Terra Incognita
Issue 87
“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
May 31st, 2009
2) What is wrong with the electric/hydro/green car industry?: There is a lot of hype about electric cars or cars powered by hydrogen or wood or garbage. But with the hype is the obvious observation that none of these cars are affordable and most have a range of 40 miles and a top speed of a golf cart. However an exploration of the history of the original petrol fueled cars can tell us something about how long these cars may take to be affordable and useable. The question in the end is, should the government meddle in this industry and will it be successful so long as the petrol car is an alternative.
What is wrong with the electric/hydro/green car industry?
Seth J. Frantzman
May 23rd, 2009
The continuing flailing about of attempts to make ‘green’ cars is the ever present adoration of the media. Each week sees another new “invention” and another wonderful miracle on wheels that has no petrol and whose only pollutant is a few drops of clean water. The latest in a long line of these programs on the ‘car of the future’ was a BBC program on a hydro car in California. The car in question seems more reasonable than some of her cousins. It has a range of around 160-200 miles, burns on Hydrogen (the same substance used to power the Hindenburg) and can reach a top speed of 85 miles per hour. This is leaps and bounds above some other electronic cars which have a range of some 40 miles and reach a top speed of 35miles per hour, basically a glorified golf cart. Come to think of it we already had golf carts, which are battery powered, so is this such an innovation?
The problem with this industry, even when it is backed up by government funding and the major auto companies, is that it doesn’t provide a car anyone wants to drive, because despite the technology the cars don’t have the range or power of cars fueled by gasoline. Furthermore the development costs of these cars are astronomical and they are thus cost prohibitive to buy. As if that were not enough some of them require replacing the fuel cells every few years, yet another cost. And as if that were not enough, there is no place to “fuel” these cars. There are no charging points for the electric ones and no gas stations for the hydro ones. The industry is a great failure, almost as great as the old car industry in the U.S, which is a complete failure.
However the seeming failure should be seen in light of the original invention of the automobile and the barriers it had cross in order to become a mass market invention available to the average consumer. Let’s consider this history. The first automobiles were experimented with in the 1860s and 1870s in Europe and the U.S. There were steam powered vehicles even in the 18th century, and in fact steam was used to power locomotives and ships.
However the modern gas powered car using the internal combustion engine was only first put to use in 1860 by a Frenchman. In the 1880s Gottlieb Daimler and Karl Benz were both working on perfecting motorcycles and tricycles in Germany, powered with the gas cylinders first invented in the 1860s. Petrol engines were used in trams and carriages and also for fire engines. But there were no cars. Only in 1893 was the first gasoline powered car driving on America’s streets, and there was only one prototype of these. In 1896 Henry Ford built his first car and sold it the first year. But it was until 1903 that he sold another. In these days, according to one report, almost every major town in the U.S. had a “mad scientist” working on his own car. Automobile companies such as the Duryea Motor Wagon, came and went.
In 1899 Olds Motor Vehicle established a successful production making the “Curved Dash MotorWagon”, a sort of large bucket on four wheels that apparently turned a profit. By 1904 they were selling 5,000 a year. The years 1906 t 1925 represent the beginnings of the automobile industry. However these early cars, such as those made by the Duryeas and Rolls Royce, could only be purchased by the elite. Ford’s Model K of 1907 for instance was priced at $65,000 in today’s currency. By 1909 Ford’s Model T was selling at around 18,000 a year. By 1920 Ford was producing a million cars a year.
The ability of people to buy cars was linked to being able to re-fuel them. To that end the first gas station was built in St. Louis in 1905. The second was built by Standard Oil in 1907. Earlier attempts at selling gas to consumers was actually as a side business at pharmacies in Germany the 1890s.
But consider the inefficiency of the early cars in fuel consumption. The Model T got about 13-20 miles per gallon (5 to 9 km per litre). It had a 10 gallon tank. Thus its maximum range was only 200 miles. It could drive at a top speed of 45 miles per hour.
If we consider the length of time that modern car development took and the time it took before the average consumer could both afford and refuel it we see that it took some 40 years or more. If we consider that Iceland built the first commercial Hydro-fuel station in 2003 we are experiencing a similar slow-revolution in the direction of these ‘renewable energies’. Those prophets of electric cars and hydro gas are correct that economies of scale should bring the prices down, just as they have done with computers. The problem is that unlike cars, which were a true revolution from the days of the horse-drawn wagon, the development of new technologies today is not a great leap from the existing gasoline powered cars. Because the new technologies do not compete, but are in fact more expensive and rudimentary, it presents a real barrier to success in the market place. The government believes that it can intervene in this fight, making fuel efficiency standards higher and taxing gasoline or giving tax credits. However the success of the first automobiles were not helped through government intervention. Thus the government mandate for electric cars may not aid their entrance into the market, but slow and hinder it.
Saturday, May 30, 2009
Terra Incognita 87 (part 1) Who is fleeing Israel
Terra Incognita
Issue 87
“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
May 31st, 2009
1) Who is fleeing Israel?: A recent survey of the Israeli population claimed to show that 23 percent of Israelis are considering leaving the country if Iran obtains a nuclear bomb. This concern about mass flight from Israel has been voiced before by scholars. It is also voiced in the academy where professors speak of Israelis “returning” to Europe. But all of this talk is predicated on a leftist Ashkenazi view of who lives in Israel. It is true that the primarily Ashkenazi leftist population of Israel’s wealthiest areas where anti-Israel protest is the pastime for Friday afternoon and military service is considered something “for suckers” may be considering “returning” to Europe, their cultural center. But the poor Israelis, the ones with roots in Russia and the Middle East and the right wing Ashkenazim aren’t going anywhere. They can’t “return” to Europe, they aren’t from there.
Who is fleeing Israel?
Seth J. Frantzman
May 24th, 2009
On May 24th the Center for Iranian Studies at Tel Aviv University released a study that showed that 23 percent of Israelis would consider leaving Israel if Iran obtains a nuclear weapon. The report didn’t give a geographic, religious or ethnic breakdown of who these people were but several statistics reveal more about them. Those over the age of 40 were more fearful than their younger counterparts. Some 39 percent of women said they would consider leaving the country whereas only 22 percent of men said so. In addition those most fearful defined themselves as left wing voters. Thus those seeking to flee were mostly left wing, older and female. What demographic in Israel fits that description? Jewish-Ashkenazi descendants of the second and third aliyah who live in Tel Aviv and the Kibbutzim and who, as a demographic, vote left or extreme-left.
This says much about this group. While living in Israel they support the Palestinians. Their secular culture is primarily directed at learning more about the “Arab other”. On Israeli independence day these are the people who go to commemorate the Nakhba. These are the people responsible for the fact that most University graduation ceremonies in Israel feature Arab music, rather than Jewish, western or Israeli music. These are the people who attend the belly-dancing classes. These are the wealthy people who drive cars and don’t suffer terrorism because they have poor people to work security for them at their left wing film festivals and they are not forced to ever ride a bus. These are the people with the dual citizenship who can flee the country easily because they have EU citizenship which they obtained based on claims that they were refugees from the Nazis. These are, in short, the exact same people who poured out of Europe in the 1930s fleeing he rise of Nazism, the same people who suddenly fled to Palestine, not as Zionists, but as Jewish refugees, when their beloved Europe, the culture of assimilation they so loved, turned on them.
And now they are going back. Not only are they going back but their culture so dominates the Israeli discourse that authors and writers falsely imagine that the nation of Israel is entirely made up of these people. Consider Benny Morris’ assertion in his One State, Two States that “The Arab community is predominantly Asiatic in character, the Jewish community predominantly European.” Or consider Ian Lustick who claimed in an article entitled “'Israel's Fight or Flight Response'” published in the National Interest that fears that Iran "might obtain a bomb could lead to substantial Jewish immigration from Israel." Or Professor David Newman of Ben-Gurion University who noted in a recent Jerusalem Post editorial that “"Much to their parents' and grandparents' dissatisfaction, young Israelis are returning to Europe in droves and are demonstrating their preferences for European lifestyles and culture just two short generations after the Holocaust. Many of them are taking up their rights to European passports, even through the problematic adoption of Polish and German citizenship." But Newman, Lustick and Morris are wrong. Israel is not primarily a European country, most of its citizens are not lining up to flee and most of them can’t “return” to Europe because they aren’t from Europe.
The Ashkenazi leftist elite who helped found the state of Israel have given birth to a false Israeli-European narrative of a country full of Holocaust survivors who have dual citizenship and might one day return to Europe. But their narrative represents only that spineless 23 percent of Israel. It represents the wealthy in Tel Aviv, the people in Rishon and Hertziliya and Ceaseria. The people in Rehavia, Talbieh and Katamon. The people in the Kibbutzim. It doesn’t represent any of the people in the settlements, and there are 250,000 of them, or the people in the development towns. It doesn’t represent the Yemenites, the Ethiopians, the Russians or the Mizrahim and Sephardim. It doesn’t represent the right wing Ashkenazim and the settlers, who are mostly Ashkenazi as well. It doesn’t represent the Americans. Most importantly it doesn’t represent the religious Jews, the orthodox and black haters, the Hasidim, the Mitnagdim, the Lithuanians.
The Ashkenazi elite of Israel worked for a long time to destroy the soul of the country. Through self hatred and comparing the country to Nazi Germany they torn down the country from within for years. They settled the poorer immigrants on the borders in the 1950s and didn’t arm them to fight the infiltrators that murdered and raped them. In the 1980s they drove up the prices of real estate inside the Green Line forcing the next generation of immigrants and vulnerable people to seek housing in the settlements. Those people who settled outside the green line they then called “Nazis” and “obstacles to peace” and bulldozed their houses and left them on the street. When the Russians came, some 1 million of them, they stuck them in new communities and settled them in areas that they were supposed to “judaize”. But their communities, from Gilo to Nazareth Alit didn’t become Jewish, they became areas of Arab migration where Russians, who have few children, either sold their homes to Muslims or gave their daughters in marriage to them. The entire Russian aliyah, 1 million strong, may not produce more than 200,000 children in the second generation, they are a community whose demographic decline is more severe than Russia itself.
But there is an Israel that is not fearful and has decided to stay. Some of them also have dual citizenship but they are not planning on “returning” to Europe. They know that Europe is the land that spit them out, the land that is littered with their graveyards, graveyards that are often defaced by the new favored, loved and coddled immigrants to Europe; Muslims. Whereas the Jews were crushed and destroyed the new immigrants to Europe receive amenities and welfare and support from the leftists in Europe, people who did nothing for the Jews when they lived their but do everything for those who hate Jews today. Those who will stay in Israel know that Europe offers nothing but a dead end and that there can be no return because it is not from whence the Jews came. Israel will be better off without the 23 percent, those who represent a parasitical elite, people who do not work but do protest, people who do not pitch in but call their fellow citizens “Nazis”, those who run from terror rather than run towards it to prevent it. When the 23 percent have left the best people will be left behind, the good hard working people, the poor without foreign citizenship and the wealthy patriots, the settlers and the religious, those who know how to fight and those who want to fight. Those who love the land and those who are part of it and wish to lay down to be interred in it. There is no going back, no returning for these people. These people are home and they will remain home to face the threat.
Issue 87
“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
May 31st, 2009
1) Who is fleeing Israel?: A recent survey of the Israeli population claimed to show that 23 percent of Israelis are considering leaving the country if Iran obtains a nuclear bomb. This concern about mass flight from Israel has been voiced before by scholars. It is also voiced in the academy where professors speak of Israelis “returning” to Europe. But all of this talk is predicated on a leftist Ashkenazi view of who lives in Israel. It is true that the primarily Ashkenazi leftist population of Israel’s wealthiest areas where anti-Israel protest is the pastime for Friday afternoon and military service is considered something “for suckers” may be considering “returning” to Europe, their cultural center. But the poor Israelis, the ones with roots in Russia and the Middle East and the right wing Ashkenazim aren’t going anywhere. They can’t “return” to Europe, they aren’t from there.
Who is fleeing Israel?
Seth J. Frantzman
May 24th, 2009
On May 24th the Center for Iranian Studies at Tel Aviv University released a study that showed that 23 percent of Israelis would consider leaving Israel if Iran obtains a nuclear weapon. The report didn’t give a geographic, religious or ethnic breakdown of who these people were but several statistics reveal more about them. Those over the age of 40 were more fearful than their younger counterparts. Some 39 percent of women said they would consider leaving the country whereas only 22 percent of men said so. In addition those most fearful defined themselves as left wing voters. Thus those seeking to flee were mostly left wing, older and female. What demographic in Israel fits that description? Jewish-Ashkenazi descendants of the second and third aliyah who live in Tel Aviv and the Kibbutzim and who, as a demographic, vote left or extreme-left.
This says much about this group. While living in Israel they support the Palestinians. Their secular culture is primarily directed at learning more about the “Arab other”. On Israeli independence day these are the people who go to commemorate the Nakhba. These are the people responsible for the fact that most University graduation ceremonies in Israel feature Arab music, rather than Jewish, western or Israeli music. These are the people who attend the belly-dancing classes. These are the wealthy people who drive cars and don’t suffer terrorism because they have poor people to work security for them at their left wing film festivals and they are not forced to ever ride a bus. These are the people with the dual citizenship who can flee the country easily because they have EU citizenship which they obtained based on claims that they were refugees from the Nazis. These are, in short, the exact same people who poured out of Europe in the 1930s fleeing he rise of Nazism, the same people who suddenly fled to Palestine, not as Zionists, but as Jewish refugees, when their beloved Europe, the culture of assimilation they so loved, turned on them.
And now they are going back. Not only are they going back but their culture so dominates the Israeli discourse that authors and writers falsely imagine that the nation of Israel is entirely made up of these people. Consider Benny Morris’ assertion in his One State, Two States that “The Arab community is predominantly Asiatic in character, the Jewish community predominantly European.” Or consider Ian Lustick who claimed in an article entitled “'Israel's Fight or Flight Response'” published in the National Interest that fears that Iran "might obtain a bomb could lead to substantial Jewish immigration from Israel." Or Professor David Newman of Ben-Gurion University who noted in a recent Jerusalem Post editorial that “"Much to their parents' and grandparents' dissatisfaction, young Israelis are returning to Europe in droves and are demonstrating their preferences for European lifestyles and culture just two short generations after the Holocaust. Many of them are taking up their rights to European passports, even through the problematic adoption of Polish and German citizenship." But Newman, Lustick and Morris are wrong. Israel is not primarily a European country, most of its citizens are not lining up to flee and most of them can’t “return” to Europe because they aren’t from Europe.
The Ashkenazi leftist elite who helped found the state of Israel have given birth to a false Israeli-European narrative of a country full of Holocaust survivors who have dual citizenship and might one day return to Europe. But their narrative represents only that spineless 23 percent of Israel. It represents the wealthy in Tel Aviv, the people in Rishon and Hertziliya and Ceaseria. The people in Rehavia, Talbieh and Katamon. The people in the Kibbutzim. It doesn’t represent any of the people in the settlements, and there are 250,000 of them, or the people in the development towns. It doesn’t represent the Yemenites, the Ethiopians, the Russians or the Mizrahim and Sephardim. It doesn’t represent the right wing Ashkenazim and the settlers, who are mostly Ashkenazi as well. It doesn’t represent the Americans. Most importantly it doesn’t represent the religious Jews, the orthodox and black haters, the Hasidim, the Mitnagdim, the Lithuanians.
The Ashkenazi elite of Israel worked for a long time to destroy the soul of the country. Through self hatred and comparing the country to Nazi Germany they torn down the country from within for years. They settled the poorer immigrants on the borders in the 1950s and didn’t arm them to fight the infiltrators that murdered and raped them. In the 1980s they drove up the prices of real estate inside the Green Line forcing the next generation of immigrants and vulnerable people to seek housing in the settlements. Those people who settled outside the green line they then called “Nazis” and “obstacles to peace” and bulldozed their houses and left them on the street. When the Russians came, some 1 million of them, they stuck them in new communities and settled them in areas that they were supposed to “judaize”. But their communities, from Gilo to Nazareth Alit didn’t become Jewish, they became areas of Arab migration where Russians, who have few children, either sold their homes to Muslims or gave their daughters in marriage to them. The entire Russian aliyah, 1 million strong, may not produce more than 200,000 children in the second generation, they are a community whose demographic decline is more severe than Russia itself.
But there is an Israel that is not fearful and has decided to stay. Some of them also have dual citizenship but they are not planning on “returning” to Europe. They know that Europe is the land that spit them out, the land that is littered with their graveyards, graveyards that are often defaced by the new favored, loved and coddled immigrants to Europe; Muslims. Whereas the Jews were crushed and destroyed the new immigrants to Europe receive amenities and welfare and support from the leftists in Europe, people who did nothing for the Jews when they lived their but do everything for those who hate Jews today. Those who will stay in Israel know that Europe offers nothing but a dead end and that there can be no return because it is not from whence the Jews came. Israel will be better off without the 23 percent, those who represent a parasitical elite, people who do not work but do protest, people who do not pitch in but call their fellow citizens “Nazis”, those who run from terror rather than run towards it to prevent it. When the 23 percent have left the best people will be left behind, the good hard working people, the poor without foreign citizenship and the wealthy patriots, the settlers and the religious, those who know how to fight and those who want to fight. Those who love the land and those who are part of it and wish to lay down to be interred in it. There is no going back, no returning for these people. These people are home and they will remain home to face the threat.
Friday, May 22, 2009
Terra Incognita 86 Curtis LeMay and Sri Lanka
Terra Incognita
Issue 86
“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
May 23rd, 2009
1) Curtis LeMay, the 20th century and the age of mass: Curtis LeMay was one of the fathers of strategic bombing. He innovated the use of mass bombing during the second world war and used it to terrible affect against Japan. His life and legacy says much about the 20th century and the era of mass destruction. It is in great contrast to the wars of the 21st century.
