is itself racist. No. This is a central theme of the modern leftist-intellectual world. The Jews live and pray together today as they did in 1939. Perhaps they deserved the Holocaust? Such is the leftist European perverted view of the world.
The Other invisible hand
Seth J. Frantzman
September 25th, 2008
Adam Smith spoke of the invisible hand which guides the markets. This shows itself in economics and capitalism. It also shows itself in the idea of market efficiency. The hidden hand is the opposite of the government hand, it is supposed to make markets work better without the need for socialism and nationalization. But now, with the U.S economy in crises, the government has been on a binge of regulatory and governmental fixes. First there was the government intervention to help the sale of Bear Stearns to JP Morgan. Then there was the nationalization of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac which were Government Sponsored Entities in the first place. But the decision by the federal government to intervene in the collapse of AIG was truly 'un-American' in the words of Senator Jim Bunning, Republican of Kentucky. The government has also stepped up other unorthodox strategies, including forbidding short selling of some financial securities and also considering regulating the pay executives receive, if those executives intend for their companies to take part in the bailout. As it stands today, September 25th, the Treasury Secretary, in collaboration with the chairman of the Federal Reserve, is seeking some $700 billion to save the U.S economy from disaster. Bush reiterated this when he said "our entire economy is in danger." Specialists claim it is the worst disaster since the great crash of 1929 or the crises of 1907. Of course, we won't know until its over.
On September 24th, 2008 world leaders addressed the United Nations general assembly in new York. Several of hem blamed 'speculators' for the financial mess. President Abdoulaye Wade of Senegal noted that "we are once again the victims of speculation. This speculation puts the developed world in danger." President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva of brazil claimed that speculators were causing the "anguish of entire peoples." Evo Morales of Peru went further and claimed that the "capitalist system is the worst enemy of humanity." It is interesting, and predictable, how soon after a financial crises develops that the hidden hand of the 'speculator' will be blamed. The speculator, the dark hook-nosed, secretive, greedy, hunch-backed, thing that lurks around Wall Street and ruins financial markets. It goes by other names as well. Sometimes it is the 'fat cats' that are to blame. What is surprising is the degree to which intelligent humans, those who are responsible for running whole countries and thus, in theory should understand financial and economic systems, are so easily convinced to blame some secretive cabal of 'speculators' for a massive crises. It points to the human need, in democracy and dictatorship, to blame something for the problems, because people have a hard time ascribing blame to themselves or to things that actually deserve to be blamed.
It would be too hard for a world leader to see that the housing crises has been a slippery slope that began with some predatory mortgages and housing price shortfalls, resulting in the non-payment of mortgages, which resulted in the collapse or near collapse of sub-prime mortgage lenders in the U.S and U.K and that this led to further harm coming to regular mortgages, many of which were held by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. This led to the loss of money by investment banks such as Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers who had bet the wrong way on numerous financial instruments. At the same time a crises in the credit markets, rising inflation, the extreme rise in oil prices (from $30 to $150 over a year period) led to the seizing up of the credit markets and meant that there was less money for firms such as Bear and Lehman went they went back to the trough to re-capitalize themselves. Their declining stock prices made them seem unstable and they were sold or collapsed. Meanwhile AIG, which had held huge positions in Credit Default Swaps and other financial insurance securities that had never been completely tested in a crises found itself on the wrong end of insuring the wrong thing. But AIG was 'to big to fail' since its failure would spread to other things, so the government stepped in to prevent its collapse and now the government demands to be given the right to inject a massive amount of capital into the market to shore up the bad mortgages, helping to free up credit and insure that these 'toxic' assets held by so many firms will be backed by the power of the U.S treasury, allowing banks to go back to business as usual.
This complicated explanation couldn't be true. We must use Occams razor and see that the simplest explanation is the best. It is the speculator that is to blame. This shadowy figure is the one that drives the stock prices down and he collaborates with the 'short seller' who makes money as the stock collapses and together they suck the blood of the American tax payer. Yes. This is obvious. It’s the corporate fat cat and his huge salary that is to blame. But Humans and world leaders need some\thing simple to blame. Because of this they need the scapegoat, the other 'invisible hand' that is behind their economic problems. The Soviets blamed the 'wreckers' and 'parasites' who 'did no work'. Hitler had the Jews. Everyone needs someone. Or maybe its some other amorphous thing that’s to blame, such as 'globalization' and the WTO and the 'World Bank.' It must be.
