Terra Incognita
Issue 82
“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
April 24th, 2009
1) How I came to hate the West and what it represents: It’s fashionable to beat up on the West. That is not my intention to pick on the straw man. In the wake of 9/11 many right wing people came to believe that defending Western values was integral to defending our civilization. But the modern values of the West, especially in Europe, don’t deserve defending and they are not truly part of our civilization, they are a construct, a growth, a sort of appendage to our ancient, hallowed, honourable traditions and discarding the West is the only way to defeat the enemy.
2) The Copts and their self depreciating self hate: The Copts of Egypt play the perfect role of Dhimmi. They don’t pick their heads up to much or demand any rights. Now educated Copt film producers have gone even farther, making films that critique and ‘expose’ their culture, encouraging Copt women to divorce their husbands and marry Muslim men. Such a self hating minority, whose elites seek to destroy it and harm it in front of the majority is extraordinary. It is also a tragedy.
3) Begging for Internationalization: The newest trend in Israel is people calling on the international community to intervene and force Israel and the Palestinians to make peace. Unsurprisingly those who demand peace at any cost like this have foreign passports and can flee when their UN invasion scheme doesn’t work out.
How I came to hate the West and what it represents
Seth J. Frantzman
April 14th, 2009
In the aftermath of September 11th I, like so many others of my generation, became one of those defenders of the West and its values. My ideology was not naturally inclined to this. I had taken an interest in the radical ideologies of Communism and Fascism as a teenager. Later I became a staunch Republican. Exposed to the liberalism of the hippie-leftist-vegan-socialist idiocy of so many others I understood that the Republican party and its conservative ideology offered a more logical answer to the problems of Americans, if not all of mankind. But the Republican party in the 1990s was critical of the decadence and permissive nature of the West, its materialism and its developing social dis-fabric of non-family oriented atheistic extremism. The Republican ideology had been enthralled with Islam to a point. In the 1980s it had fallen in love with the Mujahadin of Afghanistan, ‘our freedom fighters’. Those obnoxious and savage Vietnamese in the black pajamas were not romantic, but people on camels with more nuanced pajamas, they were heroic because they alone stood against the Soviet juggernaut at a time when the American president was throwing former allies out the door with the bathwater.
Pinochet. The Shah. The Marcoses. The Contras. The Hmong. They were gone. All that was left was our Muslims. And what Muslims they were. Lovers of the family. No abortion in their countries. Seemingly aesthetic. Seemingly Spartan. Lovers of business and individualism as only believers in a god from the desert can be. No social justice and living wages there. No homosexuals either. Dick Cheney liked them. So did H. Norman Swatzkopf who admired that his wealthy Saudi officer friends would step outside of their limos to pray in the desert in their robes.
And then, after years of being nice to these people and propping up their regimes in Egypt, Jordan, Pakistan, Iraq and the Gulf, they came and attacked us. Before we had assured ourselves it was only the psychotic ones, like Qaddafi, and the Shias, like Iran, that were truly dangerous.
So on September 12th many right wing people, with the exception of Dinesh D’Souza and a few others, began to make the pilgrimage to embrace left wing values, such as tolerance and women’s rights, because we understood that it, like all of the West, was in danger from Islamism. The Neo-con heresy helped make the fruit punch more palatable, for it was both right wing and left wing at the same time, part Wilsonian progressive Trotskyism and part muscular Judeo-American-Christianity. Where once the right abjured the whoring of our values upon the nations of the world Little America was now to be brought to the savages. Henry Ford had apparently tried something like it in the Amazon. The Catholics had been civilized with democracy, brought away from their papal ring kissing. So could not the Anglo-Saxon Protestantism of Samuel Huntington’s imagination bring the Muslims to heel. Such was the crusade. Such was the multi-headed hydra that propelled us. And who was our decider in Chief but a real American Texan like George Bush condemned abroad for the same simple talking John Wayne swagger that we so admired at home.
George Bush unsheathed America’s great sword and brought it to bear on the Muslim regimes. But like so many revolutions he didn’t go far enough. “Bomb them where they live.” That was Nixon’s description of the bombing of Hanoi. But we bombed and renditioned them and it didn’t seem to work.
Americans of my persuasion understood that saving Europe was integral to saving the West. So many books were published on the subject it is hard to recall them. There was Oriana Fallaci’s The Rage and the Pride and there were others. Saving Europe was a worthy goal but only insofar as the Europeans want to save themselves.
But now I’ve come to see another side to the ‘West’. In Israel I’ve seen what else the West produces, things that need not be saved and things that ought to be opposed by every ounce in our body because they are so evil and horrific that the satanic virtues of Islam only surpass them barely. I’ve come to see the other side by witnessing just what happens with the Wasp Rot of the Western elites and their blind obedience to self hatred and their support for terrorism and genocide. The best example of this is Prof. Zeev Sternhell, a scholar of fascism and a German Jew who has lived in Israel since childhood.
Sternhell, at the height of the second intifada when the Palestinians were waging a terror war against Israel’s civilians, published an oped in Israel’s main intellectual newspaper, Haaretz. It argued that the terrorists should concentrate their attacks on the settlements outside the green line and that attacks within Israel were harming their cause because, since the majority of Israelis lived there, it would harm them and not just the settlers.
I am loathe to speak at length about my personal stories, family or other private aspects, not to protect them or myself, but because it seems tawdry and like using them to make a point. It is like so many people who bring up their ethnicity, sexual orientation or relation to Holocaust survivors all too often. But lets just say that I am familiar with a family of settlers on the West Bank outside the green line with Sternhell would make a blood-red line, shed blood on one side and not the other. This family was born to excruciating poverty in Ethiopia. Living in small grass huts clinging to the hillside they made the long trek through the Sudan in 1984 to be transported to Israel. Once in Israel they suffered discrimination at the hands of the Sternhells, the elites. They could not afford housing but in the most savage towns of Israel where Israel initially settled them, such as Kiryat Gat or Lod. So they struck out and, answering advertising for cheap but comfortable living, they moved to the West Bank. Now Sternhell, who came to the country in the early days, witnessed its war of independence and was a beneficiary of the land cleared of the Arabs would have these new immigrants be gunned down. That is democracy. That is free speech. These Ethiopians, they served in the Israeli army and they found afterword that there were no jobs for them. Relegated to the bottom of Israeli society, not even given the affirmative action of the Arabs, spat on by Ashkenazi elites and Arabs alike, they are now told that they should be shot down by professors inhabiting the top institutions of the country. This is freedom of speech. What kind of a society produces such an evil? What kind of a society produces an elite that calls for the murder of the poor? What kind of a society produces people who receive money and good living from the government and openly encourage the murder of those who can barely find jobs in the society, let alone be hired by its elite institutions. What kind of a society does such a thing? A Western society.
An eastern society is full of its injustices. To be sure. It is more brutal. But the promise of the West is to give man something better. But is that promise fulfilled when a wealthy person who can afford security and who has benefited from the government can live behind his fence and his security and order the murder of the poor?
The right wing ideology does not give the poor a greater degree of leeway just because they are poor. We don’t believe in this ‘justice’. While the poor may very well receive more in the world to come they are not given it here. But the right wing does not believe the poor in a nation should be murdered and shot. It does not encourage others to victimize them. The right sees the potential of the poor but doesn’t relegate them to death. Yet this is precisely what the West has done in producing the self-hating free speech that allows the best educated, most endowed, best members of society to encourage the murder of those who receive the least and yet in many cases are forced to give the most.
One cannot countenance such a thing. One cannot countenance the society that produces intellectuals who encourage the murder of the poor. Let the intellectuals encourage the murder of eachother, that is fine. But when a society does countenance such a thing one must call into question the foundations of that society. When the encouraging of murder is said to be an “important critique” and an “essential part of open civil society” there is a problem with the society. When the critique of society by the Social Sciences takes the form of encouraging murder then the society is rotten and must be stricken from the face of the earth like other brutal savage societies. The world cannot countenance the existence of the West and its self-hating ideologies. It is rotten to the core. The entire premise of the West is rotten for its premised on nothing. It has no roots, no values besides love of the other and self-hate. And that value is essentially the support of the murder of the nation and the citizen. When one values the other over the self and encourages the murder of the self then it is the self that is rotten and must be removed.
There is no West any longer. Its ideologies have become so perverted and self-destructive that it cannot be said to exist. What is the West if its central idea is the hatred of itself? We set out to protect European civilization from Islam but that civilization is overburdened with polluted youth who spend their days on protest tours, protesting for the causes of others in distant places, or they are assaulting Chinese Olympic athletes in the belief that this is ‘standing up to China about Tibet’ or they are visiting the brothels of Bangkok on sex tours or they are bashing the banks and accusing them of being ‘fat cats who suck blood’. No. It cannot be countenanced or defended. The shield of the West is built from rotten wood. The buckles are formed from impure metals. To defend the West the entire foundation must be recast.
The Copts and their self depreciating self hate
Seth J. Frantzman
April 13th, 2009
In the United States the “pro-Israel” anti-Israel lobbying group called J Street which seeks to move the dialogue about Israel in the Congress away from the “one sided” support that AIPAC seeks has supported showing the play ‘Seven Jewish children’. The play was written by a British play write and it depicts Jewish parents through several generations showing how holocaust survivors become Nazi-like after moving to Israel. They live in some mythical non-existent house with a pool in a country where the only people who have private pools are wealthy Arabs in Ramallah and Russian oligarchs in Ceaseria Bet. But who else would support the showing of a self-hate play than a Jewish lobbying group in the U.S?
Maybe the Copts in Egypt? Copts in Egypt represent a minority of some 10% of the population. They, like all Muslim minorities (except the Maronites in Lebanon) committed national self suicide by adhering to the heresy of ‘Arab Nationalism’ and Socialism in order not to ‘offend’ their Muslim neighbours. They emasculated themselves by falsely believing in the idea that they were part of a nation and in doing so allowed the Muslim majority to absorb them more easily, embracing “Egyptianess” they forgot their Christianess and put their national Christian pride as the original Egyptians second to their identity as modern day Arab Socialist Egyptians. Like the Christians in Iraq under Baathism and Syria and among the Palestinians they killed themselves in trying to belong, sort of like the Jews of Russia did in embracing Communism only to find that it destroyed both their identity and eventually their soul.
Now the Copts have embraced liberalism. They tend to be more progressive open-minded westernized, wealthy and urban. Thus liberalism embraces them. One of the tricks liberalism plays on people is that it tells them self critique is essential and that rather than being harmful it is actually a healthy and essential part of culture. Liberalism builds up the straw man of “everyone is a nationalist chauvinist” and tells people that they must “challenge” their community and its “stereotypes” and traditions. What is amazing is that liberalism doesn’t just do this with national cultures such as Christianity and national identity in Europe it also assaults the sinews and fibers of minority groups in Muslim countries so as to break them down and destroy them. Thus liberalism will say “bow to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia” and it will say to Western women “put on a veil in Iran”. But it will say to Iranian Jews “be open minded and date Muslims and don’t have stereotypes” and it will say to Copts in Egypt “your culture of not allowing divorce is barbaric.” An honour killing in a Muslim society is part of a “rich culture” while when a non-Muslim does it then it is terrible. When people attack minorities in the West it is called “racism” but when liberals such as Yaron Perry, an intellectual in Israel, writes about an attack on American Christian farmer-settlers in Palestine in the 19th century it is described thus: “the harsh climate added to the settlers' woes, as did the attacks by their Arab neighbors. Yaron Perry believes that the violence was a localized matter, and did not have a nationalistic basis. It was due only to envy, he says. The Christian settlers were seen as strangers who had set up a magnificent agricultural farm and this made the Arabs feel inferior, a feeling exacerbated by the settlers' attitude.” Envy? The KKK envied those uppity freed blacks, who were they to own their own land, and so it lynched a few of them. When white men see black men dating white women they feel inferior so one might suppose that they should just lynch those black men. But liberalism wouldn’t condone it in the left. But liberalism would condone the genocide of entire nations under the auspices of another people feeling ‘inferior’ and ‘envy’ and ‘loss of pride’ or ‘injustice’, the watchwords of genocidal excuse.
In a film called ‘Hassan and Morqos’ the story of ‘coexistence’ is told when a Muslim and Christian man are forced to “flee Extremists in both their communities” and live together. Their children end up dating. The movie pretends that extremism is on both sides and equal. A review of it notes that “since the 1970s and 1980s - when there was a rise in extremist Islamist thought and Christian radicalism - there have been frequent sectarian clashes in Egypt.” The review notes that there are “sectarian clashes… In one case there were rumours that a woman who had converted from Christianity to Islam had been abducted by her Coptic family. It led to hundreds of Muslim villagers going on the rampage, looting Coptic shops and setting property alight. Stones were thrown at the local church. In the second incident, Coptic residents of a small town were attacked following claims that a married Muslim woman and a Christian man were having an affair.”
The BBC describes the situation as “hostility and anger on both sides of the religious divide.” It is like CNN’s special on religious extremism that claimed that all religions are equally extreme. But the story speaks for itself. In each case there is no “clash”, there is just assaults by one on the other. It is like describing a pogrom as a “clash”, but then again that is how the Turks describe the Armenian genocide. Even the opening of the film shows this lie. The ‘controversy’ that leads the two men into hiding is a conference on religious dialogue where the Christians complain of discrimination in that the state won’t allow them to build churches and the Muslims complain that Christians control the economy. This is the ‘dispute’. Lets imagine this dispute in the context of the Jews of Europe. The Jews and Christians go to have a dialogue and the Jews complain of anti-semitism and the Christians complain that Jews control the world. This “dispute” leads “radicals from both communities to ostracize two men who are moderates.” Does this seem like a ridiculous lie. There is no dispute. There is one community that hates another and suppresses it and the other community dares to complain about it.
So the Copts responded to this by making more movies of self critique. The film ‘One Nil’ is about a Christian woman trying to get a divorce. She is encouraged to convert to Islam, where one can obtain a divorce easier, rather than in the Coptic church where it is more difficult. So she has an affair. The film speaks of the 4,000 coptic divorced women in Egypt who are victimized. The filmmakers claim they just wanted to “draw attention to the predicament of some Christian women.” The BBC speaks about “Yusuf Sidhum, the editor of Watany newspaper, who takes a particular interest in Coptic affairs, says that artists' freedom of expression cannot be curbed.” But self hate doesn’t end there. Another movie called ‘Time of Roses’ depicts a Coptic women who marries a Muslim man. And in ‘I love Cinema’ the Coptic religion is made fun of because some of its priests fast for 200 days a year.
So that is how the minority ‘expresses itself’ by castigating its religion and its traditions and its leaders and encouraging its women to convert to Islam. Why is it that ‘expression’ in Muslim countries always means demeaning minorities. There won’t be any movies in Egypt about Muslim women marrying Christian men or converting to Christianity (which is illegal) and there would never be a movie that critiques Muslim divorce where women can be discarded at will like garbage by Muslim men who simply say “I divorce you” three times, while women may not get a divorce without a special petition and approval from the man.
It leads perhaps to a related question. Why are Coptic women the only one’s supposedly suffering under the church’s divorce laws? The men also can’t divorce. For every divorced woman there is a man, is there not? The film insinuates that no woman should even marry a Coptic man. And this is the self-critique that is encouraged. Its no surprise. The Jewish minority in the West is also always expected to make films about itself where Jews make fools of themselves or where the Jewish religious are slandered. There is nothing more heroic in the West than spitting on religion, so long as its not Islam, which is why leading liberals support a resolution by the UN Human Rights Council making “defamation of Religion” a crime against humanity and specifically mentions Islam as the religion being “defamed”.
Self hate is the primary activity of minorities in Muslim countries. The Jews of Iran and Syria, rather than simply speaking through silence, always grant interviews to foreign reporters and always weave stories about how much they love their existence and how much they support their anti-semitic governments. The Copts learned well from the Jewish experience or vice-versa, they learned how to dig their own graves and they have become experts in it through training of liberalism.
Begging for Internationalization
Seth J. Frantzman
April 3rd, 2009
The ever-present calls from within Israeli society for ‘greater international involvement and pressure’ on Israel is emblematic of a contempt for Israeli democracy.’ Some on the intellectual left in Israel tend to want to see themselves as canaries in a coal mine, warning the state of its coming destruction, much like the Prophets of old did. They like to imagine themselves in the role of someone like Claus von Stauffenberg, attempted assassin of Hitler, or Stefan Zweig, an Austrian pacifist writer of the 1930s, fighting and warning the world of modern day proto-nazi regimes. One corollary of this endless prophesying of doom and struggling to be the ‘lone voice of reason’ is the tendency to insist on greater international pressure on Israel.
Usually it takes the form of the April 2003 ‘Urgent Appeal for International involvement: save Palestine and Israel’ signed by some 200 Israeli intellectuals and faculty members. It stated that “a violent apocalyptic driving out of the entire Palestinian population is explicitly advocated by the rightmost circles.” Sometimes the interest in international or American pressure can be downright crude, as when Haaretz editor David Landau told Condolezza Rice in September of 2007 that he believed the U.S needed to ‘rape’ Israel. According to reports he “referred to Israel as a ‘failed state’ politically, one in need of a U.S.-imposed settlement.”
The belief that international pressure is a godsend for Israel is quite widespread. A February 2009 petition signed by five Israeli academics, including Prof. Rachel Giora and Eva Yablonka of Tel Aviv University, in support of a recent anti-Israel motion at Manchester University noted that; “We strongly believe that without some pressure from outside Israel and without concrete support for Palestinians nothing will change in our part of the world.” Another archetype of the feelings of this minority is Gideon Levy who noted in a November 2008 article entitled ‘let’s hope Obama won’t be a friend of Israel’ that “changing the Middle East was in the power of each and every U.S. president, who could have pressured Israel and put an end to the occupation. Most of them kept their hands off as if it were a hot potato…So bring us an American president who is not another dreadful ‘friend of Israel,’ an Obama who won't blindly follow the positions of the Jewish lobby and the Israeli government.”
In a similar vein on April 3, 2009 Naomi Chazan wrote in the Upfront weekend edition of the Jerusalem Post that “a much more assertive international involvement is therefore necessary…the threat of isolation verging on ostracism may be precisely the kind of jolt that has been needed for some time…[furthermore] long-overdue internationalization may center initially on brokering a series of localized understandings…such an externally driven impetus can also revitalize domestic politics.”
