Terra Incognita
Issue 89
“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
June 23, 2009
4) A white woman in Dubai: Another European woman has run afoul of some savage law in some savage country which was once considered her private sexual dreamworld-playground. Now she is whining that her children, which are “her world”, are being taken away from her by her once exotic Arabian lover. But if she cared about those children so much then why did she raise them in a country where she was not aware of the law and why did she give them foreign names?
A white woman in Dubai
Seth Frantzman
June 2nd, 2009
UK national Marnie Pierce was living the good life. She was travelling the world, getting to know the other. She married an ‘exotic’ Egyptian man named Ihab El Labban. She had three children and like a good western white woman she made sure to name them Islamic names, Ziad and Latih, not names evoking her own background. But then one day the romantic world of the white woman came crashing down.
Police came bursting into her villa in Dubai with her estranged Husband. Finding her having lunch with a male British friend they arrested her for adultery in March of 2008. In November she was convicted of adultery and sentenced to 6 months in prison. Her British passport was confiscated. And then the whining began. Pierce first didn’t show up when she was supposed to go to jail. Like a spoiled child she went into hiding and began telling her ‘story’ to the media which was all to happy to report on this story of “British national arrested for adultery.”
Finally in February of 2009 she turned herself in. The whining never stopped. She cried and cried about “never seeing my children again.” She spoke of those typical things that people in the West speak of when things go wrong; “desperation, loss, fear and numbness.” She said before entering prison and after handing her children over to her estranged husband “my children are devastated. I just want my life back. I don’t deserve this…my children will be out of here within hours of me being taken to jail and then I will never see them again. They are my world.”
But were they her world? They didn’t live in her world of western values. They were named Ziad and Litah and they were good pious Muslims. They spoke good Arabic, not English. They learned Koran at school. Mommy decided she wanted the romantic multi-cultural life of the east and she wanted her western values to follow her their. But there must be no sympathy for the Pierce’s of the world. There are legions of them all seemingly stemming from that “Not without my daughter” film. But that case to was entirely the fault of the naïve western woman acting on her obsession with exoticism and sex over love of her own culture and moving to a foreign country and then expecting to not have to obey its laws. It is a never ending list of these cry stories by westerners in these places. Whether it was the Japanese-Iranian journalist imprisoned in Iran for “spying” whose case became another cause célèbre or another case of two tourists in Dubai facing prison for moral indecency by having sex on a beach. It is always the same: Westerner goes abroad, loves other culture, suffers hardship due to foreign culture, whines to western press. But the Pierces of the world deserve prison. They choose to adopt the life of Islam, to marry Arabs, to name their children Arab names, in many cases to convert to Islam, to reside in foreign countries and then they thought that at a moments notice those country’s laws shouldn’t apply to them. There is nothing more pleasing that hearing of the terrors these people face who have abandoned their culture and fathered untold numbers of children in foreign countries. When they lived in the West they never wanted children but suddenly transported to some exotic land they want to cover up the bodies they once used to gain money in porn on attention on the dance floor, and they suddenly want lots of children just so long as those children will not speak their language, not have names like theirs and not have anything to do with their culture.
Send them to prison. Take their children from them. If the children were really the “world” of Mrs. Pierce (nay Fatima el Labban) then she wouldn’t have raised them in a hateful country like Dubai. She gave up her country long ago. There should be no sympathy for her. She didn’t want the West or its values, she spurned it and found the ‘other’ exotic. So, Mrs Pierce you got the other. Now live with it. Go to prison. Lose your children. You never deserved them in the first place since you couldn’t even give one of them an English sounding name.
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Terra Incognita 89 part 3 Educating Evil
Terra Incognita
Issue 89
“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
June 23, 2009
3) Educating evil: The West’s role in educating the elites of barbaric regimes: It turns out the up and coming wet-behind-the-ears dictator of North Korea, the younger son of Kim Il Song, was educated at a Western University. Should it be any surprise that a Western Liberal arts education has helped shepherd along another less than liberal dictator. The Western academy certainly did wonders for Syria and Cambodia and other countries run by people educated at the best institutions in Europe and the U.S. The failure is entirely due to the University which coddles other cultures and in fact encourages these beasts to act out their evil fantasies.
Educating evil: The West’s role in educating the elites of barbaric regimes
Seth J. Frantzman
June 2nd, 2009
Among the recent tidbits of news items regarding North Korea’s warmongering was the information that the youngest son of Kim Jung Il, the current dictator, is next in line to rule the country. But that is not what was interesting. What is important is that the son was educated in Europe, in Switzerland. He is not the first dictator educated in Europe. Most dictators and their children, such as the current ruler of Syria, were educated at European universities. Europeans welcome these descendants of evil with open arms. Not only that but European universities pride themselves in educating these children.
What we learn from these examples is the degree to which the West’s priding itself on providing a ‘liberal-arts’ education where values such as human rights and democracy are inculcated is a myth. The values cultivated at the universities in the West are not the values of the West. Instead the values these children learn are praise for communism, Islamism and terrorism. These little tikes from savage barbaric countries that are in the midst of genocides learn that their culture should be praised. They learn that terrorism is romantic when they see the legions of Europeans wandering about with Khaffiyahs. They learn that fundamentalist religion in the form of Islam is exotic and romantic. No where do they learn anything about democracy or human rights. No where do they learn any values that supposedly underpin the West. Thus the greatest cultural and intellectual export of the West is dictatorship. This is inadvertent. It is not that the West encourages dictatorship, but simply that the west does not export its values at its institutions of higher learning, instead the West praises endlessly the values of the other.
In encouraging diversity the West never bothers to educate these children of hate in the values of the West. In contrast if Western students study in these countries, which they do from time to time on foreign exchange programs in places like Cairo, they are inculcated with the values of dictatorship, love for the leader and religion. And being good Western students, always wanting to learn about the other, they become lock step soldiers praising the leader, bowing down to religion and never questioning.
The West and its educational institutions are complete failures, embarrassments to the values that the West supposedly includes. There is no democracy at the University. There are no Human rights. There is no free speech. Western students believe they have free speech because of their khaffiyah wearing terror supporting and Islam study sessions but in reality they aren’t exercising free speech but merely replicating the dictatorial policies of foreign regimes. The University in the West is an extension of the dictatorships of the East.
The Universities of the West haven’t come up with one new idea in the last 50 years, they rest on their laurels with stale and un-interesting academics and scholars who live in a past when the university produced ideas and innovation. The ability of the sons of dictators to come and go at the Western University and take away nothing from the experience is merely one more illustration of the complete bankruptcy of the University system.
Issue 89
“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
June 23, 2009
3) Educating evil: The West’s role in educating the elites of barbaric regimes: It turns out the up and coming wet-behind-the-ears dictator of North Korea, the younger son of Kim Il Song, was educated at a Western University. Should it be any surprise that a Western Liberal arts education has helped shepherd along another less than liberal dictator. The Western academy certainly did wonders for Syria and Cambodia and other countries run by people educated at the best institutions in Europe and the U.S. The failure is entirely due to the University which coddles other cultures and in fact encourages these beasts to act out their evil fantasies.
Educating evil: The West’s role in educating the elites of barbaric regimes
Seth J. Frantzman
June 2nd, 2009
Among the recent tidbits of news items regarding North Korea’s warmongering was the information that the youngest son of Kim Jung Il, the current dictator, is next in line to rule the country. But that is not what was interesting. What is important is that the son was educated in Europe, in Switzerland. He is not the first dictator educated in Europe. Most dictators and their children, such as the current ruler of Syria, were educated at European universities. Europeans welcome these descendants of evil with open arms. Not only that but European universities pride themselves in educating these children.
What we learn from these examples is the degree to which the West’s priding itself on providing a ‘liberal-arts’ education where values such as human rights and democracy are inculcated is a myth. The values cultivated at the universities in the West are not the values of the West. Instead the values these children learn are praise for communism, Islamism and terrorism. These little tikes from savage barbaric countries that are in the midst of genocides learn that their culture should be praised. They learn that terrorism is romantic when they see the legions of Europeans wandering about with Khaffiyahs. They learn that fundamentalist religion in the form of Islam is exotic and romantic. No where do they learn anything about democracy or human rights. No where do they learn any values that supposedly underpin the West. Thus the greatest cultural and intellectual export of the West is dictatorship. This is inadvertent. It is not that the West encourages dictatorship, but simply that the west does not export its values at its institutions of higher learning, instead the West praises endlessly the values of the other.
In encouraging diversity the West never bothers to educate these children of hate in the values of the West. In contrast if Western students study in these countries, which they do from time to time on foreign exchange programs in places like Cairo, they are inculcated with the values of dictatorship, love for the leader and religion. And being good Western students, always wanting to learn about the other, they become lock step soldiers praising the leader, bowing down to religion and never questioning.
The West and its educational institutions are complete failures, embarrassments to the values that the West supposedly includes. There is no democracy at the University. There are no Human rights. There is no free speech. Western students believe they have free speech because of their khaffiyah wearing terror supporting and Islam study sessions but in reality they aren’t exercising free speech but merely replicating the dictatorial policies of foreign regimes. The University in the West is an extension of the dictatorships of the East.
The Universities of the West haven’t come up with one new idea in the last 50 years, they rest on their laurels with stale and un-interesting academics and scholars who live in a past when the university produced ideas and innovation. The ability of the sons of dictators to come and go at the Western University and take away nothing from the experience is merely one more illustration of the complete bankruptcy of the University system.