It couldn't be John Mitchel and Ann Sawyer and their sub-prime mortgage in Mesa Arizona and their non-payment of that mortgage that has steamrolled, along with a million other people behind on their payments to cause this hiccup in the financial markets. It couldn't be complicated and misunderstood things such as Credit Default Swaps (CDS) which Warren Buffet described as hazardous because: "unless derivatives contracts are collateralized or guaranteed, their ultimate value also depends on the creditworthiness of the counterparties to them. In the meantime, though, before a contract is settled, the counterparties record profits and losses -often huge in amount- in their current earnings statements without so much as a penny changing hands. The range of derivatives contracts is limited only by the imagination of man (or sometimes, so it seems, madmen)." Simply put, CDS can amplify risks in the end, even though they seem to have insured against defaults. Too complicated. Its easier to blame the 'speculator'.
A terror excuser gets some terror
September 27th, 2008
Seth J. Frantzman
The wounding of Prof. Sternhell in a pipe bomb attack and the hyper-reaction of the media and politicians in Israel reminds us of a number of myths associated with terrorism, the right wing and fascism. It reminds us that the life, or in this case the leg, of one leftist professor is more important than hundreds or thousands of the lives of other civilians murdered in terror attacks, not to mention the tens of thousands wounded in them. It reminds us of the typical misuse of the word ‘fascism’ now being applied to ‘Jewish fascism’ (In Paxton’s Fascism he too describes Jewish ‘fascism’ and in Short’s Pol Pot he also mentions Jewish fascism) and, of course, not to Palestinian fascism. It reminds us of the odd association that eftists ascribe to the connections between ‘the right’ and ‘violence’, when in fact history has shown that political violence is no more a province of the right than the left and is probably more associated with the left. It reminds us of the apoplectic warnings, so typical of percocious Israel, about the ‘danger to democracy’, something that ignores the historica destruction of other democracies and seems to ignore the fact that many more people have already died from terror in Israel without there being a ‘danger to democracy’ (the assumption also is that the right poses a ‘danger to democracy’ whereas the left does not, something that is aso not historicaly accurate). Finally this story reminds us of the fact that professors who preach in support of terror and excuse it and justify it and even, in Sternhell’s case, tell the terrorists who to concentrate their murder on, sometimes, in a great twist of irony, pay for their words by learning about the very terrorism they supported.
On September 25th, 2008 there appeared in Haaretz, the leading intelectual newspaper in Israel an oped by the veteran extreme-leftist Gideon Levy entitled ‘culture criminals.’ In this article he bemoaned, correctly, the vulgarization of television shows in Israel. But he juxtaposed the modern programming with his vision of what television should consist of. It should be ‘challenging’ and ‘subversive’. In addition he describes the Jews in Israel as containing a ‘minority, with economic and other means.’ This minority the “good, rather average Israeli, who watched ‘Waltz with Bashir’ and ‘The Band’s Visit’, who goes to the theater and museums.” Levy was describing a wealthy bourgouise leftist whose idea of an ‘Israeli movie’ is only one that is about Arabs (Waltz with Bashir is about Lebanon and Bands Visit is about Egyptians, in both the Israeli is merely the foil). The ‘good Israel’ is the wealthy one. He described what this column has described before, the two societies, one consisting of the ‘good wealthy leftist’ who cares only for the other and the other society which consists of the poor savage intolerant majority which deserves to die in terror attacks.