2) A model success: The defeat of the Tamils: The defeat of the Tamils and the death of their phenomenal leader is a major event. After 26 years of savage war the Tamil Tigers have been defeated. During the height of their power they controlled a great swath of Sri Lanka and even ruled their own mini-state. But following break down in a ceasefire the government launched a massive offensive in January. For the Hindu minority, who the Tamils represented, it is a tragedy, but their seeming lack of protest in front of the army offensive may show their disillusionment with what seems to have been a short-sighted and immature use of the chance at self government the Tigers once achieved.
Curtis LeMay, the 20th century and the age of mass
Seth J. Frantzman
May 16th, 2009
Warren Kozak’s recently released LeMay: The Life and Wars of General Curtis LeMay reminds not only of one of America’s most controversial generals but also of man whose epic use of weapons was emblematic of the 20th century. LeMay lived in the 20th century, he was born in 1906 and died in 1990. He is credited with being the father of Strategic Bombing, was called various “Old Iron Ass’ and ‘Bombs Away LeMay’ and is credited with partially causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians through his the bombers he unleashed against Japan in 1944-1945.
LeMay became a pilot in the U.S air force in 1939 and in 1942 he was dispatched to the U.K as part of the U.S commitment to help defend England from a Nazi invasion. Although a high ranking officer he chose to personally lead most of the bombing missions that he dispatched to bomb German cities. It was here between 1942 and 1944 that he first grasped the logic of using total war and strategic bombing to destroy the economy and will of the Germans to fight the War. Transferred to the Japanese theatre in 1944 he became the ‘father’ of strategic bombing, ordering one bombing of Tokyo that supposedly took 100,000 lives. After the war he was in charge of the Berlin Air Lift and advocated the use of strategic bombing against North Vietnam, a tactic that eventually proved successful when Nixon unleashed it in 1972. For those opposed to his militant policies and total war approach LeMay represented all that was bad about American power and war.
But LeMay is emblematic of the 20th century. His approach to war says much about what the 20th century was and what the 21st century is not. The 20th century was a century of mass movements and mass death tolls. It was a century of extremes and social engineering. By contrast the 20th century is one of precision guided weapons, ‘small wars’ and even smaller death tolls. It is a century of chaotic terror organizations fighting high tech armies and it is a century where the battle of the births is more important than the battle fought with the rifle.
Whereas William T. Sherman was one of the American ‘fathers’ of the use of Total War in 1864 he was not emblematic of the 19th century which was merely a playground of death tolls compared to the 20th. Consider that the 20th century was brought in with the Boers languishing in British concentration camps in South Africa and the German genocide of Africans in Namibia. It ended with the savagery of Rwanda and the Balkan wars. When the century opened many of the world’s peoples lived in multi-ethnic empires. When it ended most lived in nation states with porous borders. The great events of the 20th century, the Holocaust and the Cold War exist almost in a vacuum, for most of the world’s peoples and most of the important events taking place today they have no connection. The rise of Islamism and China, for instance, took place completely outside of the two. Although most Westerners speak of “Nazis” all the time as a point of reference for everything from bad coffee to conflicts in far off places, they have no connection, real or imagined, to the Second World War.
It is hard to imagine that LeMay’s bombers incinerated from 100,000 people or that he supposedly wounded another 450,000 and left 8 million homeless when he was done with Japan. There are still large death tolls today, such as from the Tsunami in Asia. There are still large population movements, but most of them are scripted and fabricated by a media that thrives on chaos. The supposed “100,000” Pakistani refugees from fighting in the Swat valley are but one example. Compare them to the actual 10 million refugees wandering around Europe in 1945 and the 9 million Americans under arms the same year and the ridiculousness of ‘civilians may be harmed in fighting in Sri Lanka, UN warns’ is apparent. The even more ridiculous shrill outcries over 8 dead children in Gaza becomes evident. The 20th century witnessed real violence and real mass movements of people. The 21st century is more the century of the whining victim than of the real victim.
Whereas in the 21st century people love to speak of diversity the 20th century, when it began, actually had diversity. Consider the cities of Odessa on the Black Sea and Vilna on the Baltic. These were cities teaming with Jews, Greeks, Roma, Tartars, Russians, Lithuanians, Germans and Poles. Today they are urban wastelands filled entirely with Ukrainians on the one hand and Lithuanians on the other. That was the result of the 20th century. We know what befell Vilna. Stalin removed the Poles in 1939. Hitler killed off the Jews. Then Stalin finished the job by removing the remaining Germans. Odessa too was despoiled. The Greeks and Germans were deported by Stalin. Hitler killed the Jews. All that remained were Ukrainians. There are few cities in the world not thus affected. While there is ‘diversity’ the real remnant of the 20th century is the lack of that value that so many progressives bow down to. What is perhaps more surprising is that LeMay’s Toyo bombing raid where 100,000 died probably had less affect historically than the events of Sept. 11. That says much about the 20th century and much about the 21st.
A model success: The defeat of the Tamils
Seth J. Frantzman
May 17, 2009
In a damn the torpedoes approach and with a clenched fist and a determined military the Sri Lankan government has swiftly put an end to 26 years of brutal civil war in defeating the Tamil Tigers. This despite the best efforts of the ‘international community’ and the BBC to encourage and end to the fighting and a continuation of terrorism and murder.
The BBC was disappointed on May 17th, 2009 when it reported that units of the Sri Lankan army had linked up on the dunes in northeast Sri Lanka, destroying the last elements of the Tamil Tiger’s army. The headline was ‘Pleas ignored: international calls for restraint go unheeded as the war heads to a bloody conclusion.’ The UN’s Gordon Weiss in Sri Lanka had warned of a “bloodbath” should the army finish the job. Perhaps knowing that the West and its BBC and UN allies would never understand and applaud a military victory over a terrorist militia, Mahinda Rajapakse, the president of Sri Lanka, spoke about his victory at a conference in Jordan, where 39 years ago that country used similar tactics to destroy the Palestinian terrorist forces threatening its existence.
The BBC needed to insert its typical shrill statements about “unseen horrors” and “tens of thousands of civilians may be trapped.” Then there was the “no way of knowing for” if the army’s statement was true. There were “children clinging to rafts” and twenty-five thousand “starving” and “wounded” people who had escaped. There were people who “hadn’t eaten for weeks” and children with “limbs blown off”. There was a video that the “military claimed” was a rebel training video. There were captured Tamil Tigers, but there was “no way of knowing for sure since independent journalists are barred from the conflict zone.” Oddly enough there was footage of them taken by the BBC. The BBC journalist got in one last extremism; “aid agencies have grave concern…tens of thousands are trapped facing an unimaginable hell.” This was David Gramaticus’s report from Colombo in Sri Lanka.
The greatness of the government’s victory over the Tamils cannot be overstated. Despite all the typical innuendo about “hell” and “unseen horrors” the government pushed on using its military to its fullest. And it has won and with the victory peace may finally come to Sri Lanka’s civilians. Unlike other governments the Sri Lankan government has put its people, the taxpayers and voters, those the state is supposed to protect, above the “unseen horrors” and “unimaginable hells” conjured up by the media and the UN. An analysis of the reporting of this conflict should serve as a model of how the media works to not only create conflict but to blow it out of all reasonable proportion in order to convey a sense of alarm to audiences throughout the world. The BBC which, when shown terrorist training videos and captured enemy fighters can never seem to “confirm” that they are what they are and always attribute them to some sort of innuendo strewn conspiracy with the word “claim” and quotation marks put before every sentence, seems perfectly capable of making the most shocking statements about an “unseen” horrors and “unimaginable” hells. But if they are unseen then how do we know they exist? Why is the hell not merely another “claim”? Why are there no quotes around these accusations.
The war against terrorism is not merely a war against the terrorists themselves but against the media and the UN as well. The Gordon Weisses and David Gramaticuses of the world are practitioners of the best art of Stalinistic Pravda and yellow journalism, working hard to inflame public opinion so as to allow terrorists to continue their campaigns. Sri Lanka has won the terror war, hopefully, and it remains to be seen if the world can learn from her actions or if the world will continue to be enslaved by the likes of the BBC and the UN. Sri Lanka’s citizens have freed themselves of the shackles of the ‘international community’. We too have nothing to lose but our chains.
Issue 86
“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
May 23rd, 2009
1) Curtis LeMay, the 20th century and the age of mass: Curtis LeMay was one of the fathers of strategic bombing. He innovated the use of mass bombing during the second world war and used it to terrible affect against Japan. His life and legacy says much about the 20th century and the era of mass destruction. It is in great contrast to the wars of the 21st century.
2) A model success: The defeat of the Tamils: The defeat of the Tamils and the death of their phenomenal leader is a major event. After 26 years of savage war the Tamil Tigers have been defeated. During the height of their power they controlled a great swath of Sri Lanka and even ruled their own mini-state. But following break down in a ceasefire the government launched a massive offensive in January. For the Hindu minority, who the Tamils represented, it is a tragedy, but their seeming lack of protest in front of the army offensive may show their disillusionment with what seems to have been a short-sighted and immature use of the chance at self government the Tigers once achieved.
Curtis LeMay, the 20th century and the age of mass
Seth J. Frantzman
May 16th, 2009
Warren Kozak’s recently released LeMay: The Life and Wars of General Curtis LeMay reminds not only of one of America’s most controversial generals but also of man whose epic use of weapons was emblematic of the 20th century. LeMay lived in the 20th century, he was born in 1906 and died in 1990. He is credited with being the father of Strategic Bombing, was called various “Old Iron Ass’ and ‘Bombs Away LeMay’ and is credited with partially causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians through his the bombers he unleashed against Japan in 1944-1945.
LeMay became a pilot in the U.S air force in 1939 and in 1942 he was dispatched to the U.K as part of the U.S commitment to help defend England from a Nazi invasion. Although a high ranking officer he chose to personally lead most of the bombing missions that he dispatched to bomb German cities. It was here between 1942 and 1944 that he first grasped the logic of using total war and strategic bombing to destroy the economy and will of the Germans to fight the War. Transferred to the Japanese theatre in 1944 he became the ‘father’ of strategic bombing, ordering one bombing of Tokyo that supposedly took 100,000 lives. After the war he was in charge of the Berlin Air Lift and advocated the use of strategic bombing against North Vietnam, a tactic that eventually proved successful when Nixon unleashed it in 1972. For those opposed to his militant policies and total war approach LeMay represented all that was bad about American power and war.
But LeMay is emblematic of the 20th century. His approach to war says much about what the 20th century was and what the 21st century is not. The 20th century was a century of mass movements and mass death tolls. It was a century of extremes and social engineering. By contrast the 20th century is one of precision guided weapons, ‘small wars’ and even smaller death tolls. It is a century of chaotic terror organizations fighting high tech armies and it is a century where the battle of the births is more important than the battle fought with the rifle.
Whereas William T. Sherman was one of the American ‘fathers’ of the use of Total War in 1864 he was not emblematic of the 19th century which was merely a playground of death tolls compared to the 20th. Consider that the 20th century was brought in with the Boers languishing in British concentration camps in South Africa and the German genocide of Africans in Namibia. It ended with the savagery of Rwanda and the Balkan wars. When the century opened many of the world’s peoples lived in multi-ethnic empires. When it ended most lived in nation states with porous borders. The great events of the 20th century, the Holocaust and the Cold War exist almost in a vacuum, for most of the world’s peoples and most of the important events taking place today they have no connection. The rise of Islamism and China, for instance, took place completely outside of the two. Although most Westerners speak of “Nazis” all the time as a point of reference for everything from bad coffee to conflicts in far off places, they have no connection, real or imagined, to the Second World War.
It is hard to imagine that LeMay’s bombers incinerated from 100,000 people or that he supposedly wounded another 450,000 and left 8 million homeless when he was done with Japan. There are still large death tolls today, such as from the Tsunami in Asia. There are still large population movements, but most of them are scripted and fabricated by a media that thrives on chaos. The supposed “100,000” Pakistani refugees from fighting in the Swat valley are but one example. Compare them to the actual 10 million refugees wandering around Europe in 1945 and the 9 million Americans under arms the same year and the ridiculousness of ‘civilians may be harmed in fighting in Sri Lanka, UN warns’ is apparent. The even more ridiculous shrill outcries over 8 dead children in Gaza becomes evident. The 20th century witnessed real violence and real mass movements of people. The 21st century is more the century of the whining victim than of the real victim.
Whereas in the 21st century people love to speak of diversity the 20th century, when it began, actually had diversity. Consider the cities of Odessa on the Black Sea and Vilna on the Baltic. These were cities teaming with Jews, Greeks, Roma, Tartars, Russians, Lithuanians, Germans and Poles. Today they are urban wastelands filled entirely with Ukrainians on the one hand and Lithuanians on the other. That was the result of the 20th century. We know what befell Vilna. Stalin removed the Poles in 1939. Hitler killed off the Jews. Then Stalin finished the job by removing the remaining Germans. Odessa too was despoiled. The Greeks and Germans were deported by Stalin. Hitler killed the Jews. All that remained were Ukrainians. There are few cities in the world not thus affected. While there is ‘diversity’ the real remnant of the 20th century is the lack of that value that so many progressives bow down to. What is perhaps more surprising is that LeMay’s Toyo bombing raid where 100,000 died probably had less affect historically than the events of Sept. 11. That says much about the 20th century and much about the 21st.
A model success: The defeat of the Tamils
Seth J. Frantzman
May 17, 2009
In a damn the torpedoes approach and with a clenched fist and a determined military the Sri Lankan government has swiftly put an end to 26 years of brutal civil war in defeating the Tamil Tigers. This despite the best efforts of the ‘international community’ and the BBC to encourage and end to the fighting and a continuation of terrorism and murder.
The BBC was disappointed on May 17th, 2009 when it reported that units of the Sri Lankan army had linked up on the dunes in northeast Sri Lanka, destroying the last elements of the Tamil Tiger’s army. The headline was ‘Pleas ignored: international calls for restraint go unheeded as the war heads to a bloody conclusion.’ The UN’s Gordon Weiss in Sri Lanka had warned of a “bloodbath” should the army finish the job. Perhaps knowing that the West and its BBC and UN allies would never understand and applaud a military victory over a terrorist militia, Mahinda Rajapakse, the president of Sri Lanka, spoke about his victory at a conference in Jordan, where 39 years ago that country used similar tactics to destroy the Palestinian terrorist forces threatening its existence.
The BBC needed to insert its typical shrill statements about “unseen horrors” and “tens of thousands of civilians may be trapped.” Then there was the “no way of knowing for” if the army’s statement was true. There were “children clinging to rafts” and twenty-five thousand “starving” and “wounded” people who had escaped. There were people who “hadn’t eaten for weeks” and children with “limbs blown off”. There was a video that the “military claimed” was a rebel training video. There were captured Tamil Tigers, but there was “no way of knowing for sure since independent journalists are barred from the conflict zone.” Oddly enough there was footage of them taken by the BBC. The BBC journalist got in one last extremism; “aid agencies have grave concern…tens of thousands are trapped facing an unimaginable hell.” This was David Gramaticus’s report from Colombo in Sri Lanka.
The greatness of the government’s victory over the Tamils cannot be overstated. Despite all the typical innuendo about “hell” and “unseen horrors” the government pushed on using its military to its fullest. And it has won and with the victory peace may finally come to Sri Lanka’s civilians. Unlike other governments the Sri Lankan government has put its people, the taxpayers and voters, those the state is supposed to protect, above the “unseen horrors” and “unimaginable hells” conjured up by the media and the UN. An analysis of the reporting of this conflict should serve as a model of how the media works to not only create conflict but to blow it out of all reasonable proportion in order to convey a sense of alarm to audiences throughout the world. The BBC which, when shown terrorist training videos and captured enemy fighters can never seem to “confirm” that they are what they are and always attribute them to some sort of innuendo strewn conspiracy with the word “claim” and quotation marks put before every sentence, seems perfectly capable of making the most shocking statements about an “unseen” horrors and “unimaginable” hells. But if they are unseen then how do we know they exist? Why is the hell not merely another “claim”? Why are there no quotes around these accusations.
The war against terrorism is not merely a war against the terrorists themselves but against the media and the UN as well. The Gordon Weisses and David Gramaticuses of the world are practitioners of the best art of Stalinistic Pravda and yellow journalism, working hard to inflame public opinion so as to allow terrorists to continue their campaigns. Sri Lanka has won the terror war, hopefully, and it remains to be seen if the world can learn from her actions or if the world will continue to be enslaved by the likes of the BBC and the UN. Sri Lanka’s citizens have freed themselves of the shackles of the ‘international community’. We too have nothing to lose but our chains.
Friday, May 15, 2009
Terra Incognita 85 Refugees and Internationalization
Terra Incognita
Issue 85
“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
May 14th, 2009
1) The plague of refugees: The idea of refugees is one that floods our modern discourse. We accept the fact that they have always existed and will always exist and that we must have sympathy for them. But to what extent are they fabricated and to what extent is their existence an accident of modernity?
2) Begging for Internationalization: The ever-present calls from within Israeli society for ‘greater international involvement and pressure’ on Israel is emblematic of a contempt for Israeli democracy. It is not only in Israel that those voices that speak so fondly of ‘democracy’ are the first to declare their state a ‘dictatorship’ or a ‘fascist’ country when the electorate does not vote the way they want to. Every democracy suffers from the existence of un-democratic elements. There are those on the right, those on the left and those that simply condemn the country for being undemocratic when the countries majority is not in line with their minority extremism.
The plague of refugees
Seth J. Frantzman
May 7th, 2009
Refugees are a plague and a scam. They always seem to appear whenever there is conflict and they always conveniently appear whenever there is a terrorist group amidst them. In recent years the presence of refugees has time and again thwarted governments from dismantling terrorist organizations. However governments that refrain from ignoring the presence of refugees in order to complete the job of stopping pernicious terrorist organizations are not doing their duty to their people and are in fact violating the rights of the citizenry by not protecting it from enemies at home and abroad.
