Terra Incognita
Issue 94
“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
July 31, 2009
The Colonization of the conflict (Published in the Jerusalem Post July 28, 2009)
Seth J. Frantzman
July 10, 2009
Recent revelations that European embassies and the EU fund several radical Israeli ‘human rights’ organizations begs the question: to what degree is the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians choreographed and colonized by outsiders? In the weekly protest at Bil’in Palestinians once again threw rocks at Israeli soldiers and attempted to break through the security fence. But as with every week there were more foreigners than Arabs. Even the Arabs that come aren’t from the villages nearby: the army meets with the heads of the village in order to explain to them what modes of protest are acceptable. The weekly event is like a play or a sitcom that is staged again and again; the format is the same every time.
So why does it go on? The protestors don’t have an actual goal. They claim to be “Anarchists Against the Fence” or “peace activists” but the events at Bil’in aren’t peaceful and nor is there any realistic expectation among the protestors that their weekly event will actually affect the fence. Nor is the fence in that area particularly egregious, it deviates from the Green Line by less than 2 kilometers and it doesn’t bisect Arab homes or anything of that nature. The claim that it is on the “land” of Bil’in is only true insofar as it is on land near the village, not land that is or was actively used by the villagers.
So why does it go on? It goes on because those who arrive there have a vested interest in having it go on. Websites (such as Bilin-village.org) devoted to the protest at Bil’in stress that many important people and organizations have joined the protests including the Israeli Jewish organization “Physicians for Human Rights”, International Solidarity Movement and Gush Shalom (another Israeli ‘peace’ organization). It is a mandatory stop on any protest-tourists visit to the Holy Land. And it is the place to get wounded for foreign protesters.
Thus European Parliament vice-President Luisa Morgantini and Julio Toscano, an Italian judge, were injured at Bil’in in June of 2008. Mairead Corrigan, who won a Nobel prize for “peace” work in Northern Ireland, was hurt in an April 2007 protest. Lymor Goldstein, an Israeli lawyer was wounded in 2006. But these people aren’t wounded accidentally or because the soldiers intend t wound them, they are wounded because they want to be wounded. They chose to be wounded as a way of receiving a sort of protest badge of honour.
No one is more emblematic of the symbiotic relationship between protestor and Bil’in than Jonathan Pollak, a leader of Anarchists Against the Wall. A graphic designer who grew up in Tel Aviv (and now lives in posh bohemian Jaffa), he is an Israeli Brahmin, being the son of actor Yossi Pollak, brother of actor Avshalom Pollak and film director Shai Pollak. He has supposedly been involved in over 300 demonstrations. As part of his work with ISM he even toured the U.S on a fundraising mission in 2005. This type of protest-tourism isn’t about protesting a legitimate cause, it is about a way of life, where the protest is not the means but the end in itself. Were the wall to disappear the protest would have to go on because so much is invested in it.
Consider the amount of money that goes in to funding the foreigners who attend the Bil’il protest. Consider the air fares, the hotel accommodations and transport to and from the site. Consider the websites, the numerous organizations and the media attention. When Naomi Klien, a Canadian author, visited Israel in June to launch her book ‘The Shock Doctrine’ in Hebrew she made the required pilgrimage to Bil’in and voiced support for a boycott of Israel: “It’s an extraordinarily important part of Israel’s identity to be able to have the illusion of Western normalcy..When that is threatened, when the rock concerts don’t come, when the symphonies don’t come, when a film you really want to see doesn’t play at the Jerusalem film festival… then it starts to threaten the very idea of what the Israeli state is.”
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a very real conflict. But there is another side to it as well that is simply entertainment for the West. This includes the disproportionate coverage in the New York Times and BBC that covers the most minor people, incidents and events here, especially if they have olive trees in the background. The ‘peace’ organizations that are involved in the conflict have a vested financial and personal interest in it continuing. Without the conflict they would have nothing to do. That is why ‘peace’ activism at Bil’in doesn’t take the form of peaceful protest, but of rock throwing and assaults designed to encourage tear gas and rubber bullets from the IDF which are needed for people to claim they were “injured”, all in front of the cameras. That isn’t peace, it is a manufacturing of the conflict, manipulation of the conflict for the cameras. Were the conflict to go away the legions of people like Mr. Pollak and Ms. Klein who make it their life would no longer be “activists” as a job description. People don’t work against their self-interest. If their job is “peace” they live for war because without it their life’s work would disappear. Furthermore, without Bil’in where would Europeans and Americans go for a protest tourist vacation in the summer?
Friday, July 31, 2009
Terra Incognita 94 Part 2 Ayn Rand in Tehran
Terra Incognita
Issue 94
“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
July 31, 2009
Reading Ayn Rand in Tehran
Seth J. Frantzman
July 24, 2009
The bestselling book, Reading Lolita in Tehran, the author Azar Nafasi narrates her experience of living in Iran during and after the revolution of 1979, the subsequent hardships she faced as a lecturer at the University of Tehran and her decision to leave the country in 1997. The book’s central focus is the story of a secretive book club the author founded in 1995 where her and seven female students read Western authors and discussed women, sex and marriage.
Among the books the author exposed her students to were works by Jane Austen, Henry James, Gustave Flaubert, Saul Bellow, Joseph Konrad and the ubiquitous Vladamir Nabokov. She brought them great canon of Western literature and through this asked the students to examine their lives in Iran. In the end, although the book was translated into 32 languages, it came in for harsh criticism by the academy, the thinkers, the progressives, the liberals and the Islamists in the West. Hamid Dabashi, a professor at Columbia claimed that it was part of “Orientalism” and that “By seeking to recycle a kaffeeklatsch version of English literature as the ideological foregrounding of American empire, Reading Lolita in Tehran is reminiscent of the most pestiferous colonial projects of the British in India.” He referred to Nafasi as a “native informer” and “colonial agent”. Odd, considering that it was Nafasi who stayed in Iran after the revolution and Dabashi who has suckled at the breast of the Western academy. But why be surprised, the Western progressive institutions are the primary sponsors of radical Islamist thought. The West produced other harsh criticism. Fatameh Keshavarz, a literature professor at Washington University, and another expat Iranian, claimed that the book was had “damaging misrepresentations” about Iran. Odd again considering that it was Nafasi who lived most of her life in Iran and not Keshavarz, the Western Islamic nationalist. Seyed Mohammad, for once an actual Iranian living in Iran and teaching at Tehran University, also claimed that the book was Orientalist.
Dabashi, the Columbia University professor (coming from a university that already sponsors other extremists such as Abu el Haj and Khalidi) even criticized the cover of the book, which depicts two headscarf clad women; “the denoted message here seems quite obvious: these two young women are reading 'Lolita' in Tehran—they are reading ('Lolita'), and they are in Tehran (they look Iranian and they have scarves on their head). The connoted message is equally self-evident: Imagine that—illicit sex with teenagers in an Islamic Republic! How about that, the cover suggestively proposes and asks, can you imagine reading Lolita in Tehran? Look at these two Oriental Lolitas! The racist implication of the suggestion—as with astonishment asking, 'can you even imagine reading that novel in that country?'--competes with its overtly Orientalised pedophilia and confounds the transparency of a marketing strategy that appeals to the most deranged Oriental fantasies of a nation already petrified out of its wits by a ferocious war....equally evident in this cover is the whole genre of colonial picture postcards of young Algerian women—staged, produced and bought by the French colonial officers. Malek Alloula has studied these pictures in The Colonial Harem (1995).”
But Dabashi’s point is worth exploring. Lolita is about illicit sex with teenagers. But is this western? In a recent story from South Africa we read about Fatima Hassam who was married to her husband Ebrahim for 39 years. One day when returning from vacation she found that Ebrahaim had married a second wife, a young girl named Maggie who converted to Islam for the marriage and is not called ‘Mirriam’. Lolita is only western insofar as it is Islamic. And therein lies the problem. Exposing Muslims to Madame Bovary or the Great Gatsby is exposing them to a Western Culture that was primarily an
Islamic one, full of family honour and shame and women locked indoors.
In general exposing Muslims to “western culture” today would only encourage greater Islamism, which is embodied by the likes of Dabashi and most of the Western elite who champion Islamism, convert to Islam, coddle Islamic ‘culture’ and support Islamic law. What might be more helpful is to bring the Muslims translations of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged. Rand hated tradition, despised the love of the masses, was disgusted by intellectualism and progressive intellectuals who coddled Stalinism and she was an independent woman, a sexual consumer of men who modeled her male protagonists on her male ideal and her female characters on herself.
But in the end the entire process is worthless. If they read Western literature they are “collaborators” and “native informers”. Anyway the West’s primary intellectual accomplishment in the last 200 years is freeing itself from the church only to become enthralled with Islamism and support a new inquisition. Muslims, particularly Muslim women, do not need the curse of the West, which would sooner lock them in closets and banish them from public view legalizing shariah law, than given them air to breath.
Issue 94
“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
July 31, 2009
Reading Ayn Rand in Tehran
Seth J. Frantzman
July 24, 2009
The bestselling book, Reading Lolita in Tehran, the author Azar Nafasi narrates her experience of living in Iran during and after the revolution of 1979, the subsequent hardships she faced as a lecturer at the University of Tehran and her decision to leave the country in 1997. The book’s central focus is the story of a secretive book club the author founded in 1995 where her and seven female students read Western authors and discussed women, sex and marriage.
Among the books the author exposed her students to were works by Jane Austen, Henry James, Gustave Flaubert, Saul Bellow, Joseph Konrad and the ubiquitous Vladamir Nabokov. She brought them great canon of Western literature and through this asked the students to examine their lives in Iran. In the end, although the book was translated into 32 languages, it came in for harsh criticism by the academy, the thinkers, the progressives, the liberals and the Islamists in the West. Hamid Dabashi, a professor at Columbia claimed that it was part of “Orientalism” and that “By seeking to recycle a kaffeeklatsch version of English literature as the ideological foregrounding of American empire, Reading Lolita in Tehran is reminiscent of the most pestiferous colonial projects of the British in India.” He referred to Nafasi as a “native informer” and “colonial agent”. Odd, considering that it was Nafasi who stayed in Iran after the revolution and Dabashi who has suckled at the breast of the Western academy. But why be surprised, the Western progressive institutions are the primary sponsors of radical Islamist thought. The West produced other harsh criticism. Fatameh Keshavarz, a literature professor at Washington University, and another expat Iranian, claimed that the book was had “damaging misrepresentations” about Iran. Odd again considering that it was Nafasi who lived most of her life in Iran and not Keshavarz, the Western Islamic nationalist. Seyed Mohammad, for once an actual Iranian living in Iran and teaching at Tehran University, also claimed that the book was Orientalist.
Dabashi, the Columbia University professor (coming from a university that already sponsors other extremists such as Abu el Haj and Khalidi) even criticized the cover of the book, which depicts two headscarf clad women; “the denoted message here seems quite obvious: these two young women are reading 'Lolita' in Tehran—they are reading ('Lolita'), and they are in Tehran (they look Iranian and they have scarves on their head). The connoted message is equally self-evident: Imagine that—illicit sex with teenagers in an Islamic Republic! How about that, the cover suggestively proposes and asks, can you imagine reading Lolita in Tehran? Look at these two Oriental Lolitas! The racist implication of the suggestion—as with astonishment asking, 'can you even imagine reading that novel in that country?'--competes with its overtly Orientalised pedophilia and confounds the transparency of a marketing strategy that appeals to the most deranged Oriental fantasies of a nation already petrified out of its wits by a ferocious war....equally evident in this cover is the whole genre of colonial picture postcards of young Algerian women—staged, produced and bought by the French colonial officers. Malek Alloula has studied these pictures in The Colonial Harem (1995).”
But Dabashi’s point is worth exploring. Lolita is about illicit sex with teenagers. But is this western? In a recent story from South Africa we read about Fatima Hassam who was married to her husband Ebrahim for 39 years. One day when returning from vacation she found that Ebrahaim had married a second wife, a young girl named Maggie who converted to Islam for the marriage and is not called ‘Mirriam’. Lolita is only western insofar as it is Islamic. And therein lies the problem. Exposing Muslims to Madame Bovary or the Great Gatsby is exposing them to a Western Culture that was primarily an
Islamic one, full of family honour and shame and women locked indoors.
In general exposing Muslims to “western culture” today would only encourage greater Islamism, which is embodied by the likes of Dabashi and most of the Western elite who champion Islamism, convert to Islam, coddle Islamic ‘culture’ and support Islamic law. What might be more helpful is to bring the Muslims translations of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged. Rand hated tradition, despised the love of the masses, was disgusted by intellectualism and progressive intellectuals who coddled Stalinism and she was an independent woman, a sexual consumer of men who modeled her male protagonists on her male ideal and her female characters on herself.
But in the end the entire process is worthless. If they read Western literature they are “collaborators” and “native informers”. Anyway the West’s primary intellectual accomplishment in the last 200 years is freeing itself from the church only to become enthralled with Islamism and support a new inquisition. Muslims, particularly Muslim women, do not need the curse of the West, which would sooner lock them in closets and banish them from public view legalizing shariah law, than given them air to breath.
Terra Incognita 94 part 1 Goldman Sachs' success
Terra Incognita
Issue 94
“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
July 31, 2009
Punishing Success: Complaining about Goldman Sachs
Seth J. Frantzman
July 19, 2009
News reports of Goldman Sachs recent windfall in profits would make it seem that it was some sort of a gladiator who had received ill-gotten gains. One report called it part of a “narrowing concentration of financial power.” Robert Reich, a former Secretary of Labor labeled it one of the “last of survivors” as if it was some exotic dinosaur that had emerged from the dust of a meteor strike. In a way it had, earning $3.4 in its second quarter.
The well known economist and columnist Paul Krugman was critical. For him Goldman’s success is “bad for America” because its business model is based on the very things that supposedly brought on the financial crises of 2008. Goldman is accused of practicing “bad habits” which make another crises more likely. According to Krugman it was the financial firms that “directed vast quantities of capital into the construction of unsellable houses and empty shopping malls.” He made no mention of Fannie Mae and the U.S government’s role. And there is a bugbear behind it all, a “financial lobby” that is setting the stage for another disaster. This critique of Goldman’s profits and its payment of bonuses, estimated at $770,000 per employee, can be found on the political right as well where Glenn Beck has raked it over the coals for being in bed with the government and insinuated that it was involved in some corrupt deal with former treasury secretary (and formed Goldman executive) Hank Paulson.
