Terra Incognita
Issue 60
“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
November 10th, 2008
1) Could we imagine such a world: If we didn’t live in this world could we imagine it? Could we imagine that people travel from one country to another, live in that country and enjoy its benefits and then blow up a bus in that country murder people they have never met and who never did anything to them? Could we imagine a society when women are bought and sold as chattel? I doubt we could imagine the horrors this world produces and for that reason we should question how ‘progressive’ our society is and what, if any, benefits all our liberalism and democracy has brought us.
2) The world will never know her name: (dis) honourable killings and the war on women: Whether women live in an Islamic society or a western liberal one they may face the same fate. In a recent case in Somalia a 13 year old girl was placed in a hole up to her neck and stoned to death by ‘brave’ men who claimed she had dishonored them, apparently because three of them had been ‘enticed’ to rape her. But in Holland some brothels were recently found to have women who had been forcibly tattooed with the names of their ‘owners’. In Israel a judge sympathized with pimps who beat women who refused to ‘work’ during their periods and declared a women has ‘freedom of movement’ if her pimp takes her to a gynecologist once a month. Such a world. Liberal. Progressive. Democratic. Dictatorship. Islamist. The same. Each is satanic and each destroys the soul of humanity.
3) The importance of gun ownership: Colt handguns declared in their earliest advertising that ‘God made all men, Colt made them equal.’ The danger many see in gun ownership by the common man is that it makes him equal to the most powerful man. It was not always this way. Serfs could rarely bring down a feudal lord wearing armor. Gun ownership is the one thing that restrains government from murdering the citizenry.
4) A review of 'The Holocaust is Over: We Must Rise from its Ashes' by Avraham Burg, is published by Palgrave Macmillan: Avraham Burg profited from claiming to be a Zionist. He was a head of the Jewish Agency and respected member of the Knesset. Now he claims the Holocaust is an ‘industry’ and that the Jews must set the Germans free from their guilt. Yet he also claims Israel is akin to the Weimer Republic, a pre-fascist state. The Golan is Israel’s ‘Anschluss.’ Burg believes Israel should be part of Europe and that Europe should become Islamic. In light of Bradley Burston declaring “this year this Jew is embracing Jihad” perhaps we should not be surprised. But Burg’s psychological breakdown must be examined in light of his German Jewish heritage. Can he really tell us that the Israel is ‘European’ when a majority of its Jews are not from Europe. Can he tell us it ‘uses’ the Holocaust when a majority of the Jews in Israel have nothing to do with Europe and Europe’s Nazi history. Burg’s outburst represents the last German-Jewish-Israeli-Ashkenazi-elite’s assault on Israel and must be seen in that context.
Could we imagine such a world
November 5th, 2008
Seth J. Frantzman
If we didn’t live in this world could we imagine it? Let us imagine that we didn’t know this world and let us forget all the things we know about it and imagine that someone came and told a story about such a world. Lets say they told us about a place where women are bought and sold in the backrooms of dank apartments and in restrooms of dirty restaurants. They are placed on display nude and checked for their desirability before being handed over from one man to another for the equivalent of a month’s worth of wages in society. Imagine a place where men from one country and from one religion travel thousands of miles to other lands and plant bombs so as to kill people they have never met and never interacted with and who have never harmed them. Let us imagine a place where those who benefit the most from the rights granted to them by society are the first to condemn that society and demand its destruction, they are the least likely to serve that society but instead demand that poorer people serve that society and die for it so that they can enjoy their freedom to hate the society that begat them. If we learned of such a place, where women are chattel, where people murder others for no reason and where the wealthy and the intellectuals, the most endowed and privileged members of society, hate their own countries, would we want to live in such a world? Would we really choose to live there? Would we think any of it makes any sense. Just think again about this world we have become used to. Think of this thing, terrorism, we have become used to. Think of our society where some members decide, on a whim, to blow up other members of the world for no reason. Think of the Madrid and London bombings and 9/11 and think about how those who carried them out were granted all the freedoms and welfare from those countries and they chose to murder people they had never met and then afterward their acts were described by the media as part of a ‘struggle’ and that they were ‘militants’ with ‘grievances’ and how intellectuals accused those who died of being ‘Eichmans’ and said that there was a ‘myth of the innocent victim’ and then said “revenge solves nothing.” Why would we choose such a society? Who would? If someone said that this society is also a good one because it has ‘democracy’ and it has ‘human rights’ and ‘freedom of speech’ might we question what those things are if they produce things.
We live in such a world and I ask, is such a world truly worth it? I mean is it worth anything? In our world where Islamic law is worshipped and loved in the West, where the Archbishop of Canterbury supports its implication and where we already have Shariah courts allowed to rule in domestic violence cases in the U.K. I ask, is such a world worth anything? And I ask you to consider this story: Aisha Ibrahim Duhulow, a 13 year old girl in Somalia was raped by three adult males while on the way to her grandmothers. He took her to the police. They brought her to the Islamic Shariah court which pronounced her guilty of 'adultery’ even though she was not married. She was brought to a football stadium where a 1,000 men gathered to watch her execution. She was led out and she asked of the men "what do you want from me." The grown men said to the 13 year old girl "We will do what Allah has instructed us." She saw then that they intended to kill her and said "I am not going. Don't kill me." They took her to a hole that they had dug in the ground and they buried her up to her neck, making sure the headscarf remained on her head lest her immodesty offend the men. 50 grown men stoned the 13 year old girl's head. They then brought nurses to see if she was dead. The nurses removed her body from the ground and said she was not dead. So they re-buried her and stoned her until she died. Amnesty International representatives and a "human rights activist" and other journalists were on the scene to witness what happened. A Unicef official from the UN was also nearby receiving reports. His name is Christian Balslev-Olesen. I will not use his first name again for he is an insult to that word and it should be stricken from his name. Why do we live in such a godless world? Let us think again about the story. A 13 year old girl. Let us pause. A 13 year old girl. She was raped by 3 grown men. She is accused of being the criminal and murdered by being buried up to her neck so that 50 grown men can stone her. I want to ask again. Why do we live in such a godless world? And think of her last moments. She can see the grown men, the same men that raped her. She can also see the Human Rights Activist. She can see the Unicef workers. She can see the BBC reporters. She can see Christian Balslev-Olesen. I want you to think again of this scene. A 13 year old girl is forced into a hole in the ground so that 50 grown men can stone her head. All the while Europeans stand around and take notes. A human rights activist takes notes. I want you to think again of this. This world. Our world. Is it a place that deserves justice? Is it a place that deserves humanity? Does it deserve anything? It deserves justice. Amnesty International deserves Justice for this. Unicef deserves justice for this. Human rights activists and the reporters present deserve justice for this. Mr. Braslev-Olesen, you deserve justice for this. Islam, that evil thing that destroys this world and takes the soul from humanity, that thing that rapes a 13 year old and then stones her, that thing that requires she be buried up to her neck so that grown men may stone her, Islam deserves justice. Will justice come to these things? No. Braslev-Olesen will return to his Villa in whatever European country he resides. Will someone one day put a knife to his throat and drag him to his back patio and place him in a hole and stone him to death? No. There will be no justice. Do these Muslims, these animals, do they, as they raise a stone over their head to throw at a 13 year old girl, do they have any humanity? Are they human? What kind of a man can do such a thing? In my mind the world is not worth our effort. Humanity is not worth anything. When the world media's representatives and the UN representatives can look on and do nothing, when grown men stone 13 year old girls and call its 'God's will', I cannot say we live in any sort of human society. We live in nothing. Will Aisha Ibrahim Duhulow ever return to us? Will she ever have her justice? It is on our shoulders to wait until Mr. Braslev-Olesen dies and then to seek out his grave and demolish it so that no memory of him remains. The name Braslev-Olesen is a curse on humanity, only slightly less a curse than that thing called Mohammed that was vomited forth in the 7th century. We can do that bit of justice for a 13 year old girl who died at the hands of men while another man sat by. May the UN and Islam be buried up to their necks in the blood they have watched be spilled and may they and this world die the death that both so brilliantly deserve. I can think of no other verdict for such a place. Our own comforts are meaningless if such crimes are committed.