Not all people become refugees at the same rate. Some communities become refugees very easily. From the Albanians to Palestinians and Afghans there are communities that seem to have refugeedom as their natural second trait. It is not clear why but some people leave their homes at the slightest provocation. Others have to first be massacred and slaughtered to make them leave. Whatever the case refugees are a menace and they are a menace that the media loves to photograph.
Why do refugees exist? They didn’t always exist. They are primarily a modern invention. There were always people that fled conflict ever since man engaged in conflict. But in the old days when people fled conflict this was seen as a logical by-product of conflict. When armies are bludgeoning eachother to death in some place the people leave that place or risk death. This was a logical choice. Communities nearby frequently provided some aid or assistance to these people. When the war was over the people returned or if they were unable to they simply moved somewhere else.
Great movements of peoples are part of history. From the Barbarian invasions of Europe to the Mongol and Arab conquests there were times in history when massive numbers of people were on the move. When tribes expanded in some places neighboring people became displaced and moved on. Such was the Mfecane or “crushing” that the Zulus unleashed on neighboring peoples, driving the Ndebele into Zimbabwe and the Sotho and Swazi into the mountain strongholds they still live in. The Boer trek, also in Southern Africa, is another example of the movement of people. In the old days people moved about, this was what they did and it was, for some peoples, especially semi-nomadic ones, their singular characteristic. Some peoples stayed put, inhabiting the same place for generations. But even they were not immune to the results of war, famine and social upheaval. Sometimes peoples were moved about by nations, such as the Circassians who were exiled by the Russians, the Chechans who were exiled by Stalin, the Volga and Baltic-Prussian Germans, who were destroyed by Stalin and the Pontic Greeks, Armenians and others who were destroyed by the Turkish regime. All these events may be tragic or happenstance, but they were, until recently, seen as a part of human history, if a sometimes particularly sad part.
Then suddenly the term “refugee” was invented. It is derived from the Latin, refugium and comes from the French refugie. Its first use in English dates from 1685. The first use in international law was in 1921 when the League of Nations established a High Commissioner for Refugees. Since that point the world has transformed the refugee from a standard part of history, a natural human occurrence, to something that must be looked after, coddled, cared for and become something that must be “solved”. It is a little like the concept of poverty. People will always be poor but once poverty was transformed into a “poverty line” we suddenly became aware that we must “solve poverty” without the slightest realization that once people are pulled up out of “poverty” the very notion of poverty must be re-defined since there will always be “poor” people. Thus since the 1920s the world has become increasingly shackled to the nation of “refugees” to the extent that we now live under a sort of refugee dictatorship.
Today the UN and various states define ‘refugees’ and ‘asylum seekers differently leading to some confusion. For instance the UN High Commissioner of Refugees believes there are 8 million official “refugees” while the U.S claims there are some 62 million. Then there are the special refugees, the Palestinian refugees who unlike other “refugees” will always be refugees under a special UN law that allows them to pass their refugee status from generation to generation. We thus live in a world of refugees.
The claim that there are endangered refugees is used as a tool to undermine states and support terrorist refuges. Thus when Sri Lanka is on the verge of defeating the Tamil Tigers, who have killed tens of thousands over the years, the world suddenly expresses concern that there are “refugees” in danger because of the army’s offensive against the Tamils. So there is now a safe zone in Sri Lanka for refugees where the army is not allowed to shell and where the Tamil fighters can thus re-arm and train and rest while fighting their terror war. Now with the Pakistani army trying to deal with the Taliban threat to that country the Red Cross has claimed that the army must refrain from attacking the Swat valley, the heart of the Taliban in Pakistan, because of the presence of refugees.
The concept of a refugee and his supposedly being threatened while he chooses to flee and live amongst terrorists is predicated on the idea that people take no personal responsibility for their actions. A refugee is robbed of his agency when he is defined as being ‘in danger’ merely because artillery shells and bombs might be falling around him. The refugee should learn from his surroundings, the way refugees used to, and flee the area of fighting. But refugees have a unique ability to somehow always congregate where the fighting is worst, all seemingly fleeing to the area wherever the army offensive is taking place. How did all these refugees end up in a “safe zone” in northern Sri Lanka that happens to also be in the midst of the last strip of land controlled by the Tamil Tigers? How did all the refugees end up fleeing to the Swat valley where the Taliban is based? Why don’t they flee away from the terrorist centers? Why aren’t the “safe zones” established in safe areas, rather than in the midst of the war zone.
During the First World War there were millions of refugees displaced by the Western Front which cut across the French countryside and was dozens of miles from side t side, encompassing trenches, rear areas and secondary lines of defense. Yet, oddly, refugees weren’t settled in “safe zones” in the midst of Verdun, the bloodiest stretch of land on the Western Front, they managed to somehow find their way to Paris and elsewhere. How is that possible? Why did the refugees of 1916 end up hundreds of miles away from the front line and the refugees today always seem to be right at the front, in the way of the shelling and the artillery?
Is it because war takes place faster and over greater distances these days? Perhaps that is part of the answer but the overall answer is that the kind of people who become refugees these days tend to be dumb, they tend to want to be victims, they tend to have a media, UN and Red Cross presence that sets up camps and hospitals for them and “safe zones” in the midst of the war zone and they tend to be used by terrorists as shields. In fact many times the refugees are part and parcel of the terrorist effort which undermines the state through the refugees. Refugee camps are nefarious centers of violence and terror. From Jordan in 1970, when they sheltered the Palestinians who tried to overthrow Jordan, to Lebanon and the Congo where they are used at places where the terrorists train and arm, they are a threat to the security of the world.
There should not be refugees. There should certainly not be refugees who never stop being refugees. It is unfortunate that wars go on and on but it is the responsibility of people to either join the war or leave the area. The fact that international bodies need refugees in order to operate, the fact that there is a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy on the part of the Red Cross and the UNHCR in a sense that in order for them to stay in business they need refugees and human suffering conspires with the media leads to the perpetuation of the idea that there are refugees. In fact there are not. There are no refugees in Sri Lanka living in a “safe zone” or in the swat valley. The people there are enemies and they are destabilizing the state. Those sad people who actually fled the fighting and have gotten out of the line of fire are “refugees”. So long as people remain in war zones there should be no sympathy for them. As Clint Eastwood says in Unforgiven when he is accused of shooting an unarmed man; “well he should have armed himself.” The “refugees” should either arm themselves and take part in the fight or get out of the way.
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.” (neither are the very Ashkenazi Heredim and Meretz has recently joined a protest movement in Ramat Aviv to keep the “black hatters” out of ‘their’ neighbourhood) 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.
Issue 85
“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
May 14th, 2009
1) The plague of refugees: The idea of refugees is one that floods our modern discourse. We accept the fact that they have always existed and will always exist and that we must have sympathy for them. But to what extent are they fabricated and to what extent is their existence an accident of modernity?
2) Begging for Internationalization: The ever-present calls from within Israeli society for ‘greater international involvement and pressure’ on Israel is emblematic of a contempt for Israeli democracy. It is not only in Israel that those voices that speak so fondly of ‘democracy’ are the first to declare their state a ‘dictatorship’ or a ‘fascist’ country when the electorate does not vote the way they want to. Every democracy suffers from the existence of un-democratic elements. There are those on the right, those on the left and those that simply condemn the country for being undemocratic when the countries majority is not in line with their minority extremism.
The plague of refugees
Seth J. Frantzman
May 7th, 2009
Refugees are a plague and a scam. They always seem to appear whenever there is conflict and they always conveniently appear whenever there is a terrorist group amidst them. In recent years the presence of refugees has time and again thwarted governments from dismantling terrorist organizations. However governments that refrain from ignoring the presence of refugees in order to complete the job of stopping pernicious terrorist organizations are not doing their duty to their people and are in fact violating the rights of the citizenry by not protecting it from enemies at home and abroad.
Not all people become refugees at the same rate. Some communities become refugees very easily. From the Albanians to Palestinians and Afghans there are communities that seem to have refugeedom as their natural second trait. It is not clear why but some people leave their homes at the slightest provocation. Others have to first be massacred and slaughtered to make them leave. Whatever the case refugees are a menace and they are a menace that the media loves to photograph.
Why do refugees exist? They didn’t always exist. They are primarily a modern invention. There were always people that fled conflict ever since man engaged in conflict. But in the old days when people fled conflict this was seen as a logical by-product of conflict. When armies are bludgeoning eachother to death in some place the people leave that place or risk death. This was a logical choice. Communities nearby frequently provided some aid or assistance to these people. When the war was over the people returned or if they were unable to they simply moved somewhere else.
Great movements of peoples are part of history. From the Barbarian invasions of Europe to the Mongol and Arab conquests there were times in history when massive numbers of people were on the move. When tribes expanded in some places neighboring people became displaced and moved on. Such was the Mfecane or “crushing” that the Zulus unleashed on neighboring peoples, driving the Ndebele into Zimbabwe and the Sotho and Swazi into the mountain strongholds they still live in. The Boer trek, also in Southern Africa, is another example of the movement of people. In the old days people moved about, this was what they did and it was, for some peoples, especially semi-nomadic ones, their singular characteristic. Some peoples stayed put, inhabiting the same place for generations. But even they were not immune to the results of war, famine and social upheaval. Sometimes peoples were moved about by nations, such as the Circassians who were exiled by the Russians, the Chechans who were exiled by Stalin, the Volga and Baltic-Prussian Germans, who were destroyed by Stalin and the Pontic Greeks, Armenians and others who were destroyed by the Turkish regime. All these events may be tragic or happenstance, but they were, until recently, seen as a part of human history, if a sometimes particularly sad part.
Then suddenly the term “refugee” was invented. It is derived from the Latin, refugium and comes from the French refugie. Its first use in English dates from 1685. The first use in international law was in 1921 when the League of Nations established a High Commissioner for Refugees. Since that point the world has transformed the refugee from a standard part of history, a natural human occurrence, to something that must be looked after, coddled, cared for and become something that must be “solved”. It is a little like the concept of poverty. People will always be poor but once poverty was transformed into a “poverty line” we suddenly became aware that we must “solve poverty” without the slightest realization that once people are pulled up out of “poverty” the very notion of poverty must be re-defined since there will always be “poor” people. Thus since the 1920s the world has become increasingly shackled to the nation of “refugees” to the extent that we now live under a sort of refugee dictatorship.
Today the UN and various states define ‘refugees’ and ‘asylum seekers differently leading to some confusion. For instance the UN High Commissioner of Refugees believes there are 8 million official “refugees” while the U.S claims there are some 62 million. Then there are the special refugees, the Palestinian refugees who unlike other “refugees” will always be refugees under a special UN law that allows them to pass their refugee status from generation to generation. We thus live in a world of refugees.
The claim that there are endangered refugees is used as a tool to undermine states and support terrorist refuges. Thus when Sri Lanka is on the verge of defeating the Tamil Tigers, who have killed tens of thousands over the years, the world suddenly expresses concern that there are “refugees” in danger because of the army’s offensive against the Tamils. So there is now a safe zone in Sri Lanka for refugees where the army is not allowed to shell and where the Tamil fighters can thus re-arm and train and rest while fighting their terror war. Now with the Pakistani army trying to deal with the Taliban threat to that country the Red Cross has claimed that the army must refrain from attacking the Swat valley, the heart of the Taliban in Pakistan, because of the presence of refugees.
The concept of a refugee and his supposedly being threatened while he chooses to flee and live amongst terrorists is predicated on the idea that people take no personal responsibility for their actions. A refugee is robbed of his agency when he is defined as being ‘in danger’ merely because artillery shells and bombs might be falling around him. The refugee should learn from his surroundings, the way refugees used to, and flee the area of fighting. But refugees have a unique ability to somehow always congregate where the fighting is worst, all seemingly fleeing to the area wherever the army offensive is taking place. How did all these refugees end up in a “safe zone” in northern Sri Lanka that happens to also be in the midst of the last strip of land controlled by the Tamil Tigers? How did all the refugees end up fleeing to the Swat valley where the Taliban is based? Why don’t they flee away from the terrorist centers? Why aren’t the “safe zones” established in safe areas, rather than in the midst of the war zone.
During the First World War there were millions of refugees displaced by the Western Front which cut across the French countryside and was dozens of miles from side t side, encompassing trenches, rear areas and secondary lines of defense. Yet, oddly, refugees weren’t settled in “safe zones” in the midst of Verdun, the bloodiest stretch of land on the Western Front, they managed to somehow find their way to Paris and elsewhere. How is that possible? Why did the refugees of 1916 end up hundreds of miles away from the front line and the refugees today always seem to be right at the front, in the way of the shelling and the artillery?
Is it because war takes place faster and over greater distances these days? Perhaps that is part of the answer but the overall answer is that the kind of people who become refugees these days tend to be dumb, they tend to want to be victims, they tend to have a media, UN and Red Cross presence that sets up camps and hospitals for them and “safe zones” in the midst of the war zone and they tend to be used by terrorists as shields. In fact many times the refugees are part and parcel of the terrorist effort which undermines the state through the refugees. Refugee camps are nefarious centers of violence and terror. From Jordan in 1970, when they sheltered the Palestinians who tried to overthrow Jordan, to Lebanon and the Congo where they are used at places where the terrorists train and arm, they are a threat to the security of the world.
There should not be refugees. There should certainly not be refugees who never stop being refugees. It is unfortunate that wars go on and on but it is the responsibility of people to either join the war or leave the area. The fact that international bodies need refugees in order to operate, the fact that there is a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy on the part of the Red Cross and the UNHCR in a sense that in order for them to stay in business they need refugees and human suffering conspires with the media leads to the perpetuation of the idea that there are refugees. In fact there are not. There are no refugees in Sri Lanka living in a “safe zone” or in the swat valley. The people there are enemies and they are destabilizing the state. Those sad people who actually fled the fighting and have gotten out of the line of fire are “refugees”. So long as people remain in war zones there should be no sympathy for them. As Clint Eastwood says in Unforgiven when he is accused of shooting an unarmed man; “well he should have armed himself.” The “refugees” should either arm themselves and take part in the fight or get out of the way.
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.” (neither are the very Ashkenazi Heredim and Meretz has recently joined a protest movement in Ramat Aviv to keep the “black hatters” out of ‘their’ neighbourhood) 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.
Thursday, May 7, 2009
Terra Incognita 83 Opposition, Shaking hands, blaming the victims
Terra Incognita
Issue 83
“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
April 30th, 2009
1) The Permanent Opposition: Modern society has a unique ability to create legions of people whose succor is the opposition and critiquing. This political ethos believes that purity can be found only in critique and that power ultimately corrupts. These themes have their source in the old Philosophers of Greece and the Christian hermits. But today this group of permanent opposition is not just a few people, it is entire political parties, the academy and most of the intellectual classes. Here we highlight three of them; Emma Goldman, Anna Poblovskaya and Helen Zille.
2) Did FDR or Churchill shake hands with Hitler and accept Mein Kampf ?: When Barack Obama grasped Hugo Chavez’s hand twice in as many days, once giving him a sort of ‘cool hand shake’ and the other time accepting a book, his actions flew in the face of two centuries of American ideology and foreign policy. Hugo Chavez has been exposed by the Economist and others as a thuggish power-hound. A low brow individual Chavez has insulted the U.S and former presidents as well as embraced terrorists. Yet Obama felt comfortable with him.
3) Blaming the Victims: Descendants of German Jews and their role in hatred of modern Jews and Israel: Why are German Jews and their descendants and people that call themselves “descendants of Holocaust survivors” so prominent in anti-Israel activity and in describing modern Jews as ‘nazis’? They claim to be standing up for ‘never again’ and that the Holocaust forces them to be ‘lone voices’. But they aren’t alone. There is a disproportionate involvement by the descendants of Weimer and this must have other explanations. As a proviso it should be stated, not all Holocaust survivors and their descendants hate Israel, most do not, but a great majority of the most extreme anti-Jewish and anti-Israel Jewish voices are people who claim to be related to Holocaust survivors. A massively disproportionate number of them are descendants of German-Jews who make up a tiny sliver of the Jewish people.
The Permanent Opposition
Seth J. Frantzman
April 23rd, 2009
There was always in history the person who enjoyed being outside politics so as to continually critique it. There were religious aesthetics, philosophers, poets, comics and famous soldiers who preferred the path of the ‘lone voice’ always opposed to whatever power arose in the center. But this tradition, which is particularly common in the Jewish, Greek, Roman and Western tradition, has today found a greater voice as intellectualism spreads to the masses, thus creating masses of critiquers, armies of opposition that roam the countryside, like wandering prophets of old, a terrible nuisance to society.
Consider three cases of these professional critiquers in the age of modernity; Emma Goldman, Anna Poblovskaya and Helen Zille.
Helen Zille was born in 1951 in Johannesburg. Widely perceived as Jewish she is actually technically not, her mother’s father was Jewish and her father’s mother was. She is a member of the Rondebosch United Church in Cape Town. During the 1970s she gained fame as a journalist for the Rand Daily Mail, ‘exposing’ the fact that Steve Biko, a black ANC activist had died in prison. Zille became increasingly involved in anti-government activity such as the white women’s ‘Black Sash’ movement opposing apartheid. She was also active in opposing conscription.
She became active in more mainstream politics in the late 1980s. At the time the main opposition to the ruling National Party was the Democratic Party which was founded in 1989 on the corpses of several other parties such as the Progressive Federal Party (whose leaders included Helen Suzman and Harry Schwarz. These parties received most of their electoral support from English speaking whites and Jews, people who tended to be more urban, middle-class and wealthy, those who received much from Apartheid and thus hated it the most, as is typical in modern democracies where the elites and the bourgouise oppose the existence of the system which they suckle off of. Zille became a member of the Western Cape provincial legislature for the Democratic Alliance (the reincarnation of the DP) in 1999 and subsequently an MP in 2004. Elected the mayor of Cape Town in 2006 she eclipsed the leader of the Democratic Alliance Tony Leon. In 2009 she stood as the leader of the DA against Jacob Zuma of the ANC for the presidency of South Africa.
