Terra Incognita 78 Culling, why leftists hate, honour killings

Terra Incognita
Issue 78
“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”

A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel

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

March 23rd, 2009

1) Culling, biodiversity and the evils of government control: It was recently revealed that Kruger National Park in South Africa is considering ‘managing’ its elephant population by shooting thousands of them. The reason is to maintain ‘biological diversity’. The problem with ‘managing’ the environment is that man is bad at it and that it is exceedingly arrogant. The environment can manage itself, it doesn’t need man introducing, re-introducing and then culling species in order to create some sort of delicate diverse fantasy. Perhaps however we will need to ‘manage’ the human population in order to insure its diversity. Such things have been tried before.

2) Why they hate: The leftist hate is gaining ground everyday and resembling, more and more, the extremism present in crowds of Muslim protestors. Their extremism reflect the need of humans to have causes especially in a modern era of too much wealth and too much time on our hands.

3) A short history of Honour Killings: Why are honour killings always ascribed to ‘culture’ and ‘tradition’ and not to religion. Recent cases show the depth to which ‘tradition’ is a cover up for the truth. In addition recently discovered newspaper accounts from the 1930s and 1940s show that even then judges accepted the ‘tradition’ excuse and spoke of how ‘progressive’ societies would help end this societal ill. But instead the West has become host to honour killings, rather than the honour killing societies ending this practice.

Culling, biodiversity and the evils of government control
March 14th, 2009
Seth J. Frantzman

Kruger National Park is roughly 19,000 sq. km, larger than many small countries. By comparison Belgium is 30,000 sq km and Puerto Rico is 13,700 sq. km. It is larger than several U.S states. It is, according to reports, bulging at the seams with some 13,000 (2005 census) African elephants. By contrast Puerto Rico only has 4 million people. So the managers of Kruger National Park have decided to ‘manage’ the elephant population by ‘culling’ (killing) between 2,500 and 6,000 of them.

Until 1995 the park’s authorities culled about 7% (about 500) of the population annually. At that time the population stood at 8,870. The moratorium on culling inaugurated in 1995 was a result of the fall of apartheid when the new government, wanting to please every liberal special interest decided that culling was decidedly un-politically correct. In 10 years the elephant population thus grew by 4,000, which is less than 500 a year and thus less than the 7% that had been culled before 1995. What this means is that somehow, as if by magic, once the culling stopped the growth rate of he elephants actually stopped, since culling before 1995 had never been intended to decrease the elephant population on along term basis, but to ‘manage’ it.