But this scorn for Goldman should make us all take a step back. Why is Goldman being punished for success? Goldman Sachs made the correct choices before the financial disaster of 2008. It got rid of its exposure to sub-prime mortgages. Talking heads seem to forget that Hank Paulson forced the banks to take federal money and that several banks, such as Wells Fargo, didn’t want the money and would not have taken it without the government’s insistence that all financial institutions were ‘in this together’ as part of a way to reassure the markets. Goldman took its taxpayer bailout and promptly paid it back. It should be thanked for this not scourged. Unlike Goldman other American companies are a continued drain on the economy, such as AIG which has become a black hole of taxpayer bailouts. To date it has received $150 billion, by contrast Goldman received $12.9 billion.
America has an aversion to giant corporate monopolies and thus fears that Goldman may now be too big are valid. But the insinuation that its success, its profits and its bonuses are somehow ill-gotten and wrong represent a cultural disconnect that seems to applaud failure with a sort of schadenfreude. Would it be preferable if Goldman Sachs was still on the federal dole? Would it be preferable if it was still deep underwater in toxic sub-prime assets? Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio complained that out of work Americans have hurt feelings by seeing Goldman’s windfall. Douglas Elliot of the Brookings Institute claimed “it does not feel right that bankers should be making so much money.”
There was a time when Americans applauded success but the current crises seems to have made people secretly wish for failure because we should all be ‘in this together’. But we are not in this together and the success of Goldman will point the way to more corporate successes and less unemployment. It already employs 29,000 people, which we should applaud, rather than wishing that they be laid off.
Krugman blames Goldman for profiting when other banks failed; “Goldman made profits by playing the rest of us for suckers.” This is tantamount to saying that Toyota made ill-gotten profits by successfully understanding that building efficient reliable cars was better than building SUVs. Toyota didn’t make us suckers by taking GM’s market share. Toyota was successful in its business just as Goldman was successful in its. Goldman’s survival is similar to the seeming survival of Ford. Should we condemn Ford for not having failed like the rest of its industry? After all we want it to be ‘in this together’ with us?
While the idea of Goldman Sachs executives receiving millions in bonuses seems gratuitous when millions are out of work it is not logical to extend the appearance of impropriety to condemnation of the company because others are suffering. It is simply not true. The Goldman model has proved resilient and its brokers have proved far sighted. That is how fortunes are made and lost. In the wake of the 1929 crash a little known financial analyst named Benjamin Graham began to write a book on investing. That book, ‘Security Analysis’ became Warren Buffet’s central influence. Buffet today is not only fabulously wealthy but also a major employer of Americans. Learning from our mistakes and building wealth again so that America remains an economic power and source of inspiration should be a goal in the wake of this recession. Instead it appears some prefer that we point fingers at those who survived and profited and pull them down as well like a bunch of children at school jealously destroying a fellow student’s winning science project.
Issue 94
“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
July 31, 2009
Punishing Success: Complaining about Goldman Sachs
Seth J. Frantzman
July 19, 2009
News reports of Goldman Sachs recent windfall in profits would make it seem that it was some sort of a gladiator who had received ill-gotten gains. One report called it part of a “narrowing concentration of financial power.” Robert Reich, a former Secretary of Labor labeled it one of the “last of survivors” as if it was some exotic dinosaur that had emerged from the dust of a meteor strike. In a way it had, earning $3.4 in its second quarter.
The well known economist and columnist Paul Krugman was critical. For him Goldman’s success is “bad for America” because its business model is based on the very things that supposedly brought on the financial crises of 2008. Goldman is accused of practicing “bad habits” which make another crises more likely. According to Krugman it was the financial firms that “directed vast quantities of capital into the construction of unsellable houses and empty shopping malls.” He made no mention of Fannie Mae and the U.S government’s role. And there is a bugbear behind it all, a “financial lobby” that is setting the stage for another disaster. This critique of Goldman’s profits and its payment of bonuses, estimated at $770,000 per employee, can be found on the political right as well where Glenn Beck has raked it over the coals for being in bed with the government and insinuated that it was involved in some corrupt deal with former treasury secretary (and formed Goldman executive) Hank Paulson.
But this scorn for Goldman should make us all take a step back. Why is Goldman being punished for success? Goldman Sachs made the correct choices before the financial disaster of 2008. It got rid of its exposure to sub-prime mortgages. Talking heads seem to forget that Hank Paulson forced the banks to take federal money and that several banks, such as Wells Fargo, didn’t want the money and would not have taken it without the government’s insistence that all financial institutions were ‘in this together’ as part of a way to reassure the markets. Goldman took its taxpayer bailout and promptly paid it back. It should be thanked for this not scourged. Unlike Goldman other American companies are a continued drain on the economy, such as AIG which has become a black hole of taxpayer bailouts. To date it has received $150 billion, by contrast Goldman received $12.9 billion.
America has an aversion to giant corporate monopolies and thus fears that Goldman may now be too big are valid. But the insinuation that its success, its profits and its bonuses are somehow ill-gotten and wrong represent a cultural disconnect that seems to applaud failure with a sort of schadenfreude. Would it be preferable if Goldman Sachs was still on the federal dole? Would it be preferable if it was still deep underwater in toxic sub-prime assets? Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio complained that out of work Americans have hurt feelings by seeing Goldman’s windfall. Douglas Elliot of the Brookings Institute claimed “it does not feel right that bankers should be making so much money.”
There was a time when Americans applauded success but the current crises seems to have made people secretly wish for failure because we should all be ‘in this together’. But we are not in this together and the success of Goldman will point the way to more corporate successes and less unemployment. It already employs 29,000 people, which we should applaud, rather than wishing that they be laid off.
Krugman blames Goldman for profiting when other banks failed; “Goldman made profits by playing the rest of us for suckers.” This is tantamount to saying that Toyota made ill-gotten profits by successfully understanding that building efficient reliable cars was better than building SUVs. Toyota didn’t make us suckers by taking GM’s market share. Toyota was successful in its business just as Goldman was successful in its. Goldman’s survival is similar to the seeming survival of Ford. Should we condemn Ford for not having failed like the rest of its industry? After all we want it to be ‘in this together’ with us?
While the idea of Goldman Sachs executives receiving millions in bonuses seems gratuitous when millions are out of work it is not logical to extend the appearance of impropriety to condemnation of the company because others are suffering. It is simply not true. The Goldman model has proved resilient and its brokers have proved far sighted. That is how fortunes are made and lost. In the wake of the 1929 crash a little known financial analyst named Benjamin Graham began to write a book on investing. That book, ‘Security Analysis’ became Warren Buffet’s central influence. Buffet today is not only fabulously wealthy but also a major employer of Americans. Learning from our mistakes and building wealth again so that America remains an economic power and source of inspiration should be a goal in the wake of this recession. Instead it appears some prefer that we point fingers at those who survived and profited and pull them down as well like a bunch of children at school jealously destroying a fellow student’s winning science project.
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
Terra Incognita 93 News from the Islamist world
Terra Incognita
Issue 93
“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
July 22, 2009
4) An extraordinary religion: Our Shariah loving friends: A few cases of Islamist evil, murdering of rape victims, acid burning of women and the other typical run of the mill stories remind us once again of Islamism’s evil but it also reminds us of the way in which westerners collaborate with it.
An extraordinary religion: Our Shariah loving friends
Seth J. Frantzman
July 19, 2009
New stories from the Muslim world continue to make us happy to know that one day all of the leftist feminists in our own societies, who so hate the freedom granted them by our nations, will one day live under the regimes and culture they find exotic. Consider an interview with a member of Iran’s Basij militia. In Iran it is illegal for women to be executed as virgins so women who are executed must first be married. But sometimes women end up on death row without having been married. In this case, the militia member related, it was his job to arrange temporary “marriages” for them with guards who would then rape them the night before their execution.
But he relates more details from the Islamic republic, the republic loved and supported by many in the West (consider for a moment the story of Filicia Langer, German-Jewish woman who claims to be Holocaust survivor, recipient of Germany’s highest civilian honor the Federal Cross and who uses this status as an excuse to hate Israel and who praises Ahmadinjed and claims he is mistranslated in the press). The Basij militia member relates that in Iran a woman is considered responsible for her actions at 9 but a man is only considered responsible at 13. Not a surprise. This part of the larger Islamic legal view that men have no responsibility and that women who are raped at age 10 should be stoned for “adultery.”
In another story we learn of Yusra al-Azami a 20 years old student was gunned down in Gaza in 2005. But recently more discussion of this has come out. Lynn Welchman has published an article in the Palestinian nationalist Journal of Palestine Studies arguing that the case of her murder and subsequent judgments are part of the “overlapping normative frameworks” of Islamic law in Gaza. So let’s learn more. She was driving in a car with her sister and two men in April of 2005 when Hamas gunmen from a morality police unit followed them, pulled her from the car and shot her to death for violating Islamic “honour.” It turned out that the men she and her sister were with were in fact their fiancés and they were to be married in coming days. The five men implicated in the murder were taken before an Islamic judge who was supposed to enforce “God’s law.” The judges ruled that the five men should be “censured” for their behavior, that “the shooting was not intended to kill…the shots occurred randomly to different places.” Therefore the men should pay a fine to the woman’s family of 25,000 Jordanian dinars, 1,000 American dollars to the owner of the car (it too had been shot, like the woman) and 1,000 dollars for causing emotional harm to the other three people in the car.
In a second case the female author of this article, Welchman, tells us about situating it in the “political context of competing normative discourses.” In this case however we hear of an Arab woman who a man attempted to rape and who was saved by two local Bedouin. In this case the judge ordered the family of the woman be paid 200,000 dinars for the dishonor caused by the conduct of the man who attempted rape. Nothing was to be given to the girl, except much of the calculation of the money owed was due to her having lost her sandals and headscarf in the event.
In another story from 2007 we hear about Zahra al Azzo, a 16 year old girl who was murdered by her brother to cleanse the family’s honour. How had she dishonored the family? She had been kidnapped and raped. The killer get a few months in prison. According to Syrian law a man who admits he killed a woman to preserve family “honour” cannot receive more than a year in prison and the average was six months. A recent initiative to abolish Article 548 of the penal code in that country will supposedly ensure men are sentenced to a minimum of two years. The need t murder women for the “crime” of having been raped, while the rapist goes free says much about why women must remain in Purdah or “exclusion” in Muslim countries. If they are allowed out every man knows he can rape them and not be punished and in fact it will be her crime for having been raped. But then again, Human Rights Watch raises money in those very countries where women are whipped and murdered for being raped. But in Pakistan they do things differently: there they just burn women with acid for such “crimes” as refusing to marry someone. 200 cases have been reported from April to June this year.
In the end what we can learn from these stories of women forcibly raped before execution and money paid to compensate for a woman’s murder is more about the treatment of woman in Islamic society. But we can also learn a lot about our society, about our secularism, our freedom and our intellectualism. Consider that the leading leftist Israeli daily, Haaretz, reported the murder of the girl as an “attempted robbery” which reflected the original Hamas press release. The Jewish Israeli leftist author, Arnon Regular, doesn’t quote Hamas as saying it was a robbery but actually claims it was himself (although he is based in Tel Aviv, not Gaza). According to Arnon “The gunmen, who apparently were attempting to rob the couples–two brothers and their girlfriends–suddenly opened fire at the car.” Remember he wasn’t there but he gives Hamas the benefit of the doubt.
We learn much from these stories. We learn that it is so important that a woman be de-virginized before death that she is forcibly ‘married’ and raped before being executed in Islamic countries. We learn that “progressive” journalists in our society excuse the murder of young women. They go even further than Islamism for the Islamic judge admitted that the murder of the girl was a crime, he just valued the girl at 25,000 Jordanian dinars. We learn that to murder women in Islamic countries is not seen as a harm to a person, but a harm to a family for which money is paid, much as it was in the case of the attempted rape. We learn that intellectuals and scholars in the West turn the brutality of murder in “normative discourses.”
What we see here is the typical story of evils of Islamism and the way in which the West’s best intellectuals and people excuse its evil. It reminds one of the famous dispute between Miguel de Unamuno, a Spanish philosopher, and Millan Astray, a Francoist Spanish general at the University of Salamanca in October of 1936 at the beginning of the Spanish Civil war which pitted radical militant liberalism and communism against Spanish nationalism and fascism. In a dialogue condemning the Falangist belief in “Long live death (Viva la Muerte)” Unamuno was shouted down by a crowd and Astray with the words “death to the intelligentsia.” Unamuno objected that while the nationalists would win by brute force they would not convince without having “reason and right in the struggle.” Indeed in the war against Islamism, whose motto is “long live death” and the war against the intelligentsia in the West that excuses Islamism it is obvious that those who oppose both are right. The question is how to reason against the twin evils that threaten the soul of humanity? These stories should help to answer that question.
Issue 93
“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
July 22, 2009
4) An extraordinary religion: Our Shariah loving friends: A few cases of Islamist evil, murdering of rape victims, acid burning of women and the other typical run of the mill stories remind us once again of Islamism’s evil but it also reminds us of the way in which westerners collaborate with it.
An extraordinary religion: Our Shariah loving friends
Seth J. Frantzman
July 19, 2009
New stories from the Muslim world continue to make us happy to know that one day all of the leftist feminists in our own societies, who so hate the freedom granted them by our nations, will one day live under the regimes and culture they find exotic. Consider an interview with a member of Iran’s Basij militia. In Iran it is illegal for women to be executed as virgins so women who are executed must first be married. But sometimes women end up on death row without having been married. In this case, the militia member related, it was his job to arrange temporary “marriages” for them with guards who would then rape them the night before their execution.
But he relates more details from the Islamic republic, the republic loved and supported by many in the West (consider for a moment the story of Filicia Langer, German-Jewish woman who claims to be Holocaust survivor, recipient of Germany’s highest civilian honor the Federal Cross and who uses this status as an excuse to hate Israel and who praises Ahmadinjed and claims he is mistranslated in the press). The Basij militia member relates that in Iran a woman is considered responsible for her actions at 9 but a man is only considered responsible at 13. Not a surprise. This part of the larger Islamic legal view that men have no responsibility and that women who are raped at age 10 should be stoned for “adultery.”