If turnout remains as it is she will instead become the premier of the Western Cape government instead because the DA will fall far short of 50% of the vote.
Interviewed by the BBC on the eve of the elections this one time darling of the left was accused of running a ‘negative attack’. Where once the snobbish voice of Helen Zille might have been heard condemning the evils of the Afrikaner regime it was now her turn to be browbeaten by the arrogant BBC interviewer. But Zille is still the lone voice, arguing against the corruption and potential criminality of a Zuma regime. “What’s negative is Jacob Zuma, a one man constitution wrecking machine.” Suddenly Zille is a champion of law and order, complaining that the Big Man Zuma “scrapped the Scorpions, our elite crime busting unit.” How is this possible that the one time champion of the ANC and the Biko-cum-Zumas has turned into the major opposition against them. Why isn’t Zille a member of government rather than a member of the opposition? Isn’t this the government her and her white female friends in the Black Sash dreamed about when they could walk freely in the townships as heroes? Now Zille and her friends live behind barbed wire in big houses, no longer walking “among them.” The secret of the what Zille is, is part and parcel of what frustrates the West again and again. It is those whose culture is critique and not governing. When tasked with governing they are either incapable or they find a way to make themselves once again into the opposition. Thus Zille now finds herself at the head of a party whose base is mostly whites and Indians and Coloureds, people that once backed the National Party. Law and Order. That’s the new watchword of this leftist. But Zille wasn’t alone. All of her fellow-travellers followed her into opposition. Harry Scwhartz became a critic and so did Helen Suzman. Her foundation describes her stance up until her recent death thus; “Like all liberals, Helen welcomed the transition to democracy in 1994, and she readily acknowledges that in major areas things are a lot better. But she is disappointed by the continued high unemployment rate, poor delivery and widespread corruption. She has been dismayed by president Mbeki's evident lack of concern about HIV/Aids and the effect of affirmative action in driving skilled whites out of the country as well as his government's protection of Zimbabwe's dictator.” Another line in her biography on the website might explain some of the critiquing; “Another issue that has irritated her is the attempt by many in the ANC to dismiss the part played by white liberals in ending apartheid.” She just wants more attention to her and her ilk, the critiquers, the whiners, the people who received the most from apartheid, desired the liberal limelight and realized that by destroying Apartheid they might reap the benefits as its ‘lone voice’. They saw early that the world was going the other way and they thought that perhaps as a small select leftist elite they could run a country but when things turned out differently and they were obviously incapable of actually governing, they went back to the opposition.
But Zille is not alone. Consider the like of Russias most famous journalist, whose writings in English abroad have been as popular as her writings at home in her native Russian are not. Anna Politkovskaya is a martyr, supposedly. Often perceived as Russian, as Zille is Jewish, she was actually born in New York in 1958 to Ukrainians who were working as Soviet Diplomats. Her early life was thus one of upper class plush living, receiving much largesse from the USSR and attending its best institutions such as Moscow State University. She became a writer for the newspaper Izvestiya during the 1980s. In 1999 she began writing for Novaya Gazeta. Biographies of her tend to imply that she was a champion of the liberalizing of Gorbachev and opposed to the old Soviet system. Before her deaths he often accused Putin of resurrecting the Soviet system. From this we can apparently gleam that she opposed the Soviet Union. But when it fell and it had ample time to return to old Russia’s roots she didn’t appreciate that either. She sees Putin as a new Stalin rather than the new Czar, but while Russia has changed it is the Politkovskaya that has stayed the same. Rather than joining with the new regime to help build the country she became its greatest hater and accessory to terrorist mass murder.
She gained fame as a reporter and sympathizer with Chechan terrorism. She was so well liked among the terrorists that during the Moscow theatre siege she was invited by them to be their representative to the government. She brought them food and water. During the Breslan mass killing where hundreds of children were murdered by Muslim terrorists she was there again not to complain about the murder of the children but to condemn the government. She never shed a tear for the 186 Russian children murdered at the hand of terror at Breslan. Like all critiquers she was famous abroad. She spoke fluent English and published in English and was greated by applause when she went abroad, for instance to the Sydney Writers Festival. She won more than 10 awards in the West. This was a woman who had only hate and contempt for her country, a country whose people’s blood and toil she lived off of either by writing about them or growing up on the largesse provided by them. Tributes claimed that “Anna paid with her life for her courageous opposition to the ruling class.” She was a member of that ruling class. She didn’t oppose it, she opposed the lives and existence of the people, including the
The queen of critique is no doubt Emma Goldman. She was born in Kovno in 1869 in Lithuania, then under the Russian empire. She arrived in the U.S in 1885 where the nation granted her freedom. She used the freedom to become an anarchist and she plotted to murder an American industrialist named Henry Clay Frick. Being cowardly her friend attempted the assassination and was imprisoned for it. If this traitorous deed was not enough, coming to a country as a refugee and plotting to murder its prominent citizens who had built the economy that attracted her family in the first place, there were more to come. In 1901 after listening to a hate speech by Goldman, Leon Czolgosz attempted to murder President Mckinley. She used the free speech laws of the nation to found Mother Earth an anarchist newspaper dedicated to destroying the country from which she received so much. A deep hater of America her newspaper carried a cover in 1912 entitled ‘Patriotism in action’ with an American jamming a flag down the throat of a man who apparently represents the world. During World War I she published material opposing conscription and was subsequently arrested for her anti-government activity. In 1919, under the Anarchist Exclusion Act, perhaps the most intelligent law ever passed by the U.S government, Goldman was finally deported, a foreigner who had been allowed into the country and hated it and attempted to destroy it from the moment she arrived, she was sent back to Russia, now the USSR, from whence she came.
In the USSR, a type of government she had wanted to create in America, she found that free speech, which she had thrived on to spread hate, was called a “bourgeois superstition.” Goldman travelled around the country and although receiving largesse she came to hate the Soviet system. She left to Latvia and then to Germany. But she hated both countries and she then moved to London in 1924. This hater who had encouraged murder lived a posh life. In Canada she enjoyed herself and was once agan allowed into the U.S in 1934 to lecture on drama. The New York Times, New Yorker and other newspapers praised her autobiography. She relaxed at Nice and Saint Tropez. In 1936 she journeyed in Spain to encourage the murder of Spaniards by the Anarchists of Barcelona. In 1939 she found herself in England and, on the eve of the outbreak of the Second World War, she described England as “more fascist than the fascists.” She supported Nazism: “"[M]uch as I loathe Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin and Franco.. I would not support a war against them and for the democracies which, in the last analysis, are only Fascist in disguise." She died in 1940 and was buried in Canada. She is today described as an “icon of freedom” just as all of the professional critiquers believe themselves. But how many died because of the poison pen of Goldman and the freedom granted her in the democracies which she hated so much?
Zille, Goldman and Politkovskaya represent the height of the problem with modernity, freedom, critique and the cult of opposition. We live in a world where to be in ‘opposition’ is seen as naturally positive and free. One academic said that “The State without Social Sciences is ruthless, social sciences without the state are useless.” This parasitic relationship which this sociologist revealed is entirely correct. They view the state as naturally evil and that Social Sciences, which is to say critique, correct that ruthlessness, but only because it exists in opposition to the state, living off state subsidy. Meanwhile, of course, the critique cannot exist by itself in a vacume, it needs something to critique. Thus when critique wins, such as removing the USSR or Apartheid, it naturally must go back into opposition. This is why Emma Goldman, wherever she went came to hate it and always marvelled at some other system, only to travel there and oppose it. The Goldmans and Zilles play at politics but they can never be in power. They de-stablize the political system because the system requires a real opposition, not a fake one that when it finally acheives its goals turns on itself and runs back to the opposition, unable to govern and fearing the responsibilities inherent in having power. The pre-state ‘zionist’ leaders Judah Magnes and Martin Buber did the same thing in Israel, hating the responsibility of government they came to hate Zionism and Magnes left the country so as not to have any responsibility.
Did FDR or Churchill shake hands with Hitler and accept Mein Kampf?
Seth J. Frantzman
April 19th, 2009
Fresh from bowing to the Saudi King, calling America arrogant and blaming the U.S for gun violence in Mexico, Barack Obama shook hands, not once but twice, with Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. He also accepted an anti-American book as a gift from the Venezuelan soon-to-be dictator for life. Obama’s irresponsible behavior is in direct contrast to the tradition of American presidents and administrations that have supported democracy in the world and abjured dictatorships.
According to Martin Frost, a former Texas democratic Congressman, “it is in our [America’s] interest to try to have good relations with countries in our hemisphere.” From his perspective, and apparently Obama’s the objective of meeting with Chavez and easing restrictions on Cuba is to “try and open up Cuba.” It is all about having good relations and playing well with others because we “ought to be trying to make friends.” This is in line with the logic that believes in “talking” to Iran because it’s “just talking” and there can be no harm done in that.
The problem with this ideology is that it has much in common with the ideology that Ian Kershaw, biographer of Hitler, revealed in his Making Friends with Hitler: Lord Londonderry and the roots of appeasement (Allen Lane, 2007). Londonderry was a cousin of Winston Churchill, an English aristocrat and was Britain’s Secretary of State for Air during the crucial years 1931-1935 when Nazism was on the march and an aerial deterrent was in great need. Unfortunately Londonderry was also a Nazi sympathizer who believed that nothing could be lost in talking to Hitler and his lieutenants like Ribbentrop and Goring. In the name of dialogue Londonderry never stopped talking and shaking hands and accepting gifts from the Nazi leadership until war broke out in 1939. In the name of not being labeled a “war monger” he became one of the worst of the appeasers.
The U.S and its citizens have long played a role in supporting the independence and democratic institutions of new nations. From being the first country to recognize Mexico’s independence in 1836 to Abraham Lincoln’s recognition of Haiti in 1862, recognition of Israel in 1948 and support for the creation of East Timor and Kosovo the U.S has worked to create new democracies and support the fight against totalitarianism. American policy has not always been without contradictions in this realm, such as befriending Ferdinand Marcos or the Shah of Iran, but in both cases the U.S worked to bring about democratic reform, succeeding in the Philippines and failing in Iran. But it has never been American policy to accept or support dictatorships and it has always been U.S policy to prevent the slide towards tyranny.
The hand shaking with Chavez and the jovial banter is even more misplaced considering the things Chavez has said and done. He has not only courted Mahmud Ahmadinjed and uttered anti-Semitic statements but he has also embarked on a virtual how-to guide in demolishing what was once a flourishing Latin American democracy. On February 15th a referendum allowed him to abolish term limits. Manuel Rosales, mayor of the second largest city and an opposition leader is in hiding. General Raul Baduel, another opposition figure, has been arrested. Antonio Ledezma, mayor of Caracas has been prevented from entering his office because of his critical statements and his job has been made redundant by federally imposed controls. Free speech no longer exists as the press has been muzzled and non-government television stations, such as RCTV, have been forced off the air. Chavez has already been in power ten years, one sixth of the time of his friend Field Castro. He has verbally abused other Latin leaders, from Vicente Fox of Mexico to Columbia’s Alvaro Uribe, both friends of the U.S. He described George Bush as the devil and a donkey and expelled the U.S ambassador. He has become a friend of Libya’s Col. Moammar Qaddafi, Belorussian tyrant Alexander Lukashenko Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe.
The coddling of Chavez by Obama is a terrible message to struggling democracies all over the world. It is a betrayal of those in Latin America and the world who have long sought America’s help in defending democracy. Now it appears America is only interested in friendship and dialogue with the likes of China, Russia, Iran, Cuba and Venezuela. FDR, who never stooped to shake hands with Hitler or accept a copy of Mein Kampf would be ashamed to see the state that America’s support for democracy is in.
Blaming the Victims: Descendants of German Jews and their role in hatred of modern Jews and Israel
April 22, 2009
Seth J. Frantzman
One of the most disturbing trends that appeared in full force this Holocaust memorial day is the twisting of the traditional view of Jews as victims so that Jews are actually accused of crimes in the present because of their having been victims. As participants from all over the world took place in the annual March of the Living and as Alan Dershowitz was carted away by police in Geneva for wanting to protest Ahmadinjed’s appearance at the Durban II conference on racism, people discussed the importance and role of the Holocaust in everyday life today.
One of the most interesting pieces of research to come out on this subject is research about the connection between the Holocaust and radical left-wing peace movements. Dr. Tova Benski, chair of the Behavioral Sciences Department at the College of Management in Rishon Lezion, has shown that around 80 percent of the female members of peace organizations, such as Women in Black, are middle-aged Ashkenazi women…second-generation Holocaust survivors.” What is interesting is what motivates these women. They declared in the research that it was important to them “not to be like the Germans.” They claim the Holocaust was a main “legitimizing factor for the establishment of the state [of Israel] ”
But then these women make a radical claim. They assert that Jews ‘unify the enemy’, turning all of the world into an ‘other’ that is seen as always suppressing Jews. Jews claim to be the “eternal victim…we have always been the victims; we continue to be the victims." Benski, who sympathizes with these activist women, notes that “rather than subscribe to a unified idea of the historical 'enemy,' these women are putting a specific, particular face on the Palestinians… rather than adopt the usual idea of perpetual Jewish victimhood, these women are saying, 'We don't want to be the oppressors. We don't want to do to anyone what was done to us.” These daughters of Holocaust survivors actually step over the line and claim that modern day Israel is akin to the Nazis and that they are the lone voices opposing this new Nazism and protecting the new Jews, the Palestinians.
Why did the Holocaust get twisted around like this? Why did the actual victims of the Holocaust, the Jews, get turned into something negative and pernicious for being victims. If a person is raped and she becomes wary of walking alone at night do we claim she is “unifying the enemy” and making all men her enemy simply because she was an actual victim and now fears repetition of what happened to her?
Consider Merav Michaeli’s ‘From Kasztner to Shalit’ which also claims that the idea of Jews as victims is unacceptable. She claims that in Israel “only death is really sacred. Holocaust Remembrance Day is a good example of how in Israel the dead become heroes who get commemorated.” Michaeli castigates that state for calling on people not to forget and for spending money on memorials; “after all, our leaders are interested in perpetuity, and death is eternal…the State of Israel accepts only the new Jew, the belligerent Israeli.” Once again Jews are insulted for being victims and there is an insinuation that the victims are used or manipulated by modern day Jews who are only “belligerent.”
Consider the account of Bernice Eisenstein, author of ‘I was the Child of Holocaust Survivors’, who describes the Holocaust as “a drug” and that she “dealt in the pain of the Holocaust…my parents were in Auschwitz, can you compete with that?” There is a subtle perversion to all of these observations, from Benski to Michaeli and Eisenstein. The tragedy of it all is the way the Holocaust is twisted around so that discussion of Jewish victims is negative, it is a ‘drug’, or that discussion of memorializing them is negative because it is somehow fake and that any vow that it will ‘never happen again’ represents a ‘billigerent’ attitude that is almost racist against the world because it ‘unify’s the enemy.’
Writing on April 23rd Larry Derner noted that “the trauma to the Jews during the Holocaust has, over the years, been twisted into the aggression of the Jews in today's Israel… Jewish victimhood has not been redemptive; that instead, it's fueled Israel's victimization of Palestinians” But Sephardim, Mizrahim, Ethiopians and most of Russian Jewry, who together form the majority of Israel’s population, didn't have this "trauma". Their narrative of being Holocaust survivors. Furthermore its twisted to turn Holocaust survivors into people who are thus aggressors simply because of the Holocaust.
The truth is that the wealthy leftist Ashkenazi Holocaust survivors seek to colonize the Jewish people with their trauma. They want to turn the Jewish people into the ‘new Nazis’ so that they, the children of Holocaust survivors can do what their relatives didn’t do, ‘stand up to Nazis’. Now they can be the heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto, except in this case they are standing up to their own people. The reason they hate their own people goes back to their yearning to live in the Weimer Republic from whence many of their German-Jewish relatives fled or lived. The Weimer republic for these people is the greatest thing that ever existed. A republic of permissiveness and anything goes, a socialist extremist republic where prostitutes offered ‘mother-daughter sex’ on the street. This was the temple of these people, most of whome were assimilated Jews like Karl Marx who hated Judaism and hated their fellow Jews. Such was their hate of the Jews then that when Ostjuden began immigrating to Germany they refused to even see this ‘dirt’ as Jewish. The same is replicated today in the hatred of religious Jews by the secular leftist Ashkenazi elite in Israel which refers to them as ‘bloodsuckers’ and ‘nazis’ on a daily basis at the university.
These leftist descandants of Holocaust survivors claim that the living Holocaust survivors didn’t get enough support from the government but it is they who are obsessed with comparing everything to the Holocaust. They claim Israel manipulates the Holocaust to its own ends but it is they who manipulate the Holocaust to their ends. And it is eminently clear the degree to which they do this. From Norman Finkelstein to Amira Hass and Avraham Burg, all those who hate Israel and accuse it of Nazism, all claim to be children of Holocaust survivors and all of them see a new Holocaust in Israel. All of the hate Israel and seek its destruction. All of them accuse Israel of ‘using’ the Holocaust. Consider how Michael Neumann, editor of the radical anti-semitic website Counterpunch and author of The Case Against Israel describes himself. “Born 1946, the son of German Jewish refugees.” German and Jewish. Those are the twin keys in discerning who these people are. From Baruch Kimmerling to all the heads of Peace Now, HaMoked and Yesh Gvul the economic and historical details are the same: Wealthy, Leftist, Ashkenazi, German-Jewish. The German-Jews and their Holocaust survivor children and grand-children have set about destroying the Jewish people and Israel in order to take revenge for the Holocaust, for the destruction for their Weimer Republic and the fact that Israel’s early leaders didn’t allow for them to create a republic of self-hate, akin to Weimer, in Israel. They tried. Judah Magnes, head of the Hebrew University, tried to stem Jewish immigration so he and his could be a permanent minority in Israel. Leo Baeck, head of the German Jewish community during the Holocaust, collaborated with the Nazis at Thereisenstadt, hiding information about the Holocaust from fellow Jews.
