1) The Other 300: In 480 B.C three hundred Spartans left their homes to fight the Persian army. In 2009 around 300 women, mostly from Eastern Europe, left the Gaza strip. What separates the three hundred Spartan men from the three hundred East European women. The Spartan men traded their lives to defend the freedom of their nation. The three hundred east European women traded their lives for slavery in Gaza, for Islamic servitude, for covering their hair and making babies for their husbands and their husbands’ culture. As one of them said “there is nothing for me in Ukraine.” Why did modernity create self hate and lack of love for one’s heritage and home while ancient peoples had a deep sense of love for their people and their homes and their freedom?
2) Where were they in 1939? The European Protestor carries signs declaring a ‘Palestinian Holocaust’ and saying ‘we are all Palestinians’. The insinuation is clear; the Palestinians are the new Jews and Europeans want to show their solidarity with those Jews. But why didn’t the Europeans care for the Jews that actually lived in their midst in 1939? Why weren’t they ‘all Jews’ in 1939? Why didn’t they protest the real Holocaust that they, most Europeans, created and collaborated with? Do they love the New Jews so much in order to assuage their guilt?
3) The Gaza War 2009: History and perspectives: From whence did the Gaza war spring and what are some of the perspectives on it?
The Other 300
Seth J. Frantzman
January 4th, 2009
In 480 B.C three hundred Spartan men left their homes never to return. They died at the battle of Thermopylae to prevent the Persians from invading their homeland. In early January of 2009 three hundred women and their children were allowed by Israel to flee the Gaza strip. According to reports these were "foreign born wives of Gazans…citizens of Russia, Ukraine and other nations in the former Soviet Union, women who met Gazans studying in their countries." Among the 300 there were also six Norwegian women, seven Turks and 16 Americans. It was truly an international cast, just as the Spartan contingent at Thermopylae was bolstered by Thebans and others.
What makes the 300 of 2009 different from the 300 of 480 B.C? The first difference is that the former were all men and the latter were all women and their children. But there is another difference as well. What motivated the three hundred of 480 B.C to travel far from home and risk death? What motivated the 300 of today to do the same? What were the bonds to land and nation and religion that were common to the Spartans and likewise uncommon to the women of Russia and Ukraine? What does this say about the role of modernity and freedom in people's lives?
The Spartan men left their homes because they loved them so. They understood that by leaving they would help secure a future for their children. They died because they understood that preservation of their people was more important than their individual lives. For them, their children and their women were held in the utmost esteem and they wanted their people, their community, to have a long and glorious future. They desired freedom and not slavery and thus sacrificed their lives so that others might be free.
The women of the former Soviet Union, let's call them Slavic women, left their homes out of a deep sense of disinterest in their country, their people, their heritage, their language or the future. Many people make excuses about why they would choose to leave, poverty being the most common explanation. But the poverty of Russia and Ukraine, even at its worst in the 1990s has never rivaled Gaza. The media tells us that Gaza is poor and squalid, a festering hole of humanity. Even though it is true that there are wealthy people in Gaza, it is equally true that there were always wealthy men in Russia, to which these women could have attached themselves.
The women left Russia for Gaza because of secularism, freedom and democracy. We see these things as positive. Open borders, secularism, free-markets, freedom for women and democracy are the pillars of western civilization. But is there not a strange downside to these pillars, sort of a strange sewage in which the pillars rest? The Russian women in Gaza represent the underside, the unintended consequences, of western civilization. They represent the abandonment of heritage, religion, family and self. They represent the negation of the future.
Of all the women and children fleeing Gaza not one has children who are Orthodox Christians. All of their children are Muslims. Their daughters all dutifully cover their hair as do the Slavic women. Pictures of the women tell the entire story. The covered faces of their daughters, the boys dressing as they please, the Palestinian Khaffiyas, the lily-white faces of the mothers and the swarthier faces of the children. The names tell the story. Svetlana, Natasha, Galina. But these are names without a past or a future. There is no future for Svetlana. The future for her is Mohammed, Aisha and Ahmed. None of her daughters will share in her heritage. Neither will her sons. Her sons will not be raised on Peter the Great, Cyrillic, Chekov or Lenin. Her children will be raised on Hadith, Sunna and Said Qutb.
There is something else fascinating about the 300 Svetlanas fleeing Gaza. While their culture of democracy, freedom and secularism provided them the opportunities to meet foreign men, convert to a foreign religion and travel to a poverty infested foreign place, that very freedom is quickly replaced, voluntarily, by the prison of dictatorship, religion and love of heritage and family. While Svetlana, had she continued her life in Russia, would never have wanted children and would have passed her nights drinking alcohol and not believing in God or country, suddenly transforms herself, in the foreign land and in the arms of Islam, into a god fearing, child loving, housewife whose only concern is he 'domain of women' in the house. That domain in her own country was disdained, she never desired to cook dinner for her boyfriends or, had it happened, Russian husband. But in Gaza she dutifully performs her 'duty', cleaning he house, sitting at home, fretting over the children and accepting that her husband must take more wives "so his needs can be satisfied." The western white women who would leave a man who 'cheated' on her, will, under the culture of the other, love the man who brings home a second, third and forth wife. Let the Svetlana's tell their story themselves: "the children want to ply outside…every time they run outside, your heart sinks." Let Lilia tell us about her devotion to her man; "my husband is a doctor." Let Galina tell us about her husband and family and God; "the children…thank God." For the western, educated, western women the family and god and children and the job of the husband suddenly become all-important.
It reminds one of the story of Sir James Goldsmith's daughter Jemima. At the age of 21, with all the trappings of secularism and modernity and democracy and freedom granted her she chose to marry a 42 year old Pakistani man. She dutifully converted to Islam, covered her hair and began wearing 'traditional' clothing. The former nightclubber who had no qualms wearing short skirts, going and showing plenty of skin, suddenly swathed herself in 'modest' clothing. She said that her former life in England offered nothing but "it would seem that a Western woman's happiness hinges largely upon her access to nightclubs, alcohol and revealing clothes; and the absence of such apparent freedom and luxuries in Islamic societies is seen as an infringement of her basic rights…Besides, without in any way wishing to disparage the culture of the Western world, into which I was born, I am more than willing to forego the transient pleasures derived from alcohol and nightclubs; and as for the clothes I will be wearing, I find the traditional shalwar kameez (tunic and trousers) worn by most Pakistani women far more elegant and feminine than anything in my wardrobe.(Sunday Telegraph, 1995". She became a good Muslim, giving speeches on how wonderful a religion it is and writing opeds on it; "indeed, the Sunnah - which describes the life of the Prophet - shows that the messenger of Islam himself married both a Christian and a Jew during his lifetime." She discussed the topic of women in Islam and the women's correct place: "they are strong-minded independent women - yet at the same time they remain deeply committed both to their families and their religion. Thus, I was able to see - in theory and in practice - how Islam promotes the essential notion of the family unit without subjugating its female members. "
Lets take a step back and consider this. The women is raised in the Western country, given the freedom to do as she pleases. She decides that what she values in life is family and modest dressing. Because western society does not provide her with heritage or religion or the possibility to be modest and family loving in her own environment she must seek those values elsewhere. Naturally she will raise her children with none of the freedoms she was raised with. Jemima informs us that "As it explicitly states in the Quran, a Muslim is permitted to marry from "the People of the Book" - in other words, either a Christian or a Jew." But Jemima's two children, if they were daughters, would not be allowed to marry a Christian or a Jew, because respecting her new culture she would never permit them to marry a Christian or Jewish man, who are variously described in her beloved new Hadith as 'pigs and dogs'. So the west, the freedom, creates the person who submits to the hatred of whatever culture comes along and promises a return to the base instincts, and he west thus serves as a flesh machine, supplying the other with bodies, bodies unencumbered by thoughts or heritage or faith that are like empty vases to be filled with culture and heritage, and then will be put to work birthing that newfound culture. The women in the west who has on average, 1.2 children, will suddenly blossom into a baby-making machine, having 10 children or "whatever my husband desires." That woman who would never deign to wash a dish or do 'women's work' or learn to cook, will suddenly love her 'domain' and be "committed to family." Family, that thing hated in the west, disdained as archaic, and children, those things that one rarely sees in Europe, those alien creatures to be sent off as quickly as possible to child-care so the working mother can return to work, those annoying things that keep secular man awake at night, angry at his pleasures being interrupted, those beasts that no one wants to hear crying and who people are ashamed to take anywhere lest their tantrums disturb secular man, those things suddenly become loved, a worthwhile part of society. The "family unit", far from being some exotic idea from the 16th century is suddenly at the forefront of the woman's mind.
Sometime secularism has a way of returning to the perfect Islamic marriage. Jemima's husband cheated on her voraciously. But she accepted it as an Islamic woman because "he has his needs." Imprisoned in the house of her husband and his family she later recalled "I now think, my God, I mean, how did I live five years with Imran’s whole family, who I was very close to? I mean, I really liked and respected them, but obviously, they lived very, very differently." In 2004 her husband divorced her, she was not 30 so she was too old for him and his 'needs' meant he needed a younger woman, another 21 year old. She returned to England where, becoming a secular western woman once again, after doing her Islamic duty and raising her two children as good Muslim men (i.e doing whatever they want without any responsibility, sending them to strip clubs, encouraging them to do as Mohammed did and marry a Jew and a Christian, and do as Mohammed and be with young teenage girls, trade in slaves and commit massacres of non-believers), she began clubbing again and soon took up with the notorious actor Hugh Grant. She carried on an immodest relationship with him for years, in the tradition of secularism. But there was no marriage in the offing, western man does not marry his women, he just enjoys them, and secular woman does not marry or have children with her men.
Jemima is no Svetlana. The Svetlanas of Gaza will not return to their culture. They are already getting fat and they have their 'duty' to fulfill towards raising good Muslim children and telling them the stories of the 'Great Arab Conquests' so they will know their heritage.
If we were able to take a few thousand westerners back to the time of Thermopylae and we were to send 300 of our best women against the Persians we would find that they would join the Persian army, adopt its culture, produce 3,000 children for the Persians (at 10 children per woman) and encourage those children to become Persian nationalists.
That is the essential difference between the 300 of 480 B.C and the 300 of today. Secularism and freedom and democracy and open borders are surely wonderful things. But it all has a downside that is has been ill considered. It produces empty people, blank slates, open vases, yearning to be filled with something. The West cannot fill men or women with anything, it can only take away and empty them out. They thus become willing recipients of culture and tradition and heritage. All those things that just a generation or two ago women did in the west, such as cover their hair or love their families or believe in God, suddenly it all seems so exotic and in the name of some other culture women flock to it en masse.
Sparta offered the men something to defend, something to love. They loved their land and wished for a future for their children. They believed in their gods and yearned to defend them. Today's society, as epitomized by the Svetlanas in Gaza, will trade their country, their language, their heritage, their religion and their culture for anything, even if it’s a place widely considered to be at the center of a humanitarian crises, governed by an Islamist dictatorship, rife with violence, having shortages of common household items and in the midst of a war. One of the Svetlanas described the war in Gaza like it was the "siege of Leningrad." But there is an essential difference. During the siege of Leningrad Muslim women didn't marry Russian men and journey there to take part in it and Russian women fought for their country to defend that city. Today's Russian women would have no part of it. Secularism provides her with no explanations regarding why she would waste her time, her luxuries or her life defending a city that has no meaning to her. This is the central problem with the secular modern society. It provides no explanations about why its worth preserving for it inculcates no values in anyone and spends most of its time tearing down, 'exploding myths' and 'challenging traditions.'
Where were they in 1939?
Seth J. Frantzman
January 6th, 2008
In Paris Europeans carried signs declaring "we are all Palestinians". In the U.K they say "end the Holocaust in Gaza." In the U.S they say "Nuke Israel." The lack of originality is only matched by the desire to equate Israel with Nazism as in 'Israel: The Fourth Reich', 'Holocaust by Holocaust Survivors,' 'Nazi Genocide, Israeli Genocide.' When examining these images of protestors and those besides them it is important to keep one question in mind: where were they in 1939?
