Terra Incognita
Issue 100
“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
November 9, 2009
1) Déjà vu all over Again: Post-Humanism and the Fort Hood shooting: The Fort Hood massacre has all the hallmarks of a typical Islamist terrorist incident and tells us much about the post-human liberal world we live in. It includes the typical devices of liberals: Anti-racism as an excuse not to police people, support for terrorism by not wanting to offend others, different standards for different people based solely on ideas of victimhood, turning the perpetrator into the victim, disregard for the actual victims. All were present when Major Hasan walked onto Fort Hood army base and gunned down 13 men and women from different religious and ethnic backgrounds. Major Hasan murdered diversity and engaged in terrorism because those at the temple of post-humanism would not secure citizens in their own country in the name of not offending others.
Déjà vu all over again: The Fort Hood shooting
Seth J. Frantzman
The dead in the Fort Hood Massacre are: Michael Grant Cahill (62), Major L Eduardo Caraveo (52), Staff Sgt Justin M DeCrow (32), Capt John P Gaffaney (56), Spc. Frederick Greene (29), Spc. Jason Dean Hunt (22), Sgt Amy Krueger (29), Pfc. Aaron Thomas Nemelka (19), Pfc. Michael Pearson (22), Capt Russell Seager, (41), Pvt Francheska Velez (21), Lt Col Juanita Warman (55), and Spc. Kham Xiong (23).
The two policemen who ended the massacre were: Police Sergeant Kimberly Munley Sergeant Mark Todd.
Another mass murder. Another time when we must learn all the details about the “cause” and “reasons” behind the man who murdered people. Another time when the religious community and ideology that spawned the murder is said to be the “victim”, rather than the actual victims. Another time when we learn nothing about the victims, who become another nameless number. Another terrorist act which isn’t called “terrorism”. Another long list of excuses about the “motives” so that by the time you finish hearing them you believe that the killer was actually the real victim because he faced “harassment” or “stress” or “trauma” or “discrimination”.
The November 10th issue of the New York Times explained that despite the fact that the murdered shouted “God is Great (Allahu Akhbar)” as he shot unarmed people down, that he was not motivated by religion. He was a solitary individual. And if we read the rest of the details that the media is telling us we learn more about the supposed victimhood of the murderer. He was supposedly called a “camel jockey” by fellow soldiers. Supposedly he suffered from stress, despite the fact that it was his job as an army psychiatrist to help others with that problem.
We learn other things as well. When the murders became public knowledge on Thursday, November 5th the news media, including Fox News refused to name the killer. The Fox news commentators even admitted “we have a name, but we don’t want to share it, we don’t want people to jump to conclusions, we want to be sure this is the right name, because this name means a lot…” What they meant was that Major Nidal Malik Hasan, the murderer and terrorist, was the name and that his name might lead one to conclude that he was a Muslim. But in order to ensure us that he wasn’t a “real” Muslim, Fox News originally informed the public that in fact he was a convert. It was only after a phone call from his cousin that the media admitted that, Mr. Hasan was in fact a real Muslim, born of a Muslim father.
Outside the major media outlets one can learn a few more details about the life of Mr. Hasan. He attended the Dar al Hijrah mosque in Falls Church, Virginia. The same mosque was attended by at least two 9/11 hijackers (Hizmi and Hanjour and perhaps Midhar). The radical preacher of the mosque, Anwar al –Awlaki (Aulaqi) also knew one of the 9/11 hijackers.
It gets better. During the 2007-2008 year Mr. Hasan had shared his anti-American views with students at a military college (whose name has as yet not been released by the FBI). He supported suicide bombing and said Shariah law should supplant the Constitution. The FBI, of course, did nothing because it did not want to be accused of profiling Muslims in the American military. The FBI was aware that a man called Nidal Hasan had compared the “heroics” of suicide bombing to the heroism of a soldier who throws himself on a grenade. He said “If one suicide bomber can kill 100 enemy soldiers because they were caught off guard that would be considered a strategic victory.” The FBI did not question the Major or keep any tabs on him. For these reasons the Major purchased handguns unimpeded in Texas, said his goodbyes to his friends, gave away all of his furniture to a neighbor and got onto the Fort Hood base, where he worked, with his weapons, which were not supposed to be in his possession on the base.
The Army, prior to the Major’s murdering of its members, had been good to him. He had enlisted as a teenager and it had paid his way through college at Virginia Tech and for training as a psychiatrist at Bethesda’s Uniformed Services University. He was then given the soft job of being a psychiatrist at Walter Reed medical center. He rose quickly through the ranks and as a Major, after receiving several less than great reviews, was sent to Fort Hood Darnell Army Medical Center.
Major Hasan’s family were Palestinians from the Jerusalem area. One of his brothers apparently still lives there. He supposedly became “more devout” after the death of his parents, who had both prospered in the U.S, owning a restaurant and other businesses.
We learn from reports that Hasan was not a very good psychiatrist, that he himself needed counseling. It is not clear but his hatred of the mission the soldiers were carrying out in Iraq and his support of their murder by suicide bombers may not have helped his job in counseling them for PTSD (Post-traumatic stress disorder). Whatever the case, when he was informed that he would be sent to Iraq he hired a lawyer to get out of his service. However the military, which had paid for his two degrees, would not let him leave. Finally they said he would only be deployed to Afghanistan, not Iraq, in deferential treatment to his sensibilities as a Muslim Arab.
Let us review the things Mr. Hasan received in life. His parents were immigrants who came to the U.S and became middle class. The son received two degrees for free. He was given a good job in the army and allowed to remain near home. He progressed through the ranks faster than other individuals even though he received low grades on reviews by superiors. Affirmitive action by those in the Military who wanted to show that the U.S army is good to Muslims helped him succeed. When he was set to be deployed he, unlike the million other soldiers in the army who have seen action in Iraq, received special treatment as a Muslim and was told he would go to a different location. He was allowed, through free speech, to encourage the murder of the same troops he was supposed to counsel. The FBI did not investigate his pro-terror views or his connections to 9/11 hijackers because he was a Muslim and the FBI didn’t want to be perceived as racist. Even the police officers who ended the rampage suffered from a bit of liberalism. After Hasan was wounded soldiers shouted “give him two more” to finish him off but the police officer didn’t. He handcuffed the wounded terrorist. It is a shame, while liberalism says people should’nt “confirm the kill”, this is the best method, by leaving the terrorist alive one must then spend more public money (as if enough hasn’t been wasted on Mr. Hasan) to put him on trial and keep him in prison.
Mr. Hasan prosletyzed t the patients he “counseled.” He wore a white robe type and headcovering as is typical among religious Muslims (although usually only for peasants in Egypt, Saudis and Imams, Mr. Hasan evidently wore it to express himself and because he knew it would shield him from criticism because people would fear profiling a Muslim). While at Fort Hood for the few months he was stationed there he attended a strip club regularly and purchased lap dances, as did most religious-terrorist Muslims such as the 9/11 hijackers (Muslims who critique the west complain about its decadence but it is the most extreme of them who enjoy that decadence the most, the ‘hook’ Imam in London Abu Hamza was a bouncer for a strip club, all the 9/11 hijackers attended them and Saudi royalty usually hire retinues of them when they travel, it is part of the larger Islamist hypocrisy where men do as they please but expect Muslim women to be “moral” all the while the Islamist-Muslim male engages western women in acts of immorality, immorality the Western women supports because she herself is usually blind to hypocrisy and is told by society not to be “racist” against the “other”).
After murdering 13 people and wounding 29, all of whome were unarmed and some of whome were civilians he was hospitalized at an army hospital where he now received free medical care from the same army he tried to murder. As for November 9th few people in the U.S or the world know the names of the victims. However the secretary of the army, a general, has said that the real message of the massacre is that Muslims might face a backlash. Secretary of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano, has warned that she was “part of efforts to reassure the Arab world that US authorities were taking measures to quell anti-Islam sentiments after last week's rampage by an American-born Muslim serving as US Army psychiatrist. “ when speaking of the tragedy she noted “this was a terrible tragedy for all involved…obviously we object to [the fact] that any anti-Muslim sentiment should emenate from this” she said in Dubai while on a trip. So the tragedy is actually the anti-Muslim sentiment, not the murder by a Muslim fanatic of 13 people. She then noted that “her agency is working with state and local groups to try to deflect any anti-Muslim anger.”
General George Casey, the U.S Army Chief of Staff, has instructed soldiers to be on the lookout for anti-Muslim reaction. He said it was “important not to get caught up in speculation” about Major Hasan’s Muslim faith.” He claimed that ‘focusing on the Islamic roots of the gunmen “could heighten backlash” and that “diversity” gives the military strength.
So let’s understand this. The FBI didn’t investigate Hasan because it feared it would be called “racism.” But this allowed Hasan to engage in his own racist murder of non-Muslims, his own murdering of diversity since he gunned down Asians, Hispanics and whites simply because they were’nt Muslim. Thus in pursuit of protecting “diversity” the post-humanists ensure the murdering of that same diversity at the hands of the extremist.
The Army, whose security at Fort Hood was lazy and which could have prevented this massacre by investigating the complaints of soldiers who had received “treatment” by Hasan, has said that the real threat is anti-American backlash. Homeland Security, whose job it is to protect Americans from people like Major Hasan has said that the real victims are Muslims, not the 13 people who were massacred. Had Homeland Security, the FBI and the Army not been obsessed with “diversity” and fearful of being called racist and done their jobs in terms of security than the massacre would have been prevented. Mr. Hasan would be in prison and discharged from the army and 13 people would be alive. Instead what has happened is that liberal let the rot set in and everyone said “I don’t have this hot potato” and passed the buck, even transferring Mr. Hasan rather than punishing him and than giving him more second chances by letting him choose where to be deployed to because of his religion. The agencies and government discriminated in favor of Mr. Hasan, but his pistols did not discriminate when they gunned our soldiers down. The government now claims the “real” victims are American Muslims and the supposed backlash they might receive. This is liberal at its height. It doesn’t do anything to protect the lives of the citizen and then when the citizen is dead it feels sorry for the person who murdered him. Good police work and a color-blind system would have caught Mr. Hasan, instead the same liberalism that created Hasan and let him run wild is the same one that now whines about a backlash, a backlash that doesn’t exist, solely to transfer blame to others.
It may be a supreme irony that the same Homeland Security that refuses to even examine American Muslims for terror potential, a year ago warned that the real terrorism might come from right wing Christian “militias” and discharged soldiers. Homeland Security wasn’t afraid to tar all American Christians veterans as potential terrorists. Had Mr. Hasan been a right wing Christian, rather than a right wing Muslim, would General Casey and Janet Napolitano warn about an anti-Christian backlash? Or would good police work have uncovered a psychiatrist who praised the murder of soldiers on the internet and to fellow soldiers and who gave away all his furniture and purchased two pistols and drove with them onto the base? 13 people are dead because of liberalism, because of the coddling of Muslims, because of General Casey and Janet Napolitano. That is why they are dead. They are dead because of the FBI. The backlash should’nt just be against the extremists at the Falls Church Mosque, but against the government in general which dispatched our people to war and then doesn’t defend them at home, which disarms our soldiers on their bases but lets the terrorist come on the base with his guns, which send our quiet men and women to war but when they whine and complain and have lawyers they get their pick at where and when they are deployed. There should be a backlash, and it should be broad and deep.
Monday, November 9, 2009
Thursday, October 22, 2009
Terra Incognia 99 Chosen Trauma, Why they hate us and Israeli universities
Terra Incognita
Issue 99
“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
October 22, 2009
1) There is no such thing as ‘chosen trauma’: The idea of a “chosen trauma” is a recent development. It is to psychiatry what the “other” is to philosophy and is part and parcel of the post-humanist undermining of history and truth. People do not “choose” to have trauma, they actually have trauma when people commit genocide against them or deport them from their land. Caring about the trauma of the group is not “racist” because it “excludes” others. It is a natural human emotion.
2) Why they hate us?: The West is hated by two groups: Islam and Western women. Not all Muslims hate the West and neither do all Western women. However one can find, in the western female coddling of Islam and the belief that Islam is “exotic” or the feeling sorry for Muslim minorities and the conversion of western women to Islam that western women, freed by the west, desire nothing more than the slavery of Islam. The West fails in its granting of freedom to people and educating them because it educates contempt and its freedom fails when those who benefit the most have the most contempt for it.
2) A Story about Justice and the University in Israel: The University in Israel speaks often of justice. But is it justice when that university protects its academics but those academics, who receive pay from the state, encourage terrorists to murder the students and destroy the state?
There is no such thing as a “chosen trauma”
Seth J. Frantzman
October 22, 2009
In order to punish victims and attempt to destroy identity, post-humanism has created something called “chosen trauma”. Describing what ‘Chosen trauma’ is Vamik Volkan in the publication Group Analysis (2001 University of Virginia) describes it thus “subjective experience of thousands or millions of people who are linked by a persistent sense of sameness.” It is the “mental representation of a massive trauma that the group’s ancestors suffered.” But we also learn that this is inherently negative; “when a group regresses, its chosen trauma is reactivated in order to support the group’s threatened identity. This reactivation may have dramatic and destructive consequences.” Thus any sort of rememberance of suffering is negative in the eyes of post-humanism because it inevitably leads to group identification and causes the group to potentially mistreat others. At the very least it means that the group may identify with itself and thus be “racist”.
Another description of the idea of “chosen trauma” can be found in an article by Ayse Karabat in The Daily Zaman in Istanbul. He describes it as “the mental representation of an event that causes a group to feel victimized. The group mythologizes an event and draws it into its identity, passing the mental representation, along with associated feelings and defenses, from generation to generation.” In writing about the “chosen trauma” he was speaking about Armenians in Turkey and their preservation of their community and attempts by youth to free themselves from the cautious behavior of the “elders” who view themselves, according to the article, too often as victims.
H.D.S. Greenway of the New York Times uses the term to describe the Turkish and Greek Cypriots. He creates yet another definition; “to described the way nations, as well as individuals, can seize upon a wrong done to them to the exclusion of any wrongs committed by themselves.”
The invention of the term “chosen trauma” is deeply connected to the Turks and Cyprus.
Greenway didn’t bother to do the background research and missed the fact that Vamik Volkan, who invented the term, is a Turkis-Cypriot. Born in 1932 he moved the United States at some point. He has done much of his work on the psychology of conflict. Had he been involved in Philosophy he would have preached to us about the idea of the “other” but he has transferred this idea to his own work. In 1988 he spoke of the “need to have enemies and allies”. He has written on “killing in the name of identity” and “from ethnic pride to ethnic terrorism”. He has also written on homosexuality, cross breeding plan species, as well the “animal” and “primitive” instincts and psychological problems that exist within us. For Mr. Volkan it is obvious the experience of being a Turkish Cypriot (a Muslim group that complains of its own victimhood and at the same time has used that as an excuse to cleanse its portion of the island of minorities) lodged deeply in his mind and he has connected all human instincts that involve group identity, pride and dislike of others with being “primitive” and “animal.” It reminds this author of a college textbook on anthropology that spoke of how “primitive people once identified themselves first with their group and were suspicious of outsiders.”
But what about the revenge of the primitive? Post-humanism has tried to convince us that trauma can be “chosen” and that trauma is a “myth” and that its consequence is violence against the “other.” The group “excludes” the things it does in order to remember what was done to it. This discussion therefore concludes that any rememberance of a trauma is not only wrong but that it is primarily mythological and therefore not based on truth. This is part and parcel of modernity’s assault on history.
There are real traumas. When a community is partially destroyed, its women raped and its land stolen it is indeed a trauma. Modernity would tell us that there is no truth behind such events as the Armenians genocide, the Rwandan genocide, the Trail of Tears, the Great Trek, the Holocaust or any other event. It is merely a “chosen trauma”. When the Jews describe the Holocaust as something that “happened to Jews” they are “excluding” the Gypsies and gays and Russians murdered by the Nazis. Thus in remembering their ‘chosen trauma’ they are racist. And, to take the argument one step further, the Jews then use the Holocaust as an excuse to abuse Palestinians, in the words of Avraham Burg they “manipulate the Holocaust.”
This is why people speak of a chosen trauma. The brainwashing of individuals to have no attachment to the group is quite successful. At the Israeli university, which is one of the more liberal and self-hating in the world, the three or four Ethiopian Jewish students who are enrolled there are raised to believe that it is racist for them to take any special interest in their Ethiopian community. Instead they are convinced that the Arabs are the group, the “other”, that they should work to help. Thus poor Ethiopians who live in tenements find themselves graduating with bachelors degrees in sociology and going out to give their free time and energy protesting “Ethiopian jewish racism against Arabs” and defending Muslim cemetaries in Israel. Such is the degree of communal destruction that the leftist post-human university can take people who are penniless and who suffered a terrible trauma coming to Israel (in which tens of thousands died of starvations and thousands were raped) and turn them into people who believe that loving their own community is “racist” and one must work tirelessly for the “other.”
By describing history as “myth” the post-human ideology of “chosen trauma” deconstructs that history. Thus the murder of millions in the Holocaust becomes part of a “Jewish myth of suffering.” Who speaks that way? No liberal would dare say that. But they say it about the Armenians. The Armenians have a “chosen trauma” and they should get over it.
The use of the word “chosen” in “chosen trauma” also degrades the existence of the trauma. The idea is that the individual should choose not to have a trauma. He should mature and become modern and throw off the shackles of the past, a past which involved memory and identity and exclusion. Modern man is just man, by himself, with no group. There is but one race: human.
The question that should be posed about “chosen trauma” is two-fold. Why do certain groups get to have their chosen trauma. African-Americans can never seem to forget the trauma of slavery and they are aided and abeted in this by the same liberal who tells the Armenians or others to forget their trauma. Black blame all their problems on slavery. Whether it is the fact that 80% of black American children are born out of wedlock (what people now glorify as “my baby daddy”) or the fact that black women “relax” their hair, it is all due to slavery, even though it isn’t. But no one tells the blacks to abandon their “chosen trauma” or that in having pride in being black that they are ‘excluding’ others. The same should be said of the Muslims, especially Palestinians. No one asks them to get rid of their chosen trauma of the “nakba” or for Muslims to forget the “crusades”. Instead the west blames all of the problems in the Middle East on colonialism and “western oppression” and the “humiliation of the Crusades and the Israeli Occupation.” So where is the complaints about the Palestinians “excluding” others or the consequences that their obsession with their trauma has on the peace process?
The other question that should be posed is whether or not the murder of leftists can be also described as a “chosen trauma”. We often hear leftists whining when a few of them get suppressed. Whether it is the attempted bombing of Prof. Sternhell or the tyranny of Pinochet, one must always hear about the assault on a few leftists and “dissidents” here and there. But is that not also a “chosen trauma”? Is it not also part of a “myth”?