In another story we learn of Yusra al-Azami a 20 years old student was gunned down in Gaza in 2005. But recently more discussion of this has come out. Lynn Welchman has published an article in the Palestinian nationalist Journal of Palestine Studies arguing that the case of her murder and subsequent judgments are part of the “overlapping normative frameworks” of Islamic law in Gaza. So let’s learn more. She was driving in a car with her sister and two men in April of 2005 when Hamas gunmen from a morality police unit followed them, pulled her from the car and shot her to death for violating Islamic “honour.” It turned out that the men she and her sister were with were in fact their fiancés and they were to be married in coming days. The five men implicated in the murder were taken before an Islamic judge who was supposed to enforce “God’s law.” The judges ruled that the five men should be “censured” for their behavior, that “the shooting was not intended to kill…the shots occurred randomly to different places.” Therefore the men should pay a fine to the woman’s family of 25,000 Jordanian dinars, 1,000 American dollars to the owner of the car (it too had been shot, like the woman) and 1,000 dollars for causing emotional harm to the other three people in the car.
In a second case the female author of this article, Welchman, tells us about situating it in the “political context of competing normative discourses.” In this case however we hear of an Arab woman who a man attempted to rape and who was saved by two local Bedouin. In this case the judge ordered the family of the woman be paid 200,000 dinars for the dishonor caused by the conduct of the man who attempted rape. Nothing was to be given to the girl, except much of the calculation of the money owed was due to her having lost her sandals and headscarf in the event.
In another story from 2007 we hear about Zahra al Azzo, a 16 year old girl who was murdered by her brother to cleanse the family’s honour. How had she dishonored the family? She had been kidnapped and raped. The killer get a few months in prison. According to Syrian law a man who admits he killed a woman to preserve family “honour” cannot receive more than a year in prison and the average was six months. A recent initiative to abolish Article 548 of the penal code in that country will supposedly ensure men are sentenced to a minimum of two years. The need t murder women for the “crime” of having been raped, while the rapist goes free says much about why women must remain in Purdah or “exclusion” in Muslim countries. If they are allowed out every man knows he can rape them and not be punished and in fact it will be her crime for having been raped. But then again, Human Rights Watch raises money in those very countries where women are whipped and murdered for being raped. But in Pakistan they do things differently: there they just burn women with acid for such “crimes” as refusing to marry someone. 200 cases have been reported from April to June this year.
In the end what we can learn from these stories of women forcibly raped before execution and money paid to compensate for a woman’s murder is more about the treatment of woman in Islamic society. But we can also learn a lot about our society, about our secularism, our freedom and our intellectualism. Consider that the leading leftist Israeli daily, Haaretz, reported the murder of the girl as an “attempted robbery” which reflected the original Hamas press release. The Jewish Israeli leftist author, Arnon Regular, doesn’t quote Hamas as saying it was a robbery but actually claims it was himself (although he is based in Tel Aviv, not Gaza). According to Arnon “The gunmen, who apparently were attempting to rob the couples–two brothers and their girlfriends–suddenly opened fire at the car.” Remember he wasn’t there but he gives Hamas the benefit of the doubt.
We learn much from these stories. We learn that it is so important that a woman be de-virginized before death that she is forcibly ‘married’ and raped before being executed in Islamic countries. We learn that “progressive” journalists in our society excuse the murder of young women. They go even further than Islamism for the Islamic judge admitted that the murder of the girl was a crime, he just valued the girl at 25,000 Jordanian dinars. We learn that to murder women in Islamic countries is not seen as a harm to a person, but a harm to a family for which money is paid, much as it was in the case of the attempted rape. We learn that intellectuals and scholars in the West turn the brutality of murder in “normative discourses.”
What we see here is the typical story of evils of Islamism and the way in which the West’s best intellectuals and people excuse its evil. It reminds one of the famous dispute between Miguel de Unamuno, a Spanish philosopher, and Millan Astray, a Francoist Spanish general at the University of Salamanca in October of 1936 at the beginning of the Spanish Civil war which pitted radical militant liberalism and communism against Spanish nationalism and fascism. In a dialogue condemning the Falangist belief in “Long live death (Viva la Muerte)” Unamuno was shouted down by a crowd and Astray with the words “death to the intelligentsia.” Unamuno objected that while the nationalists would win by brute force they would not convince without having “reason and right in the struggle.” Indeed in the war against Islamism, whose motto is “long live death” and the war against the intelligentsia in the West that excuses Islamism it is obvious that those who oppose both are right. The question is how to reason against the twin evils that threaten the soul of humanity? These stories should help to answer that question.
Terra Incognita 93 Terror and Human Rights organizations
Terra Incognita
Issue 93
“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
July 22, 2009
3) Terror and Human Rights Organizations: The recent revelations that Human Rights watch raises money in Saudi Arabia should raise awareness of the fact that human rights organizations are funded by the same sources and people who fund terrorist organizations. But their cooperation and similarity goes beyond that. They are organized the same way, use the media the same way and undermine democracy the same way.
Terror and Human Rights organizations
Seth J. Frantzman
July 19, 2009
Recent revelations that Human Rights Watch raised money from Saudi Arabia by emphasizing its criticism of Israel makes one realize that the same Saudis who fund Al Qaeda may also be funding Human Rights Watch. This means the two organizations and their leaders in the Middle East; Bin Laden and Sarah Leah Whitson, may have more in common than we subsequently realized. So are there other ways that some Human Rights Organizations and Terrorist Organizations are similar?
The two seem to be in a symbiotic relationship. Human Rights Organizations spend most of their time defending terrorists or those that support them and frustrating the efforts of states to remove the scourge of terrorism (Consider the recent irony of Amnesty International “strongly condemns Saudi Arabia over abuses allegedly committed during counter-terrorism efforts”-note no critique of the country’s other abuses of woman and foreign workers). But the symbiosis goes beyond that. The organizational structure is the same as well. They have a head office and then they have tentacles that stretch throughout the globe which work with local groups and recruit locally and receive local reports. They organize themselves into cells in the local environment, usually consisting of three men and women, which control the local hydra of the umbrella group. The cells operate independently, in the case of the terror organization they plan and orchestrate attacks whereas the Human rights cell orchestrates reports and criticism of the local state, a form of attack.
In addition both have training camps and centers where local recruits are sent on expenses paid flights to train in their work. Most members of these organizations are wealthy and most are educated or exposed to the West and its values. They both have an international outlook. Both terrorists and human rights activists hate Israel and both criticize local Muslim governments, such as that of Egypt. Both work in their own way to widdle away and undermine the state.
But it is in funding, following the money, that we also find a similarity. Both receive government and private donations. Both terrorist organizations and human rights organizations are organized as charities and both receive funding from Saudi Arabia and from the West. They also cooperate. Consider Human Rights Watch and Al Qaeda. Both receive money from Saudi Arabia. The money is funneled through numbered accounts, usually untraceable (Human Rights Watch doesn’t report who its Saudi donors are or have open books), and then local activists wage a vicious war of “reports” against the state. Human Rights Organizations use terrorism of the mind, attempting through publicity seeking articles and reports to shock the citizenry and ruin the reputations of states, while the terrorist organization use terrorism of the body, murdering and slaughtering people to shock the citizenry and ruin the reputation of a state, weakening it in the hopes it will collapse.
Both operate under the theory that ‘harming us makes us stronger.’ Thus attacks on human rights organizations either by locals or police or states seems to validate their point, the state is brutal and the suppression of the organization means that it must have been correct. Absence of an ability to report, the organization will then issue reports of imminent genocide or ‘warnings’ and ‘concerns’. Terrorist organizations thrive off of suppression, using it as a recruiting tool. Thus Al Qaeda once complained that the U.S occupied Saudi Arabia and harmed Muslims, and this was the excuse for 9/11, but 9/11 produced the Afghan and Iraq wars and gave Al Qaeda more claims of Muslims being occupied and suppressed as an excuse for further terror. Both use the media to gain exposure. If no one reported terrorist attacks or human rights reports than terrorist organizations and human rights organizations would have a hard time justifying their existence. Likewise democracies seem to suffer disproportionately from both. Extreme dictatorships usually receive little critique from human rights organizations, Saudi being a case in point, and terrorists have trouble operating in strong dictatorships.
It is unfortunate that the structure, funding and operations of Human Rights Watch and Al Qaeda have much in common. It goes to show the perversion that has overtaken the Human Rights industry and perverted it from its original interest in the ‘rights of man’ to the rights of terrorists and their supports.
Issue 93
“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
July 22, 2009
3) Terror and Human Rights Organizations: The recent revelations that Human Rights watch raises money in Saudi Arabia should raise awareness of the fact that human rights organizations are funded by the same sources and people who fund terrorist organizations. But their cooperation and similarity goes beyond that. They are organized the same way, use the media the same way and undermine democracy the same way.
Terror and Human Rights organizations
Seth J. Frantzman
July 19, 2009
Recent revelations that Human Rights Watch raised money from Saudi Arabia by emphasizing its criticism of Israel makes one realize that the same Saudis who fund Al Qaeda may also be funding Human Rights Watch. This means the two organizations and their leaders in the Middle East; Bin Laden and Sarah Leah Whitson, may have more in common than we subsequently realized. So are there other ways that some Human Rights Organizations and Terrorist Organizations are similar?
The two seem to be in a symbiotic relationship. Human Rights Organizations spend most of their time defending terrorists or those that support them and frustrating the efforts of states to remove the scourge of terrorism (Consider the recent irony of Amnesty International “strongly condemns Saudi Arabia over abuses allegedly committed during counter-terrorism efforts”-note no critique of the country’s other abuses of woman and foreign workers). But the symbiosis goes beyond that. The organizational structure is the same as well. They have a head office and then they have tentacles that stretch throughout the globe which work with local groups and recruit locally and receive local reports. They organize themselves into cells in the local environment, usually consisting of three men and women, which control the local hydra of the umbrella group. The cells operate independently, in the case of the terror organization they plan and orchestrate attacks whereas the Human rights cell orchestrates reports and criticism of the local state, a form of attack.
In addition both have training camps and centers where local recruits are sent on expenses paid flights to train in their work. Most members of these organizations are wealthy and most are educated or exposed to the West and its values. They both have an international outlook. Both terrorists and human rights activists hate Israel and both criticize local Muslim governments, such as that of Egypt. Both work in their own way to widdle away and undermine the state.
But it is in funding, following the money, that we also find a similarity. Both receive government and private donations. Both terrorist organizations and human rights organizations are organized as charities and both receive funding from Saudi Arabia and from the West. They also cooperate. Consider Human Rights Watch and Al Qaeda. Both receive money from Saudi Arabia. The money is funneled through numbered accounts, usually untraceable (Human Rights Watch doesn’t report who its Saudi donors are or have open books), and then local activists wage a vicious war of “reports” against the state. Human Rights Organizations use terrorism of the mind, attempting through publicity seeking articles and reports to shock the citizenry and ruin the reputations of states, while the terrorist organization use terrorism of the body, murdering and slaughtering people to shock the citizenry and ruin the reputation of a state, weakening it in the hopes it will collapse.
Both operate under the theory that ‘harming us makes us stronger.’ Thus attacks on human rights organizations either by locals or police or states seems to validate their point, the state is brutal and the suppression of the organization means that it must have been correct. Absence of an ability to report, the organization will then issue reports of imminent genocide or ‘warnings’ and ‘concerns’. Terrorist organizations thrive off of suppression, using it as a recruiting tool. Thus Al Qaeda once complained that the U.S occupied Saudi Arabia and harmed Muslims, and this was the excuse for 9/11, but 9/11 produced the Afghan and Iraq wars and gave Al Qaeda more claims of Muslims being occupied and suppressed as an excuse for further terror. Both use the media to gain exposure. If no one reported terrorist attacks or human rights reports than terrorist organizations and human rights organizations would have a hard time justifying their existence. Likewise democracies seem to suffer disproportionately from both. Extreme dictatorships usually receive little critique from human rights organizations, Saudi being a case in point, and terrorists have trouble operating in strong dictatorships.
It is unfortunate that the structure, funding and operations of Human Rights Watch and Al Qaeda have much in common. It goes to show the perversion that has overtaken the Human Rights industry and perverted it from its original interest in the ‘rights of man’ to the rights of terrorists and their supports.
Terra Incognita 93 part 2 Spoiled terrorists
Terra Incognita
Issue 92
“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
July 22, 2009
2) All terrorism is spoiled: Terrorists are spoiled wealthy children who usually receive government assistance and usually are educated in the West. The recent case of the Somalis in Minessota, who the U.S gave asylum to their parents and gave them jobs and money, is a case in point. Like the spoiled brat Osama Bin Laden or Said Qutb, they were all products of wealth and of government money, largesse, welfare and western enlightenment.
All terrorism is spoiled
Seth J. Frantzman
July 14, 2009
The basis of terrorism is wealth, education and spoiled living. All terrorists are wealthy or middle class. All of them received benefits from the government. Most never worked in a job during their lives. This is the profile of a terrorist. In the leftist conception of terrorism it stems from poverty, humiliation, discrimination, occupation or racism. But in fact all terrorists come from homogenous societies and all of them come from societies that have spent most of their time murdering and cleansing minorities from their midst. Every terrorist is not humiliated but in fact spends most of his life humiliating others.
Consider the 9/11 terrorists. They went to strip clubs and humiliated women. They lived off government aid and received free educations in Europe and the U.S. They were all wealthy Saudis who grew up with Philipino maids, most of which were humiliated and beaten by them. They came from the most homogenous racist society in the world: Saudi Arabia. This is the breeding ground of terrorism.
A recent article in the New York Times expressed shock that a bunch of youthful Somalis in Minnesota had taken up the Jihad and returned to Somalia. Consider these ungrateful wealthy spoiled brats. Their parents were refugees from Somalia and the United States took them in. They received largesse and welfare. Their children never worked but enjoyed the largesse of the United States. Coddled as ‘refugees’ and worshipped as ‘African-Americans’ (which they were not) they enjoyed the good life that their parents toil allowed them. They went to college and joined a Muslim prayer circle. And then suddenly they had an awakening that they had to “defend Islam” by going to Somalia and murdering people. The New York Times couldn’t understand how these people would embrace a homeland they never knew. But all terrorism embraces mythological homelands. The wealthy soviet playboys who murdered and slaughtered people fought for a “proletariat” they scoffed at. Carlos the Jackal, who was born in South America to a wealthy family, slaughtered his way through Europe and the Arab world murdering for no reason, except to kill.