The world will never know her name: (dis) honourable killings and the war on women
November 5th, 2008
Seth J. Frantzman
Hidden on a sidebar on page seven of the International Herald Tribune on November 5th, 2008 was the headline ‘Girl is stoned to death by Islamists in Somalia.’ The United Nations reported that a 13 year old girl who had been raped by three men and complained to police was taken by men, placed in a hole, and stoned to death. Under Islamic law she was accused of ‘adultery’, a crime punishable by death. We won’t ever know her name. In her society she may not have even had a name that mattered. She was chattel, less valuable than a mule, a piece of meat to be raped for the pleasure of men and then stoned by those same men for ‘dishonouring’ her family.
Take the recent case where the Tel Aviv District court judge Dalia Ganot freed five suspected human traffickers because, according to the judge, the prostitutes were not “forced into sex…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.” According to reports “Ganot wrote in her ruling that the two complainants seemed to have freedom of movement, noting that one of the defendants said he took them to the gynecologist and the supermarket, as well as the beach and Superland.” That is freedom of movement for a woman, a human being? If they are taken to a gynecologist once a month to make sure they aren’t pregnant from being forced to have sex with 13 men a day? That is freedom of movement? But Ganot went further, noting that “it is normal for a pimp to be angry if his prostitute refuses to work on her period.” But we don’t even know the womens’ names.
There is also the recent story entitled; ‘Brothels forbid prostitutes to use condoms to prevent evidence.” ‘Massage parlors’ forbid their prostitutes from using condoms. One woman relates that “you work an eight hour shift..they [the owners] are the one’s making the profits while we’re taking risks.” But the owner has the best interests of the men at heart: “the damage a woman carrier can do is horrendous.” While the newspaper and other media investigators never have problems gaining entrance to these places the police seem oblivious.
Or maybe we should think of the story of the Abu Ghanem brothers of Ramla who murdered Rim Abu Ghanem. Now through a plea deal they will receive only manslaughter charges because Rim was a woman and not a man and thus, apparently, not deserving of having her murderers jailed for murder. At Hebrew University there is Prof. Eyal Ben-Ari whose own female doctoral students accused him of sexual harassment and rape for more than a year and the authorities did nothing until a police investigation was opened and then, quietly, closed.
In Europe a recent story out of Holland reveals the underside of legalized prostitution. Women were sold to brothel owners, forced to engage in sex with more than a dozen clients a day and the German-Turkish brothel owners forced the women to have the names of their ‘owners’ tattooed on their bodies. They were thus branded like cattle, sold like meat and will be tossed into the trash one day by their ‘owners’ like trash. Such is the fate of women in a democratic ‘progressive’ western society.
We live in a harsh world which has little respect for women. This is not only an Israeli phenomenon. In New York there was Kitty Genovese who was beaten and murdered for half an hour while citizens looked on in New York in 1964. Had Kitty bean Carl there is no doubt people would have intervened. But 13 year old boys aren’t placed in a hole and stoned to death while a UN agency refuses to even tell us their name either. We must fight for women’s rights, especially the most marginal women, because no woman should die in our world in such a savage manner and not have the world know her name.
The importance of gun ownership
October 30th, 2008
Seth J. Frantzman
When colt pistols first began marketing its firearms it called it the equalizer. “God made all men, Colt made them equal.” This statement, from what should have been a stodgy gun maker and its clients, has a revolutionary, seemingly leftist, element to it. The gun, in the hands of the poor, makes them equal to the wealthiest man. In history it has usually been the inability to fashion weapons that has separated society so easily into classes. During the time of tribalism and hunting and gathering all the men in the tribe could usually fashion their own weapons, which were usually quite simple such as bows and arrows or spears and clubs. But as society progressed so did the weapons. Roman weapons were pieces of art, sharpened by master craftsmen. While slaves and savage peoples might surely steal them or get a hold them, they could not produce them. During the feudal period the weapons and amour of a knight were the work likewise of master blacksmiths. Not only health and good living separated the knight from the serfs, they simply had no chance against him should they revolt. This is why revolts never succeeded in feudal Europe. With the introduction of the rifle and the fact that it is even more complicated to make one would have assumed that the government and the wealthy would have been the only ones with access to such specialized weapons. But in fact Colt provided the people with a radical idea. In a country founded by men whose freedom and need to defend themselves meant they were literally swimming in a glut of weapons there was a natural attachment to having a gun at home. The outgrowth of this in the U.S was a robust firearms industry providing guns for the common man.
The message of Colt is interesting. All men are equal. This statement is also made in discussing man before the law. But in outside society men are not equal. Colt provided humanity with an equalizer, a weapon, that no man, despite his wealth and power, could be protected from. This was brought brutally home in the assassinations of U.S president’s Mckinley and Lincoln. Others were to come. Could a common man have brought down a king during the feudal period or a Roman emperor?
The opposition to gun ownership and laws allowing people to kill burglars in order to defend their homes is distinctly a leftist position, ironically, and it is one grounded in the leftist knowledge that as the elites in society they do not want the poor being able to gun them down. One would have assumed the opposite. The left is the party of the ‘people’. It needs the votes of the savage poor in order to win. But while the wealthy leftist politicians rely on the poor for votes they don’t want the poor being able to kill them. The leftist ideology of a utopian society is built on an image of feudalism. This is why Simon Sebag Montefiore’s Court of the Red Tsar was so interesting a read. It showed the degree to which Stalin’s court simply remade the only feudal court of the Tsar. Serfs were no better off in either, in fact they perished in the millions under Communism and they were also slaves, except under Communism they were called ‘peasants’. There is no surprise that such movements as Communism and Nazism made gun ownership illegal. They did not want the citizens to be equal to the officials.
So we see in the U.S that those who oppose gun ownership the most, such as Rosie O’Donnel, usually live in gated communities, with armed guards. This is the great irony. The wealthy man says that the people should be denied their guns and yet they themselves have armed guards and ‘armed response’ security. In Israel the recent passage of the ‘Dromi Law’, named after a farmer who shot a Bedouin who was robbing his property, has made it easier for people to shoot to defend their property. Who opposes the law? The Communist and leftist political parties. They don’t want the people to be armed. In the U.S by contrast we have the terrorist, Bill Ayers, who as a wealthy intellectual choose to try to murder poor people doing their jobs, such as policeman. Now, when challenged by reporters, he has the gall to call the police for help and ask the reporters to leave his ‘property’, an irony considering as an anarchist he objects to the idea of property. But his reaction is typical. As a wealthy leftist he denies the people the right to bear arms, but he wants his property and a police force to protect him. This is the classic response.
Colt was right in the 1870s. It is even more right today. The right of a person to bear arms should not be infringed by a government. Everytime the right of the people to their weapons has been infringed terrible things have followed. The government cannot be trusted to have a monopoly on firepower, not under Rome or the Feudal knights or today. Man must always be able to reach for his equalizer in order to oppose tyranny.
A review of 'The Holocaust is Over: We Must Rise from its Ashes' by Avraham Burg, is published by Palgrave Macmillan.
Reviewed by Seth J. Frantzman
November 8th, 2008
Avraham Burg was a leadering member of the Israeli establishment, a head of the Jewish agency, World Zionist organization, speaker of the Knesset, a resident of the posh Kibbutz Nataf, businessman, ‘Zionist’, leftist intellectual, ‘religious’ person and member of the government. Burg speaks in a recent interview to the British daily The Independent, home of the anti-semite Robert Fisk. The Independent calls him “Israel’s new prophet.” He speaks about a “Holocaust industry.” He speaks about how he “singlehandedly” shook the foundations of the “Zionist establishment.” He speaks of how Israel is “racist” and how he has a duty to care about the “children of the Palestinians.” He speaks about the “obsessive and cheapening use or abuse of the Holocaust as a theological pillar of Jewish identity.” He desires to leave the “Judaism of the Ghetto for Humanistic universal Judaism.” He notes this his father was a “German Jew” who opposed the execution of Adolph Eichmann. He speaks about the good Jews, those of the “sacred memory” who died in the Holocaust. He speaks of how he has moved to Europe and loved the “cultural melaei of Berlin” and how Jews have a duty to “set Germany free” from Holocaust guilt. He compares Israel to the Weimer Republic and claims that the Arabs are the new Jews and how Israel is in the incubation period of creating a new Nazism. He admires Professor yeshayu Leibowitz, an Israeli intellectual who claimed Israel was not worth being allowd to exist because of the ‘occupation’ and that Israel was made up of “Judeao-Nazis” who are a “pathological cycle of the abused child becoming a violent parent.” Burg calls Israel’s occupation an “Israeli Anschluss” using the word for the German invasion of Austria in 1938. Burg stresses his love for Diaspora judaism, his commitment for “social justice” and his love of the “humanism and universalism.” For Burg “Israel is part of Europe.” He is a “human being. I belong to humanity.” He opposes French president Sarkozy because he sees Sarkozy as intolerant towards Islam. He desires that Israel become part of the EU and asks “Is it getting lost into the American melting pot or is it being a stone in the ongoing beautiful mosaic of Europe?"” He supports the development of a “European Islam” where Europe becomes Islamic.