Now with the park supposedly ‘bursting’ with ‘too many’ elephants, although the density is less than one per square kilometer, the park’s officials are calling for hunters and others to come and get rid of them. It is perhaps an irony since the recent ‘explosion’ of elephant population is only a phenomenon of the last 20 years. In the 1980s the problem was poaching and elephant populations in Africa were decimated. People feared for the survival of the species, much as they now do the mountain gorillas. But the elephant has survived. There are supposed to be some 500,000 elephants in Africa with 300,000 of them in Southern Africa. But “elephant experts, scientists and wildlife managers” have warned that “they fear [so many elephants] will destroy vegetation crucial to the survival of small species.” Oddly enough the original moratorium on gunning down the elephants had been passed in 1995 after efforts “to protect the park's biodiversity. The practice [of culling] was stopped when it was acknowledged there was insufficient evidence to determine how a fixed number of elephants might affect the park. The new plan seeks to answer that question.”
Nevertheless in the name of ‘diversity’ the elephant must go. At Pilansberg national park in South Africa the mantra of biodiversity is drummed into visitors who must read signs that claim “biological and cultural diversity are the foundations of stability.” So diversity is the excuse behind a plan to destroy half the population of the elephants of Kruger National Park. The entire idea of ‘managing’ an ecosystem is typical of the leftist view of wildlife and humanity. There is a belief that humanity, like animals and plants, must be managed. Towards this end the Soviet and other Communist regimes culled some 100 million people throughout the world in the 20th century. Now the mantra is ‘diversity’. The idea is that too many elephants are destroying other plants and that this harms other species. So man must ‘manage’ the ecosystem. How better to ‘manage’ it but through the muzzle of a gun. It is quite ironic that the knee-jerk reaction to ‘too many’ animals is the desire to shoot them. Why not give the elephants to neighbouring countries or to zoos? Kruger is not without some intelligence. One idea has been to use ‘elephant contraceptives’. Other ideas have been “to kill or sterilize females about to become pregnant for the first time.” This is according to an article published in Animal Conservation entitled ‘Managing the elephants of Kruger National Park’ in 1998. It is ironic that the publication is called ‘conservation’ because the animals aren’t actually being conserved. According to the same report “To achieve zero population growth, about three-quarters of the adult female elephants would need to be on contraceptives.” This is about what European, Japanese and Russian human females have achieved in their own sex lives without the need for government management and intervention. It is strange that so many elephants must be killed in order to achieve ‘diversity’ when one considers how slow elephants are to produce offspring. According to one article “an African elephant cow may first conceive from the age of 9 -11 years and the gestation period is almost 2 years. The interval between subsequent births can be anywhere between 4 to 9 years depending on conditions such as drought or overcrowding. Birth rates peak during the rainy season when conditions are most favourable for the new calf. Twin births have been known but are rare.”
There are a whole range of issues that the story of the elephants at Kruger brings to light. One is the idiocy of it all. The elephants don’t threaten anything. Their population is miniscule. By contrast the human population is more destructive. The ant population is probably more destructive. The growth of the elephant population is quite low and slaughtering so many will push the size of the herd back to its levels in the 1970s, sort of like the direction of the stock market. But what is most disturbing is the way in which, in the name of conservation and ‘diversity’, murder is always the answer. It has been the answer in other regimes, except it has been humans who have born the brunt of it. At the heart of the idea of culling is the idea that man knows what is best. It is an irony that it is the same environmentalists who create national parks that then want to brutally manage them. The heart of the idea of culling is that man must ‘manage’ wildlife, as if wildlife does not manage itself. But Kruger national park is not some miniscule place where a few too many animals running wild can indeed harm all the other species. Kruger is a massive place, a place where wildlife should be able to survive naturally, the way it would, in the wild. Before man became so numerous and so arrogant in his ‘management’ of animals the animals seem to have done just fine. Yet today, under the albatross of liberalism, the ecosystem and its ‘diversity’ must be managed. In the spirit of this mismanagement and manhandling of the environment is the liberal tendancy to ‘re-introduce’ species all the time. From wolves to other beasts, species have been ‘reintroduced’ only to find that they harm other species, like some rare mountain sheep, and then man must go in to manage them all. The problem is that it should have been left alone in the first place and absent of that it is best, once it is already screwed up, to leave it to sort itself out. Wildlife, like the planet, does a good job of sorting itself out, yet in the need of magic solutions and immediate changes man, liberal environmental man, desires immediate change. But these extreme changes, such as culling, can also harm other species. Overpopulation is not inherently a problem, it is something that happens from time to time among animal populations which periodically ‘boom’ and ‘crash’. Sort of like stock markets.
Managing animals is as bad as managing markets. Government intervention, quick fixes, radical stimulus and other extreme measures upset systems that can naturally work themselves out. But it is all part and parcel of the evil of government intervention in general, from the environment to the market. Consider two small examples. One is of a spring named Ein Handok in Israel. Recent signs placed by the government help guide hikers to this spring. Now fences and further signs have grown up around it. Soon, no doubt, the increased traffic of hikers will be said to ‘harm’ the archeological site and it will be closed. It is the irony, had the government not interfered in the first place no on would have come and it would’nt have to be closed due to ‘pollution’. Then there is the case of Acadia National Park. Once upon a time one could walk in its mountains with freedom and enjoyment. Now large wooden fences guide the hiker. Once upon a time hikers built stone pyrimids, called cairns to mark trails. Not he government builds them and inevitably large ugly signs adorn them explaining “cairns are carefully placed piles of rocks built by trail crews to mark trails and guide hikers…adding to cairns or building other cairns or rock objects detracts from the natural landscape, causes soil erosion and plant loss and misleads hikers…do not add to or build cairns or other rock objects.” Its too bad no one could have told the native Americans not to have built their rock objects or carved anything, lest they ruin the environment. Little did they know the erosion and plant loss and misleading they were causing. But the idiocy of such signs is the product of the sign itself, the creation of trails for people who should’nt be hiking in the first place, now tramping like hordes on such trails and needing fences to keep them from getting lost.
From the elephants of Kruger to the cairns of Acadia the environment has been destroyed by environmentalism. Only in such an upside down world could the destruction of half the elephant population of a park be considered a positive step towards preserving ‘diversity’. One day we may indeed face a government that tells us we need to ‘cull’ certain races in order to preserve the ‘diversity’ of our world. Anything is possible in the extremism that requires gunning down things in order to preserve them.