The life of every terrorist is the same. Every single one is born in middle class lifestyle. Every single one receives a good education and almost all of them receive government aid at some point. Perhaps it is the boredom of their spoiled lives that gives them the time to ponder Jihad. Whatever it is it is not poverty, it is wealth and education that causes terror. If you want terror to cease then one should turn every country into Sub-Saharan Africa think Chad or the Congo. There is no terrorism there.
Issue 92
“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
July 22, 2009
2) All terrorism is spoiled: Terrorists are spoiled wealthy children who usually receive government assistance and usually are educated in the West. The recent case of the Somalis in Minessota, who the U.S gave asylum to their parents and gave them jobs and money, is a case in point. Like the spoiled brat Osama Bin Laden or Said Qutb, they were all products of wealth and of government money, largesse, welfare and western enlightenment.
All terrorism is spoiled
Seth J. Frantzman
July 14, 2009
The basis of terrorism is wealth, education and spoiled living. All terrorists are wealthy or middle class. All of them received benefits from the government. Most never worked in a job during their lives. This is the profile of a terrorist. In the leftist conception of terrorism it stems from poverty, humiliation, discrimination, occupation or racism. But in fact all terrorists come from homogenous societies and all of them come from societies that have spent most of their time murdering and cleansing minorities from their midst. Every terrorist is not humiliated but in fact spends most of his life humiliating others.
Consider the 9/11 terrorists. They went to strip clubs and humiliated women. They lived off government aid and received free educations in Europe and the U.S. They were all wealthy Saudis who grew up with Philipino maids, most of which were humiliated and beaten by them. They came from the most homogenous racist society in the world: Saudi Arabia. This is the breeding ground of terrorism.
A recent article in the New York Times expressed shock that a bunch of youthful Somalis in Minnesota had taken up the Jihad and returned to Somalia. Consider these ungrateful wealthy spoiled brats. Their parents were refugees from Somalia and the United States took them in. They received largesse and welfare. Their children never worked but enjoyed the largesse of the United States. Coddled as ‘refugees’ and worshipped as ‘African-Americans’ (which they were not) they enjoyed the good life that their parents toil allowed them. They went to college and joined a Muslim prayer circle. And then suddenly they had an awakening that they had to “defend Islam” by going to Somalia and murdering people. The New York Times couldn’t understand how these people would embrace a homeland they never knew. But all terrorism embraces mythological homelands. The wealthy soviet playboys who murdered and slaughtered people fought for a “proletariat” they scoffed at. Carlos the Jackal, who was born in South America to a wealthy family, slaughtered his way through Europe and the Arab world murdering for no reason, except to kill.
The life of every terrorist is the same. Every single one is born in middle class lifestyle. Every single one receives a good education and almost all of them receive government aid at some point. Perhaps it is the boredom of their spoiled lives that gives them the time to ponder Jihad. Whatever it is it is not poverty, it is wealth and education that causes terror. If you want terror to cease then one should turn every country into Sub-Saharan Africa think Chad or the Congo. There is no terrorism there.
Terra Incognita 93 part 1 Sotomayor
Terra Incognita
Issue 92
“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
July 22, 2009
1) The positive side of the Sotomayor appointment: The positive side of the Sotomayor appointment is the realization that America cannot escape the racialist needs of the left to categorize everything by skin color or supposed skin color. But at least we will never ever again have to have another “historic” first with the Supreme court in terms of “Latinas”. One more historic position filled with one more minority.
2) All terrorism is spoiled: Terrorists are spoiled wealthy children who usually receive government assistance and usually are educated in the West. The recent case of the Somalis in Minessota, who the U.S gave asylum to their parents and gave them jobs and money, is a case in point. Like the spoiled brat Osama Bin Laden or Said Qutb, they were all products of wealth and of government money, largesse, welfare and western enlightenment.
3) Terror and Human Rights Organizations: The recent revelations that Human Rights watch raises money in Saudi Arabia should raise awareness of the fact that human rights organizations are funded by the same sources and people who fund terrorist organizations. But their cooperation and similarity goes beyond that. They are organized the same way, use the media the same way and undermine democracy the same way.
4) An extraordinary religion: Our Shariah loving friends: A few cases of Islamist evil, murdering of rape victims, acid burning of women and the other typical run of the mill stories remind us once again of Islamism’s evil but it also reminds us of the way in which westerners collaborate with it.
The positive side of the Sotomayor appointment
Seth J. Frantzman
July 14, 2009
Sonya Sotomayor will be the next U.S Supreme Court Justice. The woman who claimed a “wise Latina” will judge better than a “white man” will pass confirmation in coming days. But for those that worry that her racism and her arrogant belief that she is “wise” is a negative, there is in fact a silver lining. With newspapers speaking of yet another “historic” precedent, the first ‘Latina’ on the supreme court, we can actually breathe a sigh of relief. We will never again have to hear about another “first” for a Latina on the court. No more “Historic” appointments there. Just as Barak Obama’s victory has saved us ever again having to hear about another “historic” black U.S president we have no killed another bird with another stone; we have checked another box of minority success.
We should all celebrate the success of special minority groups because each time another black is appointed to another ‘historic’ position that means we never have to hear that headline again and never have to run to the toilet and throw up because we have watched yet another person be judged based on the color of their skin rather than the content of their character. It was a godsend to have Mr. Obama elected because now we will never have to see the guilt stricken white people saying “I can’t vote against the first black nominee for President”.
There is another silver lining to the Sotomayor idiocy. The fact that yet another racist succeeded in American politics based on her ‘race’ proves yet again the importance of inter-racial marriage. Sotomayor is another reminded of why white people in America need to reach out to their Latina and black sisters and brothers and make love to them and produce children with them. White women long ago came to understand that procreating with minorities would ensure their children success and white men can begin to learn from these events as well. Consider Barak Obama’s mother. Had she had Barak with a white man he would never have become president. Inter-racial marriage and inter-racial children are a godsend to white people for it allows them a relatively harmless way for them to change their skin color, at east that of their children, and ensure the success of their race, albeit in slightly altered form.
In order to destroy the system of affirmative action and the banal evil of race-based appointments and “historic” elections the white man (and women) can overload the system by all having children with blacks or ‘latinas’ or other non-whites. What is a “latina” anyway but a person born, or whose origins are in, some Latin country, most of which are either entirely white or mostly white owing to the fact that the “latina race” is merely a product of Spanish conquistadors raping and having sex with lots of native-Americans.
White people can’t succeed in America because they are not cool or exotic. Their history is viewed as racist and ignorant. Their “cultural experience” is not as important as that of a “wise latina” no matter what they did in life and no matter how little the “wise latina” accomplished. But they can ensure the success of their children by having children with a minority. Then that minority can pretend to belong to the culture of some far off place, just as Barak Obama, who never met his father, pretends to be a “son of Africa”. So get on the Barak Obama band wagon. Marry blacks and latins. Save the white race by ensuring its success through intermarriage. Destroy the evils of affirmative action that judges us all on our skin color by becoming black. We can all do it. And whites don’t have to find latins and blacks from the U.S, any of them will do and there are lots of them in Africa and South America. White people don’t have to abandon their names in order to accomplish this goal. Most black people have normal sounding Christian last names (like Washington, Mandela or Jackson) and all Latin names can be Americanized as well (Carlos becomes Charles for instance). So get on the minority success bandwagon. Affirmative action can only be defeated if we all become eligible for it. Those with children who check the “white” box will need 1350s on their SATs to be considered for Ivy league education, but if your children check the “black” box they only need 1000s to get in. So if you are white in America there is no logical or pragmatic reason to have children with one of your own. And if you insist on marrying a white you can at least adopt an African child, like Madonna has done, ensuring that child’s success. But don’t make the mistake of adopting an Asian or marrying one, they need 1400s on their SATs because they tend to score too well and because they are not, yet, eligible for “historic” success. They are not a favoured minority, so even though there are billions of them it is best to avoid them. Let them become the new whites.
Consider the story of Frank Ricci, a fire fighter with 14 years on the job who took a test for promotion in New Haven and having passed it with the highest grades was denied promotion because not enough black fire-fighters passed the test. He was judged based on the color of his skin and not the content of his character. He was born to a poverty stricken household and spent thousands of dollars to hire tutors because of his dyslexia. But no matter. He had the wrong skin color. When Sotomayor, the ‘latina’ was confronted with this case on the court of appeals she threw it out, noting that local \governments have the right to do whatever they want to enforce diversity, creating not a meritocracy but a raceocracy.
Sotomayor’s success is a godsend to us all. It should be a wake up call to every white person in the U.S. Your time is done. A person can brag of being better than you by the very nature of their race and this person is then feted by the Senate for their fake ‘life experience’ which consists simply of being born to the right color mother and father. Whites shouldn’t become angry, racist and ignorant and buy guns. They should think sexually strategically and bond with those who can most ensure their future generations’ success. Millions of intelligent whites have already shown the way, producing successful offspring that can pretend they are from some struggling minority group even though they grew up in private schools and wealthy neighbourhoods. Just as most Americans can be served better health care by pretending to be illegal aliens, most whites can ensure more success by crossing the racial barrier and pretending to be something else, or at least giving their children the chance to do so.
Issue 92
“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
July 22, 2009
1) The positive side of the Sotomayor appointment: The positive side of the Sotomayor appointment is the realization that America cannot escape the racialist needs of the left to categorize everything by skin color or supposed skin color. But at least we will never ever again have to have another “historic” first with the Supreme court in terms of “Latinas”. One more historic position filled with one more minority.
2) All terrorism is spoiled: Terrorists are spoiled wealthy children who usually receive government assistance and usually are educated in the West. The recent case of the Somalis in Minessota, who the U.S gave asylum to their parents and gave them jobs and money, is a case in point. Like the spoiled brat Osama Bin Laden or Said Qutb, they were all products of wealth and of government money, largesse, welfare and western enlightenment.
3) Terror and Human Rights Organizations: The recent revelations that Human Rights watch raises money in Saudi Arabia should raise awareness of the fact that human rights organizations are funded by the same sources and people who fund terrorist organizations. But their cooperation and similarity goes beyond that. They are organized the same way, use the media the same way and undermine democracy the same way.
4) An extraordinary religion: Our Shariah loving friends: A few cases of Islamist evil, murdering of rape victims, acid burning of women and the other typical run of the mill stories remind us once again of Islamism’s evil but it also reminds us of the way in which westerners collaborate with it.
The positive side of the Sotomayor appointment
Seth J. Frantzman
July 14, 2009
Sonya Sotomayor will be the next U.S Supreme Court Justice. The woman who claimed a “wise Latina” will judge better than a “white man” will pass confirmation in coming days. But for those that worry that her racism and her arrogant belief that she is “wise” is a negative, there is in fact a silver lining. With newspapers speaking of yet another “historic” precedent, the first ‘Latina’ on the supreme court, we can actually breathe a sigh of relief. We will never again have to hear about another “first” for a Latina on the court. No more “Historic” appointments there. Just as Barak Obama’s victory has saved us ever again having to hear about another “historic” black U.S president we have no killed another bird with another stone; we have checked another box of minority success.
We should all celebrate the success of special minority groups because each time another black is appointed to another ‘historic’ position that means we never have to hear that headline again and never have to run to the toilet and throw up because we have watched yet another person be judged based on the color of their skin rather than the content of their character. It was a godsend to have Mr. Obama elected because now we will never have to see the guilt stricken white people saying “I can’t vote against the first black nominee for President”.
There is another silver lining to the Sotomayor idiocy. The fact that yet another racist succeeded in American politics based on her ‘race’ proves yet again the importance of inter-racial marriage. Sotomayor is another reminded of why white people in America need to reach out to their Latina and black sisters and brothers and make love to them and produce children with them. White women long ago came to understand that procreating with minorities would ensure their children success and white men can begin to learn from these events as well. Consider Barak Obama’s mother. Had she had Barak with a white man he would never have become president. Inter-racial marriage and inter-racial children are a godsend to white people for it allows them a relatively harmless way for them to change their skin color, at east that of their children, and ensure the success of their race, albeit in slightly altered form.
In order to destroy the system of affirmative action and the banal evil of race-based appointments and “historic” elections the white man (and women) can overload the system by all having children with blacks or ‘latinas’ or other non-whites. What is a “latina” anyway but a person born, or whose origins are in, some Latin country, most of which are either entirely white or mostly white owing to the fact that the “latina race” is merely a product of Spanish conquistadors raping and having sex with lots of native-Americans.
White people can’t succeed in America because they are not cool or exotic. Their history is viewed as racist and ignorant. Their “cultural experience” is not as important as that of a “wise latina” no matter what they did in life and no matter how little the “wise latina” accomplished. But they can ensure the success of their children by having children with a minority. Then that minority can pretend to belong to the culture of some far off place, just as Barak Obama, who never met his father, pretends to be a “son of Africa”. So get on the Barak Obama band wagon. Marry blacks and latins. Save the white race by ensuring its success through intermarriage. Destroy the evils of affirmative action that judges us all on our skin color by becoming black. We can all do it. And whites don’t have to find latins and blacks from the U.S, any of them will do and there are lots of them in Africa and South America. White people don’t have to abandon their names in order to accomplish this goal. Most black people have normal sounding Christian last names (like Washington, Mandela or Jackson) and all Latin names can be Americanized as well (Carlos becomes Charles for instance). So get on the minority success bandwagon. Affirmative action can only be defeated if we all become eligible for it. Those with children who check the “white” box will need 1350s on their SATs to be considered for Ivy league education, but if your children check the “black” box they only need 1000s to get in. So if you are white in America there is no logical or pragmatic reason to have children with one of your own. And if you insist on marrying a white you can at least adopt an African child, like Madonna has done, ensuring that child’s success. But don’t make the mistake of adopting an Asian or marrying one, they need 1400s on their SATs because they tend to score too well and because they are not, yet, eligible for “historic” success. They are not a favoured minority, so even though there are billions of them it is best to avoid them. Let them become the new whites.