Burg's recent polemic should not be taken at face value. It is both representative of an entire way of life, an entire class, thought process, track in human history and political pursuasion, a culture, and also representative of the mental perversion, the psychic decline, of a single individual. Both are tragic. In terms of psychosis Mr. Burg represents the general perversions and antics of German Jews and their descendants. He is connected, theologically, with Hannah Arendt and Leo Beack and other self-hating German Jews such as Baruch Kimmerling for which everything is the Holocaust, especially when it is the Jews. In the Freudian world of the surviving German Jews and their descendants such as Norman Finkelstien, the Jews become the Nazis, because absent of actual Nazis they can only find Nazis among their own people, a people that when they were numerous they hated. We must only recall that in Hamburg after the Holocaust the 70 surviving members of the community refused to share their properties and synagogoues and community areas with the thousands of 'Ostjuden' who had ended up there as refugees. Such was the contempt of the German Jews for other Jews.
But now those 'Ostjuden' have become for them the 'Nazis' partly out of desire to keep their names in the press and keep themselves interesting, and partly due to a bizarre psychological tragedy. For the German Jews the Jews are the Nazis because they believe the Jewish people have been traumatized by the Holocaust. Except ironically most of the Jews today labeled and slandered as 'Nazis' by German-Jewish intellectuals are actually Jews from outside of Europe who have no connection to the Holocaust. It is the Jews of the Sephardie, Mizrachi, Ethiopian and Russian communities who make up Israel, not European Holocaust survivors. And yet the German Jewish intellectuals and their descendants would have us believe that the Jews, because of the trauma of the Holocaust, have become the 'new Nazis' and the Palestinians the 'new Jews' and the Jews take out their trauma on the Palestinians. It is not a unique belief of Avraham Burg, but a widespread belief among a certain class of Jewish self-hating intellectuals such as Israel Shahak, Moshe Lieberman, Joel Kovel, Michael Hoffman, Tanya Reinhardt, Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, Baruch Kimmerling and Jonathan Cook. And yet the irony of the claim is that it is they who suffer the trauma of the Holocaust, for they are the German Jews. It is not the Jews of Israel, the off-spring of the pre-Holocaust Sabras such as Moshe Dayan and Ariel Sharon, or the offspring of the yemenite immigrants, the offspring of cobblers from Aleppo or wine merchants from Persia or shoemakers from Kabul. No it is not the offspring of Soviet Jewish engineers or Ethiopian Jewish farmers who have this trauma. It is the German Jew who has this 'trauma'. But there are very few German Jews today, just as there are very few European Jews. The Jews of Russia didn't suffer the 'trauma' of the Holocaust. Those that did are dead. Those that survived were the one's whose towns were evacuated to the East and who served in Stalin's Great Patriotic War. They were the conquering men of Eastern Europe who stood like giants over the Nazi corpse. The American Jews don't suffer from this problem for they also came as liberators to Europe to cleanse Europe of its disease of Nazism. 1.5 million Jews fought on the side of the allied armies in World War two. These were not victims. 200,000 Soviet Jews alone died in fighting units in the war. In all, how many Holocaust survivors truly came to Israel and what percentage are they and their descendants of the county today? Some 500,000-650,000 Holocaust survivors came to Israel between 1945 and 1950 and today there are between 250,000-400,000 people in Israel who are classified as Holocaust survivors. They are therefore Less than 10% of the Jewish population. Between 1945 and 1958 they formed almost half the population of the country until the arrival of 800,000 Jewish refugees from Arab lands during the same period caused their percentage to decrease (Israel's Jewish population was 790,000 in 1949, it had been 600,000 in 1945, in 1958 it was 2 million). The theory that the trauma of the survivor accounts for the behavior of Israel is meaningless, it would be like blaming some behavior of the United States foreign policy on the 13% of the U.S which is descendants of African slaves and saying their trauma has caused the U.S to do something. Unfortunatly German Jews require that they be the center of attention and that since they are no longer a cultural center as they were before 1939 and people are less and less interested in them as holocaust survivors or as symbols of a 'vanished Europe' and 'vanished culture' they have found that their only niche is the defamation of Israel and its citizens. The trauma of Holocaust survivors is not that they take out their pain on Palestinians but that they take out their pain on other Jews and accuse those other Jews of being 'Nazis'. Here the German Jews continue their policy of hatred, discrimination and disdain for those they perceive as less cultured then themselves, such as the 'Ost Juden' now called 'ultra-orthodox' or the 'blacks' who we know as Sephardim, Mizrachim and others. Nothing is more upsetting for the descandants of German Jews than to see their old national enemies, the Russians, in the form of the Russian Jews, outnumbering them in Israel and elsewhere. So they heap scorn on Israel, comparing it to a Nazi country, but what we have witnessed is the final defeat of German Jewry and its policy of assimilation, communism, self-hatred and arrogance that they attempted to mete out to the Jewish people. Burg and his ilk represent the last attempt, like Sitting Bull's Last Stand, to flail about, now trying to encourage anti-semitism among Europeans, to claim the Holocaust is a 'universal story' and has nothing to do with Jews, and to claim the Jewish religion is 'universal' and even to claim that we need a 'European Islam', whatever it takes to destroy the Jewish people for which German Jews long ago lost any affinity for. But in the end, given the low birth rates of the Burgs and Finkelsteins and Chomskys, it is the Jews that they have hated who will defeat them, not in the war of intellectuals, or the battle of brute strength, but in the battle of the births, for the long term impact of the German Jews, while we will be forced to forever recall their utopian Weimer Republic, will not be felt demographically and intellectually they will die out if only because there will be no more of them soon. Burg is the last generation to haunt us. Hannah Arendt had a sexual affair with the chief philosopher of Nazism, Martin Heidegger, and she defended him at his trial, and she then accused the Jews of causing the Holocaust and 'collaborating' with the Nazis, while at the same time she supported Eichmann at his trial and defined him as 'banal' or 'dull', excusing his acts. Now Burg compares Israel to the Nazis. But Mr. Burg, how long do you have left in this world? Arendt died in 1975. Kimmerling is gone. Chomksy and Finkelstein will go too. And you, Mr. Burg, you will also go. They call Burg a prophet. That is what the European calls him, Europeans who don't believe in prophets. Time defeats Nazism. It was time that was on the side of man against Nazism. It was time that was on our side against Communism. It died to. Time is on our side against Mr. Burg and his thought process. Each Jewish child that is born to an Orthodox Jew, a Sephardie, a Russian Jew or an Ethiopian defeats the Burgs and fulfills the promise of the Jewish people. Children defeat self-hatred and anti-Semitism. Children defeat Nazism. Children defeat the German Jewish legacy. No greater yoke hangs around the neck of the Jewish people than the endless accusations that Jews are the 'Nazis' and Palestinians are the 'Jews', an accusation made by the European and his German-Jewish friends. But the European has no children. Mohammed is the most popular name in European schools. Nazism traumatized the European and caused him to have less children. Now, in his last fit of childish anger, the European lashes out at the Jews and calls them 'Nazis'. But there will be no Europeans in 50 years. They are gone from this world. They and their civilization. Burg and Europe are dying and all we can do is rejoice over the corpse of this thing, this civilization that exterminated the Jews and then called the surviving Jews 'Nazis' and even had the gall to say that it was the act of exterminating the Jew, the trauma caused by it, that made the Jew a Nazi. So the European wins either way, he murders the Jews and gets rid of him and if the Jew survives then he says of the Jew, 'you are the murderer'. Oh, but the European neglects to have children along the way and so he dies to. And the Jew lives on. It is funny to think of an Orthodox-Jewish family travelling around Europe in fifty years seeing the graves of Avraham Burg and Tony Judt and Robert Fisk and Alan Hart and all the intellectual Europeans who called Jews 'Nazis'. To think of the idea that those Europeans were so full of their hate that they neglected to have children. No Orthodox Jew reads the filth that eminates forth from the Burg or from the Independent or Oxford. So the orthodox Jew won't even care to know the grave of the European or the Burg. And that is the great irony. Modernity and its humanism brought this world nothing. Where was it to stop the genocide in Rwanda?. It was no where to be found. It was a lie. It was rhetoric and platitudes and accusations. It was 'human rights'. It was 'social justice'. It was 'universal'. But it was none of those things. It was, in