The insistence on the overbearing involvement of the international community, and the trust and reliance on its decisions, is indicative of a severe distrust of Israeli democracy. Those on the Left who call for this have declared that while they acknowledge the failure of their political parties at the polls in 2009 they must need foreigners to impose a solution on Israel. This has long been typical of fringe groups such as Yesh Gvul which try to get Israelis indicted abroad for ‘war crimes’ because courts in Israel will not do their bidding.
The apparent reason for the need for international intervention is the feeling that the Leftist parties have failed. Zeev Sternhell, Israel prize winner and controversial professor, has said that Labor has lost its purpose. Describing the disillusionment with Labour he notes “The real problem is that the Israeli left is an artificial, even a false, left. It lacks every one of the instinctive responses that are identified with the natural left - standing with the weak, the oppressed and the working poor against the strong, and against the state itself.” For him “the natural left is always suspicious of the government.” The left is on a “suicidal path.” For Israel Harel, another columnist, the left failed because of its inability to achieve peace when given the chance and its “over-identification of this public with Arab-Palestinian nationalism.” It’s no surprise therefore that Zahava Gal-On, formerly a Meretz MK, has been described by Haaretz as the “last leftist” among a left with “no clear message…no edge.”
In turning to outsiders these voices pretend they are canaries in a mine shaft but instead they are anti-democrats. It is interesting that some of Israel’s elite would trust the same nations who perpetrated the Holocaust to be fair arbitrators of the current conflict. They are continually embarrassed of their countrymen, most recently the foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman. This is a mistake. The Israeli voter casts his vote for Lieberman for a reason, primarily because the Left is seen as out of touch, elitist and as incapable of solving the intractable situation. Gal-On admitted as much in an April 3rd interview when she noted that Mizrahim, Jews from the Middle East are “not the classic faces of Meretz.” Rather than courting that voter with reasonable solutions some on the Left would simply ignore him and ask foreigners to do the job. This is not a positive development in Israeli politics. It is the same narrow minded distrust of the voter that led radical movements, such as the Bolsheviks, to seize power from elected moderate governments.
Friday, April 24, 2009
Saturday, April 18, 2009
Terra Incognita 81 Self hate, 1812 and fiddling while Rome burns
Terra Incognita
Issue 81
“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
Note from the editor: Apologies for the lateness of this issue it was due to the holidays here.
April 18th, 2009
1) Topics in Jewish self hate?: During the recent Gaza war a woman in Jewish Argentina held up a sign declaring “soy Judia, no maten en mi nombre’ (I’m a Jewess don’t kill my name”). What was she talking about? How could her name be killed by a war in a far off country? What she meant is that she truly believed that her name, as a “good Jew” good be ‘murdered’ by the behavior of Israel. Can anyone imagine a Muslim protesting in such a manner because of the outlandish behavior of other Muslims. No. Her response is uniquely Jewish and points to two types of Judaisms, the one of the self hate, the one that imagines what a “Jew” is and the other of people who are Jewish.
2) Re-writing the history of the War of 1812: A new documentary by a Canadian director paints the war of 1812 as a war between an imperialistic America and a free Canada with a “constitution” with her people fighting alongside the “first peoples’ to resist American aggression. Perhaps modern Canadians have forgotten that in 1812 they were part of the British empire and the First Nations are an imaginary concept of leftist modern people.
3) The country is dying and the leader is laughing: Barack Obama likes to joke a lot. Perhaps it is time to realize the situation we face is not a laughing matter. Obama wants to believe he is like FDR and Lincoln. But did they tell jokes and talk about their “picks” for some football match in times of crises. The White House and its cabinet of boy heroes like Tim Geither could use a little maturity.
Is Self-Hate a god of the Jews?
Seth J. Frantzman
April 7th, 2009
Four recent articles, in quick succession, made me ponder Karl Marx’s old maxim that “money” is the God of the Jews. If in Marx’s time he saw Jews who god was money perhaps in today’s world there are some Jews whose god is that of self hate. Or perhaps what Marx misunderstood and what is understandable today is that there are in fact two Judaisms, one of Jews and the other of ‘the Jews’. One of people who are actually Jewish and actually practice a religion called Judaism and another of people who talk about “being Jewish” and what it means to “be Jewish” and what “Jews should do.” Consider the Jewish woman from Argentina who, during the war in Gaza, held a placard around her body that said “End the genocide in Gaza…don’t murder my name.” What she meant was her name as a “Jew.” But was she a Jew or a “Jew”. Which tribe did she belong to?
Lets consider four articles. Adina Hoffman’s biography of an Israei-Arab named Mohamed Taha entitled My Happiness bears no relation to Happiness: a Poets life in the Palestinians Century. Could anyone but a Jew create something as arrogant as a ‘Palestinian century’. Even the Palestinians, who think of little besides themselves and their ‘struggle’ and ‘suffering’, don’t believe they should have a whole century devoted to them. But Hoffman can conceive of such a thing. She can’t conceive of a “Jewish century” but a Palestinian one. She and Joel S. Migdal and Baruch Kimmerling, the two authors of The Palestinians, a seminal work on the history of those people whose century it was, a book written by Jews about a people, the Palestinians, they imagined and created. Then there is Joel Kovel, author of Overcoming Zionism or Norman Finkelsteins book on the Holocaust Industry or Avraham Burg’s book on how the “Jews manipulate” the Holocaust.
But let’s move on from those people. There is the story of the Jewish American protestors in Jerusalem protesting the Museum of Tolerance, claiming it is built on a Muslim graveyard. They are joined by the Israel Religious Action Center, the legal arm of the Reform movement in Israel (this legal organization’s website claims to be about helping Israelis but isn’t even in Hebrew). That’s right, reform Judaism has backed Muslims who claim a museum built by the Simon Wiesenthal center is built on a graveyard, which it is not. But the Hartman institute, another Jewish organization in Jerusalem, goes further, claiming the “most important” cause of Jews should be “Arab minority rights in Israel.” And where was the field trip of Jewish charities from the U.S two years ago in Israel? Umm al Fahm, an Arab town, where they also declared that the “rights of Arabs in Israel” is one of their “central goals.” Such is the aim of the New Israel Fund, a Jewish charity which works to funnel money only to Arab and primarily Muslim causes in Israel.
But moving on let’s consider something else. There is the hosting of the play “Seven Jewish Children” at the Washington Jewish Communist Center where one viewer said that the audience felt its “guts had been torn out”. They listened to this play which speaks of a wealthy Israel composed entirely of lily white Holocaust survivors relaxing at their pools built atop some Palestinians home. J Street, an American Jewish lobbying organization has even support the play. Would any group in the world except Jews support a play in which they are accused of being victims of Nazism who become blood thirsty Nazis themselves?
But that is joined today with an editorial by Alex Sinclair entitled ‘This Seder night, spill some wine for Gaza’s dead’. And like those Jews who claim the central theme of their religion is ‘Tikkun Olam’ or ‘fixing the entire world’ this person claims that the main message of Passover is to “commemorates the tragedy that befell the Egyptians. As we recount the ten plagues that decimated Egyptian society, we spill a drop of wine for each plague, to remind us of the Egyptian blood that was spilt. The act of spilling the wine compels us to retain our humanity when we might understandably forget it… we are commanded to feel sad at the loss of human life amongst our enemies… This segment of the Seder, teaching generations of Jews that Schadenfreude is the most un-Jewish of emotions, is one of Judaism's finest hours… To my mind, when we consider recent events in Gaza, we have no option but to transform the spilling of the wine from ancient ritual to contemporary commentary… But the spilling of wine for Gazan life may help save our own humanity. Recent revelations about soldiers' T-shirt slogans that show utter contempt for Palestinian life show just how far we have to go to re-educate ourselves… and spill a drop of wine to mourn the Palestinian blood that we have spilled in order to keep ourselves free. Our humanity and our Judaism demand nothing less” For her Judaism’s central message is the Palestinians.
That leads me to the conclusion that there are two Judaisms. There is one Judaism centered around wealthy Reform Jews and other leftist Jews that centers around Palestinians and ‘saving the world’. This is the Judaism of the ‘cause’, the Judaism of the endless complaining about obscure minorities and the Judaism that endlessly tells us that the “Jews suffered so now we Jews must be the beacon of hope in the world, Jews must sound the alarm…its is the duty of Jews to be a moral…” This is the Judaism of extremism, the Jews who led Bolshevism, the Jews who led the riots in 1968 in France, the Jews who compare everything they hate to Hitler and Nazism, an accusation that usually ends with their fellow Jews being described this way. This is the Judaism of Judah Leib Magnes, American head of the Hebrew University in the 1940s, who agreed to stymie Jewish immigration to Palestine in the 1930s in order to bolster the Arab support for his Brit-Shalom movement, his Judaism that would have condemned the European Jews to Hitler’s grasp so he could have his ‘bi-national state’. This is the Judaism of ‘don’t kill my name’ of Tony Judt, German-Jewish European writer, who complains that the existence of Israel causes anti-semitism which might harm him and that therefore Israel must be ended so he can resume his position as ‘the Jew’ in Europe, the classic other. This is the Judaism of Hannah Arnedt who blamed the Jews for ‘collaborating’ with Nazism but called the Nazis ‘banal’. This is the Judaism of those, such as Martin Buber, who whined and hemmed and hawed about the ‘morality’ of killing Eichman.
Then there is the actual Judaism. The Judaism of curses and of sanctifying God’s name (Kiddush HaShem). Lets recall this Judaism. In this Judaism the Talmud teaches that “if one comes to kill you, rise up [in the night], and kill him first [before he wakes].” Religious scholars go further however; “Even where the assailant does not directly threaten one's life, as with a burglar or armed robber, he may be killed in self-defense, where it may be assumed that he will kill if provoked. The Torah says, “if a burglar is caught in the act of breaking in, and is struck and killed, it is not considered an act of murder" (Exodus 22:1). We derive all cases of self-defense from this case.
Consider some others cases of this Judaism; “Just as one may kill in self-defense, so it is required to kill one who is pursuing or attacking another with murderous intent. Of course, if it is possible, one must save the person being pursued by injuring the attacker. Only when this cannot be done must we have no pity and kill the attacker. Similarly, any assailant who might kill when provoked, such as a burglar or armed robber, must be killed by any passer-by to save the victim. We are taught that rape is equivalent to murder. Therefore, if one is attacking a woman with the intent of raping her, he may be killed to save her as long as he has not completed the act. Regarding a woman being sexually attacked, the Torah states, "Only the rapist shall be put to death... Since he attacked the betrothed girl in the field, even if she had cried out, there would have been no one to come to her aid" (Deut. 22:25, 27), which implies that if a rescuer is present, he may use any means to save her, even if it means killing the attacker. One may similarly save a man from homosexual attack. An informer who denounces a fellow Jew to the government to be killed, imprisoned, or even fined is likened to an assailant, since being arrested can be a dangerous and traumatic experience.”
There are people who try to pretend to be members of both these Jewish peoples. This includes the Neturei Karta and people like Rabbi Michael Lerner who edits Tikkun magazine and is an outspoken leftist American critic of Israel. He writes that “The climate of hostility toward dissenters in the Jewish world has risen to new levels of verbal abuse. Tikkun is the only nationally distributed Jewish magazine to challenge the assumptions of the occupation, to urge dismantling of the settlements in the West Bank and to insist that Israel must acknowledge some (not total) responsibility for Palestinian refugees. Just as we in the anti-Vietnam War movement of the 1960s saw our opposition as flowing from the highest values of American democracy, so we in the Jewish peace movement insist that it is Jewish values that lead us to insist that every human being is created in the image of God and that the brutality done to the Palestinian people is as much a tragedy as the brutality being done by Palestinian terrorists to Israelis.” But Lerner is rational, his belief that Judaism must be harnessed to all sorts of secular causes, such as opposing the Vietnam war, and that there is some connection between Judaism and what is done to the “Palestinian people” clearly paint him as a member of the former movement of the ‘not in my name’ Jews.
Marx asked; “What is the object of the Jew's worship in this world? Usury. What is his worldly god? Money. . . What is the foundation of the Jew in this world? Practical necessity, private advantage. . . . The bill of exchange is the Jew's real God. His God is the illusory bill of exchange.” A lot of Jews throughout Europe liked this Marxism. Millions perhaps embraced it from 1900 to 1968. Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kameniev, Rosa Luxemburg, Danny the Red. True some embraced it as a reaction to a conservative European society that rejected their membership in the nation and Communism offered them a road to assimilation and acceptance. But they loved this anti-semitic movement nonetheless. Winston Churchill understood this problem in his article ‘Zionism versus Bolshevism: a struggle for the soul of the Jewish people’ published on February 8th, 1920 in the Illustrated Sunday Herald.
We might quote liberally from this for he says something important. He noted that “some people like Jews and some do not; but no thoughtful man can doubt the fact that they are beyond all question the most formidable and the most remarkable race which has ever appeared in the world... The conflict between good and evil which proceeds unceasingly in the breast of man nowhere reaches such an intensity as in the Jewish race…. this same astounding race may at the present time be in the actual process of producing another system of morals and philosophy, as malevolent as Christianity was benevolent, which, if not arrested, would shatter irretrievably all that Christianity has rendered possible…. In a people of peculiar genius like the Jews, contrasts are more vivid, the extremes are more widely separated, the resulting consequences are more decisive. [There are three types of Jews;] First there are the Jews who, dwelling in every country throughout the world, identify themselves with that country, enter into its national life… In violent opposition to all this sphere of Jewish effort rise the schemes of the International Jews. The adherents of this sinister confederacy are mostly men reared up among the unhappy populations of countries where Jews are persecuted on account of their race. Most, if not all, of them have forsaken the faith of their forefathers, and divorced from their minds all spiritual hopes of the next world… this world-wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilization and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality, has been steadily growing… There is no need to exaggerate the part played in the creation of Bolshevism and in the actual bringing about of the Russian Revolution, by these international and for the most part atheistical Jews… Zionism offers the third sphere to the political conceptions of the Jewish race. In violent contrast to international communism, it presents to the Jew a national idea of a commanding character… The struggle which is now beginning between the Zionist and Bolshevik Jews is little less than a struggle for the soul of the Jewish people.” Churchill furthermore argued that the “National Jews should come forward on every occasion, as many of them in England have already done, and take a prominent part in every measure for combating the Bolshevik conspiracy.”
This ‘struggle for the soul’ of the Jews brings to mind Yoram Hazony’s The Jewish State: The Struggle for Israel’s soul. The use by Churchill of the word ‘International Jews’ may bring to mind Henry Ford’s International Jew, widely regarded as a re-statement of the Elders of Zion. So how do we understand this? How do we understand Marx’s ‘God of the Jews’ and the struggle for the soul of Jews found in Hazony and Churchill? How do we understand the problem of the ‘not in my name’ Jews and the ‘Tikkun Olam’ Jews who want to subjugate the religion so that the central duty of Jews is always t save starving African children but not care about their own Jewish brethren. How can one reconcile the Jews at the Washington Jewish Community Center having heir ‘guts torn out’ by the ‘Seven Jewish Children’ play and the Jews who create Palestinian history and create even a ‘Palestinian century’? How can we understand the two Judaism’s we are confronted with just as Churchill was confronted with what he described as three Judaisms?
Perhaps there have always been more than one “Jews”. The Jews of the imagination who the gentiles imagined and the real Jews. But what is extraordinary is that today’s split in the Jewish people is primarily between a Jew imagined by some who call themselves Jews and the Jews who are just Jews. The God of the former is self-hatred at the same time as it is radical in its self-obsession, its idea that the Jews must ‘fix the world’. Who would place such a burden on one people? What kind of person, upon seeing some far off country bombing some other country, wears a placard on the street saying ‘don’t kill my name’? Could anyone imagine a Muslim doing something so ridiculous? No.
There are two Jewish peoples. There are the Jews, not always pleasant but at least honest, who do things that are not necessarily “Jewish” but preserve something of their Judaism. These are the Jews who see the Holocaust as primarily a crime against the Jews. Then there are the Jews who speak a lot about doing things that are “Jewish” and defining every cause as a ‘duty’ of Jews and who ceaselessly heap scorn and hate on other Jews because they believe those Jews reflect badly on them. These are the people whose god is the exile and the minority status of the other and the people who really believe their “name” can be murdered. What name? The name of human rights and gay rights and rights for all sorts of obscure peoples, the cause, the endless causes of the bourgouise with too much time on their hands?
Too bad for them. I prefer the Judaism of “if one comes to kill you, rise up [in the night], and kill him first [before he wakes].” This is described as a positive commandment. This is in direct contrast to other Jews who respond to what they see as a “killing of their name” by rising up with their ugly faces and their unkempt, unwashed hair, their droopy flaccid bodies and their scarves and dirty baggy unflattering clothing and hold placards on streets.
Re-writing the history of the War of 1812
Seth J. Frantzman
April 4th, 2009
Modern man, scholars and simpletons alike, have an odd inability to imagine things in history that are different than the prevailing conditions of the present. History is thus judged from the false lense, rather than being rendered from the past to the present it is all imagined from the present. A new documentary on the War of 1812 directed by Canadian filmmaker Brian McKenna proves this point. It speaks of an America searching for empire that required Canada for her resources. This was 1812 and America was seeking manifest destiny in that northern province of the British Empire. But the word Empire should stick in the throat.
The documentary speaks of the “people of the first nations, British subjects and exiles from the American revolution.” It speaks of an expansive U.S of “7.5 million strong…expanding rapidly.” It is a militant nation run by “young military officers.” But England, and her empire are of course tied down by war, the war against Napoleon. The documentary claims that “one advantage England has is her domination of the sea.”
From the beginning this is almost a propaganda film directed at the current role of America in the world. It changes history to speak of a Canadian people “free citizens” who “cannot be conquered” and who are loyal to a “constitution and King.” In 1812? What constitution of Canada? It speaks of ‘aboriginal’ “first nations” in Canada fighting alongside “American exiles” to drive out the Yankee invader. Perhaps it forgets that Canada was a part of the British empire and that rather than America invading Canada to achieve an ‘empire’ she was very much the weaker of the two warring parties and that the war, until recently, was known in America as the “second war of independence.” Perhaps the present state of England, a small nation with a on-again-off-again economy is not the England of old.