The desire by many Europeans and their resident Muslim populations to equate Israeli actions with those of the Nazis includes two hypocrisies. On the European side there is the disturbing fact that many of these same European countries with the most anti-Israel rhetoric were host to Nazi-collaborationist regimes. France stands out in this respect. When the French declare "we are Palestinians" it is important to wonder why, in 1940, they didn't declare "we are Jews." From one point of view the desire by many European 'peace activists' and 'human rights activists' to stand up for the Palestinians and connect with them stems directly from a subconscious guilt and knowledge that Europeans did little to save their Jewish neighbours during the Holocaust. This is a unique perversion whereby the person, out guilt for not saving Jews, turns the modern Jewish state into a 'Nazi state' in order to defend those he believes are victims of modern Jews. What is unique is that in both cases Jews must be the victims of European wrath. In 1940 it was the European collaboration. In 2009 it is the European solidarity with Palestinians and a deep hatred of Israel.
The knee-jerk reaction to identify Israel with Nazism may stem from a deeper subconscious need for Europeans and other Westerners to absolve themselves of guilt over the Holocaust. If the Jews, the victims of the Holocaust, can be shown to be the 'new Nazis' then there is a feeling, on the one hand that the perpetrators of the Nazi genocide and their collaborators were not unique, many peoples, even Jews, are Nazis today. On the other hand by turning the Jews, the victims, into the Nazis the European can declare that the victims are no longer in need of sympathy and the put the Nazi era to rest by saying 'look, the victims are Nazis too so why feel sorry for them.' The end result is a clean conscience for Europeans. Going out on the street with a khaffiya and identifying with the 'new Jews', the Palestinians, and declaring Israel the 'new Nazi regime' is cathartic.
The other side to the 'Palestinian Holocaust in Gaza' protests is the participation by numerous Muslims in Europe and the U.S. For the Muslim participants the need to make Israel into a Nazi state and declare the Gaza suffering a 'Holocaust' is also necessary. On the one hand Holocaust denial is common in Muslim countries, as is the view that Palestinians were the real victims of the Holocaust because the Europeans established Israel due to Holocaust guilt. By declaring the 'real' Holocaust to be taking place in Gaza Muslim protestors adopt Jewish suffering for their own ends, ignoring the fact that many of them believe the Holocaust to be partially a myth, and they thus come to own the Holocaust as its newest victims. On the other hand the use of the word 'Holocaust' is deliberate, a deliberate way to say that "we Muslims are the new Jews." Thus the European who declares Israel to be creating a Holocaust perverts history in order to clean his conscience while the Muslim perverts history, with the full knowledge that the original Holocaust killed 6 million while the Gaza war has killed 600, in order to become the world's newest victim.
The irony is that this alliance is acknowledged and celebrated. Europeans have convinced themselves that there really is a 'Holocaust' in Gaza and Muslim activists on behalf of Palestinians have convinced themselves that if people must feel sorry for Jewish suffering then the best chances the Palestinians have is to become the 'new Jews'. These facts cannot ignore history. Where were the European protestors in 1939? They were cheering and chanting and holding banners. They were holding banners with swastikas on them welcoming Hitler.
The Gaza War 2009: History and perspectives
Seth J. Frantzman
January 7th, 2009
The Background and Israel's Operation
In January of 2005, Hamas, a religious Muslim political party generally considered to be modeled on the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt and which had used terrorism as a weapon against Israeli civilians and soldiers since the mid 1990s, won Gaza's municipal elections in a landslide, sweeping away the traditional, internationally respected and more secular movement of Fatah (a party founded by Yasser Arafat and which was modeled on Arab nationalism as opposed to Islamism. It too had practiced terrorism against Israeli and Jewish civilians numerous times and had its own 'armed wings'. Arafat died in 2004 and the ineffectual, peace process adhering Mahmud Abbas took over Fatah).
In August of 2005 Israel enacted is disengagement from Gaza, removing 7,000 settlers from the Strip and dismantling its civilian and military infrastructure there. It ceremoniously closed the gate to Gaza in September, ending 38 years of occupation. Greenhouses were left behind along with an EU and World Bank plan to aid Gaza in its economic development. Israel removed its troops from the Gaza-Egypt border and Egyptian troops were deployed there.
In January of 2006 Hamas was on the general Palestinian elections with the help of extremely strong support from Gazan's, who number more than 1.5 million people (as opposed to the West Bank's 2.4 million). Negotiations between the rival Palestinian factions led to increased clashes between them. The EU and other international monitors refused to accept a Hamas led Palestinian government until Hamas would renounce violence and recognize the existence of Israel. At the Gaza-Egypt Rafah border crossing (Gaza's only land-border crossing that does not lead to Israel), which had been opened in November of 2005 and was monitored by EU representatives, clashes and lawlessness by Palestinians, connected perhaps to internal Palestinian divisions and the general lawlessness pervasive in Gaza, drove the EU monitors away in the spring of 2006 and the crossing was closed.
With the EU monitors gone from the Gaza-Egypt border crossing the Egyptian government, whose historical inspiration of Arab nationalism and moderate Sunni Islam is close to Fatah's and Abbas's versions, closed the border. Egypt feared the Hamas operatives, connected with Egypt's own troublesome Muslim Brotherhood party, would pour into Sinai and use it as a base for terror or other activities.
In June of 2006 Gilad Schalit, an Israeli solder serving on the Gaza-Israel border, was abducted by Hamas. This, along with the continued firing of Kassam rockets at Israeli border towns such as Sderot, led to an Israeli military incursion and bombing of Hamas targets (Operation Autumn Clouds). With the outbreak of the Israel-Lebanon war soon after, perhaps launched by Hizbullah to show support for Hamas, the conflict in Gaza became quieter until a cease fire was agreed to between Israel and Hamas in November of 2006.
From December of 2006 until June 14th of 2007 there was a low level Civil War in the Gaza strip between Hamas and Fatah in which some 300 Palestinians died. It ended in June with the complete seizure of Gaza by Hamas, the ejection of the Hamas leadership from the West Bank, the flight of Fatah leaders from Gaza and a seeming partition of the Palestinian territories into the Fatah's West Bank and Hamas' Gaza.
From June of 2007 until June of 2008 there was continued Kassam rocket fire by Hamas into Israel, culminating sometimes in more than 30 rockets fired per day. During the period relatively few Israeli civilians died, around 18, but thousands of rockets terrorized the population of the Israeli towns bordering the strip. A total of some 8,000 rockets fell on Israel between the disengagement and December of 2008.
Between June and December of 2008 there was a cease fire or Hudna (temporary truce or calm) between Israel and Hamas. According to Hamas this was supposed to include the opening of border crossings. However Egypt, angry over Hamas' brutalization of Fatah (in which Fatah Palestinians had been thrown of roof tops and tortured), did not open the Rafah crossing. Israel allowed only minimal supplies to enter Gaza. It did not help encourage Egypt that in January of 2008 Hamas and civilian Palestinians had overrun the Rafah border, destroying the border fence and pouring in Egypt. Clashes resulted and some Palestinians were killed in Egypt's assertion of renewed control of the border.
On December 13th, with the end of the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas imminent, Israel said it was willing to renew the 'calm'. Hamas disagreed, claiming that with the border closed it was not getting its end of the bargain. During the ceasefire rocket fire by Hamas had been sporadic and after December 13th became more general, with dozens of rockets being fired, culminating in a December 24th barrage of 60 rockets.
On the 25th of December Ehud Olmert, Israel's beleagured and scandal plagued Prime Minister, who was to leave office in February of 2009, went on Arab television. With the full knowledge that a plan had been prepared by his generals, including chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi and Ehud Barak, the former Israeli commando turned Labour leader and Defense minister, Olmert warned Hamas to "stop it." He declared "we want to live as good neighbours." The rocket fire did not stop.
On December 27th some fifty Israeli warplanes struck targets inside Gaza. The day before Israel had re-opened the Gaza crossings to fuel and aid and prominent Israeli politicians had declared they had no interest in invading Gaza. Hamas, apparently thinking that an Israeli attack was being postponed, had brought its men out for several parades and military graduation ceremonies. The Israeli planes killed some 200 Hamas militants on the first day of the bombing, destroying Hamas headquarters and infrastructure. In subsequent days Hamas built tunnels between Gaza and Egypt, used to smuggle weapons, food and people, were struck as well as the Islamic university. By January Israel had begun targeting senior Hamas leaders and on the 3d of January the Israeli army entered Gaza with the intention of ending the continued Hamas rocket fire (which had killed some three Israelis) and destroying the organization's 15,000 man 'army'.
The International View
There is a general sense among the international community that 'peace' is the preference of humanity. This is primarily a European view gained after some 1,000 years of bloody fighting among Europeans and the aftermath of the Horrors of the Holocaust and colonialism led Europeans to believe in peace. Therefore war is perceived by Europeans and in the west as something out of the ordinary, to be stopped as soon as possible. Needless to say, other cultures do not necessarily view war this way. Some believe, especially in a strictly Islamist view, that war (i.e the lesser Jihad) is the natural order of things (with the world viewed as Dar al Harb and Dar al Islam, the world of war and the world of peace/Islam), especially when enemies, such as infidels, are vanquished or until a 'defensive war' to 'protect Muslims' is waged to victory.
The international community and the culture of students and the media in the West has been conditioned increasingly over the years to see Israel as an unrestrained bully, a 'superpower' which abuses its neighbours and which has an archaic belief in nationalism, an extremist patriotism, a negative religiousness (as opposed to a secular state where religion is separated from the state), and practices a form of colonialism or 'Aparthied' in the occupied Palestinian territories. This has been the prevailing viewpoint even since the 1970s when the UN declared that 'Zionism is Racism'. With the outbreak of the first Intifada, which mostly pitted stone throwing Palestinians against Israeli soldiers, this idea of the Palestinian David confronting the Israeli Goliath was cemented among a western view that believes that the underdog is usually right (i.e Tibet is morally superior to China at least in part because it is weaker).
The Second Intifada which lasted from 2000-2004 in which some 800 Israelis and 3000 Palestinians died cemented this view even more. Palestinians were heroic victims, perhaps not when blowing up buses or nightclubs, but at least when they could be seen as women and children passing through Israeli checkpoints. After Sept. 11th, 2001 the West also came to the view that the Middle East 'conflict' was fueling 'Islamic rage' that was 'spilling over' and threatening the peaceful coexistence of Muslims in Europe and causing terror throughout the world.
The EU has wanted an increased role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the UK especially sees itself as a natural broker of 'peace' because it was the UK which originally colonized Palestine (1917-1948) and helped it become the mess that it is through an ill-conceived and planned 1947 partition and war that the British fled from at the time.
There is also a concept often repeated by the media and politicians that claims that 'disproportionate force' is unacceptable. From this viewpoint the Israeli use of F-16s against men firing small rockets is perceived as both unfair and disproportionate. However those that claim disproportion have ironically usually been countries that had their own disproportionate wars. The UK invaded Iraq along with the U.S in 2003, using disproportionate force. NATO and the EU bombed the Serbs twice, using disproportionate force.
There is a general feeling that 'not enough' Israelis die in wars with the Palestinians. The media makes this clear through using such words as "only three Israelis have been killed." The insinuation is that if only the body counts on both sides were equal then things would be better.
There is a general obsession with Israel by people in the world who tend to see it as a unique conflict even when other, more bloody conflicts, rage elsewhere in places such as Kashmir, Sri Lanka and Sudan. The reason for the interest in Israel may be merely the fact that the West is primarily Christians and the Muslim world is Muslim and Israel contains holy sites for both these religions. It may be part of the 'Clash of Civilizations' whereby people see it as a civilizational dispute. It may be also because Jews take a great interest, both critical and supportive, in the conflict and Jews are an influential, if small, group in some western countries. Whatever the logic the media's coverage of conflict is disproportionate. Some 300,000 have died in Darfur and there has never been a 'breaking news' bulletin for those people (who are Muslims like the Palestinians), perhaps because they have black skin (unlike the Palestinians) and are not as important to a Western audience which finds it hard to identify with black people. Perhaps it is because the West has some sort of strange need after the Holocaust to feel it is saying 'never again' and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict involves Jews and the West feels that even though in this case it is supporting those who harm Jews that in some twisted fashion it is doing its duty to stop massacres. Perhaps it is due to the increased role and population of Muslims in western countries. Muslims who have convinced many westerners that Muslims are the new romantic minority group who need to be supported and that their causes, foremost among them the Palestinians, are thus romantic, just as the previous generation of westerners fought apartheid or 'civil rights' or protested Vietnam. The Palestinians are a cause-celebre, as evidenced by the fact that many students where the Palestinian khaffiya or checkered scarf (yet western students where either the black one without knowing it is a Fatah khaffiya and they wear the red one without realizing it is connected to the PFLP or communist Palestinian party. Hamas looks disdainfully on these symbols which it connects with its secular enemies).