truth, terrorism and self-hate and rape and sex-slavery and prostitution, and the degredation of women, it was 'Fashion TV' and 'Who wants to be America's next top model', it was mini-skirts and fake breasts and nose jobs and tummy tucks. It was pornography and strippers and strip teases and BDSM and whore houses and brothels. It was protest tourism and wearing your Khaffiya and justifyuing terrorism and loving the 'other' and diversity and multi-culturalism and moral relativsm. Modernity. It died because it did not produce. It did not have children. It was self love and self obsession and self exploitation and arrogant and self-fulfilling and selfish. And we witness it dying. Day by day. And as it dies it gives more hate and becomes more angry. Every day as it grows smaller and smaller with the knowledge that there can be no universalism it desires to take vengeance upon the Jewish people for it is angry that they have outlasted it. It cannot understand how the Jews can defeat it and survive it. And that is why it desires, in its last act, to do what it could not do over a thousand years, with all the technology at its disposal in 1942, all of its power, it desires to do intellectually what it could not do with its hands, for Europeans do seldom use their hands for anything meaningful, but it speaks to a stone floor. It falls on deaf ears. Rich Europeans sit at home and read a review in the Independent with Avraham Burg and they say 'see, the Jews monopolize the Holocaust and make it an industry, see the Jews are the real Nazis, the Jews….the Jews….the Jews….the Jews…" But they are so busy reading the Independent they do not have sexual intercourse and when they do they resort to some perversion. And all the while the Orthodox Jew is producing, more children, more and more and more. Each time the European calls a Jew a Nazi, an Orthodox Jewish child is born. It is like each time a bell rings an angel gets his wings. The European rings the bell of 'Jews are Nazis' and more and more Jews are born. It is surprising to think that the Jews defeated the Europeans, with all their white haired well dressed men who sit at the EU, to think that they have been defeated, but they have. They may have their mistresses and their fancy houses and their fast cars and their wine tastings, but we have children. And children are the future. Europeans and Avraham Burg is the past.
Saturday, November 15, 2008
Terra Incognita 59 Ted Stevens, received wisdom and Barbados
Terra Incognita
Issue 59
“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
November 4th, 2008
1) Ted Stevens: Man of Steel: Senator Ted Stevens, the longest serving Republican senator, has been convicted of corruption. Now he faces 35 years in prison and numerous voices are threatening to expel him from the Senate if he wins re-election. Stevens served as a ‘flying tiger’ in the Second World war in China. He wrote the law granting Alaska statehood and was responsible for granting native Americans rights to large swaths of Alaska. The man devoted his entire life to real public service, not naked ambition, but serving the nation. Now the long knives are out for this man of steel. It is a tragedy that people should condemn such a figure, a man who literally carved out an entire state from the wilderness and defended China from Japanese imperialism.
2) Received Wisdom: African slavery and the American Frontier, Part 1 of 2: Received wisdom tells us that the Africans had the institution of slavery before the arrival of Europeans in the 15th century but that their institution was ‘humane’. Furthermore history tells us that the institution predated the arrival of Islam in Africa in the 8th century. But a true examination of the sources shows that there was never African slavery south, central or west Africa. For instance slavery only came to Namibia in the 19th century. Islam brought the institution of slavery to Africa, causing native tribes bordering Islam to embrace the institution to survive and Europeans followed suit. The African’s “natural state” was not some “humane” slavery, this is a lie designed to make Islam seem ‘native’ to Africa and at the same time make European slavery appear ‘worse.’ But in truth it was always a satanic institution, one brought on a large scale by Islam and one still practiced in Islamic African states, usually by Arabs against Africans. History shows the only African solution to Islam and its slavery has been when cannibals have eaten the slave traders. We could all learn from this.
3) Obama's Model: The Democratic Labour party of Barbados: Before there was Obama and the mantra of ‘change we can believe in’ there was the DLP victory in Barbados and their campaign of ‘change’. But what has befallen Barbados since the election of the DLP in January of 2008? What role did race play in that election? Did Owen Arthur really accuse his DLP enemies of being ‘negrocrats’ and did they call him an ‘Oreo’? Is ‘change’ a realistic and acceptable mantra for a campaign?
Ted Stevens: Man of Steel
October 28th, 2008
Seth J. Frantzman
After a lifetime of service Alaska’s senior senator and the longest serving Republican Senator (the Democratic ones are Byrd, Kennedy and Inouye), Ted Stevens, has been found guilty of corruption. His sin? Accepting $250,000 in renovations to a 2,000 square foot house. He now faces some 35 years in prison, a sentence that would mean life in prison, for he is 85 years old. John McCain has called for his resignation, describing him as ‘currupt’. But what is curruption? Is it positive that there is little sense of proportion between the law and the crime? But Stevens is not vindictive and combative, the way James Traficant was ( a former Democrat from Ohio and another ‘Man of Steel’ who was convicted of currption and will be released from prison in 2009). When pressed for answers by Foxnews, Ted Stevens was unappologetic and confident. When asked if Alaska would re-elect him, he is currently up for re-election, he said “they will.” When asked if he had any comments he said “I will tell Alaskans.” This is a man of steel. But let us recall why.
Ted Stevens was born in 1923 in a cottage built by his grandfather in Indiana. He served as a pilot in the Second World War, earning the distinguished flying cross for serving as one of the ‘Flying Tigers’ defending China from the Japanese. After a legal career he was brought, by a colleague, to the Department of the Interior in 1956. Here he helped campaign for Alaskan statehood. Stevens helped write the Alaska Statehood Act which was passed in 1958. He was involved in setting aside portions of Alaska for the federal government, for oil drilling, logging and national parks (the Alaksa National Interest Conservation Act, signed in 1980, covered some 79 million acres for instance). But his greatest influence on Alaska was the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971 (it was signed by Richard Nixon who was, oddly enough, a great supporter of Native American rights to land). This provided for some 80,000 natives to be given rights to 44 million acres and to receive moneys from oil drilling. A dozen corporations and numerous villages were recognized under the act in which the natives received shares. It was probably the most ‘progressive’ piece of legislation in terms of granting native Americans rights to their ancestral lands ever passed.
And yet now the man who fought for his country in the Second World War, who helped save China from the Japanese, who brought the State of Alaska into being and who helped shape its landscape is being called ‘currupt’ and risks life in prison. Is this justice? Corruption is a serious offence. There is no doubt here. But Mr. Stevens has served in the U.S Senate since 1968. The man has simply devoted his entire life to service. This is not the wishy-washy service of the modern era where people claim to ‘serve their country’ but truly serve only their own ambition and vanity. This is the service of old, of the time of such great devoteess of the nation such as Cato the Elder. Stevens, corrupt? How corrupt can he be. He is 85 years old. He doesn’t drive gold plated cadillacs. Representative Laura Richardson, who is called ‘Little Mama’ by her colleauge Representative ‘Big Mama’ Maxine Waters, drove her government paid for car 30,000 miles, using it for personal use, defaulted on three loans for a house and currently drives a 2007 Lincoln Town Car at a cost of $1,700 a month to the taxpayer. This is, of course, all ‘legal’. She is not the only one. Other Senators and Congressman receive perks beyond the norm. Yet this is a legal form of corruption. Stevens, by contrast was frugal with the taxpayers money. But some friend of his paid for some remodelling that cost between $130,000 and $250,000. Overall his house was valued at $271,000. And this is corruption. Other politicians, McCain among them, have dozens of homes and cars in multiple states. Some have compounds (such as the Bushes and Kennedys. John Edwards, who spoke of ‘two Americas’ has the largest home in his country, a six million dollar 28,000 swuare foot mansion on 102 acres. Lets compare for a second. 28,000 acres for Edwards and 2,300 for Stevens. One man served his country and fought in a war. One man was a lawyer. One man is called ‘corrupt’. Michelle Obama was the ‘vice president of community and external affairs’ where she made some $265,000 a year to do almost nothing, except sit in a chair. The same Obama told students not to ‘go into the corporate world.’ Why would someone go into a corportate world and work when they can get $265,000 to do nothing? Why would they go into the army and risk their lives when they can just enjoy being in charge of ‘community affiars’ or better yet, ‘community organizing’?