The last problem with the concept of the “chosen trauma” is that it implies there is no truth. Greenway tells us that in Cyprus the Turks and Greeks each have a “narrative” which excludes the suffering of the other. The Turks don’t mention the expulsion of the Greeks and the importation of settlers. The Greeks don’t mention the assaults on Turks the preceeded the Turkish invasion. Greenway and the promulgators of “chosen trauma” tell us that because the two communities disagree that therefore there is no truth, there is just a “chosen trauma.” But this is an assault on fact and history.
If a hundred people are killed and one group says it was “revenge” and the other group says it was “spontaneous rioting” and another group says it was “freedom fighting” it doesn’t mean that the 100 people did not die. It may be true that the Germans in Poland that were expelled in 1945 were expelled because they were “settlers” or to ‘ensure peace’ or because “it was war” but none of it means that there were millions of Germans living in Poland and the Czech Republic before 1945. People mistake the fact that different people interpret right and wrong differently in order to pretend there are no facts. Did the killers of Gandhi do it out of patriotism or evil, was the deed wrong or did it save a nation from the appeasement of Gandhi. Surely some say that the killing of Gandhi was a great and honorable deed. Most disagree and view it as abhorrent. But that doesn’t mean Gandhi wasn’t killed. In fact we even know why he was killed. Whether that killing was right or wrong cannot be determined, perhaps, but the motives of the killer can, in fact, be explored. When terrorists strike liberals like to say that the terrorist has his own motives and that because he uses the “weapon of the poor” or because he perceived himself as “humiliated” that his actions are justified. Those who disagree that people should blow themselves up and kill children do not define terrorism as “resistance”. They condemn it as wrong. The fact that people disagree on interpreting an event doesn’t mean it is part of a “myth”. It is not a “chosen trauma” that the victims of terror want to commemorate being victims. They are actually victims. Liberalism murders the victim by saying he can “choose” to not have trauma. In fact some liberals do choose to not have humanity. Some victims of terror have sympathy for the terrorists. But that is not an example of the flexibility of victimhood, it is merely another example of the inhumanity of modernity. Modernity murders the soul of man. One more example of the murder of that soul is the idea of “chosen trauma”. The real trauma we face is suffering through modernity until it can finally be destroyed so that we can all return to our “primitive” and “animal” past when we “mistakenly identified with the group and were suspicious of outsiders.”
Why they hate us?
Seth J. Frantzman
There are two groups of people who hate Western Civilization, one is Islam and the other is Western Woman.
Consider the recent events in Israel. The riots in Nazareth in 2001 and at Yom Kippur in Acre in 2008 were both partially caused by pent up anger at Arabs harassing Jewish women. An attempted lynching of two Arabs in Pisgat Zeev in 2008 was for the same reason. The murderer of Dana Bennet and the murderers of Leonard Karp were both aided by Jewish women, in one case a Jewish soldier woman. There are now groups in Pisgat Zeev and Petah Tikva aimed at discouraging Jewish women from dating Arab men. The Ethiopian community is hosting a seminar on the issue. In Kiryat Gat a Jewish 15 year old dated Beoduin men, went to night clubs with them and was then taken by them, handcuffed to a pole and burned to death with gasoline. In the Galilee an Arab gang operated for three years raping Jewish women.
When all these incidents take place one must ask why. The usual explanation by women in Israel is that the Arab men give vulnerable young Jewish women presents and flatter them and that the women come from troubled homes with either absent fathers or abusive strict fathers. This always seems to be the “answer” and no one seems to ask more questions.
However the truth is much more complicated. Arab women also come from broken homes with abusive fathers and strict traditional cultures. Yet they don’t rebel by going out with Jewish men. The excuse of the westerner to this observation is to say “well that’s because their society would kill them.” But this excuse isn’t good enough. I’ve known Arab women, mostly from secular backgrounds, not so different backgrounds than the Sephardie and Ethiopian girls in ‘vulnerable” neighbourhoods who are enticed so often by Arab men. These women don’t mind hanging out with Jewish men and from time to time they are taken with the “exotic” idea of what it would be like to go out with them. But they generally hold themselves back from such behavior. Not because of the men in their society but because they believe they would be betraying their culture. No matter how liberal and open minded they are repelled by the idea. Now why is that? Why is it that the Arab Muslim culture, which beats women, which maligns them, which allows men to go out with all sorts of women, which gives men four wives, which puts women in headscarves and expects them to stay at home and beat children, why does that society, even at its most liberal, produce women who like it, honour it and are patriots for it. Even the women who hate the Hamas brand of the Muslim religion, even the women who find Arab men obnoxious in their behavior, even those women honour their culture and faith. Why? In short, why does the western culture fail when it comes to women?
What does the west not provide the women that she would make her stay part of her own culture and not love the “other” and find the “other” exotic? Is it because the western man is metro-sexy and gay and in touch with his feminine side? Is it because the Western man no longer provides? Or is it the western education system and feminism in general that produce women who hate themselves and their culture? Is it freedom, does freedom ensure that humans, women in this case, will beg for a return to slavery, their natural state? Is the western education system, the idea of freedom, and secularism, a failure?
We in the West condemn those religious groups among us that seem to produce women who actually like being part of the group. Consider the religious Jews. Their women don’t find others “exotic”. They don’t want to learn the language, religion and culture of the “other”. Yet we are told by secular society that they are prisoners, suppressed and beaten. But the secular man who would liberate them would liberate them only to find that they don’t desire him but desire another repressive religious culture, such as that found among the Muslims. Isn’t this a puzzle? The West liberates the woman, only to find that the woman hates the West and prefers other religions and cultures that reminds her of the way it used to be in the “bad old days” of the 1950s or the Victorian period. The same women that will condemn the “conservative, chauvinist” style of the 1950s is the same women that yearns to learn Arabic, to know the difference between the Eids and the various ins and outs of Islamic law. She is the same woman who takes the belly-dancing lessons and travels abroad alone to meet and marry foreign men, never returning home. In fact she yearns precisely for the 1950s culture, because is there any culture that is more like the 1950s in terms of its view of women than Arab culture, is there any culture that is more like Victorian England and its mores and dress codes than that of the Muslims?
This is the brutal truth about the Western world and its system and its promise and its future that few want to admit. The West can be summed up with one word: failure. It is a failure. It may appear a success from certain points of view such as economics or democracy. That is all well and good. We have rights to a free trial and such things like that. But the future of society depends on women and children. The long term future depends on these essential ingredients. In nations such as China and India they murder women in the womb (such is the benefit of that western science called abortion). The brilliant Chinese allow Muslims to have as many children as they want but restrict Han Chinese to one child. Most families abort female babies and have males as their one child. There is now a gender gap in China, with millions of missing women. Muslim countries by contrast happily give birth to women and marry them in the fours to men so as to increase their population. But in Russia and Japan and other highly secular country the birth rate is less than one child for every two people. They simply don’t want children, lest the little brats ruin their pursuit of the secular life. Failure. Failure. Failure. Failure. Yes, those societies are all failures.
Europe is a failure. Its women, and I see them from time to time, are butch, mannish, small breasted, unhappy, self-hating, short-haired, and if they are not, if they are pretty and friendly, then they are only interested in African or Muslim men. Such is the European male and his uselessness as a man that he spends his days pursuing things other than women, dressing like a homosexual and generally expressing no interest in personal responsibility, work or women. The European male is gay and the European women acts like a man. Both are objectionable.
The West failed its women completely and utterly. It’s not a matter of women “getting taken advantage of” or “poor women who are vulnerable”. We have been fed this for years. This was the excuse why half of all Ukrainian women have been trafficked as sex slaves abroad. Its not poverty that caused them to be trafficked. It was teaching them to read. Yes. Isn’t that a sad commentary. They could read the adds for “housekeepers in Turkey” or whatever and they gave away their passports and allowed themselves to become slaves. It wasn’t just teaching them to read but teaching them that they should hate their culture and spurn their men and that they were “independent”. That “independence” led them to servitude. What independence it was! Poverty doesn’t turn whole nations into brothels, like Moldova. No. Yemen is poor and the women are whores. Gaza is poor and the women aren’t whores. The difference between the poor western woman and her Muslim counterpart is that the Muslim women wears a visible prison (the burka) and works as a slave for her husband. The poor trafficked Western women lives in a prison (the sex slave brothel wherever she has sold herself) and works as a sex slave for a dozen men a day. Lets be honest, there is no substantial difference between the position of the Muslim women in Gaza or the western women working as a slave in the UAE. Its not poverty that caused this or “the lure of fast money”. It is independence, equal rights and freedom and the West. It is the western male and his useless impotent culture. It is the West and its culture.
A Story about Justice and the University in Israel
October 20, 2009
Seth J. Frantzman
The University and all its humanism likes to talk about “justice” a lot. It likes to educate students about a “just” society of “equals”. The University serves as a brainwashing tool to mint students who do not think. While the University claims to want people who “think critically” the actual affect of its program is to mint people who all think the same. It is no different in Israel. The Israeli university takes people from a variety of backgrounds and, at least in the social sciences and humanities, mints students who all hate the country they live in and desire to “challenge” its existence and support the Arabs.
The Israeli university system, in terms of the Humanities and Social Sciences, is primarily composed of group think and homogeneity. It is almost exclusively Ashkenazi and leftist and it is primarily male. It excels at signing petitions against the very country it exists in. In one such petition 358 university professors and lecturer signed a petition supporting Israeli soldiers who refuse to serve in the army.
But let us be honest about this. The University prides itself on justice. But let us discuss justice for a moment. Is it justice when a wealthy University professor who receives a huge salary from the government and drives a car home to his village every night supports those who refuse to serve in the army. Is it justice that a student from a poor background must go to the army or face jail time and that this student may die in his service? Is it justice that a student from a poor background ends up working security at the university and must ride the bus back and forth to his tiny apartment and because of riding the bus or working as a security guard that student may die at the hands of terrorism? Is it justice that the student from the poor background must die for the professor who receives his salary from the state and supports the very terrorist who murders the poor? What justice is it when the wealthy who receive the most and who work for the government are the ones who support the murder of the poor?
The wealthy in the states of old may have abused the poor but at least they didn’t encourage those who murdered them? The question at the Israeli university is whether the academics deserve security? Do they deserve that the army should defend their “right” to free speech? When the right to free speech encourages those who murder the students, when the state actually pays those who encourage breaking the laws of the state then what does it say about the “right” of free speech?
One Professor at an Israeli University even told the terrorists who to target and who not to. He said they should murder only “settlers” but not good justice seekers from wealthy neighbourhoods such as himself. The army and the security guards at the university should heed the professors. The Universities in Israel operate on occupied Palestinian land, all of them are, in some way or another, involved in occupying the lands of former Arab villages. So, yes, the security guards should refuse to go to work at the University and the army should refuse to serve in any area near the university.
It is time for the professors to live the life that the rest of the nation has been forced to live. It is time for their neighbourhoods to have no security and no protection. They want to encourage the terrorists to “concentrate their attacks on the settlements”. If the university wants justice the only real justice will be in stripping the professorial elite of their diamond protection plans, stripping them of their villages and their BMWs. Send the professors in Israel to the development towns, to Sderot, to Kiryat Gat, to Kiryat Malaki and Lod and Ramla. The intellectual elite in Israel dumped the immigrants to the country in these neighbhourood and now that same cultural elite encourages terrorists to murder those people who have so little. Those who have nothing and live in poor places are drafted into the army and go without question while the wealthy high school students, the children of the cultured elite, refuse to do their service and go abroad with their European passports. It is impossible to call it justice when the poor must die so that the rich can critique their country.
No, the country does not have justice. There is no justice when those paid salaries by the state encourage the murder of other members of the state. When those paid by the state are ensured security by a state they hate there is no justice.
Issue 99
“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
October 22, 2009
1) There is no such thing as ‘chosen trauma’: The idea of a “chosen trauma” is a recent development. It is to psychiatry what the “other” is to philosophy and is part and parcel of the post-humanist undermining of history and truth. People do not “choose” to have trauma, they actually have trauma when people commit genocide against them or deport them from their land. Caring about the trauma of the group is not “racist” because it “excludes” others. It is a natural human emotion.
2) Why they hate us?: The West is hated by two groups: Islam and Western women. Not all Muslims hate the West and neither do all Western women. However one can find, in the western female coddling of Islam and the belief that Islam is “exotic” or the feeling sorry for Muslim minorities and the conversion of western women to Islam that western women, freed by the west, desire nothing more than the slavery of Islam. The West fails in its granting of freedom to people and educating them because it educates contempt and its freedom fails when those who benefit the most have the most contempt for it.
2) A Story about Justice and the University in Israel: The University in Israel speaks often of justice. But is it justice when that university protects its academics but those academics, who receive pay from the state, encourage terrorists to murder the students and destroy the state?
There is no such thing as a “chosen trauma”
Seth J. Frantzman
October 22, 2009
In order to punish victims and attempt to destroy identity, post-humanism has created something called “chosen trauma”. Describing what ‘Chosen trauma’ is Vamik Volkan in the publication Group Analysis (2001 University of Virginia) describes it thus “subjective experience of thousands or millions of people who are linked by a persistent sense of sameness.” It is the “mental representation of a massive trauma that the group’s ancestors suffered.” But we also learn that this is inherently negative; “when a group regresses, its chosen trauma is reactivated in order to support the group’s threatened identity. This reactivation may have dramatic and destructive consequences.” Thus any sort of rememberance of suffering is negative in the eyes of post-humanism because it inevitably leads to group identification and causes the group to potentially mistreat others. At the very least it means that the group may identify with itself and thus be “racist”.
Another description of the idea of “chosen trauma” can be found in an article by Ayse Karabat in The Daily Zaman in Istanbul. He describes it as “the mental representation of an event that causes a group to feel victimized. The group mythologizes an event and draws it into its identity, passing the mental representation, along with associated feelings and defenses, from generation to generation.” In writing about the “chosen trauma” he was speaking about Armenians in Turkey and their preservation of their community and attempts by youth to free themselves from the cautious behavior of the “elders” who view themselves, according to the article, too often as victims.
H.D.S. Greenway of the New York Times uses the term to describe the Turkish and Greek Cypriots. He creates yet another definition; “to described the way nations, as well as individuals, can seize upon a wrong done to them to the exclusion of any wrongs committed by themselves.”
The invention of the term “chosen trauma” is deeply connected to the Turks and Cyprus.
Greenway didn’t bother to do the background research and missed the fact that Vamik Volkan, who invented the term, is a Turkis-Cypriot. Born in 1932 he moved the United States at some point. He has done much of his work on the psychology of conflict. Had he been involved in Philosophy he would have preached to us about the idea of the “other” but he has transferred this idea to his own work. In 1988 he spoke of the “need to have enemies and allies”. He has written on “killing in the name of identity” and “from ethnic pride to ethnic terrorism”. He has also written on homosexuality, cross breeding plan species, as well the “animal” and “primitive” instincts and psychological problems that exist within us. For Mr. Volkan it is obvious the experience of being a Turkish Cypriot (a Muslim group that complains of its own victimhood and at the same time has used that as an excuse to cleanse its portion of the island of minorities) lodged deeply in his mind and he has connected all human instincts that involve group identity, pride and dislike of others with being “primitive” and “animal.” It reminds this author of a college textbook on anthropology that spoke of how “primitive people once identified themselves first with their group and were suspicious of outsiders.”
But what about the revenge of the primitive? Post-humanism has tried to convince us that trauma can be “chosen” and that trauma is a “myth” and that its consequence is violence against the “other.” The group “excludes” the things it does in order to remember what was done to it. This discussion therefore concludes that any rememberance of a trauma is not only wrong but that it is primarily mythological and therefore not based on truth. This is part and parcel of modernity’s assault on history.
There are real traumas. When a community is partially destroyed, its women raped and its land stolen it is indeed a trauma. Modernity would tell us that there is no truth behind such events as the Armenians genocide, the Rwandan genocide, the Trail of Tears, the Great Trek, the Holocaust or any other event. It is merely a “chosen trauma”. When the Jews describe the Holocaust as something that “happened to Jews” they are “excluding” the Gypsies and gays and Russians murdered by the Nazis. Thus in remembering their ‘chosen trauma’ they are racist. And, to take the argument one step further, the Jews then use the Holocaust as an excuse to abuse Palestinians, in the words of Avraham Burg they “manipulate the Holocaust.”
This is why people speak of a chosen trauma. The brainwashing of individuals to have no attachment to the group is quite successful. At the Israeli university, which is one of the more liberal and self-hating in the world, the three or four Ethiopian Jewish students who are enrolled there are raised to believe that it is racist for them to take any special interest in their Ethiopian community. Instead they are convinced that the Arabs are the group, the “other”, that they should work to help. Thus poor Ethiopians who live in tenements find themselves graduating with bachelors degrees in sociology and going out to give their free time and energy protesting “Ethiopian jewish racism against Arabs” and defending Muslim cemetaries in Israel. Such is the degree of communal destruction that the leftist post-human university can take people who are penniless and who suffered a terrible trauma coming to Israel (in which tens of thousands died of starvations and thousands were raped) and turn them into people who believe that loving their own community is “racist” and one must work tirelessly for the “other.”
By describing history as “myth” the post-human ideology of “chosen trauma” deconstructs that history. Thus the murder of millions in the Holocaust becomes part of a “Jewish myth of suffering.” Who speaks that way? No liberal would dare say that. But they say it about the Armenians. The Armenians have a “chosen trauma” and they should get over it.
The use of the word “chosen” in “chosen trauma” also degrades the existence of the trauma. The idea is that the individual should choose not to have a trauma. He should mature and become modern and throw off the shackles of the past, a past which involved memory and identity and exclusion. Modern man is just man, by himself, with no group. There is but one race: human.
The question that should be posed about “chosen trauma” is two-fold. Why do certain groups get to have their chosen trauma. African-Americans can never seem to forget the trauma of slavery and they are aided and abeted in this by the same liberal who tells the Armenians or others to forget their trauma. Black blame all their problems on slavery. Whether it is the fact that 80% of black American children are born out of wedlock (what people now glorify as “my baby daddy”) or the fact that black women “relax” their hair, it is all due to slavery, even though it isn’t. But no one tells the blacks to abandon their “chosen trauma” or that in having pride in being black that they are ‘excluding’ others. The same should be said of the Muslims, especially Palestinians. No one asks them to get rid of their chosen trauma of the “nakba” or for Muslims to forget the “crusades”. Instead the west blames all of the problems in the Middle East on colonialism and “western oppression” and the “humiliation of the Crusades and the Israeli Occupation.” So where is the complaints about the Palestinians “excluding” others or the consequences that their obsession with their trauma has on the peace process?