Consider the story of Frank Ricci, a fire fighter with 14 years on the job who took a test for promotion in New Haven and having passed it with the highest grades was denied promotion because not enough black fire-fighters passed the test. He was judged based on the color of his skin and not the content of his character. He was born to a poverty stricken household and spent thousands of dollars to hire tutors because of his dyslexia. But no matter. He had the wrong skin color. When Sotomayor, the ‘latina’ was confronted with this case on the court of appeals she threw it out, noting that local \governments have the right to do whatever they want to enforce diversity, creating not a meritocracy but a raceocracy.
Sotomayor’s success is a godsend to us all. It should be a wake up call to every white person in the U.S. Your time is done. A person can brag of being better than you by the very nature of their race and this person is then feted by the Senate for their fake ‘life experience’ which consists simply of being born to the right color mother and father. Whites shouldn’t become angry, racist and ignorant and buy guns. They should think sexually strategically and bond with those who can most ensure their future generations’ success. Millions of intelligent whites have already shown the way, producing successful offspring that can pretend they are from some struggling minority group even though they grew up in private schools and wealthy neighbourhoods. Just as most Americans can be served better health care by pretending to be illegal aliens, most whites can ensure more success by crossing the racial barrier and pretending to be something else, or at least giving their children the chance to do so.
Saturday, July 18, 2009
Terra Incognita 92 Part 2 Justice in Europe
Terra Incognita
Issue 92
“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
July 15, 2009
2) Justice in Europe: A recent headline read “Demjanjuk accused of murdering 27,000 people, faces 15 years in prison.” Demjanjuk is accused of being a Nazi camp guard and although it is obvious he could not be responsible for so many murders personally it is also obvious the degree to which the European judicial system is perverted. In Europe a person can murder dozens of people, go to prison for the ‘life sentence’ of 15 years and get out with a few more “lives” left to slaughter people. This is Europe. This is the pride of the West. This is secularism. This is justice. This is there ‘human rights’. This is progressive living. But where are the human rights for those who are being murdered?
Justice in Europe
July 14, 2009
Seth J. Frantzman
It is too bad that Hitler didn’t exist today for if he did we could watch European justice at work, we could view the actual outcome of the liberalistic-secular human hating post-human world that the European has constructed. If Hitler existed today and was arrested he would face a maximum of 15 years in prison, allowing him a few more chances to carry out his final solution.
This is exactly what has occurred with John Demjanjuk. He was born in Poland and later drafted into the Soviet Army in 1941, becoming a prisoner of War in Germany and volunteering for the German army. He found himself as a guard at the German concentration camp Sobibor. He is now accused of being involved in the murder of 27,900 people. Obviously he couldn’t personally have carried out all these murders and prosecutors could have charged him with a more realistic and smaller number. But either way it would not have mattered. In Europe justice means that one serves all their sentences simultaneously and a life sentence is only 15 years, so a person can never get more than 15 years in prison, no matter how many genocides they commit.
This is Europe. This is the high point in Western Civilization. This is all that enlightenment has been able to achieve. This is what secularism and godless humanity based on science promises us. This is how liberalism envisions justice. It is exactly why European Civilization and all that it embodies is a failure. This is why we should all be happy to ascribe to the justice systems of any other country in the world outside of what they have created in Europe. Europeans whine about ‘human rights’ violations in other countries where they hang people and cut off people’s hands. But which is a greater ‘human rights’ violation; to cut off the hands of a thief or to allow a murderer to kill tens of thousands of people every 15 years? Which one is more detrimental to the rights of humans. The European concept of “justice” ignores the fact that we, the citizenry, also deserve our rights, not just the mass murderer. To deny thieves their “human rights” by cutting off their hands is better than to condemn all of us to be murdered under a false sense of what is ‘humane.’ Murderers should be hung. Rapists should be hung. Violent criminals should be imprisoned for life. That is all there is to it. European justice caused the Holocaust and it allowed the murderers to go free and it even grants elderly Nazis furloughs lest they spend their twilight years in prison. Europe is not justice. It is death. It is an entire society based on death and the violation of the human rights of all the civilians who are not protected from dangerous criminals.
Issue 92
“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
July 15, 2009
2) Justice in Europe: A recent headline read “Demjanjuk accused of murdering 27,000 people, faces 15 years in prison.” Demjanjuk is accused of being a Nazi camp guard and although it is obvious he could not be responsible for so many murders personally it is also obvious the degree to which the European judicial system is perverted. In Europe a person can murder dozens of people, go to prison for the ‘life sentence’ of 15 years and get out with a few more “lives” left to slaughter people. This is Europe. This is the pride of the West. This is secularism. This is justice. This is there ‘human rights’. This is progressive living. But where are the human rights for those who are being murdered?
Justice in Europe
July 14, 2009
Seth J. Frantzman
It is too bad that Hitler didn’t exist today for if he did we could watch European justice at work, we could view the actual outcome of the liberalistic-secular human hating post-human world that the European has constructed. If Hitler existed today and was arrested he would face a maximum of 15 years in prison, allowing him a few more chances to carry out his final solution.
This is exactly what has occurred with John Demjanjuk. He was born in Poland and later drafted into the Soviet Army in 1941, becoming a prisoner of War in Germany and volunteering for the German army. He found himself as a guard at the German concentration camp Sobibor. He is now accused of being involved in the murder of 27,900 people. Obviously he couldn’t personally have carried out all these murders and prosecutors could have charged him with a more realistic and smaller number. But either way it would not have mattered. In Europe justice means that one serves all their sentences simultaneously and a life sentence is only 15 years, so a person can never get more than 15 years in prison, no matter how many genocides they commit.
This is Europe. This is the high point in Western Civilization. This is all that enlightenment has been able to achieve. This is what secularism and godless humanity based on science promises us. This is how liberalism envisions justice. It is exactly why European Civilization and all that it embodies is a failure. This is why we should all be happy to ascribe to the justice systems of any other country in the world outside of what they have created in Europe. Europeans whine about ‘human rights’ violations in other countries where they hang people and cut off people’s hands. But which is a greater ‘human rights’ violation; to cut off the hands of a thief or to allow a murderer to kill tens of thousands of people every 15 years? Which one is more detrimental to the rights of humans. The European concept of “justice” ignores the fact that we, the citizenry, also deserve our rights, not just the mass murderer. To deny thieves their “human rights” by cutting off their hands is better than to condemn all of us to be murdered under a false sense of what is ‘humane.’ Murderers should be hung. Rapists should be hung. Violent criminals should be imprisoned for life. That is all there is to it. European justice caused the Holocaust and it allowed the murderers to go free and it even grants elderly Nazis furloughs lest they spend their twilight years in prison. Europe is not justice. It is death. It is an entire society based on death and the violation of the human rights of all the civilians who are not protected from dangerous criminals.
Terra Incognita 92 Part 1 Honduras
Terra Incognita
Issue 92
“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
July 15, 2009
1) Misreading Events in Honduras: The ousting of Honduran president Manuel Zalaya has been portrayed as a “coup”. In fact it was ordered by the Supreme Court and the Congress and while it was military that removed him, it was a member of his own party, the next in line for succession should the president be impeached, that replaced him. An impeachment is hardly a coup and Zalaya was a threat to democracy in the form of Castro or Chavez.
Misreading Events in Honduras
Seth J. Frantzman
July 13th, 2009
On the 28th of June the Honduran army descended on the Presidential palace, arrested the president and put him on a plane to Costa Rica. Within hours a new acting President had been placed in office. It had all the marks of a coup, the kind that had once been so common in South America and Africa. World reaction was quick. The UN General Assembly unanimously called for the President, Manuel Zalaya, to be reinstated. On July 4th Honduras was expelled from the Organization of American States (OAS), an organization that has, over the years, become a bastion of democratizing influence for Latin America. From Barak Obama to Hugo Chavez the “coup” was condemned.
But what most of the media missed was the degree to which what had actually happened was that a president, perhaps seeking dictatorial powers, had been peacefully removed in a constitutional manner. Far from placing thugs on the throne of Honduras, the military had received its marching orders from the Supreme Court and it had immediately yielded to the next man in the line of succession, president of the Congress Roberto Micheletti, a member of Zalaya’s party.
Although street protests followed the ouster of Zalaya there was no bloodshed and it appears the majority of Hondurans support the actions of the military and the government. So why the widespread condemnation? Very few people seem to be aware of the fact that it was Zalaya who attempted to emulate Hugo Chavez’s one part rule. Consider the latest manifestations of that regime, which began innocently enough being democratically elected. Chavez has recently passed new legislation forcing all media outlets and cable outlets to carry his long winded rambling speeches and on July 11th a new law revoked the licenses of 40% of the nations radio stations in what Chavez described as “democratizing” the media.
The same use of “democracy” was what Zalaya had in mind when he attempted to have a referendum during which voters would be asked if they wanted to form a constitutional amending National Constituent assembly. The object of this would be to amend the constitution to remove term limits. As it stands today Honduras has a one term limit, a common law in many Latin American countries such as Mexico where a history of strong-man Caudilloism had seen dictators remain in office for decades. In order to prevent one politician gaining too much power the one term limit would force rotation at the top. Zalaya, who had assumed office in 2006, was seen as intending to emulate Hugo Chavez and want to run again in 2010. Chavez had amended Venezuela’s constitution in February 2009, after winning just such a referendum. As of today he has been in power ten years and will likely remain in office, like Fidel Castro, for more than a generation.
In late June of 2009 the Congress of Honduras, of which Zalaya’s own Liberal party was the majority, began discussing ways to impeach him for violating the constitution when he announced plans to hold an unofficial poll on amending the constitution on June 28th.
When Zalaya asked the military to pass out the ballots for his referendum, which had been declared illegal by the Congress and the Supreme Court, the chief of staff General Romeo Valasquez refused. Zalaya fired the general but the Supreme Court, in a 5-0 ruling, declared the firing illegal on the 25th of June. On the same day the Attorney General of Honduras issued an arrest warrant for Zalaya for violating the constitution. The Supreme Court, in secret, approved the warrant.
When Zalaya was bundled into a plane it had all the hallmarks of a coup. Except none of the things that usually happen in a coup happened. There was no killing. There were no Colonels to take power in some triumvirate. There was no widespread censorship or suppression of civil liberties. Polls before the “coup” in fact found that only 1 in four Hondurans supported the President. While it seemed like a coup the participation of two out of three branches of government, the virtually unanimous approval by the courts and the Congress and the fact that the President’s own party approved his removal point to the legality of it. Furthermore the fact that the next in line of succession was appointed an acting president shows that rather than a change in regime it was a maintenance of democracy.
Honduras is more of a democracy today than it was on June 27th. The critique by the OAS, Chavez and Obama are without merit. Had Zalaya been allowed to go forward with his seemingly innocuous referendum he might very well have ended up as another Chavez. Latin Americans fought for decades to remove Caudillos from office and set term limits to ensure democracy. Those limits are now being eroded through the ballot box, much as fascism and Communism exploited democracy to power. Zalaya violated his own country’s laws. Calling what happened a “coup” obscures the reality.
Issue 92
“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
July 15, 2009
1) Misreading Events in Honduras: The ousting of Honduran president Manuel Zalaya has been portrayed as a “coup”. In fact it was ordered by the Supreme Court and the Congress and while it was military that removed him, it was a member of his own party, the next in line for succession should the president be impeached, that replaced him. An impeachment is hardly a coup and Zalaya was a threat to democracy in the form of Castro or Chavez.
Misreading Events in Honduras
Seth J. Frantzman
July 13th, 2009
On the 28th of June the Honduran army descended on the Presidential palace, arrested the president and put him on a plane to Costa Rica. Within hours a new acting President had been placed in office. It had all the marks of a coup, the kind that had once been so common in South America and Africa. World reaction was quick. The UN General Assembly unanimously called for the President, Manuel Zalaya, to be reinstated. On July 4th Honduras was expelled from the Organization of American States (OAS), an organization that has, over the years, become a bastion of democratizing influence for Latin America. From Barak Obama to Hugo Chavez the “coup” was condemned.
But what most of the media missed was the degree to which what had actually happened was that a president, perhaps seeking dictatorial powers, had been peacefully removed in a constitutional manner. Far from placing thugs on the throne of Honduras, the military had received its marching orders from the Supreme Court and it had immediately yielded to the next man in the line of succession, president of the Congress Roberto Micheletti, a member of Zalaya’s party.
Although street protests followed the ouster of Zalaya there was no bloodshed and it appears the majority of Hondurans support the actions of the military and the government. So why the widespread condemnation? Very few people seem to be aware of the fact that it was Zalaya who attempted to emulate Hugo Chavez’s one part rule. Consider the latest manifestations of that regime, which began innocently enough being democratically elected. Chavez has recently passed new legislation forcing all media outlets and cable outlets to carry his long winded rambling speeches and on July 11th a new law revoked the licenses of 40% of the nations radio stations in what Chavez described as “democratizing” the media.
The same use of “democracy” was what Zalaya had in mind when he attempted to have a referendum during which voters would be asked if they wanted to form a constitutional amending National Constituent assembly. The object of this would be to amend the constitution to remove term limits. As it stands today Honduras has a one term limit, a common law in many Latin American countries such as Mexico where a history of strong-man Caudilloism had seen dictators remain in office for decades. In order to prevent one politician gaining too much power the one term limit would force rotation at the top. Zalaya, who had assumed office in 2006, was seen as intending to emulate Hugo Chavez and want to run again in 2010. Chavez had amended Venezuela’s constitution in February 2009, after winning just such a referendum. As of today he has been in power ten years and will likely remain in office, like Fidel Castro, for more than a generation.
In late June of 2009 the Congress of Honduras, of which Zalaya’s own Liberal party was the majority, began discussing ways to impeach him for violating the constitution when he announced plans to hold an unofficial poll on amending the constitution on June 28th.
When Zalaya asked the military to pass out the ballots for his referendum, which had been declared illegal by the Congress and the Supreme Court, the chief of staff General Romeo Valasquez refused. Zalaya fired the general but the Supreme Court, in a 5-0 ruling, declared the firing illegal on the 25th of June. On the same day the Attorney General of Honduras issued an arrest warrant for Zalaya for violating the constitution. The Supreme Court, in secret, approved the warrant.
