Terra Incognita 64 The West, Afghanistan, Islam, Ethiopian Jews

Terra Incognita
Issue 64
“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”

A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel

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

December 9th, 2008

1) How one becomes disillusioned with the West: Western Civilization and the Europeanism it has produced becomes less and less palatable everyday. When one see the constant march of Islam, the constant love for the minaret, the growing distance between the EU and the people who reject it, the arrogance, the NGOs, the International Criminal Court and its abductions, and the thriving sex slave trade, one becomes less and less clear that there is much to save in Europe. Perhaps Vaclav Klaus can provide us a gem of hope.

2) The war in Afghanistan is not going well
A recent attack at a supply depot in Pakistan, destroying 160 American vehicles, reminds one of other attacks on supply depots that heralded negative things for Afghanistan. Nato may be in trouble.

3) Coming to a neighborhood near you: the war on women A recent column by Nocolas Kristoff noted that in Southeast Asia there is a problem of men throwing acid in the face of women. The names of the victims and perpetrators, Aisha, Hassan, Ahmed, seem to point to one group of people. It reminds us of the case in Jordan this month where a man got 6 months for murdering his sister, or that fact that the 9th female member of a family in Ramla has been murdered, or all the other evil ways in which Islam wages a war on women.

4) A great and unfortunate injustice: Ethiopian Jews and the European claim of Israeli 'apartheid' (With illustrative Photo): Israeli apartheid is a strange kind, it is one practiced by a diverse nation against a mostly homogenous one. But what is most ironic is to see White European protestors in East Jerusalem from the ‘World Council of Churches’ confronting a black Ethiopian Border Policeman on behalf of a pasty faced white Arab woman and accusing him of practicing Apartheid. If Apartheid could mean separating the world’s decent people from the likes of Islamists and human rights activists and members of leftist church groups who preach hate, then that’s an Apartheid we could be proud of.




How one becomes disillusioned with the West
Seth J. Frantzman
December 7th, 2008

William Pfaff may have been born in America but his culture, and his name, is European. He resides in Paris, home of all those intellectually and culturally exiled from the U.S. In an oped in the New York Times on December 4th, 2008 he writes that “Are we witnessing an indiscriminate war between civilizations? But we know that the modern conflict between Muslims and Europeans and Americans began with…Israel’s European-supported installation in Palestine.” Jonathan Cook, a British journalist based in Nazareth is the author of Israel and the Clash of Civilizations. He is a frequent contributor to the leftist Guardian and Observer as well as Le Monde and The Herald Tribune. In his book, written from a European mindset, he argues that “From the early 1980s, it was Israeli policy to subdue the Palestinians, fragment Arab rivals, and foster ethnic and religious discord to maintain unchallengeable regional dominance.” In it he also claims that the aim of Israel and its western allies, whose foreign policy it controls according to the Walt and Mearsheimer thesis, is “curbing and crushing (Arab and Iranian) nationalism that might inspire Middle Eastern states" to claim the right to their own resources and deny the West their benefits.” For Cook, And most leftist Europeans, “today, Hezbollah is a legitimate political and social organization that maintains a military wing for self-defense.” For the European, Cook, Israel turns “a ‘clash of civilizations’ into an added Sunni-Shia struggle and risks making an unstable situation worse? Many Middle Eastern states are ‘uncomfortable amalgams of Sunni and Shia populations’ because they were combined into unnatural states post-WW I.” But Cook shows that the grand plan of the Jews, or as he terms them ‘Israel’ is even greater; “encourage discord and feuding within nations, destabilize them, and arrange their dismemberment into mini-states. Tribes and sectarian elements could be turned on each other, and alliances with non-Arab, non-Muslim groups like Christians, Kurds and Druze could be cultivated to advantage.” In addition the Jews have their sites set on China and “containing China by controlling its main oil source; it may also be easier to dismember the country the way the Soviet Union was dissolved.” In addition “Serbian, Ukrainian and Georgian ‘pro-democracy’ groups [will] incite political instability in Moscow.” (quotes courtesy Stephen Lendman). The goal of Israel and her U.S controlled allies is “as in Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine, it's to create ethnic tensions throughout the country, promote conflict, and hope it will destabilize the government” This all courtesy of a leftist ‘progressive’ website called ‘countercurrents.org.’