The international community must be seen to do something and it has come to the point where it believes all conflicts can be solved and that ceasefires and European monitors are the way to solve them. It has learned this from the Balkans where the EU carved out new statelets (Kosovo, Bosnia and Republika Serbska) and believes it successfully ended the conflict.
The key word 'disproportionate' force is a new part of the lingo of western discourse. It is used without thought to its logic. Wars are not fought with proportionate force just as criminals are not arrested with proportionate force. When a criminal robs a bank the police don't send one officer, they send dozens. When a man stabs a police officer they don't stab him back in order to show him 'proportion'. Those who argue for proportionate force by Israel don't seem to think about the end result of that force. Does it mean firing Kassams back at the Palestinians? The Europeans fought several wars in a proportionate manner, such as the 30 years or the 100 years war. Proportion helped them go on forever and cost numerous lives. Proportionate force was not used in the Second World war or by the U.S during the Civil Rights movement, in fact disproportion was the way in which these two great struggles were finally ended.
In general western people have a black and white view of Israel where Israel is the powerful 'white' aggressor and Palestinians are the weak 'black' victim. This makes it easy to see the conflict in racial or colonialistic terms. It is perhaps surprising for people to know then that some of the casualties of the Hamas rocket fire have been Ethiopian black children who were born to black Jewish Ethiopians who fled their country, with no help of the west, in the 1980s. It may surprise some to learn that those IDF soldiers going into Gaza are made up of people of all colors, religious belief (westerners forget that Arab Druze and Bedouins serve in the Israeli armies) and sexual orientations (Israel has no 'don't ask don't tell policy) and include numerous women soldiers.
The Israeli Palestinian conflict is, on the one hand a conflict that has a very real and genuine history, a process to it that includes numerous developments and that grows and matures and changes with time. It is, on the other hand, a myth, a myth of the west, a myth of right and wrong, of black and white, of victim and aggressor, of good and bad. It serves the western need to causes, the 'Palestinian cause', the need to wear some clothing that shows support for the downtrodden, the need to attend protests, the need to feel that one is 'helping others', the need to 'believe in peace' and the need to 'oppose conflict'. In this sense the conflict does not involve real people. It is an imagination of the West, a 'conflict' that is needed so the politicians have somewhere to travel and something to 'solve'. For that reason anything can be possible; body counts are reported without sources and the Israeli assault is described as a 'Holocaust' by upper class Khaffiya clad blond haired protestors. It is apparent to merely recall the disproportionate protests that erupted in western countries, primarily by white people, against Israel in the first day of the war when 200 Palestinians were killed. No such protests graced the streets of Europe when 200 Indians died in the recent Mumbai attacks. No such protests erupted when a similar number of Palestinians died at the hands of other Palestinians in the Fatah-Hamas civil war. No similar protests were held during the Rwandan genocide or the Sudanese genocide. The question should not be why the international community, which is to say western people, care so much about what happens in Gaza, but why they have so rarely cared about what happens to other people in the world. The question should be, if the Hamas rockets are so useless and are "home made and inaccurate" then why does Hamas fire them, before the cease fires, during the cease fires, after the cease fires and in the midst of this new war? If the Europeans and the UK are fond of 'proportionate' force then why are they still occupying Kosovo and Bosnia and Iraq in a decidedly disproportionate manner? If Europeans believe in proportion then why do their humanitarians drive SUVs in the midst of poor starving people in Haiti, lording over those people like colonialists, their white skin standing out among the myriad African faces. Should not the humanitarian drive a proportionate vehicle, say an ox-cart, like the locals? Why does the Free Gaza Movement own a yaucht that it uses to transport 'humanitarian' supplies and celebrities to Gaza. Shouldn't it use its money more frugally and purchase utilitarian boats if it genuinely wants to help Palestinians rather than just get the white faces and blond hair of its members photographed in the paper wearing the 'traditional' Khaffiya. When a westerner dons his 'Palestinian Khafiya' does he do so truly to support the Palestinian or to fit in, to seem to be part of what is 'cool', to show his and her friends that he is 'helping'? Those are the real questions.
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
Terra Incognita 68 Cuba, Disproportionate force and protestors
1) Fifty Years of Lies: Cuba is celebrating 50 years since Castro’s ‘revolution.’ A person born the day that Castro came to power would thus be 50 years old today. The media tells us Castro overthrew an ‘American backed dictatorship run by Batista.’ But Batista was a ‘dictator’ for only 8 years. Which is better, 8 years, or an entire lifetime. There is nothing revolutionary about Cuba, it is a monarchy of Fidel and his brother, a cult of personality. The revolutionaries chanted ‘Viva Cuba libre.’ But Cuba has been imprisoned for fifty years, fifty years of lies about a socialist romantic utopia.
2) A short history of disproportionate force: Disproportionate force is not defend in international law. It is defined in criminal law and in domestic police procedures. But while excessive force is illegal (i.e shooting unarmed thieves in the back), the police use disproportionate force to stop criminals (i.e surrounding banks that are being robbed.) In war disproportionate force is the way a country wins a war. The 30 years war was proportionate, one massacre after another. That’s why it lasted for thirty years. Is that better than a short, massively disproportionate war designed to end a conflict?
3) The protestor, the democracy and the terrorist: No one protested the Mumbai terror attacks. 200 dead and no one protested. But when 200 Gazans died in the first day of the First Gaza War in December of 2008 the world began to erupt in protests. Why is it that democracies produce protestors and dictatorships don’t? Why is it that no one protests terror but they protest wars against it?
Fifty Years of Lies
December 30th, 2008
Seth J. Frantzman
Cuba is ‘celebrating’ 50 years of lies. Fifty years ago a ‘small rebel band’ based in the Sierra Maestra swept away the ‘American armed dictator Batista’. So we learn from news reports. Castro is ailing so his brother, Raul, is presiding over the country. A Cuban born when Castro took Havana would today be fifty years old. We must pause and consider this. A Cuban who was twnety years old would today be seventy. Thus there are few adults that can truly remember a time without Castro.
It is interesting that news reports style Fulgenico Bautista as a ‘dictator’. He didn’t dictate much or for very long. Batista was first in power as an elected president from 1940-1944. In 1952 he launched a coup and took over the government once again. He served for 8 year. Eight years. Someone born when he took power would thus have been 8 years old when he was overthrown. Today that person is 58. Eight years. That’s all. If the people of Cuba, say those in their twenties who are now old and decrepid, could be given a choice today as to whether they wanted their entire lives to be taken up living under one pompous arrogant man, or whether they preferred the former ‘dictator’ it would be interesting to know what they would choose. They had no idea at the time, in their youth, that they were witnessing the end of history, the end of their way of life, the end of their freedom, and a long national, fifty year, nightmare where they would live in an island prison camp, a place where only one man and his family could do as they pleased. One man and his family. That is what we worshipped for so long as being romantic. Another monarchy in place in Cuba consisting of Castro and his brother.
When I was in high school in Arizona we were subjected to periodic lectures about the glories of Cuba. Some of my compatriots were encouraged to volunteer in Cuba, to clear sugar cane and ‘experience the revolution’. They were told about the island paradise of universal health care and ‘democracy’ where ‘factory workers debate their boses.’ My parents even told me about how romantic Castro had been. When I was in college I was the sole dissenter on the student senate which funded the ‘American Socialist Club’ to visit Cuba and participate in a world council of socialists. These American socialists felt the U.S was a dictatorship But doesn’t the romance ever wear off? Doesn’t it ever get old. How many lifetimes must a man and his family rule a country before it stops being romantic and it stops being a socialist utopia and it starts looking like a dark tunnel? How many times must the charade of ‘democracy’ be pushes aside. If it were a democracy there would have been elections. If Castro were popular and the people wanted to live their entire lives under one man, listening to his endless eight hour speeches and watching him wear a uniform that never seems to decay, then they could have voted again and again for him. In the U.S there are elections every four years. In Mexico it is every five. They could have voted ten times. Those who describe U.S democracy as a charade, such as Noam Chomsky and Gore Vidal, who have both referred to the American presidency as a form of “four year dictatorship” should be happy its not a fifty year dictatorship with the succession going to family members, like in a kingdom.
Cuba is a Communist Socialist utopia. A true democratic monarchichal utopia. Its like the utopias of old in Europe, with a king and his brother, no free speech and a prison camp on an island (the Isle of Pines, incidentally the same prison used by Batista and where Castro himself was imprisoned). Vidal himself has visited Cuba and along with other “cultural figures” has condemned the U.S embargo of the island. It would be nice, just once, for someone who condemns the U.S for its “four year dictatorships” to condemn a fifty year dictatorship being handed over to someone’s brother. Whose next in line? Raul Castro’s son? How romantic is that?
How is Cuba ‘revolutionary’? Its just an old style monarchy with a 1930s cult of personality. When they shout ‘viva la revolution, viva Fidel, viva la Cuba Libre’ they are lying. There is no revolution. There is no free Cuba and no people should be forced to shout ‘long live’ one mna for fifty years. Fifty years of lies.
A short history of disproportionate force
Seth J. Frantzman
December 28th, 2008
Within hours of Israel launching massive air strikes on the Gaza strip in response to Hamas' firing of over a hundred rockets in three days, the international community was already reverting to form in its complaints that Israel was using "disproportionate force." On Saturday, December 27th, not long after Israel began striking Hamas police stations and terrorist infrastructure in Gaza, the European Union condemned "the disproportionate use of force."
This cycle of terrorism, Israeli reactions and condemnations of 'disproportionate force' is common in the Middle East. In July of 2006 the UN Humanitarian chief, Jan Egeland complained that Israel had used disproportionate force. On July 13th the EU claimed Israel was using such force in Lebanon. On July 27th the Prime Minister of Turkey did the same, regarding Gaza. Mati Vanhanen, the Prime Minister of Finland, said the same thing. In 2004 it was Kofi Annan complaining that Israel needed to cease using "disproportionate force in densely populated areas." Israel isn't the only country accused of using disproportionate force. During Russia's war with Georgia in 2008 it was also accused by the U.S and Nato of using disproportionate force.
Where did this idea that disproportionate force is wrong come from? Do the western nations and leaders that complain about such use of force really live up to such preaching in their own countries? What is the history of the use of such force in war?
One of the problems with the term 'disproportionate force' is that it has no accepted definition in international law or elsewhere. George Fletcher, Cardozo professor of jurisprudence, in 'Sense and nonsense about disproportionate force' wrote in 2006 that had the British bombed Buenos Aires in the Falklands war " in that context [bombing] would have been unnecessary and therefore could not possibly qualify as proportionate." However he notes that whereas criminal law deals with proportionate force in self defense, international law has never dealt with this question; "I know of no case in the international version of shooting escaping looters where a court has affirmed that the use of force was necessary but not proportionate."
In response to Washington's condemnation of Russia's use of force in George, Dmitry Rogozin, Russia's ambassador to Nato, claimed that "the use of force to defend one's compatriots is traditionally regarded as a form of self defense" and claimed Nato and the U.S had used disproportionate force in Bosnia, Iraq and Afghanistan.
But this brings us no closer to what constitutes disproportionate force or if it should even be considered wrong. Proportionate force in theory should be proportional to the threat. Thus shooting unarmed thieves by a civilian is considered wrong. Police are accused from time to time of using too much force when taking down criminals. But no one claims that directly proportionate force should be used by civilians or the authorities. Thieves do not need to be punished by having people steal from them. Rapists are not raped. Hostage takers don't have their families taken hostage. No one would logically think that Hamas' rocket fire from Gaza should be counteracted through the use of equally indiscriminate rocket and mortar fire by Israel.
The history of warfare shows that it has never been fought in a proportionate manner. Winning wars requires not being proportional. Consider the Second World War. The American army at the end of the war numbered some 9 million men under arms. The U.S was churning out more planes and tanks in a month in 1944 than the Germans were making in a year. The Soviets massed some 20,000 tanks before the battle of Berlin in 1945. In the First Gulf War the U.S used disproportionate air power to crush the Iraqi army. In the Nato campaign in Kosovo in 1999, Nato employed more than 1,000 airplanes against a Serbia that had virtually no air force. When General Grant brought the full might of the Federal army to bear on the South in 1864 he outnumbered the confederates by 2 to 1 and more in almost all battles. Hardly proportionate.