The film speaks of Mohawk chieftans attending colleges in Scotland and keeping diaries, painting the ‘first nations’ as if they were truly a part of Canada, an equal and normal part of the country when in fact they were anything but in a nation that at the time was not a nation and whose use of a Maple Leaf on her flag today even calls into question the existence of such a nation. The documentary wants us to believe that the ‘First Nations’, a new fangled word for what were then Indian tribes were loved and respected then as they are today rather than recruited as allies, as they had been in the French and Indian War (the Seven Years War in Europe) or the American Revolution to serve alongside the British as irregular auxileries, adept at guerilla warfare.
The director of this charade is a filmmaker who has waded into controversy before. Brian Mckenna was involved in making the documentary ‘The Valour and the Horror’ after which “Canadian veterans, outraged by what they considered an inaccurate and highly biased account of the war, sued Brian and Terrance McKenna, the series directors, for libel.” The three-part 1992 documentary deals with Canadian participation in the Second World War and, true to its contemporary time, is one critique and self-hating episode after another. Its first episode deals with Canadians stationed in Hong Kong who surrender to the Japanese and are treated savgely. Here Mckenna can be sympathetic because he only portrays Canadians and prisoners of war. But in his second episode he details the role of the Canadians in the bombing of Germany and blames them for the firebombing of Dresden which he claims had no impact on the war and was thus, not in his words but which can be inferred, a war crime. the third episode, deals primarily with the massive loss Of Canadian troops at Verrieres Ridge during the assault on Normandy, “citing the incompetence and inexperience of Canadian military leadership as the cause for the high casualty rate.” According to reports “The McKennas have argued, in the tradition of investigative journalism, that they wished to set aside the official account of the war and examine events from the point or view of the participants.”
In producing a documentary on the War of 1812 McKenna has now turned his revisionism towards that episode casting America as a “great power” interested in ‘living space’ and ‘resources’ in Canada. Nothing could be further from the truth.
The country is dying and the leader is laughing
Seth J. Frantzman
April 3rd, 2009
It’s all just a joke. Whether it is giving Gordon Brown a boxed set of Wal-Mart purchased DVDs of Hollywood movies or pretending to speak a word of Russian it is all just a joke for America’s president and his team. First it was Hilary Clinton with the misspelled ‘reset’ (peregruzka not perezagruzka) button now the White House is bumbling about learning ‘Brivyet’. But it’s all a joke. Every press conference is levity. Every photo up is thumbs up and smiles.
And yet the rhetoric is about the ‘worst crises’ and ‘terrible’ economic conditions. So which is it? Are we living the high life of good time where we can joke or are we facing terrible challenges at home and abroad. And if it is the latter then why can’t the President of the United States refrain from breaking out in smiles and guffaws at every opportunity. Does Obama think that by joking with the people that the crises will be forgotten? Is this his version of ‘freedom from fear’?
There was a time when President’s and their teams took their jobs seriously. If they hammed it up with world leaders they did so in private. We know that Richard Nixon joked with Mao Tse Tung and with Golda Meir. But we know he did it in private and it was only revealed from taped transcripts of the meetings. Stalin used to get drunk with the leaders of the USSR at his dacha and the nights included antics such as putting tomatoes in people’s pockets only to watch them accidentally squish them later while they were being humiliated and asked to dance some traditional Ukrainian or Georgian dance. But no one pretended this was something that should be revealed to the press and certainly not something anyone was proud of as part of ‘policy’. But the policy of the Obama administration is just a joke, literally and figuratively.
One gets the feeling that Obama is over his head. We all made fun of George Bush’s English but at least Bush was confident in himself. We all thought Bush was stupid but with Obama, when he is not being scripted by an army of advisors and a teleprompter, he doesn’t seem to be able to say anything except for a few jokes and then small talk. Policy speeches are contrived by others. All that ‘genuine’ and ‘authentic’ talk heard on the campaign trail that Americans craved and felt was a ‘breath of fresh air’ has evaporated.
Obama is at the G20 meeting in England at a time of international economic crises. ABC’s headline was ‘Obama jokes around at G20’. The media was happy to see “the American and Russian presidents joking around.” ABC claimed that “there was at least one lighter moment.” One? It was all light moments apparently.
At another G20 news conference with Gordon Brown a reporter prompted Obama with a question about soccer picks. Obama launched into a long discussion about how he has had “enough trouble back home picking my brackets for college basketball…[my picks for] March Madness stirred up all kinds of controversy…” At a March 13th meeting with Brazilian president Lula da Silva, Obama said he would like to visit Brazil and that Republicans would like him to get lost in the Amazon.
There is a time for levity. There is a time to break the ice. But now, on television, in front of the world, is not that time. Now is the time to get to work and to be serious. If the crises is as bad as we are continuously told then it is no laughing matter. If the President of the United States thinks it is a laughing matter and not a Churchillian or FDR moment of seriousness and ‘blood, sweat and tears’, then it means he is not only out of touch and in over his head but it may mean he simply has contempt for all of us. It seems clear that the White House and cabinet are enjoying their time making ‘reset’ buttons for the Russians and beginning the Iranians to open up, but it’s time to be serious and act presidential. If it’s all just a joke then the joke is on us, the voters, who were duped into voting for this elitist team who think that suffering is something to be laughed at. People called George Bush a frat boy, but at least he took his job seriously. That’s more than can be said for the ‘community organizer’ in the Oval office now.
Issue 81
“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
Note from the editor: Apologies for the lateness of this issue it was due to the holidays here.
April 18th, 2009
1) Topics in Jewish self hate?: During the recent Gaza war a woman in Jewish Argentina held up a sign declaring “soy Judia, no maten en mi nombre’ (I’m a Jewess don’t kill my name”). What was she talking about? How could her name be killed by a war in a far off country? What she meant is that she truly believed that her name, as a “good Jew” good be ‘murdered’ by the behavior of Israel. Can anyone imagine a Muslim protesting in such a manner because of the outlandish behavior of other Muslims. No. Her response is uniquely Jewish and points to two types of Judaisms, the one of the self hate, the one that imagines what a “Jew” is and the other of people who are Jewish.
2) Re-writing the history of the War of 1812: A new documentary by a Canadian director paints the war of 1812 as a war between an imperialistic America and a free Canada with a “constitution” with her people fighting alongside the “first peoples’ to resist American aggression. Perhaps modern Canadians have forgotten that in 1812 they were part of the British empire and the First Nations are an imaginary concept of leftist modern people.
3) The country is dying and the leader is laughing: Barack Obama likes to joke a lot. Perhaps it is time to realize the situation we face is not a laughing matter. Obama wants to believe he is like FDR and Lincoln. But did they tell jokes and talk about their “picks” for some football match in times of crises. The White House and its cabinet of boy heroes like Tim Geither could use a little maturity.
Is Self-Hate a god of the Jews?
Seth J. Frantzman
April 7th, 2009
Four recent articles, in quick succession, made me ponder Karl Marx’s old maxim that “money” is the God of the Jews. If in Marx’s time he saw Jews who god was money perhaps in today’s world there are some Jews whose god is that of self hate. Or perhaps what Marx misunderstood and what is understandable today is that there are in fact two Judaisms, one of Jews and the other of ‘the Jews’. One of people who are actually Jewish and actually practice a religion called Judaism and another of people who talk about “being Jewish” and what it means to “be Jewish” and what “Jews should do.” Consider the Jewish woman from Argentina who, during the war in Gaza, held a placard around her body that said “End the genocide in Gaza…don’t murder my name.” What she meant was her name as a “Jew.” But was she a Jew or a “Jew”. Which tribe did she belong to?
Lets consider four articles. Adina Hoffman’s biography of an Israei-Arab named Mohamed Taha entitled My Happiness bears no relation to Happiness: a Poets life in the Palestinians Century. Could anyone but a Jew create something as arrogant as a ‘Palestinian century’. Even the Palestinians, who think of little besides themselves and their ‘struggle’ and ‘suffering’, don’t believe they should have a whole century devoted to them. But Hoffman can conceive of such a thing. She can’t conceive of a “Jewish century” but a Palestinian one. She and Joel S. Migdal and Baruch Kimmerling, the two authors of The Palestinians, a seminal work on the history of those people whose century it was, a book written by Jews about a people, the Palestinians, they imagined and created. Then there is Joel Kovel, author of Overcoming Zionism or Norman Finkelsteins book on the Holocaust Industry or Avraham Burg’s book on how the “Jews manipulate” the Holocaust.
But let’s move on from those people. There is the story of the Jewish American protestors in Jerusalem protesting the Museum of Tolerance, claiming it is built on a Muslim graveyard. They are joined by the Israel Religious Action Center, the legal arm of the Reform movement in Israel (this legal organization’s website claims to be about helping Israelis but isn’t even in Hebrew). That’s right, reform Judaism has backed Muslims who claim a museum built by the Simon Wiesenthal center is built on a graveyard, which it is not. But the Hartman institute, another Jewish organization in Jerusalem, goes further, claiming the “most important” cause of Jews should be “Arab minority rights in Israel.” And where was the field trip of Jewish charities from the U.S two years ago in Israel? Umm al Fahm, an Arab town, where they also declared that the “rights of Arabs in Israel” is one of their “central goals.” Such is the aim of the New Israel Fund, a Jewish charity which works to funnel money only to Arab and primarily Muslim causes in Israel.
But moving on let’s consider something else. There is the hosting of the play “Seven Jewish Children” at the Washington Jewish Communist Center where one viewer said that the audience felt its “guts had been torn out”. They listened to this play which speaks of a wealthy Israel composed entirely of lily white Holocaust survivors relaxing at their pools built atop some Palestinians home. J Street, an American Jewish lobbying organization has even support the play. Would any group in the world except Jews support a play in which they are accused of being victims of Nazism who become blood thirsty Nazis themselves?
But that is joined today with an editorial by Alex Sinclair entitled ‘This Seder night, spill some wine for Gaza’s dead’. And like those Jews who claim the central theme of their religion is ‘Tikkun Olam’ or ‘fixing the entire world’ this person claims that the main message of Passover is to “commemorates the tragedy that befell the Egyptians. As we recount the ten plagues that decimated Egyptian society, we spill a drop of wine for each plague, to remind us of the Egyptian blood that was spilt. The act of spilling the wine compels us to retain our humanity when we might understandably forget it… we are commanded to feel sad at the loss of human life amongst our enemies… This segment of the Seder, teaching generations of Jews that Schadenfreude is the most un-Jewish of emotions, is one of Judaism's finest hours… To my mind, when we consider recent events in Gaza, we have no option but to transform the spilling of the wine from ancient ritual to contemporary commentary… But the spilling of wine for Gazan life may help save our own humanity. Recent revelations about soldiers' T-shirt slogans that show utter contempt for Palestinian life show just how far we have to go to re-educate ourselves… and spill a drop of wine to mourn the Palestinian blood that we have spilled in order to keep ourselves free. Our humanity and our Judaism demand nothing less” For her Judaism’s central message is the Palestinians.
That leads me to the conclusion that there are two Judaisms. There is one Judaism centered around wealthy Reform Jews and other leftist Jews that centers around Palestinians and ‘saving the world’. This is the Judaism of the ‘cause’, the Judaism of the endless complaining about obscure minorities and the Judaism that endlessly tells us that the “Jews suffered so now we Jews must be the beacon of hope in the world, Jews must sound the alarm…its is the duty of Jews to be a moral…” This is the Judaism of extremism, the Jews who led Bolshevism, the Jews who led the riots in 1968 in France, the Jews who compare everything they hate to Hitler and Nazism, an accusation that usually ends with their fellow Jews being described this way. This is the Judaism of Judah Leib Magnes, American head of the Hebrew University in the 1940s, who agreed to stymie Jewish immigration to Palestine in the 1930s in order to bolster the Arab support for his Brit-Shalom movement, his Judaism that would have condemned the European Jews to Hitler’s grasp so he could have his ‘bi-national state’. This is the Judaism of ‘don’t kill my name’ of Tony Judt, German-Jewish European writer, who complains that the existence of Israel causes anti-semitism which might harm him and that therefore Israel must be ended so he can resume his position as ‘the Jew’ in Europe, the classic other. This is the Judaism of Hannah Arnedt who blamed the Jews for ‘collaborating’ with Nazism but called the Nazis ‘banal’. This is the Judaism of those, such as Martin Buber, who whined and hemmed and hawed about the ‘morality’ of killing Eichman.
Then there is the actual Judaism. The Judaism of curses and of sanctifying God’s name (Kiddush HaShem). Lets recall this Judaism. In this Judaism the Talmud teaches that “if one comes to kill you, rise up [in the night], and kill him first [before he wakes].” Religious scholars go further however; “Even where the assailant does not directly threaten one's life, as with a burglar or armed robber, he may be killed in self-defense, where it may be assumed that he will kill if provoked. The Torah says, “if a burglar is caught in the act of breaking in, and is struck and killed, it is not considered an act of murder" (Exodus 22:1). We derive all cases of self-defense from this case.
Consider some others cases of this Judaism; “Just as one may kill in self-defense, so it is required to kill one who is pursuing or attacking another with murderous intent. Of course, if it is possible, one must save the person being pursued by injuring the attacker. Only when this cannot be done must we have no pity and kill the attacker. Similarly, any assailant who might kill when provoked, such as a burglar or armed robber, must be killed by any passer-by to save the victim. We are taught that rape is equivalent to murder. Therefore, if one is attacking a woman with the intent of raping her, he may be killed to save her as long as he has not completed the act. Regarding a woman being sexually attacked, the Torah states, "Only the rapist shall be put to death... Since he attacked the betrothed girl in the field, even if she had cried out, there would have been no one to come to her aid" (Deut. 22:25, 27), which implies that if a rescuer is present, he may use any means to save her, even if it means killing the attacker. One may similarly save a man from homosexual attack. An informer who denounces a fellow Jew to the government to be killed, imprisoned, or even fined is likened to an assailant, since being arrested can be a dangerous and traumatic experience.”
There are people who try to pretend to be members of both these Jewish peoples. This includes the Neturei Karta and people like Rabbi Michael Lerner who edits Tikkun magazine and is an outspoken leftist American critic of Israel. He writes that “The climate of hostility toward dissenters in the Jewish world has risen to new levels of verbal abuse. Tikkun is the only nationally distributed Jewish magazine to challenge the assumptions of the occupation, to urge dismantling of the settlements in the West Bank and to insist that Israel must acknowledge some (not total) responsibility for Palestinian refugees. Just as we in the anti-Vietnam War movement of the 1960s saw our opposition as flowing from the highest values of American democracy, so we in the Jewish peace movement insist that it is Jewish values that lead us to insist that every human being is created in the image of God and that the brutality done to the Palestinian people is as much a tragedy as the brutality being done by Palestinian terrorists to Israelis.” But Lerner is rational, his belief that Judaism must be harnessed to all sorts of secular causes, such as opposing the Vietnam war, and that there is some connection between Judaism and what is done to the “Palestinian people” clearly paint him as a member of the former movement of the ‘not in my name’ Jews.
Marx asked; “What is the object of the Jew's worship in this world? Usury. What is his worldly god? Money. . . What is the foundation of the Jew in this world? Practical necessity, private advantage. . . . The bill of exchange is the Jew's real God. His God is the illusory bill of exchange.” A lot of Jews throughout Europe liked this Marxism. Millions perhaps embraced it from 1900 to 1968. Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kameniev, Rosa Luxemburg, Danny the Red. True some embraced it as a reaction to a conservative European society that rejected their membership in the nation and Communism offered them a road to assimilation and acceptance. But they loved this anti-semitic movement nonetheless. Winston Churchill understood this problem in his article ‘Zionism versus Bolshevism: a struggle for the soul of the Jewish people’ published on February 8th, 1920 in the Illustrated Sunday Herald.
We might quote liberally from this for he says something important. He noted that “some people like Jews and some do not; but no thoughtful man can doubt the fact that they are beyond all question the most formidable and the most remarkable race which has ever appeared in the world... The conflict between good and evil which proceeds unceasingly in the breast of man nowhere reaches such an intensity as in the Jewish race…. this same astounding race may at the present time be in the actual process of producing another system of morals and philosophy, as malevolent as Christianity was benevolent, which, if not arrested, would shatter irretrievably all that Christianity has rendered possible…. In a people of peculiar genius like the Jews, contrasts are more vivid, the extremes are more widely separated, the resulting consequences are more decisive. [There are three types of Jews;] First there are the Jews who, dwelling in every country throughout the world, identify themselves with that country, enter into its national life… In violent opposition to all this sphere of Jewish effort rise the schemes of the International Jews. The adherents of this sinister confederacy are mostly men reared up among the unhappy populations of countries where Jews are persecuted on account of their race. Most, if not all, of them have forsaken the faith of their forefathers, and divorced from their minds all spiritual hopes of the next world… this world-wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilization and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality, has been steadily growing… There is no need to exaggerate the part played in the creation of Bolshevism and in the actual bringing about of the Russian Revolution, by these international and for the most part atheistical Jews… Zionism offers the third sphere to the political conceptions of the Jewish race. In violent contrast to international communism, it presents to the Jew a national idea of a commanding character… The struggle which is now beginning between the Zionist and Bolshevik Jews is little less than a struggle for the soul of the Jewish people.” Churchill furthermore argued that the “National Jews should come forward on every occasion, as many of them in England have already done, and take a prominent part in every measure for combating the Bolshevik conspiracy.”
This ‘struggle for the soul’ of the Jews brings to mind Yoram Hazony’s The Jewish State: The Struggle for Israel’s soul. The use by Churchill of the word ‘International Jews’ may bring to mind Henry Ford’s International Jew, widely regarded as a re-statement of the Elders of Zion. So how do we understand this? How do we understand Marx’s ‘God of the Jews’ and the struggle for the soul of Jews found in Hazony and Churchill? How do we understand the problem of the ‘not in my name’ Jews and the ‘Tikkun Olam’ Jews who want to subjugate the religion so that the central duty of Jews is always t save starving African children but not care about their own Jewish brethren. How can one reconcile the Jews at the Washington Jewish Community Center having heir ‘guts torn out’ by the ‘Seven Jewish Children’ play and the Jews who create Palestinian history and create even a ‘Palestinian century’? How can we understand the two Judaism’s we are confronted with just as Churchill was confronted with what he described as three Judaisms?