But the European goes further. He supports Hizbullah, claiming “How is it ‘perfectly clear; to Bouckaert [a Human Rights Watch spokesman] that Hizbullah was ‘directly’ targeting Israeli civilians? It is most certainly not clear from the casualty figures…What I did try to alert readers to was the fact that many, if not most, of those military sites are located next to or inside Israeli communities, including Arab towns and villages.” Cook claims that Hizbullah targeted only military targets during its war with Israel and that since its ordinance is inaccurate it is not its fault that some civilians died.” This is the European view, published on the website of the ‘Electronic Intifada’ on September 7th, 2006 by a European born journalist, born in Buckinghamshire who received a B.A from Southampton and an M.A from the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. This is the face of the European today.

There was a time in life when people were told to learn something from the European and his enlightenment and his feminism and secularism and progressive ideology, his human rights and his gay rights. But what can the world learn from a people who so callously condemn innocent people to death? What can one say to a people, an entire continent of them, who blame a small country, Israel, for their problems and for the world’s problems, when just 60 years ago they were busy putting the ancestors of people from that country in gas chambers? How can one countenance the European and his arrogance and his belief that he alone can be host to the U.N and the International Criminal Court? How was he able to, after claiming to have de-colonized, to re-colonize the world through his ‘human rights’ and his ‘democracy’. Remember democracy? What democracy? We have seen the outcome of European democracy throughout the world, it is no different than the outcome of European democracy in the 1920s: hate and fascism, genocide and ethnic-cleansing.

There is a general disillusionment with democracy among the peoples of the world. From Thailand to Russia we see that the average people are not enthralled with democracy and its guarantee of self-hatred and the mass prostitution and enslavement, and sale, of women that follows in its footsteps. We see a general revival of religion throughout the world from Turkey to Israel, the U.S and India. What is more we see that secularism does not guarantee the human rights it claims to. In Europe, in its most liberal cities such as Amsterdam, we see that the trade in sex-slavery is thriving. This is the most brutal form of human rights abuse and has no parallel in the world, the chaining of women to beds, forcing them to have sex with dozens of men a day, selling them, branding them with tattoos (as in a recent case of prostitutes liberated from a Turkish owned brothel in Holland). This trade goes on under liberalism and is, in fact, the product of a liberal progressive society in which ‘anything goes’. It is the same European society that produces the shows on Fashion TV that we are forced to watch where women from the most ‘progressive’ European countries are transformed into human clothes hangers in a culture where ‘freedom’ guarantees that women wish to be objects, moving back and forth on a ‘runway’ for the edification of men. Such is a ‘progressive’ society: slavery and the dehumanization of women.

There is a general disgustingness about Europe, the feeling that the entire continent is pretty on the outside but disgusting and dirty underneath. Scratch the surface and one finds slavery, pornography (few convenience stores in England don’t stock less than fifty porn magazines), restive and savage immigrant populations breeding hatred, Islamism, shariah law, racism, and evil. Secularism is largely a failure. The washing away of heritage and religion is only temporary, it is quickly filled with new fake heritages and religions, new hateful ideologies. Diversity and multi-culturalism is a scam, it serves to encourage radicalism and at the same time to strip decent minority groups of their heritage, creating more blank slates of people with no heritage. Survey Sikh women in Europe and see how many know their religion or heritage? Few. See how many are willing to convert to Islam and one will find that the majority will say yes. The others are already dating atheist European white men. It is no surprise most Hindu and Sikh men wish to return to India to find a wife, who would want women born in a European society and raised to worship Fashion TV, in a society where one cannot walk down a street without seeing the discarded business-card advertisements for brothels with ‘Polish supermodels’. Such is ‘European civilization’. Who would want it? Football hooligans are condemned but their behavior is only the outcome of a society that offers no pillars in terms of faith or heritage, young men need something to believe in and for them their ‘religion’ becomes some football team and their ‘heritage’ becomes its record of winning and losing.

There is a growing disconnect between Europeanism, what it sees as an inevitable march of history towards a society increasingly ruled by secular ‘believe in nothing’ white haired men and the thriving trade in women, guns, humans and drugs of the society beneath them. The EU marches on and every time its treaties are rejected by referendum the EU simply tries to negate the people’s will. The EU will be imposed on an unwilling Europe the way the UN and the ICC was imposed on a world that never wanted it. The EU will colonize Europe and its remaining traditions and cultures and indigenous peoples the way the UN has colonized portions of the world. We can see the EU’s increasing arrogance even today with the revulsion it has for Vaclav Klaus, a former dissident, now president of Czechoslovakia and avid campaigner against the rising dictatorship of the EU and lonely dissident against the Climate Change Mafia.