Why they hate
March 14th, 2009
Seth J. Frantzman

In Brigitte Gabriel’s 2006 book Because they hate, the Lebanese born Christian woman argued that terrorism and other conflicts was primarily an outgrowth of hatred within Islam. Then in a March 2008 editorial by extreme-leftist Israeli Gideon Levy titled ‘Has anyone stopped to ask why the Swedes Hate us?’ the writer argued that the Swedes and Europeans hate Israel because of Israel’s behavior in Gaza. Levy explained that during a recent tennis match between Israel and the Swedes, anti-Israel demonstrators, protesting against the fact that an Israeli was allowed to play in their country, turned extremely violent. They also “waved banners against racism and violence.” Levy asked “Was there really no violence in Gaza, and is there no racism in Israel? If we were Swedes, wouldn't we protest against the pointless killing and destruction wrought by Israel?” Levy prophesied that “Maybe the time will indeed come when the world will get fed up with this aggression and violence of ours, which endanger world peace, and will say at long last: No more occupation, no more wars perpetrated by Israel for which the world has to pay.”

What is most interesting about these two publications is the use of the word ‘hate’ in the title. Gabriel argues, persuasively that there is a deep hatred endemic to Islam. But Levy points the way to something not usually understood or examined; the deep hatred that is endemic to leftism and ‘human rights activism’. Levy accepts the fact that Israel should be hated for is ‘crimes’ in Gaza. In accepting this he is accepting the general dialectic of leftism, the dialectic of hate.

People are often misled to believe that the left is not the province of hatred because the left so often protests against ‘right wing hate’ and against ‘racism’. But in fact, while the left claims to protest against stereotypes and generalizations and judgment and claims to want to break down barriers between us and the ‘other’, it in fact is a milieu full of hatred in the most vigorous form.

The hatred manifests itself every time there is a protest. Whether it is burning flags or burning people in effigy or comparing people to Nazis, and thus insinuating they should be killed as the Nazis were, the entire spectrum of leftist protest, activism and thought is predicated on hatred, hatred of groups and hatred of nations and hatred of religions. Consider the case of Sarah Palin, governor of Alaska and one time vice-presidential candidate. Mary Mitchell wrote in the Chicago Sun times on September 14th, 2008 that “Sarah Palin makes me sick. I hate that she was able to steal Barack Obama’s Mojo.” Consider Sarah Palin’s daughter who recently announced she is breaking up with the father of her young baby. For some reason one writer posted “Reminds me again why I hate the hell out of Sarah Palin.” Hate. Hate is the main message of the left. It is something so natural and instinctual to the left that when one is alone with leftists they speak freely of their hate the way people who are afraid of making racist jokes in public make them at home.
Its not such a secret in fact. On Amazon.com one can buy The I Hate the Republicans reader. It is part of a series by Clint Willis including I hate Ann Coulter and I hate Dick Cheney and I hate George Bush.

Part of the problem is the elasctisity of the word ‘hate’. Like ‘love’ it has been degraded so that its true passion is not always felt. But leftists and do-gooders always seem to be quick to condemn what they perceive as hate speech and hate filled societies. Brian Freedman’s recent editorial in the Jerusalem Post entitled ‘A Fading Peace’ he condemned teenage Israeli kids in Ofakim for saying to him that they hate Arabs. For Freedman, an American English teacher for the Jewish Agency this “bigotry and hatred - among both the Arabs and the Jews - is the fuel that fires this ongoing conflict and the main obstacle to forging peace between the two peoples.” Really? But hate is such a popular word among those who speak of peace and anti-racism and protest against violence. Remember again Levy’s headline “why they hate us.” They hate. The leftist protestors hate. And yet the right, the youth, are condemned for their hatred and it is said to be an obstacle to peace. But if peace and hatred really did not go hand in hand then one would not see the same pasty-faced wealthy bourqouise khaffiya clad Europeans hating Israel and calling for peace.
The truth is that the natural instinct of the left and its European and western adherents is hate. It has always been based on radical hatred. The bibles of the left, from Karl Marx to Clint Willis have expressed the need to hate and then exterminate ideas and people who do not march with them. In the name of ant-racism leftist conferences such as Durban II actually are racist. Should one be surprised? Anti-racism is racist against the groups said to be racist. So if Israel is a “racist society” then we must “hate” it for its “racism”. If Southern whites are “racist” then we must “hate them” because of their “racism”. That is always the rubric. One group is said to be racist, then they are all racists and must all be destroyed for their racism. The Nazi label rhetoric is part and parcel of the same hatred. Labeling others ‘nazis’ is equivalent to saying they and their nation should be destroyed the way the Nazis were.