Perhaps there have always been more than one “Jews”. The Jews of the imagination who the gentiles imagined and the real Jews. But what is extraordinary is that today’s split in the Jewish people is primarily between a Jew imagined by some who call themselves Jews and the Jews who are just Jews. The God of the former is self-hatred at the same time as it is radical in its self-obsession, its idea that the Jews must ‘fix the world’. Who would place such a burden on one people? What kind of person, upon seeing some far off country bombing some other country, wears a placard on the street saying ‘don’t kill my name’? Could anyone imagine a Muslim doing something so ridiculous? No.
There are two Jewish peoples. There are the Jews, not always pleasant but at least honest, who do things that are not necessarily “Jewish” but preserve something of their Judaism. These are the Jews who see the Holocaust as primarily a crime against the Jews. Then there are the Jews who speak a lot about doing things that are “Jewish” and defining every cause as a ‘duty’ of Jews and who ceaselessly heap scorn and hate on other Jews because they believe those Jews reflect badly on them. These are the people whose god is the exile and the minority status of the other and the people who really believe their “name” can be murdered. What name? The name of human rights and gay rights and rights for all sorts of obscure peoples, the cause, the endless causes of the bourgouise with too much time on their hands?
Too bad for them. I prefer the Judaism of “if one comes to kill you, rise up [in the night], and kill him first [before he wakes].” This is described as a positive commandment. This is in direct contrast to other Jews who respond to what they see as a “killing of their name” by rising up with their ugly faces and their unkempt, unwashed hair, their droopy flaccid bodies and their scarves and dirty baggy unflattering clothing and hold placards on streets.
Re-writing the history of the War of 1812
Seth J. Frantzman
April 4th, 2009
Modern man, scholars and simpletons alike, have an odd inability to imagine things in history that are different than the prevailing conditions of the present. History is thus judged from the false lense, rather than being rendered from the past to the present it is all imagined from the present. A new documentary on the War of 1812 directed by Canadian filmmaker Brian McKenna proves this point. It speaks of an America searching for empire that required Canada for her resources. This was 1812 and America was seeking manifest destiny in that northern province of the British Empire. But the word Empire should stick in the throat.
The documentary speaks of the “people of the first nations, British subjects and exiles from the American revolution.” It speaks of an expansive U.S of “7.5 million strong…expanding rapidly.” It is a militant nation run by “young military officers.” But England, and her empire are of course tied down by war, the war against Napoleon. The documentary claims that “one advantage England has is her domination of the sea.”
From the beginning this is almost a propaganda film directed at the current role of America in the world. It changes history to speak of a Canadian people “free citizens” who “cannot be conquered” and who are loyal to a “constitution and King.” In 1812? What constitution of Canada? It speaks of ‘aboriginal’ “first nations” in Canada fighting alongside “American exiles” to drive out the Yankee invader. Perhaps it forgets that Canada was a part of the British empire and that rather than America invading Canada to achieve an ‘empire’ she was very much the weaker of the two warring parties and that the war, until recently, was known in America as the “second war of independence.” Perhaps the present state of England, a small nation with a on-again-off-again economy is not the England of old.
The film speaks of Mohawk chieftans attending colleges in Scotland and keeping diaries, painting the ‘first nations’ as if they were truly a part of Canada, an equal and normal part of the country when in fact they were anything but in a nation that at the time was not a nation and whose use of a Maple Leaf on her flag today even calls into question the existence of such a nation. The documentary wants us to believe that the ‘First Nations’, a new fangled word for what were then Indian tribes were loved and respected then as they are today rather than recruited as allies, as they had been in the French and Indian War (the Seven Years War in Europe) or the American Revolution to serve alongside the British as irregular auxileries, adept at guerilla warfare.
The director of this charade is a filmmaker who has waded into controversy before. Brian Mckenna was involved in making the documentary ‘The Valour and the Horror’ after which “Canadian veterans, outraged by what they considered an inaccurate and highly biased account of the war, sued Brian and Terrance McKenna, the series directors, for libel.” The three-part 1992 documentary deals with Canadian participation in the Second World War and, true to its contemporary time, is one critique and self-hating episode after another. Its first episode deals with Canadians stationed in Hong Kong who surrender to the Japanese and are treated savgely. Here Mckenna can be sympathetic because he only portrays Canadians and prisoners of war. But in his second episode he details the role of the Canadians in the bombing of Germany and blames them for the firebombing of Dresden which he claims had no impact on the war and was thus, not in his words but which can be inferred, a war crime. the third episode, deals primarily with the massive loss Of Canadian troops at Verrieres Ridge during the assault on Normandy, “citing the incompetence and inexperience of Canadian military leadership as the cause for the high casualty rate.” According to reports “The McKennas have argued, in the tradition of investigative journalism, that they wished to set aside the official account of the war and examine events from the point or view of the participants.”
In producing a documentary on the War of 1812 McKenna has now turned his revisionism towards that episode casting America as a “great power” interested in ‘living space’ and ‘resources’ in Canada. Nothing could be further from the truth.
The country is dying and the leader is laughing
Seth J. Frantzman
April 3rd, 2009
It’s all just a joke. Whether it is giving Gordon Brown a boxed set of Wal-Mart purchased DVDs of Hollywood movies or pretending to speak a word of Russian it is all just a joke for America’s president and his team. First it was Hilary Clinton with the misspelled ‘reset’ (peregruzka not perezagruzka) button now the White House is bumbling about learning ‘Brivyet’. But it’s all a joke. Every press conference is levity. Every photo up is thumbs up and smiles.
And yet the rhetoric is about the ‘worst crises’ and ‘terrible’ economic conditions. So which is it? Are we living the high life of good time where we can joke or are we facing terrible challenges at home and abroad. And if it is the latter then why can’t the President of the United States refrain from breaking out in smiles and guffaws at every opportunity. Does Obama think that by joking with the people that the crises will be forgotten? Is this his version of ‘freedom from fear’?
There was a time when President’s and their teams took their jobs seriously. If they hammed it up with world leaders they did so in private. We know that Richard Nixon joked with Mao Tse Tung and with Golda Meir. But we know he did it in private and it was only revealed from taped transcripts of the meetings. Stalin used to get drunk with the leaders of the USSR at his dacha and the nights included antics such as putting tomatoes in people’s pockets only to watch them accidentally squish them later while they were being humiliated and asked to dance some traditional Ukrainian or Georgian dance. But no one pretended this was something that should be revealed to the press and certainly not something anyone was proud of as part of ‘policy’. But the policy of the Obama administration is just a joke, literally and figuratively.
One gets the feeling that Obama is over his head. We all made fun of George Bush’s English but at least Bush was confident in himself. We all thought Bush was stupid but with Obama, when he is not being scripted by an army of advisors and a teleprompter, he doesn’t seem to be able to say anything except for a few jokes and then small talk. Policy speeches are contrived by others. All that ‘genuine’ and ‘authentic’ talk heard on the campaign trail that Americans craved and felt was a ‘breath of fresh air’ has evaporated.
Obama is at the G20 meeting in England at a time of international economic crises. ABC’s headline was ‘Obama jokes around at G20’. The media was happy to see “the American and Russian presidents joking around.” ABC claimed that “there was at least one lighter moment.” One? It was all light moments apparently.
At another G20 news conference with Gordon Brown a reporter prompted Obama with a question about soccer picks. Obama launched into a long discussion about how he has had “enough trouble back home picking my brackets for college basketball…[my picks for] March Madness stirred up all kinds of controversy…” At a March 13th meeting with Brazilian president Lula da Silva, Obama said he would like to visit Brazil and that Republicans would like him to get lost in the Amazon.
There is a time for levity. There is a time to break the ice. But now, on television, in front of the world, is not that time. Now is the time to get to work and to be serious. If the crises is as bad as we are continuously told then it is no laughing matter. If the President of the United States thinks it is a laughing matter and not a Churchillian or FDR moment of seriousness and ‘blood, sweat and tears’, then it means he is not only out of touch and in over his head but it may mean he simply has contempt for all of us. It seems clear that the White House and cabinet are enjoying their time making ‘reset’ buttons for the Russians and beginning the Iranians to open up, but it’s time to be serious and act presidential. If it’s all just a joke then the joke is on us, the voters, who were duped into voting for this elitist team who think that suffering is something to be laughed at. People called George Bush a frat boy, but at least he took his job seriously. That’s more than can be said for the ‘community organizer’ in the Oval office now.
Saturday, April 11, 2009
Terra Incognita 80 Lula da Silva, Thugocracy, Protest tourism and the treatment of women
Terra Incognita
Issue 80
“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
Note from the editor: Apologies for the lateness of this issue it was due to the holidays here.
April 11th, 2009
1) An ignorant racist disgusting individual: President Lula da Silva: On March 26th Brazilian president Lula da Silva stood at a news conference with Gordon Brown of the UK and blamed “white men with blue eyes” for causing the financial crises. Gordon Brown didn’t wince and in not saying something or leaving the stage he shamed himself. Da Silva’s racism bears some analysis. He is a white man, a member of the white elite of Brazil. Furthermore most of the heads of American financial companies were not white but immigrants or successful minorities. Lastly, if it weren’t for the “white man” in the West the people of Brazil would still be living nude among the swamps. They take the racist easy way out by blaming others for their problems. So Brazil, if you hate the “white man” then stop sending your sons to Universities in the West, keep them at home in your country which has among the highest rates of violence in the world.
2) Thugacracy: the U.S Congress in the age of Obama: The degrading and savage behavior of the U.S congress in questioning AIG CEO Edward Liddy is a new low. Liddy was begged by the government to “serve his country” in 2008 and help save AIG for the overwhelming salary of $1 a year. Now he is being threatened with murder by strangulation with piano wire and one senator said he and his executives should commit suicide. Barnie Frank, a congressmen, is demanding he “name names” of the executives who received bonuses. The American Congress has reached one of its lowest and must demagougic points in its history. It is a tragedy for us all.
3) Protest Tourism hurts: Tristan Anderson came. He spread hate. He called people ‘nazi’. If it were’nt for an errant stun grenade he might have passed his vacation as many students in the West do and gone home having enjoyed his “exotic” experience as a “protest tourist.” But now his parents are travelling to the state they call “nazi” and “apartheid” to visit him in a hospital where the apartheid crusader doctors are operating on him and he is taken care of with free health care by impoverished nurses of the nazi state he hated so much. The state is Israel, but it could be any nation in the world afflicted with the scourge of wealthy spoiled non-working leftist western students who play at conflict and murder, genocide and terror.
4) The satanic treatment of women: The West and Islam (photos included with attachment): Two more stories of the treatment of women once again remind us of the evils of liberalism and Islamism. One involves a poor Ethiopian immigrant teenager who dated two Arab men in their twenties. When she said she no longer wanted to see them they handcuffed her and burned her to death and left her disfigured corpse in a field, just as they do with their own women when those women “transgress family honour.” Because he culture had been thoroughly westernized no one bothered to seek revenge and no one wondered ‘why was this 15 year old girl out at 2am in the morning with 25 year old Arab men?’ Liberalism murdered her. It is also responsible for recent revelations about how women were bought and sold for $5,000 from Eastern Europe to work as prostitutes. Is there no new low the liberal-Islamist alliance can subject our women to in our society before we deracinate these twin evils from our midst.
An ignorant racist disgusting individual: President Lula da Silva
March 26, 2009
Seth J. Frantzman
This newsletter has never shied from criticizing the West and Europeans and has, at times, digressed to critique those westerners who believe themselves god-sent to ‘save’ others or arrogantly tell others how to live. But President Lula da Silva, the President of Brazil, took the easy weak way of the world when he said, at a news conference with Gordon Brown on March 26th in Brazil, that “white people with blue eyes” caused the global financial crises.
Really? The head of Citigroup is an Indian, Virkam Pandit. The former CEO of Merril Lynch, Stanley O’Neill was black. PIMCO, which runs the world’s largest bond fund, is run by Mohamed el Arian, an American-Egyptian. A large chunk of Citigroup, some 7 billion initially invested or 4.9% of the company, is owned by an Arab investment fund from the Gulf. Franklin Raines, who is black, ran Fannie Mae1999 to 2004, putting in place many of the mortgage buying policies that actually led to the current crises. Bernie Madoff, who certainly didn’t help the crises, is Jewish. Furthermore it seems ironic that the same conspiracy-theory loving South Americans who hate Jews and blame them for the world financial crises would now turn those Jews, who are depicted as hunchbacked swarthy Orientals, into being ‘white’ with ‘blue eyes’. The truth is that Anglo-Saxons played, at best, a marginal role in the financial institutions that sent the markets cavalcading over a cliff. How many blond men work on Wall Street? Is Deutsh bank behind the crises?
The truth is that Lula de Silva picked out ‘white’ men because they are an easy target. They are the easy thing to blame. Everyone speaks of ‘white privilege’ and ‘white racism’ and ‘white colonialism’ and ‘dead white men’s history’. During the recent bailout bluster some politician even said he would assure the American people that the bailout money wouldn’t go to ‘white men’.
But the real spineless behavior is that of Gordon Brown, representative of the white man whose honour he has done a great disservice by not walking out on this racist, disgusting, rotten, rant. Gordon Brown stood patiently as the racism was issued forth and he pretended as if nothing wrong had been said when his turn came.
Lula de Silva is in fact a white man. He thinks he is a ‘Brazilian’ and he is being a populist by blaming the ‘greedy’ westerners. But he is the white man. He is the face of the whiteness of Brazil, of the white elite that has run that country since its independence. The elite in Brazil are almost exclusively white.
But the greatest hypocrisy of the De Dilva hate speech is that if it were not for white men there would have been no money to whine about losing in a crises. It was those same “white men” who built up the markets, not a bunch of people from Brazil. So they blame the very hand that feeds. That is typical. The day that Brazil’s economy produces one tenth per capita that the American one does, when Brazil stops sending its best students to the U.S and when it stops investing and listing is prominent companies on Wall Street then it can blame the ‘white man’ for a crises that affects them, but so long as they need the white man and live off the very crises that they accuse him of causing they must look to themselves for the blame. But South Americans, like so many of the world’s peoples and minorities in the West will never do that. They will blame others for their problems and they will continue to remain poor. It is not white men that caused the financial crises. In many cases it was prominent successful minorities and immigrants to the West that rose to the top of companies that over stretched themselves. Brazil didn’t participate. It was too busy trying just policing its own streets, with one of the highest murder rates in the world. Now it uses populist racism to complain. That is why it will always be a failure of a country that can only boast of being proud of its half nude women dancing for men on Carnival. Not much to be proud of.
Thugacracy: the U.S Congress in the age of Obama
Seth Frantzman
March 18th, 2009
In October of 2008 Edward Liddy answered the call of his country when we was asked to take over as CEO of AIG for the exorbitant salary of $1 a year. He was a CEO of Allstate insurance from 1999 to 2006. In the fall of the 2009 and in the fallowing months more than a hundred billion dollars were provided to AIG as a lifeline to prevent her falling into bankruptcy. This was pure self interest on the part of the Federal government, attempting to prevent further financial disaster after Lehman Brothers had been allowed to fail. AIG was an architect of its on destruction by writing Credit Default Swaps and other financial instruments that it never fully understood and never accounted for the total liability it would be under were the financial markets to have a hiccup, as they did in September of 2008.
On March 18th, 2009 Edward Liddy was dragged before Congress to address the ‘bonus backlash’ so that U.S congressmen could bully and scream and act out on camera to appear that they are fighting on behalf of the American people. One Congressman said of the AIG employees “You disgust us and you are disgraced professional losers.”
AIG has 116,000 employees. The U.S government is today the largest shareholder of the company. Recently is paid bonuses to more than 100 people, totaling more than $100 million. Some fifty of those employees are not with the company anymore. Prior management put this compensation regime in place as part of a retention system. The unit that helped destroy AIG in fact is receiving numerous bonuses. The unit that destroyed AIG has $1.6 trillion in exposure.
Edward Liddy’s response is clear: had he been in charge such retention bonuses would not have been paid. But The company had contracts with the employees to provide these bonuses and in fact in the industry much of the ‘salary’ of an employee is his bonus.
But now Senators and Congressmen are telling those receiving bonuses that they should commit suicide (Sen. Grasley) and shrill bullying populist low brow congressmen have said they will forcefully get back the bonuses from the employees. As part of the shrill campaign Edward Liddy has received death threats. In America in 2009 that it what you get for serving your country. There was a shameful time when going to risk death for your country meant you were greeted on return by being spat on. But now it is death threats. And those threats are part and parcel of the bullying of the Congress. The same Congressional members who told the American public that Government supported Entities, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, were in stable financial condition just weeks before they were nationalized and stock holders lost everything, the same government that begged Liddy out of retirement to run AIG, is on its high horse. This is America in 2009. No personal responsibility. No modesty. No decorum. Just bullying, like some petty dictator, like a Castro, like a Chavez.
During Edward Liddy’s testimony Code Pink protestors, who had protested the Iraq War, came to the testimony holding signs declaring Liddy a “crook.” The bullies, including Barney Frank who had said Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were secure investments has ordered AIG to provide the names of each person receiving a bonus from AIG to be provided to the Congress. Liddy replied that he had recently received a letter noting that “all the executive and their families should be executed by piano wire…we the people we will see that justice is done.” The Congress caused these threats, and now the same congressmen who incited them want the names and addresses of those receiving bonuses, in order to intimidate and perhaps harm individual Americans. To his credit Liddy has refused. One Congressman, Stephan Lynch of Massachusetts, said “offense was intended” after berating and insulting Liddy.
Have they no shame, these animals that serve in the U.S Congress, these bullies, these thugs, these panderers, these demagogues? Edward Liddy should have resigned immediately after the shameful way in which he was treated by Congress. But he didn’t because he represents the decency of much of America which is today being abused by a government that no longer values personal responsibility or decency or honour. It is a government of the thugs, but the thugs and for the thugs.
There was a time when America made things. Hoover Dam. The Empire State Building. All were constructed quickly. Now it takes years of bureaucracy just to get plans to build a few solar panels in the Mojave desert approved. It has taken 8 years to get the foundations of the ‘Freedom Tower’ built in New York.
It is not the America I grew up in, an America of responsibility and civil conduct. It is a shameful time to be an America. Some people wanted us Americans to be ashamed of Bush and of the War in Iraq. But Bush was contrite and accepted responsibility for that war and mistakes that were made during it. Bush didn’t bully people with shrillness, especially not those asked and begged to come save the economy and the country. The Obama culture of no responsibility and cavalier behavior alongside gutter politics of abuse and threats is a tragedy for America. It is not a culture that will bring the American economy back to its previous 20th century period of greatness anytime soon.