Terra Incognita 89 part 2 Obama and the car industry
Terra Incognita
Issue 89
“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
June 23, 2009
2) Obama is remaking U.S industry much the same way Bush ‘remade’ Iraq: Bush remade Iraq, sort of. Obama is attempting to bring the same incompetence to the U.S car industry by appointing twenty-five year old college graduates who never worked and have no knowledge of cars to reorganize it. The U.S automobile industry will end up no better in six years than Iraq has ended up six years after the invasion.
Obama is remaking U.S industry much the same way Bush ‘remade’ Iraq
Seth J. Frantzman
June 1, 2009
The radical prescription being meted out to the U.S automotive industry by the Obama administration is being managed with about the same level of competence as the U.S managed the ‘rebuilding’ of Iraq between 2003 and 2005. For those that recall what happened in Iraq in those years it was one giant piece of incompetence after another. It began with sending legions of youthful idealistic wet-behind-the-ears Americans to Iraq to set up stock exchanges and write constitutions. Alongside this was a massive level of outsourcing, from mercenaries to food, to companies. Then there was a huge level of wasteful spending running into the billions of dollars. The incompetence went further with revelations of hundreds of thousands of missing rifles and stacks of hundred dollar bills being doled out to less than reliable locals.
Now the same incompetence is being directed at the U.S auto industry. An article in the New York Times on June 1st 2009 revealed that a 31 year old graduate student with no background in economics, no job experience and no previous interest in the auto industry has been given the job of dismantling GM and Chrysler. This is Brian Deese, a special assistant to the President on economic policy.
Alongside the incompetence is the giving away of the auto industry to the very people who drove it into bankruptcy in the first place: the unions. In addition Chrysler has been sold to Fiat, a foreign company, while Canada will receive part of GM. So much for helping American workers and so much for U.S tax-dollars going to Americans.. The destruction of share holder equity and bondholder investments should send shockwaves through the U.S financial industry. If those who invest in companies can suddenly be deprived of their investments by the federal government so easily so that companies can be given away to those such as the United Auto Workers who donate to the political party of the president there seems to be something wrong.
The proposed settlement for GM looks something like this: the U.S government which has invested only 13 billion in the company and plans to invest a further 30-60 billion. For this the government will receive a majority stake, some 60% of the new company. Bondholders, owed 27 billion, will receive only 10%. The UAW which is owed some 20 billion in pension plan payments will receive 12%. The Canadian government which has invested almost nothing will also get 12%. The irony of all this is that the companies themselves allowed the government to get its claws into them by begging for the bailout. Had the automotive companies just declared bankruptcy in 2008 and never asked for a bailout then the Bondholders, who actually invested in the company over many years, would have been given a fare shake. But by letting the government in the companies are now being turned over to their unions, which never invested a cent in them.
It is also the fault of the former CEOs of Chrysler and GM. They were the ones who drove to Washington in several badly managed stunts to beg for bailout money. It is they who didn’t plan for the future, stopped innovating and drove their countries into the arms of the government. It is they who fired 90% of the GM’s workers over the last few decades, dismantling a workforce once half a million strong. It is they who destroyed communities across America by closing manufacturing plants and moving overseas. It is ironic that they wanted the taxpayers to bail them out when it is they who have ruined the lives of so many taxpayers. But with the government run bankruptcy of GM we are witnessing the final destruction of American industry. The ‘arsenal of democracy’, those great automotive plants that were converted to churn out bombers and weapons during the Second World War are being closed, if they already haven’t been. Soon there will be very little manufacturing industry in the U.S. This is a dangerous precedent. America is no longer an economic powerhouse built on a solid foundation. The government run dismantling of GM will turn out no better than the government run attempt to rebuild Iraq.
Issue 89
“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
June 23, 2009
2) Obama is remaking U.S industry much the same way Bush ‘remade’ Iraq: Bush remade Iraq, sort of. Obama is attempting to bring the same incompetence to the U.S car industry by appointing twenty-five year old college graduates who never worked and have no knowledge of cars to reorganize it. The U.S automobile industry will end up no better in six years than Iraq has ended up six years after the invasion.
Obama is remaking U.S industry much the same way Bush ‘remade’ Iraq
Seth J. Frantzman
June 1, 2009
The radical prescription being meted out to the U.S automotive industry by the Obama administration is being managed with about the same level of competence as the U.S managed the ‘rebuilding’ of Iraq between 2003 and 2005. For those that recall what happened in Iraq in those years it was one giant piece of incompetence after another. It began with sending legions of youthful idealistic wet-behind-the-ears Americans to Iraq to set up stock exchanges and write constitutions. Alongside this was a massive level of outsourcing, from mercenaries to food, to companies. Then there was a huge level of wasteful spending running into the billions of dollars. The incompetence went further with revelations of hundreds of thousands of missing rifles and stacks of hundred dollar bills being doled out to less than reliable locals.
Now the same incompetence is being directed at the U.S auto industry. An article in the New York Times on June 1st 2009 revealed that a 31 year old graduate student with no background in economics, no job experience and no previous interest in the auto industry has been given the job of dismantling GM and Chrysler. This is Brian Deese, a special assistant to the President on economic policy.
Alongside the incompetence is the giving away of the auto industry to the very people who drove it into bankruptcy in the first place: the unions. In addition Chrysler has been sold to Fiat, a foreign company, while Canada will receive part of GM. So much for helping American workers and so much for U.S tax-dollars going to Americans.. The destruction of share holder equity and bondholder investments should send shockwaves through the U.S financial industry. If those who invest in companies can suddenly be deprived of their investments by the federal government so easily so that companies can be given away to those such as the United Auto Workers who donate to the political party of the president there seems to be something wrong.
The proposed settlement for GM looks something like this: the U.S government which has invested only 13 billion in the company and plans to invest a further 30-60 billion. For this the government will receive a majority stake, some 60% of the new company. Bondholders, owed 27 billion, will receive only 10%. The UAW which is owed some 20 billion in pension plan payments will receive 12%. The Canadian government which has invested almost nothing will also get 12%. The irony of all this is that the companies themselves allowed the government to get its claws into them by begging for the bailout. Had the automotive companies just declared bankruptcy in 2008 and never asked for a bailout then the Bondholders, who actually invested in the company over many years, would have been given a fare shake. But by letting the government in the companies are now being turned over to their unions, which never invested a cent in them.
It is also the fault of the former CEOs of Chrysler and GM. They were the ones who drove to Washington in several badly managed stunts to beg for bailout money. It is they who didn’t plan for the future, stopped innovating and drove their countries into the arms of the government. It is they who fired 90% of the GM’s workers over the last few decades, dismantling a workforce once half a million strong. It is they who destroyed communities across America by closing manufacturing plants and moving overseas. It is ironic that they wanted the taxpayers to bail them out when it is they who have ruined the lives of so many taxpayers. But with the government run bankruptcy of GM we are witnessing the final destruction of American industry. The ‘arsenal of democracy’, those great automotive plants that were converted to churn out bombers and weapons during the Second World War are being closed, if they already haven’t been. Soon there will be very little manufacturing industry in the U.S. This is a dangerous precedent. America is no longer an economic powerhouse built on a solid foundation. The government run dismantling of GM will turn out no better than the government run attempt to rebuild Iraq.
Terra Incognita 89 Part anti-fascism
Terra Incognita
Issue 89
“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
June 23, 2009
1) Why is anti-fascism always so fascist: The victory of the British National Party in a few constituencies in England and its gaining of a few seats in the EU parliament brought on semi-riots by leftists. The BNP, widely regarded as anti-semitic by the same anti-semitic British left which sprays swastikas on synagogues and supports Hamas, has become fascist much the way all anti-fascism has become fascist and much the same way anti-racism is mostly racist. Perhaps this riddle could be understood if we simply recalled that before the rise of fascism and its anti-semitism it was the left, including old Karl Marx himself, in Europe that disseminated most of the rabid anti-semitic material.
Why is anti-fascism always so fascist
Seth J. Frantzman
June 8th, 2009
On June 7th when it was clear the BNP (British National Party) would win two seats in the European parliament some of its leaders were assaulted and their cars destroyed. The slogan of those who bashed the cars was “stop fascism” and when interviewed the next day the “anti-fascism” spokesmen spoke about it as a “nazi party”. He said the word “nazi” at least 10 times in a short two minute interview. But the scenes of the “anti-fascists” bashing the cars of fascists and the mean angry expressions on the faces of the anti-fascists the next day seemed to evoke just that, fascism. So why is anti-fascism and anti-racism always so fascist and racist?
It is often common that in the name of something like ‘anti-racism’ or ‘anti-nazism’ that people become hateful, violent and then imitate the very thing they supposedly oppose. Why? Is it because people are naturally violent and those who join leftist ‘anti-fascist’ protests would just as likely join the BNP? Or is it that this is the only way to oppose racism and ‘fascism’, by assaulting and beating it down? Oddly those who seem willing to use violence to oppose ‘fascism’ don’t think that we should use terrorism to oppose terrorists. But isn’t that the logical thing from their point of view. If, in order to stop fascism, we must become fascist then in order to stop terrorism shouldn’t we become terrorists?