The other question that should be posed is whether or not the murder of leftists can be also described as a “chosen trauma”. We often hear leftists whining when a few of them get suppressed. Whether it is the attempted bombing of Prof. Sternhell or the tyranny of Pinochet, one must always hear about the assault on a few leftists and “dissidents” here and there. But is that not also a “chosen trauma”? Is it not also part of a “myth”?
The last problem with the concept of the “chosen trauma” is that it implies there is no truth. Greenway tells us that in Cyprus the Turks and Greeks each have a “narrative” which excludes the suffering of the other. The Turks don’t mention the expulsion of the Greeks and the importation of settlers. The Greeks don’t mention the assaults on Turks the preceeded the Turkish invasion. Greenway and the promulgators of “chosen trauma” tell us that because the two communities disagree that therefore there is no truth, there is just a “chosen trauma.” But this is an assault on fact and history.
If a hundred people are killed and one group says it was “revenge” and the other group says it was “spontaneous rioting” and another group says it was “freedom fighting” it doesn’t mean that the 100 people did not die. It may be true that the Germans in Poland that were expelled in 1945 were expelled because they were “settlers” or to ‘ensure peace’ or because “it was war” but none of it means that there were millions of Germans living in Poland and the Czech Republic before 1945. People mistake the fact that different people interpret right and wrong differently in order to pretend there are no facts. Did the killers of Gandhi do it out of patriotism or evil, was the deed wrong or did it save a nation from the appeasement of Gandhi. Surely some say that the killing of Gandhi was a great and honorable deed. Most disagree and view it as abhorrent. But that doesn’t mean Gandhi wasn’t killed. In fact we even know why he was killed. Whether that killing was right or wrong cannot be determined, perhaps, but the motives of the killer can, in fact, be explored. When terrorists strike liberals like to say that the terrorist has his own motives and that because he uses the “weapon of the poor” or because he perceived himself as “humiliated” that his actions are justified. Those who disagree that people should blow themselves up and kill children do not define terrorism as “resistance”. They condemn it as wrong. The fact that people disagree on interpreting an event doesn’t mean it is part of a “myth”. It is not a “chosen trauma” that the victims of terror want to commemorate being victims. They are actually victims. Liberalism murders the victim by saying he can “choose” to not have trauma. In fact some liberals do choose to not have humanity. Some victims of terror have sympathy for the terrorists. But that is not an example of the flexibility of victimhood, it is merely another example of the inhumanity of modernity. Modernity murders the soul of man. One more example of the murder of that soul is the idea of “chosen trauma”. The real trauma we face is suffering through modernity until it can finally be destroyed so that we can all return to our “primitive” and “animal” past when we “mistakenly identified with the group and were suspicious of outsiders.”
Why they hate us?
Seth J. Frantzman
There are two groups of people who hate Western Civilization, one is Islam and the other is Western Woman.
Consider the recent events in Israel. The riots in Nazareth in 2001 and at Yom Kippur in Acre in 2008 were both partially caused by pent up anger at Arabs harassing Jewish women. An attempted lynching of two Arabs in Pisgat Zeev in 2008 was for the same reason. The murderer of Dana Bennet and the murderers of Leonard Karp were both aided by Jewish women, in one case a Jewish soldier woman. There are now groups in Pisgat Zeev and Petah Tikva aimed at discouraging Jewish women from dating Arab men. The Ethiopian community is hosting a seminar on the issue. In Kiryat Gat a Jewish 15 year old dated Beoduin men, went to night clubs with them and was then taken by them, handcuffed to a pole and burned to death with gasoline. In the Galilee an Arab gang operated for three years raping Jewish women.
When all these incidents take place one must ask why. The usual explanation by women in Israel is that the Arab men give vulnerable young Jewish women presents and flatter them and that the women come from troubled homes with either absent fathers or abusive strict fathers. This always seems to be the “answer” and no one seems to ask more questions.
However the truth is much more complicated. Arab women also come from broken homes with abusive fathers and strict traditional cultures. Yet they don’t rebel by going out with Jewish men. The excuse of the westerner to this observation is to say “well that’s because their society would kill them.” But this excuse isn’t good enough. I’ve known Arab women, mostly from secular backgrounds, not so different backgrounds than the Sephardie and Ethiopian girls in ‘vulnerable” neighbourhoods who are enticed so often by Arab men. These women don’t mind hanging out with Jewish men and from time to time they are taken with the “exotic” idea of what it would be like to go out with them. But they generally hold themselves back from such behavior. Not because of the men in their society but because they believe they would be betraying their culture. No matter how liberal and open minded they are repelled by the idea. Now why is that? Why is it that the Arab Muslim culture, which beats women, which maligns them, which allows men to go out with all sorts of women, which gives men four wives, which puts women in headscarves and expects them to stay at home and beat children, why does that society, even at its most liberal, produce women who like it, honour it and are patriots for it. Even the women who hate the Hamas brand of the Muslim religion, even the women who find Arab men obnoxious in their behavior, even those women honour their culture and faith. Why? In short, why does the western culture fail when it comes to women?
What does the west not provide the women that she would make her stay part of her own culture and not love the “other” and find the “other” exotic? Is it because the western man is metro-sexy and gay and in touch with his feminine side? Is it because the Western man no longer provides? Or is it the western education system and feminism in general that produce women who hate themselves and their culture? Is it freedom, does freedom ensure that humans, women in this case, will beg for a return to slavery, their natural state? Is the western education system, the idea of freedom, and secularism, a failure?
We in the West condemn those religious groups among us that seem to produce women who actually like being part of the group. Consider the religious Jews. Their women don’t find others “exotic”. They don’t want to learn the language, religion and culture of the “other”. Yet we are told by secular society that they are prisoners, suppressed and beaten. But the secular man who would liberate them would liberate them only to find that they don’t desire him but desire another repressive religious culture, such as that found among the Muslims. Isn’t this a puzzle? The West liberates the woman, only to find that the woman hates the West and prefers other religions and cultures that reminds her of the way it used to be in the “bad old days” of the 1950s or the Victorian period. The same women that will condemn the “conservative, chauvinist” style of the 1950s is the same women that yearns to learn Arabic, to know the difference between the Eids and the various ins and outs of Islamic law. She is the same woman who takes the belly-dancing lessons and travels abroad alone to meet and marry foreign men, never returning home. In fact she yearns precisely for the 1950s culture, because is there any culture that is more like the 1950s in terms of its view of women than Arab culture, is there any culture that is more like Victorian England and its mores and dress codes than that of the Muslims?
This is the brutal truth about the Western world and its system and its promise and its future that few want to admit. The West can be summed up with one word: failure. It is a failure. It may appear a success from certain points of view such as economics or democracy. That is all well and good. We have rights to a free trial and such things like that. But the future of society depends on women and children. The long term future depends on these essential ingredients. In nations such as China and India they murder women in the womb (such is the benefit of that western science called abortion). The brilliant Chinese allow Muslims to have as many children as they want but restrict Han Chinese to one child. Most families abort female babies and have males as their one child. There is now a gender gap in China, with millions of missing women. Muslim countries by contrast happily give birth to women and marry them in the fours to men so as to increase their population. But in Russia and Japan and other highly secular country the birth rate is less than one child for every two people. They simply don’t want children, lest the little brats ruin their pursuit of the secular life. Failure. Failure. Failure. Failure. Yes, those societies are all failures.
Europe is a failure. Its women, and I see them from time to time, are butch, mannish, small breasted, unhappy, self-hating, short-haired, and if they are not, if they are pretty and friendly, then they are only interested in African or Muslim men. Such is the European male and his uselessness as a man that he spends his days pursuing things other than women, dressing like a homosexual and generally expressing no interest in personal responsibility, work or women. The European male is gay and the European women acts like a man. Both are objectionable.
The West failed its women completely and utterly. It’s not a matter of women “getting taken advantage of” or “poor women who are vulnerable”. We have been fed this for years. This was the excuse why half of all Ukrainian women have been trafficked as sex slaves abroad. Its not poverty that caused them to be trafficked. It was teaching them to read. Yes. Isn’t that a sad commentary. They could read the adds for “housekeepers in Turkey” or whatever and they gave away their passports and allowed themselves to become slaves. It wasn’t just teaching them to read but teaching them that they should hate their culture and spurn their men and that they were “independent”. That “independence” led them to servitude. What independence it was! Poverty doesn’t turn whole nations into brothels, like Moldova. No. Yemen is poor and the women are whores. Gaza is poor and the women aren’t whores. The difference between the poor western woman and her Muslim counterpart is that the Muslim women wears a visible prison (the burka) and works as a slave for her husband. The poor trafficked Western women lives in a prison (the sex slave brothel wherever she has sold herself) and works as a sex slave for a dozen men a day. Lets be honest, there is no substantial difference between the position of the Muslim women in Gaza or the western women working as a slave in the UAE. Its not poverty that caused this or “the lure of fast money”. It is independence, equal rights and freedom and the West. It is the western male and his useless impotent culture. It is the West and its culture.
A Story about Justice and the University in Israel
October 20, 2009
Seth J. Frantzman
The University and all its humanism likes to talk about “justice” a lot. It likes to educate students about a “just” society of “equals”. The University serves as a brainwashing tool to mint students who do not think. While the University claims to want people who “think critically” the actual affect of its program is to mint people who all think the same. It is no different in Israel. The Israeli university takes people from a variety of backgrounds and, at least in the social sciences and humanities, mints students who all hate the country they live in and desire to “challenge” its existence and support the Arabs.
The Israeli university system, in terms of the Humanities and Social Sciences, is primarily composed of group think and homogeneity. It is almost exclusively Ashkenazi and leftist and it is primarily male. It excels at signing petitions against the very country it exists in. In one such petition 358 university professors and lecturer signed a petition supporting Israeli soldiers who refuse to serve in the army.
But let us be honest about this. The University prides itself on justice. But let us discuss justice for a moment. Is it justice when a wealthy University professor who receives a huge salary from the government and drives a car home to his village every night supports those who refuse to serve in the army. Is it justice that a student from a poor background must go to the army or face jail time and that this student may die in his service? Is it justice that a student from a poor background ends up working security at the university and must ride the bus back and forth to his tiny apartment and because of riding the bus or working as a security guard that student may die at the hands of terrorism? Is it justice that the student from the poor background must die for the professor who receives his salary from the state and supports the very terrorist who murders the poor? What justice is it when the wealthy who receive the most and who work for the government are the ones who support the murder of the poor?
The wealthy in the states of old may have abused the poor but at least they didn’t encourage those who murdered them? The question at the Israeli university is whether the academics deserve security? Do they deserve that the army should defend their “right” to free speech? When the right to free speech encourages those who murder the students, when the state actually pays those who encourage breaking the laws of the state then what does it say about the “right” of free speech?
One Professor at an Israeli University even told the terrorists who to target and who not to. He said they should murder only “settlers” but not good justice seekers from wealthy neighbourhoods such as himself. The army and the security guards at the university should heed the professors. The Universities in Israel operate on occupied Palestinian land, all of them are, in some way or another, involved in occupying the lands of former Arab villages. So, yes, the security guards should refuse to go to work at the University and the army should refuse to serve in any area near the university.
It is time for the professors to live the life that the rest of the nation has been forced to live. It is time for their neighbourhoods to have no security and no protection. They want to encourage the terrorists to “concentrate their attacks on the settlements”. If the university wants justice the only real justice will be in stripping the professorial elite of their diamond protection plans, stripping them of their villages and their BMWs. Send the professors in Israel to the development towns, to Sderot, to Kiryat Gat, to Kiryat Malaki and Lod and Ramla. The intellectual elite in Israel dumped the immigrants to the country in these neighbhourood and now that same cultural elite encourages terrorists to murder those people who have so little. Those who have nothing and live in poor places are drafted into the army and go without question while the wealthy high school students, the children of the cultured elite, refuse to do their service and go abroad with their European passports. It is impossible to call it justice when the poor must die so that the rich can critique their country.
No, the country does not have justice. There is no justice when those paid salaries by the state encourage the murder of other members of the state. When those paid by the state are ensured security by a state they hate there is no justice.
Terra Incognita 98 Polanski, Failure of Feminism and Europeanism
Terra Incognita
Issue 98
“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
October 1, 2009
1) What Polanski says about Europe: The arrest of filmmaker Roman Polanski in Switzerland on a 30 year old warrant for rape and sodomy of a 13 year old has opened up a rift between Europe and the U.S. The New York Times has defended the arrest of this predator but European philosophers and government officials have called the arrest “sinister” and referred to the rape as a “mistake”. Anti-Americanism is also clear in the condemnations. So what is wrong with a continent of people who support the rape of 13 year old girls. Does that continent have something in common, morally, with Somalia where a 13 year old girl was recently stoned to death for being raped?
2) The failure that is Feminism, Women’s education and women’s ‘rights’ in the West: A bunch of recent cases and revelations about Western women being “saved” from their abusive husbands in the West Bank sheds light once again on the phenomenon of women raised in free societies and given equality who desire nothing more than slavery and inequality. Black African women in 1800 had good enough sense to run from the slavers in West Africa who desired to take them in chains to the new world. But white women born today in Moscow, London or New York find a man who wishes to enslave them in Riyadh “exotic” and they run off to marry to him. This says much about the failure that is the West, feminism, women in the west, women’s education, empowerment for women and equality. Failures all.
2) Freeing ourselves from the Europeanism: More calls and more indictments by European courts of people around the world for “war crimes” once again remind us of the subtle hypocrisy that exists in a continent where the judicial system allows for “international jurisdiction” to prosecute people throughout the world but where the same states, such as Spain, give amnesty to their own criminals from the Franco period. The world that spurns this “justice” system is correct. How is it that the committers of the Holocaust are the ones today who preach to us about “human rights”?
What Polanski says about Europe
Seth J. Frantzman
October 1, 2009
In March of 1977 Roman Polanski, a French-born Polish Holocaust survivor, was enjoying himself in Los Angeles as an up and coming film director. He had made friends with Jack Nicholson. One night he met a 13 year old girl named Samantha Geimer who wanted to be a model. He convinced her to take several topless photos “for Vogue” and then invited her back to Nicholson’s Mulholland Drive villa. There he encouraged her to take her clothes off and enter a Jacuzzi, ostensibly for more of a “photo shoot”. He then plied her with alcohol and raped and sodomized her. Polanski was 43. His victim was 13. He was arrested a week later. The celebrity Polanski was given a plea deal that would allow him to serve no prison time, except the time he had spent in prison awaiting trial. When it seemed a Superior Court judge would not honour the deal he fled the United States. Since 1977 he has been on the run, having pled guilty to the crime of rape.
Polanski settled in France and purchased a home in Switzerland. At the time Europeans had no interest in honouring American requests to arrest him. For 30 years the case remained open until the 26th of September 2009 when he was suddenly arrested after disembarking from a plan in Zurich. Immediately people in Europe and Hollywood began leaping to his defense. Otto Weiser, a Swiss filmmaker, said he was “ashamed to be Swiss” and that Polanski made “a little mistake.” More than 130 other movie directors and stars signed a petition for his release. Among them were Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen (who married his own adopted daughter), Spanish director Pedro Almodovar and studio chief Harvey Weinstein. Weinstein claimed that Polanski had “served his time” for his “so-called crime.” Swiss Film Festival Jury President Debra Winger said she was shocked by the arrest and that they “await his release.” She added that she hoped the arrest warrant would be dropped because “it’s based on a three decade old case that is all but dead, except for a technicality.” The French Culture minister said that poor Polanski was being “thrown to the lions because of ancient history.” France’s foreign minister Bernard Kouchner said the arrest was “sinister.” He also said “all this just isn’t nice” because Polanksi had been honoured for his contributions to high culture. Culture Minister Frederic Mitterand expressed his outraged in anti-Americanism, “in the same way that there is a generous America that we like, there is also a scary America that has just shown its face.”
But in the U.s even the more leftist media organs such as the New York Times have tried to explain the logic behind the arrest. “we were glad to see other prominent Europeans beginning to point out that this case has nothing to do with Mr. Polanski’s work or his age. It is about an adult preying on a child. Mr. Polanski pleaded guilty to that crime and must account for it.”
Leftist voices have been the main defenders of Polanski. The World Socialist Website published an editorial accusing the New York Times of “throwing Polanski under the bus.” It accused the evils of the ‘law and order’ lobby of prosecuting Polanski and spoke of “humanitarian considerations and the spirit of forgiveness” being ignored. It accused “reactionary voices” of applauding. The Socialists claimed that “human rights” had been violated in the arrest. It accused the L.A prosecutors of attempting to ruin Polanski’s life the way they had “mercilessly pursued Michael Jackson.” The Socialists accused the Times of catering to the “extreme right” and bowing down to “family values” and other “filthy social elements.” They speak of “Polanski’s plight” as if he is some refugee. The left argues that by arresting him his “personality and entire life” are being judged. The left even goes so far as to claim that Polanski’s hard life, in which his mother died in a Nazi concentration camp and his first wife was murdered by Charles Manson, forced him to rape a 13 year old. The left asks can his past “be entirely unrelated to the crime for which Polanski was charged and to which he pled guilty? What possible value could his imprisonment serve at this time? What danger does he represent to society?” The left concludes “if the worst occurs, the editors [of the Times] will share responsibility for any tragic outcome.”
How can one understand the support for Mr. Polanski? It is not merely the support of friends and family, but the support of the most powerful, the most wealthy, major makers of culture, governments and ministers. It is not merely the support one provides to a friend but attacks on a “so-called crime” and a “little mistake.” They also speak of an “ancient” case. Consider how the French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy described Polanski’s arrest in his petition. He speaks of Polanski being “apprehended like a common terrorist.” He notes that he “risks extradition for an episode that happened years ago.” He notes that prosecution for such a crime would no longer be possible in Europe due to the expiration of the “statute of limitations.” He even says that the arrest is not “worthy of two democracies” like Switzerland and the U.S. Among those signing his petition are Salmon Rushdie and William Shawcross, the latter a U.K intellectual.
This is the way Europe and the left view the Polanski affair. Why is it that in Europe the rape of a 13 year old girl is not a crime? Why is it that in Europe such a rape is just a “little mistake” or a “so-called crime” or an “episode” that “happened years ago”? The reason is partly because of the souless secular nature of the modern day European. Europeans, especially those in Western Europe, don’t have children. They have no understanding of what it means for an elderly man to rape a 13 year old girl because none of them have daughters. Furthermore many Europeans engage in sex-tourism either in Europe with sex-slaves from Eastern Europe, or abroad in Thailand, with teenage girls. This means that don’t feel that raping a 13 year old is a crime or a mistake, it is just something that grown men do.