Prof. Zeev Sternhell was one of the ‘good’ Israelis. He was born to an affluent family in Poland in 1935. His father died of natural causes but his mother and sister were murdered by the Nazis in 1942. Sternhell survived through the help of a Polish officer and assuming the name Zbignew Oroloski and being baptized as a Catholic. He found his way to France after the war and in 1951 came to Israel, serving as a commander in the nascent Golani brigade. He studied history and political sceince at the Hebrew University, eventually obtaining a PhD in the 1970s. His research subject was the French extreme leftist turned fascist anti-semite, Maurice Barres. Sternhell has excelled over the years in taking his knowedge of the historica roots of Fascism and expanding them to include numerous other movements and ideologies in the past as well as brining them up to the present so that all sorts of people and movements in the modern era are termed by him to be ‘fascist’. Thus spiritualism became ‘fascist’ and so did the French philosopher Betrand de Jouvenal, who actually ended up suing Sternhell for defamation and winning in 1983 after Sternhell had accused him of having ‘fascist tendancies.’ This ‘creeping’ fascism is quite a common phenomenon among leftists who want to find fascists under every bedspread of mankind because ‘fascism’ like ‘racism’ is the ultimate slander of the late 20th and 21st centuries. Like many leftists he is oddly obsessed with the issue of ‘morality’, akin to Michael Walzer’s Just and Unjust Wars, in which morality, not usually an important value of the left, suddenly assumes astronomical importance. Towards this end Sternhell has ‘defined’ the history of Israel so that it has a ‘moral’ period that lasts up until 1948 and then an ‘immoral’ period after 1967 when, the Jewish people’s survival no longer at stake, the Jews had no right to fight a war which resulted in conquest. (Oddly enough the existence of other nations in the world is not predicated on the idea that just because they are not threatened with extinction they have no ‘moral right’ to exist. There are a billion Chinese people, but we do not say their country is ipso facto immoral simply because there are so many). Sternhell described 1967 as “the attempt to retain the conquests of 1967 had a strong flavor of imperial expansion.”
Over the years, apparently influenced by his interest in the roots of fascism, Sternhell became increasingly leftist. He voiced the unoriginal idea that the ‘occupation’ “Israel's ability to develop as a free and open society.” He was an enthusiastic supporter of the Oslo Accords, calling them a ‘true revolution’ but warning that “The only uncertain factor today is the moral and political price Israeli society will have to pay to overcome the resistance that the hard core of the settlers is bound to show to any just and reasonable solution.”
But then something else happaned. Sternhell, apparently because of the Second Intifada, became an excuser of terrorism. He spoke of the “legitimacy of armed resistance" by Palestinans.” He went further, on March 11th, 2001, and described how that resistance should be conducted; “the Palestinians would be wise to concentrate their struggle against the settlements, avoid harming women and children and strictly refrain from firing on Gilo, Naha Oz or Sderot; it would aso be smart to stop planting bombs to the west of the Green Line.” Thus the professor who researched fascism and accused others of being fascist and believed that Israel’s conquest was ‘immoral’ came to support and even give directions for the proper methods of a terror campaign. Eventually that terror campaign would cause the deaths of 800 Israelis and the woundings of thousands more. Is there anything more fascist than encouraging terrorism, even if one only encourages it against a certain segment of society, in this case the male ‘settlers’? But Israel rewarded the professor by giving him the Israe Prize, Israel’s most prestigious award, in February of 2008.
So on September 25th Prof. Sternhell was the victim of a pipe bomb attack at his Jerusalem home. He was sightly wounded, being released from hospital on two days later. But it did not stop the beginning of a great apoplexy . From his hospital bed he declared that “the very occurrence of the incident goes to illustrate the fragility of Israeli democracy, and the urgent need to defend it with determination and resolve.” Oddly enough, during the four years of the Second Intifada when 800 Israelis had died he had not mentioned this ‘determination and resolve’ with which the nation must be defended. Instead he had given instructions to the terrorists on the proper methods to carry out their campaign.