We cannot defeat hate, whether it is Islamic or European-leftist. So instead of worry about it and thinking it can be cured we should understand it. There is no difference between the leftists in Malmo Sweden who don Khaffiyas and violently protest the existence of an Israeli tennis player, and the Muslims who wear Khaffiyas and prepare their bombs in caves in Pakistan. They are part and parcel of the same thing. The support of Hamas is greater in the UK than it is among the Palestinians. In fact a recent poll found Marwan Bargouti, a jailed Fatah terrorist, beating Hamas by 65%. But among the UK’s liberal elites, the ones who listen to Ahmadinjed on Christmas, who invite David Irving to Oxford, and who vote for Ken Livingston and George Galloway, the support of Hamas is more than 90%. George Galloway recently did the white-mans-leftist-thing and wore the Khaffiya and the long black Ghallabiya and travelled across North Africa with a convoy of other white Europeans on a pro-Palestinian tour. In El-Arish Egypt his convoy of liberals was stoned by Arabs who oppose Hamas. No matter, he went through Rafah to Gaza and kissed the ground and embraced Ismail Haniyah. This isn’t fanciful exaggeration. He, a British citizen, really kissed the ground. Haniyeh wears a western tailored suit, but the white man wore the Ghallabiya and the Khaffiyah. No doubt any women on the convoy wore the Hijab. At the same time as he was kissing the sand the UK was announcing plans to welcome Hizbullah members to London. The same UK that denied Dutch activist Geert Wilders a visa because he dared to make a film critical of Islam and the same UK that threatens to arrest Israeli soldiers on ‘war crimes’ if they visit.

Andy Ram, the Israeli tennis player, recently travelled to the United Arab Emirates to play. Originally the UAE had feared protests and banned Shaher Peer, a female Israeli tennis star, from travelling there to a tennis tournament. But Ram was allowed and there were no protests. But when Ram travelled to Sweden the tennis match had to be played without spectators for fear of violence. Think again. For fear of violence in the midst, the heart of Europe, but not in the UAE, the stands had to be cleared. This is the result of the hate. The hate that runs wild like a cancer among the European leftists. When the European leftists will vote for Hamas in greater numbers than the Palestinian one has to ask which is worse. When the European leftist kisses the ground of Gaza and not even the Gazans will kiss it. When the Europeans host Hizbullah and will not host their own politicians. When the European leftists will place the Jew in prison for ‘war crimes’ but will host the terrorist who murders the Jew, that is the product of hate. It is the product of the cancer of Leftist hate that is so deeply ingrained in our way of life that we have come to accept it, leftists even ask questions like “has anyone stopped to ask why the Swedes Hate us” as if to imply that ‘us’ should change so that their hate will stop.

This has a parallel in the recent controversy over the candidacy of Charles Freeman for National Intelligence Council in the U.S. The New York Times acknowledged that his radical hate-filled views “are extreme only when seen through the lens of American political life.” That is true. His hate and his extremism would have been welcomed in Europe or the Islamic World, which are drifting closer and closer together in their political choices and their views of the world. When confronted with the leftist Gideon Levy’s admonition that amounts to ‘if they hate us we should change’ and Brigitte Gabriel’s view that hatred is wrong and must be opposed we should adhere to the later. Hatred and its peddlers must be confronted, whether it appears as a bourgouise UK citizen in his khaffiya or the Muslim terrorist. Each fights and each can be considered a soldier in the war of liberalism and Islam against the world. Each is an enemy of mankind and the struggle against each is part of the struggle for existence of all nations. We must not hate them, hate is an irrational response and it is the realm of the extremist. But we must recognize that our enemy knows himself by his hate. When we find ourselves wondering ‘why do they hate us’ it must no cause us to question ourselves but to recognize that their hate is their tragedy. Whether it is wealthy people from Malmo, the same neutral Swedes whose cowardice and weakness prevented them from fighting either on the side of the Nazis or against them, or the cowardice of the Muslim terrorist who fights civilians, the hatred is natural to their political choices. One should not fear them either. There is nothing to fear in those seemingly violent European protestors, they are natural cowards only operating in large groups as is the nature of modern Europe. Think of the Europeans who ‘protested’ against the Chinese Olympics by ‘heroically’ assaulting Chinese athletes carrying the torch on the streets of Europe. This is the European. So heroic, assaulting an athlete running with a torch. They didn’t travel to China to protest though, did they. Their hate is confined to the place where they can get away with it.