When Zalaya was bundled into a plane it had all the hallmarks of a coup. Except none of the things that usually happen in a coup happened. There was no killing. There were no Colonels to take power in some triumvirate. There was no widespread censorship or suppression of civil liberties. Polls before the “coup” in fact found that only 1 in four Hondurans supported the President. While it seemed like a coup the participation of two out of three branches of government, the virtually unanimous approval by the courts and the Congress and the fact that the President’s own party approved his removal point to the legality of it. Furthermore the fact that the next in line of succession was appointed an acting president shows that rather than a change in regime it was a maintenance of democracy.
Honduras is more of a democracy today than it was on June 27th. The critique by the OAS, Chavez and Obama are without merit. Had Zalaya been allowed to go forward with his seemingly innocuous referendum he might very well have ended up as another Chavez. Latin Americans fought for decades to remove Caudillos from office and set term limits to ensure democracy. Those limits are now being eroded through the ballot box, much as fascism and Communism exploited democracy to power. Zalaya violated his own country’s laws. Calling what happened a “coup” obscures the reality.
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
The Moral Bankruptcy of the Global Peace Index or how to fake peacefulness
The Moral Bankruptcy of the Global Peace Index or how to fake peacefulness
Seth J. Frantzman
June 3, 2009
Tel 97-57-855-4551, sfrantzman@hotmail.com
By the logic and methodology employed by the Global Peace Index Stalin’s Russia and Hitler’s Germany would have scored well. The Index was in the news recently with headlines that declared “Israel ranked lower than Iran”, “Israel hits rock bottom” and “Israel is one of the most violent countries.” This became apparent when the Australia-based Institute for Economics and Peace published its latest findings showing Israel to be less peaceful than Sudan. The message of studies such of this dovetails with the false legitimacy of conferences such as the UN’s Durban II which claim to be about racism but are in themselves racist. Together they are part of the moral bankruptcy and thoughtlessness that is behind so much of the rhetoric about peace, racism, war-crimes and justice that dominate the headlines.
The IEP describes itself as a “vision of humanity” that is bringing “a strategic approach to raising the world’s attention and awareness around the importance of peacefulness to humanity’s survival in the 21st century.” It claims to be dedicated to educating people about the “relationship between economic development, business and peace.”
Like other ‘indexes’ such as the Freedom Index and Property Rights Index the institute sifts through mountains of data on the world’s countries and then must reduce each data set into a set “indicators”. The indicators are then divided into three categories; “measures of ongoing domestic and international conflict, measures of safety and security in society and measures of militarization.” 144 were measured. Israel scored 141st and Sudan scored 140th. To arrive at this such variables as “relations with neighbouring countires” must all be made into numbers. This system, which is popular in the social sciences, means quantifying such abstract concepts as people’s “perception of criminality in society.” This is open to a form of fraud. Israelis may think their society is violent just like South Africans but the murder rate in Israel is 2.65 for every 100,000 whereas in South Africa it is 38.
Sudan which has caused the deaths of 300,000 of its own African citizens and displaced millions of them to Chad scores exactly the same as Israel under the category “number of displaced people as a percentage of population.” Perhaps the score for Sudan is the same as Israel because Sudan has achieved a complete genocide of its black Muslim Darfur population and there thus aren’t any displaced left? The creators of the Index seem to have punished Israel twice for the Gaza war while giving Sudan a pass since Sudan isn’t at war with her neighbours, she is just slaughtering most of the people within her borders.
This jerry-rigged statistical nonsense gives birth to a morally bankrupt result. The insinuation of the survey is clear: Israel is one of the most violent places in the world. This jives with the typical surveys in Europe where people place Israel on the top of the list of countries “threatening world peace.” By contrast countries currently involved in mass human rights violations, genocides and even slavery can be considered “peaceful.” Countries that resemble one large prison, such as North Korea are positively wonderful to live in. Lebanon, Pakistan, Zimbabwe and the Congo, all of which have central governments that barely function, are doing better than Israel. Egypt, where tourists are forbidden from visiting much of the country, where tourist attractions are like armed police camps and where tourists must travel on special trains for safety is considered 54th out of 144 country, a prime place to live. It is absent of violence apparently because neither the media nor foreigners can visit much of it. The fact that it guns down dozens of African refugees every year for the ‘crime’ of crossing its border doesn’t register on the Index. Neither do riots against Coptic Christians or terrorist acts.
Sudan shouldn’t be merely last on the list, for committing a genocide, it should have such a negative number associated with it as to indicate that it has murdered 300,000 people. Anything less points to the complete moral bankruptcy and irrelevance of “indexs” such as these. It is tempting to want to boil every country down to a neat number but when bias and thoughtlessness is built into the system of doing so the results are no different than Durban II.
Seth J. Frantzman
June 3, 2009
Tel 97-57-855-4551, sfrantzman@hotmail.com
By the logic and methodology employed by the Global Peace Index Stalin’s Russia and Hitler’s Germany would have scored well. The Index was in the news recently with headlines that declared “Israel ranked lower than Iran”, “Israel hits rock bottom” and “Israel is one of the most violent countries.” This became apparent when the Australia-based Institute for Economics and Peace published its latest findings showing Israel to be less peaceful than Sudan. The message of studies such of this dovetails with the false legitimacy of conferences such as the UN’s Durban II which claim to be about racism but are in themselves racist. Together they are part of the moral bankruptcy and thoughtlessness that is behind so much of the rhetoric about peace, racism, war-crimes and justice that dominate the headlines.
The IEP describes itself as a “vision of humanity” that is bringing “a strategic approach to raising the world’s attention and awareness around the importance of peacefulness to humanity’s survival in the 21st century.” It claims to be dedicated to educating people about the “relationship between economic development, business and peace.”
Like other ‘indexes’ such as the Freedom Index and Property Rights Index the institute sifts through mountains of data on the world’s countries and then must reduce each data set into a set “indicators”. The indicators are then divided into three categories; “measures of ongoing domestic and international conflict, measures of safety and security in society and measures of militarization.” 144 were measured. Israel scored 141st and Sudan scored 140th. To arrive at this such variables as “relations with neighbouring countires” must all be made into numbers. This system, which is popular in the social sciences, means quantifying such abstract concepts as people’s “perception of criminality in society.” This is open to a form of fraud. Israelis may think their society is violent just like South Africans but the murder rate in Israel is 2.65 for every 100,000 whereas in South Africa it is 38.
Sudan which has caused the deaths of 300,000 of its own African citizens and displaced millions of them to Chad scores exactly the same as Israel under the category “number of displaced people as a percentage of population.” Perhaps the score for Sudan is the same as Israel because Sudan has achieved a complete genocide of its black Muslim Darfur population and there thus aren’t any displaced left? The creators of the Index seem to have punished Israel twice for the Gaza war while giving Sudan a pass since Sudan isn’t at war with her neighbours, she is just slaughtering most of the people within her borders.
This jerry-rigged statistical nonsense gives birth to a morally bankrupt result. The insinuation of the survey is clear: Israel is one of the most violent places in the world. This jives with the typical surveys in Europe where people place Israel on the top of the list of countries “threatening world peace.” By contrast countries currently involved in mass human rights violations, genocides and even slavery can be considered “peaceful.” Countries that resemble one large prison, such as North Korea are positively wonderful to live in. Lebanon, Pakistan, Zimbabwe and the Congo, all of which have central governments that barely function, are doing better than Israel. Egypt, where tourists are forbidden from visiting much of the country, where tourist attractions are like armed police camps and where tourists must travel on special trains for safety is considered 54th out of 144 country, a prime place to live. It is absent of violence apparently because neither the media nor foreigners can visit much of it. The fact that it guns down dozens of African refugees every year for the ‘crime’ of crossing its border doesn’t register on the Index. Neither do riots against Coptic Christians or terrorist acts.
Sudan shouldn’t be merely last on the list, for committing a genocide, it should have such a negative number associated with it as to indicate that it has murdered 300,000 people. Anything less points to the complete moral bankruptcy and irrelevance of “indexs” such as these. It is tempting to want to boil every country down to a neat number but when bias and thoughtlessness is built into the system of doing so the results are no different than Durban II.
Saturday, July 11, 2009
Terra Incognita 91 Uighers and Global Peace Index
Terra Incognita
Issue 91
“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
July 8, 2009
1) What’s happening in Uigerstan?: Stories out of China in the media portray China as brutally cracking down on protestors in Xinjiang. These are described as “ethnic Uighurs” or “indigenous” people. They are neither. Death tolls show that it was Uighur Muslim rioters who massacred 137 Han Chinese, 35 of whome were women. The truth is that the Uighurs are the people who did the killing and China was defending itself. There is even more to the story, in fact China has been appeasing them for years.
2) The Moral Bankruptcy of the Global Peace Index or how to fake peacefulness: The Global Peace Index, another ridiculous “index” that supposedly tells us something but in reality is a fabrication, has declared Israel to be as unpeaceful as the Sudan. Only liberalistic Westerners could declare the a genocide of 300,000 people, the entire extermination of whole nations, is equal to what goes on in Israel where there is almost no violence.
What’s happening in Uigerstan?
July 10, 2009
Seth J. Frantzman
When, in early July, rioting broke out in China and 156 people were reported killed the world immediately condemned China. On July 10th Turkey even accused China of committing a “genocide” against the Uighers who live in its Xinjiang province. But for those aware of who were causing the rioting and what was really going on the truth was immediately clear. The Uighurs are a Turkish speaking people who live in Western China and are Muslim. There are roughly 11 million of them, although their nationalists claim there are closer to 25 million. They are part of a pan-Turkic belt of peoples that stretch from the borderlands of Mongolia all the way to Istanbul and are the result of age old migrations of these people across the Steppes.
Uighurs have appeared as a separate group since the 3rd century B.C and by their own name since the4th century. But it is only in the 709th centuries that they truly emerge from the shadows as a series of tribal groups which ruled a ‘Uighur Empire’ from 740-844. The decline of their empire led to the emergence of three states. An Eastern Uighur state called Yugor existed until its destruction in 1036 by the Tangut kingdom of Western China. This Kingdom was subsequently destroyed by Genghis Khan. The Karakhoja or central Uighur state, whose members were known as Udiquts, became a Buddhist state and existed until their destruction by Genghis in 1335. Next to them, the western most Uighur state of Kara-Khanids became adherents of Islam in 934 after conquest by a Turkish sultan. Like other converts they became zealous Muslims, building mosques and claiming to be “Defenders of Islam against the Buddhist Idiqut.” Like all defenders of Islam this ‘defense’ took the form of an offense and destruction of Buddhist monasteries and extermination and enslavement of neighbors.
Genghis Khan conquered all these peoples but because his loose Mongolian tribal religion quickly yielded to Islam the entire Uighur people became Islamic by the 16th century (when the various Hordes established by the Mongols had long since vanished).
At this time, known as the time of the Chagatai Khanate, the last Buddhists were exterminated. The situation remained until 1884 when Manchu China invaded the area, supported by Great Britain in its ‘Great Game’ with Russia. From this period the land of the Uighers became known as Xinjiang. Beginning in 1921 Soviet Communists began to establish communist cells in what it called the “Singkiang Provincial Government” and its “Revolutionary Uyghur Union.” During this time a nationalist-socialist-Islamist movement formed among the Uighurs, partially influenced by a Muslim reform movement known as the “Jadids”(new) and infused with Communism. As in other places Communism paved the way for Islamism by encouraging nationalism. But it was a short lived independence (much as was the case in Tibet, the Caucuses and the Baltic states). The Uighurs were overrun by Chiang Kai Chek’s nationalist Koumintang army in the 1930s and in 1949 were taken over by the Communist Chinese. Those who wanted independence fled and formed various ‘East Turkistan” liberation movements which used a blue flag with the crescent and star of Islam as its symbol.
But China mismanaged the Uighers and like all governments, appeased the Islamists among them. Although the rest of the Chinese were forbidden from having more than one child the Uighers were allowed to have as many children as they wanted because as Muslims forbidding them from procreating might be “offensive.” No other religion received such treatment in Communist China. Although the Communists destroyed Churches and Buddhist monasteries zealously they built giant mosques throughout Xinjiang, much as the Soviets had done for Muslims in Russia, encouraging an “official Islam”. Although Chinese Communism banned the traditional Buddhist long braided hair of most rural Chinese (they were cut off in public view by commissars), the Muslim headscarf was never banned or discouraged among the Uighurs, so whereas all Chinese became secular, lost their religion and had one child, Uighur Muslims were encouraged to keep their traditions and have more children, just as in the West secularism begets Islamism.
But it all backfired. Those granted educations, children, mosques, religious Muslim education and freedom by China became increasingly radical and became terrorists. Those like Rabiye Kadeer, a radical Uigher woman, became ‘human rights’ activists and received awards abroad for opposing China. They travelled to Afghanistan in the 1990s to train with other Muslims from throughout the world and several of them were rounded up by the U.S after 2001. But these were released over the years as not posing a threat to the U.S. In ignoring the global dimensions of the war on terror the U.S released Muslim terrorists who returned to Xinjiang to fight the Chinese.
In early July Uighurs used the supposed killing of two workers to begin riots and begin murdering Han Chinese in Urumqi and other cities in Xinjiang. 137 non-Muslims were murdered, including more than 30 women. It took China days to clampdown on the rioting. But the world ignored the true nature of the Islamist-hate rioting, blaming the government for a heavy hand. In fact not enough of the rioters were killed and most were let off free. When Han Chinese tried to exact revenge they were beaten back by the police. Although Mosques were closed, apparently because the minarets had been used to encourage the rioters and spread the word, worshippers managed to get back in and use them. The truth is that the riots in Xinjiang were yet another Muslim massacre of non-Muslims. Calls for Muslims now to “defend themselves” there is merely another of the typical Muslim-Islamist playbook “Islamists murder non-Muslims and then claim they must defend themselves because of the fact that people hate them for murdering others.”
The Moral Bankruptcy of the Global Peace Index or how to fake peacefulness
Seth J. Frantzman
June 3, 2009
By the logic and methodology employed by the Global Peace Index Stalin’s Russia and Hitler’s Germany would have scored well. The Index was in the news recently with headlines that declared “Israel ranked lower than Iran”, “Israel hits rock bottom” and “Israel is one of the most violent countries.” This became apparent when the Australia-based Institute for Economics and Peace published its latest findings showing Israel to be less peaceful than Sudan. The message of studies such of this dovetails with the false legitimacy of conferences such as the UN’s Durban II which claim to be about racism but are in themselves racist. Together they are part of the moral bankruptcy and thoughtlessness that is behind so much of the rhetoric about peace, racism, war-crimes and justice that dominate the headlines.