Sternhell has been a writer at Haaretz, so it was perhaps no surprise that their editorial line would rush to defend him. But the shear weight of the extremism found in Haaretz on September 26th, 2008 speaks volumes. The main editorial, of the newspaper itself, claimed that the there was no doubt as to the identity of the attackers and that Sternhell “was not another victim of some ‘wild weed’, but of Jewish fascism itself which continues to extend its roots.” It went on to ca for a “firm policy against extremist right-wing hooligans” and for the security “forces to treat Jewish terrorism as harshly as they treat Palestinian terrorism…today they [the Jewish fascists] are murdering members of the Israeli intelligentsia. Leniency toward violence is tantamount to cooperation with the terrorists.” Oddly enough the exact same editorial line just three days before in the wake of a Palestinian terror attack in which 19 Israeli soldiers were wounded, most worse than Sternhell, had excused the Palestinian terror and claimed it was due to the ‘occupation’, even though the terrorist was from Jerusalem, not the territories. Oddly enough Haaretz has never called for a firm policy against Arab terrorists, even though they have murdered thousands. It is interesting that it speaks of ‘leniency towards vioence’ because ‘tantamount to cooperation with terrorists.’ It is Prof. Sternhell who had a great deal of leniency towards Palestinian terrorism and spoke of its legitimacy. Why is one man’s terrorism so legitimate and another mans so wrong? Perhaps the settler ‘militant’ merely feels ‘occupied’ by wealthy professors such as Sternhell? Oddly enough a newspaper so quick to call Jews ‘fascist’ does not describe the Palestinian terrorists, of whatever pursuasian, ‘fascist’.
An editorial by Ari Shavit went further. He described Sternhell as “Israeliness at its finest” and accused the “evil hand” from the “sewers of darkness”, the “New Sicarii, the Jewish extremists of the Second Temple” raising their hand against Sternhell. Shavit used the word “it” to describe the Jewish terrorists. “Twenty five years after it threw a hand grenadte at Emil Grunzweig…the lunatic right has returned…thirteen years after it fired bullets into the back of Yitzhak Rabin…the lunatics…the zealots…Israeli fascism…a dark force of modern chauvinism…genuine traitors…the illigitimate stream on the right…the government has an obligation to act immediately and resolutely in order to dry up the swamps in which Jewish terror breeds.” Here we see the shrill left in its purest form, apparently frightened by an attack that strikes at ‘its’ core to the extent that it has transformed the right into a vicious beast. It is good to see it in writing, what every leftists truly thinks of those he hates, because the left speaks so often about ‘the other’, but it speaks from a deep knowledge of the other for it is the left whose hatred is a truly deep swamp, a real sewer. Once again we see the call for the government to eneact some ‘fascist’ policy no doubt, to ‘dry up the swamp’ of the right. It is odd that such language has never been used by the left to encourage the government of Israel to dry up the swamp of Palestinian terrorism.
Avner de Shalit’s editoral was more nuanced. He is the head of the Department of Political Science at Hebrew University. He spoke of a “society that on the one hand is frieghteningly violent” and of a right that is “directed against the ideological other.” He mentioned that the right turns those who oppose their Zionism into the opposite of the “good Jew.” He noted that “if it really was done by people from the right, as seems to be the case at the moment, it proves the extent to which the concepts Zionism and patriotism have become empty of content.” Oddly enough when one Muslim murders dozens of non-Muslims because of his own distorted Islamist religious beleifs the left does not extend his act to mean that Islam is “empty of content.”
But what is most interesting about Shalit’s column is his reference to the “good Jew.” This is the same terminology used by Gideon Levy, and yet in his sense he described the only good Jew as being a man such as Sternhell, a cultured wealthy intellectual. It is odd that the very same columns that discuss the evils of the right and its supposed hatred of the ‘other’ are the same ones that so quicky mutate their own language into a visceral hatred of the ‘other’, in this case the right. The right is a swamp that must be dried up, a root system that must be deracinated. It is the ‘it’, the beast from the darkness.
The extremism and speech about the ‘threat to democracy’ that eminated from the pipe bomb that harmed Prof. Sternhell is mostly due to the percousness of Israel and the fact that every tiny act becomes a ‘pogrom’ (the assault by Yitzhar residents on some Arabs or the supposed invasion of the monastery of St. John’s in the Desert come to mind), or ‘fascism’ or ‘apartheid’ or a ‘concentration camp.’ The imagery of Israel is always the Holocaust because, oddly enough, Jews seem incapable of distinugishing the difference between the deaths of 6 million and the wounding of one man.