Today Leo Baeck and Judah Magnes are hallowed names on the left and among intellectuals. There is no doubt of the link between German Jewry, its descendants and the hatred of Israel. Amos Elon is but one example. The author of Pity of It All has even moved back to Europe, to live in the Diaspora because he hates Israel. All of the leftist anti-Israel professors at Israeli universities are Ashkenazi, such as Neve Gordon or Ilan Pappe, the majority of them are also German-Jews such as Moshe Zimmerman, who compared Israeli to Nazis, to Moshe Zuckermann, a scholar of German at Tel Aviv University and Tanya Reinhardt author of books on the ‘conflict’ and a disciple of the late Dr. Kimmerling. German-Jews, all. We will never know why exactly they hate the Jewish people. But it is apparent they want to colonize the Jewish people. They want all Jews to be Holocaust survivors. Then they want to claim that the Holocaust forces the Jews to become the ‘new nazis’ because Jews are ‘trapped in a cycle’ and only these few lone voices will stand against the “Jew-Nazi” people. In order to defeat this heresy Jews must free themselves from the dominance of the German-Jewish leftist Ashkenazi elite. Only by embracing the true history of the Jews, outside of Germany, can Jews be free of this albatross.
When people read the Derfners and Eisensteins and the massively prolific intellectual descendants of Holocaust survivors and German Jewry they must remind themselves that this is not their narrative. This narrative of suffering Holocaust survivors who become Nazis is a myth. The Sabras of Israel of 1948 were all either born in Israel and were from Eastern Europe. Many of the right wing members of Begin’s fighting organization were from religious families or Sephardi background. Ariel Sharon was born in Israel. They all were. The German-Jews never contributed to the war effort of 1948 or of 1967. Any claims that Dayan and Allon and the generals of 1967 styled themselves “Prussians” is incorrect. They imagined themselves as Prussian Generals, but they were not. The German-Jews, arriving in Israel and finding no place for themselves and living in cities and becoming wealthy and an elite decided that they could place their mantle of suffering onto Israel and then transform it into a new Germany and then castigate it as a ‘nazi’ state. We must not submit to the German heresy. We must fight it with every ounce of our blood. We are not holocaust survivors forced to commit the crimes of the Holocaust. We are simply burdened by the existence of German-Jewry’s trauma and self hate about itself and its vanished civilization of the Weimer Republic. The next time someone tells you that “as a Holocaust survivor I know that the Jewish people use the Holocaust to become eternal victims and suppress the Palestinians” it would be best to say “but I’m not a Holocaust survivor and neither are the majority of those serving in the IDF. This trauma you speak of forcing me to harm Palestinians, I don’t have this trauma. So now find a new explanation.”
The German-Jews are the only people in the world that could suffer a Holocaust and then blame their own people for the Holocaust by turning them into people who play victim, pretending that all of their people suffered the Holocaust just to bash them for being victims destined to victimize. We will not be colonized by German-Jewry. The Larry Derfners live in their own Ashkenazi world where everyone is a leftist survivor and they all have this narrative of traum and suffering. But they live in a bubble.
Derfner says “the trauma to the Jews during the Holocaust has, over the years, been twisted into the aggression of the Jews in today's Israel.” But it is just the trauma of the Derfners and Finkelsteins and Zimmermans and Reinhardts and Hasses. It is not the trauma of the Feredos and Barzanis and Valeros. Why can’t the Jewish people be free of the intellectual slavery of the German-Jews? Why can’t we fight a war of anti-colonialism against this heresy to throw it off. German-Jews are self-hating and have psychological problems that they have had since the 1920s when their republic began to vanish, but the Jews in all their diversity deserve better than to be saddled with German-Jewish psychological problems, a sort of Freudian German-Jewish complex of self hate and imagininations that they are the lone voices and the new Nazis at the same time. German-Jews need Nazis, they need to be the single voice fighting it, and they want it all to exist among Jews so that Judaism can be destroyed at their hands because they resent that most Jews survived while their civilization did not. But we cannot allow the Ethiopians and Sephardim to be sacrificed on the pyre of German Jewish intellectualism. We must save them. We must save Ashkenazim from the poison of “I am a Holocaust survivor, I have a unique voice to critique Israel which is starting to resemble Nazi Germany.” I am not a Holocaust survivor. No one in my family has a connection to the Holocaust. I don’t have this ridiculous ‘trauma’ of becoming a Nazi because I was a victim. Why must the Jews be punished for the Holocaust? Let the German Jews have their intellectual illness, but save us from it.
Why are the victims being blamed? Why is the Holocaust twisted around so that it alone ‘legitimizes’ the creation of Israel, as if the Haganah and Jewish Agency and JNF and Balfour declaration and Herzl all came after 1939 and not before? There is a very real importance in discussing the over-use of the Holocaust as pulp fiction in numerous new movies such as the Reader. There is a very real importance in discussing the way in which the Holocaust or accusations of “nazi” are unacceptable. But people shouldn’t lose sight of reality. The victims were victims. Jews didn’t ask to have this done to them and they don’t manipulate the history of the Holocaust in order to be ‘eternal victims’.
Issue 83
“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
April 30th, 2009
1) The Permanent Opposition: Modern society has a unique ability to create legions of people whose succor is the opposition and critiquing. This political ethos believes that purity can be found only in critique and that power ultimately corrupts. These themes have their source in the old Philosophers of Greece and the Christian hermits. But today this group of permanent opposition is not just a few people, it is entire political parties, the academy and most of the intellectual classes. Here we highlight three of them; Emma Goldman, Anna Poblovskaya and Helen Zille.
2) Did FDR or Churchill shake hands with Hitler and accept Mein Kampf ?: When Barack Obama grasped Hugo Chavez’s hand twice in as many days, once giving him a sort of ‘cool hand shake’ and the other time accepting a book, his actions flew in the face of two centuries of American ideology and foreign policy. Hugo Chavez has been exposed by the Economist and others as a thuggish power-hound. A low brow individual Chavez has insulted the U.S and former presidents as well as embraced terrorists. Yet Obama felt comfortable with him.
3) Blaming the Victims: Descendants of German Jews and their role in hatred of modern Jews and Israel: Why are German Jews and their descendants and people that call themselves “descendants of Holocaust survivors” so prominent in anti-Israel activity and in describing modern Jews as ‘nazis’? They claim to be standing up for ‘never again’ and that the Holocaust forces them to be ‘lone voices’. But they aren’t alone. There is a disproportionate involvement by the descendants of Weimer and this must have other explanations. As a proviso it should be stated, not all Holocaust survivors and their descendants hate Israel, most do not, but a great majority of the most extreme anti-Jewish and anti-Israel Jewish voices are people who claim to be related to Holocaust survivors. A massively disproportionate number of them are descendants of German-Jews who make up a tiny sliver of the Jewish people.
The Permanent Opposition
Seth J. Frantzman
April 23rd, 2009
There was always in history the person who enjoyed being outside politics so as to continually critique it. There were religious aesthetics, philosophers, poets, comics and famous soldiers who preferred the path of the ‘lone voice’ always opposed to whatever power arose in the center. But this tradition, which is particularly common in the Jewish, Greek, Roman and Western tradition, has today found a greater voice as intellectualism spreads to the masses, thus creating masses of critiquers, armies of opposition that roam the countryside, like wandering prophets of old, a terrible nuisance to society.
Consider three cases of these professional critiquers in the age of modernity; Emma Goldman, Anna Poblovskaya and Helen Zille.
Helen Zille was born in 1951 in Johannesburg. Widely perceived as Jewish she is actually technically not, her mother’s father was Jewish and her father’s mother was. She is a member of the Rondebosch United Church in Cape Town. During the 1970s she gained fame as a journalist for the Rand Daily Mail, ‘exposing’ the fact that Steve Biko, a black ANC activist had died in prison. Zille became increasingly involved in anti-government activity such as the white women’s ‘Black Sash’ movement opposing apartheid. She was also active in opposing conscription.
She became active in more mainstream politics in the late 1980s. At the time the main opposition to the ruling National Party was the Democratic Party which was founded in 1989 on the corpses of several other parties such as the Progressive Federal Party (whose leaders included Helen Suzman and Harry Schwarz. These parties received most of their electoral support from English speaking whites and Jews, people who tended to be more urban, middle-class and wealthy, those who received much from Apartheid and thus hated it the most, as is typical in modern democracies where the elites and the bourgouise oppose the existence of the system which they suckle off of. Zille became a member of the Western Cape provincial legislature for the Democratic Alliance (the reincarnation of the DP) in 1999 and subsequently an MP in 2004. Elected the mayor of Cape Town in 2006 she eclipsed the leader of the Democratic Alliance Tony Leon. In 2009 she stood as the leader of the DA against Jacob Zuma of the ANC for the presidency of South Africa.
If turnout remains as it is she will instead become the premier of the Western Cape government instead because the DA will fall far short of 50% of the vote.
Interviewed by the BBC on the eve of the elections this one time darling of the left was accused of running a ‘negative attack’. Where once the snobbish voice of Helen Zille might have been heard condemning the evils of the Afrikaner regime it was now her turn to be browbeaten by the arrogant BBC interviewer. But Zille is still the lone voice, arguing against the corruption and potential criminality of a Zuma regime. “What’s negative is Jacob Zuma, a one man constitution wrecking machine.” Suddenly Zille is a champion of law and order, complaining that the Big Man Zuma “scrapped the Scorpions, our elite crime busting unit.” How is this possible that the one time champion of the ANC and the Biko-cum-Zumas has turned into the major opposition against them. Why isn’t Zille a member of government rather than a member of the opposition? Isn’t this the government her and her white female friends in the Black Sash dreamed about when they could walk freely in the townships as heroes? Now Zille and her friends live behind barbed wire in big houses, no longer walking “among them.” The secret of the what Zille is, is part and parcel of what frustrates the West again and again. It is those whose culture is critique and not governing. When tasked with governing they are either incapable or they find a way to make themselves once again into the opposition. Thus Zille now finds herself at the head of a party whose base is mostly whites and Indians and Coloureds, people that once backed the National Party. Law and Order. That’s the new watchword of this leftist. But Zille wasn’t alone. All of her fellow-travellers followed her into opposition. Harry Scwhartz became a critic and so did Helen Suzman. Her foundation describes her stance up until her recent death thus; “Like all liberals, Helen welcomed the transition to democracy in 1994, and she readily acknowledges that in major areas things are a lot better. But she is disappointed by the continued high unemployment rate, poor delivery and widespread corruption. She has been dismayed by president Mbeki's evident lack of concern about HIV/Aids and the effect of affirmative action in driving skilled whites out of the country as well as his government's protection of Zimbabwe's dictator.” Another line in her biography on the website might explain some of the critiquing; “Another issue that has irritated her is the attempt by many in the ANC to dismiss the part played by white liberals in ending apartheid.” She just wants more attention to her and her ilk, the critiquers, the whiners, the people who received the most from apartheid, desired the liberal limelight and realized that by destroying Apartheid they might reap the benefits as its ‘lone voice’. They saw early that the world was going the other way and they thought that perhaps as a small select leftist elite they could run a country but when things turned out differently and they were obviously incapable of actually governing, they went back to the opposition.
But Zille is not alone. Consider the like of Russias most famous journalist, whose writings in English abroad have been as popular as her writings at home in her native Russian are not. Anna Politkovskaya is a martyr, supposedly. Often perceived as Russian, as Zille is Jewish, she was actually born in New York in 1958 to Ukrainians who were working as Soviet Diplomats. Her early life was thus one of upper class plush living, receiving much largesse from the USSR and attending its best institutions such as Moscow State University. She became a writer for the newspaper Izvestiya during the 1980s. In 1999 she began writing for Novaya Gazeta. Biographies of her tend to imply that she was a champion of the liberalizing of Gorbachev and opposed to the old Soviet system. Before her deaths he often accused Putin of resurrecting the Soviet system. From this we can apparently gleam that she opposed the Soviet Union. But when it fell and it had ample time to return to old Russia’s roots she didn’t appreciate that either. She sees Putin as a new Stalin rather than the new Czar, but while Russia has changed it is the Politkovskaya that has stayed the same. Rather than joining with the new regime to help build the country she became its greatest hater and accessory to terrorist mass murder.
She gained fame as a reporter and sympathizer with Chechan terrorism. She was so well liked among the terrorists that during the Moscow theatre siege she was invited by them to be their representative to the government. She brought them food and water. During the Breslan mass killing where hundreds of children were murdered by Muslim terrorists she was there again not to complain about the murder of the children but to condemn the government. She never shed a tear for the 186 Russian children murdered at the hand of terror at Breslan. Like all critiquers she was famous abroad. She spoke fluent English and published in English and was greated by applause when she went abroad, for instance to the Sydney Writers Festival. She won more than 10 awards in the West. This was a woman who had only hate and contempt for her country, a country whose people’s blood and toil she lived off of either by writing about them or growing up on the largesse provided by them. Tributes claimed that “Anna paid with her life for her courageous opposition to the ruling class.” She was a member of that ruling class. She didn’t oppose it, she opposed the lives and existence of the people, including the
The queen of critique is no doubt Emma Goldman. She was born in Kovno in 1869 in Lithuania, then under the Russian empire. She arrived in the U.S in 1885 where the nation granted her freedom. She used the freedom to become an anarchist and she plotted to murder an American industrialist named Henry Clay Frick. Being cowardly her friend attempted the assassination and was imprisoned for it. If this traitorous deed was not enough, coming to a country as a refugee and plotting to murder its prominent citizens who had built the economy that attracted her family in the first place, there were more to come. In 1901 after listening to a hate speech by Goldman, Leon Czolgosz attempted to murder President Mckinley. She used the free speech laws of the nation to found Mother Earth an anarchist newspaper dedicated to destroying the country from which she received so much. A deep hater of America her newspaper carried a cover in 1912 entitled ‘Patriotism in action’ with an American jamming a flag down the throat of a man who apparently represents the world. During World War I she published material opposing conscription and was subsequently arrested for her anti-government activity. In 1919, under the Anarchist Exclusion Act, perhaps the most intelligent law ever passed by the U.S government, Goldman was finally deported, a foreigner who had been allowed into the country and hated it and attempted to destroy it from the moment she arrived, she was sent back to Russia, now the USSR, from whence she came.
In the USSR, a type of government she had wanted to create in America, she found that free speech, which she had thrived on to spread hate, was called a “bourgeois superstition.” Goldman travelled around the country and although receiving largesse she came to hate the Soviet system. She left to Latvia and then to Germany. But she hated both countries and she then moved to London in 1924. This hater who had encouraged murder lived a posh life. In Canada she enjoyed herself and was once agan allowed into the U.S in 1934 to lecture on drama. The New York Times, New Yorker and other newspapers praised her autobiography. She relaxed at Nice and Saint Tropez. In 1936 she journeyed in Spain to encourage the murder of Spaniards by the Anarchists of Barcelona. In 1939 she found herself in England and, on the eve of the outbreak of the Second World War, she described England as “more fascist than the fascists.” She supported Nazism: “"[M]uch as I loathe Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin and Franco.. I would not support a war against them and for the democracies which, in the last analysis, are only Fascist in disguise." She died in 1940 and was buried in Canada. She is today described as an “icon of freedom” just as all of the professional critiquers believe themselves. But how many died because of the poison pen of Goldman and the freedom granted her in the democracies which she hated so much?
Zille, Goldman and Politkovskaya represent the height of the problem with modernity, freedom, critique and the cult of opposition. We live in a world where to be in ‘opposition’ is seen as naturally positive and free. One academic said that “The State without Social Sciences is ruthless, social sciences without the state are useless.” This parasitic relationship which this sociologist revealed is entirely correct. They view the state as naturally evil and that Social Sciences, which is to say critique, correct that ruthlessness, but only because it exists in opposition to the state, living off state subsidy. Meanwhile, of course, the critique cannot exist by itself in a vacume, it needs something to critique. Thus when critique wins, such as removing the USSR or Apartheid, it naturally must go back into opposition. This is why Emma Goldman, wherever she went came to hate it and always marvelled at some other system, only to travel there and oppose it. The Goldmans and Zilles play at politics but they can never be in power. They de-stablize the political system because the system requires a real opposition, not a fake one that when it finally acheives its goals turns on itself and runs back to the opposition, unable to govern and fearing the responsibilities inherent in having power. The pre-state ‘zionist’ leaders Judah Magnes and Martin Buber did the same thing in Israel, hating the responsibility of government they came to hate Zionism and Magnes left the country so as not to have any responsibility.
Did FDR or Churchill shake hands with Hitler and accept Mein Kampf?
Seth J. Frantzman
April 19th, 2009
Fresh from bowing to the Saudi King, calling America arrogant and blaming the U.S for gun violence in Mexico, Barack Obama shook hands, not once but twice, with Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. He also accepted an anti-American book as a gift from the Venezuelan soon-to-be dictator for life. Obama’s irresponsible behavior is in direct contrast to the tradition of American presidents and administrations that have supported democracy in the world and abjured dictatorships.
According to Martin Frost, a former Texas democratic Congressman, “it is in our [America’s] interest to try to have good relations with countries in our hemisphere.” From his perspective, and apparently Obama’s the objective of meeting with Chavez and easing restrictions on Cuba is to “try and open up Cuba.” It is all about having good relations and playing well with others because we “ought to be trying to make friends.” This is in line with the logic that believes in “talking” to Iran because it’s “just talking” and there can be no harm done in that.