The problem in the end is that those who are called fascists are so rarely fascist. The question is, when will the first lynching occur under the auspices of ‘anti-fascism’? Or is it already occurring? During the Second Gaza War Jewish synagogues were bombed, graves disgraced, holocaust memorials smashed and all with slogans like “Jews are Nazis” and “stop the Holocaust in Gaza” and “stop the hate.” That which the Nazis were apparently unable to accomplish, the destruction of all the Jewish graveyards will be accomplished under the guise of ‘stopping the Holocaust’ supposedly carried out by Israel. There is nothing more beautiful to think of as the masked leftist protestor hurling a firebomb at a synagogue while shouting “stop the hate.” There is nothing more sweet than in 2003 when a crowd of ‘anti-racism’ leftists assaulted Jewish students on the streets of Paris. There is nothing more wonderful than that at a recent Taikwando competition in Sweden where a 15 year old Israeli was to participate that leftists and Muslims sent death threats to the boy. Death threats. All in the name of ‘stopping the hate.’
The success of the European far-right is not troubling, on the contrary it is what happens when the left in Europe has already become fascist, when protest tourism overtakes tourism as what college students do and when bashing synagogue windows is as big a past time as going to a beer bash. The left was always fascist. In the 1930s when the victory of the right, the old fascists, finally occurred it only happened after a decade of left wing fascism. It took the deaths of tens of thousands of “fat cat capitalists” and priests in Spain before Franco vanquished the socialist-communist threat to that country. Right wing fascism was primarily a response and an outcome of left wing extremism and lawlessness which created a power vacume where the militant right could step in. The defeat of the right in Europe in 1945 obscured the fact that violence had been the realm of both political factions. But the public was deluded afterword to believe that there was only one violent side, a nazi-fascist side, that was opposed by a good leftist partisan side. People often forget that while it was the socialists in French North Africa who disseminated most anti-semitic material before 1940, that it was the fascist Italian troops who saved most of the Jews of Libya, Italy, southern France and Yugoslavia.
Issue 89
“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
June 23, 2009
1) Why is anti-fascism always so fascist: The victory of the British National Party in a few constituencies in England and its gaining of a few seats in the EU parliament brought on semi-riots by leftists. The BNP, widely regarded as anti-semitic by the same anti-semitic British left which sprays swastikas on synagogues and supports Hamas, has become fascist much the way all anti-fascism has become fascist and much the same way anti-racism is mostly racist. Perhaps this riddle could be understood if we simply recalled that before the rise of fascism and its anti-semitism it was the left, including old Karl Marx himself, in Europe that disseminated most of the rabid anti-semitic material.
Why is anti-fascism always so fascist
Seth J. Frantzman
June 8th, 2009
On June 7th when it was clear the BNP (British National Party) would win two seats in the European parliament some of its leaders were assaulted and their cars destroyed. The slogan of those who bashed the cars was “stop fascism” and when interviewed the next day the “anti-fascism” spokesmen spoke about it as a “nazi party”. He said the word “nazi” at least 10 times in a short two minute interview. But the scenes of the “anti-fascists” bashing the cars of fascists and the mean angry expressions on the faces of the anti-fascists the next day seemed to evoke just that, fascism. So why is anti-fascism and anti-racism always so fascist and racist?
It is often common that in the name of something like ‘anti-racism’ or ‘anti-nazism’ that people become hateful, violent and then imitate the very thing they supposedly oppose. Why? Is it because people are naturally violent and those who join leftist ‘anti-fascist’ protests would just as likely join the BNP? Or is it that this is the only way to oppose racism and ‘fascism’, by assaulting and beating it down? Oddly those who seem willing to use violence to oppose ‘fascism’ don’t think that we should use terrorism to oppose terrorists. But isn’t that the logical thing from their point of view. If, in order to stop fascism, we must become fascist then in order to stop terrorism shouldn’t we become terrorists?
The problem in the end is that those who are called fascists are so rarely fascist. The question is, when will the first lynching occur under the auspices of ‘anti-fascism’? Or is it already occurring? During the Second Gaza War Jewish synagogues were bombed, graves disgraced, holocaust memorials smashed and all with slogans like “Jews are Nazis” and “stop the Holocaust in Gaza” and “stop the hate.” That which the Nazis were apparently unable to accomplish, the destruction of all the Jewish graveyards will be accomplished under the guise of ‘stopping the Holocaust’ supposedly carried out by Israel. There is nothing more beautiful to think of as the masked leftist protestor hurling a firebomb at a synagogue while shouting “stop the hate.” There is nothing more sweet than in 2003 when a crowd of ‘anti-racism’ leftists assaulted Jewish students on the streets of Paris. There is nothing more wonderful than that at a recent Taikwando competition in Sweden where a 15 year old Israeli was to participate that leftists and Muslims sent death threats to the boy. Death threats. All in the name of ‘stopping the hate.’
The success of the European far-right is not troubling, on the contrary it is what happens when the left in Europe has already become fascist, when protest tourism overtakes tourism as what college students do and when bashing synagogue windows is as big a past time as going to a beer bash. The left was always fascist. In the 1930s when the victory of the right, the old fascists, finally occurred it only happened after a decade of left wing fascism. It took the deaths of tens of thousands of “fat cat capitalists” and priests in Spain before Franco vanquished the socialist-communist threat to that country. Right wing fascism was primarily a response and an outcome of left wing extremism and lawlessness which created a power vacume where the militant right could step in. The defeat of the right in Europe in 1945 obscured the fact that violence had been the realm of both political factions. But the public was deluded afterword to believe that there was only one violent side, a nazi-fascist side, that was opposed by a good leftist partisan side. People often forget that while it was the socialists in French North Africa who disseminated most anti-semitic material before 1940, that it was the fascist Italian troops who saved most of the Jews of Libya, Italy, southern France and Yugoslavia.
Sunday, June 7, 2009
Terra Incognita 88 Part 3 From Amos Elon to Uri Avnery
Terra Incognita
Issue 88
“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
June 4th, 2009
3) From Amos Elon to Uri Avnery: Odyssey of self-hate: The great Doyen of the intellectual leftist elite in Israel, Amos Elon, is dead. He died in Europe where he was living in exile. But he is not the only member of Israel’s elite living physically or spiritually in exile. Much of the left, which views itself as European and was in fact born in Europe, is in intellectual exile from a country they no longer understand.
From Amos Elon to Uri Avnery: Odyssey of self-hate
Seth J. Frantzman
May 26th, 2009
Amos Elon, doyen of the Ashkenazi elite in Israel, died on May 25th in Italy. Born in Vienna, he had arrived in Palestine at the age of 8 in 1933. In the 1990s he began to spend more and more time at an estate he had acquired in Tuscany and eventually described himself as being in “exile” there. It is there that he died in his homeland, Europe.
Elon represents an entire dialectic, a generation, a people. His people are the elite, those who came to Israel in the 1930s or are descended from them and who came to hate the country that welcomed them as exiles and provided them with jobs and which allowed to be stationed at the highest levels of society. Few of them ever had jobs. Consider the life and career of Uri Avnery (Born Helmut Ostermann). He came in 1933 as well at the age of ten. After a brief time working for the right wing Irgun and fighting in the War of Independence in 1948 he became editor of a tabloid and pornographic (it encouraged women to model for free nude and then published photos of them on its back cover) newspaper called Ha Olam HaZeh which passed itself off as countercultural. He became disillusioned with Israel, met Yasser Arafat in Beirut in 1980 and has for many years written for the anti-semitic website ‘Counterpunch’.
When one considers all of the people in Israel who are the most outspoken in their hatred of Israel they will find that every single one, without almost any exceptions, is wealthy, leftist, Ashkenazi and many of them were born in Europe and believe the current European cultural trends should be replicated in Israel and elsewhere. Consider just a few. Baruch Kimmerling: born in Rumania in 1939, came to Israel in 1952, worked his entire life in academics. Avraham Burg, born in Jerusalem’s elite Rehavia neighborhood to German Jews in 1955, worked his entire life in politics while residing in a former Arab village converted to Jewish kibbutz called Nataf and has declared that his cultural home is Europe where he spends much of his time. Zeev Sternhell, born in Poland in 1935 to a family of Ruthenian-German Jews he was baptized as a Catholic and received papers stating her was an “Aryan” during the second world war. Surviving the Holocaust he came to Israel in 1951 and after serving in the army spent his entire life in academics. In 2001 he encouraged Palestinian terrorists to murder impoverished Jews and Jewish settlers living outside the Green line. He lives in one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in Jerusalem. Professor Moshe Zimmerman, born in Jerusalem to German-Jews in 1943 he worked his entire life in academics studying Germany and compared Israel to Nazi Germany in 1995. Meron Benvenisti born in 1934 in Palestine elite Jerusalem neighborhood of Rehavia to a Greek Jewish father and German-Jewish mother he became a deputy mayor of Jerusalem for Arab affairs in 1971, did almost nothing for the East Jerusalem Arabs, but then became a supporter of a bi-national state for Israel. Gideon Levy was born in an elite neighborhood in Tel Aviv to European Jewish parents in 1955. Tom Segev, an anti-Israel writer and journalist, was born in 1945 to a European-Jewish family. Ilan Pappe, an anti-Israel historian who is in exile in Europe, was born in 1954 to a German-Jewish family in Haifa. Amira Hass, an extreme anti-Israel activist and writer, was born in an elite neighborhood in Jerusalem to German-Jewish Holocaust survivors.