Protest Tourism hurts
Seth J. Frantzman
March 15th, 2009
It should have been just another day in the happy lavish opulent life of Tristan Anderson of Oakland California. Another day of throwing stones and calling people ‘nazi’ and assaulting police officers of a foreign country. It should have been just another day where he woke up, enjoyed coffee in an exotic land and set off to harm people and call people ‘racist’ who he had never met. But March 13th turned out differently than his tourism experience was supposed to. He was hit in the head by a tear gas canister, resulting in head trauma and harm to an eye socket and rushed to hospital, rushed by the very government who he had just been throwing rocks at and calling ‘nazi’.
On March 22nd the parents of Tristan, rather than taking a vacation from their multi-story mansion in Grass Valley, California to meet their son in Europe, since they would never travel to ‘apartheid’ Israel, had to come to the apartheid state to the hospital. The parents said they wanted “justice” for their son. The parents had at their side local extremists such as Michael Sfard, the ever present lawyer of the extreme left in Israel, Anarchists against the Wall and B’Tselem. But Tristan’s parents inadvertently shed light on his life while describing their son; “He has gone to many dangerous places. He went to Iraq during the Second Gulf War, and spent years in Central America right after the civil wars in El Salvador and Guatemala, advocating for social justice." When Tristan's girlfriend came to Israel on a birthright trip, he followed separately to be with her and to understand for himself what the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was about, Sfard said. "It is ironic that the country in which he was shot was a democracy, in which it is supposed to be the duty of everyone to follow their conscience," he said. But why did ‘understanding’ mean ‘hating’ and why did this Tristan feel he had ‘to follow his conscience’ half way around the world and not in his own country?
The existence of the Tristan Anderson is part and parcel of the existence that is the modern world. If one had approached native-Americans in 1405 and asked “do you often travel 3,000 miles to protest and throw rocks at people you’ve never met in the midst of a conflict you have no part in?” they would have replied that they had more important things to do, such as raise children and crops and perhaps even engage in conflicts of their own. Even today in 99% of the world if you asked people if they planned to travel thousands of miles away and protest and throw rocks at people they had never met, whose language and history they had no interest in learning, they would scoff.
But for a select few in the jet set elite societies of the West this is the annual tradition. For some people who don’t have jobs and have wealthy parents there is the opportunity to ‘volunteer’ in a ‘cause’. Then there is the purchasing of the plane tickets and setting off for the exotic foreign destination. Then there is landing at the airport and enjoying the peace and quiet that a foreign government provides the wealthy westerner. Then there is he trip across the country. Then there is meeting the other members of the ‘international’ group. Then there is the trip to the protest area and the throwing of rocks, rocks that can split skulls and kill, and shouting ‘nazi’. Then there is lunch and more rock throwing and then dinner. This is protest tourism.
These people are common in Israel. They come from abroad through the borders or the airport. They demand that the passport checkers not stamp their passports because they don’t want the country’s stamp on their passport. But they happily travel the country’s roads. They readily admit to any locals “I don’t want to learn Hebrew, your language, it’s not important, I am here to protest and maybe learn from Arabic.” They are put up in villas in the West Bank in some ‘refugee camp’. But there life is not that of the ‘refugees’ they romanticize. Instead they come everyday to the Jewish part of the country, the part they call ‘apartheid’ and they dance in its night clubs and drink its alcohol and frequent its theaters. But nightlife is one thing, during the day the protest begins. They wear their khaffiya, not distinguishing between the red or the white or the blue one, not even bothering to learn the difference, because it is part of fashion, not tradition.
What is most disturbing of all is to think of them, rocks in hand, about to throw the rocks at people they call ‘nazi’. These Nazis are people, sometimes their age, but from much less privileged backgrounds. What is amazing to think is that this wealthy protestor from the west might very well throw the rock that could well blind some poor immigrant to Israel. One can imagine the scenario where some Ethiopian immigrant, drafted to serve in the IDF, might be hit in the head by the rock thrown by the wealthy westerner from California. That is in essence the arrogance and evil of this tourism. It is the tourism of colonialism where the wealthy go to other countries and assault poor people for fun and call it ‘justice’ and ‘human rights’.
And the protest tourists are front page news when their pre-pubescent metrosexual flaccid bodies are harmed. Tristan Anderson’s harm was reported on Skynews on March 15th, 2009 and it was in the New York Times and International Herald Tribune the same day under the headline of ‘American harmed in protest.’
The Tristan Andersons and all their counterparts deserve exactly what they get. It is too bad more of them do not end up like their former companions Rachel Corrie and John Hurndall, two other protest tourists who died in Gaza. Their deaths or harm should not be mourned. These people are part of sickening and disgusting phenomenon of the wealthy going to the poor countries and harming the poor, arrogantly taking advantage of other countries and cultures and spitting on those cultures, supporting and excusing terrorism and the murder of civilians, shouting hate and racist things, enjoying the double standards and the needs of their western lifestyle while allying with religious extremists, and sticking their noses in conflicts that have nothing to do with them and they have no right or reason to take part in. The West is a failure, its entire ideology and foundations are a failure because it encourages and makes logical this kind of behavior, it in fact celebrates and rewards it as ‘heroic’ and there is no greater hero in the West than some young student who goes to some foreign land to ‘fix it’. The West, which can’t fix its own problems, exports them overseas by the tens of thousands every year, as extremist western students roam the globe encouraging terrorism and murder and ethnic-slaughter. Rachel Corrie and John Hurndall were killed by Arab members of the IDF, Bedouins in fact. They died at the hands of the poor, those who went to the army to earn some money and increase their opportunities. They died at the hands of the poor, the people these animals, these beasts like Tristan Anderson, would never have deigned to meet. For all their rhetoric about poverty and justice the Andersons only meet the elites of the societies they claim to support. I’ve seen them again and again, sipping their coffee in west Jerusalem, flagrantly wearing the khaffiya, the symbol of murder and terror, in the very places once blown up by terrorists. I’ve seen them encourage radicalism among the people, the Palestinians, they come to love and support. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. And when one sees it with their own eyes, the idea that someone can come to a foreign country and throw rocks and encourage the murder of people they would never deign to meet, that is the most terrible thing. There can be no justice than that they should leave the place they came to as tourists on a stretcher, born ironically by the very people they call ‘nazi’. For there is no greater evil in the modern world than that a person can go play at conflict, play at war and expect that those he calls ‘nazi’ one minute will have to transport his body t be worked on by doctors for free because he has gotten himself hurt in the play-war. He lays today at Sheba Medical Center at Tel Hashomer in Israel, no doubt the poor nurses who must help him with his pain are relatives of those poor men drafted to serve in the IDF that he threw rocks at. He will receive better medical care than those soldiers as well. That is the evil of the modern world. That people can play at protest, can throw rocks and can expect that those they one minute tried to murder must help them just because of their country of origin and that they should receive better medical treatment and world press attention than the people they tried to murder. Absolutely sickening. The Palestinians can be forgiven for wanting to protest and fight. But no forgiveness can ever be found for those that play at terror and war and murder and protest as part of summer break or as part of tourism. No sympathy. Not one ounce. No sympathy for those wealthy who throw rocks at the poor. No sympathy for the western man who throws rocks at some poor African immigrant. No sympathy for those who harm and hate. No sympathy for Tristan Anderson and all the Tristan Andersons in this world.
The satanic treatment of women: The West and Islam
Seth J. Frantzman
March 30th, 2009
In April of 2006 Ahmed Abu Mussa (24) and Muhammad Abed Alazziz el-Huzeil (27) from the town of Rahat picked up 15 year old Mika Dabab Tagapao, an Ethiopian girl from Kiryat Gat, from a nightclub in Ashdod. She had apparently been ‘dating’ both of them with both of their knowledge. She had gone that night to the club and apparently told them she didn’t want to see them anymore. She was taken to a field outside Rahat. She was handcuffed, beaten and gasoline was poured on her. She was burned to death. A few days later boys found her remains. Police were unable to identify the body, given its state and only when the girl was reported missing did they figure out the truth. It took two months to bring the Bedouin Arab Muslims to justice. Given the state of the justice system in Israel, which models itself on a liberal western democracy, they will receive a few years in prison.
The way these two grown men treated this teenage girl is emblematic of Islam. In Somalia in October of 2008 a 13 year old girl who had been raped was taken to a field, buried up to her neck and stoned to death by grown men. The judge, Sheikh Hayakallah stressed that this was Sharia law. The immorality inherent in all this is clear. The Muslim man rapes a teenage girl in Somalia. In Israel the men trade a girl back and forth using her like a sex toy. When the society is done with this woman it disposes of her in a brutal manner. That is the evil that is practiced by one part of the world.
But in the West. How is the woman disposed of there? A report today in Haaretz reveals much about the matter. In it we learn that a prostitution ring “brought hundreds of women from the former Soviet Union to Israel via Egypt. They allegedly sold the women to brothels for between $5,000 and $7,000 each…The indictment states that in one case the suspects told the woman she was being brought to Israel to care for the elderly, and in another, that she would be a waitress. Saban [a pimp] is suspected of holding a gun to the head of one woman, kicking and punching her.” That is the way of the West in regards to women. And is it so much less brutal?
No. The West is as brutal a machine to women as Islam. Let us analyze, for instance, the tale of the Ethiopian girl mentioned above. She was eleven when she came to Israel. She didn’t know, then, that she had just four years to live before being handcuffed, beaten and burned to death. I guess if she had known this perhaps she would not have wanted to ‘live the dream’ of coming to Israel from Africa, coming to what is basically a Western country from an African one. But like those western women in Moldova and Ukraine her choices determined her destiny. Liberalism determined her destiny. Liberalism took her from a reasonably simple, traditional society (although not an Islamic one where they stone rape victims to death), and provided her with the feminist rhetoric of ‘empowerment’ and ‘live your life freely’. Liberalism told the male members of her family not to keep their daughters home or protect them or guard their honour.
Liberalism said: women must be free at all costs, send them out alone at 15 to night clubs to drink in some other town. Don’t bother to care if they come home at all hours of the night. Don’t discipline them. Don’t care what they wear around town. Women are free. And free she was. She was free for four years. She was free and her freedom took her to the handcuffs and the field and the gasoline and the agonizing death. And one wonders, in those moments of death, did she wonder if liberalism had been the correct path in life. Did her parents ever wonder if following the liberal model was the correct path? Where was the community? Where were the brothers and uncles and cousins to seek revenge, to kidnap an Arab and handcuff him to a fence and set him on fire. I guess if it had been a black girl in the U.S tortured and burned to death by two white men then the entire African American community and Jesse Jackson would be marching. But liberalism brainwashed and destroyed these Ethiopians and it took only four years to destroy them. Four years. Not generations. Recall liberalism and its message: no judging, no racism, no stereotypes. That’s right. So the next women to meet Mr. Ahmed Abu Mussa and Muhammad Abed Alazziz el-Huzeil would also date them and let herself be turned into a sex toy for their pleasure and then be taken by them in a car and handcuffed and burned to death. But that is the West. That is what it does to women. That is what has happened to women. It is why women are bought and sold throughout the world and why western men themselves engage in the purchasing of women and in fact go on ‘sex tours’. Why not. That is the western message.
Let us just give one example. Along the Rue d’Aerschot near Gare du Nord in Brussels the windows are stocked with women, not mannequins, real women who sell themselves, like merchandise, as prostitutes. This is the West. This is the height of is civilization. This is it at its more ‘open’ and ‘free’. But freedom is slavery. It is not only slavery for these women but for the entire soul of the people of the West who allow this to continue. How can we say that our West is better than Saudi Arabia where the women are covered head to toe so that no one may see them. What is the difference between the society that values the woman nude in the window on sale and the society that values her covered head to toe. Neither values her as a human. Both turn her into chattel. So in our society she is bought and sold for $5,000. How much is her dowry in a Muslim society. Probably as much per capita if not more. So in on society they bury her and stone her and another she is handcuffed and burned to death. She dies at 13 as a slave or at 15 as a sex toy. So what? What is the difference?
The Western Woman: On sale for $5,000
The message of the West and of Islam are dehumanizing messages that destroy the soul of humanity. Everytime another honour killing happens in the West it is blood on the hands of the West and liberalism which tries to ‘accept other cultures’. Everytime some western woman converts to Islam and covers her hair and allows herself to be imprisoned it is a shame on the West, a testimony to the West’s unique stupidity. Every time the West allows Islamic religious instruction in its schools, as is done in Germany, and allows ‘culture’ to be an excuse in court and allows Shariah law to arbitrate domestic violence, as is done in England, it is a shame and a stain on the West. Only by ridding the West of its liberalistic influences, its moral-relativism, can it be saved. It is these things that have turned women into objects, it is these things that dishonor people and have turned fathers and brothers not into protectors of their sisters and daughters but into their virtual pimps, who abandon them and care not about them.
Issue 80
“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
Note from the editor: Apologies for the lateness of this issue it was due to the holidays here.
April 11th, 2009
1) An ignorant racist disgusting individual: President Lula da Silva: On March 26th Brazilian president Lula da Silva stood at a news conference with Gordon Brown of the UK and blamed “white men with blue eyes” for causing the financial crises. Gordon Brown didn’t wince and in not saying something or leaving the stage he shamed himself. Da Silva’s racism bears some analysis. He is a white man, a member of the white elite of Brazil. Furthermore most of the heads of American financial companies were not white but immigrants or successful minorities. Lastly, if it weren’t for the “white man” in the West the people of Brazil would still be living nude among the swamps. They take the racist easy way out by blaming others for their problems. So Brazil, if you hate the “white man” then stop sending your sons to Universities in the West, keep them at home in your country which has among the highest rates of violence in the world.
2) Thugacracy: the U.S Congress in the age of Obama: The degrading and savage behavior of the U.S congress in questioning AIG CEO Edward Liddy is a new low. Liddy was begged by the government to “serve his country” in 2008 and help save AIG for the overwhelming salary of $1 a year. Now he is being threatened with murder by strangulation with piano wire and one senator said he and his executives should commit suicide. Barnie Frank, a congressmen, is demanding he “name names” of the executives who received bonuses. The American Congress has reached one of its lowest and must demagougic points in its history. It is a tragedy for us all.
3) Protest Tourism hurts: Tristan Anderson came. He spread hate. He called people ‘nazi’. If it were’nt for an errant stun grenade he might have passed his vacation as many students in the West do and gone home having enjoyed his “exotic” experience as a “protest tourist.” But now his parents are travelling to the state they call “nazi” and “apartheid” to visit him in a hospital where the apartheid crusader doctors are operating on him and he is taken care of with free health care by impoverished nurses of the nazi state he hated so much. The state is Israel, but it could be any nation in the world afflicted with the scourge of wealthy spoiled non-working leftist western students who play at conflict and murder, genocide and terror.
4) The satanic treatment of women: The West and Islam (photos included with attachment): Two more stories of the treatment of women once again remind us of the evils of liberalism and Islamism. One involves a poor Ethiopian immigrant teenager who dated two Arab men in their twenties. When she said she no longer wanted to see them they handcuffed her and burned her to death and left her disfigured corpse in a field, just as they do with their own women when those women “transgress family honour.” Because he culture had been thoroughly westernized no one bothered to seek revenge and no one wondered ‘why was this 15 year old girl out at 2am in the morning with 25 year old Arab men?’ Liberalism murdered her. It is also responsible for recent revelations about how women were bought and sold for $5,000 from Eastern Europe to work as prostitutes. Is there no new low the liberal-Islamist alliance can subject our women to in our society before we deracinate these twin evils from our midst.
An ignorant racist disgusting individual: President Lula da Silva
March 26, 2009
Seth J. Frantzman
This newsletter has never shied from criticizing the West and Europeans and has, at times, digressed to critique those westerners who believe themselves god-sent to ‘save’ others or arrogantly tell others how to live. But President Lula da Silva, the President of Brazil, took the easy weak way of the world when he said, at a news conference with Gordon Brown on March 26th in Brazil, that “white people with blue eyes” caused the global financial crises.
Really? The head of Citigroup is an Indian, Virkam Pandit. The former CEO of Merril Lynch, Stanley O’Neill was black. PIMCO, which runs the world’s largest bond fund, is run by Mohamed el Arian, an American-Egyptian. A large chunk of Citigroup, some 7 billion initially invested or 4.9% of the company, is owned by an Arab investment fund from the Gulf. Franklin Raines, who is black, ran Fannie Mae1999 to 2004, putting in place many of the mortgage buying policies that actually led to the current crises. Bernie Madoff, who certainly didn’t help the crises, is Jewish. Furthermore it seems ironic that the same conspiracy-theory loving South Americans who hate Jews and blame them for the world financial crises would now turn those Jews, who are depicted as hunchbacked swarthy Orientals, into being ‘white’ with ‘blue eyes’. The truth is that Anglo-Saxons played, at best, a marginal role in the financial institutions that sent the markets cavalcading over a cliff. How many blond men work on Wall Street? Is Deutsh bank behind the crises?
The truth is that Lula de Silva picked out ‘white’ men because they are an easy target. They are the easy thing to blame. Everyone speaks of ‘white privilege’ and ‘white racism’ and ‘white colonialism’ and ‘dead white men’s history’. During the recent bailout bluster some politician even said he would assure the American people that the bailout money wouldn’t go to ‘white men’.
But the real spineless behavior is that of Gordon Brown, representative of the white man whose honour he has done a great disservice by not walking out on this racist, disgusting, rotten, rant. Gordon Brown stood patiently as the racism was issued forth and he pretended as if nothing wrong had been said when his turn came.
Lula de Silva is in fact a white man. He thinks he is a ‘Brazilian’ and he is being a populist by blaming the ‘greedy’ westerners. But he is the white man. He is the face of the whiteness of Brazil, of the white elite that has run that country since its independence. The elite in Brazil are almost exclusively white.