But there are other reasons for the rampant immorality that is clear from the statements of support for Polanski. Europe is like an Islamic culture. In its liberalism it has become Islamic in its treatment of women. In Islamic societies the rape of a woman is not a crime and in fact she is frequently punished, even by death, for being raped. In one case in Pakistan the rape of a teenage girl resulted in a court ordering the rape of the sister of one of the rapists. In a case in Somalia a 13 year old girl who was gang raped was then stoned to death for “adultery”. Islam views the legal status of a 13 year old girl in much the same way Western Europe views her. Europe is primarily a Muslim culture in is treatment of women, its hatred of them and its spurning of their rights.
But there is more to the case of Mr. Polanski. When Europeans speak of “ancient history” this is part and parcel of a larger European secular culture that has no history. Europeans view the 1970s as “ancient history” precisely because they hate their history, they have no memory, no culture, no heritage. In fact that belief that any crime committed a decade ago is ‘ancient history’ is part and parcel of the way in which Europe frees those who committed the Holocaust. Europe frees Nazis and known terrorists, such as the Lockerbie bomber, because their crimes are “ancient history” and because they are no longer “threats to the public.” But Mr. Polanski is a threat to the public. He is a predator who plied a barely pubescent girl with drugs and alcohol and raped her. Grand Jury testimony from the original crime even show the sickness of Mr. Polanski. He asked the girl when her last period was and if she was on birth control. This was his excuse to sodomize her. When driving her home, after raping her he said “don’t tell your mom about this.” This was no youthful indiscretion of some 19 year old celebrity who meets a 13 year old girl who is pretending to be 17. This is a 40 year old man who lies to a 13 year old girl, tempts her to become a “model” and then plies her with drugs and booze to rape her. This is a sick person. His illness, his criminal behavior, is not because of his having suffered the Holocaust or because the Manson family murdered his wife Sharon Tate. No. There is no connection and his friends playing the “he is a Holocaust survivor” card is beyond disgusting. The fact that European law has a sort statute of limitations on such crimes is not something Europeans should be proud of but in fact means that Europe is a land of criminals who merely have to avoid prosecution for crimes for a few years and can then walk free.
The reaction to the Polanski arrest by Europe’s best and brightest, the intercession by her government officials and ministers, all of this says a great deal about the fact that Europe is very much like a Polanski. It committed the Holocaust and now hopes the statute of limitations has run out on its criminal behavior. Europe established courts with “international jurisdiction” so it can prosecute people all over the world for “war crimes” when it gives its own war criminals amnesty at home. Europeans run around the world on protest tours lecturing people about “human rights” when their continent is drowning in human rights violations. They want the 1970s to be ancient history so that they can live in the mirage that they have a right to tell others how to live. But it is they who are guilty. They are guilty of adopting Islamic law. They are guilty of treating women the way Islam treats them. They are guilty of rape, rape of the soul, rape of humanity, rape of decency, rape of logic, rape of modernity. Polanski has found his greatest support in Europe and among Hollywood’s perverted elite, such as Woody Allen and Harvey Weinstein, both apparent child predators. The support for Polanski is a litmus test for what is good and what is bad in the world.
The failure that is Feminism, Women’s education and women’s ‘rights’ in the West
Seth J. Frantzman
September 17, 2009
Three articles easily located in the press shed light on the West’s failure in its education and nurturing of women. There is no value that the West teaches women that gives them the tools to live the independent life that western feminism supposedly promised them. Let us examine the evidence. In October 1st of 2008 we learn of Colleen Barghouti, a former American waitress turned whining American woman pleading to get her daughters back from her Palestinian husband. Ms. Bargouti had all the freedom that the West could provide. She got spoon fed all the nonsense about women being equal and empowered. She read all the mandatory women’s magazines. And then she locked herself in a prison cell and sold herself into slavery. Her slavery was called Yasser Barghouti, who she met while waitressing when he was a college student in 1993.
Colleen, a single mother apparently, converted to Islam, had her son, Rick, adopted by Yasser and moved to the West Bank village of Kobar in June of 2007. Colleen three good Muslim children for her husband and allowed him to beat her while she lived with him.
Then her romantic exotic life began to fall apart and she left, fleeing back to Chicago. She then began to whine and complain about getting her kids back. She was concerned that her daughters were being forced to wear headscarves in their Islamic school that they attend. Meanwhile Mr. Barghouti works for a UN funded “worker’s rights” organization. The complaining of Mrs. Barghouti eventually resulted in the involvement of the U.S consulate in a situation that she is entirely at fault for. But we in the West have gotten used to these “not without my daughter” stories. No one bothers to ask; when a woman leaves her home country marries a foreign man, converts to his religion, has three children with him, allows herself to get beaten, goes from a culture with equal rights to a culture with sub-standard rights for women, hasn’t she made enough wrong choices that she no longer deserves our interest or support? Isn’t she enough of a traitor to the Western culture that invested money and time in raising her and had to watch her spurn that culture in favor of the foreign “exotic” culture, she we no longer have to waste time and effort on this person. She wanted the exotic life, no doubt she called her friends racist when they objected to her leaving and called others “ignorant” when they noted that Islam has few rights for women. She was arrogant, so why must we now pay the price for her arrogance?
But hers is only one story. In an August 2009 incident the Palestinian police had to intervene to “save” an Israeli Jewish woman. This woman was born into a free culture with equal rights for women. She too wanted to “exotic” lifestyle. She found an exotic Palestinian boyfriend. She went to his house in Hebron and he beat her. He then locked her in the house. She was already known to the Israeli police who man checkpoints outside Arab Hebron because as an Israeli it is illegal for her to enter the city. But she did so anyway, flaunting her relationship to the Jewish Israeli soldiers and showing off her “exotic” Muslim boyfriend. The Jewish men were not good enough for her. But when she needed help suddenly she dialed the Israeli police, whining and complaining of her predicament. The Palestinian police eventually had to intervene to “rescue” this western woman.
Then there is the September 2009 story of another American woman who met an ‘exotic’ Muslim in America and moved with him to a village near the Palestinian town of Tulkarm. She had a child with her new husband. Then the husband, who already had a wife and four children, began to lock her in the house and hit her. The Western woman became unhappy and whined and complained. Her family intervened and hired some Israeli former commandos to go rescue her, risking their lives because of the stupid choices of another Western women. These three cases are just a few in an area of a few hundred square kilometers that is the West bank. All over the world are hundreds of thousands of cases like these, most going un-reported, where the Western Woman, born with equal rights, knowingly gives herself over to slavery, beatings, rape and servitude.
The point must come in the West, when hundreds of thousands of women willingly give themselves into slavery, when we must ask ourselves if the Western system and its “women’s rights” and “female empowerment” is a system that works or is logical. If you educate women to have equal rights and then you find out that large numbers of them prefer a religion where they have half the rights of a man and many of them marry men who beat them and many of them willingly leave the country that grants them equal rights to go to a foreign country where they have no rights, where they don’t know the language and then allow themselves to get pregnant and have a bunch of children and then allow themselves to get beaten, how is the Western system succeeding in terms of these women?
In fact the Western system of women’s rights is a charade. Every culture that has granted women equal rights has found that they do not want those rights and that they do everything possible to leave the countries that grant them these rights. Women from the former USSR, which granted women abortions as early as the 1920s, have fled their countries like the plague, selling themselves in the millions into sex slavery from the UAE to Japan. Consider this. For three or four generations the USSR educated women, gave them rights, gave them the right to an abortion and one finds that in brothels throughout the world that it is these women, the ones with the most rights, who make up the largest number of women trafficked in the world. But are they really being “trafficked”. We are told to feel sorry for the “natashas” imprisoned in brothels and forced to have sex with 13 men a day and beaten and raped and murdered. But why have sympathy? These women created this situation. Without the existence of the USSR, say had it been a Muslim rather than a Communist nation, there would be millions less prostitutes. The Western world excuses the existence of sex slavery by calling it the “oldest profession”. But it doesn’t add up. Muslim women from Gaza don’t sell themselves into sex slavery. Gaza isn’t over-flowing with brothels. But the UAE is overflowing, not with Muslim prostitutes, but with sex slaves from every country in the world that has given women rights, from India to Russia to Poland to Armenia. Find women who are free and you will find women who will sign up to be beaten, raped, tortured and sold into slavery.
That is the irony of the Western world. The savage Africans who were beaten, raped and sold into slavery, as shown in the slightly fanciful film Roots had enough sense to run away from the slavers. They had little knowledge of the outside world, no high science, no university, no geometry or algebra. They didn’t have Vogue or any number of women’s magazines. They didn’t have the vote or abortion. But they knew to run away when people came to enslave them. That means that they were more advanced then we are today. Yes, the West Coast of Africa in 1800 was more advanced than New York or London or Moscow in 2009. That is all one needs to know about Western Civilization and its treatment or its “success” in the realm of women and women’s rights. A woman born today in London, New York or Moscow will have less rights and less of a chance to live a life of freedom than one born in 1790s West Africa. That is the tombstone to the entire movement called “feminism” and the entire lie that has been called “progressive” and “humanistic” in the West.
Freeing ourselves from the Europeanism
Seth J. Frantzman
September 20, 2009
A recent article in the New York Times spoke of the spread of human rights. It was written by Richard Gowan and Franziska Brantner. The writers complained that “this tragedy [of backsliding on human rights] was indicative of a wider erosion of support for Western positions on human rights.” They furthermore complained that “Of the U.N.’s 192 members, 117 voted with the European Union less than half the time on human rights issues in the General Assembly over the last year.” The writers assumed that only the Europeans and the “Western powers” could be correct on human rights. They ignored the possibility that the west is wrong about human rights.
It might seem as odd that a mere fifty years after the Europeans were happily packing people into gas chambers that they should dictate to the world what is right and wrong when it comes to treatment of humans. How did the people who a mere forty years ago still held colonies that had been the scenes of genocide and slavery could dictate to the world about right and wrong. And yet that is what has happened. Human rights, international humanitarian law and all their related concepts are European exclusively. Europeans voted for Nazi and fascist parties and now it is they who call much of the “nazi” and “fascist” and expect us to accept their judgments as based on fact and logical ‘western’ reasoning because only they can know what a human rights violation is, only they can produce international law and only they are qualified to judge war crimes. The supposed basis for this is that they know it because they invented it. They invented systematic genocide and the use of gas and other war crimes. They invented ethnic-cleansing, so only they can know it when it happens.
But is there not something hypocritical about countries like Spain that give their courts “international jurisdiction” so that they can prosecute human rights violations throughout the world and then pass laws giving amnesty to their own Franco era human rights criminals? Is there not something strange about the fact that England and Belgium, both of whome committed human rights violations recently in Northern Ireland and the Congo, also giving their courts the right to investigate crimes throughout the world and yet not prosecuting the aging criminals in their midst who massacred people in Belfast and Kinshasa?
In a logical world free from hypocrisy it would be the opposite. The victims of the Europeans and their hundreds of years of colonialism, genocide, slave trade and Holocaust would dictate to the world about human rights. The Congolese, the Jews, the Aboriginals and Australia, they would be the ones writing human rights law and international humanitarian law. The victims of the endless wars engendered by Europeans would be the one’s writing war crimes law. Countries like Russia which was twice the victim of German aggression would be the one writing about the law of war, not Germany and Italy (ironically the author of the theory of ‘proportionality’ and the home of the ‘Rome statue’ respectively).
Those 70 odd countries who refuse to vote with the Europeans at the UN are not the outsiders but the logical countries. European invented human rights law has become so twisted and hypocritical, a tool in the hand of terrorists and dictators, and one that was invented by the same inventors of the gas chamber and the firebombing, that the world must once and for all free itself from the yoke of Europeanism.
Issue 98
“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
October 1, 2009
1) What Polanski says about Europe: The arrest of filmmaker Roman Polanski in Switzerland on a 30 year old warrant for rape and sodomy of a 13 year old has opened up a rift between Europe and the U.S. The New York Times has defended the arrest of this predator but European philosophers and government officials have called the arrest “sinister” and referred to the rape as a “mistake”. Anti-Americanism is also clear in the condemnations. So what is wrong with a continent of people who support the rape of 13 year old girls. Does that continent have something in common, morally, with Somalia where a 13 year old girl was recently stoned to death for being raped?
2) The failure that is Feminism, Women’s education and women’s ‘rights’ in the West: A bunch of recent cases and revelations about Western women being “saved” from their abusive husbands in the West Bank sheds light once again on the phenomenon of women raised in free societies and given equality who desire nothing more than slavery and inequality. Black African women in 1800 had good enough sense to run from the slavers in West Africa who desired to take them in chains to the new world. But white women born today in Moscow, London or New York find a man who wishes to enslave them in Riyadh “exotic” and they run off to marry to him. This says much about the failure that is the West, feminism, women in the west, women’s education, empowerment for women and equality. Failures all.
2) Freeing ourselves from the Europeanism: More calls and more indictments by European courts of people around the world for “war crimes” once again remind us of the subtle hypocrisy that exists in a continent where the judicial system allows for “international jurisdiction” to prosecute people throughout the world but where the same states, such as Spain, give amnesty to their own criminals from the Franco period. The world that spurns this “justice” system is correct. How is it that the committers of the Holocaust are the ones today who preach to us about “human rights”?
What Polanski says about Europe
Seth J. Frantzman
October 1, 2009
In March of 1977 Roman Polanski, a French-born Polish Holocaust survivor, was enjoying himself in Los Angeles as an up and coming film director. He had made friends with Jack Nicholson. One night he met a 13 year old girl named Samantha Geimer who wanted to be a model. He convinced her to take several topless photos “for Vogue” and then invited her back to Nicholson’s Mulholland Drive villa. There he encouraged her to take her clothes off and enter a Jacuzzi, ostensibly for more of a “photo shoot”. He then plied her with alcohol and raped and sodomized her. Polanski was 43. His victim was 13. He was arrested a week later. The celebrity Polanski was given a plea deal that would allow him to serve no prison time, except the time he had spent in prison awaiting trial. When it seemed a Superior Court judge would not honour the deal he fled the United States. Since 1977 he has been on the run, having pled guilty to the crime of rape.
Polanski settled in France and purchased a home in Switzerland. At the time Europeans had no interest in honouring American requests to arrest him. For 30 years the case remained open until the 26th of September 2009 when he was suddenly arrested after disembarking from a plan in Zurich. Immediately people in Europe and Hollywood began leaping to his defense. Otto Weiser, a Swiss filmmaker, said he was “ashamed to be Swiss” and that Polanski made “a little mistake.” More than 130 other movie directors and stars signed a petition for his release. Among them were Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen (who married his own adopted daughter), Spanish director Pedro Almodovar and studio chief Harvey Weinstein. Weinstein claimed that Polanski had “served his time” for his “so-called crime.” Swiss Film Festival Jury President Debra Winger said she was shocked by the arrest and that they “await his release.” She added that she hoped the arrest warrant would be dropped because “it’s based on a three decade old case that is all but dead, except for a technicality.” The French Culture minister said that poor Polanski was being “thrown to the lions because of ancient history.” France’s foreign minister Bernard Kouchner said the arrest was “sinister.” He also said “all this just isn’t nice” because Polanksi had been honoured for his contributions to high culture. Culture Minister Frederic Mitterand expressed his outraged in anti-Americanism, “in the same way that there is a generous America that we like, there is also a scary America that has just shown its face.”
But in the U.s even the more leftist media organs such as the New York Times have tried to explain the logic behind the arrest. “we were glad to see other prominent Europeans beginning to point out that this case has nothing to do with Mr. Polanski’s work or his age. It is about an adult preying on a child. Mr. Polanski pleaded guilty to that crime and must account for it.”
Leftist voices have been the main defenders of Polanski. The World Socialist Website published an editorial accusing the New York Times of “throwing Polanski under the bus.” It accused the evils of the ‘law and order’ lobby of prosecuting Polanski and spoke of “humanitarian considerations and the spirit of forgiveness” being ignored. It accused “reactionary voices” of applauding. The Socialists claimed that “human rights” had been violated in the arrest. It accused the L.A prosecutors of attempting to ruin Polanski’s life the way they had “mercilessly pursued Michael Jackson.” The Socialists accused the Times of catering to the “extreme right” and bowing down to “family values” and other “filthy social elements.” They speak of “Polanski’s plight” as if he is some refugee. The left argues that by arresting him his “personality and entire life” are being judged. The left even goes so far as to claim that Polanski’s hard life, in which his mother died in a Nazi concentration camp and his first wife was murdered by Charles Manson, forced him to rape a 13 year old. The left asks can his past “be entirely unrelated to the crime for which Polanski was charged and to which he pled guilty? What possible value could his imprisonment serve at this time? What danger does he represent to society?” The left concludes “if the worst occurs, the editors [of the Times] will share responsibility for any tragic outcome.”
How can one understand the support for Mr. Polanski? It is not merely the support of friends and family, but the support of the most powerful, the most wealthy, major makers of culture, governments and ministers. It is not merely the support one provides to a friend but attacks on a “so-called crime” and a “little mistake.” They also speak of an “ancient” case. Consider how the French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy described Polanski’s arrest in his petition. He speaks of Polanski being “apprehended like a common terrorist.” He notes that he “risks extradition for an episode that happened years ago.” He notes that prosecution for such a crime would no longer be possible in Europe due to the expiration of the “statute of limitations.” He even says that the arrest is not “worthy of two democracies” like Switzerland and the U.S. Among those signing his petition are Salmon Rushdie and William Shawcross, the latter a U.K intellectual.
This is the way Europe and the left view the Polanski affair. Why is it that in Europe the rape of a 13 year old girl is not a crime? Why is it that in Europe such a rape is just a “little mistake” or a “so-called crime” or an “episode” that “happened years ago”? The reason is partly because of the souless secular nature of the modern day European. Europeans, especially those in Western Europe, don’t have children. They have no understanding of what it means for an elderly man to rape a 13 year old girl because none of them have daughters. Furthermore many Europeans engage in sex-tourism either in Europe with sex-slaves from Eastern Europe, or abroad in Thailand, with teenage girls. This means that don’t feel that raping a 13 year old is a crime or a mistake, it is just something that grown men do.
But there are other reasons for the rampant immorality that is clear from the statements of support for Polanski. Europe is like an Islamic culture. In its liberalism it has become Islamic in its treatment of women. In Islamic societies the rape of a woman is not a crime and in fact she is frequently punished, even by death, for being raped. In one case in Pakistan the rape of a teenage girl resulted in a court ordering the rape of the sister of one of the rapists. In a case in Somalia a 13 year old girl who was gang raped was then stoned to death for “adultery”. Islam views the legal status of a 13 year old girl in much the same way Western Europe views her. Europe is primarily a Muslim culture in is treatment of women, its hatred of them and its spurning of their rights.