There are some who hate Israel from within who have come from other communities. Abie Nathan was born in 1927 in Persia, lived in Bombay where he was educated by Jesuit priests, served in the RAF in 1944 and volunteered to fly in the IAF in 1948 settling in Israel after. He soon became an outspoken ‘peace activist’ using stunts such as airplanes and a boat to promote his views. He met with terrorists, especially Yasser Arafat. He died in 2008. Tali Fahima, daughter of Algerian Jews, was born in Israel in 1976 in Kiryat Gat, an impoverished development town. She became a supporter of terrorism, had an affair with Arab terrorist gang leader Zakaria Zubeidi and when he became more peaceful she called him a traitor to the Palestinian cause, having become more extreme than the Palestinians themselves.
What links those who hate Israel and yet suckle at its breasts, receiving government money for their activities, is their view that Jews belong elsewhere and that the natural state of the Jew is to be ensconced in Europe. Consider Mordechai Vanunu’s, the Israeli nuclear spy, born in Morocco in 1954, who immigrated in 1963 and became a spy against Israel in the 1980s. He declared that “We don't need a Jewish state. There needs to be a Palestinian state. Jews can, and have lived anywhere, so a Jewish State is not necessary.” Avraham Burg said “"to define the State of Israel as a Jewish state is the key to its end. A Jewish state is explosive. It's dynamite.”
What unites the hatred in these individuals is usually four things: Urban birth, Wealth, European identity and background and participation in the very “crimes” they decry. Thus many of them served in the Israeli army and even fought in its wars and live in the abandoned houses of Arabs. Yet while they preach for bi-nationalism and meet with terrorists few seem to have turned their palatial Arab homes in Katamon over to the former Arabs who once resided in them. Benvenisti actually had the chance to help the Arabs of east Jerusalem and did absolutely nothing for them. Avraham Burg, who has decided that Jews belong in Europe has not given his home in Nataf back to the former Arab residents (who incidentally were elite bourgeoisie like him, effendis in the time of the Turks).
There were actually four generations of elites who attempted to destroy Israel. There was the elite that was born in the 19th century, some of whome immigrated before the rise of Nazism. These were best known by membership in the bi-nationalist Brit Shalom movement. Judah Magnes (born 1877 in the U.S), Martin Buber (1978 born in Austria, moved to Palestine in 1938), Hugo Bergmann (German-Jewish born in Czech in 1883, moved to Palestine in 1920). The second group were those born in the 1920s and 1930s, served in Israel’s war of independence or in the army soon after it and became extreme anti-Israel activists in the wake of the Mizrahi immigration and the 1967 war. The third generation were born later after the war of independence and mostly worked at Haaretz or at the university becoming progressively more hateful as time went on and as the country they loved became flooded by those they couldn’t identify with such as Russians, Orthodox Jews and Ethiopians. The fourth generation is the one that exists today. One representative of this generation is Talia Raphael, an American-Jewish immigrant to Israel who describes herself as “little miss left wing”, lives in Tel Aviv, participates in the “Tel Avivi-Friday afternoon humus” who claims Israel “doesn’t need a Jewish majority to survive.” American Jews are disproportionately involved in this fourth generation of hate. They include people like ‘Rabbi’ Arik Asherman of Rabbis for Human Rights, born in Erie Pennsylvania in the 1970s who came to Israel to learn Arabic and live in the Arab village of Tamra before becoming a full time ‘human rights’ activist. He wrote recently that “We Israelis tend to believe that the laws that apply to the rest of the world don`t apply to us.” He is joined by another American-Jew, Jeff Halper, founder of the Israel Committee Against Home Demolitions. Eitan Bronstein, born in Argentina in 1960, immigrated to Israel and founded the organization Zochrot which is funded by the Mennonite church and which memorialized Palestinian villages. He believes Israel must take responsibility for the 1948 war, even though most of those living in the country have ancestors who, like Bornstein’s were not here at the time. In fact like so many of these type of fourth generation self-haters from the New World they move to a country and then demand that country’s people, many of whome are immigrants like them, take responsibility for something when in fact it was in their former new world inhabitations that genocides of natives took places that they could have taken responsibility for or founded organizations memorializing their former villages. Yehudit Keshet, founder of Machsom Watch, was born in Wales and came to Israel in 1978. Jessica Montell, director of B’Tselem a peace organization which she became director of after immigrating in 1995.
Israel’s four generations of self-haters mark for generations of colonialism, an attempt by outsiders and minorities to colonize Israel and wield it for their own desires. They also represent four generations of disillusionment, unattachment, unrootedness and the need to destroy what did not turn out the way they envisioned it. Why are they colonizers? They are colonizers because they came as immigrants or were born into elite parts of society and spend their lives supporting the terrorism that murders the poor among them. They seek to colonize Israel with European and foreign ideas. In many cases their hatred and subsequent exile represent an extreme-disillusionment with the way in which their adopted country turned out. Thus many of them came from non-Jewish majority countries and wanted from the first moment in Israel to transform it into a non-Jewish majority through bi-nationalism or other schemes. This is all they knew back home, being a minority voice, a supposedly moral voice, with no responsibility for their country’s actions because they were a minority who never voted for the party in power. Judah Magnes worked to limit Jewish immigration to Israel for instance. Uri Avnery wanted Israel to be part of a North African and Middle Eastern ‘Semitic confederation’. Within this confederation Jews would be precisely the same percentage that they had been in Germany before the war.
One thing that unites these people is an inability to understand the majority of the people in Israel. As Europeans they could never come to grips with the actual Jews who surrounded them. So they ensconced themselves in the former Arab elite neighborhoods or behind gates at Kibbutzim or gated communities, hiding from the majority, the Sephardim and Mizrahim and then the Russians and Ethiopians and others. Amos Elon admitted as much when he noted that the Israel of his youth was not the Israel of the 1980s. Suddenly it was flooded by dirty coloured people, what he might have called “niggers” in America. When the coloureds and the Russian Hordes came it was time for him to leave, to go back to Europe to a society that he felt at home in, to Tuscany where not a black or Slavic face can be found.
The irony of the hatred and disdain for the Arab Jews that these four generations of self-haters have is that they find actual Arabs romantic. In this they mimic the British colonial policies which heaped scorn on the Christian Arabs and Copts but found romance and exoticism among the Bedouin and elite Muslim families. These immigrants too found much in common with the Sunni Arab elite of the Holy Land. Some family members even married into these Muslim Arab families. Many of these elites purchased former Arab homes and decorated them with Arab styles. At the university and in their cultural activities they became lovers of Arab music, of the Oud and of Islamic architecture and art, a museum for which they established in Katamon. There was of course no museum for Jewish art and architecture. Graduations at the Hebrew University include Arab music, like graduations at Arab universities throughout the middle east. There is, of course, no Jewish music at one of the only Jewish universities in the world. But that was always the irony of these four generations.
In Katamonim, a poor area of Jerusalem, the Mizrahim who came from Morocco and elsewhere were settled originally in tents. The girls among them covered their hair modestly, much as Arab Muslim women do. But for the inhabitants of nearby Katamon whose palaces are perched on the hill above this area there was no romance for these people. These people were hired to clean up the trash and the toilets and sent home at night. Much as today’s Kibbutzim hire phillipinoes and Ethiopians and others to do their work and do their laundry, these immigrants were only valued for their backs, upon which, like donkeys, loads could be put. But the Arabs across the valley in Beit Safafa or in Abu Ghosh, or after 1967 in East Jerusalem, these were the exotic people. The Mizrahi music was considered savage. Over the years the tents of these immigrants became tenement houses. Housed in cramped apartments modeled on Soviet structures they were abandoned. Drafted to the army they were sent to the front and later when the terrorism came to Jerusalem they were on the front line once again on the buses being blown up. Their women’s headscarfs were stripped off, considered dirty and primitive they were ordered to become “new Jews” by the very people who were putting up Bedouin carpets and purchasing Arab dresses from the Shuk and considering such things ‘exotic’. Then scorn was heaped upon these Katamonim people and they were called colonizers and racists by yet another generation of Ashkenazi immigrants whose cultural center was Europe.
But the greatest insult came in 2009 when professor David Newman of Ben-Gurion University declared that many Israelis are “"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." Returning? Can those people in Katamonim “return” to Europe? That is certainly where Amira Hass and Sternhell and Kimmerling and Avnery and Elon can return to. That is where Burg is. Their ancestors were European and it is the only culture they understand. But can the Sasoons return to Europe? Can the Valeros? Can the Nahums? The Peretzs? The Naharis? The Barazanis?
The role of the four generations of hate in Israel is insidious. They came, they didn’t work, they hated, they left. But all the while they worked to make those who were not like them vanish. They worked hard to vanish the Mizrahim and Sephardim, sending them to development towns that they would never have to visit. Sending them to the borders to die in rocket fire and be murdered by terrorists. When the Russians and Ethiopians came they were pushed as far away from the center as possible. Send them to the desert or to the Galilee! Settle them next to the Arabs as a buffer. And they went. They went to Gilo and Nazareth Elite. They were crushed into tenements in Ramla and Lod and Acre. And all of it so that other people would not be exposed to them and so that when their were riots they could be called “Nazis” by German-Jews who should have had the responsibility to know what a nazi really was. People who had no experience of the Holocaust were condemned by peace activists such as Burg as “manipulating the Holocaust.” But who manipulated it, those Sephardim or the Ashkenazim who imagine that all of Israel is populated by Holocaust survivors and who speak of all the Jews “returning” to Europe.