But this idea of the ‘threat to democracy’ is far fetched. The real threat to democracy is not a lone pipe bombing. The real threat is what happaned before the fall of the Weimer Republic or the Spanish Republic. In Spain the armed gangs of different parties fought in the street. In Spain men of different political pursuasions were kidnapped and murdered. Assasinations occurred daily. In Spain the members of the parliament came to work armed. It is not so different elsewhere. In many democracies political violence is quite extreme. In the Phillipines and Kenya this is the case. In fact it is primarily only in Europe where it is less the case, and that is only recently. But political assasinations happen. Terrorism can destroy democracy, but only when it is on a large scale, as was the case with the Tupamarus in Uruguay in the 1970s. The threat to democracy emerges when the army is politisized, as happaned in Spain. It emerges when the rival political camps arm themselves. Israel is often beset with apocalyptic notions of a Civil War between right and left or between the government and the right or between a government coup of the right against the forces of democracy. But Israel is far from this at the present. Israelis speak of ‘violence’ in society and a ‘brutal’ society but it is primarily from ignorance that they speak. Really violence societies such as South Africa, Brazil or Mexico, or even the U.S, could teach them something.
Another great myth that has emerged after the assault on Prof. Sternhell is the claim that violence is somehow typical of the right and that ‘fascism’ is the only anti-democratic force in society. History tells a different story. Fascism emerged at a time of radical social movements, including anarchism and communism. All of the foes of fascism were anti-democratic. Those who pretend that fascism in Spain, Italy or Germany was what led to dictatorship have misread history. Fascism triumphed in these places only against rival forces that had no love for democracy. The alternative to Franco was not American democracy, it was a Stalinist government. In the end the death toll from fascism was comparitvely light compared to the overall death toll of that great leftist movement, Communism. It is true that Fascism was a part of Nazism and that Nazism resulted in the deaths of 6-7 million Jews and some 20 million other civilians. But even when this is added to the death tolls of Mussolini’s fascism, which numbered in a several hundred, and Franco, which numbered in the several thousands, the overall amount is smaller than what Communism wrought. Stalin alone killed twenty million, committing genocide aganst numerous peoples from the Ukainians to the Volga Germans. Mao killed tens of millions more in China. Pol Pot killed 1.7 million. Mugabe killed 20,000 Ndebele in the genocide known as ‘Gukurahindi.’ Mengistu Haile Mariam of Ethiopia killed hundreds of thousands. Castro killed thousands. There is simply no distinction between the crimes of Fascism and Nazism when they are compared to their cousins Socialism and Communism. These radical movements of modernity are bestial in their results. To claim that the right has a monopoly on political violence is tragicaly mistaken.
Prof. Sternhel crossed a line when he advocated for the murder of settlers by the fascist Palestinian terror groups. In fact he, a researcher of terrorism, became a sort of fascist when he did so. He convinced himself that those male Jews living beyond the green line were not people because they were ‘settlers’ and just as in every case where the ‘other’ is dehumanized with certain words, he himself dehumanized the settlers to the point where he could justify their murder. This was the height of irresponsibility. How can a professor whose salary is paid b the government advocate for the murder of other citizens? There are all shades of people who reside across the green line. Some may well be the religious extremists who Sternhell disagreed with and some ma have used violence of a type Sternhell would describe as fascist. But there are also those who moved because of economic reasons, some whose life stories, for instance immigrating from Ethiopia, are as deep and moving as Sternhell’s. And yet Sternhell would have them be gunned down or blown up simply because he can describe them as ‘fascist’ and ‘settler’ and thus unworthy of life. Is there anything more fascist than to advocate and excuse the murder of one’s fellow man. And that is what each an every settler is in the end: a human being. And Prof. Sternhell excused their murder. He should be ashamed.
I am of the right and I will always stand with it because I cannot stand with the left. I cannot stand with an ideology that is so hypocritical. I cannot stand with an ideology that is so full of hypochondriacts. I cannot stand next to those who will deracinate me or dry me up because someone else supposedly from my own political pursuasian has done something. I cannot ever stand on the left because the left is so extremist and hateful and intolerant.