It is in law enforcement where we see the greatest use of disproportionate, but necessary, force. One criminal with a handgun can result in the arrival of dozens, if not hundreds, of officers to a crime scene. In a 1997 North Hollywood shootout, two armed bank robbers shooting at the police resulted in the arrival of 300 law enforcement members, 13 of whom were eventually wounded by the bank robbers.
Disproportionate force is the way in which crime is prevented and criminals are brought to justice. Is it also the way wars are ended. All the great causes of history, such as the abolition of slavery or the de-segregation of the south, were brought about through the use of disproportionate force, in the latter example the use of the national guard to secure rights for black Americans. Nazism would not have been defeated had the allies relied on proportionate force. Proportionate force is the recipe for unending war, for the endless victimization of civilians at the hands of terrorist aggressors. Fighting crime, like terror, and Nazism, requires disproportionate force.
The protestor, the democracy and the terrorist
December 30th, 2008
Seth J. Frantzman
Between the 26th and 29th of November a total of 173 people were murdered in Mumbai by terrorists. There were no worldwide protests. No one protested against terrorism, against Islamic extremism or against Pakistan, the nation from whence the terrorists came and where they were trained. Such is the fate of the victims of terror. Candle-light vigils and people claiming they will 'fight terror' by living life as normal and 'not letting it affect us.'
Between December 27th and 30th some 260 Palestinians were killed in the Gaza strip by Israeli bombs. Even when the death toll was closer to 200, in the first day of the bombing, protests swept the world. In London and Greece there were riots outside Israeli embassies with Europeans and their Muslim allies holding signs that declared a 'genocide', 'Holocaust' and 'massacre' in Gaza. The U.N secretary general and others called it a 'disproportionate' and 'excessive' display of force. Gideon Levy, the leftist Israeli writer, described Israel as the 'neighbourhood bully strikes again'. Yossi Sarid called on Israel to 'stop' the operation. David Grossman, an Israeli author, wrote that Israel was "imprisoned in the familiar ceremony of war….stop. Hold your fire. Try for once to act against the usual response, in contrast to the lethal logic of belligerence." In Israel there were small riots and protests by Arabs across the country. Leftist wealthy Israelis in Tel Aviv marched through the city protesting and on December 29th 'human rights' activists protested at Israeli universities. In Chicago a Jewish house of worship was firebombed.
Let us contrast these two situations. In both the death tolls were quite similar. But there is no condemnation by the UN of the terror in Mumbai. There is no emergency meeting. There is no condemnation by world leaders of disproportionate force being used by the terrorist or excessive force. There are no protests, anywhere in the world, against terrorism or its host country. There are no fire bombings of mosques. There are no calls by poet laureates in Pakistan to 'stop' the terrorism and stop bullying civilians in India. There are no riots. There are not white Europeans holding placards calling accusing Islamic terrorism of 'genocide' or a 'Holocaust' or a 'massacre'. The European does not care about those 173 dead Indians. There are no leftist Pakistanis or leftist Muslims in India to immediately begin a 'human rights' protest.
Why is one man's life worth more than another? Why is there a difference? What can we say is the essential difference between India and the Gaza strip? One is a big fat pluralistic democracy. The other is an over-populated Islamist dictatorship. But one has the support of the blond European women at universities throughout the Western world. One does not. When hundreds die in one place they are memorialized throughout the world by protests and riots and assaults on the religion of those perceived to have caused their deaths. When hundreds die in another place no one cares, not even the countrymen abroad. No Hindus in Washington or Europe protested outside the Pakistani embassy. Not one.
What does Democracy do to the soul that creates people who do not care when their own people are massacred? Why does democracy create a disjointed society where people have no passion to riot when their own people are slaughtered? Why does terrorism always succeed? Why is there never any condemnation of it, anywhere, and anyone who will stand up to it. Where are the well bred leftist authors and their gated communities to protest it and write letters condemning it?
Before Israel's bombing campaign against Gaza began there were hundreds of rockets fired against Israel. Yet Levy and Grossman and other leftist wealthy Israeli intellectuals did not write letters and condemn them. There were no protests against them by the leading students at universities or in Tel Aviv. Why? Because the inhabitant of Tel Aviv and the wealthy writer lives far away from where the rockets fall and they see no connection between themselves and the swarthy poor people who are forced to live under the rocket fire. Wealthy people in democracies live in islands of prosperity and because of their secularism they do not seem themselves connected to their own compatriots.
Yet in the other society, the Muslim dictatorship, we do not see this. Muslims around the world see themselves personally connected to the people in Gaza. Muslims in Europe, whatever their path in life, whether religious or secular or poor or wealthy, see themselves connected to the dead in Gaza. Wealthy Muslim secular Communist women from Jerusalem see themselves directly connected to the Islamists in Gaza, even if they know that they personally hate Hamas, the government of Gaza. Such is their deep connection.
Democracy and secularism's central problem is in its elites and its fragmentation of society. The lack of faith and social cohesion lead to a feeling that people are only affected if they are affected personally. Thus David Grossman or Gideon Levy is only affected by terrorism if his house or car is blown up. Otherwise he lives above it. The same is apparently true in the Hindu Indian diaspora. While Hindus may feel annoyed that their country has been attacked and they may complain at home and say 'we hate Pakistan', their emotional connection does not manifest itself in a 'human rights rally' or a protest against the massacre of Indians.
This is primarily because the victims of terrorism are not seen to have been massacred. And this is the other side of the coin. Not only democracy and secularism have failed to protect the victims, terrorism also elicits no anger from its victims. The victims of terror and their compatriots express themselves in candle-light vigils and sing song hippie dreamy eulogies. They express themselves by claiming, falsely, that they are 'fighting terrorism' by 'not letting it change our way of life.' But the Muslim who sympathizes with his 'brothers' in Gaza allows the 200 dead to change his life. He allows it to take some time from his day to go protest. He allows it to make him unhappy and angry and desire to seek 'justice'. Such concepts are not found among the victims of terror, especially when they are in a democracy.
The central problem with the fight against terror is that it does not provoke anger from the victims. Even in Pakistan, no matter the number dead, no one cares. Blow up thousands of Pakistanis and they will do nothing. They simply will not be angry about it.
One of the problems with terrorism is that we expect the government to solve it for us. The idea is that the government will take revenge for us. We rely on the government and we therefore resolve that we will not 'change our way of life' to fight terror. But a more healthy response is the response shown by Muslims to the Gaza bombing. The healthy response is the realization that the government cannot and does not stop terror. We must personally fight terror and we must allow it to change our way of life. The idea that a stiff upper lip is always the right response to being assaulted is some strange remnant of the Christian idea of 'turning the other cheek'. The idea that one always does nothing in the face of tragedy and in doing nothing 'overcomes' the tragedy and 'shows the enemy' that he has not affected us is mistaken. The process of 'going about your life as usual' is the mentality of a slave. Slaves were taken from their parents at a young age, sold in markets, stripped naked and checked like animals, whipped, raped, taken from their wives, forced to work all day everyday and never given time off or given a chance to celebrate or cultivate their own holidays, religion or tradition. There was no record of their birth or death. They were expected to always go about their life as normal, regardless of their treatment, hardship and the unbearable circumstances they had to work in. Secularism and democracy was supposed to free us from the slave mentality, but it has oddly enough internalized modernity and terrorism to the extent, in its fragmented society where every man is an island, that the slave mentality persists among people.
So long as the victims of terror go about their lives as usual and so long as the dictatorship and its extremists receive the support of their compatriots abroad and use terror to achieve their goals, the democracy will slowly fail and Islamism will slowly succeed. There is much that can be learned from Islam in terms of the rational response to death and suffering. There is little that can be learned from the response to the Mumbai bombings.
2) A short history of disproportionate force: Disproportionate force is not defend in international law. It is defined in criminal law and in domestic police procedures. But while excessive force is illegal (i.e shooting unarmed thieves in the back), the police use disproportionate force to stop criminals (i.e surrounding banks that are being robbed.) In war disproportionate force is the way a country wins a war. The 30 years war was proportionate, one massacre after another. That’s why it lasted for thirty years. Is that better than a short, massively disproportionate war designed to end a conflict?
3) The protestor, the democracy and the terrorist: No one protested the Mumbai terror attacks. 200 dead and no one protested. But when 200 Gazans died in the first day of the First Gaza War in December of 2008 the world began to erupt in protests. Why is it that democracies produce protestors and dictatorships don’t? Why is it that no one protests terror but they protest wars against it?
Fifty Years of Lies
December 30th, 2008
Seth J. Frantzman
Cuba is ‘celebrating’ 50 years of lies. Fifty years ago a ‘small rebel band’ based in the Sierra Maestra swept away the ‘American armed dictator Batista’. So we learn from news reports. Castro is ailing so his brother, Raul, is presiding over the country. A Cuban born when Castro took Havana would today be fifty years old. We must pause and consider this. A Cuban who was twnety years old would today be seventy. Thus there are few adults that can truly remember a time without Castro.
It is interesting that news reports style Fulgenico Bautista as a ‘dictator’. He didn’t dictate much or for very long. Batista was first in power as an elected president from 1940-1944. In 1952 he launched a coup and took over the government once again. He served for 8 year. Eight years. Someone born when he took power would thus have been 8 years old when he was overthrown. Today that person is 58. Eight years. That’s all. If the people of Cuba, say those in their twenties who are now old and decrepid, could be given a choice today as to whether they wanted their entire lives to be taken up living under one pompous arrogant man, or whether they preferred the former ‘dictator’ it would be interesting to know what they would choose. They had no idea at the time, in their youth, that they were witnessing the end of history, the end of their way of life, the end of their freedom, and a long national, fifty year, nightmare where they would live in an island prison camp, a place where only one man and his family could do as they pleased. One man and his family. That is what we worshipped for so long as being romantic. Another monarchy in place in Cuba consisting of Castro and his brother.
When I was in high school in Arizona we were subjected to periodic lectures about the glories of Cuba. Some of my compatriots were encouraged to volunteer in Cuba, to clear sugar cane and ‘experience the revolution’. They were told about the island paradise of universal health care and ‘democracy’ where ‘factory workers debate their boses.’ My parents even told me about how romantic Castro had been. When I was in college I was the sole dissenter on the student senate which funded the ‘American Socialist Club’ to visit Cuba and participate in a world council of socialists. These American socialists felt the U.S was a dictatorship But doesn’t the romance ever wear off? Doesn’t it ever get old. How many lifetimes must a man and his family rule a country before it stops being romantic and it stops being a socialist utopia and it starts looking like a dark tunnel? How many times must the charade of ‘democracy’ be pushes aside. If it were a democracy there would have been elections. If Castro were popular and the people wanted to live their entire lives under one man, listening to his endless eight hour speeches and watching him wear a uniform that never seems to decay, then they could have voted again and again for him. In the U.S there are elections every four years. In Mexico it is every five. They could have voted ten times. Those who describe U.S democracy as a charade, such as Noam Chomsky and Gore Vidal, who have both referred to the American presidency as a form of “four year dictatorship” should be happy its not a fifty year dictatorship with the succession going to family members, like in a kingdom.
Cuba is a Communist Socialist utopia. A true democratic monarchichal utopia. Its like the utopias of old in Europe, with a king and his brother, no free speech and a prison camp on an island (the Isle of Pines, incidentally the same prison used by Batista and where Castro himself was imprisoned). Vidal himself has visited Cuba and along with other “cultural figures” has condemned the U.S embargo of the island. It would be nice, just once, for someone who condemns the U.S for its “four year dictatorships” to condemn a fifty year dictatorship being handed over to someone’s brother. Whose next in line? Raul Castro’s son? How romantic is that?
How is Cuba ‘revolutionary’? Its just an old style monarchy with a 1930s cult of personality. When they shout ‘viva la revolution, viva Fidel, viva la Cuba Libre’ they are lying. There is no revolution. There is no free Cuba and no people should be forced to shout ‘long live’ one mna for fifty years. Fifty years of lies.
A short history of disproportionate force
Seth J. Frantzman
December 28th, 2008
Within hours of Israel launching massive air strikes on the Gaza strip in response to Hamas' firing of over a hundred rockets in three days, the international community was already reverting to form in its complaints that Israel was using "disproportionate force." On Saturday, December 27th, not long after Israel began striking Hamas police stations and terrorist infrastructure in Gaza, the European Union condemned "the disproportionate use of force."