Why does hate inflict primarily the Ashkenazi Jews and not other Jews? Why was it
European Jews who were saddled with such hate? Even among the Orthodox Jews the only ones who attend Holocaust denial conferences are members of Ashkenazi Hasidic groups. What went wrong in Europe that afflicted Jews there with extremism and self hate? A recent anti-Jewish riot at York University was led by none other than someone named Jesse Zimmerman, a Jew. Why? Why the hate? Why the self hate? Why the continuing need to tear down? Why the anger at the state? Why the strange unbalanced need to immigrate to a country only to hate it and protest against it and change its demographics so it resembles the former place of one’s birth. Why not just stay home? Why the hatred of dark skinned Arab speaking Jews and the exotic love and romance for dark skinned Arab speaking Muslims?
We may never know what went wrong in Europe. What disease was unleashed at some point in history that destroyed the souls of the Europeans and afflicts them with self hate, a disease that spreads even to any people who have contact with Europe, such as Jews and Hindus. A debilitating extremist disease of hatred and contradictions and hypocrisy. Unless the reason for the disease can be found the only savior of humanity will be in for the complete vanishing of Europeans and within those non-European states where certain classes and groups have been infected, the vanishing of that group. The group vanishes without help because it does not have children, the only logical conclusion it has is its realization that its hatred of the self means there is no need to perpetuate the self.
Issue 88
“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
June 4th, 2009
3) From Amos Elon to Uri Avnery: Odyssey of self-hate: The great Doyen of the intellectual leftist elite in Israel, Amos Elon, is dead. He died in Europe where he was living in exile. But he is not the only member of Israel’s elite living physically or spiritually in exile. Much of the left, which views itself as European and was in fact born in Europe, is in intellectual exile from a country they no longer understand.
From Amos Elon to Uri Avnery: Odyssey of self-hate
Seth J. Frantzman
May 26th, 2009
Amos Elon, doyen of the Ashkenazi elite in Israel, died on May 25th in Italy. Born in Vienna, he had arrived in Palestine at the age of 8 in 1933. In the 1990s he began to spend more and more time at an estate he had acquired in Tuscany and eventually described himself as being in “exile” there. It is there that he died in his homeland, Europe.
Elon represents an entire dialectic, a generation, a people. His people are the elite, those who came to Israel in the 1930s or are descended from them and who came to hate the country that welcomed them as exiles and provided them with jobs and which allowed to be stationed at the highest levels of society. Few of them ever had jobs. Consider the life and career of Uri Avnery (Born Helmut Ostermann). He came in 1933 as well at the age of ten. After a brief time working for the right wing Irgun and fighting in the War of Independence in 1948 he became editor of a tabloid and pornographic (it encouraged women to model for free nude and then published photos of them on its back cover) newspaper called Ha Olam HaZeh which passed itself off as countercultural. He became disillusioned with Israel, met Yasser Arafat in Beirut in 1980 and has for many years written for the anti-semitic website ‘Counterpunch’.
When one considers all of the people in Israel who are the most outspoken in their hatred of Israel they will find that every single one, without almost any exceptions, is wealthy, leftist, Ashkenazi and many of them were born in Europe and believe the current European cultural trends should be replicated in Israel and elsewhere. Consider just a few. Baruch Kimmerling: born in Rumania in 1939, came to Israel in 1952, worked his entire life in academics. Avraham Burg, born in Jerusalem’s elite Rehavia neighborhood to German Jews in 1955, worked his entire life in politics while residing in a former Arab village converted to Jewish kibbutz called Nataf and has declared that his cultural home is Europe where he spends much of his time. Zeev Sternhell, born in Poland in 1935 to a family of Ruthenian-German Jews he was baptized as a Catholic and received papers stating her was an “Aryan” during the second world war. Surviving the Holocaust he came to Israel in 1951 and after serving in the army spent his entire life in academics. In 2001 he encouraged Palestinian terrorists to murder impoverished Jews and Jewish settlers living outside the Green line. He lives in one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in Jerusalem. Professor Moshe Zimmerman, born in Jerusalem to German-Jews in 1943 he worked his entire life in academics studying Germany and compared Israel to Nazi Germany in 1995. Meron Benvenisti born in 1934 in Palestine elite Jerusalem neighborhood of Rehavia to a Greek Jewish father and German-Jewish mother he became a deputy mayor of Jerusalem for Arab affairs in 1971, did almost nothing for the East Jerusalem Arabs, but then became a supporter of a bi-national state for Israel. Gideon Levy was born in an elite neighborhood in Tel Aviv to European Jewish parents in 1955. Tom Segev, an anti-Israel writer and journalist, was born in 1945 to a European-Jewish family. Ilan Pappe, an anti-Israel historian who is in exile in Europe, was born in 1954 to a German-Jewish family in Haifa. Amira Hass, an extreme anti-Israel activist and writer, was born in an elite neighborhood in Jerusalem to German-Jewish Holocaust survivors.
There are some who hate Israel from within who have come from other communities. Abie Nathan was born in 1927 in Persia, lived in Bombay where he was educated by Jesuit priests, served in the RAF in 1944 and volunteered to fly in the IAF in 1948 settling in Israel after. He soon became an outspoken ‘peace activist’ using stunts such as airplanes and a boat to promote his views. He met with terrorists, especially Yasser Arafat. He died in 2008. Tali Fahima, daughter of Algerian Jews, was born in Israel in 1976 in Kiryat Gat, an impoverished development town. She became a supporter of terrorism, had an affair with Arab terrorist gang leader Zakaria Zubeidi and when he became more peaceful she called him a traitor to the Palestinian cause, having become more extreme than the Palestinians themselves.
What links those who hate Israel and yet suckle at its breasts, receiving government money for their activities, is their view that Jews belong elsewhere and that the natural state of the Jew is to be ensconced in Europe. Consider Mordechai Vanunu’s, the Israeli nuclear spy, born in Morocco in 1954, who immigrated in 1963 and became a spy against Israel in the 1980s. He declared that “We don't need a Jewish state. There needs to be a Palestinian state. Jews can, and have lived anywhere, so a Jewish State is not necessary.” Avraham Burg said “"to define the State of Israel as a Jewish state is the key to its end. A Jewish state is explosive. It's dynamite.”
What unites the hatred in these individuals is usually four things: Urban birth, Wealth, European identity and background and participation in the very “crimes” they decry. Thus many of them served in the Israeli army and even fought in its wars and live in the abandoned houses of Arabs. Yet while they preach for bi-nationalism and meet with terrorists few seem to have turned their palatial Arab homes in Katamon over to the former Arabs who once resided in them. Benvenisti actually had the chance to help the Arabs of east Jerusalem and did absolutely nothing for them. Avraham Burg, who has decided that Jews belong in Europe has not given his home in Nataf back to the former Arab residents (who incidentally were elite bourgeoisie like him, effendis in the time of the Turks).
There were actually four generations of elites who attempted to destroy Israel. There was the elite that was born in the 19th century, some of whome immigrated before the rise of Nazism. These were best known by membership in the bi-nationalist Brit Shalom movement. Judah Magnes (born 1877 in the U.S), Martin Buber (1978 born in Austria, moved to Palestine in 1938), Hugo Bergmann (German-Jewish born in Czech in 1883, moved to Palestine in 1920). The second group were those born in the 1920s and 1930s, served in Israel’s war of independence or in the army soon after it and became extreme anti-Israel activists in the wake of the Mizrahi immigration and the 1967 war. The third generation were born later after the war of independence and mostly worked at Haaretz or at the university becoming progressively more hateful as time went on and as the country they loved became flooded by those they couldn’t identify with such as Russians, Orthodox Jews and Ethiopians. The fourth generation is the one that exists today. One representative of this generation is Talia Raphael, an American-Jewish immigrant to Israel who describes herself as “little miss left wing”, lives in Tel Aviv, participates in the “Tel Avivi-Friday afternoon humus” who claims Israel “doesn’t need a Jewish majority to survive.” American Jews are disproportionately involved in this fourth generation of hate. They include people like ‘Rabbi’ Arik Asherman of Rabbis for Human Rights, born in Erie Pennsylvania in the 1970s who came to Israel to learn Arabic and live in the Arab village of Tamra before becoming a full time ‘human rights’ activist. He wrote recently that “We Israelis tend to believe that the laws that apply to the rest of the world don`t apply to us.” He is joined by another American-Jew, Jeff Halper, founder of the Israel Committee Against Home Demolitions. Eitan Bronstein, born in Argentina in 1960, immigrated to Israel and founded the organization Zochrot which is funded by the Mennonite church and which memorialized Palestinian villages. He believes Israel must take responsibility for the 1948 war, even though most of those living in the country have ancestors who, like Bornstein’s were not here at the time. In fact like so many of these type of fourth generation self-haters from the New World they move to a country and then demand that country’s people, many of whome are immigrants like them, take responsibility for something when in fact it was in their former new world inhabitations that genocides of natives took places that they could have taken responsibility for or founded organizations memorializing their former villages. Yehudit Keshet, founder of Machsom Watch, was born in Wales and came to Israel in 1978. Jessica Montell, director of B’Tselem a peace organization which she became director of after immigrating in 1995.