But there is more to the case of Mr. Polanski. When Europeans speak of “ancient history” this is part and parcel of a larger European secular culture that has no history. Europeans view the 1970s as “ancient history” precisely because they hate their history, they have no memory, no culture, no heritage. In fact that belief that any crime committed a decade ago is ‘ancient history’ is part and parcel of the way in which Europe frees those who committed the Holocaust. Europe frees Nazis and known terrorists, such as the Lockerbie bomber, because their crimes are “ancient history” and because they are no longer “threats to the public.” But Mr. Polanski is a threat to the public. He is a predator who plied a barely pubescent girl with drugs and alcohol and raped her. Grand Jury testimony from the original crime even show the sickness of Mr. Polanski. He asked the girl when her last period was and if she was on birth control. This was his excuse to sodomize her. When driving her home, after raping her he said “don’t tell your mom about this.” This was no youthful indiscretion of some 19 year old celebrity who meets a 13 year old girl who is pretending to be 17. This is a 40 year old man who lies to a 13 year old girl, tempts her to become a “model” and then plies her with drugs and booze to rape her. This is a sick person. His illness, his criminal behavior, is not because of his having suffered the Holocaust or because the Manson family murdered his wife Sharon Tate. No. There is no connection and his friends playing the “he is a Holocaust survivor” card is beyond disgusting. The fact that European law has a sort statute of limitations on such crimes is not something Europeans should be proud of but in fact means that Europe is a land of criminals who merely have to avoid prosecution for crimes for a few years and can then walk free.
The reaction to the Polanski arrest by Europe’s best and brightest, the intercession by her government officials and ministers, all of this says a great deal about the fact that Europe is very much like a Polanski. It committed the Holocaust and now hopes the statute of limitations has run out on its criminal behavior. Europe established courts with “international jurisdiction” so it can prosecute people all over the world for “war crimes” when it gives its own war criminals amnesty at home. Europeans run around the world on protest tours lecturing people about “human rights” when their continent is drowning in human rights violations. They want the 1970s to be ancient history so that they can live in the mirage that they have a right to tell others how to live. But it is they who are guilty. They are guilty of adopting Islamic law. They are guilty of treating women the way Islam treats them. They are guilty of rape, rape of the soul, rape of humanity, rape of decency, rape of logic, rape of modernity. Polanski has found his greatest support in Europe and among Hollywood’s perverted elite, such as Woody Allen and Harvey Weinstein, both apparent child predators. The support for Polanski is a litmus test for what is good and what is bad in the world.
The failure that is Feminism, Women’s education and women’s ‘rights’ in the West
Seth J. Frantzman
September 17, 2009
Three articles easily located in the press shed light on the West’s failure in its education and nurturing of women. There is no value that the West teaches women that gives them the tools to live the independent life that western feminism supposedly promised them. Let us examine the evidence. In October 1st of 2008 we learn of Colleen Barghouti, a former American waitress turned whining American woman pleading to get her daughters back from her Palestinian husband. Ms. Bargouti had all the freedom that the West could provide. She got spoon fed all the nonsense about women being equal and empowered. She read all the mandatory women’s magazines. And then she locked herself in a prison cell and sold herself into slavery. Her slavery was called Yasser Barghouti, who she met while waitressing when he was a college student in 1993.
Colleen, a single mother apparently, converted to Islam, had her son, Rick, adopted by Yasser and moved to the West Bank village of Kobar in June of 2007. Colleen three good Muslim children for her husband and allowed him to beat her while she lived with him.
Then her romantic exotic life began to fall apart and she left, fleeing back to Chicago. She then began to whine and complain about getting her kids back. She was concerned that her daughters were being forced to wear headscarves in their Islamic school that they attend. Meanwhile Mr. Barghouti works for a UN funded “worker’s rights” organization. The complaining of Mrs. Barghouti eventually resulted in the involvement of the U.S consulate in a situation that she is entirely at fault for. But we in the West have gotten used to these “not without my daughter” stories. No one bothers to ask; when a woman leaves her home country marries a foreign man, converts to his religion, has three children with him, allows herself to get beaten, goes from a culture with equal rights to a culture with sub-standard rights for women, hasn’t she made enough wrong choices that she no longer deserves our interest or support? Isn’t she enough of a traitor to the Western culture that invested money and time in raising her and had to watch her spurn that culture in favor of the foreign “exotic” culture, she we no longer have to waste time and effort on this person. She wanted the exotic life, no doubt she called her friends racist when they objected to her leaving and called others “ignorant” when they noted that Islam has few rights for women. She was arrogant, so why must we now pay the price for her arrogance?
But hers is only one story. In an August 2009 incident the Palestinian police had to intervene to “save” an Israeli Jewish woman. This woman was born into a free culture with equal rights for women. She too wanted to “exotic” lifestyle. She found an exotic Palestinian boyfriend. She went to his house in Hebron and he beat her. He then locked her in the house. She was already known to the Israeli police who man checkpoints outside Arab Hebron because as an Israeli it is illegal for her to enter the city. But she did so anyway, flaunting her relationship to the Jewish Israeli soldiers and showing off her “exotic” Muslim boyfriend. The Jewish men were not good enough for her. But when she needed help suddenly she dialed the Israeli police, whining and complaining of her predicament. The Palestinian police eventually had to intervene to “rescue” this western woman.
Then there is the September 2009 story of another American woman who met an ‘exotic’ Muslim in America and moved with him to a village near the Palestinian town of Tulkarm. She had a child with her new husband. Then the husband, who already had a wife and four children, began to lock her in the house and hit her. The Western woman became unhappy and whined and complained. Her family intervened and hired some Israeli former commandos to go rescue her, risking their lives because of the stupid choices of another Western women. These three cases are just a few in an area of a few hundred square kilometers that is the West bank. All over the world are hundreds of thousands of cases like these, most going un-reported, where the Western Woman, born with equal rights, knowingly gives herself over to slavery, beatings, rape and servitude.
The point must come in the West, when hundreds of thousands of women willingly give themselves into slavery, when we must ask ourselves if the Western system and its “women’s rights” and “female empowerment” is a system that works or is logical. If you educate women to have equal rights and then you find out that large numbers of them prefer a religion where they have half the rights of a man and many of them marry men who beat them and many of them willingly leave the country that grants them equal rights to go to a foreign country where they have no rights, where they don’t know the language and then allow themselves to get pregnant and have a bunch of children and then allow themselves to get beaten, how is the Western system succeeding in terms of these women?
In fact the Western system of women’s rights is a charade. Every culture that has granted women equal rights has found that they do not want those rights and that they do everything possible to leave the countries that grant them these rights. Women from the former USSR, which granted women abortions as early as the 1920s, have fled their countries like the plague, selling themselves in the millions into sex slavery from the UAE to Japan. Consider this. For three or four generations the USSR educated women, gave them rights, gave them the right to an abortion and one finds that in brothels throughout the world that it is these women, the ones with the most rights, who make up the largest number of women trafficked in the world. But are they really being “trafficked”. We are told to feel sorry for the “natashas” imprisoned in brothels and forced to have sex with 13 men a day and beaten and raped and murdered. But why have sympathy? These women created this situation. Without the existence of the USSR, say had it been a Muslim rather than a Communist nation, there would be millions less prostitutes. The Western world excuses the existence of sex slavery by calling it the “oldest profession”. But it doesn’t add up. Muslim women from Gaza don’t sell themselves into sex slavery. Gaza isn’t over-flowing with brothels. But the UAE is overflowing, not with Muslim prostitutes, but with sex slaves from every country in the world that has given women rights, from India to Russia to Poland to Armenia. Find women who are free and you will find women who will sign up to be beaten, raped, tortured and sold into slavery.
That is the irony of the Western world. The savage Africans who were beaten, raped and sold into slavery, as shown in the slightly fanciful film Roots had enough sense to run away from the slavers. They had little knowledge of the outside world, no high science, no university, no geometry or algebra. They didn’t have Vogue or any number of women’s magazines. They didn’t have the vote or abortion. But they knew to run away when people came to enslave them. That means that they were more advanced then we are today. Yes, the West Coast of Africa in 1800 was more advanced than New York or London or Moscow in 2009. That is all one needs to know about Western Civilization and its treatment or its “success” in the realm of women and women’s rights. A woman born today in London, New York or Moscow will have less rights and less of a chance to live a life of freedom than one born in 1790s West Africa. That is the tombstone to the entire movement called “feminism” and the entire lie that has been called “progressive” and “humanistic” in the West.
Freeing ourselves from the Europeanism
Seth J. Frantzman
September 20, 2009
A recent article in the New York Times spoke of the spread of human rights. It was written by Richard Gowan and Franziska Brantner. The writers complained that “this tragedy [of backsliding on human rights] was indicative of a wider erosion of support for Western positions on human rights.” They furthermore complained that “Of the U.N.’s 192 members, 117 voted with the European Union less than half the time on human rights issues in the General Assembly over the last year.” The writers assumed that only the Europeans and the “Western powers” could be correct on human rights. They ignored the possibility that the west is wrong about human rights.
It might seem as odd that a mere fifty years after the Europeans were happily packing people into gas chambers that they should dictate to the world what is right and wrong when it comes to treatment of humans. How did the people who a mere forty years ago still held colonies that had been the scenes of genocide and slavery could dictate to the world about right and wrong. And yet that is what has happened. Human rights, international humanitarian law and all their related concepts are European exclusively. Europeans voted for Nazi and fascist parties and now it is they who call much of the “nazi” and “fascist” and expect us to accept their judgments as based on fact and logical ‘western’ reasoning because only they can know what a human rights violation is, only they can produce international law and only they are qualified to judge war crimes. The supposed basis for this is that they know it because they invented it. They invented systematic genocide and the use of gas and other war crimes. They invented ethnic-cleansing, so only they can know it when it happens.
But is there not something hypocritical about countries like Spain that give their courts “international jurisdiction” so that they can prosecute human rights violations throughout the world and then pass laws giving amnesty to their own Franco era human rights criminals? Is there not something strange about the fact that England and Belgium, both of whome committed human rights violations recently in Northern Ireland and the Congo, also giving their courts the right to investigate crimes throughout the world and yet not prosecuting the aging criminals in their midst who massacred people in Belfast and Kinshasa?
In a logical world free from hypocrisy it would be the opposite. The victims of the Europeans and their hundreds of years of colonialism, genocide, slave trade and Holocaust would dictate to the world about human rights. The Congolese, the Jews, the Aboriginals and Australia, they would be the ones writing human rights law and international humanitarian law. The victims of the endless wars engendered by Europeans would be the one’s writing war crimes law. Countries like Russia which was twice the victim of German aggression would be the one writing about the law of war, not Germany and Italy (ironically the author of the theory of ‘proportionality’ and the home of the ‘Rome statue’ respectively).
Those 70 odd countries who refuse to vote with the Europeans at the UN are not the outsiders but the logical countries. European invented human rights law has become so twisted and hypocritical, a tool in the hand of terrorists and dictators, and one that was invented by the same inventors of the gas chamber and the firebombing, that the world must once and for all free itself from the yoke of Europeanism.
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
Terra Incognita part 3
The Euro-Islamist alliance
Seth J. Frantzman
September 1, 2009
With seventy years having past since the Nazi-Soviet pact the world is watching as Putin is attempting to re-write the history of that pact. Yet before our very eyes a different pact is being signed, one between the secular European and the religious Muslim. The modern day pact has much in common with the pact of old, both set out to dominate the world with their values and both seek to destroy the souls of all mankind and destroy all the diverse communities, which have souls, that inhabit the world. The difference is that whereas the Soviets and Nazis used force of arms, the modern axis of Euro-Islam penetrates us through ideas and through procreation, killing us from above through the mind (murdering the spirit, shackling the mind) and from below.
The latest example of the alliance is a Swedish newspaper which published accounts of Israelis supposedly stealing Palestinian organs. The collaborator, a European journalist and his Muslim source. But its just the tip of the iceberg. In addition there is the International Criminal Court and the entire European justice system. At the ICC men who defended their nations, such as Slobodan Milosevic, never get their day in court but rot in prison until they die. But the Libyan Lockerbie bomber and former Nazis walk free. This is part and parcel of the alliance.
Consider the conflict over the Mohammed cartoons. A Danish newspaper publishes cartoons of Mohammed. In response the Arab press in Europe and abroad publishes cartoons against Jews, denying the Holocaust, a Holocaust that the Europeans themselves perpetrated. One of those groups who published Holocaust denial cartoons was the Arab European League. The European press expands on this war against the Jews in a variety of ways. The major Swedish daily Aftonbladet publishes stories about Israel harvesting Palestinian organs to sell. Then in September the Spanish daily El Monde, to commemorate 70 years since the outbreak of WWII publishes David Irving, the Holocaust denier, as part of its “free speech” discussion of whether the Holocaust actually took place, a Holocaust the Spanish actually collaborated in by providing aid and shelter to the Nazis during and after the war. In addition the UN, a European funded organization, does not teach about the Holocaust in the schools in runs in Gaza. And in England the Holocaust is no longer taught in several schools because it might “offend” the Muslim students that England has imported over the years. And loe and behold Mr. Irving is invited to the Oxford Student Union debating society as part of its “free speech” agenda.
This is Europe. Europe commits the Holocaust, then imports Muslims to draw cartoons denying it and then in the name of the theory of “free speech” the European publishes articles denying the Holocaust and claiming Jews harvest organs for sale. Europe is a cesspool and in its spiritual sewer it allies itself with Islamism.
Other recent examples of the European alliance with Islam include a NATO admiral blaming Israel for piracy, the Norwegian government divesting from Israel’s Elbit company, and the latest book by a Norwegian author in which he volunteered at a Gaza hospital and reports that Israel murdered only civilians in its war in Gaza, the Norwegian “doctor” also claims that Sept. 11 was a good thing. This is the face of the European. It is the face of Holocaust denial posing as free speech, support for terrorism (i.e the release of the lockerbie bomber) and racism and anti-semitism in general in which Europeans ally with Muslim regimes in their war against the world.
The revelation of the broad spectrum of European hatred shows the degree to which the ‘West’ is a myth. There is nothing European worth preserving in Europe. There are no secular-humanistic “progressive” values in Europe that anyone can learn from. It is a tainted continent, poisoned. Only when its individual peoples throw off the yoke of Europeanism, secularism and Islamism can it emerge from its immoral, self-hating, Islamist-supporting, terror-nurturing, America-hating, Arrogant self obsessed value-less cesspool.
Seth J. Frantzman
September 1, 2009
With seventy years having past since the Nazi-Soviet pact the world is watching as Putin is attempting to re-write the history of that pact. Yet before our very eyes a different pact is being signed, one between the secular European and the religious Muslim. The modern day pact has much in common with the pact of old, both set out to dominate the world with their values and both seek to destroy the souls of all mankind and destroy all the diverse communities, which have souls, that inhabit the world. The difference is that whereas the Soviets and Nazis used force of arms, the modern axis of Euro-Islam penetrates us through ideas and through procreation, killing us from above through the mind (murdering the spirit, shackling the mind) and from below.
The latest example of the alliance is a Swedish newspaper which published accounts of Israelis supposedly stealing Palestinian organs. The collaborator, a European journalist and his Muslim source. But its just the tip of the iceberg. In addition there is the International Criminal Court and the entire European justice system. At the ICC men who defended their nations, such as Slobodan Milosevic, never get their day in court but rot in prison until they die. But the Libyan Lockerbie bomber and former Nazis walk free. This is part and parcel of the alliance.
Consider the conflict over the Mohammed cartoons. A Danish newspaper publishes cartoons of Mohammed. In response the Arab press in Europe and abroad publishes cartoons against Jews, denying the Holocaust, a Holocaust that the Europeans themselves perpetrated. One of those groups who published Holocaust denial cartoons was the Arab European League. The European press expands on this war against the Jews in a variety of ways. The major Swedish daily Aftonbladet publishes stories about Israel harvesting Palestinian organs to sell. Then in September the Spanish daily El Monde, to commemorate 70 years since the outbreak of WWII publishes David Irving, the Holocaust denier, as part of its “free speech” discussion of whether the Holocaust actually took place, a Holocaust the Spanish actually collaborated in by providing aid and shelter to the Nazis during and after the war. In addition the UN, a European funded organization, does not teach about the Holocaust in the schools in runs in Gaza. And in England the Holocaust is no longer taught in several schools because it might “offend” the Muslim students that England has imported over the years. And loe and behold Mr. Irving is invited to the Oxford Student Union debating society as part of its “free speech” agenda.
This is Europe. Europe commits the Holocaust, then imports Muslims to draw cartoons denying it and then in the name of the theory of “free speech” the European publishes articles denying the Holocaust and claiming Jews harvest organs for sale. Europe is a cesspool and in its spiritual sewer it allies itself with Islamism.
Other recent examples of the European alliance with Islam include a NATO admiral blaming Israel for piracy, the Norwegian government divesting from Israel’s Elbit company, and the latest book by a Norwegian author in which he volunteered at a Gaza hospital and reports that Israel murdered only civilians in its war in Gaza, the Norwegian “doctor” also claims that Sept. 11 was a good thing. This is the face of the European. It is the face of Holocaust denial posing as free speech, support for terrorism (i.e the release of the lockerbie bomber) and racism and anti-semitism in general in which Europeans ally with Muslim regimes in their war against the world.
The revelation of the broad spectrum of European hatred shows the degree to which the ‘West’ is a myth. There is nothing European worth preserving in Europe. There are no secular-humanistic “progressive” values in Europe that anyone can learn from. It is a tainted continent, poisoned. Only when its individual peoples throw off the yoke of Europeanism, secularism and Islamism can it emerge from its immoral, self-hating, Islamist-supporting, terror-nurturing, America-hating, Arrogant self obsessed value-less cesspool.
Terra Incognita 97 part 2
How to Make a black under class
Seth J. Frantzman
Sept. 6, 2009
Every once in a while in life a person with given the chance to watch the creation of a problem from its inception. Every once in a while one is given the chance to witness an ideology that will lead to terrible outcomes. In Israel it seems one gets a chance to witness these things more often than one would like. The situation brooding in Tel Aviv with foreign workers and immigrants. We know where that will end up; ethnic riots, crime, prostitution, drug use, human rights whining and the creation of a vast foreign worker slum. The Bedouin villages in the Negev, we all know where that is going; the conquest of the land by lawless nomads because the state is unwilling to enforce its own laws and guard its own lands. The teaching of the “Nakhba” and the allowance of Arabs not to sing the national anthem in Arab schools in Israel; will lead to the creation of an Israel-hating minority population completely unconnected to the country and its history.
But what concerns us here is not these, probably more dire, problems. What if one could go back in time to witness the creation of the American black underclass and its inability to succeed and its increasing cultural problems that make its success less and less likely rather than more and more. What if one could go back in time to find the fountainhead, the find the well meaning leftist mentality that led to the separating of the blacks from the American way of life to the extent that all other minority groups, no matter how poor or how different, have succeeded to a greater extent economically and culturally. What if one could go back and find the problem and set right what once went wrong?