The problem with this ideology is that it has much in common with the ideology that Ian Kershaw, biographer of Hitler, revealed in his Making Friends with Hitler: Lord Londonderry and the roots of appeasement (Allen Lane, 2007). Londonderry was a cousin of Winston Churchill, an English aristocrat and was Britain’s Secretary of State for Air during the crucial years 1931-1935 when Nazism was on the march and an aerial deterrent was in great need. Unfortunately Londonderry was also a Nazi sympathizer who believed that nothing could be lost in talking to Hitler and his lieutenants like Ribbentrop and Goring. In the name of dialogue Londonderry never stopped talking and shaking hands and accepting gifts from the Nazi leadership until war broke out in 1939. In the name of not being labeled a “war monger” he became one of the worst of the appeasers.
The U.S and its citizens have long played a role in supporting the independence and democratic institutions of new nations. From being the first country to recognize Mexico’s independence in 1836 to Abraham Lincoln’s recognition of Haiti in 1862, recognition of Israel in 1948 and support for the creation of East Timor and Kosovo the U.S has worked to create new democracies and support the fight against totalitarianism. American policy has not always been without contradictions in this realm, such as befriending Ferdinand Marcos or the Shah of Iran, but in both cases the U.S worked to bring about democratic reform, succeeding in the Philippines and failing in Iran. But it has never been American policy to accept or support dictatorships and it has always been U.S policy to prevent the slide towards tyranny.
The hand shaking with Chavez and the jovial banter is even more misplaced considering the things Chavez has said and done. He has not only courted Mahmud Ahmadinjed and uttered anti-Semitic statements but he has also embarked on a virtual how-to guide in demolishing what was once a flourishing Latin American democracy. On February 15th a referendum allowed him to abolish term limits. Manuel Rosales, mayor of the second largest city and an opposition leader is in hiding. General Raul Baduel, another opposition figure, has been arrested. Antonio Ledezma, mayor of Caracas has been prevented from entering his office because of his critical statements and his job has been made redundant by federally imposed controls. Free speech no longer exists as the press has been muzzled and non-government television stations, such as RCTV, have been forced off the air. Chavez has already been in power ten years, one sixth of the time of his friend Field Castro. He has verbally abused other Latin leaders, from Vicente Fox of Mexico to Columbia’s Alvaro Uribe, both friends of the U.S. He described George Bush as the devil and a donkey and expelled the U.S ambassador. He has become a friend of Libya’s Col. Moammar Qaddafi, Belorussian tyrant Alexander Lukashenko Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe.
The coddling of Chavez by Obama is a terrible message to struggling democracies all over the world. It is a betrayal of those in Latin America and the world who have long sought America’s help in defending democracy. Now it appears America is only interested in friendship and dialogue with the likes of China, Russia, Iran, Cuba and Venezuela. FDR, who never stooped to shake hands with Hitler or accept a copy of Mein Kampf would be ashamed to see the state that America’s support for democracy is in.
Blaming the Victims: Descendants of German Jews and their role in hatred of modern Jews and Israel
April 22, 2009
Seth J. Frantzman
One of the most disturbing trends that appeared in full force this Holocaust memorial day is the twisting of the traditional view of Jews as victims so that Jews are actually accused of crimes in the present because of their having been victims. As participants from all over the world took place in the annual March of the Living and as Alan Dershowitz was carted away by police in Geneva for wanting to protest Ahmadinjed’s appearance at the Durban II conference on racism, people discussed the importance and role of the Holocaust in everyday life today.
One of the most interesting pieces of research to come out on this subject is research about the connection between the Holocaust and radical left-wing peace movements. Dr. Tova Benski, chair of the Behavioral Sciences Department at the College of Management in Rishon Lezion, has shown that around 80 percent of the female members of peace organizations, such as Women in Black, are middle-aged Ashkenazi women…second-generation Holocaust survivors.” What is interesting is what motivates these women. They declared in the research that it was important to them “not to be like the Germans.” They claim the Holocaust was a main “legitimizing factor for the establishment of the state [of Israel] ”
But then these women make a radical claim. They assert that Jews ‘unify the enemy’, turning all of the world into an ‘other’ that is seen as always suppressing Jews. Jews claim to be the “eternal victim…we have always been the victims; we continue to be the victims." Benski, who sympathizes with these activist women, notes that “rather than subscribe to a unified idea of the historical 'enemy,' these women are putting a specific, particular face on the Palestinians… rather than adopt the usual idea of perpetual Jewish victimhood, these women are saying, 'We don't want to be the oppressors. We don't want to do to anyone what was done to us.” These daughters of Holocaust survivors actually step over the line and claim that modern day Israel is akin to the Nazis and that they are the lone voices opposing this new Nazism and protecting the new Jews, the Palestinians.
Why did the Holocaust get twisted around like this? Why did the actual victims of the Holocaust, the Jews, get turned into something negative and pernicious for being victims. If a person is raped and she becomes wary of walking alone at night do we claim she is “unifying the enemy” and making all men her enemy simply because she was an actual victim and now fears repetition of what happened to her?
Consider Merav Michaeli’s ‘From Kasztner to Shalit’ which also claims that the idea of Jews as victims is unacceptable. She claims that in Israel “only death is really sacred. Holocaust Remembrance Day is a good example of how in Israel the dead become heroes who get commemorated.” Michaeli castigates that state for calling on people not to forget and for spending money on memorials; “after all, our leaders are interested in perpetuity, and death is eternal…the State of Israel accepts only the new Jew, the belligerent Israeli.” Once again Jews are insulted for being victims and there is an insinuation that the victims are used or manipulated by modern day Jews who are only “belligerent.”
Consider the account of Bernice Eisenstein, author of ‘I was the Child of Holocaust Survivors’, who describes the Holocaust as “a drug” and that she “dealt in the pain of the Holocaust…my parents were in Auschwitz, can you compete with that?” There is a subtle perversion to all of these observations, from Benski to Michaeli and Eisenstein. The tragedy of it all is the way the Holocaust is twisted around so that discussion of Jewish victims is negative, it is a ‘drug’, or that discussion of memorializing them is negative because it is somehow fake and that any vow that it will ‘never happen again’ represents a ‘billigerent’ attitude that is almost racist against the world because it ‘unify’s the enemy.’
Writing on April 23rd Larry Derner noted that “the trauma to the Jews during the Holocaust has, over the years, been twisted into the aggression of the Jews in today's Israel… Jewish victimhood has not been redemptive; that instead, it's fueled Israel's victimization of Palestinians” But Sephardim, Mizrahim, Ethiopians and most of Russian Jewry, who together form the majority of Israel’s population, didn't have this "trauma". Their narrative of being Holocaust survivors. Furthermore its twisted to turn Holocaust survivors into people who are thus aggressors simply because of the Holocaust.
The truth is that the wealthy leftist Ashkenazi Holocaust survivors seek to colonize the Jewish people with their trauma. They want to turn the Jewish people into the ‘new Nazis’ so that they, the children of Holocaust survivors can do what their relatives didn’t do, ‘stand up to Nazis’. Now they can be the heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto, except in this case they are standing up to their own people. The reason they hate their own people goes back to their yearning to live in the Weimer Republic from whence many of their German-Jewish relatives fled or lived. The Weimer republic for these people is the greatest thing that ever existed. A republic of permissiveness and anything goes, a socialist extremist republic where prostitutes offered ‘mother-daughter sex’ on the street. This was the temple of these people, most of whome were assimilated Jews like Karl Marx who hated Judaism and hated their fellow Jews. Such was their hate of the Jews then that when Ostjuden began immigrating to Germany they refused to even see this ‘dirt’ as Jewish. The same is replicated today in the hatred of religious Jews by the secular leftist Ashkenazi elite in Israel which refers to them as ‘bloodsuckers’ and ‘nazis’ on a daily basis at the university.
These leftist descandants of Holocaust survivors claim that the living Holocaust survivors didn’t get enough support from the government but it is they who are obsessed with comparing everything to the Holocaust. They claim Israel manipulates the Holocaust to its own ends but it is they who manipulate the Holocaust to their ends. And it is eminently clear the degree to which they do this. From Norman Finkelstein to Amira Hass and Avraham Burg, all those who hate Israel and accuse it of Nazism, all claim to be children of Holocaust survivors and all of them see a new Holocaust in Israel. All of the hate Israel and seek its destruction. All of them accuse Israel of ‘using’ the Holocaust. Consider how Michael Neumann, editor of the radical anti-semitic website Counterpunch and author of The Case Against Israel describes himself. “Born 1946, the son of German Jewish refugees.” German and Jewish. Those are the twin keys in discerning who these people are. From Baruch Kimmerling to all the heads of Peace Now, HaMoked and Yesh Gvul the economic and historical details are the same: Wealthy, Leftist, Ashkenazi, German-Jewish. The German-Jews and their Holocaust survivor children and grand-children have set about destroying the Jewish people and Israel in order to take revenge for the Holocaust, for the destruction for their Weimer Republic and the fact that Israel’s early leaders didn’t allow for them to create a republic of self-hate, akin to Weimer, in Israel. They tried. Judah Magnes, head of the Hebrew University, tried to stem Jewish immigration so he and his could be a permanent minority in Israel. Leo Baeck, head of the German Jewish community during the Holocaust, collaborated with the Nazis at Thereisenstadt, hiding information about the Holocaust from fellow Jews.
Today Leo Baeck and Judah Magnes are hallowed names on the left and among intellectuals. There is no doubt of the link between German Jewry, its descendants and the hatred of Israel. Amos Elon is but one example. The author of Pity of It All has even moved back to Europe, to live in the Diaspora because he hates Israel. All of the leftist anti-Israel professors at Israeli universities are Ashkenazi, such as Neve Gordon or Ilan Pappe, the majority of them are also German-Jews such as Moshe Zimmerman, who compared Israeli to Nazis, to Moshe Zuckermann, a scholar of German at Tel Aviv University and Tanya Reinhardt author of books on the ‘conflict’ and a disciple of the late Dr. Kimmerling. German-Jews, all. We will never know why exactly they hate the Jewish people. But it is apparent they want to colonize the Jewish people. They want all Jews to be Holocaust survivors. Then they want to claim that the Holocaust forces the Jews to become the ‘new nazis’ because Jews are ‘trapped in a cycle’ and only these few lone voices will stand against the “Jew-Nazi” people. In order to defeat this heresy Jews must free themselves from the dominance of the German-Jewish leftist Ashkenazi elite. Only by embracing the true history of the Jews, outside of Germany, can Jews be free of this albatross.
When people read the Derfners and Eisensteins and the massively prolific intellectual descendants of Holocaust survivors and German Jewry they must remind themselves that this is not their narrative. This narrative of suffering Holocaust survivors who become Nazis is a myth. The Sabras of Israel of 1948 were all either born in Israel and were from Eastern Europe. Many of the right wing members of Begin’s fighting organization were from religious families or Sephardi background. Ariel Sharon was born in Israel. They all were. The German-Jews never contributed to the war effort of 1948 or of 1967. Any claims that Dayan and Allon and the generals of 1967 styled themselves “Prussians” is incorrect. They imagined themselves as Prussian Generals, but they were not. The German-Jews, arriving in Israel and finding no place for themselves and living in cities and becoming wealthy and an elite decided that they could place their mantle of suffering onto Israel and then transform it into a new Germany and then castigate it as a ‘nazi’ state. We must not submit to the German heresy. We must fight it with every ounce of our blood. We are not holocaust survivors forced to commit the crimes of the Holocaust. We are simply burdened by the existence of German-Jewry’s trauma and self hate about itself and its vanished civilization of the Weimer Republic. The next time someone tells you that “as a Holocaust survivor I know that the Jewish people use the Holocaust to become eternal victims and suppress the Palestinians” it would be best to say “but I’m not a Holocaust survivor and neither are the majority of those serving in the IDF. This trauma you speak of forcing me to harm Palestinians, I don’t have this trauma. So now find a new explanation.”
The German-Jews are the only people in the world that could suffer a Holocaust and then blame their own people for the Holocaust by turning them into people who play victim, pretending that all of their people suffered the Holocaust just to bash them for being victims destined to victimize. We will not be colonized by German-Jewry. The Larry Derfners live in their own Ashkenazi world where everyone is a leftist survivor and they all have this narrative of traum and suffering. But they live in a bubble.
Derfner says “the trauma to the Jews during the Holocaust has, over the years, been twisted into the aggression of the Jews in today's Israel.” But it is just the trauma of the Derfners and Finkelsteins and Zimmermans and Reinhardts and Hasses. It is not the trauma of the Feredos and Barzanis and Valeros. Why can’t the Jewish people be free of the intellectual slavery of the German-Jews? Why can’t we fight a war of anti-colonialism against this heresy to throw it off. German-Jews are self-hating and have psychological problems that they have had since the 1920s when their republic began to vanish, but the Jews in all their diversity deserve better than to be saddled with German-Jewish psychological problems, a sort of Freudian German-Jewish complex of self hate and imagininations that they are the lone voices and the new Nazis at the same time. German-Jews need Nazis, they need to be the single voice fighting it, and they want it all to exist among Jews so that Judaism can be destroyed at their hands because they resent that most Jews survived while their civilization did not. But we cannot allow the Ethiopians and Sephardim to be sacrificed on the pyre of German Jewish intellectualism. We must save them. We must save Ashkenazim from the poison of “I am a Holocaust survivor, I have a unique voice to critique Israel which is starting to resemble Nazi Germany.” I am not a Holocaust survivor. No one in my family has a connection to the Holocaust. I don’t have this ridiculous ‘trauma’ of becoming a Nazi because I was a victim. Why must the Jews be punished for the Holocaust? Let the German Jews have their intellectual illness, but save us from it.
Why are the victims being blamed? Why is the Holocaust twisted around so that it alone ‘legitimizes’ the creation of Israel, as if the Haganah and Jewish Agency and JNF and Balfour declaration and Herzl all came after 1939 and not before? There is a very real importance in discussing the over-use of the Holocaust as pulp fiction in numerous new movies such as the Reader. There is a very real importance in discussing the way in which the Holocaust or accusations of “nazi” are unacceptable. But people shouldn’t lose sight of reality. The victims were victims. Jews didn’t ask to have this done to them and they don’t manipulate the history of the Holocaust in order to be ‘eternal victims’.
Terra Incognita 84 Durban II, Hindu Nationalism and Alistair Crooke
Terra Incognita
Issue 84
“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
May 7th, 2009
1) The truth about Durban II: People complain that the U.N anti-racism conference called Durban II was ‘hijacked’ by third world countries. Nothing could be further from the truth. Third world countries and their antics are merely playing within the rules, lies and rhetoric set up by the people who created the U.N. The entire day of an ‘anti-racism’ conference is a Western notion. The fact that the conference was in itself racist is no surprise, western ‘peace’ and ‘human rights’ movements have for many years championed genocide and called it ‘peace’ and championed terrorism and called it ‘human rights’. From Pol Pot to Ahmadinjed and Castro and Chavez, all the third world leaders merely learned well from the West how to exploit its rhetoric and were widely supported by leftist wealthy intellectual collaborators.
2) Why do people condemn Hindu Nationalism? The answer may be connected to a disdain for Zionism: The virulent hatred of Hindutva found among intellectuals and ‘right thinking’ individuals from India to the U.S is part and parcel of the same hatred for the existence of Israel. Is it a coincidence that Gandhi encouraged the Jews to kill themselves and also opposed Zionism only to be gunned down by a hero of Hindutva for betraying his country, authoring an introduction to the Koran and encouragint he ethnic-cleansing and genocide of Hindus and Sikhs in Pakistan?
3) Alastair Crooke, MI6 and the hatred of the West: Alastair Crooke, 30 year veteran of MI6 has authored a new book that brings Islamism to the West and argues that is merely resisting capitalism. Crooke is merely the latest in a century long string of members of the British elite and veterans of the secret service who have come to hate the West. From Harry St. John Philby to his son Kim a line runs directly to Crooke.
The truth about Durban II
Seth J. Frantzman
April 23rd, 2009
Reasonable people are aware of the travesty of the UN anti-racism conference entitled Durban II that took place in Geneva recently. The appearance of the nationalist holocaust denier Mahmud Ahmadinjed overshadowed the event, making a conference that was anti-racism actually a racist conference. People condemn the UN. People condemn Ahmadinjed and some condemn the Muslim and third world countries that are accused of ‘hijacking’ the organization and ‘distorting’ the meaning of human rights.
But those who condemn it are wrong. They are wrong not because they condemn the ridiculousness of it all but because they don’t understand what underpins the entire process and rhetoric. Human rights is an invention of the West. Freedom of Speech is an invention of the West. Racism and anti-racism are ideas invented in the West. Xenophobia and protesting against it are inventions of the West. All of the ideas and dialogue and conventions and panels that underpin everything that happened at the conference is part of the West. The “unacceptable behavior” that resulted in the banning of Jewish groups from the conference is part and parcel of the West. On both sides it is Western. The outburst of the protesters and the idea that there is some sort of ‘acceptable behaviour’. Who do you think wrote the rules for that behavior, the people in the Third World who barely know how to behave? No. It was people from the West who wrote up the rules about what ‘behavoir’ was acceptable.
The entire idea of having an ‘anti-racism conference’ is a Western idea. The idea of conferences is Western. The idea of a United Nations is western. The entire idea of ‘peace’ and ‘world peace’ are Western. No other tradition understands or recognizes these ridiculous ideas. People have complained that the conference only focused on Israel as a violator of human rights and that the fact that Iran and Libya chaired the committee setting up the conference is a ‘hypocrisy’. But such hypocrisy was all built into the UN when it was created after World War Two. The entire idea that some giant ungainly bureaucracy could provide ‘collective security’ is a myth of the West. No other region of the world has such as ridiculous organization, except perhaps the Organization of African States, whose creation was also envisioned by Western do-gooders.