Israel’s four generations of self-haters mark for generations of colonialism, an attempt by outsiders and minorities to colonize Israel and wield it for their own desires. They also represent four generations of disillusionment, unattachment, unrootedness and the need to destroy what did not turn out the way they envisioned it. Why are they colonizers? They are colonizers because they came as immigrants or were born into elite parts of society and spend their lives supporting the terrorism that murders the poor among them. They seek to colonize Israel with European and foreign ideas. In many cases their hatred and subsequent exile represent an extreme-disillusionment with the way in which their adopted country turned out. Thus many of them came from non-Jewish majority countries and wanted from the first moment in Israel to transform it into a non-Jewish majority through bi-nationalism or other schemes. This is all they knew back home, being a minority voice, a supposedly moral voice, with no responsibility for their country’s actions because they were a minority who never voted for the party in power. Judah Magnes worked to limit Jewish immigration to Israel for instance. Uri Avnery wanted Israel to be part of a North African and Middle Eastern ‘Semitic confederation’. Within this confederation Jews would be precisely the same percentage that they had been in Germany before the war.
One thing that unites these people is an inability to understand the majority of the people in Israel. As Europeans they could never come to grips with the actual Jews who surrounded them. So they ensconced themselves in the former Arab elite neighborhoods or behind gates at Kibbutzim or gated communities, hiding from the majority, the Sephardim and Mizrahim and then the Russians and Ethiopians and others. Amos Elon admitted as much when he noted that the Israel of his youth was not the Israel of the 1980s. Suddenly it was flooded by dirty coloured people, what he might have called “niggers” in America. When the coloureds and the Russian Hordes came it was time for him to leave, to go back to Europe to a society that he felt at home in, to Tuscany where not a black or Slavic face can be found.
The irony of the hatred and disdain for the Arab Jews that these four generations of self-haters have is that they find actual Arabs romantic. In this they mimic the British colonial policies which heaped scorn on the Christian Arabs and Copts but found romance and exoticism among the Bedouin and elite Muslim families. These immigrants too found much in common with the Sunni Arab elite of the Holy Land. Some family members even married into these Muslim Arab families. Many of these elites purchased former Arab homes and decorated them with Arab styles. At the university and in their cultural activities they became lovers of Arab music, of the Oud and of Islamic architecture and art, a museum for which they established in Katamon. There was of course no museum for Jewish art and architecture. Graduations at the Hebrew University include Arab music, like graduations at Arab universities throughout the middle east. There is, of course, no Jewish music at one of the only Jewish universities in the world. But that was always the irony of these four generations.
In Katamonim, a poor area of Jerusalem, the Mizrahim who came from Morocco and elsewhere were settled originally in tents. The girls among them covered their hair modestly, much as Arab Muslim women do. But for the inhabitants of nearby Katamon whose palaces are perched on the hill above this area there was no romance for these people. These people were hired to clean up the trash and the toilets and sent home at night. Much as today’s Kibbutzim hire phillipinoes and Ethiopians and others to do their work and do their laundry, these immigrants were only valued for their backs, upon which, like donkeys, loads could be put. But the Arabs across the valley in Beit Safafa or in Abu Ghosh, or after 1967 in East Jerusalem, these were the exotic people. The Mizrahi music was considered savage. Over the years the tents of these immigrants became tenement houses. Housed in cramped apartments modeled on Soviet structures they were abandoned. Drafted to the army they were sent to the front and later when the terrorism came to Jerusalem they were on the front line once again on the buses being blown up. Their women’s headscarfs were stripped off, considered dirty and primitive they were ordered to become “new Jews” by the very people who were putting up Bedouin carpets and purchasing Arab dresses from the Shuk and considering such things ‘exotic’. Then scorn was heaped upon these Katamonim people and they were called colonizers and racists by yet another generation of Ashkenazi immigrants whose cultural center was Europe.
But the greatest insult came in 2009 when professor David Newman of Ben-Gurion University declared that many Israelis are “"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." Returning? Can those people in Katamonim “return” to Europe? That is certainly where Amira Hass and Sternhell and Kimmerling and Avnery and Elon can return to. That is where Burg is. Their ancestors were European and it is the only culture they understand. But can the Sasoons return to Europe? Can the Valeros? Can the Nahums? The Peretzs? The Naharis? The Barazanis?
The role of the four generations of hate in Israel is insidious. They came, they didn’t work, they hated, they left. But all the while they worked to make those who were not like them vanish. They worked hard to vanish the Mizrahim and Sephardim, sending them to development towns that they would never have to visit. Sending them to the borders to die in rocket fire and be murdered by terrorists. When the Russians and Ethiopians came they were pushed as far away from the center as possible. Send them to the desert or to the Galilee! Settle them next to the Arabs as a buffer. And they went. They went to Gilo and Nazareth Elite. They were crushed into tenements in Ramla and Lod and Acre. And all of it so that other people would not be exposed to them and so that when their were riots they could be called “Nazis” by German-Jews who should have had the responsibility to know what a nazi really was. People who had no experience of the Holocaust were condemned by peace activists such as Burg as “manipulating the Holocaust.” But who manipulated it, those Sephardim or the Ashkenazim who imagine that all of Israel is populated by Holocaust survivors and who speak of all the Jews “returning” to Europe.
Why does hate inflict primarily the Ashkenazi Jews and not other Jews? Why was it
European Jews who were saddled with such hate? Even among the Orthodox Jews the only ones who attend Holocaust denial conferences are members of Ashkenazi Hasidic groups. What went wrong in Europe that afflicted Jews there with extremism and self hate? A recent anti-Jewish riot at York University was led by none other than someone named Jesse Zimmerman, a Jew. Why? Why the hate? Why the self hate? Why the continuing need to tear down? Why the anger at the state? Why the strange unbalanced need to immigrate to a country only to hate it and protest against it and change its demographics so it resembles the former place of one’s birth. Why not just stay home? Why the hatred of dark skinned Arab speaking Jews and the exotic love and romance for dark skinned Arab speaking Muslims?
We may never know what went wrong in Europe. What disease was unleashed at some point in history that destroyed the souls of the Europeans and afflicts them with self hate, a disease that spreads even to any people who have contact with Europe, such as Jews and Hindus. A debilitating extremist disease of hatred and contradictions and hypocrisy. Unless the reason for the disease can be found the only savior of humanity will be in for the complete vanishing of Europeans and within those non-European states where certain classes and groups have been infected, the vanishing of that group. The group vanishes without help because it does not have children, the only logical conclusion it has is its realization that its hatred of the self means there is no need to perpetuate the self.
Terra Incognita 88 Part 2: The Media's recent lies
Terra Incognita
Issue 88
“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
June 4th, 2009
2) Chronicles of Hate and coverup: Norman Rose, Egypt, Sudan and Rueters: A few observations of the world we live in including a new book on the Palestine Mandate, a documentary of Sudan and a Rueters coverup of the Armenian and Greek genocides in Turkey.
Chronicles of Hate and coverup: Norman Rose, Egypt, Sudan and Rueters
May 31, 2009
Eth J. Frantzman
On May 28th, Reuters reported that “Turkey, which historically has poor relations with Armenia, said in April it was close to establishing diplomatic relations after it closed its border with Armenia in 1993. Turkey and Armenia trace their own dispute back to the First World War killing of Armenians by Ottoman Turks. Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan on Saturday criticized state policies that led to the expulsion of tens of thousands of Christian ethnic Greeks in the 20th century as ‘fascist.’” This massive distortion of history is typical of the wire agencies such as the Associated Press and Reuters which frequently rely on local ‘journalists’ for their wire reports. Let us count the ways Reuters got its history wrong. To claim that the dispute between Armenia and Turkey is merely about the “killing of Armenians by Ottoman Turks” would be akin to say that Israeli-German relations were only about the “killing of Jews by Nazi Germans.” There is, in the sentence, no description of what killing, not even the word “massacre” is used, let alone genocide. 1.2 million Armenians were killed between 1915 and 1920 by the Ottoman Turkish government. Is that just some “killing.” And of the Greeks it was not “tens of thousands” but also over a million, including not just Greeks but also Assyrians and the Greeks known as Pontic Greeks. But is it a surprise that one of the West’s major wire services should cover up the 20th century’s first genocide? After all, how have we, the ‘human rights generation’ done regarding the 21st century’s first genocide in Sudan?