I am of the right and I will always stand with it because I cannot stand with the left. I cannot stand with an ideology that is so hypocritical. I cannot stand with an ideology that is so full of hypochondriacts. I cannot stand next to those who will deracinate me or dry me up because someone else supposedly from my own political pursuasian has done something. I cannot ever stand on the left because the left is so extremist and hateful and intolerant. The left invented the theory of the other and yet it is so quick to find its own ‘other’ in those it hates on the right. Its other becomes the ‘fascist’ and the ‘racist’. And how often have I had to suffer these terms, to the degree that I have to come to the conclusion that it is better to be a fascist and a racist because such words have no meaning and are so often applied to those that are so decent. How often has the left turned everyone it disagrees with into a ‘racist’, for no reason, only to smear the person and harm them. John McCain has already become ‘hitler’ in the eyes of the left, just as all his predeccesors were ‘hitler’. But if they were all hitler than who was this ‘hitler’? We are all involved in pogroms and apartheid and crusading and imperialism and fascism and nazism and racism and ethnocentrism and ethnocracy to the degree that it is all one terrible web of epitaphs, constantly thrown by those who claim so often that one must not ‘judge the other’.
Live and pray with your own people? You deserve racism
Seth J. Frantzman
September 25th, 2008
Everyday the leftist-secular European divides himself from the rest of humanity more and more. The latest was a statement by Dominique Sopo, president of the group SOS-Racisme, which "works against discrimination." When asked about why there is violence and hatred between groups in the 19th Arrondissement of Paris, and why Jews in particular are targeted by anti-Semitic statements and violence he noted that Jews were leaving the public schools; "when you live only with your own kind, you build yourself in opposition to the territory next door, in opposition to those who do not have the same origin." So the new logic of those who oppose racism is quite simple: if you happen to live mostly next to people who are like you than you deserve racism. If you live in a multi-cultural area and your child suffers violence and discrimination at school and you therefore remove them from that school than you are "building yourself in opposition" to everyone else and you deserve racism. This is an interesting view of the reason for racism. It lays the onus for racism not on those who are racist and hateful but on the victims because the victim is to blame for "building himself in opposition." Its odd how this same logic, of those who deserve racism, only seems to apply selectively. In the U.S where there are African-American Student Centers and Hispanic Student Centers no one claims that by "building themselves in opposition" these groups deserve to be hated. If Muslims go to their Halal butcher and live in their own areas and build a giant mosque no one says they deserve to hated merely for living next to one another. But when it’s the Jews it's different. It's always different when it’s the Jews and Europeans. It's always different when it's people with names like Dominique and it's dealing with the Jews. That is the message Europe always gives us. There is 'racism' and then there is racism. When the victim is blamed for the racism against him because he has dared to try to protect his own children and he has dared to eat and drink and be merry with those who come from a similar background, when he is blamed for merely living next to those he knows or for loving his own family, when he is blamed for these things than he must struggle against those who would excuse his murder. He must struggle not only against those who hate him for his race and his religion but he must also raise a hand against those who call themselves anti-racists, against those from SOS-Racisme, and he must fight them to. When the anti-racist joins the racist to murder the minority, the minority must fight equally against both oppressors and in this world the anti-racist has proved himself, time and again, to be in league with the racist just as the secular-leftist is in league with the Islamist. There is not a day that goes by that one cannot say of Europe: it gets what it deserves. Dominique Sopo no doubt lives in a community with his own leftist bourgeoisie friends. He lives only with his own kind. We have a right to hate him and his kind. And we should allow that hate to strike him down when he enters our community, when he comes to tell us about 'racism' for it is he who has fanned the flames of the racism and excused it, just as bourgeoisie leftists always excuse the murder of innocent people. It will not always be this way. The BBC and SOS-Racisme and all these groups and those who are employed by them will pay for their support of terrorism and racism. One can feed a crocodile with the hopes that it will eat you last only for so long. Eventually it will eat you when you have run out of food to feed it. The leftist European thought he could feed the Jews, Serbs and other decent people of the world to the crocodile, but it is the European who will be eaten.
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