This cycle of terrorism, Israeli reactions and condemnations of 'disproportionate force' is common in the Middle East. In July of 2006 the UN Humanitarian chief, Jan Egeland complained that Israel had used disproportionate force. On July 13th the EU claimed Israel was using such force in Lebanon. On July 27th the Prime Minister of Turkey did the same, regarding Gaza. Mati Vanhanen, the Prime Minister of Finland, said the same thing. In 2004 it was Kofi Annan complaining that Israel needed to cease using "disproportionate force in densely populated areas." Israel isn't the only country accused of using disproportionate force. During Russia's war with Georgia in 2008 it was also accused by the U.S and Nato of using disproportionate force.
Where did this idea that disproportionate force is wrong come from? Do the western nations and leaders that complain about such use of force really live up to such preaching in their own countries? What is the history of the use of such force in war?
One of the problems with the term 'disproportionate force' is that it has no accepted definition in international law or elsewhere. George Fletcher, Cardozo professor of jurisprudence, in 'Sense and nonsense about disproportionate force' wrote in 2006 that had the British bombed Buenos Aires in the Falklands war " in that context [bombing] would have been unnecessary and therefore could not possibly qualify as proportionate." However he notes that whereas criminal law deals with proportionate force in self defense, international law has never dealt with this question; "I know of no case in the international version of shooting escaping looters where a court has affirmed that the use of force was necessary but not proportionate."
In response to Washington's condemnation of Russia's use of force in George, Dmitry Rogozin, Russia's ambassador to Nato, claimed that "the use of force to defend one's compatriots is traditionally regarded as a form of self defense" and claimed Nato and the U.S had used disproportionate force in Bosnia, Iraq and Afghanistan.
But this brings us no closer to what constitutes disproportionate force or if it should even be considered wrong. Proportionate force in theory should be proportional to the threat. Thus shooting unarmed thieves by a civilian is considered wrong. Police are accused from time to time of using too much force when taking down criminals. But no one claims that directly proportionate force should be used by civilians or the authorities. Thieves do not need to be punished by having people steal from them. Rapists are not raped. Hostage takers don't have their families taken hostage. No one would logically think that Hamas' rocket fire from Gaza should be counteracted through the use of equally indiscriminate rocket and mortar fire by Israel.
The history of warfare shows that it has never been fought in a proportionate manner. Winning wars requires not being proportional. Consider the Second World War. The American army at the end of the war numbered some 9 million men under arms. The U.S was churning out more planes and tanks in a month in 1944 than the Germans were making in a year. The Soviets massed some 20,000 tanks before the battle of Berlin in 1945. In the First Gulf War the U.S used disproportionate air power to crush the Iraqi army. In the Nato campaign in Kosovo in 1999, Nato employed more than 1,000 airplanes against a Serbia that had virtually no air force. When General Grant brought the full might of the Federal army to bear on the South in 1864 he outnumbered the confederates by 2 to 1 and more in almost all battles. Hardly proportionate.
It is in law enforcement where we see the greatest use of disproportionate, but necessary, force. One criminal with a handgun can result in the arrival of dozens, if not hundreds, of officers to a crime scene. In a 1997 North Hollywood shootout, two armed bank robbers shooting at the police resulted in the arrival of 300 law enforcement members, 13 of whom were eventually wounded by the bank robbers.
Disproportionate force is the way in which crime is prevented and criminals are brought to justice. Is it also the way wars are ended. All the great causes of history, such as the abolition of slavery or the de-segregation of the south, were brought about through the use of disproportionate force, in the latter example the use of the national guard to secure rights for black Americans. Nazism would not have been defeated had the allies relied on proportionate force. Proportionate force is the recipe for unending war, for the endless victimization of civilians at the hands of terrorist aggressors. Fighting crime, like terror, and Nazism, requires disproportionate force.
The protestor, the democracy and the terrorist
December 30th, 2008
Seth J. Frantzman
Between the 26th and 29th of November a total of 173 people were murdered in Mumbai by terrorists. There were no worldwide protests. No one protested against terrorism, against Islamic extremism or against Pakistan, the nation from whence the terrorists came and where they were trained. Such is the fate of the victims of terror. Candle-light vigils and people claiming they will 'fight terror' by living life as normal and 'not letting it affect us.'
Between December 27th and 30th some 260 Palestinians were killed in the Gaza strip by Israeli bombs. Even when the death toll was closer to 200, in the first day of the bombing, protests swept the world. In London and Greece there were riots outside Israeli embassies with Europeans and their Muslim allies holding signs that declared a 'genocide', 'Holocaust' and 'massacre' in Gaza. The U.N secretary general and others called it a 'disproportionate' and 'excessive' display of force. Gideon Levy, the leftist Israeli writer, described Israel as the 'neighbourhood bully strikes again'. Yossi Sarid called on Israel to 'stop' the operation. David Grossman, an Israeli author, wrote that Israel was "imprisoned in the familiar ceremony of war….stop. Hold your fire. Try for once to act against the usual response, in contrast to the lethal logic of belligerence." In Israel there were small riots and protests by Arabs across the country. Leftist wealthy Israelis in Tel Aviv marched through the city protesting and on December 29th 'human rights' activists protested at Israeli universities. In Chicago a Jewish house of worship was firebombed.
Let us contrast these two situations. In both the death tolls were quite similar. But there is no condemnation by the UN of the terror in Mumbai. There is no emergency meeting. There is no condemnation by world leaders of disproportionate force being used by the terrorist or excessive force. There are no protests, anywhere in the world, against terrorism or its host country. There are no fire bombings of mosques. There are no calls by poet laureates in Pakistan to 'stop' the terrorism and stop bullying civilians in India. There are no riots. There are not white Europeans holding placards calling accusing Islamic terrorism of 'genocide' or a 'Holocaust' or a 'massacre'. The European does not care about those 173 dead Indians. There are no leftist Pakistanis or leftist Muslims in India to immediately begin a 'human rights' protest.
Why is one man's life worth more than another? Why is there a difference? What can we say is the essential difference between India and the Gaza strip? One is a big fat pluralistic democracy. The other is an over-populated Islamist dictatorship. But one has the support of the blond European women at universities throughout the Western world. One does not. When hundreds die in one place they are memorialized throughout the world by protests and riots and assaults on the religion of those perceived to have caused their deaths. When hundreds die in another place no one cares, not even the countrymen abroad. No Hindus in Washington or Europe protested outside the Pakistani embassy. Not one.
What does Democracy do to the soul that creates people who do not care when their own people are massacred? Why does democracy create a disjointed society where people have no passion to riot when their own people are slaughtered? Why does terrorism always succeed? Why is there never any condemnation of it, anywhere, and anyone who will stand up to it. Where are the well bred leftist authors and their gated communities to protest it and write letters condemning it?
Before Israel's bombing campaign against Gaza began there were hundreds of rockets fired against Israel. Yet Levy and Grossman and other leftist wealthy Israeli intellectuals did not write letters and condemn them. There were no protests against them by the leading students at universities or in Tel Aviv. Why? Because the inhabitant of Tel Aviv and the wealthy writer lives far away from where the rockets fall and they see no connection between themselves and the swarthy poor people who are forced to live under the rocket fire. Wealthy people in democracies live in islands of prosperity and because of their secularism they do not seem themselves connected to their own compatriots.
Yet in the other society, the Muslim dictatorship, we do not see this. Muslims around the world see themselves personally connected to the people in Gaza. Muslims in Europe, whatever their path in life, whether religious or secular or poor or wealthy, see themselves connected to the dead in Gaza. Wealthy Muslim secular Communist women from Jerusalem see themselves directly connected to the Islamists in Gaza, even if they know that they personally hate Hamas, the government of Gaza. Such is their deep connection.
Democracy and secularism's central problem is in its elites and its fragmentation of society. The lack of faith and social cohesion lead to a feeling that people are only affected if they are affected personally. Thus David Grossman or Gideon Levy is only affected by terrorism if his house or car is blown up. Otherwise he lives above it. The same is apparently true in the Hindu Indian diaspora. While Hindus may feel annoyed that their country has been attacked and they may complain at home and say 'we hate Pakistan', their emotional connection does not manifest itself in a 'human rights rally' or a protest against the massacre of Indians.
This is primarily because the victims of terrorism are not seen to have been massacred. And this is the other side of the coin. Not only democracy and secularism have failed to protect the victims, terrorism also elicits no anger from its victims. The victims of terror and their compatriots express themselves in candle-light vigils and sing song hippie dreamy eulogies. They express themselves by claiming, falsely, that they are 'fighting terrorism' by 'not letting it change our way of life.' But the Muslim who sympathizes with his 'brothers' in Gaza allows the 200 dead to change his life. He allows it to take some time from his day to go protest. He allows it to make him unhappy and angry and desire to seek 'justice'. Such concepts are not found among the victims of terror, especially when they are in a democracy.
The central problem with the fight against terror is that it does not provoke anger from the victims. Even in Pakistan, no matter the number dead, no one cares. Blow up thousands of Pakistanis and they will do nothing. They simply will not be angry about it.
One of the problems with terrorism is that we expect the government to solve it for us. The idea is that the government will take revenge for us. We rely on the government and we therefore resolve that we will not 'change our way of life' to fight terror. But a more healthy response is the response shown by Muslims to the Gaza bombing. The healthy response is the realization that the government cannot and does not stop terror. We must personally fight terror and we must allow it to change our way of life. The idea that a stiff upper lip is always the right response to being assaulted is some strange remnant of the Christian idea of 'turning the other cheek'. The idea that one always does nothing in the face of tragedy and in doing nothing 'overcomes' the tragedy and 'shows the enemy' that he has not affected us is mistaken. The process of 'going about your life as usual' is the mentality of a slave. Slaves were taken from their parents at a young age, sold in markets, stripped naked and checked like animals, whipped, raped, taken from their wives, forced to work all day everyday and never given time off or given a chance to celebrate or cultivate their own holidays, religion or tradition. There was no record of their birth or death. They were expected to always go about their life as normal, regardless of their treatment, hardship and the unbearable circumstances they had to work in. Secularism and democracy was supposed to free us from the slave mentality, but it has oddly enough internalized modernity and terrorism to the extent, in its fragmented society where every man is an island, that the slave mentality persists among people.
So long as the victims of terror go about their lives as usual and so long as the dictatorship and its extremists receive the support of their compatriots abroad and use terror to achieve their goals, the democracy will slowly fail and Islamism will slowly succeed. There is much that can be learned from Islam in terms of the rational response to death and suffering. There is little that can be learned from the response to the Mumbai bombings.
Terra Incognita 67 Europe, Why women leave and justice
1) Its funny to think: The dark news from Europe, the stories of more minarets, more Shariah law, and more Khaffiyeh wearing extremists, is beginning to take the form of a large joke, a sort of joke on humanity, 'progress' and civilization. Its especially funny considering two recent news items; that Hamas removes Khaffiyas from the necks of European activists in Gaza because they perceive the symbol as supporting Fatah and that the film Whatever Lola Wants, which romanticizes belly dancing, will also not be shown in Gaza, but will be cheered wholeheartedly by western audiences yearning for the 'exotic'.
2) Why the women leave: The news reports of dead women found in various countries never end. Sex slaves tossed aside like garbage, 'cocktail waitresses' murdered in Japan, nurses beheaded in Saudi, 13 year old rape victims in Somalia stoned to death by courageous men. The slaughter of women is at an all time high. In the UK they admit to 'losing' 2000 women a year from the school system, most forced into marriage. In Pakistan special graveyards are designated for the anonymous victims of honour killings. We see once again that whereas the Islamic society murders women and it is accepted, that in the Western and secular society women are also disappeared, sold and trafficked and crushed beneath the boot of modernity. But why? Why does secularism and freedom for women also lead to the murder and enslavement of so many of them, just as in the Islamist society?
3) Europe and the concept of Justice: The recent release of another member of the "Red Army Faction', a leftist group of German terrorists from the 1970s, reminds us of the central concept of European 'justice'. They are released because they are not perceived to be a threat to society. For the same reason aging Nazis were long ago released. European justice does not seek retribution. Worst of all it does not recognize that the victims of these people were denied their right to life, and that therefore the murderer should also be denied his freedom. Europeans speak of a 'proportionate' response. There is nothing more disproportionate than letting a murderer run free who has taken the lives of others.