A short history of Honour Killings
March 18th, 2009
Seth J. Frantzman

On November 4th, 2008 thirteen year old Aisha Ibrahim Buhulow was forced into a small hole dug in he ground. She was covered with dirt up to her neck and stoned to death by a crowd of grown men. A crowd of 1,000 men cheered as fifty of their peers pelted the little girls head with stones. But fifty grown men apparently had trouble killing the thirteen year old. She was removed twice from the hole, found to be still breathing, she was placed back in so the stoning could continue. Her crime? She had been raped by three men and this ‘adultery’ had meant she had to die to cleanse the ‘honour’ of the community. This was in Kismayo in Somalia. Despite the fact that locals spoke of the stoning as “what Allah instructed us” Mohammed Fatihi noted that “This is a justice system which has adopted a façade of Islamic law to apply what are, in reality, age-old tribal customs.” Houssine Mohamed, a Muslim scholar in Algeria claimed “sentencing her to death cannot be related to Islam.”

Three months earlier on August 30th, 2008 it was reported that five women, three of them teenagers, were beaten, shot and thrown into a ditch and buried, some while still alive. Their crime? Wanting to marry husbands of their own choosing. But according to one Pakistani lawmaker from the province of Baluchistan, where the killings took place, “these are centuries-old traditions and I will continue to defend them," said Israr Ullah Zehri.

In February of 2009 Muzzammil Hassan, founder of Bridges TV, a station devoted to countering negative stereotypes of Muslims in the U.S, was arrested for beheading his wife, Aasiya Hassan.
On March 2nd Ramzan Kadyrov, the president of Chechnya noted that seven women whose bodies had been found dumped by the roadside had “loose morals” and had been killed for “running around.” According to the New York Times “Honor killings are considered part of Chechen tradition.” Natalya Estemirova, a prominent human rights activist in Grozny noted that "If women are killed according to tradition then it is done very secretly to prevent too many people from finding out that someone in the family behaved incorrectly."
In Canada it was revealed in December of 2008 that Aqsa Parvez, a 16 year old Canadian whose family was from Pakistan, had been buried in an unmarked grave after she had been strangled to death by family members who were subsequently arrested. Tarek Fatah, founder of the Muslim Canadian Congress, noted that “a victim of an honour killing is always left in an unmarked grave.”

The ‘tradition’ of Honour Killing is not new. Reports from the Palestine Post, the ancestor of today’s Jerusalem Post reported on hundreds of them during a decade and a half of publication under the British Mandate. In one sympathetic ruling in December of 1939 Justice Copland noted that “I am quite aware of the unfortunate tradition and custom which is particularly prevalent in the villages…you have committed a crime and killed a human being.” The murderer, Mohammed Joumeh Abu Kalbein of Silwan was given only ten years imprisonment for “manslaughter.” Joumeh noted that he was innocent and had merely “defended” his honour. Copland felt the situation in the country had improved in his time and recalled that his first years as a judge had seen two “honour killings” a month.
However 6 years earlier a writer in the newspaper had noted “all enlightened Iraqis must view with misgiving the lenient attitude which is still shown by courts of justice towards certain crimes of a mot heinous nature which, in a more advanced country, would never be pardoned. The writer was referring to the case of Salman ibn Khadayer who stabbed his neice 48 times after she had run away with a man she had fallen in love with. The police had brought her back to her family home where the uncle “felt compelled” to kill her to clean the ‘honour’ of the family. The court was lenient “having regard to his reasons for committing the murder.” The murderer received 10 years in prison.
But other cases from the Mandate show that the phenomenon of honor killings were common. In may of 1941 there were two such cases on the same day. Stabbing was the preferred method of ‘defending’ themselves by these grown men. In an April 1937 case Ahmad Khalil Mustafa and Abdul Jalil el Abed of Dura near Hebron murdered the sister of Mustafa for wanting to divorce her husband. One contemporary voice noted that “many persons in this country will commit a murder where family honour has been sullied with as little feeling as a solider who runs his bayonet through another soldier wearing a different uniform.” (June 13, 1933).

Today Israel faces the honor killing scurge once again. Eight women in Ramla have been murdered by male members of their abu Ghanem clan, some in their teens for rejecting to marry men selected by their male relatives. Things were no different seventy years ago. Two members of the Mughrabi family, Mohammed Bin Wannas in 1944 and Mohammed Ali in 1947, were convicted of killing female members of their family. In fact a member of the same Abu Ghanem clan, Abdul Hamid Ghanem was sentenced to two years for attempting to murder his wife in May f 1941.

The recent revelation that Sharia courts, called Muslim Arbitration Tribunals, have been set up in the UK, with the power to rule on incidents of domestic violence reminds us that very little has changed in terms of honor killings since the 1930s, if anything the West has become more tolerant of it and have come to adhere to Justice Copland’s “tradition” excuse.