But let us allow Klaus and the ancestor of his ideas, Fredrick Von Hayek, speak for themselves. In a speech in August of 2005 entitled ‘the Intellectuals and Socialism as seen from a post-communist country situated in predominantly post-democratic Europe.’
Hayek described ‘intellectuals’ as “the professional second-hand dealers in ideas…[not] possessing special knowledge of anything in particular…[with no] direct responsibility for practical affairs…[need not] even be particularly intelligent…the power of ideas [of intellectuals] grows in proportion to their generality, abstractness, and even vagueness” The Klaus corollary is “They prefer ideas, which give them jobs and income and which enhance their power and prestige…They look for ideas, which enhance the role of the state because the state is usually their main employer, sponsor or donator…They are not good at details. They do not have ambitions to solve a problem.” Klaus notes that the modern EU model “as we see both in Europe and in America, the intellectuals love such a system. It gives them money and an easy life…I have in mind environmentalism (with its Earth First, not Freedom First principle), radical humanrightism…I also have in mind multiculturalism, feminism, apolitical technocratism (based on the resentment against politics and politicians), internationalism (and especially its European variant called Europeanism) and a rapidly growing phenomenon I call NGOism.” (http://www.klaus.cz/klaus2/asp/clanek.asp?id=wFYl3mgsTzI6)

Klaus is prescient. He is not alone. Throughout Europe there are still people who yearn to be free of the chains of liberalism. There are those who want to take up the burden in the clash of civilizations rather than denying, as Pfaff does, its existence, or blaming it, as Cook, does on Israel. There are people in Europe who believe in local heritage and religion. They are few.


The war in Afghanistan is not going well
Seth J. Frantzman
December 9th, 2008

On August 11th, 1988 a soviet munitions dump was blown up in Afghanistan, killing 500 people. The destruction of the dump was the result of rocket fire from Afghan rebels, the same rebels who are the ancestors of today’s Taliban. In February of 1989 the Soviet Union withdrew its troops from Afghanistan. In April of 1992 the Communist government of the country was overthrown by a coalition of rebels that included Islamists and the Northern Alliance of Ahmad Shah Masod (mostly Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazars) In 1999 three arms dumps in Kabul exploded mysteriously, the last in June of that year. By the end of 2000 the Taliban controlled 95% of Afghanistan.

On December 7th, 2008 some 160 Nato vehicles were torched in northwestern Pakistan after their car park was raided by the Taliban. The Pakistani security guards and police tasked with guarding the site didn’t put up much of a fight apparently. Two separate sites were attacked, the Portward terminal and Al-Faisal depot, and numerous humvees were among the vehicles destroyed. The successful attack, the inability of Nato to secure its supply lines and the unwillingness of the Pakistanis to stand and fight shows the degree to which the Nato fight in Afghanistan is going the way of previous failures by the Soviets and the Northern Alliance.


Coming to a neighborhood near you: the war on women
Seth J. Frantzman
December 1st, 2008

From Afghanistan to Cambodia they throw acid in their faces when they are not modest enough. In Saudi Arabia they gang rape women and then courts order those women whipped for committing ‘adultery’. In Jordan when a woman is murdered and the man says he did it to defend his family’s honour then he gets only 6 months in prison. In Somalia when teenage girls are raped she is buried up to her neck in a football stadium and stoned to death by a crowd of ‘brave’ men because she has committed ‘adultery’.

And in England when a husband beats his wife they go to a Shariah court and the judges urge her to give him a second chance.

Its coming to a community near you. Friendly, neighborhood Islam and its treatment of women. You can’t wait to feel its tolerance and coexistence that it brings. You can’t wait for your daughter to date one so she can be beaten, raped, stoned, whipped and have acid thrown in her face. Tolerance. Coexistence. Diversity. Multi-culturalism. Post-modernism. Globalization. Immigration. Secularism. Modernity. Europeanism. The UN. Liberal-leftism. Intellectuals. Its all coming and its bringing friendly neighborhood Islam and its treatment of women.