Its funny to think
December 27th, 2008
Seth J. Frantzman
It funny to think that in Gaza people who wear black and white checkered Khaffiyas have them removed by the police and are questioned. That is Hamas justice. The newest ‘exotic’ movie to come out of North Africa, ‘Whatever Lola Wants’ includes an hour of a white teenage American girl shaking her breasts and buttocks for crowds of men as part of her ‘belly dancing training’ where she ‘frees her mind’ and ‘comes to know her body.’ But there are some people who won’t be going to this degrading film; Islamists. It is a strange world where the Hamas loving Islamic terrorist won’t countenance the terror-supporting khaffiyah but the blond haired-blue eyed woman from the U.K will proudly wear it in Jerusalem and wax poetic about ‘Al Khalil’ the “real name of Hebron”, while she lectures some Palestinian girl on how that girl is “not sufficiently nationalistic, you learned Hebrew, that language of oppression.” It is a strange world where one can only count on the Islamist to remove the symbol of terrorism, the Khaffiyeh, and where one can only rely on the white European to wear that khaffiyeh, even at a restaurant in Jerusalem recently renovated after being bombed by one of those very Khaffiyeh wearing terrorists.
Let me speak clearly. The woman from the U.K wears the symbol that supports the terror that blew up Restobar on Gaza Street causing blood to flow down the street. The Hamas government of the Gaza strip takes that Khaffiyeh from around the neck of the same surprised blue eyed white girl and explains “not around here.” The European gushes with enthusiasm and crowds up to see the ‘cultural’ masterpiece of some white teenage girl gyrating her breasts for men to watch and the white Europeans say “oh, this is an expression of an ancient fertility ritual from the Middle East.” But the actual resident of the Middle East, except for some French speaking elites in Tunis, don’t go to see this degrading movie.
Laura Ramsey in 'Whatever Lola Wants' shown at the Dubai film festival. If its cultural then how come Muslim women don't dress like this and they have to import European, African or Indian women to dance for them?
Why is it that Islam makes more sense than western civilization and liberalism? Why is it that Islamism is so rarely contradictory. It is strait. It likes terrorism, so long as it is its terrorism. It won’t allow belly dancing to be passed of as some ‘ancient cultural ritual that empowers women.’ It tells it like it is: “Belly dancing is a western import, invented by western women, it is a dirty immoral display of female nudity and corrupts men and women who are exposed to it.” Western liberalism would like to jam ‘oriental dance’ down the throat of Islam, forcing it to ‘admit’ that its part of Middle Eastern culture. But its not. Belly Dancing is only ‘Middle Eastern’ in the sense that strip clubs are ‘western’. Both arose for the same reason: to give men a place to go and smoke a pipe and pay a few coins to watch women disgrace themselves in the nude so the men may enjoy themselves. Is a tripper, on her hands and knees, shaking her thong in a man’s face practicing an ‘ancient fertility ritual’? Not really. She doesn’t get pregnant very often with those clients, so we can’t really say she is ‘fertile’. She reminds the man of sex, so in that sense she is encouraging his instinctual desire to impregnate something. But liberalism would twist it all around so we can’t figure out what is an ancient part of our culture and what is just a bunch of sleazy immorality.
There is something funny about watching Minarets arise over European cities and watching those leftist-khaffiyeh-wearing Israel-hating-Europeans supporting the rise of this religion in their midst. There is something funny about watching European women with their unkempt hair and their ‘African’ necklaces championing the cause of separate swimming at public pools and at parks for men and women. Only liberalism would support the very thing that it spent between 1850 and 1950 trying to make us get rid of. At the very point where the last social clubs will be forced to integrate men and women one will find that Islam will come along and save them, under the auspices of culture, so that they can remain 'males only', lest the Muslim men be offended. The slaughtering of sheep and other animals for Muslims, Halal butchery, is being brought to the same Europe where some people wish to bar Jews from Kosher butchery. So Islam will save the Jews dietary habits. The Europeans will soon no longer have to recall their history of genocide, the Holocaust, also thanks to Islam which finds learning about the Holocaust ‘offensive’. That is good. Europeans shouldn't have to learn about their own history. They can read Ibn Khaldun’s The Mugaddinah, his masterpiece of ‘world’ history. Europeans hated the Jews and gave them little, but it is good to see them bending over backwards for their most recent arrivals. The European, who never wore a Star and David on his arm, wears the Khaffiyeh around his neck and it is ‘cool’. The Jews were not cool enough for Europe. Islam is cool.
There is something funny about the knowledge that Shariah law is now legal in England and beating one’s wife is now judged in a special Shariah court. There is just something funny about European schools going over to Halal diets for the children. There is something funny about the fact that Amsterdam has legal prostitution and drug use and is 20% Muslim Islamist. Its sort of like a nightmare come true: sex slavery and Islamism, all in one city. Its nice to see gay activists supporting Islamism. Its funny to watch halter top wearing bra-less European women in their miniskirts marching for Islam. Its funny to watch it all because its all just a big joke.
No two civilizations were made for eachother more in history than the European and the Muslim. European men are becoming homosexual at about the same rate that Muslim men in Europe desire polygamy. Could anything fit more closely except a continent of same sex relationship loving males, abandoned women, and polygamous Muslims?
What is still funny to think about is my memories of that European 22 year old white woman, scampering off to her house in the Shuafat refugee camp in the West Bank to meet her curfew, she doesn’t want to offend those Muslim sensibilities, wearing that khaffiyeh and declaring that she was “wants to live in a traditional Arab village but close enough to Jerusalem so I can go to bars in West Jerusalem.” The European. They are such funny people. They will wear that khaffieyh in the West Bank to show their support for the ‘resistance’, they will encourage nationalism among Palestinians, they go with that khaffiyeh to some bar in Jewish Tel Aviv, a bar that has been blown up by terrorists, and the European doesn’t think of the offense that they cause, or they enjoy the idea that they are "exercising their rights by wearing it, showing the Israelis that I support the Palestinians and am proud of it.” The European. When one knows the smirk on the Europeans face when the European hears about terrorism in other countries, the lack of empathy for other peoples who suffer from the terror the European supports, when one thinks of it they almost wish terror upon Europe, they almost look forward to watching Europe reap what it has sown. And then one thinks of Hamas and how they ban the Khaffiyeh. Will Hamas save us from the European? Who is worse, the Hamas activist or his European female European collaborator? Who is worse: the terrorist or his excuser, his lover, those who call his act ‘resistance’? The terrorist is honest. The European is not. The European needlessly spits on the graves of the dead and offends the victims, wearing its khaffiyeh into the offices of terror victims, enjoying tea at elitist coffee shops and looking down on average people. Hamas doesn’t spit on the grave of the terror victim. Hamas can be relied on for its hate and one can fight Hamas with a closed fist. But how does one fight the European and his support of terrorism and the fact that he comes to every country in the world and exploits democracy in order to fan the flames of terrorism and ethnic hatred and nationalism? How does one fight him? Hamas knows how. We could learn much from Hamas. The European loves Hamas. If we can become like Hamas will the European love us? If not at least we can deal with the European the way Hamas has: remove the khaffiyeh and interrogate and expel them, tell the European once and for all: stay home and stop coming to our countries and trampling on the graves of our dead. You Europeans caused enough bloodshed, enough genocides: the world has had enough. Luckily leftist Europeans have few children and their continent is being slowly made more and more poor through the immigrants in Europe: soon they will decline and be poor and suffer terror and ethnic and religious strife.
Why the women leave
December 16th, 2008
Seth J. Frantzman
Philipino maids throw themselves off balconies in Lebanon. Canadian nurses are beheaded in Saudi Arabia. British ‘cocktail waitresses’ are murdered in Japan. American college students are murdered in Italy. Women from Moldova are ‘tricked’ into becoming sex slaves in Macedonia, forced to clean toilets with their tongues, and then released from imprisonment when they get AIDs. In Haifa women have sex with forty men a night ‘to feed their children’. What is wrong with women in our world? Why is it that our world, our modern world, is a brutal place where women are raped, murdered, disappeared and turned into slaves by the millions? In Somalia they rape teenage girls and then accuse them of ‘adultery’ and bury them up to their necks and stone them to death. What is most fascinating about all this is that it is women in some cases who make the choices to engage in these activities or at the very least trust some advertisement to be a ‘dancer’ or ‘nurse’ in some country where the first step on their ‘journey to work’ is to give away their passport to some man and then be ‘smuggled’ by other men who then rape them. No matter, they follow their fate.
Why is it that the modern world, with its secularism and education is primarily responsible for creating slavery and slavery entirely among the female half of secular societies. Its an interesting side of women’s ‘liberation’ and freedom that guarantees that within ten or fifty years of giving women equal rights one will find, as they have found in the Philippines, that something like 20% of the women in the country have simply disappeared and gone abroad, never to return. They are working as nurses or caretakers or prostitutes throughout the world. Not only do they never return, none of them seek to marry Phillipino men, they disappear into the meat grinder of poverty and nothingness of a brutal secular world. Where have all the women gone in the Ukraine or Moldova? They are ‘working’ as prostitutes in Prague or Macedonia or Amsterdam, on display in some window to be bought and sold by men. The most beautiful make their male pimps the most money until they have become ‘old and loose’ and then they are tossed aside, with any number of drug problems and STDs, into some trash heap.
It doesn’t happen to men. Men don’t sell themselves into slavery. Men don’t end up locked in houses in Lebanon, throwing themselves out windows to escape. Men don’t allow themselves to be sold as slaves, raped and put on display in some window like an animal. So why does secularism lead to the dehumanization of women? Why does ‘equal rights’ lead to a society without women with the women sold into some brothel somewhere with no rights? Why is it that in nations where rights are granted to women, when there is even the slightest economic downturn, the women sell themselves on ‘Russian brides’ websites and marry foreign men and immediately leave their countries, converting to whatever religion they can find so as to leave behind the country and the nation and the heritage that granted them equality? Why is it that the freedom granted women in Russia led to most of them coming to places like Israel and marrying Bedouin men in polygamous marriages, converting to Islam, having 13 children and covering themselves up. They wouldn't have had 13 children with a Russian man. They wouldn’t have covered themselves up modestly for a Russian man. They wouldn't have allowed a Russian man to lock them inside all day so he could enjoy other women. But they will do it for whatever man comes along who isn’t Russian or Orthodox Christian. That is the message of secularism, so far as women are concerned: slavery and abandonment of the society that grants the freedom.
There was a time in society, when people were religious, when women had a role in the family and in the religion and in conveying traditions to the young. There was a time when women committed suicide after seeing their men sold into slavery after defeat in battle. There was a time when women wept for the men in their society and supported them in times of war and economic hardship. But secularism guarantees, because it produces a society of irresponsible men who spend more time picking out their metrosexual jeans and watching porn then paying attention to their women, that the women have no interest in the society that grants them freedom and equality. It is almost unheard of to see women nationalists and right wing women in a democratic secular society. Women are always, in a secular liberal society, at the forefront of movements to help ‘the other’ and bring Shariah law or some other hateful law of inequality into society. Why is that? Why is it that women in the free society can always be counted on to support those religions and laws that grant less freedom to women? Why is it that women judges can always be counted on to give light prison sentences to rapists whereas male judges give harsher ones? One finds that whatever is the culture in society that treats women the worst this will be the culture considered the most ‘exotic’ and most ‘romantic’ by women in a secular society.
While women will be the first ones in the secular society to want to ‘push the bounds’ of society by being nude in operas and plays and protesting nude or being photographed nude, the same women will inevitably cover their hair and act modestly and quietly for whatever immigrant minority religion demands that of them. While women will fight for abortion in their secular society one finds that those same women, once they have discovered Islam, will have 13 children.
This is the paradox of freedom for women. Societies that grant women freedom do not find that women like that society any longer. Religions that grant women equality will find that women no longer want to worship that religion. Take Christianity, that religion where gays are ordained in Europe and women are priests. But how many women are proud Christians in Europe? How many women take enjoyment in reading the Bible? But give them a Koran and they will be exploring the Sunna and the Hadith and pronouncing Al Khalil correctly and letting the word “Mohammed” role off their lips like they are post-coital. Why?