Corruption is an interesting idea. There is corruption in many places and in general the United States is a culture that abhors corruption. That is a good thing. But there is more than one type of corruption. There is the kind that Stevens was involved in. But there is also the kind that Edwards and Richardson and the Obamas were involved in. This is the kind where one bilks soceity and the taxpayers out of money. This is the one where one gets big profits working for a ‘non-profit’ organization. Stevens spent a lifetime in the Senate. He was there was Nixon resigned. All that life didn’t bring him a 102 acre property, or dozens of cars and a 28,000 square foot house. He didn’t request the most expensive car to lease on the taxpayers dole from the Senate. Stevens was a modest man of modest backround. He is a man of steel and the Senate deserves him. The people of Alaska, a state he almost single handedly created and crafted, deserve their most loyal citizen. If he is sent to prison it will be a great tragedy. John McCain has done a disservice by damning this man. McCain got a pass when he was one of the ‘Keating five’. He deserved a pass because of his service. But it seems the pot cannot refrain from calling the kettle black. Should Stevens return the money? Yes. Should he declare it on his tax returns or whatever he was supposed to have done? Yes. But the man of steel counts on the people and the people will not let him down. This is why he does not deny or grandstand. He simply says, when asked if they will send him back to public service; “I know they will.”
Received Wisdom: African slavery and the American Frontier, Part 1 of 2
Seth J. Frantzman
October 27th, 2008
There are two pieces of received wisdom that every American and many other people around the world are led to believe: African slavery existed before the American slave trade and was more humane and the American frontier was one of manifest destiny where the white man exterminated the peaceful natives. These two narratives are central to any understanding of the history of Africa and the United States. But it turns out that both narratives are fraught with lies.
Let us begin with Africa. Most students are now taught that African slavery was part of African society but that it was more humane than its western counterpart. The narrative tells us that Africans enjoyed trading in slaves and that all African tribes did so. In the book Slavery in Africa: Historical and Anthropological perspectives by Igor Kopytoff and Suzanne Miers we are treated with the following "the question that requires study is not the simplistic one of whether African 'slavery' in general was benign or not. Such questions are based on a false premise. They assume that these complex and extremely varied systems can be treated as a single institution-African slavery….some were used in ritual sacrifices or killed to accompany a dead chief…acquired persons were valuable as economic, social and political capital, as a type of wealth that could be converted from one use to another and that had the comparable advantage of being self-supporting and self-reproducing…they could serve as pawns…be held in reserve and bartered in times of scarcity…the Sena primarily wanted 'slaves' as social and not labor units…the Tawana economic level would suggest a relatively benign and assimilative form of 'slavery'…yet we find that Tawana 'slaves' were kept from easy integration with their masters by ethnic considerations as were the machube of the Fulani whose rather simple productive economy coexisted with a very onerous and chattellike 'slavery'." It is perhaps inevitable that only a white western leftist academic could write this way about slavery in Africa. Because people in the West cannot think and do not see humanity as human, since they live in a state of post-humanism, they apparently cannot reason either. Thus slavery becomes 'slavery'. Humans become 'acquired persons' and 'labor units'. Of course. What else would they be? They couldn't be human. Ironically, in an attempt to be scientific and anthropological the modern leftist liberal at the university reproduces the same callous inhuman treatment of the slave as one might have found in the Old South.
But beyond the myth of the 'benign' African slave trade and how slaves existed in 'varied' systems' there is another piece of history that is left unraveled. Was slavery as wide spread in Africa as we have been led to believe? Was it truly a 'native' African institution that 'all' African tribes practiced? To unravel this question we must actually return to the present. Where does slavery exist in Africa today? It exists in the Sudan. It also exists in Niger, Mauritania and Mali. Who are the slaves in these states? They are the darker African peoples. Who are the slave owners? They are the whiter Arab Muslims. This is not only apparent from the numerous books that have come out from former slaves in the Sudan (such as Mande Nazer's Slave and Francis Bok's Escape from Slavery) but it is most apparent in the story of Hadijatou Mani. She was born in Niger and sold into slavery at the age of 12 to a Muslim named Soulaymane Narou. Her price was $500. For ten years she was forced to do domestic and agricultural work. She was, of course, raped by her owner at the age of 13. There are still some 40,000 slaves in Niger and the practice was only criminalized 5 in 2003. When one researches other parts of Africa they find precisely the same thing as one finds in Niger. In Somalia for instance there exist the Somali Bantu, a minority group of dark skinned Africans who are suppressed by the lighter skinned Arab Somalis. But these dark skinned Africans aren’t actually from Somlia. Their roots are in Mozambique, Malawi and Tanzania. So how did they end up in southern Somalia in such numbers? They were transported there as slaves by Islam.
Any history of Africa tries as best it can to show on the one hand that the slave trade in the 'West' by Europeans was 'more brutal than its Eastern counterpart' and on the other hand tries to show that slavery existed in Africa before the arrival of Islam in the 8th century. But there is an essential problem with both narratives. A map of the slave trade in the 13th century, before the coming of the Europeans, shows where it was most prominent and who practiced it. In North Africa there was the Hafsid caliphate. There was the empire of Mali, a Muslim kingdom. And all along the East African coast there were the 'Arab slave stations'. There simply was no slavery in the non-Muslim parts of Africa. But there was slavery on the borderlands of Islam, practiced by non-Muslim tribes who worked as intermediaries. This phenomenon of Africans working as intermediaries in the trade was one that would be found against after the advent of the European slave trade in West Africa. Once local tribes grew tired of seeing their men and women taken away in chains they realized that they could only survive if they themselves could trade the bodies of others. They either became traders, were enslaves or fled the coastline. In some cases, such as the Sudan, the non-Muslim tribes agreed to provide human tribute every year in return for not being enslaves and forcibly converted to Islam or exterminated. The modern day genocide and slavery in Darfur is the legacy of this old pact. When the blacks of Darfur rose up against their Arab masters in Khartoum they were genocided precisely because of this old pact from the 8th century. In many cases it didn't matter if the African tribes converted to Islam, they were still viewed as 'abd' or 'slave'. There are only a few recorded instances of Africans refusing to engage in the slave trade and also defeating the slavers. In one case a tribe of cannibals from Madagascar came upon some Arabs on an island near Zanzibar. The Africans killed and ate the Arabs. The Arabs did not return. In another example of the use of cannibalism to defeat slaving the British employed African cannibals to eat Arab slavers who were operating in the Congo. But these are the only two known instances where Africans refused were victorious and did not have to compromise their morality by selling their fellow man. The existence of non-Muslim Africans working as intermediaries for the Islamic slave trade on the border lands of Islam is not unique. The Byzantine empire, in its attempts to appease Islam, sold the Slavic people into slavery for hundreds of years before Byzantium also fell to the Islamic sword.
Slavery in Africa was an invention of Arab slave traders and Islam. Historians in the west have worked hard to obscure this because the western academy has only two narratives about slavery in Africa: it existed before the 15ht century and was benign and it always existed in Africa in an indigenous way where the institution was different than that practiced in the Americas. But history records the truth. There simply were no slaves in Southern Africa before the arrival of Muslim slavers in Mozambique (one of the provinces in Mozambique, for instance, is called Gaza, a Muslim Arab name). Later, by way of the Portuguese, the word 'Kaffir', which means 'infidel' in Arabic and was used by Arab slavers to describe all Africans, was transferred to the Dutch colonizers of the Cape. The word then became akin to the word 'Nigger' in the U.S, its roots forgotten. But its roots should not have been forgotten. There were no Kaffirs or Niggers before the arrival of Islam in Africa. There were no 'labor units' or 'acquired persons'. The Xhosa and Khoisans didn't practice slavery. The Heroro of Namibia never had slaves. It is fanciful for us to want to see an Africa full of slaves, even benign ones, and for us to see it has 'native' to African culture. My teachers in high school tried to teach me this myth. They wrote on a board about the differences between 'Christian' slavery and 'Muslim' slavery and 'African' slavery. The Christian one in the Americas was the worst, of course. The Muslim one had all sorts of wonderful advantages such as the myth that the children of the female slaves with their Arab masters were no longer slaves and that if the slaves converted to Islam they were usually freed. The African form of slavery was said to be best, an idealic utopia where the slave was a member of society and loved his station in life. But there was no African slavery. African slavery was an invention of Islam, one that may have had its earliest roots in pre-Muslim Arab slaving in east Africa but one that came to the rest of Africa with the expansion of Islam. One cannot ignore the fact that the Bantu tribes, especially, rarely enslaved one another. Arabs brought slavery to all of Africa, sending slavers deep into the heart of Central Africa, depopulating the Kenyan and Tanzanian coastline, and raping so many Africans so as to create all sorts of mixed semi-Arab peoples from the Sudan to Somalia. While the West Africans were immune for a time from this barbarism they were finally brought under this satanic system in the 16th century with the arrival of the European slave stations in West Africa. By the 20th century the institution had spread to Namibia and the Congo before being outlawed by the British and finally abolished through the work of the British navy. It was only abolished in the United States in the course of the Civil War.