But the greatest hypocrisy of the De Dilva hate speech is that if it were not for white men there would have been no money to whine about losing in a crises. It was those same “white men” who built up the markets, not a bunch of people from Brazil. So they blame the very hand that feeds. That is typical. The day that Brazil’s economy produces one tenth per capita that the American one does, when Brazil stops sending its best students to the U.S and when it stops investing and listing is prominent companies on Wall Street then it can blame the ‘white man’ for a crises that affects them, but so long as they need the white man and live off the very crises that they accuse him of causing they must look to themselves for the blame. But South Americans, like so many of the world’s peoples and minorities in the West will never do that. They will blame others for their problems and they will continue to remain poor. It is not white men that caused the financial crises. In many cases it was prominent successful minorities and immigrants to the West that rose to the top of companies that over stretched themselves. Brazil didn’t participate. It was too busy trying just policing its own streets, with one of the highest murder rates in the world. Now it uses populist racism to complain. That is why it will always be a failure of a country that can only boast of being proud of its half nude women dancing for men on Carnival. Not much to be proud of.
Thugacracy: the U.S Congress in the age of Obama
Seth Frantzman
March 18th, 2009
In October of 2008 Edward Liddy answered the call of his country when we was asked to take over as CEO of AIG for the exorbitant salary of $1 a year. He was a CEO of Allstate insurance from 1999 to 2006. In the fall of the 2009 and in the fallowing months more than a hundred billion dollars were provided to AIG as a lifeline to prevent her falling into bankruptcy. This was pure self interest on the part of the Federal government, attempting to prevent further financial disaster after Lehman Brothers had been allowed to fail. AIG was an architect of its on destruction by writing Credit Default Swaps and other financial instruments that it never fully understood and never accounted for the total liability it would be under were the financial markets to have a hiccup, as they did in September of 2008.
On March 18th, 2009 Edward Liddy was dragged before Congress to address the ‘bonus backlash’ so that U.S congressmen could bully and scream and act out on camera to appear that they are fighting on behalf of the American people. One Congressman said of the AIG employees “You disgust us and you are disgraced professional losers.”
AIG has 116,000 employees. The U.S government is today the largest shareholder of the company. Recently is paid bonuses to more than 100 people, totaling more than $100 million. Some fifty of those employees are not with the company anymore. Prior management put this compensation regime in place as part of a retention system. The unit that helped destroy AIG in fact is receiving numerous bonuses. The unit that destroyed AIG has $1.6 trillion in exposure.
Edward Liddy’s response is clear: had he been in charge such retention bonuses would not have been paid. But The company had contracts with the employees to provide these bonuses and in fact in the industry much of the ‘salary’ of an employee is his bonus.
But now Senators and Congressmen are telling those receiving bonuses that they should commit suicide (Sen. Grasley) and shrill bullying populist low brow congressmen have said they will forcefully get back the bonuses from the employees. As part of the shrill campaign Edward Liddy has received death threats. In America in 2009 that it what you get for serving your country. There was a shameful time when going to risk death for your country meant you were greeted on return by being spat on. But now it is death threats. And those threats are part and parcel of the bullying of the Congress. The same Congressional members who told the American public that Government supported Entities, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, were in stable financial condition just weeks before they were nationalized and stock holders lost everything, the same government that begged Liddy out of retirement to run AIG, is on its high horse. This is America in 2009. No personal responsibility. No modesty. No decorum. Just bullying, like some petty dictator, like a Castro, like a Chavez.
During Edward Liddy’s testimony Code Pink protestors, who had protested the Iraq War, came to the testimony holding signs declaring Liddy a “crook.” The bullies, including Barney Frank who had said Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were secure investments has ordered AIG to provide the names of each person receiving a bonus from AIG to be provided to the Congress. Liddy replied that he had recently received a letter noting that “all the executive and their families should be executed by piano wire…we the people we will see that justice is done.” The Congress caused these threats, and now the same congressmen who incited them want the names and addresses of those receiving bonuses, in order to intimidate and perhaps harm individual Americans. To his credit Liddy has refused. One Congressman, Stephan Lynch of Massachusetts, said “offense was intended” after berating and insulting Liddy.
Have they no shame, these animals that serve in the U.S Congress, these bullies, these thugs, these panderers, these demagogues? Edward Liddy should have resigned immediately after the shameful way in which he was treated by Congress. But he didn’t because he represents the decency of much of America which is today being abused by a government that no longer values personal responsibility or decency or honour. It is a government of the thugs, but the thugs and for the thugs.
There was a time when America made things. Hoover Dam. The Empire State Building. All were constructed quickly. Now it takes years of bureaucracy just to get plans to build a few solar panels in the Mojave desert approved. It has taken 8 years to get the foundations of the ‘Freedom Tower’ built in New York.
It is not the America I grew up in, an America of responsibility and civil conduct. It is a shameful time to be an America. Some people wanted us Americans to be ashamed of Bush and of the War in Iraq. But Bush was contrite and accepted responsibility for that war and mistakes that were made during it. Bush didn’t bully people with shrillness, especially not those asked and begged to come save the economy and the country. The Obama culture of no responsibility and cavalier behavior alongside gutter politics of abuse and threats is a tragedy for America. It is not a culture that will bring the American economy back to its previous 20th century period of greatness anytime soon.
Protest Tourism hurts
Seth J. Frantzman
March 15th, 2009
It should have been just another day in the happy lavish opulent life of Tristan Anderson of Oakland California. Another day of throwing stones and calling people ‘nazi’ and assaulting police officers of a foreign country. It should have been just another day where he woke up, enjoyed coffee in an exotic land and set off to harm people and call people ‘racist’ who he had never met. But March 13th turned out differently than his tourism experience was supposed to. He was hit in the head by a tear gas canister, resulting in head trauma and harm to an eye socket and rushed to hospital, rushed by the very government who he had just been throwing rocks at and calling ‘nazi’.
On March 22nd the parents of Tristan, rather than taking a vacation from their multi-story mansion in Grass Valley, California to meet their son in Europe, since they would never travel to ‘apartheid’ Israel, had to come to the apartheid state to the hospital. The parents said they wanted “justice” for their son. The parents had at their side local extremists such as Michael Sfard, the ever present lawyer of the extreme left in Israel, Anarchists against the Wall and B’Tselem. But Tristan’s parents inadvertently shed light on his life while describing their son; “He has gone to many dangerous places. He went to Iraq during the Second Gulf War, and spent years in Central America right after the civil wars in El Salvador and Guatemala, advocating for social justice." When Tristan's girlfriend came to Israel on a birthright trip, he followed separately to be with her and to understand for himself what the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was about, Sfard said. "It is ironic that the country in which he was shot was a democracy, in which it is supposed to be the duty of everyone to follow their conscience," he said. But why did ‘understanding’ mean ‘hating’ and why did this Tristan feel he had ‘to follow his conscience’ half way around the world and not in his own country?
The existence of the Tristan Anderson is part and parcel of the existence that is the modern world. If one had approached native-Americans in 1405 and asked “do you often travel 3,000 miles to protest and throw rocks at people you’ve never met in the midst of a conflict you have no part in?” they would have replied that they had more important things to do, such as raise children and crops and perhaps even engage in conflicts of their own. Even today in 99% of the world if you asked people if they planned to travel thousands of miles away and protest and throw rocks at people they had never met, whose language and history they had no interest in learning, they would scoff.
But for a select few in the jet set elite societies of the West this is the annual tradition. For some people who don’t have jobs and have wealthy parents there is the opportunity to ‘volunteer’ in a ‘cause’. Then there is the purchasing of the plane tickets and setting off for the exotic foreign destination. Then there is landing at the airport and enjoying the peace and quiet that a foreign government provides the wealthy westerner. Then there is he trip across the country. Then there is meeting the other members of the ‘international’ group. Then there is the trip to the protest area and the throwing of rocks, rocks that can split skulls and kill, and shouting ‘nazi’. Then there is lunch and more rock throwing and then dinner. This is protest tourism.
These people are common in Israel. They come from abroad through the borders or the airport. They demand that the passport checkers not stamp their passports because they don’t want the country’s stamp on their passport. But they happily travel the country’s roads. They readily admit to any locals “I don’t want to learn Hebrew, your language, it’s not important, I am here to protest and maybe learn from Arabic.” They are put up in villas in the West Bank in some ‘refugee camp’. But there life is not that of the ‘refugees’ they romanticize. Instead they come everyday to the Jewish part of the country, the part they call ‘apartheid’ and they dance in its night clubs and drink its alcohol and frequent its theaters. But nightlife is one thing, during the day the protest begins. They wear their khaffiya, not distinguishing between the red or the white or the blue one, not even bothering to learn the difference, because it is part of fashion, not tradition.
What is most disturbing of all is to think of them, rocks in hand, about to throw the rocks at people they call ‘nazi’. These Nazis are people, sometimes their age, but from much less privileged backgrounds. What is amazing to think is that this wealthy protestor from the west might very well throw the rock that could well blind some poor immigrant to Israel. One can imagine the scenario where some Ethiopian immigrant, drafted to serve in the IDF, might be hit in the head by the rock thrown by the wealthy westerner from California. That is in essence the arrogance and evil of this tourism. It is the tourism of colonialism where the wealthy go to other countries and assault poor people for fun and call it ‘justice’ and ‘human rights’.
And the protest tourists are front page news when their pre-pubescent metrosexual flaccid bodies are harmed. Tristan Anderson’s harm was reported on Skynews on March 15th, 2009 and it was in the New York Times and International Herald Tribune the same day under the headline of ‘American harmed in protest.’
The Tristan Andersons and all their counterparts deserve exactly what they get. It is too bad more of them do not end up like their former companions Rachel Corrie and John Hurndall, two other protest tourists who died in Gaza. Their deaths or harm should not be mourned. These people are part of sickening and disgusting phenomenon of the wealthy going to the poor countries and harming the poor, arrogantly taking advantage of other countries and cultures and spitting on those cultures, supporting and excusing terrorism and the murder of civilians, shouting hate and racist things, enjoying the double standards and the needs of their western lifestyle while allying with religious extremists, and sticking their noses in conflicts that have nothing to do with them and they have no right or reason to take part in. The West is a failure, its entire ideology and foundations are a failure because it encourages and makes logical this kind of behavior, it in fact celebrates and rewards it as ‘heroic’ and there is no greater hero in the West than some young student who goes to some foreign land to ‘fix it’. The West, which can’t fix its own problems, exports them overseas by the tens of thousands every year, as extremist western students roam the globe encouraging terrorism and murder and ethnic-slaughter. Rachel Corrie and John Hurndall were killed by Arab members of the IDF, Bedouins in fact. They died at the hands of the poor, those who went to the army to earn some money and increase their opportunities. They died at the hands of the poor, the people these animals, these beasts like Tristan Anderson, would never have deigned to meet. For all their rhetoric about poverty and justice the Andersons only meet the elites of the societies they claim to support. I’ve seen them again and again, sipping their coffee in west Jerusalem, flagrantly wearing the khaffiya, the symbol of murder and terror, in the very places once blown up by terrorists. I’ve seen them encourage radicalism among the people, the Palestinians, they come to love and support. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. And when one sees it with their own eyes, the idea that someone can come to a foreign country and throw rocks and encourage the murder of people they would never deign to meet, that is the most terrible thing. There can be no justice than that they should leave the place they came to as tourists on a stretcher, born ironically by the very people they call ‘nazi’. For there is no greater evil in the modern world than that a person can go play at conflict, play at war and expect that those he calls ‘nazi’ one minute will have to transport his body t be worked on by doctors for free because he has gotten himself hurt in the play-war. He lays today at Sheba Medical Center at Tel Hashomer in Israel, no doubt the poor nurses who must help him with his pain are relatives of those poor men drafted to serve in the IDF that he threw rocks at. He will receive better medical care than those soldiers as well. That is the evil of the modern world. That people can play at protest, can throw rocks and can expect that those they one minute tried to murder must help them just because of their country of origin and that they should receive better medical treatment and world press attention than the people they tried to murder. Absolutely sickening. The Palestinians can be forgiven for wanting to protest and fight. But no forgiveness can ever be found for those that play at terror and war and murder and protest as part of summer break or as part of tourism. No sympathy. Not one ounce. No sympathy for those wealthy who throw rocks at the poor. No sympathy for the western man who throws rocks at some poor African immigrant. No sympathy for those who harm and hate. No sympathy for Tristan Anderson and all the Tristan Andersons in this world.
The satanic treatment of women: The West and Islam
Seth J. Frantzman
March 30th, 2009
In April of 2006 Ahmed Abu Mussa (24) and Muhammad Abed Alazziz el-Huzeil (27) from the town of Rahat picked up 15 year old Mika Dabab Tagapao, an Ethiopian girl from Kiryat Gat, from a nightclub in Ashdod. She had apparently been ‘dating’ both of them with both of their knowledge. She had gone that night to the club and apparently told them she didn’t want to see them anymore. She was taken to a field outside Rahat. She was handcuffed, beaten and gasoline was poured on her. She was burned to death. A few days later boys found her remains. Police were unable to identify the body, given its state and only when the girl was reported missing did they figure out the truth. It took two months to bring the Bedouin Arab Muslims to justice. Given the state of the justice system in Israel, which models itself on a liberal western democracy, they will receive a few years in prison.
The way these two grown men treated this teenage girl is emblematic of Islam. In Somalia in October of 2008 a 13 year old girl who had been raped was taken to a field, buried up to her neck and stoned to death by grown men. The judge, Sheikh Hayakallah stressed that this was Sharia law. The immorality inherent in all this is clear. The Muslim man rapes a teenage girl in Somalia. In Israel the men trade a girl back and forth using her like a sex toy. When the society is done with this woman it disposes of her in a brutal manner. That is the evil that is practiced by one part of the world.
But in the West. How is the woman disposed of there? A report today in Haaretz reveals much about the matter. In it we learn that a prostitution ring “brought hundreds of women from the former Soviet Union to Israel via Egypt. They allegedly sold the women to brothels for between $5,000 and $7,000 each…The indictment states that in one case the suspects told the woman she was being brought to Israel to care for the elderly, and in another, that she would be a waitress. Saban [a pimp] is suspected of holding a gun to the head of one woman, kicking and punching her.” That is the way of the West in regards to women. And is it so much less brutal?
No. The West is as brutal a machine to women as Islam. Let us analyze, for instance, the tale of the Ethiopian girl mentioned above. She was eleven when she came to Israel. She didn’t know, then, that she had just four years to live before being handcuffed, beaten and burned to death. I guess if she had known this perhaps she would not have wanted to ‘live the dream’ of coming to Israel from Africa, coming to what is basically a Western country from an African one. But like those western women in Moldova and Ukraine her choices determined her destiny. Liberalism determined her destiny. Liberalism took her from a reasonably simple, traditional society (although not an Islamic one where they stone rape victims to death), and provided her with the feminist rhetoric of ‘empowerment’ and ‘live your life freely’. Liberalism told the male members of her family not to keep their daughters home or protect them or guard their honour.
Liberalism said: women must be free at all costs, send them out alone at 15 to night clubs to drink in some other town. Don’t bother to care if they come home at all hours of the night. Don’t discipline them. Don’t care what they wear around town. Women are free. And free she was. She was free for four years. She was free and her freedom took her to the handcuffs and the field and the gasoline and the agonizing death. And one wonders, in those moments of death, did she wonder if liberalism had been the correct path in life. Did her parents ever wonder if following the liberal model was the correct path? Where was the community? Where were the brothers and uncles and cousins to seek revenge, to kidnap an Arab and handcuff him to a fence and set him on fire. I guess if it had been a black girl in the U.S tortured and burned to death by two white men then the entire African American community and Jesse Jackson would be marching. But liberalism brainwashed and destroyed these Ethiopians and it took only four years to destroy them. Four years. Not generations. Recall liberalism and its message: no judging, no racism, no stereotypes. That’s right. So the next women to meet Mr. Ahmed Abu Mussa and Muhammad Abed Alazziz el-Huzeil would also date them and let herself be turned into a sex toy for their pleasure and then be taken by them in a car and handcuffed and burned to death. But that is the West. That is what it does to women. That is what has happened to women. It is why women are bought and sold throughout the world and why western men themselves engage in the purchasing of women and in fact go on ‘sex tours’. Why not. That is the western message.
Let us just give one example. Along the Rue d’Aerschot near Gare du Nord in Brussels the windows are stocked with women, not mannequins, real women who sell themselves, like merchandise, as prostitutes. This is the West. This is the height of is civilization. This is it at its more ‘open’ and ‘free’. But freedom is slavery. It is not only slavery for these women but for the entire soul of the people of the West who allow this to continue. How can we say that our West is better than Saudi Arabia where the women are covered head to toe so that no one may see them. What is the difference between the society that values the woman nude in the window on sale and the society that values her covered head to toe. Neither values her as a human. Both turn her into chattel. So in our society she is bought and sold for $5,000. How much is her dowry in a Muslim society. Probably as much per capita if not more. So in on society they bury her and stone her and another she is handcuffed and burned to death. She dies at 13 as a slave or at 15 as a sex toy. So what? What is the difference?
The Western Woman: On sale for $5,000
The message of the West and of Islam are dehumanizing messages that destroy the soul of humanity. Everytime another honour killing happens in the West it is blood on the hands of the West and liberalism which tries to ‘accept other cultures’. Everytime some western woman converts to Islam and covers her hair and allows herself to be imprisoned it is a shame on the West, a testimony to the West’s unique stupidity. Every time the West allows Islamic religious instruction in its schools, as is done in Germany, and allows ‘culture’ to be an excuse in court and allows Shariah law to arbitrate domestic violence, as is done in England, it is a shame and a stain on the West. Only by ridding the West of its liberalistic influences, its moral-relativism, can it be saved. It is these things that have turned women into objects, it is these things that dishonor people and have turned fathers and brothers not into protectors of their sisters and daughters but into their virtual pimps, who abandon them and care not about them.
Terra Incognita 79 Condoms, Firtzl and Jewish belonging
Terra Incognita
Issue 79
“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
April 1st, 2009
1) Neo-colonialism and condoms: The Pope went to Africa and in a relatively obscure interview he noted, what has always been the Church’s stance, that he opposed condoms and was not sure they actually help stop the spread of AIDs. He was not given the chance to elaborate before the wires were hot with controversy and voices from throughout the western world were condemning him for his ‘primitive’ view. Oddly enough the Africans themselves weren’t offended. Millions mobbed him in Angola and throughout the continent all the while that white NGO workers were condemning him for ‘offending Africa’. Africans are more grown up than the Western world apparently. They understand that condoms are, at best, a stop gap against AIDS, not a ‘solution’.
2) Josef Fritzl and the evils of Europe: Josef Frizl, the Austrian who raped and imprisoned his daughter in a cell for two dozen years was sent to prison. He will be eligible for parole because of a European system where a ‘life sentence’ is just a doze years and where one cannot receive more than one sentence for multiple crimes. This is ‘justice’. He may spend less time in prison than his daughter was forced to spend in the cell her constructed for her. Welcome to Europe.