Is the problem a problem that is central to women, the natural love of enslavement and being second class citizens, or is it a problem of secular democracy, granting people freedom leads them to take it for granted and they come to have contempt for what they are familiar with, or is it a problem with men, men become increasingly fat and weak in a wealthy secular democracy, exposed to ‘perfect’ women in porn and magazine covers they no longer value their ‘normal’ women, they become irresponsible because of the ease of abortion, having no honour for women, deserting pregnant women and expecting women to be single mothers while men live a life of irresponsibility and childishness, drowning themselves in impotent drug use, drunkeness and games of foolishness.
It is all three. Women have an innate and strange and twisted desire to be abused, dominated, told what to do and degraded. In the West we speak of women entering a ‘vicious cycle of bad relationships’ but this disguises the truth; these women in these ‘abusive relationships’ desire this abuse, just as prostitutes may use the excuse of being ‘abused by my dad’ but in truth they have sought out this lifestyle and while not enjoying it have played a great part in wanting to be it, just as strippers and porn stars are mostly middle class and choose to become what they are. Secularism is a diseased system that decays the moral and spiritual qualities of people, forcing them eventually to hate secularism and love its destruction, or at the very least not want to defend it. Worst of all are the men of the west, a primarily weak and pathetic gathering of metrosexual flabbiness, fat, weak, skinny beyond normality, overly enjoying childish games, rarely growing up and never having any interest in the women in their society.
The three go hand in hand. Women, who out of a sense of wanting to be honoured, degrade themselves out of the false premise that men who abuse them, rape them or lock them up ‘love them’, secularism gives people no structure in an ‘anything goes’ society, and the men become fat, impotent and weak, increasingly incapable of raising their fists to do anything and unwilling to chase their women in a manner that shows the women they are actually wanted and desired by their men. Lack of any religion or faith or decency or tradition and heritage adds to the illness of the society and produces generations of women who fall prey to enslavement and who flee their countries for opportunities (after all secularism and capitalism value ‘opportunity) abroad, the men flee too, there are Spanish and Australian towns where all the men have simply left for work in America or the UAE. Men without the strictures of religion have no interest in the future and have no interest in children, a thing they view as a burden to their fun loving life. It is an ill society, truly sick, where the men and the women have a mutual dislike for one another to the extent that the women sell themselves into slavery and the men become bisexual, such is their love for themselves and their male bodies.
Europe and the concept of Justice
December 25th, 2008
Seth J. Frantzman
Another day, another murderer freed in Europe. In European countries a ‘life sentence’ is between 15-22 years. Hardly a year goes by without another terrorist or former Nazi being released due to ‘old age’ or because they are ‘no longer a threat to society.’ The latest murderer to be freed was Christian Klar, a German who has served 26 years of his ‘life sentence’. He is 55 years old. Klar was arrested in 1982 as a member of the Red Army Faction or Baader-Mienhof gang which murdered 34 high profile German businessmen and politicians. Klar took the lives of three people; Hans-Martin Schleyer, Siegfried Buback and Jurgen Punto. These three men were murdered because the communist ideology and youthful leftist extremism of Klar and his bourgeoisie leftist friends led them to take the lives of those they saw as ‘capitalists’. The German leftists of the Red Army Faction also participated in the hijacking of the Air France jet to Entebbe that was subsequently freed by the Israelis. During that hijacking the German leftists and their Arab Muslim allies separated the Jewish passengers from the non-Jewish ones.
Klar took the lives of three men. Some of them were about the same age he is now. He took there lives for no reason. They had done nothing wrong and yet Klar believed he had the ‘right’ to take their lives. Yet no one, especially not the state it seems, has the right to take the life of Klar. His ‘life sentence’ is hardly that. He murdered three people and denied them the right to live their lives and denied their families the ability to say goodbye or see these three men again. Yet Klar will see his family and even have the chance to raise children and love and be loved. He took all that three men ever had and all they would ever have, but he receives everything from society. Society in Europe and the European sense of ‘justice’ is the reason that the life of the murderer is full and free and the life of the victim is worth nothing.
Why is it that justice has become perverted in this matter. People have come to believe that prison serves only as a place to keep ‘dangerous’ people away from society. Once these people are ‘rehabilitated’ or old or ‘no longer a threat’ or they ‘show remorse’ they are allowed to go free. But why are murderers who planned their murder and killed again and again allowed to go free. One can understand that some people murder others accidentally in an act of rage. Those people, while taking a life, may deserve rehabilitation and a second chance. But when someone stalks other people, kidnaps them and murders them and then does it again and again how can that person and how can justice be served by freeing them.
The justice system, particularly in Europe, is not about punishment any longer. It is not about taking away the freedom of someone who denied others their freedom. Instead it is so brutally pragmatic and cold that it simply seeks to remove the threatening person from society until that person is considered no longer a threat. But this is a brutal way to serve justice for it does not justice to the people whose lives were taken. They are not entered into the equation. This is a significant problem. A Nazi can take the lives of tens of thousands at a camp he is in charge of. He can torture and rape and do all manner of evil unspeakable things. And yet when he reaches the age of 80 because of his ‘old age’ he is allowed to leave prison and enjoy his last years in comfort. But his victims received no comfort. They died cold and alone. They were murdered senselessly and without reason. They were brutally tortured and worked to death. But the ‘old’ Nazi gets to visit his family and smile and enjoy the holidays. He denied others lives and family and holidays but he receives it all in the name of a ‘justice’ system that seeks merely to protect society from threats and not punish those who threaten others.
It is a very strange world to know that a person who murdered senselessly can sit on a bus next to you and he can chat and smile.
A society that abandons the concept of revenge and retribution in its justice system loses the concept of justice. Prison is not simply a place to put people who are dangerous and who interrupt society's norms. It is also a place to punish people. In a society that finds the death penalty immoral he least we can do is keep murderers in prison for the rest of their lives. They denied life. There is no reason that they should be allowed to have life.
2) Why the women leave: The news reports of dead women found in various countries never end. Sex slaves tossed aside like garbage, 'cocktail waitresses' murdered in Japan, nurses beheaded in Saudi, 13 year old rape victims in Somalia stoned to death by courageous men. The slaughter of women is at an all time high. In the UK they admit to 'losing' 2000 women a year from the school system, most forced into marriage. In Pakistan special graveyards are designated for the anonymous victims of honour killings. We see once again that whereas the Islamic society murders women and it is accepted, that in the Western and secular society women are also disappeared, sold and trafficked and crushed beneath the boot of modernity. But why? Why does secularism and freedom for women also lead to the murder and enslavement of so many of them, just as in the Islamist society?
3) Europe and the concept of Justice: The recent release of another member of the "Red Army Faction', a leftist group of German terrorists from the 1970s, reminds us of the central concept of European 'justice'. They are released because they are not perceived to be a threat to society. For the same reason aging Nazis were long ago released. European justice does not seek retribution. Worst of all it does not recognize that the victims of these people were denied their right to life, and that therefore the murderer should also be denied his freedom. Europeans speak of a 'proportionate' response. There is nothing more disproportionate than letting a murderer run free who has taken the lives of others.
Its funny to think
December 27th, 2008
Seth J. Frantzman
It funny to think that in Gaza people who wear black and white checkered Khaffiyas have them removed by the police and are questioned. That is Hamas justice. The newest ‘exotic’ movie to come out of North Africa, ‘Whatever Lola Wants’ includes an hour of a white teenage American girl shaking her breasts and buttocks for crowds of men as part of her ‘belly dancing training’ where she ‘frees her mind’ and ‘comes to know her body.’ But there are some people who won’t be going to this degrading film; Islamists. It is a strange world where the Hamas loving Islamic terrorist won’t countenance the terror-supporting khaffiyah but the blond haired-blue eyed woman from the U.K will proudly wear it in Jerusalem and wax poetic about ‘Al Khalil’ the “real name of Hebron”, while she lectures some Palestinian girl on how that girl is “not sufficiently nationalistic, you learned Hebrew, that language of oppression.” It is a strange world where one can only count on the Islamist to remove the symbol of terrorism, the Khaffiyeh, and where one can only rely on the white European to wear that khaffiyeh, even at a restaurant in Jerusalem recently renovated after being bombed by one of those very Khaffiyeh wearing terrorists.
Let me speak clearly. The woman from the U.K wears the symbol that supports the terror that blew up Restobar on Gaza Street causing blood to flow down the street. The Hamas government of the Gaza strip takes that Khaffiyeh from around the neck of the same surprised blue eyed white girl and explains “not around here.” The European gushes with enthusiasm and crowds up to see the ‘cultural’ masterpiece of some white teenage girl gyrating her breasts for men to watch and the white Europeans say “oh, this is an expression of an ancient fertility ritual from the Middle East.” But the actual resident of the Middle East, except for some French speaking elites in Tunis, don’t go to see this degrading movie.
Laura Ramsey in 'Whatever Lola Wants' shown at the Dubai film festival. If its cultural then how come Muslim women don't dress like this and they have to import European, African or Indian women to dance for them?
Why is it that Islam makes more sense than western civilization and liberalism? Why is it that Islamism is so rarely contradictory. It is strait. It likes terrorism, so long as it is its terrorism. It won’t allow belly dancing to be passed of as some ‘ancient cultural ritual that empowers women.’ It tells it like it is: “Belly dancing is a western import, invented by western women, it is a dirty immoral display of female nudity and corrupts men and women who are exposed to it.” Western liberalism would like to jam ‘oriental dance’ down the throat of Islam, forcing it to ‘admit’ that its part of Middle Eastern culture. But its not. Belly Dancing is only ‘Middle Eastern’ in the sense that strip clubs are ‘western’. Both arose for the same reason: to give men a place to go and smoke a pipe and pay a few coins to watch women disgrace themselves in the nude so the men may enjoy themselves. Is a tripper, on her hands and knees, shaking her thong in a man’s face practicing an ‘ancient fertility ritual’? Not really. She doesn’t get pregnant very often with those clients, so we can’t really say she is ‘fertile’. She reminds the man of sex, so in that sense she is encouraging his instinctual desire to impregnate something. But liberalism would twist it all around so we can’t figure out what is an ancient part of our culture and what is just a bunch of sleazy immorality.
There is something funny about watching Minarets arise over European cities and watching those leftist-khaffiyeh-wearing Israel-hating-Europeans supporting the rise of this religion in their midst. There is something funny about watching European women with their unkempt hair and their ‘African’ necklaces championing the cause of separate swimming at public pools and at parks for men and women. Only liberalism would support the very thing that it spent between 1850 and 1950 trying to make us get rid of. At the very point where the last social clubs will be forced to integrate men and women one will find that Islam will come along and save them, under the auspices of culture, so that they can remain 'males only', lest the Muslim men be offended. The slaughtering of sheep and other animals for Muslims, Halal butchery, is being brought to the same Europe where some people wish to bar Jews from Kosher butchery. So Islam will save the Jews dietary habits. The Europeans will soon no longer have to recall their history of genocide, the Holocaust, also thanks to Islam which finds learning about the Holocaust ‘offensive’. That is good. Europeans shouldn't have to learn about their own history. They can read Ibn Khaldun’s The Mugaddinah, his masterpiece of ‘world’ history. Europeans hated the Jews and gave them little, but it is good to see them bending over backwards for their most recent arrivals. The European, who never wore a Star and David on his arm, wears the Khaffiyeh around his neck and it is ‘cool’. The Jews were not cool enough for Europe. Islam is cool.
There is something funny about the knowledge that Shariah law is now legal in England and beating one’s wife is now judged in a special Shariah court. There is just something funny about European schools going over to Halal diets for the children. There is something funny about the fact that Amsterdam has legal prostitution and drug use and is 20% Muslim Islamist. Its sort of like a nightmare come true: sex slavery and Islamism, all in one city. Its nice to see gay activists supporting Islamism. Its funny to watch halter top wearing bra-less European women in their miniskirts marching for Islam. Its funny to watch it all because its all just a big joke.
No two civilizations were made for eachother more in history than the European and the Muslim. European men are becoming homosexual at about the same rate that Muslim men in Europe desire polygamy. Could anything fit more closely except a continent of same sex relationship loving males, abandoned women, and polygamous Muslims?