The IEP describes itself as a “vision of humanity” that is bringing “a strategic approach to raising the world’s attention and awareness around the importance of peacefulness to humanity’s survival in the 21st century.” It claims to be dedicated to educating people about the “relationship between economic development, business and peace.”
Like other ‘indexes’ such as the Freedom Index and Property Rights Index the institute sifts through mountains of data on the world’s countries and then must reduce each data set into a set “indicators”. The indicators are then divided into three categories; “measures of ongoing domestic and international conflict, measures of safety and security in society and measures of militarization.” 144 were measured. Israel scored 141st and Sudan scored 140th. To arrive at this such variables as “relations with neighbouring countires” must all be made into numbers. This system, which is popular in the social sciences, means quantifying such abstract concepts as people’s “perception of criminality in society.” This is open to a form of fraud. Israelis may think their society is violent just like South Africans but the murder rate in Israel is 2.65 for every 100,000 whereas in South Africa it is 38.
Sudan which has caused the deaths of 300,000 of its own African citizens and displaced millions of them to Chad scores exactly the same as Israel under the category “number of displaced people as a percentage of population.” Perhaps the score for Sudan is the same as Israel because Sudan has achieved a complete genocide of its black Muslim Darfur population and there thus aren’t any displaced left? The creators of the Index seem to have punished Israel twice for the Gaza war while giving Sudan a pass since Sudan isn’t at war with her neighbours, she is just slaughtering most of the people within her borders.
This jerry-rigged statistical nonsense gives birth to a morally bankrupt result. The insinuation of the survey is clear: Israel is one of the most violent places in the world. This jives with the typical surveys in Europe where people place Israel on the top of the list of countries “threatening world peace.” By contrast countries currently involved in mass human rights violations, genocides and even slavery can be considered “peaceful.” Countries that resemble one large prison, such as North Korea are positively wonderful to live in. Lebanon, Pakistan, Zimbabwe and the Congo, all of which have central governments that barely function, are doing better than Israel. Egypt, where tourists are forbidden from visiting much of the country, where tourist attractions are like armed police camps and where tourists must travel on special trains for safety is considered 54th out of 144 country, a prime place to live. It is absent of violence apparently because neither the media nor foreigners can visit much of it. The fact that it guns down dozens of African refugees every year for the ‘crime’ of crossing its border doesn’t register on the Index. Neither do riots against Coptic Christians or terrorist acts.
Sudan shouldn’t be merely last on the list, for committing a genocide, it should have such a negative number associated with it as to indicate that it has murdered 300,000 people. Anything less points to the complete moral bankruptcy and irrelevance of “indexs” such as these. It is tempting to want to boil every country down to a neat number but when bias and thoughtlessness is built into the system of doing so the results are no different than Durban II.
Issue 91
“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
July 8, 2009
1) What’s happening in Uigerstan?: Stories out of China in the media portray China as brutally cracking down on protestors in Xinjiang. These are described as “ethnic Uighurs” or “indigenous” people. They are neither. Death tolls show that it was Uighur Muslim rioters who massacred 137 Han Chinese, 35 of whome were women. The truth is that the Uighurs are the people who did the killing and China was defending itself. There is even more to the story, in fact China has been appeasing them for years.
2) The Moral Bankruptcy of the Global Peace Index or how to fake peacefulness: The Global Peace Index, another ridiculous “index” that supposedly tells us something but in reality is a fabrication, has declared Israel to be as unpeaceful as the Sudan. Only liberalistic Westerners could declare the a genocide of 300,000 people, the entire extermination of whole nations, is equal to what goes on in Israel where there is almost no violence.
What’s happening in Uigerstan?
July 10, 2009
Seth J. Frantzman
When, in early July, rioting broke out in China and 156 people were reported killed the world immediately condemned China. On July 10th Turkey even accused China of committing a “genocide” against the Uighers who live in its Xinjiang province. But for those aware of who were causing the rioting and what was really going on the truth was immediately clear. The Uighurs are a Turkish speaking people who live in Western China and are Muslim. There are roughly 11 million of them, although their nationalists claim there are closer to 25 million. They are part of a pan-Turkic belt of peoples that stretch from the borderlands of Mongolia all the way to Istanbul and are the result of age old migrations of these people across the Steppes.
Uighurs have appeared as a separate group since the 3rd century B.C and by their own name since the4th century. But it is only in the 709th centuries that they truly emerge from the shadows as a series of tribal groups which ruled a ‘Uighur Empire’ from 740-844. The decline of their empire led to the emergence of three states. An Eastern Uighur state called Yugor existed until its destruction in 1036 by the Tangut kingdom of Western China. This Kingdom was subsequently destroyed by Genghis Khan. The Karakhoja or central Uighur state, whose members were known as Udiquts, became a Buddhist state and existed until their destruction by Genghis in 1335. Next to them, the western most Uighur state of Kara-Khanids became adherents of Islam in 934 after conquest by a Turkish sultan. Like other converts they became zealous Muslims, building mosques and claiming to be “Defenders of Islam against the Buddhist Idiqut.” Like all defenders of Islam this ‘defense’ took the form of an offense and destruction of Buddhist monasteries and extermination and enslavement of neighbors.
Genghis Khan conquered all these peoples but because his loose Mongolian tribal religion quickly yielded to Islam the entire Uighur people became Islamic by the 16th century (when the various Hordes established by the Mongols had long since vanished).
At this time, known as the time of the Chagatai Khanate, the last Buddhists were exterminated. The situation remained until 1884 when Manchu China invaded the area, supported by Great Britain in its ‘Great Game’ with Russia. From this period the land of the Uighers became known as Xinjiang. Beginning in 1921 Soviet Communists began to establish communist cells in what it called the “Singkiang Provincial Government” and its “Revolutionary Uyghur Union.” During this time a nationalist-socialist-Islamist movement formed among the Uighurs, partially influenced by a Muslim reform movement known as the “Jadids”(new) and infused with Communism. As in other places Communism paved the way for Islamism by encouraging nationalism. But it was a short lived independence (much as was the case in Tibet, the Caucuses and the Baltic states). The Uighurs were overrun by Chiang Kai Chek’s nationalist Koumintang army in the 1930s and in 1949 were taken over by the Communist Chinese. Those who wanted independence fled and formed various ‘East Turkistan” liberation movements which used a blue flag with the crescent and star of Islam as its symbol.
But China mismanaged the Uighers and like all governments, appeased the Islamists among them. Although the rest of the Chinese were forbidden from having more than one child the Uighers were allowed to have as many children as they wanted because as Muslims forbidding them from procreating might be “offensive.” No other religion received such treatment in Communist China. Although the Communists destroyed Churches and Buddhist monasteries zealously they built giant mosques throughout Xinjiang, much as the Soviets had done for Muslims in Russia, encouraging an “official Islam”. Although Chinese Communism banned the traditional Buddhist long braided hair of most rural Chinese (they were cut off in public view by commissars), the Muslim headscarf was never banned or discouraged among the Uighurs, so whereas all Chinese became secular, lost their religion and had one child, Uighur Muslims were encouraged to keep their traditions and have more children, just as in the West secularism begets Islamism.
But it all backfired. Those granted educations, children, mosques, religious Muslim education and freedom by China became increasingly radical and became terrorists. Those like Rabiye Kadeer, a radical Uigher woman, became ‘human rights’ activists and received awards abroad for opposing China. They travelled to Afghanistan in the 1990s to train with other Muslims from throughout the world and several of them were rounded up by the U.S after 2001. But these were released over the years as not posing a threat to the U.S. In ignoring the global dimensions of the war on terror the U.S released Muslim terrorists who returned to Xinjiang to fight the Chinese.
In early July Uighurs used the supposed killing of two workers to begin riots and begin murdering Han Chinese in Urumqi and other cities in Xinjiang. 137 non-Muslims were murdered, including more than 30 women. It took China days to clampdown on the rioting. But the world ignored the true nature of the Islamist-hate rioting, blaming the government for a heavy hand. In fact not enough of the rioters were killed and most were let off free. When Han Chinese tried to exact revenge they were beaten back by the police. Although Mosques were closed, apparently because the minarets had been used to encourage the rioters and spread the word, worshippers managed to get back in and use them. The truth is that the riots in Xinjiang were yet another Muslim massacre of non-Muslims. Calls for Muslims now to “defend themselves” there is merely another of the typical Muslim-Islamist playbook “Islamists murder non-Muslims and then claim they must defend themselves because of the fact that people hate them for murdering others.”
The Moral Bankruptcy of the Global Peace Index or how to fake peacefulness
Seth J. Frantzman
June 3, 2009
By the logic and methodology employed by the Global Peace Index Stalin’s Russia and Hitler’s Germany would have scored well. The Index was in the news recently with headlines that declared “Israel ranked lower than Iran”, “Israel hits rock bottom” and “Israel is one of the most violent countries.” This became apparent when the Australia-based Institute for Economics and Peace published its latest findings showing Israel to be less peaceful than Sudan. The message of studies such of this dovetails with the false legitimacy of conferences such as the UN’s Durban II which claim to be about racism but are in themselves racist. Together they are part of the moral bankruptcy and thoughtlessness that is behind so much of the rhetoric about peace, racism, war-crimes and justice that dominate the headlines.
The IEP describes itself as a “vision of humanity” that is bringing “a strategic approach to raising the world’s attention and awareness around the importance of peacefulness to humanity’s survival in the 21st century.” It claims to be dedicated to educating people about the “relationship between economic development, business and peace.”
Like other ‘indexes’ such as the Freedom Index and Property Rights Index the institute sifts through mountains of data on the world’s countries and then must reduce each data set into a set “indicators”. The indicators are then divided into three categories; “measures of ongoing domestic and international conflict, measures of safety and security in society and measures of militarization.” 144 were measured. Israel scored 141st and Sudan scored 140th. To arrive at this such variables as “relations with neighbouring countires” must all be made into numbers. This system, which is popular in the social sciences, means quantifying such abstract concepts as people’s “perception of criminality in society.” This is open to a form of fraud. Israelis may think their society is violent just like South Africans but the murder rate in Israel is 2.65 for every 100,000 whereas in South Africa it is 38.
Sudan which has caused the deaths of 300,000 of its own African citizens and displaced millions of them to Chad scores exactly the same as Israel under the category “number of displaced people as a percentage of population.” Perhaps the score for Sudan is the same as Israel because Sudan has achieved a complete genocide of its black Muslim Darfur population and there thus aren’t any displaced left? The creators of the Index seem to have punished Israel twice for the Gaza war while giving Sudan a pass since Sudan isn’t at war with her neighbours, she is just slaughtering most of the people within her borders.
This jerry-rigged statistical nonsense gives birth to a morally bankrupt result. The insinuation of the survey is clear: Israel is one of the most violent places in the world. This jives with the typical surveys in Europe where people place Israel on the top of the list of countries “threatening world peace.” By contrast countries currently involved in mass human rights violations, genocides and even slavery can be considered “peaceful.” Countries that resemble one large prison, such as North Korea are positively wonderful to live in. Lebanon, Pakistan, Zimbabwe and the Congo, all of which have central governments that barely function, are doing better than Israel. Egypt, where tourists are forbidden from visiting much of the country, where tourist attractions are like armed police camps and where tourists must travel on special trains for safety is considered 54th out of 144 country, a prime place to live. It is absent of violence apparently because neither the media nor foreigners can visit much of it. The fact that it guns down dozens of African refugees every year for the ‘crime’ of crossing its border doesn’t register on the Index. Neither do riots against Coptic Christians or terrorist acts.
Sudan shouldn’t be merely last on the list, for committing a genocide, it should have such a negative number associated with it as to indicate that it has murdered 300,000 people. Anything less points to the complete moral bankruptcy and irrelevance of “indexs” such as these. It is tempting to want to boil every country down to a neat number but when bias and thoughtlessness is built into the system of doing so the results are no different than Durban II.
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
Terra Incognita 90 Rifles, Eastern Sex and Health Care
Terra Incognita
Issue 90
“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
June 31, 2009
1) Amazing stupidity: James Carrol, a leftist American who recently declared in support of Islamism ‘God is Greatest’ has claimed that the gun is the main tool of “white supremacy.” He perhaps forgets that Turkish soldiers armed with modern rifles defeated the Russians in the 1870s at Plevna. Hardly a tool of the ‘white man’.
2) Richard Bernstein’s blindness: In a recent book on sexual encounters between the East and West Mr. Bernstein makes many claims. He and those reviewing his book have once again become blind to the actual realities.
3) Where Health Care in the U.S Went wrong: Health care in America is so expensive not because of the insurance company bogey-man but because of hospitals that bilk people out of money and because of the existing government plans that don’t work, because of illegals and because of malpractice madness.
Amazing stupidity
Seth J. Frantzman
June 23, 2009
On June 23 James Carrol wrote a strange article in the New York Times entitled “More than mere lunacy.” He was talking about a white supremacist who murdered a black security guard at the Holocaust Memorial. He claims that the murder was because of “a set of extravagant hatreds combined with a mysticism of the weapon laying bare multiple connections.” He believes that it is due to “an effervescent lethality that is peculiar to the culture that comes from Europe. What we call ‘racism’ can be traced to the 15th century Iberian idea of ‘blood purity’…that idea combined at about the same time with assumptions of innate European superiority over the ‘savages’ encountered in the first wave of colonialism.”
Carrol tells us that European imperialism “unlike say the imperialism of ancient Rome, depended on the ideology of absolute ranking by race.” Carrol tells us that the murder of the Jews by the Nazis was merely the latest round of what the Europeans had done in South America and apparently in “Colorado.” And “one thing alone empowered Europeans to wreak such havoc wherever they went and that was the gun. The gun was the epochal tool of white male supremacy.”
Who knew? It just so happens that I have been reading American Rifle by Alexander Rose. The rifle was indeed invented by the White Man. But the gun wasn’t and neither was the first destructive affects of its cousin, the cannon, first felt by the “inferior savages.” In fact it was the15th century destruction of Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks which was carried out through the gun, in this case used by the Ottomans. The Ottoman army in fact employed not only small Abus guns (really cannons) but also flintlocks in their conquest of eastern Europe. Here they colonized and enslaved and dare say ranked the peoples according to race and according to religion. Later, as Alexander Rose informs us, it was the purchasing of Remington rifles by the Ottomans in the 19th century that led to the deaths of 40,000 Russian soldiers at the battle of Pleven (Plevna) in 1877.