3) Belonging, the Jews and the Europeans: The British writer who wrote ‘Seven Jewish children’ included a line in which the Jewish parent admits that she doesn’t ‘belong’ in the Holy Land. Some leftist Europeans don’t believe Jews belong in the Middle East, just as their ancestors didn’t think Jews belonged in Europe. Oddly enough these same leftists think that most of the Middle East belongs in Europe. But it is not just the leftist Europeans who are to blame, Jews themselves are ambivalent about where they ‘belong’. Some of them would prefer rootlessness and the chance to critique the entire world than the belonging to one specific place. The irresponsibility of being a worldly ‘humanistic’ critique monger is easier than the responsibility of citizenship and belonging.
Neo-colonialism and condoms
Seth J. Frantzman
March 22nd, 2009
On March 17th, on his way to Cameroon, Pope Benedict XVI made a comment to a journalist while on the flight to the begin his tour of Africa. He said, in Italian, “Se non c’è l’anima, se gli africani non si aiutano, non si può risolvere il flagello con la distribuzione di preservativi: al contrario, il rischio è di aumentare il problema.” The English language press translated this as “[AIDS] is a tragedy that cannot be overcome by money alone, and that cannot be overcome through the distribution of condoms, which even aggravates the problems” of the spread of AIDs.” Despite questions about the translation, the reporting of what the Pope had said set off a media firestorm.
Suddenly the Pope’s mission to the Dark Continent was of interest to the lighter skin continents. No one had expected this. Those who report on Catholic Affairs, such as John Allen of the National Catholic Reporter had pleaded just a day before, on March 16th, for people to care about the Pope’s mission. He wrote about “five reasons why the papal trip to Africa is important.” Allen noted that “In general, news about Africa doesn’t ‘sell’ unless there’s a calamity -- genocide, mass starvation, and the like.” But he stressed that Africa is the future of the Church and that the Pope had the opportunity to speak on Muslim-Christian relations and to reach out to Africans during the ‘age of Obama’ and make ‘old Europe’ relative to them. Allen’s comments were a little playful and low brow but he also seems to have made a prediction; “If there’s no hint of controversy, the sheer pull of Benedict’s personality isn’t enough to galvanize interest.” And the next day, right on schedule for the Pope, who has, according to the media, offended Muslims (alluding to their ‘violence’ which made them become violent) and Jews (de-excommunicating some recalcitrant priests, one of whome denied the Holocaust), there was someone to be offended. This time it was the AIDs-condom mafia.
Of course the Pope wasn’t exactly reflecting on some new radical doctrine. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now the Pope, had been Prefect of the Congregation for Doctrine of the which is tasked with “promoting and safeguarding the doctrine on the faith and morals throughout the Catholic world.” He served in this position from 1981 to 2005, basically the entire time that the former Pope, John Paul II, was Pope. So he helped construct John Paul II’s more conservative or traditional approach to Catholic views on such things as condoms.
But the media has an interest in flagging controversy and ‘scandal’ around the Pope and its members have misquoted him in the past. They did so most famously when it turned an academic, and mostly ponderous, lecture about the Byzantine emperors and Islam into a ‘Pope calls Islam violent’ headline which set the flames of violence alight across the Muslim world and resulted in the murder of at least one nun and a priest and the sacking of several churches.
The controversy over the Pope’s condemns reached fever pitch within a few days. One writer from the International AIDS Society noted that “Pope’s comments could fuel HIV/AIDS.” Other AIDs groups condemned the comments. The Government of France expressed outrage, an oddity for a secular regime. But while the Pope’s comments created rage in the West they went almost unnoticed in Africa. Basmah Fahim of Reuters claimed that “Africans chide Pope” on his comments but her report only noted that “politicians, activists and doctors have criticized the pontiff for being unscientific and dangerous.” Actual mainstream Africans didn’t protest. In the final stop of the Pope’s visit, in Angola, over a million, out of a population of 13 million in the country, turned out to hear him speak. No protests were reported.
There are 33 million people infected with AIDs globally. The Pope’s comments reflected the official view of the Catholic church which, while controversial in certain circles in the West, has not seemed particularly controversial in Africa itself. The truth of the ‘scandal’ and ‘controversy’ about the Pope’s comments is that it reflects a form of neo-colonialism by ‘activists’ in the West who intend that their values and judgments about the use of condoms should be imposed on Africa because ‘we know best’. But the Africans themselves disagree and they showed the depths of their disagreement by turning out in record breaking numbers to show their support for the Pope and the Church. Activists and doctors should distribute condoms in Africa but imposing the Western solution for AIDs should go no further, otherwise it is soaked in arrogance and the idea that only the West can ‘solve’ Africa’s problems. Not all of Africa is marred by AIDs. Particularly Muslim Northern Africa and Uganda have dramatically different infection rates than the rest. They have dealt with the AIDS epidemic in an African way, one that may not walk hand in hand with the West’s solution, but one that has much in common with the Pope’s actual condoms in Italian.
Josef Fritzl and the evils of Europe
Seth J. Frantzman
March 19th, 2009
The case of Josef Fritzl exposes an evil of Europe, the evil underside of liberalism and Nazism that lurks behind dark corners of that continent. Nazism is what allowed Fritzl to get away with his crime. It was the town of people who ask no questions, who accept stories about noises. Nazism is what allowed him to live the double life and show no remorse, much as the Nazis showed no remorse and were able to morph themselves into new men in the New World. Nazism and Austrian Collaboration were what enabled Frizl.
To recount his evil is almost too hard to bear. He imprisoned his own daughter for 24 years. He raped her some 3,000 times. He forced her to act in pornographic scenes in front of a camera for his enjoyment. He took three of the children he fathered with her above ground to live with his family which adopted them. How did she give birth in the basement? How did medical professionals and no one else notice this elaborate evil? He chained his daughter up for 9 months, the first nine of her enslavement. He fathered three more children with her and forced them to remain in the basement. One grew to be a teenager having never seen sunlight. He fathered a seventh child which he then allowed to die in the cellar prison. And it all happened underneath the house shared with his wife and another lodger.
But European ‘justice’ caught up with him. He is to be sentenced to ‘life’, which is 20 years in Austria, in a medical asylum. He will enjoy walks everyday outside. During his time in prison so far he has been visited daily by a friendly psychiatrist who expressed understand of his crimes. Now he will have teams of people waiting on his every need at a top notch psychological institution. No solitary confinement for this man. He will not even remain confined for the same he confined his daughter. No chains for this beast.
In Austria, as in most of Europe there is no justice. Those tried for crimes may only receive the harshest sentence for the worst crime. Thus Frizl was charged with 11 counts of manslaughter, rape, imprisonment, incest, coercion and enslavement among others. But he can only be sentenced for the neglect and manslaughter of his son who he allowed to die in the prison. That is European ‘justice’. If a person were to murder twenty people in Europe the most they could be sentenced for is one murder and in Europe that means between 16 and 20 years in prison, which is what Europeans call ‘life’. It is interesting that in Europe 20 years is ‘life’. That means a person who lives a full life span, 80 years, actually lives four lives.
But European justice gets worse. If judges decide he is “no longer a danger to the public” he can be freed in fifteen years. That is the logic behind release in Europe. A person can murder and murder and rape and murder and rape and terrorize and enslave and once they claim to no longer be a ‘danger’ they can be released. European justice does not envision actually punishing people. The idea is simply to make society safe from them. This is the evil that lurks beneath Europe. The evil of liberalism, in not punishing the beasts the lurk among us, is related to the evil of Nazism, for Nazism lurked in many places outside Germany among the collaborators in Austria and Croatia, and yet there was no remorse in those places for the Nazi past. Europe is a dangerous place to be a civilian. People are under constant threat because there is no justice in that place. On this account the ‘progressive’ justice system has lost all sight of justice. In other societies justice is connected to compensation. A hand for stealing. A life for a life. And that is logical. Enslave people, rape them, commit incest, murder your children; the remedy should be solitary confinement and then death. There can be tolerance in the world for the Frizls or anything like them. Unfortunately the ‘most advanced’ society in the world allows these beasts to roam free, from Frizls to terrorists to Nazis to rapists and child molesters, they all roam free because of a liberal society that grants them creature comforts in prison and endless compassion.
Belonging, the Jews and the Europeans
Seth J. Frantzman
March 19th, 2009
In Caryl Churchill’s recent play, ‘Seven Jewish Children’ one of the characters says to another “Don’t tell her she doesn’t belong here.” This encapsulates how the European thinks about the Jews in Israel. They don’t belong. They certainly don’t belong to the land (one Palestinian book is actually titled We Belong to the Land). The question of where the European feels the Jews belong, and by extension where the European belong and where other people ‘belong’ is important. What is also important is to see how some of the Jews think about the issue of belonging to a place.
For almost 2,000 years the Jews didn’t belong in Europe. They were massacred, expelled, harassed, confined to ghettos, forced to wear special clothes and finally gassed en masse by the Europeans. Not all the Europeans hated them all the time. Each European nation had its own special period of hatred for the Jews and demanding that they remove themselves because they didn’t belong. It was in Europe that the Jew stopped farming and living in isolated rural settlements and confined himself to the cities, out of fear of being assaulted in the countryside. But his dwelling in the city made him more of foreigner, since foreigners congregate in cities, they are obviously not part of the land. It made him easier to remove as well, city dwellers are not an essential part of the economy in countries that at the time were mostly rural. So the Jew didn’t belong. But then, after the Germans and their collaborators, the Austrians, Croats and others, destroyed European Jewry between 1933 and 1945 something changed. The Europeans, like Caryl Churchill decided that the Jews belonged in Europe, now that none of them were left. Country’s such as Spain even invited them back, after 500 years of being without them.
The Europeans have an interesting sense of belonging. They take it for granted that all of them belong where they are and that they can tell their children they ‘belong’ in their countries. In fact even if Europeans move from place to place or country to country they don’t seem to feel that their children don’t ‘belong’ in that place. If Caryl Churchill raised children in the U.S she would have no qualm telling them they belong as citizens of their new country. Furthermore the Europeans of the ideology that claims the Jews don’t ‘belong’ in Israel are the same ones who struggle on behalf of the rights of foreign immigrants to Europe. For the Europeans any non-European who has arrived in any form, legal or illegal, ‘belongs’ in Europe. They would not tell an Algerian immigrant to not tell their children “she doesn’t belong here.”
The Jews themselves are ambivalent about their belonging. Numerous Jewish voices, especially the Jewish elites of Israel, the German Yekkee Jews, and the leftist Jews in the U.K and the U.S, are not sure they belong anywhere. Haim Beresheet, a U.K lecturer who calls himself ‘Israeli’ penned a protest letter with hundreds of other Jews describing the Palestinians as ‘indigenous’. When asked if he was indigenous, he and other signers, noted that only the Palestinians can be ‘indigenous’ to Israel and that “not every nation has a corresponding place it is indigenous to.” So the Jews are not indigenous and by extension those Jews such as Beresheet are not indigenous to anything. They need the exile. It is no surprise, the exile is part of their identity, being outsiders looking in with a ‘worldview’ and an ‘international humanist’ viewpoint is important to them. One sees this in the endless writings of anti-Israel types such as Avraham Burg who tell us that the Jews must be a “light unto the nations” who must roam around the world supporting causes and being the ‘moral center’. Those Jews want this position for themselves, a sort of Cohanim for the world, a sort of Braham elite that determines the morals of the world, always expressing outrage in shrill causes.
Take three simple more examples. The Israel Religious Action Center in Israel, which is the “legal arm” of the Reform Jewish movement in Israel, has started a campaign to end the building by the Simon Wiesenthal center of a Museum in the city. Einat Horowitz, a director of the organization noted “We should use further legal action to gain time to create enough public pressure to stop the project.” Ostensibly the movement claims that their decision is based on “our values are ones of equality, tolerance, and pluralism and that is clearly why we have taken this position.” However the movement has never taken a similar position to protect Jewish sites, such as the Temple Mount or Mount of Olives from destruction. Rachel Canar, Director of Development and Overseas Communications only response when queried was “I personally as a teenager helped to restore an abandon Jewish cemetery in Placerville, California that my Reform summer camp had taken on as one of its tikkun olam projects.” The truth is that the Reform Movement’s legal arm and thus the movement itself spends most of its time condemning Jews, Israel and Judaism and spending money to “Tikkun Olam” everywhere. Its website, which although it has the word ‘Israel’ in the title is entirely in English lists its ‘issues’. Its ‘issues’ are about Africa and AIDs and a ‘living wage’ and ‘lesbians’ and fixing everything wrong with the 6 billion people in the world. Nothing about Jews.
But it doesn’t stop with the Reform movement. A recent book review in the Economist called “Palestinian Poetry on the Wasteland” Now Adina Hoffman has published ‘My Happiness bears no relation to happiness: a poet’s life in the Palestinian century’. It is the story of “Taha Muhammad Ali was born in 1931 in the Galilee village of Saffuriyya and was forced to flee during the war in 1948. He traveled on foot to Lebanon and returned a year later to find his village destroyed.” Who is Adina Hoffman. She is “Adina Hoffman is the author of House of Windows: Portraits from a Jerusalem Neighborhood. Her essays and criticism have appeared in the Nation, the Washington Post, and the Times Literary Supplement and on the BBC. One of the founders and editors of Ibis Editions, she lives in Jerusalem.” Hoffman joins the ranks of others such as Joel Migdal, Baruch Kimmerling, Noam Chomsky, Joel Kovel and a virtual army of Jewish intellectuals who have devoted their lives to telling the story of Palestinians, even the most obscure stories (who can forget The Lemon Tree or Five Palestinian Walks, if the Palestinians aren’t careful there will be more books on them than there are Palestinians, there is bread and butter in the publishing industry like the story of some obscure Palestinian and his ‘hard’ life). It is these writers who have even encouraged greater Palestinian nationalism and encouraged the concept not only of bi-nationalism but of a ‘Greater Palestine’ (including Jordan, Lebanon, Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. Of course they weren’t too happy when the Greater Israel voices wanted this for the Jews). It is they who claim things like “In fact, notes Adina Hoffman, it was not until after the 1967 war reconnected them [Palestinians] with their brethren in the West Bank and Gaza that they fully understood that, despite 19 years as citizens of a country that still prefers to call them “Israeli Arabs”, they were still just as Palestinian as those “outside”. Until then, they had been (and, to some extent, still are) viewed as collaborators with the Jewish state.” So the Jew defines the Palestinians in Israel as ‘collaborators’ and loves their ‘reconnection with their brethren’. It is odd that the same Jews when they lived in Europe did not appreciate being called ‘collaborators’ and ‘traitors’ for living among the Europeans but having connections to ‘their brethren’ abroad. But who else should have created Palestinian history if not intellectual Jews in Israel, creating Palestinians where none existed so as to create a national movement that they argue should displace Israel, creating a bi-national state so that they, intellectual Jews, can be a minority in it.
The insidiousness of all of it can also be seen in the story of Daniel (Danny) Abebe. According to a report entitled ‘breaking the silence’ we learn that “Danny Abebe exposes some ugly truths about Ethiopian aliya, over his community's vehement objections.” He is a journalist for Yideot Ahronot. He came to Israel in 1984 from Ethiopia. It didn’t take long for him to learn what it means to be an upper class intellectual Jew. Accepted into the elite of Israel’s intellectual leftist society he quickly realized that popularity and fame come from self hate. He realized that self-critique is the god of this culture. “I know this [Ethiopian] community very well and one of the problems is that it kept all the problems inside, focusing instead on building a new life here," So he became the pet of the white Ashkenazi elite in Israel, paid by the newspapers and given awards by intellectuals, to condemn and spread hate about his community. Like those who turned Ben-Gurion into a racist ethnic-cleanser, Abebe set out in a documentary to prove that the Ethiopian leaders of the Ethiopian Aliya, known as the ‘Committee’, were in fact all rapists who traded sex for transport, sort like a cabal of Kastners (the famous Jewish Hungarian who helped family connections flee Hungary). Abebe paints himself as a crusader “raising some very ugly ghosts and perhaps even causing a rift within an already trouble-ridden community.”
Ababe claims “I think it will only be good for the community to discuss this issue. Before we can solve the problems of our community, we must look inside ourselves and note what mistakes we made.” He points out he is not looking at it from an ‘Ethiopian perspective’. This is a perspective he abandoned long ago into order to join his western brethren in their self hate. He learned fast how to become western. So he has set about in Israel, in the Hebrew press (not of course in his own Amharic language…like all self-haters his hate is published for the consumption of others, sort of like Hoffman’s Palestinian story is for English language readers, not in Arabic for Arabs even thought its about them), to tarnish and destroy his community. Its not the only story he is involved in. He has opposed the immigration of the Falash Mura community and heaped scorn and the on American Jews for their assistance in this operation and others. He has accused his own people of being slave owners, claiming that the Ethiopian Jews owned slaves in Ethiopia. Whatever the western leftist self-hating press wants he can provide, from lurid stories of rape to laughing about his ‘primitive’ people at cocktail parties. He is a case study in self-hatred. It didn’t take long, not even one generation, for the self-hatred of western Jews to become part and parcel of the Ethiopian Jewish community, for the desire to destroy, crush, and tear down in the name of ‘breaking the silence’. It didn’t take long for the money earned from lurid journalism and the approval of the cocktail party and the flaccid intellectual to bring in the self hate.
They can’t abide the existence of Israel, the degrading of the Jewish people to a mere state with bus drivers and sewage workers and soldiers and beggars, no that is not the role they envision for themselves and because of their own arrogant self centered vision of rootlessness they condemn the entire Jewish people to being non-indigenous and not belonging. The tragedy of these Jews is as tragic and disgusting as the way the European who suppressed the Jew now arrogantly decides the Jew does not belong anywhere, certainly not Israel.
Issue 79
“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
April 1st, 2009
1) Neo-colonialism and condoms: The Pope went to Africa and in a relatively obscure interview he noted, what has always been the Church’s stance, that he opposed condoms and was not sure they actually help stop the spread of AIDs. He was not given the chance to elaborate before the wires were hot with controversy and voices from throughout the western world were condemning him for his ‘primitive’ view. Oddly enough the Africans themselves weren’t offended. Millions mobbed him in Angola and throughout the continent all the while that white NGO workers were condemning him for ‘offending Africa’. Africans are more grown up than the Western world apparently. They understand that condoms are, at best, a stop gap against AIDS, not a ‘solution’.