People wonder ‘why doesn’t the conference note racism in other countries like Iran?’ What do people expect. The idea of racism is western and it was brought to these other countries by western whites. These Western whites told the natives that “the white man is racist against you.” This is the narrative that these people learned. When tribes in Rwanda massacred and genocided eachother they didn’t see it as racism. People in Iran cannot imagine that the hatred and discrimination against black Iranians in south Iran is ‘racist’ because such a concept does not exist. There cannot be racism in countries outside the West because these people, even when they are all obviously racist, cannot understand the idea. Even when the Turks were busy raping and murdering all the Armenians, or when Palestinians call Jews dogs and blow themselves up or when Arabs in Sudan call the blacks “Kaffir” there is no idea that this is racism. This is entirely the fault of the West which communicated to these people the liberal idea of ‘anti-colonialism’. The fact is obvious. Whether it is white Mexican woman, descendants of
Spaniards who deride Indians as ‘dirty savages’ complaining that she suffers racism as a ‘hispanic’ or it is white Iranians in an Iranian film trying to ‘wash the black off’ a black child from southern Iran or it is a Palestinian claiming that the fact that no white Arab will marry a descendant of slaves living in Rahat in Israel is not slavery we live in a world of the lie of racism, the western leftist colonization of our mind by the concept of racism and the forcing of the whole world to believe in a twisted concept of racism.
Durban II represents everything that underpins the West and its leftists; weakness, soft racism, bureaucracy, hate, extremism, hate disguised as ‘justice’, and appeasement. The genious of the West in creating the committees and processes and rules underpinning Durban II is that the West was able to export the extreme dictatorial ways of extremist hate regimes that are racist to the center of Europe to continue their dictatorial ways. In a ridiculous place that claims to believe in free speech, inside the UN chamber there was no free speech. There was the speech of Amadinjed and their was Libya chairing a session in which a doctor who tried to mention Libyan tortures of him, based solely on the fact that he was a foreigner. During the session the doctor was silenced and ordered to leave.
Only Europe. Only the West and all it represents could create something like this where the dictatorship that is Libya could be transported to an international gathering so it would be allowed to dictate the entire gathering, not just in its own country.
People shouldn’t be shocked by Durban II. They should look into their own souls. The Third World didn’t ‘hijack’ Durban II, it just played by the rules set down by the idealist Western leftists who created the UN in the first place. The West and Franz Fannon and Albert Memmi were the ones that wrote ‘Wretched of the Nations’ and ‘Colonizer and the Colonized’. They communicated the message “you are colonized, you are victims, you suffer racism.” The people thus received a blank check to engage in whatever evil they wanted in the name of opposing these things. They butchered, murdered, genocided, ethnically-cleansed and slaughtered and all in the name of the Western ideal of ‘justice’ and ‘anti-colonialism’ and ‘anti-racism’ and ‘peace’. Albeit the savage behavior of these people palled in comparison to the West’s own Nazism and their savage behavior had existed before Fannon and Memmi. What happened is that their actions, of cruel murder and terrorism and genocided simply received an excuse in Western terms. When these people slaughtered eachother it was understood in the ‘context of colonialism’. There could’nt be racism between ‘Third World Peoples’. No. Racism only exists from the ‘powerful’ against the ‘weak’ and from ‘white’ to ‘black’. That is why Durban II could never condemn the Sudanese Genocide as a racial conflict because there can’t be racism among ‘native peoples’ or ‘between Muslims’. The West created these myths of the ‘tolerant east’ and ‘tolerant multi-racial Islam’.
To destroy Durban II and its ‘hijacking’ one need only destroy the liberalistic underpinning of the West. Remember the fall of South Africa. Remember what the Truth and Reconciliation Commission stated? “Racism arrived in South Africa in 1652 with the arrival of the first colonizers.” That myth of a ‘non-racist’ indigenous wonderful noble savage utopia being invaded by ‘white racists’ is part and parcel of the entire Western liberal narrative that underpins everything the collective Western peace-minded justice types believe in. Africans didn’t understand in the 17th century that these few hundred Dutch immigrants with their stone church building and boats were ‘white racists’. They understood they were different. They were busy fighting one another. When the Zulus systematically destroyed neighbouring tribes and smaller Zulu tribes that would not submit to Shaka those people being destroyed looked to the ‘racist whites’ for protection and guns. But the neatly crafted ‘narrative’ of whiteness and blackness was created in 1988 by Rhodes University professor Julian Cobbing who claimed that the Mfecane or ‘crushing period’ when the Zulus scattered tribes all across Southern Africa, was actually an Apartheid conspiracy. How could something that happened in the 1820s be a conspiracy of something from the 1960s? It turned out the Apartheid historians exaggerated the crushing in order to create a myth of black on black violence. Cobbing ‘proved’ that European slave traders forced the Zulu to engage in the destruction of neighbouring tribes, to what end or why is not clear, since there were few slavers operating in the area at the time nor did the Zulus sell their victims to Europeans. No matter. It reminds one of the riots against Zimbabwean immigrants in South Africa in May of 2008. This was black on black of course. But what was the reason? Reporters and commentators noted that it was the ‘legacy of apartheid’. This is liberalism at its best. The Mfecane of 1820 can be said to be an ‘apartheid conspiracy’ even though descriptions of it are proudly related even in Zulu history from the period. The slaughter of Zimbabwe immigrants by machete wielding Zulus and Xhosas in 2008 can be said to be because of Apartheid, no matter that Apartheid ended 14 years ago and the 20 year olds engaging in the riots have no memory of it. That is Durban II. It is the creation of a liberal myth, a myth of race and racism and anti-racism. Then people wonder “why doesn’t Durban II find any racism in the world except in Israel?” Because that is what liberalism and white people told people in the Third World to find. Europe told them to find racism only in Israel. Europeans told them that there is only one racist country. No matter how many Arabs are crammed into tenaments in Paris, no matter how many blacks in Iran have their skin washed to ‘get the black out’, no matter how many ‘kaffirs’ die in Sudan, no matter how many Philipinos are beheaded in Saudi or how many Ethiopians are kidnapped to be sold into slavery in the UAE, no matter how many Han and Hui Chinese are attacked by Tibetans angry at their settlement in Lhasa by the government, no matter how many murders and rapes and slaves are sold in their world and how many people slaughter and genocide and murder eachother, there will never be any racism or xenophobia or ‘related intolerance’ outside of what liberalism has created. Liberalism created, for instance, “islamophobia” as the newest bogey-man that we all have to be worried about. The new racism of the 21st century is “islamophobia”.
Don’t blame these people at Durban II for their extraordinary racist and hateful and extremist behavior. The venue was given to it by Europeans. The money for it came from America and other wealthy countries. It is run ‘demcoratically’ so that means that it is run by Muslim countries since there are more of them and Liberalism gives it its talking points and rhetoric. Every single value found at Durban II, even some of the words and rhetoric of Ahmadnjed, were crafted and learned in the West. To destroy Durban III the entire underpinnings of the West and its ‘anti-racism’ and ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ and ‘peace’ and ‘collective security’ and ‘talking rather than fighting’ and ‘conferences’ must be undone. The entire of infrastructure of the UN must be undone. Until that is done don’t expect Muslim nations to continue to use the tool as Muslims know how to do, to promote their nationalistic religious beliefs. They are only being themselves and playing by the rules of the West and Fannon and Memmi. They didn’t ‘hijack’ the UN, the UN should never have been allowed to grow into its present form.
Why do people condemn Hindu Nationalism? The answer may be connected to a disdain for Zionism.
Seth J. Frantzman
April 28th, 2009
In a recent book entitled The Hindus: Alternative History Wendy Doniger claims that Hinduism was invented by the British. Doniger is a scholar of Indian religions at the University of Chicago. She argues that Hinduism’s unity and its holy Vedas are primarily a myth created by Protestants who sought a “unified Hinduism”. She further argues that upper-caste Brahmins and other elites in India collaborated with the British and invented a “British-Brahmin version of Hinduism-one of the many invented traditions born around the world in the 18th and 19th centuries.” These ‘bad Hindus’ are accused of having an inferiority complex. She claims that the Hindu Nationalism (Hindutva) of today thus uses a fake Hinduism for its own historiography and that she seeks to tell an “alternative to the narrative of Hindu history that they [the nationalists] tell.”
When it comes to classic Hindu texts such as the Ramayana and Mahabharata she condemns them for their violence. The Mughal Muslim emperors who colonized India for Islam for three hundred years were, according to a reviewer, “motivated by real politik rather than religious fundamentalism” when they destroyed thousands of Hindu temples and sold hundreds of thousands of Hindus into slavery. According t Pankaj Mishra, an author who has praised the book, Doniger should be admired for striding “intrepidly into a polemical arena almost as treacherous as Israel-Arab relations.” Mishra calls Hindu Nationalism the “Indian heirs to British imperialists who invented ‘Hinduism’” and accuses them of wanting to create a “culturally-homogenous and militant nation-state.”
Reading this virulent condemnation of Hinduism and Hindu Nationalism one is reminded of European-Jewish intellectual Tony Judt’s condemnation of Israel; “the very idea of a Jewish state [is] rooted in another time and place…in a world where nations and peoples increasingly intermingle and intermarry..[it is] dysfunctional…an anachronism.” Doniger’s claim that Hinduism was invented in the 19th century bares a striking resemblance to Tel Aviv University professor Shlomo Sand’s claim in his book When and How the Jewish People was invented (2008) that Jews are not a “nation-race” but rather a colorful amalgam of converts.
Almost every book on modern India is full of condemnations for Hindu Nationalism which is seen as the anti-thesis of Gandhi’s ‘good’ pacifism. Professors in the West are full of attempts to re-write Hindu claims that their temples were destroyed by the Muslims and either claim there were no Hindu temples or excuse the mass destruction of them and the building of Mosques atop them. Excusing the imposition of slavery on Hindus by Islamic invaders who arrived in large numbers in the 11th century under Mahmud of Ghazna is a little harder, but even it is excused.
Hindu Nationalism, like Zionism, is condemned for having a “nationalist archeology.” Critiquing Israeli archeology Nachman Ben Yehuda has described the Myth of Masada and Nadia Abu el-Haj has written on ‘reflections on archeology and Israeli settler-nationhood’. Ramachandra Guha in his India After Gandhi writes that the Hindu temple at Ayodha that was destroyed in the 16th century by the Mughal Emperor Buber to build the Babri Mosque was merely the site of “Hindu sentiment and myth” and not the historical birthplace of the Hindu god Ram.
There is a connection between the contempt for Hindu Nationalism and the disdain for Zionism that exists in many circles. They are widely condemned for similar things. Both are accused of inventing a history for their people and religion. Both are accused of inventing and perverting archeology. Both are accused of being anachronisms in a world that is supposedly ‘multi-cultural’. Both are seen as militant and anti-Muslim.
But there is another connection that is often over-looked. Both were unlikely victims of Gandhi’s sometimes misplaced pacifism. Gandhi condemned not only Zionism but also encouraged the Jews of Europe to voluntarily submit to Nazism and throw “themselves into the sea from cliffs” in order to please Hitler. Gandhi, a Hindu, penned an introduction to the Koran, a book that is deeply prejudiced against pagan Hinduism, and during the partition of India he excused the ethnic-cleansing of Sikhs and Hindus in Pakistan while encouraging India to protect her Muslim minority.
But what truly unites Zionism and Hindu Nationalism is the fact that both represent the aspirations of unique peoples and states. There is only one Hindu state and one Jewish state in the world. Both are accused of daring to declare themselves Jewish and Hindu and thus seek ‘homogeneity’. This accusation is made in a world with some 48 countries with a Muslim majority and 169 Christian majority countries. India and Israel, far from being homogenous anachronisms are tiny drops of diversity in a world that is increasingly homogenous. Hindu nationalism is not a result of a British imperialism anymore than Zionism is, both grew out of a long suppressed and colonized peoples’ dreams for their own country free from foreign rule. Those who want to expose themselves to Hindu nationalism and its true underpinnings should pick up Lal K. Advani’s My Country My Life. Absent of that people should at least give Hinduism, like Judaism, the benefit of the doubt, they are based on real religions and real texts, not myths conjured up in the 19th century.
Alastair Crooke, MI6 and the hatred of the West
May 4, 2009
Seth J. Frantzman
It is not easy to find information on Alistair Crooke, not to be confused by Alistair Cooke, a well known journalist who died in 2004. He was born in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), studied in Switzerland and at St. Andrew’s in Scotland and received a degree in Economics. What is known is that he worked for MI6, the U.K’s secret intelligence service for more than 30 years. As an agent in the 1980s he worked in Pakistan, running guns to the Mujahadin fighting the Soviets. He was thus part of Charlie Wilson’s ‘war’ in which the U.S government helped fund Islamism’s war against Communism.
According to one biography he then became a “security advisor to Javier Solana, the European Union High Representative and Head of Foreign and Security Policy. He played a role in the negotiations to end the Siege of the Church of the Nativity in 2002 and helped facilitate the Palestinian cease-fires of 2002 and 2003. He also was a staff member of the Mitchell Committee that enquired into the causes of the Intifada.” It is not clear when he left MI6, or if he ever left, but it is clear that the British government ended all official employment contracts with him in 2003 in response to fears that he had become completely partial to Islamism.
Now this confidant of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, former spiritual leader of Hamas, Yasser Arafat and Nasrallah, lives in Beirut and has penned a book entitled Resistance: The Essence of the Islamist Revolution. In this tome he argues that Islamism is merely “resisting” the West’s “market-based definition of the individual and society.” He has gone one step further than merely writing a book to bring the ideas of Islamism to the West, he has started a ‘Conflicts Forum’ in 2004 in Beirut. The Forum supposedly includes “former spies, diplomats and peace activists.” Mark Perry, a military intelligence and foreign affairs analyst, is the co-director of the forum. Crooke has made it his mission to spread the bible of Islamism in a language the West can understand. He wants to “valorize what they are saying.” He also wants to challenge “western misconceptions.” For Crooke the West’s values are no longer interesting but Islam is being revived and is “in the ascendant.” In addition the Economist’s review of his book accuses him of “1960s campus radicalism” and that he believes “the force used by Islamist movements is to be understood as an act of spiritual, cultural and social resistance.” Crooke believes that Hezbollah’s television station, Al-Manar is part of a “resistance media.”
Crooke’s hatred of the West is merely the latest manifestation of self-hatred of some British elites who have worked in British intelligence in the Middle East. Harry St. John Philby was the first. A radical socialist he joined the Indian Civil Service in 1907. Like Crooke he was not born in the U.K but rather in Sri Lanka and educated at Trinity College at Cambridge. He became an adherent and follower of the Saudi warlord Ibn Saud and Wahhabism and helped provide advice on the best way for this radical Arab family to take over what is now Saudi Arabia. He opposed British entry into the Second World War. He became a dutiful ally of Arab nationalism as well, supporting Nasser against his own country and making anti-Semitic statements.
But it was his son Kim Philby and the ‘Cambridge Five’, along with Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross. After working for MI6 and becoming a double agent for the Soviets he ended up in Beirut like Crooke. In Beirut he was unmasked for a second time (the first time prominent people had defended his good name) as a Soviet agent. But during the same time he became an adherent of Arab nationalism and wrote biased articles for the Economist as their correspondent. When he was finally whisked away to the Communist utopia he had so loved it didn’t turn out as he expected. He became an alcoholic and the Communists gave him little honour.
The other Cambridge Five didn’t have life as expected in the USSR either. One died of alcoholism and the other’s wife left him. The utopia was not as expected. One who had enjoyed the freedom of being an open homosexual in upper class British society found that Socialism in action didn’t cater to his sexual orientation as he had expected.
The modern self-hatred of Alistair Crooke and his career for MI6 should not be such a surprise. His loyalty to Islamism mirrors the former loyalties of the Cambridge Five to Communism and Harry St. John Philby’s earlier loyalty to Wahhabism and Arab nationalism. Why does MI6 produce so many people with such a virulent hatred for the West? It is not clear but whatever the problem it is clear that hatred for the West has a long and gloried tradition among certain sectors of the British intelligence community and their prestigious pedigrees. This stretches back to Sir Oswald Mosley’s Nazi-sympathizing right down to the present.
Issue 84
“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
May 7th, 2009
1) The truth about Durban II: People complain that the U.N anti-racism conference called Durban II was ‘hijacked’ by third world countries. Nothing could be further from the truth. Third world countries and their antics are merely playing within the rules, lies and rhetoric set up by the people who created the U.N. The entire day of an ‘anti-racism’ conference is a Western notion. The fact that the conference was in itself racist is no surprise, western ‘peace’ and ‘human rights’ movements have for many years championed genocide and called it ‘peace’ and championed terrorism and called it ‘human rights’. From Pol Pot to Ahmadinjed and Castro and Chavez, all the third world leaders merely learned well from the West how to exploit its rhetoric and were widely supported by leftist wealthy intellectual collaborators.
2) Why do people condemn Hindu Nationalism? The answer may be connected to a disdain for Zionism: The virulent hatred of Hindutva found among intellectuals and ‘right thinking’ individuals from India to the U.S is part and parcel of the same hatred for the existence of Israel. Is it a coincidence that Gandhi encouraged the Jews to kill themselves and also opposed Zionism only to be gunned down by a hero of Hindutva for betraying his country, authoring an introduction to the Koran and encouragint he ethnic-cleansing and genocide of Hindus and Sikhs in Pakistan?
3) Alastair Crooke, MI6 and the hatred of the West: Alastair Crooke, 30 year veteran of MI6 has authored a new book that brings Islamism to the West and argues that is merely resisting capitalism. Crooke is merely the latest in a century long string of members of the British elite and veterans of the secret service who have come to hate the West. From Harry St. John Philby to his son Kim a line runs directly to Crooke.
