Terra Incognita 82 The West, Copts and Internationalization

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.