In Israel we get to witness the well meaning racist leftist views that will eventually lead to the creation of a black Ethiopian underclass and destroy a once proud people, the Ethiopians. What is interesting is that the creation of a black underclass does not happen because people are poor and savage. Most people are convinced that the creation of such an underclass is directly because of the poor and tragic circumstances from which the blacks were derived; i.e slavery in the U.S and immigration from a pre-modern rural nation in Israel. But in fact this is not the case. Left to their own devices and untouched by the leftist and the well meaning liberal these people would not necessarily succeed greatly but they would also not become trapped in a cycle of failure.
It is the creation of the cycle, the mechanism, the organism, of failure, an entire system designed to perpetuate poverty, cultural problems, whining, complaining, chip-on-the-shoulder, “I can’t succeed”, which comes about because of the intervention of the well meaning leftist. TO see how it is created, to see the fountainhead of it, we must go no further than Shlomo Goren’s article in the Jerusalem Post on September 6th, 2009.
Goren is writing about the enrollment of Ethiopian children in first grade in a prestigious semi-private school in the Israeli town of Petah Tikva. He speaks about Ethiopian children “fresh from the absorption center wish little to know basic education.” It would be interesting to know, since these are first graders, what “basic education” their non-Ethiopian peers supposedly have that makes them better? Did they learn to breast feed faster when they were babies? But Goren informs us that these savage Ethiopians can’t possibly be expected to “successfully integrate” in a “high achieving, high pressure” school environment. Mr. Goren’s evidence is that he himself once knew a black student and that student was a “troublemaker.” But Goren adds a caveat, he has known a few of those black faced individuals who have achieved, they were, amazingly given their black skin, “integrate well enough to succeed in high level academic institutions.” Their success should be something for the history book surely, after all they are not expected to do so well, and what on earth are they doing infiltrating the elite preserve of a “high level academic institution?”
Goren explains that “Ethiopian integration is a slower process than that of other immigrations.” Therefore they need “system prepared to accept anyone who is ready in an unbiased manner.” What they need is “separate tutoring.” But this separate tutoring is aimed at “helping those students rise up to the level of their peers.” But for Goren it is all with good intentions. He notes that this separate system will help “the students acclimate at their own pace.” Goren himself has volunteered in these segregated settings to teach the bushmen, to wit Ethiopians, to learn to chop wood, or whatever rudimentary lesson they are learning to prepare them for the “proper integration at their own pace. “Integration” is the center piece of the Goren narrative. In order to “integrate” them we must educate them separately and given them all sorts of separate special help. Surely, this makes them feel integrated. Goren provides yet one more nugget of insight into “integration” at the end of his diatribe; he argues that they need to “integrate at a healthy and productive pace, albeit a slower one than today's ‘instant’ culture.”
The Goren thesis is the liberal-leftist thesis. The idea is that in order to help people we must give them all sorts of special help, this supposedly helps them feel a part of society, even while they are entirely educated with people like them, and supposedly prepares them to “succeed at their own pace.” But this coddling leads to failure. Much like bi-lingual education created generations of Hispanic Americans who couldn’t speak English or Spanish, the coddling creates a generation of failure, a generation used to being educated together, never exposed to the “other” and one that then fails completely. Liberalism strangles minorities through its good intentions, through its interest in “helping” people. If you want people to fail give them affirmative action. If you want them to fail then educated them at “their own pace” and in their own language. Make exceptions for them, give them all sorts of special programs, just for them and then ask them to be like everyone else. Educating failure is what happens when, rather than expecting the best out of people in a high pressure learning environment, you set them aside and provide them a special learning environment and then after years of this slovenly behavior throw them into society and say “oh, whoops they failed and sunk to the bottom.”
Goren speaks of saddling the Ethiopians with a “system”. The last thing they need is a system and the last thing they need is the Gorens of the world “helping” them and tutoring them. Helping people is a ticket to failure. If you want to destroy a community just provide it with help and assistance, make it dependent, tell it that it learns at “its own pace”. Racists could not have dreamed up any better system to destroy minority groups, perhaps in fact that is what it is all about, racist leftists want to create a system that is self-perpetuating so that the well meaning liberal and his children will always have a job “helping” the savage minority rather than being displaced by him. In Israel the first generation of Ethiopian immigrants succeeded beyond most people’s dreams, and yet now society sees them receiving a few PhDs and says “oh my God, these people might take my job one day, give them a system to keep them down there in the gutter where they belong so I can keep teaching about ‘racism.’” After all, is not racism and the need for it in society primarily grist for the mill of the left, an entire industry that keeps wealthy leftists and their children in riding britches?
Seth J. Frantzman
Sept. 6, 2009
Every once in a while in life a person with given the chance to watch the creation of a problem from its inception. Every once in a while one is given the chance to witness an ideology that will lead to terrible outcomes. In Israel it seems one gets a chance to witness these things more often than one would like. The situation brooding in Tel Aviv with foreign workers and immigrants. We know where that will end up; ethnic riots, crime, prostitution, drug use, human rights whining and the creation of a vast foreign worker slum. The Bedouin villages in the Negev, we all know where that is going; the conquest of the land by lawless nomads because the state is unwilling to enforce its own laws and guard its own lands. The teaching of the “Nakhba” and the allowance of Arabs not to sing the national anthem in Arab schools in Israel; will lead to the creation of an Israel-hating minority population completely unconnected to the country and its history.
But what concerns us here is not these, probably more dire, problems. What if one could go back in time to witness the creation of the American black underclass and its inability to succeed and its increasing cultural problems that make its success less and less likely rather than more and more. What if one could go back in time to find the fountainhead, the find the well meaning leftist mentality that led to the separating of the blacks from the American way of life to the extent that all other minority groups, no matter how poor or how different, have succeeded to a greater extent economically and culturally. What if one could go back and find the problem and set right what once went wrong?
In Israel we get to witness the well meaning racist leftist views that will eventually lead to the creation of a black Ethiopian underclass and destroy a once proud people, the Ethiopians. What is interesting is that the creation of a black underclass does not happen because people are poor and savage. Most people are convinced that the creation of such an underclass is directly because of the poor and tragic circumstances from which the blacks were derived; i.e slavery in the U.S and immigration from a pre-modern rural nation in Israel. But in fact this is not the case. Left to their own devices and untouched by the leftist and the well meaning liberal these people would not necessarily succeed greatly but they would also not become trapped in a cycle of failure.
It is the creation of the cycle, the mechanism, the organism, of failure, an entire system designed to perpetuate poverty, cultural problems, whining, complaining, chip-on-the-shoulder, “I can’t succeed”, which comes about because of the intervention of the well meaning leftist. TO see how it is created, to see the fountainhead of it, we must go no further than Shlomo Goren’s article in the Jerusalem Post on September 6th, 2009.
Goren is writing about the enrollment of Ethiopian children in first grade in a prestigious semi-private school in the Israeli town of Petah Tikva. He speaks about Ethiopian children “fresh from the absorption center wish little to know basic education.” It would be interesting to know, since these are first graders, what “basic education” their non-Ethiopian peers supposedly have that makes them better? Did they learn to breast feed faster when they were babies? But Goren informs us that these savage Ethiopians can’t possibly be expected to “successfully integrate” in a “high achieving, high pressure” school environment. Mr. Goren’s evidence is that he himself once knew a black student and that student was a “troublemaker.” But Goren adds a caveat, he has known a few of those black faced individuals who have achieved, they were, amazingly given their black skin, “integrate well enough to succeed in high level academic institutions.” Their success should be something for the history book surely, after all they are not expected to do so well, and what on earth are they doing infiltrating the elite preserve of a “high level academic institution?”
Goren explains that “Ethiopian integration is a slower process than that of other immigrations.” Therefore they need “system prepared to accept anyone who is ready in an unbiased manner.” What they need is “separate tutoring.” But this separate tutoring is aimed at “helping those students rise up to the level of their peers.” But for Goren it is all with good intentions. He notes that this separate system will help “the students acclimate at their own pace.” Goren himself has volunteered in these segregated settings to teach the bushmen, to wit Ethiopians, to learn to chop wood, or whatever rudimentary lesson they are learning to prepare them for the “proper integration at their own pace. “Integration” is the center piece of the Goren narrative. In order to “integrate” them we must educate them separately and given them all sorts of separate special help. Surely, this makes them feel integrated. Goren provides yet one more nugget of insight into “integration” at the end of his diatribe; he argues that they need to “integrate at a healthy and productive pace, albeit a slower one than today's ‘instant’ culture.”
The Goren thesis is the liberal-leftist thesis. The idea is that in order to help people we must give them all sorts of special help, this supposedly helps them feel a part of society, even while they are entirely educated with people like them, and supposedly prepares them to “succeed at their own pace.” But this coddling leads to failure. Much like bi-lingual education created generations of Hispanic Americans who couldn’t speak English or Spanish, the coddling creates a generation of failure, a generation used to being educated together, never exposed to the “other” and one that then fails completely. Liberalism strangles minorities through its good intentions, through its interest in “helping” people. If you want people to fail give them affirmative action. If you want them to fail then educated them at “their own pace” and in their own language. Make exceptions for them, give them all sorts of special programs, just for them and then ask them to be like everyone else. Educating failure is what happens when, rather than expecting the best out of people in a high pressure learning environment, you set them aside and provide them a special learning environment and then after years of this slovenly behavior throw them into society and say “oh, whoops they failed and sunk to the bottom.”
Goren speaks of saddling the Ethiopians with a “system”. The last thing they need is a system and the last thing they need is the Gorens of the world “helping” them and tutoring them. Helping people is a ticket to failure. If you want to destroy a community just provide it with help and assistance, make it dependent, tell it that it learns at “its own pace”. Racists could not have dreamed up any better system to destroy minority groups, perhaps in fact that is what it is all about, racist leftists want to create a system that is self-perpetuating so that the well meaning liberal and his children will always have a job “helping” the savage minority rather than being displaced by him. In Israel the first generation of Ethiopian immigrants succeeded beyond most people’s dreams, and yet now society sees them receiving a few PhDs and says “oh my God, these people might take my job one day, give them a system to keep them down there in the gutter where they belong so I can keep teaching about ‘racism.’” After all, is not racism and the need for it in society primarily grist for the mill of the left, an entire industry that keeps wealthy leftists and their children in riding britches?
Terra Incognita 97 Caster Semanya, underclasses and the Euro-Islamist alliance part1
Liberalism and Caster Semanya
Seth J. Frantzman
September 13, 2009
In July of 2009 South African Caster Semanya was seemingly on track to become a phenomenal runner. The 18 year old was beating her own best times again and again. In August she won the 800 meter at the World Athletic Championship in Berlin. Then questions began to be asked about the competitor’s gender. The International Association of Athletics Federations decided to order the athlete to submit to a wide variety of gender tests. Nick Davies of the IAAF noted that “There is chromosome testing, gynecological investigation, all manner of things, organs, X-rays, scans. … It’s very, very comprehensive.”
South African sports officials proudly defended their native son. One sports minister threatened a war over the accusations. Leaonard Chuene, President of Athletics South Africa claimed; “you denounce my child as a boy when she’s a girl? If you did that to my child, I’d shoot you.” This might not be so un-typical in a country whose President once had a song written about him entitled “Bring me my machine gun.” But actually there seems something touching about a nation defending the honour of one of its own against the invasive prodding of obnoxious sports scientists.
What is not touching is that liberalism has sunk its fangs into the case of Ms. Semanya. If Semanya is being raped once by the IAAF it turns out that the post-humanists want seconds. Kai Wright, writing at the online magazine The Root, decided that the Semanya case was not merely racist but was also raised questions about gender. She noted that the case was really about “Western culture’s desperate, frightened effort to maintain the fiction of binary, fixed gender.” Wight claimed that Semanya’s “Humanity” had been sacrificed to western culture and “science” which Wight puts in quotes, as if here is no such thing. Wight also speaks of “white folks imposing their self-centered notions of feminity, once again.” According to Wight the runner “could be both [boy and girl]. And who cares? It happens. Our social certainty about the male-female divide is not supported by biology.” Consider that the author of this polemic has questioned “science” when dealing with gender testing rules but here we now must bow down to what “biology” tells us about the difference between men and women.
One liberal biology professor was quoted by Wight as saying “humans like categories neat, but nature is a slob.” As evidence of this Wight notes that “People have large, protruding clitorises; scrotums divided such that they look like labia; inactive hormone receptors and on and on.” Furthermore supposedly one in 2,000 children are born with similar issues and must have “cruel” plastic surgery to “correct perfectly natural variations.” Supposedly people are “mutilated to fit comfortably inside our mythical gender boxes.” As evidence of the evil of gender testing in sports Ms. Wight notes that men are not subjected to gender to tests. The claim is counter-intuitive. Gender tests exist to keep men out of women’s sports. Ms. Wight seems to forget that rarely do women try to sneak into male events and compete as men, anyway if they do they don’t win against males in such things as running, so there is no suspicion that Usain Bolt, the fastest man in the world, is in fact a woman. Its unfortunate that women athletes are sometimes humiliated in this manner, but it is because there must be a line drawn in sports as to what a “man” and “woman” is, and its not as simple, apparently, as having them drop their shorts.
But that’s not the point here. Wight tells us that this whole thing is due to the West and its fake concepts of male and female. Wight is part of the liberal parthenon that always tells us that other cultures are better than the “West.” So the West, which liberalism has been attempting to make gender-neutral (i.e that there is no difference in dress, in work, in rights or even in appearance of men and women) for decades. And they have suceeded. Many women in the West look like men and men have become increasingly effeminate. Yet the West is still condemned for its “desperate, frightened effort to maintain the fiction of binary, fixed gender” But if this is what the “West” is doing than that implies that in the East they have no such issues with women who are not women, women with both sets of genitalia or women without wombs (as Semanya apparently has been shown to lack.) Is Wight kidding. Like all liberals she fantisizes about an Islam that is gender nuetral where the Burka is part of “women’s liberation” and the veil is part of “empowerment”. Like Michel Faucault who condemned the west for not accepting his gayness, the liberal believes that the other countries are open to homosexuality and transvestites and hermaphodites and all manner of sexual difference. Unfortunatly none of the myths are true. The East tends to know what a woman is better than the West, rather than blurring the lines between the two as Wight would have us believe, women are more defined as pronounced as women. But liberalism would have us believe that it is the “white folks imposing their notion of femininity.” Hardly. I recently witnessed some Europeans travelling to a museum in Israel. Its not clear what scandanvaian or Low country they were from but the men were all effeminate and weak and the women were tall, mannish and all had short cropped hair, like boys. It is the whites who blurred the gender lines, not the coloured folk of the earth. It is people like Ms. Wight who made it so we can’t determine what a man and a woman are anymore.
And Ms. Wight is not even correct about biology. Nature is not a “slob”. Like all things that create it does a pretty good job creating neat categories while producing minor deviations within the grand scheme. Most women have all the sexual organs of a woman and most men do as well. Its not as if thirty percent of all women are born without wombs and have testosterone levels equal to men, if that were the case than the human race would’nt reproduce successfully. Most people don’t have “both genitalia”. Most have just one, despite the fantasies of the post-humanists who would love a world without sex or gender. We didn’t create a fake binary defnition, rather we are used to seeing on a daily basis the normative sexual creations of nature (i.e women with breasts and so on and men with penises and so on). All of the other variations are not the norm. 1 in 2000 is not the norm. If one out of 2,000 times you saw a dog it bit you would you say “we should dis-abuse ourselves of this normative notion that most dogs don’t bite”?
But liberalism wasn’t done with Ms. Semenya. A New York Times editorial by Mark Gevisser positioned her story amidst South Africa’s past and her politics of ‘angst.’ Gevisser noted the angry reaction of South Africans to questions about their athelete’s sex. The A.N.C. youth leader Julius Malema called sex testing a “racist attack on a beautiful woman,” and Leonard Chuene, asked: “Who are white people to question the makeup of an African girl?” He also said that they should not “allow Europeans to define how our children should look ...” Indeed, if they allow the Europeans to get their hands on African women the women will come out flat chested, secular, lesbian and self hating, the only thing they will have in common with South African women is that they will find black men sexually appealing.
Mr. Gevisser calls the defense of Semenya by athletic officials “jingoism.” And we can’t have jingoism in our pristine self hating world. The word “normative” which is a favorite of the post-humanist writers finds its way into Gevisser’s critique just as it did Wights; “How, in a macho culture that accepts such behavior as normative, does one entrench the values of dignity and privacy that Mr. Zuma himself lauded when he welcomed Ms. Semenya home?” So now a different liberal is condemning South Africa for being too macho, the opposite of Wight’s accusation that it was the macho west determining the sex of the gender neutral Africans? Mr. Gevisser’s commentary, which is hard to follow, concludes that “compels us all to ask tough questions about how we understand the old binary oppositions of masculinity and femininity.”
Mr. Gevisser insinuates that Semanya is the victim of “cruel experimentation” by her formerly East German coach who once worked as some sort of evil German scientist in an old 007 movie. He insinuates that she was slipped some sort of anabolic steroid cocktail and that she was therefore turned into a modern day Sarah Baartman, “the ‘Hottentot Venus’ of the early 19th century, a singer and dancer of the Khoi people who was born into slavery and brought over to Europe by impressarios who put her on public display because of her unusually large [compared to the West European woman who has unusually small] buttocks and genitals.”
Are the post-humanists kidding themselves? First we are told that it is a white-male western conspiracy about normative binary sexual categories that harmed Semanya. Then we are told that she is part of an evil German scientific plot at cruel experimentation, akin to some sort of 19th century racist carnival freak show. In fact the story is much simpler. Semanya won a race. Someone on some committee decided she was too good and that she didn’t look much like a woman. She was subjected to tests. The results of the tests have not been released but rumours show that they determined she has “male and female sex organs - but no womb.” Now the question will be what the rules of the IAAF say determines what a “woman” is and whether she will compete more and keep her medals. Such is life. Its not racism. Its not the West forcing anything on South Africa. Its not the West determining what women should look like or what “normative” gender is.
Seth J. Frantzman
September 13, 2009
In July of 2009 South African Caster Semanya was seemingly on track to become a phenomenal runner. The 18 year old was beating her own best times again and again. In August she won the 800 meter at the World Athletic Championship in Berlin. Then questions began to be asked about the competitor’s gender. The International Association of Athletics Federations decided to order the athlete to submit to a wide variety of gender tests. Nick Davies of the IAAF noted that “There is chromosome testing, gynecological investigation, all manner of things, organs, X-rays, scans. … It’s very, very comprehensive.”