Obama's Model: The Democratic Labour party of Barbados
October 28th, 2008
Seth J. Frantzman
The Obama campaign likes to brag about its brand and about how it has stayed 'on message'. The message of course is 'change'. That is the mantra of the Obama campaign and it about the only substantive thing that comes out of its mouth at every campaign stop. Change. Change we can believe in. We need Change. It may surprise some people to know that the Obama's message of Change and its use of this message was modeled, unconsciously, on the campaign of David Thompson of Barbados.
What does a small Carribean island have to do with the U.S election? Before there was Obama there was David Thompson and before Americans voted for change the people of Barbados also voted overwhelmingly for change. But Barbados may serve as a model for what change will mean for America. David Thompson swept into office in January of 2008 with a 2/3 (20 seats to 10) majority in the Barbados House of Assembly. His mandate for change will proceed the Obama one for exactly one year. And we can look to Barbados to see what the mantra of change can bring when it is ushered in, not only with a majority in parliament, but also when it is carried into office by an extreme-left ideology.
Change was a word that rang true to Bajans (the people of Barbados) because the Barbados Labour Party had been in office since 1976. Its leader in the elections of January 2008 was Owen Arthur, who had been in office since 1994. Owen Arthur wasn't exactly the George Bush of Barbados but his party, the BLP, was their version of the ‘Grand Old Party’, founded in 1938. The Democratic Labour Party, the other main party in Barbados, was founded in 1955. Although the BLP was the party of independence it was seen increasingly as the party of business, a party that catered to the huge numbers of tourists who visit the island and a party that was, some say, 'the party of the white man', referring to the small white minority in Barbados, descendants of the old British colonials. Barbados is overwhelming black, like all former British colonies in the West Indies.
What was interesting about the election of David Thompson to the top spot in Barbados is that his skin color has gotten him as much attention as Mr. Obama's has gotten him. David Thompson is, in the parlance of a Barbados, 'a Bajan with light skin'. For an island that is primarily of African ancestry it may be surprising that race plays a role in politics. But sources show that Owen Arthur referred to some of his enemies as "negrocrats." In one speech he supposedly said “He [Harold Hoyte of Nation News] picks upon certain people in Barbados politics, because that is the nature of the negrocrat; there are some people who feel they’re better off than people like ourselves and a man like me, in their mind, has no legitimate right to lead this country because I ain’t come from nowhere.” Oddly enough Mr. Arthur was accused by his enemies of being an "Oreo”-(black on the outside, white on the inside). In contrast the former Environment Minister of Barbados referred to David Thompson as "Caucasian." As one writer at the Barbados Free Press pointed out on May 25th, 2006 "The official website of the Barbados Labour Party (BLP) displays photos of Barbados citizens who are only of one specific race. Despite the fact that Barbados citizens hail from virtually every race and cultural heritage, only citizens of the majority race are shown on the BLP website. And - it apparently is not even enough to be of African heritage - one must have a darker skin tone to be shown on the BLP website. No lighter-skinned persons of african heritage or mixed race persons are shown on the website. And certainly no mixed-race couples like some of the folks who bring you the Barbados Free Press."
In the end, the racial controversies aside, the Barbados election of January 2008 did come down to change. The Thompson campaign fought the election on one word; 'change'. Arthur noted that the DLP was running on a platform of "change for the sake of change" and that it was made up of a "group of wild boys and old men in a great hurry" who would bring Barbados the "politics of desperation." Perhaps he meant the politics of an extreme agenda.
In the end change came to Barbados. The BLP went down to a disastrous defeat. On October 28th, 2008 the chairwoman of the BLP, Billie Miller noted that "We have handed over to those who govern now, an economy humming with progressive projects. Some of them have slowed down and it is not a year yet, and some of them have come to a full stop." Now the BLP faces the prospects that the Israeli opposition party Likud faced after its defeat by Kadima in April of 2006. It must refashion itself, streamline itself, reform itself and re-brand itself. The Republican party, it seems, will face a similar challenge, as a recent article in the Economist in October 2008 noted that even conservatives or 'Obamacons' were jumping the sinking Republican ship.
But the real question is whether the platform of 'change' is a meaningful one. Change is a nice word and surely appeals to voters, especially younger ones who believe all changes are good and associate the word with being 'progressive'. But change for the sake of change can be dangerous and problematic. The U.S now faces the same fate of Barbados and it is worthwhile staying tuned to events on that small island to see where change takes it.
Issue 59
“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
November 4th, 2008
1) Ted Stevens: Man of Steel: Senator Ted Stevens, the longest serving Republican senator, has been convicted of corruption. Now he faces 35 years in prison and numerous voices are threatening to expel him from the Senate if he wins re-election. Stevens served as a ‘flying tiger’ in the Second World war in China. He wrote the law granting Alaska statehood and was responsible for granting native Americans rights to large swaths of Alaska. The man devoted his entire life to real public service, not naked ambition, but serving the nation. Now the long knives are out for this man of steel. It is a tragedy that people should condemn such a figure, a man who literally carved out an entire state from the wilderness and defended China from Japanese imperialism.
2) Received Wisdom: African slavery and the American Frontier, Part 1 of 2: Received wisdom tells us that the Africans had the institution of slavery before the arrival of Europeans in the 15th century but that their institution was ‘humane’. Furthermore history tells us that the institution predated the arrival of Islam in Africa in the 8th century. But a true examination of the sources shows that there was never African slavery south, central or west Africa. For instance slavery only came to Namibia in the 19th century. Islam brought the institution of slavery to Africa, causing native tribes bordering Islam to embrace the institution to survive and Europeans followed suit. The African’s “natural state” was not some “humane” slavery, this is a lie designed to make Islam seem ‘native’ to Africa and at the same time make European slavery appear ‘worse.’ But in truth it was always a satanic institution, one brought on a large scale by Islam and one still practiced in Islamic African states, usually by Arabs against Africans. History shows the only African solution to Islam and its slavery has been when cannibals have eaten the slave traders. We could all learn from this.
3) Obama's Model: The Democratic Labour party of Barbados: Before there was Obama and the mantra of ‘change we can believe in’ there was the DLP victory in Barbados and their campaign of ‘change’. But what has befallen Barbados since the election of the DLP in January of 2008? What role did race play in that election? Did Owen Arthur really accuse his DLP enemies of being ‘negrocrats’ and did they call him an ‘Oreo’? Is ‘change’ a realistic and acceptable mantra for a campaign?
Ted Stevens: Man of Steel
October 28th, 2008
Seth J. Frantzman
After a lifetime of service Alaska’s senior senator and the longest serving Republican Senator (the Democratic ones are Byrd, Kennedy and Inouye), Ted Stevens, has been found guilty of corruption. His sin? Accepting $250,000 in renovations to a 2,000 square foot house. He now faces some 35 years in prison, a sentence that would mean life in prison, for he is 85 years old. John McCain has called for his resignation, describing him as ‘currupt’. But what is curruption? Is it positive that there is little sense of proportion between the law and the crime? But Stevens is not vindictive and combative, the way James Traficant was ( a former Democrat from Ohio and another ‘Man of Steel’ who was convicted of currption and will be released from prison in 2009). When pressed for answers by Foxnews, Ted Stevens was unappologetic and confident. When asked if Alaska would re-elect him, he is currently up for re-election, he said “they will.” When asked if he had any comments he said “I will tell Alaskans.” This is a man of steel. But let us recall why.