Can it be called a religion? Why is it that in every Muslim country the role of the man is to beat his wife, to throw acid in women’s faces, bury teenagers up to their necks and stone them, shoot women in the back of the head in front of crowds at football stadiums and hang them. What kind of a world is it where it is called a ‘religion’ when the male sex, the one endowed with strength, uses that strength to beat little girls, beat their wives and disfigure the faces of women by acid, and murder their own sisters to protect their ‘honour’. What honour is this? What kind of men are these? What kind of culture and religion is this?

And yet we must live with it. This thing that exists in this world next to us, this plague that exists in this world, this thing that turns the world black, that clothes women in black to symbolize the blackness of the world that it creates. How do we coexist with it which beats those that are weak, which disfigures them, which strangles young sisters, which whips women, which stones young girls and rapes them. Lest we forget the case in Pakistan where a man raped a women and the ‘justice’ was for his sister to be raped. This is this thing. Do we live with it? Or do we struggle against it with every ounce that is left in our body? Do we accept it? Do we do what the English have done and invite its laws into our court rooms and allow its judges to settle domestic violence cases? Furthermore why do our women collaborate with it? Why is it always our women who love Islam the most and romanticize it and love to look at pictures of its slave markets and its harems and talk about its culture and its ‘equality’? Why? Why do we live in such a world?




A great and unfortunate injustice: Ethiopian Jews and the European claim of Israeli 'apartheid'
November 20th, 2008
Seth J. Frantzman



As sad, inconsistent, anti-Semitic and degrading as the claim of Israel being a 'Nazi' state is, it is perhaps more tragic that recently it has been joined with the chorus of European and western voices describing Israel as an apartheid state. It has become more fashionable in the West to describe Israel as an Apartheid state as people have begun to realize that a direct comparison of Israel and Nazi Germany, as UN Human Rights Council special investigator Richard Falk once did, is going out of fashion. When Shimon Peres paid a state visit to England in November of 2008 he came in for a barrage of assaults by protestors. An 'action alert' at the Global BDS (Boycott, Sanctions, Divestment) movement called for protesting Peres because; "Beginning with his role in arranging for the weapons that were used to forcibly expel over 750,000 indigenous Palestinian refugees in the 1948 war, Peres has committed the past sixty years to the policies of apartheid and aggression that characterize Israel."

The way in which the 'Apartheid' allegation works is three fold. First it hinges on the claim that Jews are a minority within 'Palestine', which includes non-occupied Gaza, and thus are not giving over to majority rule. This is based on the idea that since Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza cannot vote in Israeli elections, even though in Gaza's case they are not administered by Israel, they are thus disenfranchised, and the situation is undemocratic. Secondly it hinges on the idea that a two-state solution and the separation fence is ipso-facto a form of 'separation' and thus 'apartheid', which means 'separateness', because two peoples are being separated. Thirdly it hinges on the idea that idea that Jews are 'white' while Palestinians are 'black.

While people may focus on the technicalities of the first two claims it is the third claim that actually results in the emotional connection westerners are able to draw with apartheid. Apartheid could only be seen as apartheid because it was so blatantly obvious in South Africa that the separation of peoples was predicated on skin color. In order to make the Jews 'white' and a 'European colony' those who speak of apartheid try to reinforce their claims by describing Palestinians as 'indigenous' and Israeli Jews as 'European immigrants.'

This leaves a great and tragic irony. There are more than a hundred thousand Ethiopian Jews today in Israel. They exist in all walks of life and throughout the towns and villages of the country. One poignant picture this author recalls taking is of an Ethiopian Jew working in the Border Police in Arab East Jerusalem. He is confronting an Arab woman and there are two members of the World Council of Churches, supporters of Palestinians, standing nearby speaking about Israeli 'apartheid'. But it is the black man asking the white Arab woman for her documentation to pass that puts to shame this allegation. If Israel is an apartheid state it surely is an odd form of Apartheid where black and white Jews, Sephardim and Russians, Indian and Mexican Jews, Arab Druze and Arab Bedouin of all colors and faiths work together and serve together and have equal rights. It is a tragic irony that Europeans and Western anti-Israel protestors call this 'apartheid.' They who did not help the Ethiopian Jews when those Jews were starving and dying in the 1980s. And yet they claim that Israel is an 'apartheid' state. Nothing could be more ironic and nothing can be more hurtful towards Ethiopian Jews who have suddenly, after 2,500 years of being in exile in Africa and suffering discrimination are being told they are 'white' just so that Palestinians can be labeled 'black'.