South African sports officials proudly defended their native son. One sports minister threatened a war over the accusations. Leaonard Chuene, President of Athletics South Africa claimed; “you denounce my child as a boy when she’s a girl? If you did that to my child, I’d shoot you.” This might not be so un-typical in a country whose President once had a song written about him entitled “Bring me my machine gun.” But actually there seems something touching about a nation defending the honour of one of its own against the invasive prodding of obnoxious sports scientists.
What is not touching is that liberalism has sunk its fangs into the case of Ms. Semanya. If Semanya is being raped once by the IAAF it turns out that the post-humanists want seconds. Kai Wright, writing at the online magazine The Root, decided that the Semanya case was not merely racist but was also raised questions about gender. She noted that the case was really about “Western culture’s desperate, frightened effort to maintain the fiction of binary, fixed gender.” Wight claimed that Semanya’s “Humanity” had been sacrificed to western culture and “science” which Wight puts in quotes, as if here is no such thing. Wight also speaks of “white folks imposing their self-centered notions of feminity, once again.” According to Wight the runner “could be both [boy and girl]. And who cares? It happens. Our social certainty about the male-female divide is not supported by biology.” Consider that the author of this polemic has questioned “science” when dealing with gender testing rules but here we now must bow down to what “biology” tells us about the difference between men and women.
One liberal biology professor was quoted by Wight as saying “humans like categories neat, but nature is a slob.” As evidence of this Wight notes that “People have large, protruding clitorises; scrotums divided such that they look like labia; inactive hormone receptors and on and on.” Furthermore supposedly one in 2,000 children are born with similar issues and must have “cruel” plastic surgery to “correct perfectly natural variations.” Supposedly people are “mutilated to fit comfortably inside our mythical gender boxes.” As evidence of the evil of gender testing in sports Ms. Wight notes that men are not subjected to gender to tests. The claim is counter-intuitive. Gender tests exist to keep men out of women’s sports. Ms. Wight seems to forget that rarely do women try to sneak into male events and compete as men, anyway if they do they don’t win against males in such things as running, so there is no suspicion that Usain Bolt, the fastest man in the world, is in fact a woman. Its unfortunate that women athletes are sometimes humiliated in this manner, but it is because there must be a line drawn in sports as to what a “man” and “woman” is, and its not as simple, apparently, as having them drop their shorts.
But that’s not the point here. Wight tells us that this whole thing is due to the West and its fake concepts of male and female. Wight is part of the liberal parthenon that always tells us that other cultures are better than the “West.” So the West, which liberalism has been attempting to make gender-neutral (i.e that there is no difference in dress, in work, in rights or even in appearance of men and women) for decades. And they have suceeded. Many women in the West look like men and men have become increasingly effeminate. Yet the West is still condemned for its “desperate, frightened effort to maintain the fiction of binary, fixed gender” But if this is what the “West” is doing than that implies that in the East they have no such issues with women who are not women, women with both sets of genitalia or women without wombs (as Semanya apparently has been shown to lack.) Is Wight kidding. Like all liberals she fantisizes about an Islam that is gender nuetral where the Burka is part of “women’s liberation” and the veil is part of “empowerment”. Like Michel Faucault who condemned the west for not accepting his gayness, the liberal believes that the other countries are open to homosexuality and transvestites and hermaphodites and all manner of sexual difference. Unfortunatly none of the myths are true. The East tends to know what a woman is better than the West, rather than blurring the lines between the two as Wight would have us believe, women are more defined as pronounced as women. But liberalism would have us believe that it is the “white folks imposing their notion of femininity.” Hardly. I recently witnessed some Europeans travelling to a museum in Israel. Its not clear what scandanvaian or Low country they were from but the men were all effeminate and weak and the women were tall, mannish and all had short cropped hair, like boys. It is the whites who blurred the gender lines, not the coloured folk of the earth. It is people like Ms. Wight who made it so we can’t determine what a man and a woman are anymore.
And Ms. Wight is not even correct about biology. Nature is not a “slob”. Like all things that create it does a pretty good job creating neat categories while producing minor deviations within the grand scheme. Most women have all the sexual organs of a woman and most men do as well. Its not as if thirty percent of all women are born without wombs and have testosterone levels equal to men, if that were the case than the human race would’nt reproduce successfully. Most people don’t have “both genitalia”. Most have just one, despite the fantasies of the post-humanists who would love a world without sex or gender. We didn’t create a fake binary defnition, rather we are used to seeing on a daily basis the normative sexual creations of nature (i.e women with breasts and so on and men with penises and so on). All of the other variations are not the norm. 1 in 2000 is not the norm. If one out of 2,000 times you saw a dog it bit you would you say “we should dis-abuse ourselves of this normative notion that most dogs don’t bite”?
But liberalism wasn’t done with Ms. Semenya. A New York Times editorial by Mark Gevisser positioned her story amidst South Africa’s past and her politics of ‘angst.’ Gevisser noted the angry reaction of South Africans to questions about their athelete’s sex. The A.N.C. youth leader Julius Malema called sex testing a “racist attack on a beautiful woman,” and Leonard Chuene, asked: “Who are white people to question the makeup of an African girl?” He also said that they should not “allow Europeans to define how our children should look ...” Indeed, if they allow the Europeans to get their hands on African women the women will come out flat chested, secular, lesbian and self hating, the only thing they will have in common with South African women is that they will find black men sexually appealing.
Mr. Gevisser calls the defense of Semenya by athletic officials “jingoism.” And we can’t have jingoism in our pristine self hating world. The word “normative” which is a favorite of the post-humanist writers finds its way into Gevisser’s critique just as it did Wights; “How, in a macho culture that accepts such behavior as normative, does one entrench the values of dignity and privacy that Mr. Zuma himself lauded when he welcomed Ms. Semenya home?” So now a different liberal is condemning South Africa for being too macho, the opposite of Wight’s accusation that it was the macho west determining the sex of the gender neutral Africans? Mr. Gevisser’s commentary, which is hard to follow, concludes that “compels us all to ask tough questions about how we understand the old binary oppositions of masculinity and femininity.”
Mr. Gevisser insinuates that Semanya is the victim of “cruel experimentation” by her formerly East German coach who once worked as some sort of evil German scientist in an old 007 movie. He insinuates that she was slipped some sort of anabolic steroid cocktail and that she was therefore turned into a modern day Sarah Baartman, “the ‘Hottentot Venus’ of the early 19th century, a singer and dancer of the Khoi people who was born into slavery and brought over to Europe by impressarios who put her on public display because of her unusually large [compared to the West European woman who has unusually small] buttocks and genitals.”
Are the post-humanists kidding themselves? First we are told that it is a white-male western conspiracy about normative binary sexual categories that harmed Semanya. Then we are told that she is part of an evil German scientific plot at cruel experimentation, akin to some sort of 19th century racist carnival freak show. In fact the story is much simpler. Semanya won a race. Someone on some committee decided she was too good and that she didn’t look much like a woman. She was subjected to tests. The results of the tests have not been released but rumours show that they determined she has “male and female sex organs - but no womb.” Now the question will be what the rules of the IAAF say determines what a “woman” is and whether she will compete more and keep her medals. Such is life. Its not racism. Its not the West forcing anything on South Africa. Its not the West determining what women should look like or what “normative” gender is.
Monday, August 31, 2009
Terra Incognita 96 Leonard Karp, Islamism and Iran
Terra Incognita
Issue 96
“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
September 1, 2009
1) There will be no Protest For Leonard Karp: In a recent murder in Tel Aviv a man and his family were accosted by a group of young Arab Muslim men and their Jewish girlfriends. The gang proceeded to harass a father, his wife and his daughter and then beat the father to death. When he died there was no protest because Liberal secular western society is so immoral and devoid of humanity that it no longer cares for its fellow man.
2) From Gaza to Nigeria: Recently extremist Islamist cults have gotten into suicidal battles with their own governments, even in places where they already have Islamic law. It shows a growing trend of cult-radicalization in the Islamist society.
3) A Tragic Irony: No Fans of Israel: The three American hikers kidnapped by Iran should not be viewed as victims. They not only blatantly wandered around the Iranian border without a map but they have a long history of supporting and collaborating with Islamism and terrorism.
There will be no Protest For Leonard Karp
Seth J. Frantzman
August 17, 2009
There will be no protest for Leonard Karp. We don’t know much about this simple man. A resident of Petah Tikva in Israel at one time he moved from Petah Tikva to Ramat Aviv, north of Tel Aviv, when their two daughters decided to attend Tel Aviv University. We don’t know much about this man because he wasn’t a member of some special minority group. He wasn’t a homosexual. He wasn’t lynched in the American South. He was just a 59 year old Jewish man who decided to take his daughter and wife for a walk on the beach in Tel Aviv. And for that Liberalism murdered him.
There will be no protest for Leonard Karp. The life of Leonard Karp does not matter. It is a life that was not worth living. Leonard Karp was not a man in our eyes, in the eyes of the secular society from which he came. He was merely the end result of what Gideon Levy tells us is what happened when “Arabs from Jaljuliya, raise their heads and voice in social frustration.” Leonard Karp was thus what happens when social frustration takes place. His death, at the hands of 8 Arab men and two Jewish women, is due to social frustration.
There will be no protest for Leonard Karp. There was just a funeral of a few hundred people. His daughters said much about “peace.” They said “We wish that those who do good will receive good in return and that those who do bad will realize that they were wrong, repent and pay the price." Leonard Karp, this is our way, the secular society’s way, of saying goodbye. We don’t mention how you died. How your daughter was accosted by a gang of young men and their prostitute girlfriends. We don’t mention that you defended your daughter, Hila’s, honour. We don’t mention that they beat you, like an animal. We don’t mention that they chased your wife and beat her. We don’t mention that it took 8 men, 8 men at the height of their strength in their twenties to beat you, a 59 year old man, to death. We don’t mention how they took you to the water’s edge, to the pier, and they beat you and drowned you and threw you like garbage into the sea. We don’t mention that after they went back to a forest near Rosh Ha’Ayin and drank alchohol with their prostitutes who helped them and they felt no remorse. We don’t say anything like this. Because this is the West. This is the height of the progressive civilization. This is what we call modernity. We call it that because, Mr. Karp, we have no humanity.
There will be no protest for Leonard Karp. There was no protest for Caeser either when his friends stabbed him to death. Why should you expect any? When gays are shot down or African-Americans or when Arab refugees are removed from churches they occupy in Denmark, then there are protests. But Mr. Karp your skin is not black, your name is not Mohammed and you don’t have a rainbow bracelet. Oh, Mr. Karp, if only you had been a gay, if only you had converted to Islam, if only you had been a Muslim. Then they would have loved you. We would have loved you. Our society. Our culture. Our modern world. Then we would have had a great fanfare at your death. We would have remembered you like we do Rodney King or Matthew Shephard. But Karp you knew you were nothing when you got up in the morning. You meant nothing to this world, so when they beat you, treated you like garbage you should have expected it. Modern society long ago labeled you not worthy of living because long ago those who practice in our best institutions, our best intellectuals, our best and the brightest, they long ago said that you were not worth allowing to live because your life can be snapped away because of “social frustration.”
There will be no protest for Leonard Karp. Did you think your brother Ya’acov would call for revenge, or your daughters scream in the shrill screams that the Arabs have for their fallen dead? Did you think that you should have met your fate in a leftist liberal city where no one comes to the aid of another man the way they used to? The ancient law said that if a woman cries out during a rape and no one comes to her aid it is as if she did not cry out because the judges could not understand how, in a city, a woman might cry out and no one would help her. Such was the honour of the towns that when a women was assaulted the men would come to save her. But such is the dishonour we have long known in our settlements that a woman can be raped for half an hour in New York since the 1960s and not one will come. Such is the shame of the entire nation and yet every member of the nation no doubt thinks themselves innocent. But when one does not aid in the distress of the rape victim, is one not collaborating with the rapist? When one does not prevent their daughters from going out with murderers and gangs of young men who murder and harass women, is that father and mother not collaborating in the murder? When one does not fight to preserve the honour of their own daughters but allows them to go out with men who rape and abuse them, is that person not liable for the subsequent actions of their daughter and her friends?
There will be no protest for Leonard Karp. But all up and down the line society failed you Mr. Karp. It began with the Arabs in their village who society taught to be racist and sexually harass women. It was helped on its way by the Jewish prostitutes of Petah Tikva whose parents did not care for their honour. It was aided by a city of secular people who cared not about eachother. It was then allowed to continue, after your death, by your own family who did not gird their loins for revenge. And the final nail in your coffin was placed their by intellectuals who excused your death as part of “social frustration.” But Mr. Karp your death does not goo forgotten. There is within a few of us a morsel of decency who understands that you had a right to live. You had an inalieble right, a natural right. It was racism and hate and rapacious evil that took your life away. Only revenge, revenge against immorality and against the villages from whence your attackers came, can cleanse the stain of your death from the land. Alas those few who understand cannot take revenge, for it was the duty of your family to have that revenge. But we understand that it was the liberal secular society that murdered you, as much as the savage Islamist society murdered you. One held the knife and the other plunged it in. One excused the other, one enabled the other. Mr. Karp, we will protest for you, in our hearts, if not in the streets. We believe that from the failure that is the secular Western world, the greatest failure that the world ever produced, the greatest promise and the greatest let down, that through its failure will come a better world. A world in which Mr. Karp might have died peacefully in his bed.
From Gaza to Nigeria
Seth J. Frantzman
August 15, 2009
The sudden and bloody fighting that broke out at a mosque in the Gaza Strip on Friday, August 14th is emblematic of a new phenomenon within the Islamist movement. From Gaza to northern Nigeria and Pakistan, throughout the Islamic world, a new type of militancy has grown up, one that involves extremist preachers, their followers begging for martyrdom, and self-destructive battles that result in their deaths, usually at the hands of fellow Muslims.
The phenomenon of extremist religious movements surrounding inspired preachers is surely not new nor confined to Islam. Revivalist Christian sects such as the Branch Davidians and their leader David Koresh have clashed with police in the U.S and in India the Sikh leader Bhindranwale led a militant independence movement that resulted in thousands of deaths. The ‘Ghost Dance’ which swept up Native American communities in 1890 was led by the Paiute prophet known as Wovoka and resulted in the Wounded Knee Massacre. The practitioners believed their special religious garments would repel bullets. A similar phenomenon occurred in China in 1900 when a religious society known as the “Boxers” produced a wave of anti-Western militancy led by men who believed their devotion could protect them from bullets. Their movement was destroyed by the intervention of European armies.
A minority Muslim sect known as the Isma’ilis produced a radical sect known as the Assassins who spent the 11th and 12th centuries harassing and murdering Muslim and Christian leaders in the Middle East before being exterminated by the Mongols in 1256. In Israel’s War of Independence in 1948 an extremist Muslim Brotherhood unit wearing supposedly protective garments stormed Jewish Kfar Darom in Gaza resulting in the deaths of most of its members who had travelled from North Africa (Kfar Darom fell to the Egyptian army soon after). Indonesia has been stricken by Islamist revival movements since the 19th century, partly sparked, oddly, by the Krakatoa eruption of 1883, which today manifest themselves in the groups like Darul Islam and Jemaah Islamiyah.
Islamism it seems is beginning to produce more and more radical fringe movements that, far from being part of a unifying umbrella as Al Quieda intended, are “linked to Al Quieda” but succeed mostly in fighting Muslim governments and destroying themselves as well as civilians located near their mosques. The July 2007 Siege of the Red Mosque (Lal Masjid) was one such example. It was Led by brothers Maulana Abdul Aziz and Abdul Rashid Ghazi, sons of a radical preacher named Maulana Qari Abdullah who founded the Mosque in 1965. A series of escalating incidents led to an 8 day siege of the mosque in which 11 Pakistani special forces, 84 Mosque members and 14 civilians were killed.
On July 31, 2009, following days of fighting, Mohammed Yusuf of the Boko Haram sect was killed in northern Nigeria. His sect had launched a series of attacks on police stations, churches, and government offices in several northern Nigerian states. More than 200 people died before the army launched an assault on the organization’s mosque, capturing Yusuf who later died in custody.
But the most famous example of an extremist Islamist uprising is the siege of Mecca, so well documented in a recent book, The Siege of Mecca, by Yasoslav Trofimov. On November 20, 1979 some five hundred armed followers of Juhaiman ibn Muhammad ibn Saif al Utaibi, a member of a leading Saudi family, invaded the Grand Mosque in Mecca. A siege lasted 14 days during which 250 militants and 130 Saudi national guardsmen were killed. The leader of the group was later beheaded, along with 67 of his followers.
Then suddenly in the afternoon hours of August 14th, 2009 word came out of Gaza of a gun battle between radical Islamists who had proclaimed a caliphate and members of Hamas, which controls the Gaza strip. Some 100 members of Jund Ansar Allah led by Abdel-Latif Moussa, a radical preacher at the Ibn Taymiyah mosque, were confronted by Hamas security forces that surrounded the Mosque and a shootout developed. Initial reports claim up to 24 people died including six Hamas police officers and one civilian. The leader of the group reportedly blew himself up.
All of these examples point to a trend in Islamism. It was once thought that Islamists primarily viewed themselves at war with secular Muslim regimes. That later morphed into Al Quieda, which viewed itself as being at war with the entire non-Muslim world, inspiring movements from China to the Balkans. But now Islamists are turning on eachother. The BBC described the situation, in a tongue in cheek manner, as one group “accusing the Islamist group of not being Islamist enough.”
The one thing that unites all of these events is disappointment with unfulfilled Islamist government, guns, mosques and preachers who seek to revive an Islamic past, whether the Mahdi, as in Saudi Arabia’s siege, or the Caliphate, as in Gaza. A secondary problem is that it makes pernicious tyrannical government’s such as Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Gaza’s Hamas seem more benign because they are “fighting terrorism” or “they too are threatened by extremists.” In fact their support, or in the case of Nigeria, the appeasement, of Islamism helps breed further radicalism.
A Tragic Irony: No Fans of Israel
August 8th, 2009
Seth J. Frantzman
An analysis of the writings and photography of three Jewish Americans being held captive in Iran shows that one of them was a radical anti-Israel critic. On August 1st three Americans went missing in the mountains of Kurdistan. There had been four of them travelling and submitting articles for publication in Western and other media outlets. On July 31st Shon Meckfessel stayed behind in Sulaimania while Sarah Shourd, Josh Fattal and Shane Bauer went for a trip to a nearby town called Ahmed Awa. According to Shon they had no idea that Ahmad Awa was near the border with Iran; “not one of these people mentioned that Ahmed Awa was anywhere near the Iranian border.” There was no Lonely Planet for Iraqi Kurdistan and they couldn’t find it on the map they had. So three of them set off while the fourth stayed home sick.