Ted Stevens was born in 1923 in a cottage built by his grandfather in Indiana. He served as a pilot in the Second World War, earning the distinguished flying cross for serving as one of the ‘Flying Tigers’ defending China from the Japanese. After a legal career he was brought, by a colleague, to the Department of the Interior in 1956. Here he helped campaign for Alaskan statehood. Stevens helped write the Alaska Statehood Act which was passed in 1958. He was involved in setting aside portions of Alaska for the federal government, for oil drilling, logging and national parks (the Alaksa National Interest Conservation Act, signed in 1980, covered some 79 million acres for instance). But his greatest influence on Alaska was the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971 (it was signed by Richard Nixon who was, oddly enough, a great supporter of Native American rights to land). This provided for some 80,000 natives to be given rights to 44 million acres and to receive moneys from oil drilling. A dozen corporations and numerous villages were recognized under the act in which the natives received shares. It was probably the most ‘progressive’ piece of legislation in terms of granting native Americans rights to their ancestral lands ever passed.
And yet now the man who fought for his country in the Second World War, who helped save China from the Japanese, who brought the State of Alaska into being and who helped shape its landscape is being called ‘currupt’ and risks life in prison. Is this justice? Corruption is a serious offence. There is no doubt here. But Mr. Stevens has served in the U.S Senate since 1968. The man has simply devoted his entire life to service. This is not the wishy-washy service of the modern era where people claim to ‘serve their country’ but truly serve only their own ambition and vanity. This is the service of old, of the time of such great devoteess of the nation such as Cato the Elder. Stevens, corrupt? How corrupt can he be. He is 85 years old. He doesn’t drive gold plated cadillacs. Representative Laura Richardson, who is called ‘Little Mama’ by her colleauge Representative ‘Big Mama’ Maxine Waters, drove her government paid for car 30,000 miles, using it for personal use, defaulted on three loans for a house and currently drives a 2007 Lincoln Town Car at a cost of $1,700 a month to the taxpayer. This is, of course, all ‘legal’. She is not the only one. Other Senators and Congressman receive perks beyond the norm. Yet this is a legal form of corruption. Stevens, by contrast was frugal with the taxpayers money. But some friend of his paid for some remodelling that cost between $130,000 and $250,000. Overall his house was valued at $271,000. And this is corruption. Other politicians, McCain among them, have dozens of homes and cars in multiple states. Some have compounds (such as the Bushes and Kennedys. John Edwards, who spoke of ‘two Americas’ has the largest home in his country, a six million dollar 28,000 swuare foot mansion on 102 acres. Lets compare for a second. 28,000 acres for Edwards and 2,300 for Stevens. One man served his country and fought in a war. One man was a lawyer. One man is called ‘corrupt’. Michelle Obama was the ‘vice president of community and external affairs’ where she made some $265,000 a year to do almost nothing, except sit in a chair. The same Obama told students not to ‘go into the corporate world.’ Why would someone go into a corportate world and work when they can get $265,000 to do nothing? Why would they go into the army and risk their lives when they can just enjoy being in charge of ‘community affiars’ or better yet, ‘community organizing’?
Corruption is an interesting idea. There is corruption in many places and in general the United States is a culture that abhors corruption. That is a good thing. But there is more than one type of corruption. There is the kind that Stevens was involved in. But there is also the kind that Edwards and Richardson and the Obamas were involved in. This is the kind where one bilks soceity and the taxpayers out of money. This is the one where one gets big profits working for a ‘non-profit’ organization. Stevens spent a lifetime in the Senate. He was there was Nixon resigned. All that life didn’t bring him a 102 acre property, or dozens of cars and a 28,000 square foot house. He didn’t request the most expensive car to lease on the taxpayers dole from the Senate. Stevens was a modest man of modest backround. He is a man of steel and the Senate deserves him. The people of Alaska, a state he almost single handedly created and crafted, deserve their most loyal citizen. If he is sent to prison it will be a great tragedy. John McCain has done a disservice by damning this man. McCain got a pass when he was one of the ‘Keating five’. He deserved a pass because of his service. But it seems the pot cannot refrain from calling the kettle black. Should Stevens return the money? Yes. Should he declare it on his tax returns or whatever he was supposed to have done? Yes. But the man of steel counts on the people and the people will not let him down. This is why he does not deny or grandstand. He simply says, when asked if they will send him back to public service; “I know they will.”
Received Wisdom: African slavery and the American Frontier, Part 1 of 2
Seth J. Frantzman
October 27th, 2008
There are two pieces of received wisdom that every American and many other people around the world are led to believe: African slavery existed before the American slave trade and was more humane and the American frontier was one of manifest destiny where the white man exterminated the peaceful natives. These two narratives are central to any understanding of the history of Africa and the United States. But it turns out that both narratives are fraught with lies.
Let us begin with Africa. Most students are now taught that African slavery was part of African society but that it was more humane than its western counterpart. The narrative tells us that Africans enjoyed trading in slaves and that all African tribes did so. In the book Slavery in Africa: Historical and Anthropological perspectives by Igor Kopytoff and Suzanne Miers we are treated with the following "the question that requires study is not the simplistic one of whether African 'slavery' in general was benign or not. Such questions are based on a false premise. They assume that these complex and extremely varied systems can be treated as a single institution-African slavery….some were used in ritual sacrifices or killed to accompany a dead chief…acquired persons were valuable as economic, social and political capital, as a type of wealth that could be converted from one use to another and that had the comparable advantage of being self-supporting and self-reproducing…they could serve as pawns…be held in reserve and bartered in times of scarcity…the Sena primarily wanted 'slaves' as social and not labor units…the Tawana economic level would suggest a relatively benign and assimilative form of 'slavery'…yet we find that Tawana 'slaves' were kept from easy integration with their masters by ethnic considerations as were the machube of the Fulani whose rather simple productive economy coexisted with a very onerous and chattellike 'slavery'." It is perhaps inevitable that only a white western leftist academic could write this way about slavery in Africa. Because people in the West cannot think and do not see humanity as human, since they live in a state of post-humanism, they apparently cannot reason either. Thus slavery becomes 'slavery'. Humans become 'acquired persons' and 'labor units'. Of course. What else would they be? They couldn't be human. Ironically, in an attempt to be scientific and anthropological the modern leftist liberal at the university reproduces the same callous inhuman treatment of the slave as one might have found in the Old South.
But beyond the myth of the 'benign' African slave trade and how slaves existed in 'varied' systems' there is another piece of history that is left unraveled. Was slavery as wide spread in Africa as we have been led to believe? Was it truly a 'native' African institution that 'all' African tribes practiced? To unravel this question we must actually return to the present. Where does slavery exist in Africa today? It exists in the Sudan. It also exists in Niger, Mauritania and Mali. Who are the slaves in these states? They are the darker African peoples. Who are the slave owners? They are the whiter Arab Muslims. This is not only apparent from the numerous books that have come out from former slaves in the Sudan (such as Mande Nazer's Slave and Francis Bok's Escape from Slavery) but it is most apparent in the story of Hadijatou Mani. She was born in Niger and sold into slavery at the age of 12 to a Muslim named Soulaymane Narou. Her price was $500. For ten years she was forced to do domestic and agricultural work. She was, of course, raped by her owner at the age of 13. There are still some 40,000 slaves in Niger and the practice was only criminalized 5 in 2003. When one researches other parts of Africa they find precisely the same thing as one finds in Niger. In Somalia for instance there exist the Somali Bantu, a minority group of dark skinned Africans who are suppressed by the lighter skinned Arab Somalis. But these dark skinned Africans aren’t actually from Somlia. Their roots are in Mozambique, Malawi and Tanzania. So how did they end up in southern Somalia in such numbers? They were transported there as slaves by Islam.