The truth about Durban II
Seth J. Frantzman
April 23rd, 2009
Reasonable people are aware of the travesty of the UN anti-racism conference entitled Durban II that took place in Geneva recently. The appearance of the nationalist holocaust denier Mahmud Ahmadinjed overshadowed the event, making a conference that was anti-racism actually a racist conference. People condemn the UN. People condemn Ahmadinjed and some condemn the Muslim and third world countries that are accused of ‘hijacking’ the organization and ‘distorting’ the meaning of human rights.
But those who condemn it are wrong. They are wrong not because they condemn the ridiculousness of it all but because they don’t understand what underpins the entire process and rhetoric. Human rights is an invention of the West. Freedom of Speech is an invention of the West. Racism and anti-racism are ideas invented in the West. Xenophobia and protesting against it are inventions of the West. All of the ideas and dialogue and conventions and panels that underpin everything that happened at the conference is part of the West. The “unacceptable behavior” that resulted in the banning of Jewish groups from the conference is part and parcel of the West. On both sides it is Western. The outburst of the protesters and the idea that there is some sort of ‘acceptable behaviour’. Who do you think wrote the rules for that behavior, the people in the Third World who barely know how to behave? No. It was people from the West who wrote up the rules about what ‘behavoir’ was acceptable.
The entire idea of having an ‘anti-racism conference’ is a Western idea. The idea of conferences is Western. The idea of a United Nations is western. The entire idea of ‘peace’ and ‘world peace’ are Western. No other tradition understands or recognizes these ridiculous ideas. People have complained that the conference only focused on Israel as a violator of human rights and that the fact that Iran and Libya chaired the committee setting up the conference is a ‘hypocrisy’. But such hypocrisy was all built into the UN when it was created after World War Two. The entire idea that some giant ungainly bureaucracy could provide ‘collective security’ is a myth of the West. No other region of the world has such as ridiculous organization, except perhaps the Organization of African States, whose creation was also envisioned by Western do-gooders.
People wonder ‘why doesn’t the conference note racism in other countries like Iran?’ What do people expect. The idea of racism is western and it was brought to these other countries by western whites. These Western whites told the natives that “the white man is racist against you.” This is the narrative that these people learned. When tribes in Rwanda massacred and genocided eachother they didn’t see it as racism. People in Iran cannot imagine that the hatred and discrimination against black Iranians in south Iran is ‘racist’ because such a concept does not exist. There cannot be racism in countries outside the West because these people, even when they are all obviously racist, cannot understand the idea. Even when the Turks were busy raping and murdering all the Armenians, or when Palestinians call Jews dogs and blow themselves up or when Arabs in Sudan call the blacks “Kaffir” there is no idea that this is racism. This is entirely the fault of the West which communicated to these people the liberal idea of ‘anti-colonialism’. The fact is obvious. Whether it is white Mexican woman, descendants of
Spaniards who deride Indians as ‘dirty savages’ complaining that she suffers racism as a ‘hispanic’ or it is white Iranians in an Iranian film trying to ‘wash the black off’ a black child from southern Iran or it is a Palestinian claiming that the fact that no white Arab will marry a descendant of slaves living in Rahat in Israel is not slavery we live in a world of the lie of racism, the western leftist colonization of our mind by the concept of racism and the forcing of the whole world to believe in a twisted concept of racism.
Durban II represents everything that underpins the West and its leftists; weakness, soft racism, bureaucracy, hate, extremism, hate disguised as ‘justice’, and appeasement. The genious of the West in creating the committees and processes and rules underpinning Durban II is that the West was able to export the extreme dictatorial ways of extremist hate regimes that are racist to the center of Europe to continue their dictatorial ways. In a ridiculous place that claims to believe in free speech, inside the UN chamber there was no free speech. There was the speech of Amadinjed and their was Libya chairing a session in which a doctor who tried to mention Libyan tortures of him, based solely on the fact that he was a foreigner. During the session the doctor was silenced and ordered to leave.
Only Europe. Only the West and all it represents could create something like this where the dictatorship that is Libya could be transported to an international gathering so it would be allowed to dictate the entire gathering, not just in its own country.
People shouldn’t be shocked by Durban II. They should look into their own souls. The Third World didn’t ‘hijack’ Durban II, it just played by the rules set down by the idealist Western leftists who created the UN in the first place. The West and Franz Fannon and Albert Memmi were the ones that wrote ‘Wretched of the Nations’ and ‘Colonizer and the Colonized’. They communicated the message “you are colonized, you are victims, you suffer racism.” The people thus received a blank check to engage in whatever evil they wanted in the name of opposing these things. They butchered, murdered, genocided, ethnically-cleansed and slaughtered and all in the name of the Western ideal of ‘justice’ and ‘anti-colonialism’ and ‘anti-racism’ and ‘peace’. Albeit the savage behavior of these people palled in comparison to the West’s own Nazism and their savage behavior had existed before Fannon and Memmi. What happened is that their actions, of cruel murder and terrorism and genocided simply received an excuse in Western terms. When these people slaughtered eachother it was understood in the ‘context of colonialism’. There could’nt be racism between ‘Third World Peoples’. No. Racism only exists from the ‘powerful’ against the ‘weak’ and from ‘white’ to ‘black’. That is why Durban II could never condemn the Sudanese Genocide as a racial conflict because there can’t be racism among ‘native peoples’ or ‘between Muslims’. The West created these myths of the ‘tolerant east’ and ‘tolerant multi-racial Islam’.
To destroy Durban II and its ‘hijacking’ one need only destroy the liberalistic underpinning of the West. Remember the fall of South Africa. Remember what the Truth and Reconciliation Commission stated? “Racism arrived in South Africa in 1652 with the arrival of the first colonizers.” That myth of a ‘non-racist’ indigenous wonderful noble savage utopia being invaded by ‘white racists’ is part and parcel of the entire Western liberal narrative that underpins everything the collective Western peace-minded justice types believe in. Africans didn’t understand in the 17th century that these few hundred Dutch immigrants with their stone church building and boats were ‘white racists’. They understood they were different. They were busy fighting one another. When the Zulus systematically destroyed neighbouring tribes and smaller Zulu tribes that would not submit to Shaka those people being destroyed looked to the ‘racist whites’ for protection and guns. But the neatly crafted ‘narrative’ of whiteness and blackness was created in 1988 by Rhodes University professor Julian Cobbing who claimed that the Mfecane or ‘crushing period’ when the Zulus scattered tribes all across Southern Africa, was actually an Apartheid conspiracy. How could something that happened in the 1820s be a conspiracy of something from the 1960s? It turned out the Apartheid historians exaggerated the crushing in order to create a myth of black on black violence. Cobbing ‘proved’ that European slave traders forced the Zulu to engage in the destruction of neighbouring tribes, to what end or why is not clear, since there were few slavers operating in the area at the time nor did the Zulus sell their victims to Europeans. No matter. It reminds one of the riots against Zimbabwean immigrants in South Africa in May of 2008. This was black on black of course. But what was the reason? Reporters and commentators noted that it was the ‘legacy of apartheid’. This is liberalism at its best. The Mfecane of 1820 can be said to be an ‘apartheid conspiracy’ even though descriptions of it are proudly related even in Zulu history from the period. The slaughter of Zimbabwe immigrants by machete wielding Zulus and Xhosas in 2008 can be said to be because of Apartheid, no matter that Apartheid ended 14 years ago and the 20 year olds engaging in the riots have no memory of it. That is Durban II. It is the creation of a liberal myth, a myth of race and racism and anti-racism. Then people wonder “why doesn’t Durban II find any racism in the world except in Israel?” Because that is what liberalism and white people told people in the Third World to find. Europe told them to find racism only in Israel. Europeans told them that there is only one racist country. No matter how many Arabs are crammed into tenaments in Paris, no matter how many blacks in Iran have their skin washed to ‘get the black out’, no matter how many ‘kaffirs’ die in Sudan, no matter how many Philipinos are beheaded in Saudi or how many Ethiopians are kidnapped to be sold into slavery in the UAE, no matter how many Han and Hui Chinese are attacked by Tibetans angry at their settlement in Lhasa by the government, no matter how many murders and rapes and slaves are sold in their world and how many people slaughter and genocide and murder eachother, there will never be any racism or xenophobia or ‘related intolerance’ outside of what liberalism has created. Liberalism created, for instance, “islamophobia” as the newest bogey-man that we all have to be worried about. The new racism of the 21st century is “islamophobia”.
Don’t blame these people at Durban II for their extraordinary racist and hateful and extremist behavior. The venue was given to it by Europeans. The money for it came from America and other wealthy countries. It is run ‘demcoratically’ so that means that it is run by Muslim countries since there are more of them and Liberalism gives it its talking points and rhetoric. Every single value found at Durban II, even some of the words and rhetoric of Ahmadnjed, were crafted and learned in the West. To destroy Durban III the entire underpinnings of the West and its ‘anti-racism’ and ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ and ‘peace’ and ‘collective security’ and ‘talking rather than fighting’ and ‘conferences’ must be undone. The entire of infrastructure of the UN must be undone. Until that is done don’t expect Muslim nations to continue to use the tool as Muslims know how to do, to promote their nationalistic religious beliefs. They are only being themselves and playing by the rules of the West and Fannon and Memmi. They didn’t ‘hijack’ the UN, the UN should never have been allowed to grow into its present form.
Why do people condemn Hindu Nationalism? The answer may be connected to a disdain for Zionism.
Seth J. Frantzman
April 28th, 2009
In a recent book entitled The Hindus: Alternative History Wendy Doniger claims that Hinduism was invented by the British. Doniger is a scholar of Indian religions at the University of Chicago. She argues that Hinduism’s unity and its holy Vedas are primarily a myth created by Protestants who sought a “unified Hinduism”. She further argues that upper-caste Brahmins and other elites in India collaborated with the British and invented a “British-Brahmin version of Hinduism-one of the many invented traditions born around the world in the 18th and 19th centuries.” These ‘bad Hindus’ are accused of having an inferiority complex. She claims that the Hindu Nationalism (Hindutva) of today thus uses a fake Hinduism for its own historiography and that she seeks to tell an “alternative to the narrative of Hindu history that they [the nationalists] tell.”
When it comes to classic Hindu texts such as the Ramayana and Mahabharata she condemns them for their violence. The Mughal Muslim emperors who colonized India for Islam for three hundred years were, according to a reviewer, “motivated by real politik rather than religious fundamentalism” when they destroyed thousands of Hindu temples and sold hundreds of thousands of Hindus into slavery. According t Pankaj Mishra, an author who has praised the book, Doniger should be admired for striding “intrepidly into a polemical arena almost as treacherous as Israel-Arab relations.” Mishra calls Hindu Nationalism the “Indian heirs to British imperialists who invented ‘Hinduism’” and accuses them of wanting to create a “culturally-homogenous and militant nation-state.”
Reading this virulent condemnation of Hinduism and Hindu Nationalism one is reminded of European-Jewish intellectual Tony Judt’s condemnation of Israel; “the very idea of a Jewish state [is] rooted in another time and place…in a world where nations and peoples increasingly intermingle and intermarry..[it is] dysfunctional…an anachronism.” Doniger’s claim that Hinduism was invented in the 19th century bares a striking resemblance to Tel Aviv University professor Shlomo Sand’s claim in his book When and How the Jewish People was invented (2008) that Jews are not a “nation-race” but rather a colorful amalgam of converts.
Almost every book on modern India is full of condemnations for Hindu Nationalism which is seen as the anti-thesis of Gandhi’s ‘good’ pacifism. Professors in the West are full of attempts to re-write Hindu claims that their temples were destroyed by the Muslims and either claim there were no Hindu temples or excuse the mass destruction of them and the building of Mosques atop them. Excusing the imposition of slavery on Hindus by Islamic invaders who arrived in large numbers in the 11th century under Mahmud of Ghazna is a little harder, but even it is excused.
Hindu Nationalism, like Zionism, is condemned for having a “nationalist archeology.” Critiquing Israeli archeology Nachman Ben Yehuda has described the Myth of Masada and Nadia Abu el-Haj has written on ‘reflections on archeology and Israeli settler-nationhood’. Ramachandra Guha in his India After Gandhi writes that the Hindu temple at Ayodha that was destroyed in the 16th century by the Mughal Emperor Buber to build the Babri Mosque was merely the site of “Hindu sentiment and myth” and not the historical birthplace of the Hindu god Ram.
There is a connection between the contempt for Hindu Nationalism and the disdain for Zionism that exists in many circles. They are widely condemned for similar things. Both are accused of inventing a history for their people and religion. Both are accused of inventing and perverting archeology. Both are accused of being anachronisms in a world that is supposedly ‘multi-cultural’. Both are seen as militant and anti-Muslim.
But there is another connection that is often over-looked. Both were unlikely victims of Gandhi’s sometimes misplaced pacifism. Gandhi condemned not only Zionism but also encouraged the Jews of Europe to voluntarily submit to Nazism and throw “themselves into the sea from cliffs” in order to please Hitler. Gandhi, a Hindu, penned an introduction to the Koran, a book that is deeply prejudiced against pagan Hinduism, and during the partition of India he excused the ethnic-cleansing of Sikhs and Hindus in Pakistan while encouraging India to protect her Muslim minority.
But what truly unites Zionism and Hindu Nationalism is the fact that both represent the aspirations of unique peoples and states. There is only one Hindu state and one Jewish state in the world. Both are accused of daring to declare themselves Jewish and Hindu and thus seek ‘homogeneity’. This accusation is made in a world with some 48 countries with a Muslim majority and 169 Christian majority countries. India and Israel, far from being homogenous anachronisms are tiny drops of diversity in a world that is increasingly homogenous. Hindu nationalism is not a result of a British imperialism anymore than Zionism is, both grew out of a long suppressed and colonized peoples’ dreams for their own country free from foreign rule. Those who want to expose themselves to Hindu nationalism and its true underpinnings should pick up Lal K. Advani’s My Country My Life. Absent of that people should at least give Hinduism, like Judaism, the benefit of the doubt, they are based on real religions and real texts, not myths conjured up in the 19th century.
Alastair Crooke, MI6 and the hatred of the West
May 4, 2009
Seth J. Frantzman
It is not easy to find information on Alistair Crooke, not to be confused by Alistair Cooke, a well known journalist who died in 2004. He was born in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), studied in Switzerland and at St. Andrew’s in Scotland and received a degree in Economics. What is known is that he worked for MI6, the U.K’s secret intelligence service for more than 30 years. As an agent in the 1980s he worked in Pakistan, running guns to the Mujahadin fighting the Soviets. He was thus part of Charlie Wilson’s ‘war’ in which the U.S government helped fund Islamism’s war against Communism.
According to one biography he then became a “security advisor to Javier Solana, the European Union High Representative and Head of Foreign and Security Policy. He played a role in the negotiations to end the Siege of the Church of the Nativity in 2002 and helped facilitate the Palestinian cease-fires of 2002 and 2003. He also was a staff member of the Mitchell Committee that enquired into the causes of the Intifada.” It is not clear when he left MI6, or if he ever left, but it is clear that the British government ended all official employment contracts with him in 2003 in response to fears that he had become completely partial to Islamism.
Now this confidant of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, former spiritual leader of Hamas, Yasser Arafat and Nasrallah, lives in Beirut and has penned a book entitled Resistance: The Essence of the Islamist Revolution. In this tome he argues that Islamism is merely “resisting” the West’s “market-based definition of the individual and society.” He has gone one step further than merely writing a book to bring the ideas of Islamism to the West, he has started a ‘Conflicts Forum’ in 2004 in Beirut. The Forum supposedly includes “former spies, diplomats and peace activists.” Mark Perry, a military intelligence and foreign affairs analyst, is the co-director of the forum. Crooke has made it his mission to spread the bible of Islamism in a language the West can understand. He wants to “valorize what they are saying.” He also wants to challenge “western misconceptions.” For Crooke the West’s values are no longer interesting but Islam is being revived and is “in the ascendant.” In addition the Economist’s review of his book accuses him of “1960s campus radicalism” and that he believes “the force used by Islamist movements is to be understood as an act of spiritual, cultural and social resistance.” Crooke believes that Hezbollah’s television station, Al-Manar is part of a “resistance media.”
Crooke’s hatred of the West is merely the latest manifestation of self-hatred of some British elites who have worked in British intelligence in the Middle East. Harry St. John Philby was the first. A radical socialist he joined the Indian Civil Service in 1907. Like Crooke he was not born in the U.K but rather in Sri Lanka and educated at Trinity College at Cambridge. He became an adherent and follower of the Saudi warlord Ibn Saud and Wahhabism and helped provide advice on the best way for this radical Arab family to take over what is now Saudi Arabia. He opposed British entry into the Second World War. He became a dutiful ally of Arab nationalism as well, supporting Nasser against his own country and making anti-Semitic statements.
But it was his son Kim Philby and the ‘Cambridge Five’, along with Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross. After working for MI6 and becoming a double agent for the Soviets he ended up in Beirut like Crooke. In Beirut he was unmasked for a second time (the first time prominent people had defended his good name) as a Soviet agent. But during the same time he became an adherent of Arab nationalism and wrote biased articles for the Economist as their correspondent. When he was finally whisked away to the Communist utopia he had so loved it didn’t turn out as he expected. He became an alcoholic and the Communists gave him little honour.
The other Cambridge Five didn’t have life as expected in the USSR either. One died of alcoholism and the other’s wife left him. The utopia was not as expected. One who had enjoyed the freedom of being an open homosexual in upper class British society found that Socialism in action didn’t cater to his sexual orientation as he had expected.
The modern self-hatred of Alistair Crooke and his career for MI6 should not be such a surprise. His loyalty to Islamism mirrors the former loyalties of the Cambridge Five to Communism and Harry St. John Philby’s earlier loyalty to Wahhabism and Arab nationalism. Why does MI6 produce so many people with such a virulent hatred for the West? It is not clear but whatever the problem it is clear that hatred for the West has a long and gloried tradition among certain sectors of the British intelligence community and their prestigious pedigrees. This stretches back to Sir Oswald Mosley’s Nazi-sympathizing right down to the present.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