The next day one of them phoned to say they were being taken into custody by Iranian border guards. On August 9th it was confirmed by Iran that they were being held. But the three “hikers” were not ordinary hiking enthusiasts. They were well heeled journalists. Joshua Fattal was a contributor to the Jewish Week. Shane Bauer, the most prolific, had recently been in Syria, Ethiopia and Sudan doing investigative and photojournalism. Shane has spent the last six years in the Middle East and Africa and his writings have appears in the L.A Times, Christian Science Monitor, Al Aljazeera, New American Media, Democracy Now! and elsewhere. He has also written for left wing American media outlets such as The Nation and Mother Jones.
Like Shane the other two hikers were Jewish and Joshua Fattal has contributed to the Jewish Week. The Vanguard News Network, a neo-nazi online forum noted that “maybe they were spying. They worked in journalism. That is a jew infested industry.” Angry hate-filled posts about the three followed. It seems that Iran, at least officially, believes the same thing and wishes to use the three as yet another state-sponsored unlawful hostage taking bargaining chip with the West.
But the connection of two of the journalists to Israel is worth mentioning. Shane has a photo on his website about the country titled “Neo-Nazi in Tel Aviv” taken on July 1, 2009. The photo shows an African woman and child in the foreground, but in the background is a woman with a three pronged swastika, which is usually used as a symbol by Afrikaner nationalists. The photojournalist, Mr. Bauer, might have pointed out the irony of the Afrikaner symbol next to the black woman and child on the streets of Tel Aviv. But instead he seemed to be wanting to say something more, something negative about Israel. It wasn’t titled “African woman in Tel Aviv.”
While Bauer and Fattal don’t appear to have written much about Israel, Sarah Shourd has written numerous malicious things praising Syria and condemning Israel. She identifies herself as “teacher-activist-writer from California currently based in the Middle East. She loves fresh broccoli, Zapatistas [a radical leftist anti-Government insurgency in Mexico] and anyone who can change her mind.” On her website (http://unfetteredeyes.wordpress.com) she wears a khaffiya proudly and praises anti-Israel documentaries such as ‘Palestinian Blues’, ‘Leila Khaled: Hijacker’ and ‘Occupation 101’.
A May 3, 2009 post on her blog notes “It’s been more than 4 months since the Israeli Massacre in Gaza.” Shourd speaks of Hamas winning “what many consider to be the first truly democratic election in the Middle East.” Apparently Israel is not in the Middle East. Gaza is “one of the most populated places in the world.” She apparently means by population density. She speaks of how Israel is “killing resistance” and “all our love for Gaza.”
She mocks the Western perception of Syria; “The hazy sketch of Syria we get in U.S. becomes progressively more hazy as to almost loose all definition once you are here. Dangerous? Conservative? Anti-American? Oppressive to women? Backwards? Extremist? It’s not nearly as simplistic as that.” It is perhaps ironic because only last month Syria changed a law regarding honor killings of women which had made the maximum sentence for men accused of murdering their female relatives only one year. Now the minimum is two years. She explains that “Large, reassuring shots of President Al-Assad adorn almost every shop window in Damascus.” Shourd mentions that in Yemen “many Yemenis have challenged me, saying my analysis falls short. They say that I am too apologetic towards the terrorists, framing them as victims rather than the perpetrators.”
It is perhaps an irony that Bauer and Shourd were arrested hiking in the Kurdish hills. Is there a difference between the perception of Israel by Iran and its president and that of Shourd? Whatever the case the Israel connection is there. We can only hope the experience of these three in custody will change their opinion of Israel or Gaza. But for now Mr. Bauer’s Israel will only be the “Neo-Nazi in Tel Aviv” and for Shourd Israel will only be the country that massacres and places people in giant prisons.
Issue 96
“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
September 1, 2009
1) There will be no Protest For Leonard Karp: In a recent murder in Tel Aviv a man and his family were accosted by a group of young Arab Muslim men and their Jewish girlfriends. The gang proceeded to harass a father, his wife and his daughter and then beat the father to death. When he died there was no protest because Liberal secular western society is so immoral and devoid of humanity that it no longer cares for its fellow man.
2) From Gaza to Nigeria: Recently extremist Islamist cults have gotten into suicidal battles with their own governments, even in places where they already have Islamic law. It shows a growing trend of cult-radicalization in the Islamist society.
3) A Tragic Irony: No Fans of Israel: The three American hikers kidnapped by Iran should not be viewed as victims. They not only blatantly wandered around the Iranian border without a map but they have a long history of supporting and collaborating with Islamism and terrorism.
There will be no Protest For Leonard Karp
Seth J. Frantzman
August 17, 2009
There will be no protest for Leonard Karp. We don’t know much about this simple man. A resident of Petah Tikva in Israel at one time he moved from Petah Tikva to Ramat Aviv, north of Tel Aviv, when their two daughters decided to attend Tel Aviv University. We don’t know much about this man because he wasn’t a member of some special minority group. He wasn’t a homosexual. He wasn’t lynched in the American South. He was just a 59 year old Jewish man who decided to take his daughter and wife for a walk on the beach in Tel Aviv. And for that Liberalism murdered him.
There will be no protest for Leonard Karp. The life of Leonard Karp does not matter. It is a life that was not worth living. Leonard Karp was not a man in our eyes, in the eyes of the secular society from which he came. He was merely the end result of what Gideon Levy tells us is what happened when “Arabs from Jaljuliya, raise their heads and voice in social frustration.” Leonard Karp was thus what happens when social frustration takes place. His death, at the hands of 8 Arab men and two Jewish women, is due to social frustration.
There will be no protest for Leonard Karp. There was just a funeral of a few hundred people. His daughters said much about “peace.” They said “We wish that those who do good will receive good in return and that those who do bad will realize that they were wrong, repent and pay the price." Leonard Karp, this is our way, the secular society’s way, of saying goodbye. We don’t mention how you died. How your daughter was accosted by a gang of young men and their prostitute girlfriends. We don’t mention that you defended your daughter, Hila’s, honour. We don’t mention that they beat you, like an animal. We don’t mention that they chased your wife and beat her. We don’t mention that it took 8 men, 8 men at the height of their strength in their twenties to beat you, a 59 year old man, to death. We don’t mention how they took you to the water’s edge, to the pier, and they beat you and drowned you and threw you like garbage into the sea. We don’t mention that after they went back to a forest near Rosh Ha’Ayin and drank alchohol with their prostitutes who helped them and they felt no remorse. We don’t say anything like this. Because this is the West. This is the height of the progressive civilization. This is what we call modernity. We call it that because, Mr. Karp, we have no humanity.
There will be no protest for Leonard Karp. There was no protest for Caeser either when his friends stabbed him to death. Why should you expect any? When gays are shot down or African-Americans or when Arab refugees are removed from churches they occupy in Denmark, then there are protests. But Mr. Karp your skin is not black, your name is not Mohammed and you don’t have a rainbow bracelet. Oh, Mr. Karp, if only you had been a gay, if only you had converted to Islam, if only you had been a Muslim. Then they would have loved you. We would have loved you. Our society. Our culture. Our modern world. Then we would have had a great fanfare at your death. We would have remembered you like we do Rodney King or Matthew Shephard. But Karp you knew you were nothing when you got up in the morning. You meant nothing to this world, so when they beat you, treated you like garbage you should have expected it. Modern society long ago labeled you not worthy of living because long ago those who practice in our best institutions, our best intellectuals, our best and the brightest, they long ago said that you were not worth allowing to live because your life can be snapped away because of “social frustration.”
There will be no protest for Leonard Karp. Did you think your brother Ya’acov would call for revenge, or your daughters scream in the shrill screams that the Arabs have for their fallen dead? Did you think that you should have met your fate in a leftist liberal city where no one comes to the aid of another man the way they used to? The ancient law said that if a woman cries out during a rape and no one comes to her aid it is as if she did not cry out because the judges could not understand how, in a city, a woman might cry out and no one would help her. Such was the honour of the towns that when a women was assaulted the men would come to save her. But such is the dishonour we have long known in our settlements that a woman can be raped for half an hour in New York since the 1960s and not one will come. Such is the shame of the entire nation and yet every member of the nation no doubt thinks themselves innocent. But when one does not aid in the distress of the rape victim, is one not collaborating with the rapist? When one does not prevent their daughters from going out with murderers and gangs of young men who murder and harass women, is that father and mother not collaborating in the murder? When one does not fight to preserve the honour of their own daughters but allows them to go out with men who rape and abuse them, is that person not liable for the subsequent actions of their daughter and her friends?
There will be no protest for Leonard Karp. But all up and down the line society failed you Mr. Karp. It began with the Arabs in their village who society taught to be racist and sexually harass women. It was helped on its way by the Jewish prostitutes of Petah Tikva whose parents did not care for their honour. It was aided by a city of secular people who cared not about eachother. It was then allowed to continue, after your death, by your own family who did not gird their loins for revenge. And the final nail in your coffin was placed their by intellectuals who excused your death as part of “social frustration.” But Mr. Karp your death does not goo forgotten. There is within a few of us a morsel of decency who understands that you had a right to live. You had an inalieble right, a natural right. It was racism and hate and rapacious evil that took your life away. Only revenge, revenge against immorality and against the villages from whence your attackers came, can cleanse the stain of your death from the land. Alas those few who understand cannot take revenge, for it was the duty of your family to have that revenge. But we understand that it was the liberal secular society that murdered you, as much as the savage Islamist society murdered you. One held the knife and the other plunged it in. One excused the other, one enabled the other. Mr. Karp, we will protest for you, in our hearts, if not in the streets. We believe that from the failure that is the secular Western world, the greatest failure that the world ever produced, the greatest promise and the greatest let down, that through its failure will come a better world. A world in which Mr. Karp might have died peacefully in his bed.
From Gaza to Nigeria
Seth J. Frantzman
August 15, 2009
The sudden and bloody fighting that broke out at a mosque in the Gaza Strip on Friday, August 14th is emblematic of a new phenomenon within the Islamist movement. From Gaza to northern Nigeria and Pakistan, throughout the Islamic world, a new type of militancy has grown up, one that involves extremist preachers, their followers begging for martyrdom, and self-destructive battles that result in their deaths, usually at the hands of fellow Muslims.
The phenomenon of extremist religious movements surrounding inspired preachers is surely not new nor confined to Islam. Revivalist Christian sects such as the Branch Davidians and their leader David Koresh have clashed with police in the U.S and in India the Sikh leader Bhindranwale led a militant independence movement that resulted in thousands of deaths. The ‘Ghost Dance’ which swept up Native American communities in 1890 was led by the Paiute prophet known as Wovoka and resulted in the Wounded Knee Massacre. The practitioners believed their special religious garments would repel bullets. A similar phenomenon occurred in China in 1900 when a religious society known as the “Boxers” produced a wave of anti-Western militancy led by men who believed their devotion could protect them from bullets. Their movement was destroyed by the intervention of European armies.
A minority Muslim sect known as the Isma’ilis produced a radical sect known as the Assassins who spent the 11th and 12th centuries harassing and murdering Muslim and Christian leaders in the Middle East before being exterminated by the Mongols in 1256. In Israel’s War of Independence in 1948 an extremist Muslim Brotherhood unit wearing supposedly protective garments stormed Jewish Kfar Darom in Gaza resulting in the deaths of most of its members who had travelled from North Africa (Kfar Darom fell to the Egyptian army soon after). Indonesia has been stricken by Islamist revival movements since the 19th century, partly sparked, oddly, by the Krakatoa eruption of 1883, which today manifest themselves in the groups like Darul Islam and Jemaah Islamiyah.
Islamism it seems is beginning to produce more and more radical fringe movements that, far from being part of a unifying umbrella as Al Quieda intended, are “linked to Al Quieda” but succeed mostly in fighting Muslim governments and destroying themselves as well as civilians located near their mosques. The July 2007 Siege of the Red Mosque (Lal Masjid) was one such example. It was Led by brothers Maulana Abdul Aziz and Abdul Rashid Ghazi, sons of a radical preacher named Maulana Qari Abdullah who founded the Mosque in 1965. A series of escalating incidents led to an 8 day siege of the mosque in which 11 Pakistani special forces, 84 Mosque members and 14 civilians were killed.
On July 31, 2009, following days of fighting, Mohammed Yusuf of the Boko Haram sect was killed in northern Nigeria. His sect had launched a series of attacks on police stations, churches, and government offices in several northern Nigerian states. More than 200 people died before the army launched an assault on the organization’s mosque, capturing Yusuf who later died in custody.
But the most famous example of an extremist Islamist uprising is the siege of Mecca, so well documented in a recent book, The Siege of Mecca, by Yasoslav Trofimov. On November 20, 1979 some five hundred armed followers of Juhaiman ibn Muhammad ibn Saif al Utaibi, a member of a leading Saudi family, invaded the Grand Mosque in Mecca. A siege lasted 14 days during which 250 militants and 130 Saudi national guardsmen were killed. The leader of the group was later beheaded, along with 67 of his followers.
Then suddenly in the afternoon hours of August 14th, 2009 word came out of Gaza of a gun battle between radical Islamists who had proclaimed a caliphate and members of Hamas, which controls the Gaza strip. Some 100 members of Jund Ansar Allah led by Abdel-Latif Moussa, a radical preacher at the Ibn Taymiyah mosque, were confronted by Hamas security forces that surrounded the Mosque and a shootout developed. Initial reports claim up to 24 people died including six Hamas police officers and one civilian. The leader of the group reportedly blew himself up.
All of these examples point to a trend in Islamism. It was once thought that Islamists primarily viewed themselves at war with secular Muslim regimes. That later morphed into Al Quieda, which viewed itself as being at war with the entire non-Muslim world, inspiring movements from China to the Balkans. But now Islamists are turning on eachother. The BBC described the situation, in a tongue in cheek manner, as one group “accusing the Islamist group of not being Islamist enough.”
The one thing that unites all of these events is disappointment with unfulfilled Islamist government, guns, mosques and preachers who seek to revive an Islamic past, whether the Mahdi, as in Saudi Arabia’s siege, or the Caliphate, as in Gaza. A secondary problem is that it makes pernicious tyrannical government’s such as Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Gaza’s Hamas seem more benign because they are “fighting terrorism” or “they too are threatened by extremists.” In fact their support, or in the case of Nigeria, the appeasement, of Islamism helps breed further radicalism.
A Tragic Irony: No Fans of Israel
August 8th, 2009
Seth J. Frantzman
An analysis of the writings and photography of three Jewish Americans being held captive in Iran shows that one of them was a radical anti-Israel critic. On August 1st three Americans went missing in the mountains of Kurdistan. There had been four of them travelling and submitting articles for publication in Western and other media outlets. On July 31st Shon Meckfessel stayed behind in Sulaimania while Sarah Shourd, Josh Fattal and Shane Bauer went for a trip to a nearby town called Ahmed Awa. According to Shon they had no idea that Ahmad Awa was near the border with Iran; “not one of these people mentioned that Ahmed Awa was anywhere near the Iranian border.” There was no Lonely Planet for Iraqi Kurdistan and they couldn’t find it on the map they had. So three of them set off while the fourth stayed home sick.
The next day one of them phoned to say they were being taken into custody by Iranian border guards. On August 9th it was confirmed by Iran that they were being held. But the three “hikers” were not ordinary hiking enthusiasts. They were well heeled journalists. Joshua Fattal was a contributor to the Jewish Week. Shane Bauer, the most prolific, had recently been in Syria, Ethiopia and Sudan doing investigative and photojournalism. Shane has spent the last six years in the Middle East and Africa and his writings have appears in the L.A Times, Christian Science Monitor, Al Aljazeera, New American Media, Democracy Now! and elsewhere. He has also written for left wing American media outlets such as The Nation and Mother Jones.
Like Shane the other two hikers were Jewish and Joshua Fattal has contributed to the Jewish Week. The Vanguard News Network, a neo-nazi online forum noted that “maybe they were spying. They worked in journalism. That is a jew infested industry.” Angry hate-filled posts about the three followed. It seems that Iran, at least officially, believes the same thing and wishes to use the three as yet another state-sponsored unlawful hostage taking bargaining chip with the West.
But the connection of two of the journalists to Israel is worth mentioning. Shane has a photo on his website about the country titled “Neo-Nazi in Tel Aviv” taken on July 1, 2009. The photo shows an African woman and child in the foreground, but in the background is a woman with a three pronged swastika, which is usually used as a symbol by Afrikaner nationalists. The photojournalist, Mr. Bauer, might have pointed out the irony of the Afrikaner symbol next to the black woman and child on the streets of Tel Aviv. But instead he seemed to be wanting to say something more, something negative about Israel. It wasn’t titled “African woman in Tel Aviv.”
While Bauer and Fattal don’t appear to have written much about Israel, Sarah Shourd has written numerous malicious things praising Syria and condemning Israel. She identifies herself as “teacher-activist-writer from California currently based in the Middle East. She loves fresh broccoli, Zapatistas [a radical leftist anti-Government insurgency in Mexico] and anyone who can change her mind.” On her website (http://unfetteredeyes.wordpress.com) she wears a khaffiya proudly and praises anti-Israel documentaries such as ‘Palestinian Blues’, ‘Leila Khaled: Hijacker’ and ‘Occupation 101’.
A May 3, 2009 post on her blog notes “It’s been more than 4 months since the Israeli Massacre in Gaza.” Shourd speaks of Hamas winning “what many consider to be the first truly democratic election in the Middle East.” Apparently Israel is not in the Middle East. Gaza is “one of the most populated places in the world.” She apparently means by population density. She speaks of how Israel is “killing resistance” and “all our love for Gaza.”
She mocks the Western perception of Syria; “The hazy sketch of Syria we get in U.S. becomes progressively more hazy as to almost loose all definition once you are here. Dangerous? Conservative? Anti-American? Oppressive to women? Backwards? Extremist? It’s not nearly as simplistic as that.” It is perhaps ironic because only last month Syria changed a law regarding honor killings of women which had made the maximum sentence for men accused of murdering their female relatives only one year. Now the minimum is two years. She explains that “Large, reassuring shots of President Al-Assad adorn almost every shop window in Damascus.” Shourd mentions that in Yemen “many Yemenis have challenged me, saying my analysis falls short. They say that I am too apologetic towards the terrorists, framing them as victims rather than the perpetrators.”
It is perhaps an irony that Bauer and Shourd were arrested hiking in the Kurdish hills. Is there a difference between the perception of Israel by Iran and its president and that of Shourd? Whatever the case the Israel connection is there. We can only hope the experience of these three in custody will change their opinion of Israel or Gaza. But for now Mr. Bauer’s Israel will only be the “Neo-Nazi in Tel Aviv” and for Shourd Israel will only be the country that massacres and places people in giant prisons.
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