Any history of Africa tries as best it can to show on the one hand that the slave trade in the 'West' by Europeans was 'more brutal than its Eastern counterpart' and on the other hand tries to show that slavery existed in Africa before the arrival of Islam in the 8th century. But there is an essential problem with both narratives. A map of the slave trade in the 13th century, before the coming of the Europeans, shows where it was most prominent and who practiced it. In North Africa there was the Hafsid caliphate. There was the empire of Mali, a Muslim kingdom. And all along the East African coast there were the 'Arab slave stations'. There simply was no slavery in the non-Muslim parts of Africa. But there was slavery on the borderlands of Islam, practiced by non-Muslim tribes who worked as intermediaries. This phenomenon of Africans working as intermediaries in the trade was one that would be found against after the advent of the European slave trade in West Africa. Once local tribes grew tired of seeing their men and women taken away in chains they realized that they could only survive if they themselves could trade the bodies of others. They either became traders, were enslaves or fled the coastline. In some cases, such as the Sudan, the non-Muslim tribes agreed to provide human tribute every year in return for not being enslaves and forcibly converted to Islam or exterminated. The modern day genocide and slavery in Darfur is the legacy of this old pact. When the blacks of Darfur rose up against their Arab masters in Khartoum they were genocided precisely because of this old pact from the 8th century. In many cases it didn't matter if the African tribes converted to Islam, they were still viewed as 'abd' or 'slave'. There are only a few recorded instances of Africans refusing to engage in the slave trade and also defeating the slavers. In one case a tribe of cannibals from Madagascar came upon some Arabs on an island near Zanzibar. The Africans killed and ate the Arabs. The Arabs did not return. In another example of the use of cannibalism to defeat slaving the British employed African cannibals to eat Arab slavers who were operating in the Congo. But these are the only two known instances where Africans refused were victorious and did not have to compromise their morality by selling their fellow man. The existence of non-Muslim Africans working as intermediaries for the Islamic slave trade on the border lands of Islam is not unique. The Byzantine empire, in its attempts to appease Islam, sold the Slavic people into slavery for hundreds of years before Byzantium also fell to the Islamic sword.
Slavery in Africa was an invention of Arab slave traders and Islam. Historians in the west have worked hard to obscure this because the western academy has only two narratives about slavery in Africa: it existed before the 15ht century and was benign and it always existed in Africa in an indigenous way where the institution was different than that practiced in the Americas. But history records the truth. There simply were no slaves in Southern Africa before the arrival of Muslim slavers in Mozambique (one of the provinces in Mozambique, for instance, is called Gaza, a Muslim Arab name). Later, by way of the Portuguese, the word 'Kaffir', which means 'infidel' in Arabic and was used by Arab slavers to describe all Africans, was transferred to the Dutch colonizers of the Cape. The word then became akin to the word 'Nigger' in the U.S, its roots forgotten. But its roots should not have been forgotten. There were no Kaffirs or Niggers before the arrival of Islam in Africa. There were no 'labor units' or 'acquired persons'. The Xhosa and Khoisans didn't practice slavery. The Heroro of Namibia never had slaves. It is fanciful for us to want to see an Africa full of slaves, even benign ones, and for us to see it has 'native' to African culture. My teachers in high school tried to teach me this myth. They wrote on a board about the differences between 'Christian' slavery and 'Muslim' slavery and 'African' slavery. The Christian one in the Americas was the worst, of course. The Muslim one had all sorts of wonderful advantages such as the myth that the children of the female slaves with their Arab masters were no longer slaves and that if the slaves converted to Islam they were usually freed. The African form of slavery was said to be best, an idealic utopia where the slave was a member of society and loved his station in life. But there was no African slavery. African slavery was an invention of Islam, one that may have had its earliest roots in pre-Muslim Arab slaving in east Africa but one that came to the rest of Africa with the expansion of Islam. One cannot ignore the fact that the Bantu tribes, especially, rarely enslaved one another. Arabs brought slavery to all of Africa, sending slavers deep into the heart of Central Africa, depopulating the Kenyan and Tanzanian coastline, and raping so many Africans so as to create all sorts of mixed semi-Arab peoples from the Sudan to Somalia. While the West Africans were immune for a time from this barbarism they were finally brought under this satanic system in the 16th century with the arrival of the European slave stations in West Africa. By the 20th century the institution had spread to Namibia and the Congo before being outlawed by the British and finally abolished through the work of the British navy. It was only abolished in the United States in the course of the Civil War.
Obama's Model: The Democratic Labour party of Barbados
October 28th, 2008
Seth J. Frantzman
The Obama campaign likes to brag about its brand and about how it has stayed 'on message'. The message of course is 'change'. That is the mantra of the Obama campaign and it about the only substantive thing that comes out of its mouth at every campaign stop. Change. Change we can believe in. We need Change. It may surprise some people to know that the Obama's message of Change and its use of this message was modeled, unconsciously, on the campaign of David Thompson of Barbados.
What does a small Carribean island have to do with the U.S election? Before there was Obama there was David Thompson and before Americans voted for change the people of Barbados also voted overwhelmingly for change. But Barbados may serve as a model for what change will mean for America. David Thompson swept into office in January of 2008 with a 2/3 (20 seats to 10) majority in the Barbados House of Assembly. His mandate for change will proceed the Obama one for exactly one year. And we can look to Barbados to see what the mantra of change can bring when it is ushered in, not only with a majority in parliament, but also when it is carried into office by an extreme-left ideology.
Change was a word that rang true to Bajans (the people of Barbados) because the Barbados Labour Party had been in office since 1976. Its leader in the elections of January 2008 was Owen Arthur, who had been in office since 1994. Owen Arthur wasn't exactly the George Bush of Barbados but his party, the BLP, was their version of the ‘Grand Old Party’, founded in 1938. The Democratic Labour Party, the other main party in Barbados, was founded in 1955. Although the BLP was the party of independence it was seen increasingly as the party of business, a party that catered to the huge numbers of tourists who visit the island and a party that was, some say, 'the party of the white man', referring to the small white minority in Barbados, descendants of the old British colonials. Barbados is overwhelming black, like all former British colonies in the West Indies.
What was interesting about the election of David Thompson to the top spot in Barbados is that his skin color has gotten him as much attention as Mr. Obama's has gotten him. David Thompson is, in the parlance of a Barbados, 'a Bajan with light skin'. For an island that is primarily of African ancestry it may be surprising that race plays a role in politics. But sources show that Owen Arthur referred to some of his enemies as "negrocrats." In one speech he supposedly said “He [Harold Hoyte of Nation News] picks upon certain people in Barbados politics, because that is the nature of the negrocrat; there are some people who feel they’re better off than people like ourselves and a man like me, in their mind, has no legitimate right to lead this country because I ain’t come from nowhere.” Oddly enough Mr. Arthur was accused by his enemies of being an "Oreo”-(black on the outside, white on the inside). In contrast the former Environment Minister of Barbados referred to David Thompson as "Caucasian." As one writer at the Barbados Free Press pointed out on May 25th, 2006 "The official website of the Barbados Labour Party (BLP) displays photos of Barbados citizens who are only of one specific race. Despite the fact that Barbados citizens hail from virtually every race and cultural heritage, only citizens of the majority race are shown on the BLP website. And - it apparently is not even enough to be of African heritage - one must have a darker skin tone to be shown on the BLP website. No lighter-skinned persons of african heritage or mixed race persons are shown on the website. And certainly no mixed-race couples like some of the folks who bring you the Barbados Free Press."
In the end, the racial controversies aside, the Barbados election of January 2008 did come down to change. The Thompson campaign fought the election on one word; 'change'. Arthur noted that the DLP was running on a platform of "change for the sake of change" and that it was made up of a "group of wild boys and old men in a great hurry" who would bring Barbados the "politics of desperation." Perhaps he meant the politics of an extreme agenda.
In the end change came to Barbados. The BLP went down to a disastrous defeat. On October 28th, 2008 the chairwoman of the BLP, Billie Miller noted that "We have handed over to those who govern now, an economy humming with progressive projects. Some of them have slowed down and it is not a year yet, and some of them have come to a full stop." Now the BLP faces the prospects that the Israeli opposition party Likud faced after its defeat by Kadima in April of 2006. It must refashion itself, streamline itself, reform itself and re-brand itself. The Republican party, it seems, will face a similar challenge, as a recent article in the Economist in October 2008 noted that even conservatives or 'Obamacons' were jumping the sinking Republican ship.
But the real question is whether the platform of 'change' is a meaningful one. Change is a nice word and surely appeals to voters, especially younger ones who believe all changes are good and associate the word with being 'progressive'. But change for the sake of change can be dangerous and problematic. The U.S now faces the same fate of Barbados and it is worthwhile staying tuned to events on that small island to see where change takes it.
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