This is the generation of ‘human rights’. Everyone is a supporter of this ridiculous value. Who can be against ‘human rights’? But how are those rights doing? Do humans have more rights now than they did 100 years ago. We like to pat ourselves on the back and claim they do. We have conferences and committees and watch groups and activists and legions of volunteers that talk a lot about human rights. But this is also the generation that talks a lot about genocide and yet it is the era where genocides happens more often than in any other generation. Between Rwanda and Darfur there was only 10 years. Between the Armenian genocide and the Holocaust there were 25 years. Between the Holocaust and Cambodia there were 30 years. Then between that and 1994 there were 20 years. We aren’t doing ‘never again’, we are doing it again and again and again. Our pashas of genocide literature are too busy blaming the U.S for genocides. The U.S is blamed for not defining the Rwandan genocide as a genocide, remember ‘holocaust survivor’ Madeline Albright claiming that it was just “acts” of genocide. But Bush is blamed for calling the Sudanese genocide a ‘genocide’ and thus creating a “climate of debate” about whether it was a genocide or not. No matter that the other 222 other countries in the world didn’t do anything to define either of these mass murders as genocide or not, let along lift a finger. That’s right. What did Russia do? Nothing. China? Nothing. Austria? Nothing. England? Nothing. France? Nothing (well it aided the genocidaires in Rwanda). Germany? Nothing. Spain? Nothing. Japan? Nothing. Australia? Nothing. Canada? Nothing. Brazil? Nothing. South Africa? Nothing. Egypt? Nothing. Iran? Nothing. India? Nothing. But no blame for the rest of the world. The era of ‘human rights’ is no less than an era in which humans have few rights but where everyone speaks about ‘racism’ and ‘human rights’.
Given the recent documentary on Darfur, Sand and Sorrow one learns why the genocide was so successful and why Arab Islamist sponsored genocide has always been and will always be successful. It includes three methods; slavery, rape and murder. The children are kidnapped and enslaved, the women are raped and the men are murdered. This logic of cleansing has been the practice of Islamism since its earliest days in the 8th century. It was carried out to perfect effect in every land conquered by this hate-mongering ideology, from Egypt to North Africa and India. It illustrates the triumph of mobile herders over farmers. The Africans in the Sudan are farmers forever at the mercy of Bedouin nomadic raiders who arrive, rape the women, murder the men and steal the children. The black rebel groups of course do what every nation that has fought Islamism has always done, it fights the Sudanese military, just as Byzantium fought the Arab armies. It doesn’t target the women and children and yet it is them who provide the resource for more and more armies of Islamist fighters. Polygamy and enslavement and rape are the cruel weapons that lead to victory, today as much as they did in the 8th century.
We can see a similar process at work in Egypt. Whereas in Sudan the blacks are referred to as ‘slave’ by the Arabs who massacre them, in Egypt the Christian Coptic garbage pickers are called ‘Zabaleen’ or ‘garbage collectors’. Using the swine flu, which is not spread by swine, as an excuse the Egyptian government ordered all the pigs, who are owned by Christians, killed in Egypt. It is yet another nail in the coffin of the minority, a minority that is weak and one that, like all minorities under Islam, will never resort to terror in order to raise its head.
Norman Rose is a erudite upper class Briton who has penned a book entitled A Senseless, Squalid War: Voices from Palestine, 1948-1947. He is a graduate of the London School of Economics and is the chair of the department of International Relations at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is an anti-semite. In his book he speaks about “Zionist propaganda” and he speaks about the U.S being “putty in the hands of the Jews” and as if that were not enough he ignores Arab terrorism in the lead up to the 1948 war. Of course the British press is cooing about the book. The Spectator calls it “even-handed”. Anti-semitism can be hard and it can be soft. In the case of Rose, like his fellow Israel hater Jacqueline Rose, he uses the subtleties of language. He calls Jewish terrorism “cruel”. But Arab terrorism is just a few “killings”. When Jews die it is because of “revenge” and when Arabs are killed it is a tragedy. This is how racism works: one value for one side and another for the other.
Issue 88
“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
June 4th, 2009
2) Chronicles of Hate and coverup: Norman Rose, Egypt, Sudan and Rueters: A few observations of the world we live in including a new book on the Palestine Mandate, a documentary of Sudan and a Rueters coverup of the Armenian and Greek genocides in Turkey.
Chronicles of Hate and coverup: Norman Rose, Egypt, Sudan and Rueters
May 31, 2009
Eth J. Frantzman
On May 28th, Reuters reported that “Turkey, which historically has poor relations with Armenia, said in April it was close to establishing diplomatic relations after it closed its border with Armenia in 1993. Turkey and Armenia trace their own dispute back to the First World War killing of Armenians by Ottoman Turks. Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan on Saturday criticized state policies that led to the expulsion of tens of thousands of Christian ethnic Greeks in the 20th century as ‘fascist.’” This massive distortion of history is typical of the wire agencies such as the Associated Press and Reuters which frequently rely on local ‘journalists’ for their wire reports. Let us count the ways Reuters got its history wrong. To claim that the dispute between Armenia and Turkey is merely about the “killing of Armenians by Ottoman Turks” would be akin to say that Israeli-German relations were only about the “killing of Jews by Nazi Germans.” There is, in the sentence, no description of what killing, not even the word “massacre” is used, let alone genocide. 1.2 million Armenians were killed between 1915 and 1920 by the Ottoman Turkish government. Is that just some “killing.” And of the Greeks it was not “tens of thousands” but also over a million, including not just Greeks but also Assyrians and the Greeks known as Pontic Greeks. But is it a surprise that one of the West’s major wire services should cover up the 20th century’s first genocide? After all, how have we, the ‘human rights generation’ done regarding the 21st century’s first genocide in Sudan?
This is the generation of ‘human rights’. Everyone is a supporter of this ridiculous value. Who can be against ‘human rights’? But how are those rights doing? Do humans have more rights now than they did 100 years ago. We like to pat ourselves on the back and claim they do. We have conferences and committees and watch groups and activists and legions of volunteers that talk a lot about human rights. But this is also the generation that talks a lot about genocide and yet it is the era where genocides happens more often than in any other generation. Between Rwanda and Darfur there was only 10 years. Between the Armenian genocide and the Holocaust there were 25 years. Between the Holocaust and Cambodia there were 30 years. Then between that and 1994 there were 20 years. We aren’t doing ‘never again’, we are doing it again and again and again. Our pashas of genocide literature are too busy blaming the U.S for genocides. The U.S is blamed for not defining the Rwandan genocide as a genocide, remember ‘holocaust survivor’ Madeline Albright claiming that it was just “acts” of genocide. But Bush is blamed for calling the Sudanese genocide a ‘genocide’ and thus creating a “climate of debate” about whether it was a genocide or not. No matter that the other 222 other countries in the world didn’t do anything to define either of these mass murders as genocide or not, let along lift a finger. That’s right. What did Russia do? Nothing. China? Nothing. Austria? Nothing. England? Nothing. France? Nothing (well it aided the genocidaires in Rwanda). Germany? Nothing. Spain? Nothing. Japan? Nothing. Australia? Nothing. Canada? Nothing. Brazil? Nothing. South Africa? Nothing. Egypt? Nothing. Iran? Nothing. India? Nothing. But no blame for the rest of the world. The era of ‘human rights’ is no less than an era in which humans have few rights but where everyone speaks about ‘racism’ and ‘human rights’.
Given the recent documentary on Darfur, Sand and Sorrow one learns why the genocide was so successful and why Arab Islamist sponsored genocide has always been and will always be successful. It includes three methods; slavery, rape and murder. The children are kidnapped and enslaved, the women are raped and the men are murdered. This logic of cleansing has been the practice of Islamism since its earliest days in the 8th century. It was carried out to perfect effect in every land conquered by this hate-mongering ideology, from Egypt to North Africa and India. It illustrates the triumph of mobile herders over farmers. The Africans in the Sudan are farmers forever at the mercy of Bedouin nomadic raiders who arrive, rape the women, murder the men and steal the children. The black rebel groups of course do what every nation that has fought Islamism has always done, it fights the Sudanese military, just as Byzantium fought the Arab armies. It doesn’t target the women and children and yet it is them who provide the resource for more and more armies of Islamist fighters. Polygamy and enslavement and rape are the cruel weapons that lead to victory, today as much as they did in the 8th century.
We can see a similar process at work in Egypt. Whereas in Sudan the blacks are referred to as ‘slave’ by the Arabs who massacre them, in Egypt the Christian Coptic garbage pickers are called ‘Zabaleen’ or ‘garbage collectors’. Using the swine flu, which is not spread by swine, as an excuse the Egyptian government ordered all the pigs, who are owned by Christians, killed in Egypt. It is yet another nail in the coffin of the minority, a minority that is weak and one that, like all minorities under Islam, will never resort to terror in order to raise its head.
Norman Rose is a erudite upper class Briton who has penned a book entitled A Senseless, Squalid War: Voices from Palestine, 1948-1947. He is a graduate of the London School of Economics and is the chair of the department of International Relations at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is an anti-semite. In his book he speaks about “Zionist propaganda” and he speaks about the U.S being “putty in the hands of the Jews” and as if that were not enough he ignores Arab terrorism in the lead up to the 1948 war. Of course the British press is cooing about the book. The Spectator calls it “even-handed”. Anti-semitism can be hard and it can be soft. In the case of Rose, like his fellow Israel hater Jacqueline Rose, he uses the subtleties of language. He calls Jewish terrorism “cruel”. But Arab terrorism is just a few “killings”. When Jews die it is because of “revenge” and when Arabs are killed it is a tragedy. This is how racism works: one value for one side and another for the other.
Terra Incognita 88 Part 1: Star Trek
Terra Incognita
Issue 88
“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
June 4th, 2009
1) Star Trek and Star Wars going back in time: Recently movie franchises have been going back to their ‘origins’ in various “prequels.” Examples include Batman, Indiana Jones, Star Trek and Star Wars. This development is most interesting in Star Trek and Star Wars because when they were originally released they presented a picture of the future. Now we are seeing the past in the future. Whereas the original movies offered a vision for humanity and ideas Hollywood now tells us humanity has no ideas and possibly no future.