2) Josef Fritzl and the evils of Europe: Josef Frizl, the Austrian who raped and imprisoned his daughter in a cell for two dozen years was sent to prison. He will be eligible for parole because of a European system where a ‘life sentence’ is just a doze years and where one cannot receive more than one sentence for multiple crimes. This is ‘justice’. He may spend less time in prison than his daughter was forced to spend in the cell her constructed for her. Welcome to Europe.
3) Belonging, the Jews and the Europeans: The British writer who wrote ‘Seven Jewish children’ included a line in which the Jewish parent admits that she doesn’t ‘belong’ in the Holy Land. Some leftist Europeans don’t believe Jews belong in the Middle East, just as their ancestors didn’t think Jews belonged in Europe. Oddly enough these same leftists think that most of the Middle East belongs in Europe. But it is not just the leftist Europeans who are to blame, Jews themselves are ambivalent about where they ‘belong’. Some of them would prefer rootlessness and the chance to critique the entire world than the belonging to one specific place. The irresponsibility of being a worldly ‘humanistic’ critique monger is easier than the responsibility of citizenship and belonging.
Neo-colonialism and condoms
Seth J. Frantzman
March 22nd, 2009
On March 17th, on his way to Cameroon, Pope Benedict XVI made a comment to a journalist while on the flight to the begin his tour of Africa. He said, in Italian, “Se non c’è l’anima, se gli africani non si aiutano, non si può risolvere il flagello con la distribuzione di preservativi: al contrario, il rischio è di aumentare il problema.” The English language press translated this as “[AIDS] is a tragedy that cannot be overcome by money alone, and that cannot be overcome through the distribution of condoms, which even aggravates the problems” of the spread of AIDs.” Despite questions about the translation, the reporting of what the Pope had said set off a media firestorm.
Suddenly the Pope’s mission to the Dark Continent was of interest to the lighter skin continents. No one had expected this. Those who report on Catholic Affairs, such as John Allen of the National Catholic Reporter had pleaded just a day before, on March 16th, for people to care about the Pope’s mission. He wrote about “five reasons why the papal trip to Africa is important.” Allen noted that “In general, news about Africa doesn’t ‘sell’ unless there’s a calamity -- genocide, mass starvation, and the like.” But he stressed that Africa is the future of the Church and that the Pope had the opportunity to speak on Muslim-Christian relations and to reach out to Africans during the ‘age of Obama’ and make ‘old Europe’ relative to them. Allen’s comments were a little playful and low brow but he also seems to have made a prediction; “If there’s no hint of controversy, the sheer pull of Benedict’s personality isn’t enough to galvanize interest.” And the next day, right on schedule for the Pope, who has, according to the media, offended Muslims (alluding to their ‘violence’ which made them become violent) and Jews (de-excommunicating some recalcitrant priests, one of whome denied the Holocaust), there was someone to be offended. This time it was the AIDs-condom mafia.
Of course the Pope wasn’t exactly reflecting on some new radical doctrine. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now the Pope, had been Prefect of the Congregation for Doctrine of the which is tasked with “promoting and safeguarding the doctrine on the faith and morals throughout the Catholic world.” He served in this position from 1981 to 2005, basically the entire time that the former Pope, John Paul II, was Pope. So he helped construct John Paul II’s more conservative or traditional approach to Catholic views on such things as condoms.
But the media has an interest in flagging controversy and ‘scandal’ around the Pope and its members have misquoted him in the past. They did so most famously when it turned an academic, and mostly ponderous, lecture about the Byzantine emperors and Islam into a ‘Pope calls Islam violent’ headline which set the flames of violence alight across the Muslim world and resulted in the murder of at least one nun and a priest and the sacking of several churches.
The controversy over the Pope’s condemns reached fever pitch within a few days. One writer from the International AIDS Society noted that “Pope’s comments could fuel HIV/AIDS.” Other AIDs groups condemned the comments. The Government of France expressed outrage, an oddity for a secular regime. But while the Pope’s comments created rage in the West they went almost unnoticed in Africa. Basmah Fahim of Reuters claimed that “Africans chide Pope” on his comments but her report only noted that “politicians, activists and doctors have criticized the pontiff for being unscientific and dangerous.” Actual mainstream Africans didn’t protest. In the final stop of the Pope’s visit, in Angola, over a million, out of a population of 13 million in the country, turned out to hear him speak. No protests were reported.
There are 33 million people infected with AIDs globally. The Pope’s comments reflected the official view of the Catholic church which, while controversial in certain circles in the West, has not seemed particularly controversial in Africa itself. The truth of the ‘scandal’ and ‘controversy’ about the Pope’s comments is that it reflects a form of neo-colonialism by ‘activists’ in the West who intend that their values and judgments about the use of condoms should be imposed on Africa because ‘we know best’. But the Africans themselves disagree and they showed the depths of their disagreement by turning out in record breaking numbers to show their support for the Pope and the Church. Activists and doctors should distribute condoms in Africa but imposing the Western solution for AIDs should go no further, otherwise it is soaked in arrogance and the idea that only the West can ‘solve’ Africa’s problems. Not all of Africa is marred by AIDs. Particularly Muslim Northern Africa and Uganda have dramatically different infection rates than the rest. They have dealt with the AIDS epidemic in an African way, one that may not walk hand in hand with the West’s solution, but one that has much in common with the Pope’s actual condoms in Italian.
Josef Fritzl and the evils of Europe
Seth J. Frantzman
March 19th, 2009
The case of Josef Fritzl exposes an evil of Europe, the evil underside of liberalism and Nazism that lurks behind dark corners of that continent. Nazism is what allowed Fritzl to get away with his crime. It was the town of people who ask no questions, who accept stories about noises. Nazism is what allowed him to live the double life and show no remorse, much as the Nazis showed no remorse and were able to morph themselves into new men in the New World. Nazism and Austrian Collaboration were what enabled Frizl.
To recount his evil is almost too hard to bear. He imprisoned his own daughter for 24 years. He raped her some 3,000 times. He forced her to act in pornographic scenes in front of a camera for his enjoyment. He took three of the children he fathered with her above ground to live with his family which adopted them. How did she give birth in the basement? How did medical professionals and no one else notice this elaborate evil? He chained his daughter up for 9 months, the first nine of her enslavement. He fathered three more children with her and forced them to remain in the basement. One grew to be a teenager having never seen sunlight. He fathered a seventh child which he then allowed to die in the cellar prison. And it all happened underneath the house shared with his wife and another lodger.
But European ‘justice’ caught up with him. He is to be sentenced to ‘life’, which is 20 years in Austria, in a medical asylum. He will enjoy walks everyday outside. During his time in prison so far he has been visited daily by a friendly psychiatrist who expressed understand of his crimes. Now he will have teams of people waiting on his every need at a top notch psychological institution. No solitary confinement for this man. He will not even remain confined for the same he confined his daughter. No chains for this beast.
In Austria, as in most of Europe there is no justice. Those tried for crimes may only receive the harshest sentence for the worst crime. Thus Frizl was charged with 11 counts of manslaughter, rape, imprisonment, incest, coercion and enslavement among others. But he can only be sentenced for the neglect and manslaughter of his son who he allowed to die in the prison. That is European ‘justice’. If a person were to murder twenty people in Europe the most they could be sentenced for is one murder and in Europe that means between 16 and 20 years in prison, which is what Europeans call ‘life’. It is interesting that in Europe 20 years is ‘life’. That means a person who lives a full life span, 80 years, actually lives four lives.
But European justice gets worse. If judges decide he is “no longer a danger to the public” he can be freed in fifteen years. That is the logic behind release in Europe. A person can murder and murder and rape and murder and rape and terrorize and enslave and once they claim to no longer be a ‘danger’ they can be released. European justice does not envision actually punishing people. The idea is simply to make society safe from them. This is the evil that lurks beneath Europe. The evil of liberalism, in not punishing the beasts the lurk among us, is related to the evil of Nazism, for Nazism lurked in many places outside Germany among the collaborators in Austria and Croatia, and yet there was no remorse in those places for the Nazi past. Europe is a dangerous place to be a civilian. People are under constant threat because there is no justice in that place. On this account the ‘progressive’ justice system has lost all sight of justice. In other societies justice is connected to compensation. A hand for stealing. A life for a life. And that is logical. Enslave people, rape them, commit incest, murder your children; the remedy should be solitary confinement and then death. There can be tolerance in the world for the Frizls or anything like them. Unfortunately the ‘most advanced’ society in the world allows these beasts to roam free, from Frizls to terrorists to Nazis to rapists and child molesters, they all roam free because of a liberal society that grants them creature comforts in prison and endless compassion.
Belonging, the Jews and the Europeans
Seth J. Frantzman
March 19th, 2009
In Caryl Churchill’s recent play, ‘Seven Jewish Children’ one of the characters says to another “Don’t tell her she doesn’t belong here.” This encapsulates how the European thinks about the Jews in Israel. They don’t belong. They certainly don’t belong to the land (one Palestinian book is actually titled We Belong to the Land). The question of where the European feels the Jews belong, and by extension where the European belong and where other people ‘belong’ is important. What is also important is to see how some of the Jews think about the issue of belonging to a place.
For almost 2,000 years the Jews didn’t belong in Europe. They were massacred, expelled, harassed, confined to ghettos, forced to wear special clothes and finally gassed en masse by the Europeans. Not all the Europeans hated them all the time. Each European nation had its own special period of hatred for the Jews and demanding that they remove themselves because they didn’t belong. It was in Europe that the Jew stopped farming and living in isolated rural settlements and confined himself to the cities, out of fear of being assaulted in the countryside. But his dwelling in the city made him more of foreigner, since foreigners congregate in cities, they are obviously not part of the land. It made him easier to remove as well, city dwellers are not an essential part of the economy in countries that at the time were mostly rural. So the Jew didn’t belong. But then, after the Germans and their collaborators, the Austrians, Croats and others, destroyed European Jewry between 1933 and 1945 something changed. The Europeans, like Caryl Churchill decided that the Jews belonged in Europe, now that none of them were left. Country’s such as Spain even invited them back, after 500 years of being without them.
The Europeans have an interesting sense of belonging. They take it for granted that all of them belong where they are and that they can tell their children they ‘belong’ in their countries. In fact even if Europeans move from place to place or country to country they don’t seem to feel that their children don’t ‘belong’ in that place. If Caryl Churchill raised children in the U.S she would have no qualm telling them they belong as citizens of their new country. Furthermore the Europeans of the ideology that claims the Jews don’t ‘belong’ in Israel are the same ones who struggle on behalf of the rights of foreign immigrants to Europe. For the Europeans any non-European who has arrived in any form, legal or illegal, ‘belongs’ in Europe. They would not tell an Algerian immigrant to not tell their children “she doesn’t belong here.”
The Jews themselves are ambivalent about their belonging. Numerous Jewish voices, especially the Jewish elites of Israel, the German Yekkee Jews, and the leftist Jews in the U.K and the U.S, are not sure they belong anywhere. Haim Beresheet, a U.K lecturer who calls himself ‘Israeli’ penned a protest letter with hundreds of other Jews describing the Palestinians as ‘indigenous’. When asked if he was indigenous, he and other signers, noted that only the Palestinians can be ‘indigenous’ to Israel and that “not every nation has a corresponding place it is indigenous to.” So the Jews are not indigenous and by extension those Jews such as Beresheet are not indigenous to anything. They need the exile. It is no surprise, the exile is part of their identity, being outsiders looking in with a ‘worldview’ and an ‘international humanist’ viewpoint is important to them. One sees this in the endless writings of anti-Israel types such as Avraham Burg who tell us that the Jews must be a “light unto the nations” who must roam around the world supporting causes and being the ‘moral center’. Those Jews want this position for themselves, a sort of Cohanim for the world, a sort of Braham elite that determines the morals of the world, always expressing outrage in shrill causes.
Take three simple more examples. The Israel Religious Action Center in Israel, which is the “legal arm” of the Reform Jewish movement in Israel, has started a campaign to end the building by the Simon Wiesenthal center of a Museum in the city. Einat Horowitz, a director of the organization noted “We should use further legal action to gain time to create enough public pressure to stop the project.” Ostensibly the movement claims that their decision is based on “our values are ones of equality, tolerance, and pluralism and that is clearly why we have taken this position.” However the movement has never taken a similar position to protect Jewish sites, such as the Temple Mount or Mount of Olives from destruction. Rachel Canar, Director of Development and Overseas Communications only response when queried was “I personally as a teenager helped to restore an abandon Jewish cemetery in Placerville, California that my Reform summer camp had taken on as one of its tikkun olam projects.” The truth is that the Reform Movement’s legal arm and thus the movement itself spends most of its time condemning Jews, Israel and Judaism and spending money to “Tikkun Olam” everywhere. Its website, which although it has the word ‘Israel’ in the title is entirely in English lists its ‘issues’. Its ‘issues’ are about Africa and AIDs and a ‘living wage’ and ‘lesbians’ and fixing everything wrong with the 6 billion people in the world. Nothing about Jews.
But it doesn’t stop with the Reform movement. A recent book review in the Economist called “Palestinian Poetry on the Wasteland” Now Adina Hoffman has published ‘My Happiness bears no relation to happiness: a poet’s life in the Palestinian century’. It is the story of “Taha Muhammad Ali was born in 1931 in the Galilee village of Saffuriyya and was forced to flee during the war in 1948. He traveled on foot to Lebanon and returned a year later to find his village destroyed.” Who is Adina Hoffman. She is “Adina Hoffman is the author of House of Windows: Portraits from a Jerusalem Neighborhood. Her essays and criticism have appeared in the Nation, the Washington Post, and the Times Literary Supplement and on the BBC. One of the founders and editors of Ibis Editions, she lives in Jerusalem.” Hoffman joins the ranks of others such as Joel Migdal, Baruch Kimmerling, Noam Chomsky, Joel Kovel and a virtual army of Jewish intellectuals who have devoted their lives to telling the story of Palestinians, even the most obscure stories (who can forget The Lemon Tree or Five Palestinian Walks, if the Palestinians aren’t careful there will be more books on them than there are Palestinians, there is bread and butter in the publishing industry like the story of some obscure Palestinian and his ‘hard’ life). It is these writers who have even encouraged greater Palestinian nationalism and encouraged the concept not only of bi-nationalism but of a ‘Greater Palestine’ (including Jordan, Lebanon, Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. Of course they weren’t too happy when the Greater Israel voices wanted this for the Jews). It is they who claim things like “In fact, notes Adina Hoffman, it was not until after the 1967 war reconnected them [Palestinians] with their brethren in the West Bank and Gaza that they fully understood that, despite 19 years as citizens of a country that still prefers to call them “Israeli Arabs”, they were still just as Palestinian as those “outside”. Until then, they had been (and, to some extent, still are) viewed as collaborators with the Jewish state.” So the Jew defines the Palestinians in Israel as ‘collaborators’ and loves their ‘reconnection with their brethren’. It is odd that the same Jews when they lived in Europe did not appreciate being called ‘collaborators’ and ‘traitors’ for living among the Europeans but having connections to ‘their brethren’ abroad. But who else should have created Palestinian history if not intellectual Jews in Israel, creating Palestinians where none existed so as to create a national movement that they argue should displace Israel, creating a bi-national state so that they, intellectual Jews, can be a minority in it.
The insidiousness of all of it can also be seen in the story of Daniel (Danny) Abebe. According to a report entitled ‘breaking the silence’ we learn that “Danny Abebe exposes some ugly truths about Ethiopian aliya, over his community's vehement objections.” He is a journalist for Yideot Ahronot. He came to Israel in 1984 from Ethiopia. It didn’t take long for him to learn what it means to be an upper class intellectual Jew. Accepted into the elite of Israel’s intellectual leftist society he quickly realized that popularity and fame come from self hate. He realized that self-critique is the god of this culture. “I know this [Ethiopian] community very well and one of the problems is that it kept all the problems inside, focusing instead on building a new life here," So he became the pet of the white Ashkenazi elite in Israel, paid by the newspapers and given awards by intellectuals, to condemn and spread hate about his community. Like those who turned Ben-Gurion into a racist ethnic-cleanser, Abebe set out in a documentary to prove that the Ethiopian leaders of the Ethiopian Aliya, known as the ‘Committee’, were in fact all rapists who traded sex for transport, sort like a cabal of Kastners (the famous Jewish Hungarian who helped family connections flee Hungary). Abebe paints himself as a crusader “raising some very ugly ghosts and perhaps even causing a rift within an already trouble-ridden community.”
Ababe claims “I think it will only be good for the community to discuss this issue. Before we can solve the problems of our community, we must look inside ourselves and note what mistakes we made.” He points out he is not looking at it from an ‘Ethiopian perspective’. This is a perspective he abandoned long ago into order to join his western brethren in their self hate. He learned fast how to become western. So he has set about in Israel, in the Hebrew press (not of course in his own Amharic language…like all self-haters his hate is published for the consumption of others, sort of like Hoffman’s Palestinian story is for English language readers, not in Arabic for Arabs even thought its about them), to tarnish and destroy his community. Its not the only story he is involved in. He has opposed the immigration of the Falash Mura community and heaped scorn and the on American Jews for their assistance in this operation and others. He has accused his own people of being slave owners, claiming that the Ethiopian Jews owned slaves in Ethiopia. Whatever the western leftist self-hating press wants he can provide, from lurid stories of rape to laughing about his ‘primitive’ people at cocktail parties. He is a case study in self-hatred. It didn’t take long, not even one generation, for the self-hatred of western Jews to become part and parcel of the Ethiopian Jewish community, for the desire to destroy, crush, and tear down in the name of ‘breaking the silence’. It didn’t take long for the money earned from lurid journalism and the approval of the cocktail party and the flaccid intellectual to bring in the self hate.
They can’t abide the existence of Israel, the degrading of the Jewish people to a mere state with bus drivers and sewage workers and soldiers and beggars, no that is not the role they envision for themselves and because of their own arrogant self centered vision of rootlessness they condemn the entire Jewish people to being non-indigenous and not belonging. The tragedy of these Jews is as tragic and disgusting as the way the European who suppressed the Jew now arrogantly decides the Jew does not belong anywhere, certainly not Israel.
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