What is still funny to think about is my memories of that European 22 year old white woman, scampering off to her house in the Shuafat refugee camp in the West Bank to meet her curfew, she doesn’t want to offend those Muslim sensibilities, wearing that khaffiyeh and declaring that she was “wants to live in a traditional Arab village but close enough to Jerusalem so I can go to bars in West Jerusalem.” The European. They are such funny people. They will wear that khaffieyh in the West Bank to show their support for the ‘resistance’, they will encourage nationalism among Palestinians, they go with that khaffiyeh to some bar in Jewish Tel Aviv, a bar that has been blown up by terrorists, and the European doesn’t think of the offense that they cause, or they enjoy the idea that they are "exercising their rights by wearing it, showing the Israelis that I support the Palestinians and am proud of it.” The European. When one knows the smirk on the Europeans face when the European hears about terrorism in other countries, the lack of empathy for other peoples who suffer from the terror the European supports, when one thinks of it they almost wish terror upon Europe, they almost look forward to watching Europe reap what it has sown. And then one thinks of Hamas and how they ban the Khaffiyeh. Will Hamas save us from the European? Who is worse, the Hamas activist or his European female European collaborator? Who is worse: the terrorist or his excuser, his lover, those who call his act ‘resistance’? The terrorist is honest. The European is not. The European needlessly spits on the graves of the dead and offends the victims, wearing its khaffiyeh into the offices of terror victims, enjoying tea at elitist coffee shops and looking down on average people. Hamas doesn’t spit on the grave of the terror victim. Hamas can be relied on for its hate and one can fight Hamas with a closed fist. But how does one fight the European and his support of terrorism and the fact that he comes to every country in the world and exploits democracy in order to fan the flames of terrorism and ethnic hatred and nationalism? How does one fight him? Hamas knows how. We could learn much from Hamas. The European loves Hamas. If we can become like Hamas will the European love us? If not at least we can deal with the European the way Hamas has: remove the khaffiyeh and interrogate and expel them, tell the European once and for all: stay home and stop coming to our countries and trampling on the graves of our dead. You Europeans caused enough bloodshed, enough genocides: the world has had enough. Luckily leftist Europeans have few children and their continent is being slowly made more and more poor through the immigrants in Europe: soon they will decline and be poor and suffer terror and ethnic and religious strife.
Why the women leave
December 16th, 2008
Seth J. Frantzman
Philipino maids throw themselves off balconies in Lebanon. Canadian nurses are beheaded in Saudi Arabia. British ‘cocktail waitresses’ are murdered in Japan. American college students are murdered in Italy. Women from Moldova are ‘tricked’ into becoming sex slaves in Macedonia, forced to clean toilets with their tongues, and then released from imprisonment when they get AIDs. In Haifa women have sex with forty men a night ‘to feed their children’. What is wrong with women in our world? Why is it that our world, our modern world, is a brutal place where women are raped, murdered, disappeared and turned into slaves by the millions? In Somalia they rape teenage girls and then accuse them of ‘adultery’ and bury them up to their necks and stone them to death. What is most fascinating about all this is that it is women in some cases who make the choices to engage in these activities or at the very least trust some advertisement to be a ‘dancer’ or ‘nurse’ in some country where the first step on their ‘journey to work’ is to give away their passport to some man and then be ‘smuggled’ by other men who then rape them. No matter, they follow their fate.
Why is it that the modern world, with its secularism and education is primarily responsible for creating slavery and slavery entirely among the female half of secular societies. Its an interesting side of women’s ‘liberation’ and freedom that guarantees that within ten or fifty years of giving women equal rights one will find, as they have found in the Philippines, that something like 20% of the women in the country have simply disappeared and gone abroad, never to return. They are working as nurses or caretakers or prostitutes throughout the world. Not only do they never return, none of them seek to marry Phillipino men, they disappear into the meat grinder of poverty and nothingness of a brutal secular world. Where have all the women gone in the Ukraine or Moldova? They are ‘working’ as prostitutes in Prague or Macedonia or Amsterdam, on display in some window to be bought and sold by men. The most beautiful make their male pimps the most money until they have become ‘old and loose’ and then they are tossed aside, with any number of drug problems and STDs, into some trash heap.
It doesn’t happen to men. Men don’t sell themselves into slavery. Men don’t end up locked in houses in Lebanon, throwing themselves out windows to escape. Men don’t allow themselves to be sold as slaves, raped and put on display in some window like an animal. So why does secularism lead to the dehumanization of women? Why does ‘equal rights’ lead to a society without women with the women sold into some brothel somewhere with no rights? Why is it that in nations where rights are granted to women, when there is even the slightest economic downturn, the women sell themselves on ‘Russian brides’ websites and marry foreign men and immediately leave their countries, converting to whatever religion they can find so as to leave behind the country and the nation and the heritage that granted them equality? Why is it that the freedom granted women in Russia led to most of them coming to places like Israel and marrying Bedouin men in polygamous marriages, converting to Islam, having 13 children and covering themselves up. They wouldn't have had 13 children with a Russian man. They wouldn’t have covered themselves up modestly for a Russian man. They wouldn't have allowed a Russian man to lock them inside all day so he could enjoy other women. But they will do it for whatever man comes along who isn’t Russian or Orthodox Christian. That is the message of secularism, so far as women are concerned: slavery and abandonment of the society that grants the freedom.
There was a time in society, when people were religious, when women had a role in the family and in the religion and in conveying traditions to the young. There was a time when women committed suicide after seeing their men sold into slavery after defeat in battle. There was a time when women wept for the men in their society and supported them in times of war and economic hardship. But secularism guarantees, because it produces a society of irresponsible men who spend more time picking out their metrosexual jeans and watching porn then paying attention to their women, that the women have no interest in the society that grants them freedom and equality. It is almost unheard of to see women nationalists and right wing women in a democratic secular society. Women are always, in a secular liberal society, at the forefront of movements to help ‘the other’ and bring Shariah law or some other hateful law of inequality into society. Why is that? Why is it that women in the free society can always be counted on to support those religions and laws that grant less freedom to women? Why is it that women judges can always be counted on to give light prison sentences to rapists whereas male judges give harsher ones? One finds that whatever is the culture in society that treats women the worst this will be the culture considered the most ‘exotic’ and most ‘romantic’ by women in a secular society.
While women will be the first ones in the secular society to want to ‘push the bounds’ of society by being nude in operas and plays and protesting nude or being photographed nude, the same women will inevitably cover their hair and act modestly and quietly for whatever immigrant minority religion demands that of them. While women will fight for abortion in their secular society one finds that those same women, once they have discovered Islam, will have 13 children.
This is the paradox of freedom for women. Societies that grant women freedom do not find that women like that society any longer. Religions that grant women equality will find that women no longer want to worship that religion. Take Christianity, that religion where gays are ordained in Europe and women are priests. But how many women are proud Christians in Europe? How many women take enjoyment in reading the Bible? But give them a Koran and they will be exploring the Sunna and the Hadith and pronouncing Al Khalil correctly and letting the word “Mohammed” role off their lips like they are post-coital. Why?
Is the problem a problem that is central to women, the natural love of enslavement and being second class citizens, or is it a problem of secular democracy, granting people freedom leads them to take it for granted and they come to have contempt for what they are familiar with, or is it a problem with men, men become increasingly fat and weak in a wealthy secular democracy, exposed to ‘perfect’ women in porn and magazine covers they no longer value their ‘normal’ women, they become irresponsible because of the ease of abortion, having no honour for women, deserting pregnant women and expecting women to be single mothers while men live a life of irresponsibility and childishness, drowning themselves in impotent drug use, drunkeness and games of foolishness.
It is all three. Women have an innate and strange and twisted desire to be abused, dominated, told what to do and degraded. In the West we speak of women entering a ‘vicious cycle of bad relationships’ but this disguises the truth; these women in these ‘abusive relationships’ desire this abuse, just as prostitutes may use the excuse of being ‘abused by my dad’ but in truth they have sought out this lifestyle and while not enjoying it have played a great part in wanting to be it, just as strippers and porn stars are mostly middle class and choose to become what they are. Secularism is a diseased system that decays the moral and spiritual qualities of people, forcing them eventually to hate secularism and love its destruction, or at the very least not want to defend it. Worst of all are the men of the west, a primarily weak and pathetic gathering of metrosexual flabbiness, fat, weak, skinny beyond normality, overly enjoying childish games, rarely growing up and never having any interest in the women in their society.
The three go hand in hand. Women, who out of a sense of wanting to be honoured, degrade themselves out of the false premise that men who abuse them, rape them or lock them up ‘love them’, secularism gives people no structure in an ‘anything goes’ society, and the men become fat, impotent and weak, increasingly incapable of raising their fists to do anything and unwilling to chase their women in a manner that shows the women they are actually wanted and desired by their men. Lack of any religion or faith or decency or tradition and heritage adds to the illness of the society and produces generations of women who fall prey to enslavement and who flee their countries for opportunities (after all secularism and capitalism value ‘opportunity) abroad, the men flee too, there are Spanish and Australian towns where all the men have simply left for work in America or the UAE. Men without the strictures of religion have no interest in the future and have no interest in children, a thing they view as a burden to their fun loving life. It is an ill society, truly sick, where the men and the women have a mutual dislike for one another to the extent that the women sell themselves into slavery and the men become bisexual, such is their love for themselves and their male bodies.
Europe and the concept of Justice
December 25th, 2008
Seth J. Frantzman
Another day, another murderer freed in Europe. In European countries a ‘life sentence’ is between 15-22 years. Hardly a year goes by without another terrorist or former Nazi being released due to ‘old age’ or because they are ‘no longer a threat to society.’ The latest murderer to be freed was Christian Klar, a German who has served 26 years of his ‘life sentence’. He is 55 years old. Klar was arrested in 1982 as a member of the Red Army Faction or Baader-Mienhof gang which murdered 34 high profile German businessmen and politicians. Klar took the lives of three people; Hans-Martin Schleyer, Siegfried Buback and Jurgen Punto. These three men were murdered because the communist ideology and youthful leftist extremism of Klar and his bourgeoisie leftist friends led them to take the lives of those they saw as ‘capitalists’. The German leftists of the Red Army Faction also participated in the hijacking of the Air France jet to Entebbe that was subsequently freed by the Israelis. During that hijacking the German leftists and their Arab Muslim allies separated the Jewish passengers from the non-Jewish ones.
Klar took the lives of three men. Some of them were about the same age he is now. He took there lives for no reason. They had done nothing wrong and yet Klar believed he had the ‘right’ to take their lives. Yet no one, especially not the state it seems, has the right to take the life of Klar. His ‘life sentence’ is hardly that. He murdered three people and denied them the right to live their lives and denied their families the ability to say goodbye or see these three men again. Yet Klar will see his family and even have the chance to raise children and love and be loved. He took all that three men ever had and all they would ever have, but he receives everything from society. Society in Europe and the European sense of ‘justice’ is the reason that the life of the murderer is full and free and the life of the victim is worth nothing.
Why is it that justice has become perverted in this matter. People have come to believe that prison serves only as a place to keep ‘dangerous’ people away from society. Once these people are ‘rehabilitated’ or old or ‘no longer a threat’ or they ‘show remorse’ they are allowed to go free. But why are murderers who planned their murder and killed again and again allowed to go free. One can understand that some people murder others accidentally in an act of rage. Those people, while taking a life, may deserve rehabilitation and a second chance. But when someone stalks other people, kidnaps them and murders them and then does it again and again how can that person and how can justice be served by freeing them.
The justice system, particularly in Europe, is not about punishment any longer. It is not about taking away the freedom of someone who denied others their freedom. Instead it is so brutally pragmatic and cold that it simply seeks to remove the threatening person from society until that person is considered no longer a threat. But this is a brutal way to serve justice for it does not justice to the people whose lives were taken. They are not entered into the equation. This is a significant problem. A Nazi can take the lives of tens of thousands at a camp he is in charge of. He can torture and rape and do all manner of evil unspeakable things. And yet when he reaches the age of 80 because of his ‘old age’ he is allowed to leave prison and enjoy his last years in comfort. But his victims received no comfort. They died cold and alone. They were murdered senselessly and without reason. They were brutally tortured and worked to death. But the ‘old’ Nazi gets to visit his family and smile and enjoy the holidays. He denied others lives and family and holidays but he receives it all in the name of a ‘justice’ system that seeks merely to protect society from threats and not punish those who threaten others.
It is a very strange world to know that a person who murdered senselessly can sit on a bus next to you and he can chat and smile.
A society that abandons the concept of revenge and retribution in its justice system loses the concept of justice. Prison is not simply a place to put people who are dangerous and who interrupt society's norms. It is also a place to punish people. In a society that finds the death penalty immoral he least we can do is keep murderers in prison for the rest of their lives. They denied life. There is no reason that they should be allowed to have life.
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