Star Trek and Star Wars going back in time
Seth Frantzman
June 1, 2009
The mega-franchise of Star Trek has recently released a new film Star Trek: The Future Begins. Like recently released prequels to Batman and Star Wars this new film takes the viewer back to the past, exploring the early lives of the crew who eventually became famous in the Star Trek series. But this ‘back to the past’ approach that has become so popular in Hollywood is not just about expanding on successful franchises, the tendency to go back to the past also says much about our own culture, our inability to imagine the future and Hollywood’s own inability to confront the issues that affect us today.
The original Star Trek series ran from 1966 to 1969. The series was groundbreaking in several ways. It was not only futuristic but it also imagined a utopian world where peace had come to earth and released man’s energies to explore the universe using a Starfleet of essentially humanitarian and peace seeking soldiers. Star Trek’s original cast was also groundbreaking in being multi-cultural, including an African woman (Uhara), a Russian man (Chekov), an Asian (Sulu) and an alien (Spock). But while Star Trek supposedly imagined a utopian future its episodes were steeped in the symbolism of the present. It dealt with the controversial issues of the Vietnam war in several episodes, softly critiquing both militarism and passivism. Later Star Trek television series such as The Next Generation (1987-1994) explored issues of inter-racial dating by involving the Klingon Worf with the half human Deanna Troi. It continued its groundbreaking efforts by having a female captain and lead in Voyager (1995-2001). The franchise had to navigate the end of the Cold War and did so by having the traditional enemies of the utopian ‘Federation’, the Klingon empire seek peace in Star Trek VI after a Chernobyl like environmental disaster. The episode speaks of the Klingon Empire’s economy polluting itself to death because of its focus on war, an obvious parallel to what befell the Soviets.
Star Wars was a motion picture franchise with the first episode being released in 1977. Its third episode, ‘The Return of the Jedi’ was released in 1983. The entire plot of Star Wars involves a group of rebels fighting an all encroaching empire. This has a seeming parallel to the perception among Americans in the late 1970s that the U.S was losing the Cold War. There was also a religious element in Star Wars with the ‘force’ and Luke Skywalker being a sort of Jesus-like figure coming to save humanity.
Then between 1999 and2005 Star Wars came out with three new feature films, all ‘prequel’ episodes intended to explain how it came to pass that an evil empire was formed out of what had been a peaceful republic. This seems to parallel the fall of Rome’s Republic or the destruction of democracy in 1930s Europe. But since the episodes were released in 2002 and 2005 it also has harsh things to say about the Bush Administration’s war on terror and the critique that many of the American Republic’s values were having ridden rough shod over them.
When Star Trek decided to follow in the footsteps of Star Wars and create a prequel episode it didn’t have any of the social commentary of its earlier movies or of Star Wars. Star Trek 2009 doesn’t say anything. But why? Why is Hollywood going back to the past? Can it not imagine a future? Has it already cast enough diverse actors and had blind men flying space ships and women as captains that it simply can’t do any better? Is it saying “we have reached the future”? Or is it simply afraid to confront the issues of the present, such as the rise of Islamism and terrorism? Does it feel that an inter-galactic religious cult of terrorists is either too far fetched or too ridiculous? Can anyone imagine Captain Kirk up against religious terrorists in the future? The future always seemed to be without religion, at least the human characters never had any religions. The Aliens were always pious and many of them dressed in costumes reminiscent of American Indians or Arabs or a combination of the two. Headscarfs and face veils were typical as were long flowing roads and carved wooden staffs. Thus Star Trek and Star Wars seemed to be telling us; in the future man will abandon God but the Gods of the others, such as Vulcan theology, will be fascinating. This is much the way many in the West view religion today: it is interesting if it is foreign and ‘exotic’, it is problematic if it is from our own past.
But does the endless returning to the past also mean that our leading cultural critics simply can’t imagine a future. In Star Trek the Federation was always supposed to be a peaceful utopia but meddlesome aliens kept threatening it. Once the Klingons were humbled and became allies the enemy became Romulans or the Borg or something else. A return to the past seems to say “if only we can go back to the Cold War where the enemies were clear.” The decision by the makers of these massive franchises to return to the past says much about the lack of new ideas, ingenuity and innovation in our own time. The diversity imagined in Star Trek has come to fruition and many people seem disillusioned that it hasn’t brought the promise they thought it would. A black president here, a woman in charge there and yet we haven’t found utopia. Hollywood is telling us we never will.
Issue 88
“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
June 4th, 2009
1) Star Trek and Star Wars going back in time: Recently movie franchises have been going back to their ‘origins’ in various “prequels.” Examples include Batman, Indiana Jones, Star Trek and Star Wars. This development is most interesting in Star Trek and Star Wars because when they were originally released they presented a picture of the future. Now we are seeing the past in the future. Whereas the original movies offered a vision for humanity and ideas Hollywood now tells us humanity has no ideas and possibly no future.
Star Trek and Star Wars going back in time
Seth Frantzman
June 1, 2009
The mega-franchise of Star Trek has recently released a new film Star Trek: The Future Begins. Like recently released prequels to Batman and Star Wars this new film takes the viewer back to the past, exploring the early lives of the crew who eventually became famous in the Star Trek series. But this ‘back to the past’ approach that has become so popular in Hollywood is not just about expanding on successful franchises, the tendency to go back to the past also says much about our own culture, our inability to imagine the future and Hollywood’s own inability to confront the issues that affect us today.
The original Star Trek series ran from 1966 to 1969. The series was groundbreaking in several ways. It was not only futuristic but it also imagined a utopian world where peace had come to earth and released man’s energies to explore the universe using a Starfleet of essentially humanitarian and peace seeking soldiers. Star Trek’s original cast was also groundbreaking in being multi-cultural, including an African woman (Uhara), a Russian man (Chekov), an Asian (Sulu) and an alien (Spock). But while Star Trek supposedly imagined a utopian future its episodes were steeped in the symbolism of the present. It dealt with the controversial issues of the Vietnam war in several episodes, softly critiquing both militarism and passivism. Later Star Trek television series such as The Next Generation (1987-1994) explored issues of inter-racial dating by involving the Klingon Worf with the half human Deanna Troi. It continued its groundbreaking efforts by having a female captain and lead in Voyager (1995-2001). The franchise had to navigate the end of the Cold War and did so by having the traditional enemies of the utopian ‘Federation’, the Klingon empire seek peace in Star Trek VI after a Chernobyl like environmental disaster. The episode speaks of the Klingon Empire’s economy polluting itself to death because of its focus on war, an obvious parallel to what befell the Soviets.
Star Wars was a motion picture franchise with the first episode being released in 1977. Its third episode, ‘The Return of the Jedi’ was released in 1983. The entire plot of Star Wars involves a group of rebels fighting an all encroaching empire. This has a seeming parallel to the perception among Americans in the late 1970s that the U.S was losing the Cold War. There was also a religious element in Star Wars with the ‘force’ and Luke Skywalker being a sort of Jesus-like figure coming to save humanity.
Then between 1999 and2005 Star Wars came out with three new feature films, all ‘prequel’ episodes intended to explain how it came to pass that an evil empire was formed out of what had been a peaceful republic. This seems to parallel the fall of Rome’s Republic or the destruction of democracy in 1930s Europe. But since the episodes were released in 2002 and 2005 it also has harsh things to say about the Bush Administration’s war on terror and the critique that many of the American Republic’s values were having ridden rough shod over them.
When Star Trek decided to follow in the footsteps of Star Wars and create a prequel episode it didn’t have any of the social commentary of its earlier movies or of Star Wars. Star Trek 2009 doesn’t say anything. But why? Why is Hollywood going back to the past? Can it not imagine a future? Has it already cast enough diverse actors and had blind men flying space ships and women as captains that it simply can’t do any better? Is it saying “we have reached the future”? Or is it simply afraid to confront the issues of the present, such as the rise of Islamism and terrorism? Does it feel that an inter-galactic religious cult of terrorists is either too far fetched or too ridiculous? Can anyone imagine Captain Kirk up against religious terrorists in the future? The future always seemed to be without religion, at least the human characters never had any religions. The Aliens were always pious and many of them dressed in costumes reminiscent of American Indians or Arabs or a combination of the two. Headscarfs and face veils were typical as were long flowing roads and carved wooden staffs. Thus Star Trek and Star Wars seemed to be telling us; in the future man will abandon God but the Gods of the others, such as Vulcan theology, will be fascinating. This is much the way many in the West view religion today: it is interesting if it is foreign and ‘exotic’, it is problematic if it is from our own past.
But does the endless returning to the past also mean that our leading cultural critics simply can’t imagine a future. In Star Trek the Federation was always supposed to be a peaceful utopia but meddlesome aliens kept threatening it. Once the Klingons were humbled and became allies the enemy became Romulans or the Borg or something else. A return to the past seems to say “if only we can go back to the Cold War where the enemies were clear.” The decision by the makers of these massive franchises to return to the past says much about the lack of new ideas, ingenuity and innovation in our own time. The diversity imagined in Star Trek has come to fruition and many people seem disillusioned that it hasn’t brought the promise they thought it would. A black president here, a woman in charge there and yet we haven’t found utopia. Hollywood is telling us we never will.
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