The Europeans of the 15th century had no such belief in their superiority over any savages. Cortes and Pizarro were certainly true believers that God might well get them through their hardships while conquering the Aztec and Inca empires but neither was under any false notion that his was the superior force. Both were heavily outnumbered by the “savages” who would certainly have overwhelmed them if not for fortuitous events. In Cotez’s case it was the fact that many of locals helped him and in Pizarro’s case it was that he kidnapped the enemy king. There were few guns among Cortez’s men and his ‘army’ numbered only in the hundred anyway. But let us recall that the 15th and 16th century conquistadores were not actually setting out to conquer ‘ savage’ places but rather to skirt the Muslim empires’ control of the spice islands. While Europeans hacked and butchered their way through parts of Africa, South America and India they were never under the impression that they were always the stronger, in fact the bloodbaths, when they occurred, resulted from their know they were weak and would be overwhelmed if they didn’t strike first. Only some of the civilizations they encountered were truly primitive and those were in the Northern most parts of America and Australia.
Carrol, like most people in the West who cannot distinguish black from white and future from past and up from down, confuse the 15th century with the 19th century and anyway confuse battles like Rourke’s drift, where rifled firepower proved devastating against Zulu ranks, and Isandwala where the Zulus overwhelmed British units that were much better armed. Anyway the ‘savages’ certainly understood the importance of guns. The Native Americans were rumoured many times to be better armed than their American adversaries because they purchased modern rifles at times when the U.S army was still issuing muskets made at Springfield to its units.
But the supposed “white supremacy” and love of the gun that propelled it was not directed so much at the ‘savages’ as it was directed against other whites. More whites died from white made bullets than ‘savages’ ever died from them. How many native Americans are supposed to have died in what the extremist Ward Churchill called the “American genocide.” 100,000? 200,000? But how many American whites died in the Civil War, which was waged of course to set a bunch of those “inferior savages” free? 500,000. How many whites died in the Great War? Millions. And how many in the Second World War? 40 million (not including Jews and Asians).
The gun has been the major killer of white people, not blacks and Asians and “savages” and “inferior” people. That white supremacists use the gun is because the gun is a reasonably cheap advanced weapon. Oddly for Mr. Carrol when Muslims use the suicide bomb vest he doesn’t speak of it being the “epochal tool of Muslim male supremacy.” But that is because the worldview of Carrol and those like him is imbued with endless drudgery of “races” and “Savages” and “inferior people” and “blood purity.” If one were to add up all the people like the white supremacist, who was himself not very supreme but rather some hapless savage individual, who opened fire at the Holocaust Memorial and one were to add up all the leftists like Carrol one would find there are more leftists who divide the world into “races” than there are racists who do. The perpetuation of race theory and discussion of “racial purity” and ridiculously racist and ignorant statements like “one thing alone empowered Europeans to wreak such havoc wherever they went and that was the gun. The gun was the epochal tool of white male supremacy” is entirely the province of leftists. Only the end of the weird obsession to be racist in order to condemn racism will end the idiotic idea of race that wasn’t invented in the 15th century but rather in the late 20th, primarily as a straw man for people to oppose.
Richard Bernstein’s blindness
Seth J. Frantzman
June 23, 2009
Richard Bernstein was born in 1944 and apparently grew up on a poultry farm. He attended the University Connecticut and at Harvard. In 1973 he went to work for Time magazine. Later he became a bureau chief for that magazine in China which began a life-long obsession with that country. While living there he married a “beautiful Chinese dancer” named Zhongman Li. This became his “vision of the East.” Bernstein seemed to be on the right track in 1994 when he wrote Dictatorship of Virtue: Multiculturalism and the Battle for America’s Future in which he noted “we find ourselves immured in an Orwellian culture, where language has become an instrument of political coercion and institutions created for intellectual enlightenment have been turned into bureaucracies of untruth.”
But now he has gone one step further with The East, The West and Sex: A History of Erotic Encounters. Bernstein decided to do what Edward Said has done with Orientalism but do so through the medium of sex. He decides to describe the “East” as everything from North Africa to Japan, including the pacific islands. Yet his expertise and apparent experience is mostly with China. No matter. His book argues that the east was “a place where sexual pleasure was not commonly associated with sin” Reviewing the book Toni Bentley, whose qualification to review it is that he was a dancer “with the New York City Ballet for 10 years and author” agrees mostly with Bernstein’s views but faults him for writing a “not very sexy book about a very sexy subject.”
Bentley writes that the Mormons should be given “credit” for trying to bring “Harem culture” to the uptight west. He argues that “India was playing twister-the Kama Sutra version” more than a thousand years before Columbus.” Bernstein argues that until the 19th century “most of world still subscribed to what I have been calling the harem culture.” Bernstein likes this culture because it is “more realistic about male sexual desire than Western culture.” Bernstein appears to disagree with Said, the West didn’t create a fake eroticized East, it was in fact more erotic. According to Bentley “many of the different cultures that Bernstein studies do have ancient histories of sexual sophistication and often sweetness far beyond what’s been attained in the West.” Christianity simply has no “interest in exploring human sexual desire or potential.” Bernstein claims that it was Western men who met the erotic east and had sex with most of it and have continued to do up until today through the ‘sex tourism’ of places like Thailand. Meanwhile “it would seem implausible, if not entirely impossible, for there to be a story of say a Frenchwoman who falls in love with a Persian or Arab adventurer.” Bentley elaborates that the Western men and their Eastern women leave “Western women and Eastern men awkwardly conversing in the Jacuzzi.” And according to these two experts the Eastern woman is “more plumlike than melonlike of breast, spare rather than full of buttocks and hips.”
Bernstein should be congratulated for attacking a controversial subject and for daring to pin prick the evils and wrongheadedness of Orientalism. But he should not be congratulated for being blind. By blind I mean he is blind on many levels. He is blind on the physical level. While Bernstein’s “vision of the East” in the form of his Chinese wife may be slender of breast and buttocks, he seems to have ignored the rest of the female East and mistaken the silicone implants so common among Western women with their actual appearance. Western women are not “melonlike” of breast and neither are they “full of buttocks.” Let us be honest. They are more flat chested and poorly endowed than they let on, with some exceptions. Western Woman have better diets today than they used to but even with them the European obsession with being skinny has kept them poorly endowed. With some exceptions of hybrid vigor, found in Texas and California, they have remained less well endowed. And Bernstein is comparing the wrong women, he is comparing Chinese women with what he is familiar with in New York. He should be opening his eyes a little bit because the diversity of breast and buttocks is hardly what he makes it out to be. But alas here it is not his fault. He can’t be expected to have done research on this issue among the half billion Muslim women that make up his “east” because they are all covered up with chadors, burkas, purdah, abbays, veils, hijabs and niqabs. So unlike the Arab slavers of the 19th century who used to strip the female slaves they took from Africa and Ukraine naked to examine them, he can be forgiven.
But let us move on to more blindness. We are told that the Indians are more liberal in sex because of the Kama Sutra. But the Kama Sutra in the second century CE. Bentley and Bernstein have seemingly projected the Christian West of the 18th century back to the Second. But despite the fact that Christ and lived and died by that time it is not true that the ‘bad’ uptight ways of Western Sex had yet destroyed the greatness of what was once a very sexual Roman and Greek culture. The Greeks of course must be slightly forgiven, theirs was not a Kama Sutra that involved women, but they apparently enjoyed sex greatly. The Romans were not prudes, they had sex with lots of women on their marching back and forth across the Mediterranean. Their sin was that they didn’t have enough harem apparently. But they did have slaves, so Bernstein and Bentley should forgive the West. We had slavery into the 19th century, just like the East, and anyone who has read Albion’s Seed is familiar that the Southern plantation owners “sexual mores” were far from Victorian. They had a lot of sex with all sorts of people, mostly their slaves, sort of like the Arab slavers. So they should be celebrated. The Portuguese in Brazil and Spanish elsewhere in the 16th century developed many harem cultures. So rather than condemned as uptight we should also celebrate them. If not for those obnoxious voices such as Abraham Lincoln and Bartholomew De Las Casas we might have had our own ‘harem culture’ and then we could be as open minded as the East. So we too were “realistic” about the sexual needs of the male. Maybe we should have kept this realistic culture up. We too used to beat our wives; one Russian nobleman even wrote a book about the proper way to do it. Men in the West also used to go out on benders and have sex with lots of women while their women stayed home modestly. We used to be more “realistic”. From the appearances of Amsterdam where men can stroll along the street where women sit naked in the windows and choose what they want it seems we are still “realistic.” So why all the condemnation. We had slavery and harems and rape and lots of sex. The problem seems to have been our abolition of the institution of slavery and equal rights for women, but the institutionalization of the sex slave trade seems to be bringing us back to a “realistic” view of the male humans need.
According to Bentley the East has done better because it understands the male “potential” and “Sweetness” and “sophistication.” Part of this sophistication, so we are told, is the fact that the Ottoman Sultan had “1,60 virgins, each hoping to be chosen for one night of honor” with the sultan. Yes, this is more sophisticated, at least for the few men who become sultan. It is more sweet, apparently, for those men. Is it sweet to the women, most of whome were kidnapped as slaves from Africa, India, Eastern Europe and elsewhere by Muslim slavers and pirates and sold to the harem? I guess it must have been sweet for those women like Sarah la Preta from Ethiopia, taken from her Christian family at 8 by Muslim raiders and transported to Jerusalem and sold in a slave market. Sweet and sophisticated. And her potential was fulfilled. When she died she had no last name except that attached to her by the family that purchased her. Very sophisticated. But we in West were just as sophisticated as anyone who has read or watched Roots can testify. We took those Negroes from Africa and we raped the women and kept them as mistresses and took their names and tribes from them. They fulfilled their potential too. So why the insults for the West. The Boers in South Africa fathered an entire nation through sophistication and so did the Spanish conquistadors.
But now that we have proved that the West did just as good as Islam and the East let us also prove that the second corollary of this book is a myth. Bernstein claims that the Eastern man and the Western man are being left out of this sexual equation. This is his apparent experience in China where few white women arrive to find Asian men to date. But that is an accident of history which has painted the Asian male as not very well endowed, sexy or interesting. But Western women have, for a very long, time been meeting Eastern men in other milieus. From Othello to the slave markets of Istanbul and Cairo, where Greek, Ukrainian and Georgian women were still on sale in the mid 19th century, the Western woman has met lots of Eastern men. And from books such as The Lustful Turk to movies such as Under the Sheltering Sky or the 1986 film Harem where “Jessica, a young British girl, goes off to Arabia with her father to be with her fiancé when he's called there suddenly on diplomatic duty. On a tourist journey she's kidnapped by what appears to be a Bedouin tribe and sold into the harem of the Sultan” there is enough imagination about Western women and the erotic Eastern man.
Bernstein’s book had a good premise but in its insinuation that the West didn’t do enough to duplicate the “realistic harem culture” he has made a serious error. There are lots of things that might be more realistic in our society that we might well adopt from the wonderful east. Beating women for infidelity or killing our daughters for defaming family honour might be realistic. It would certainly prevent what has happened in Moldova and Ukraine where one in four women seems to have sold herself into sex slavery and there are few women left in some small towns. Slavery is pretty realistic. Maybe we should bring it back. It is a very unrealistic idea that all of us should have to work when we could just kidnap others to do it for us. Genocide is quite realistic, along with religious extremism, after all no one wants to have live next to people that aren’t like them. And legalizing rape is realistic, as Islam has done by stoning and whipping women for the ‘crime’ of adultery when they are raped, because men need to rape, they can’t control themselves. Bernstein and Bentley are correct. The East was more “realistic”. But Bentley and Bernstein might be unhappy to find out that their Jewish and peasant stock from which the former and latter came might not have brought them the plaudits they have received in our unrealistic boring Western society. Bernstein would be back in his realistic ghetto making shoes for the sultan or selling his wares on the streets and cleaning the gutters on Shabbat and wearing a blue turban, as Jews were forced to do in Muslim countries. And Bentley, we he would be some useless Fellahin, some peasant considered less than a dog to be whipped and beaten at his masters will. Realistic. Sophisticated. And don’t worry Mr. Bernstein and Bentley, your wives and daughters will be in the sultans harem being treated with sweetness.
Where Health Care in the U.S Went wrong
Seth J. Frantzman
June 28, 2009
The Economist recently reported that the U.S pays almost twice what most European countries do on health care per capita. That includes both public and private spending. What is more shocking is that the U.S public spending is about equal to what European countries spend per capita. To make sense of this think of it this way: the U.S government spends exactly the same amount as European governments do to insure less than 25% of the people. Even if the U.S abolished all of the private insurance funded health care and private individuals paying for health care it would still spend as much as the Europeans and yet most Americans would therefore not even be receiving health care.
Why is it like this? Is it because Americans are less healthy? Do they go to the doctor more? Do they simply like to spend more money? Is it because the availability of private health care means wealthy individuals pay huge amounts for special health care regimes that are not available in the socialized systems elsewhere? No. But if that is not the culprit then surely it must be the American Health Insurance system of private insurers who charge individuals too much? No.
What causes the U.S to spend so much on health care is consists of the following; Government funded health care regimes such as medicare that are bilked by hospitals which charge ten times what other countries charge for simple procedures, needless operations and drug companies that bilk them out of huge amounts for prescription drugs. Second is he uninsured mass of 50 million Americans who visit hospitals, and being poor visit them more than the wealthy, and don’t pay their bills forcing the hospitals to pass that on to insurance companies and the government. Third is the ability of the hospitals and doctors to bilk insurance companies by charging whatever they please for whatever, sometimes non-existent, things they want to charge for. Thus in the U.S a visit to the emergency room by a patient who is perfectly healthy can result in tens of thousands of dollars in charges for a few hour stay. Staying overnight in the hospital can result in tens of thousands of dollars in bills and an operation or being seen by a doctor can run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars in bills.
Those who set their sights on the HMO or private insurer as the bogey-man of the U.S health care system are missing where the actual charges are coming from. Insurance companies charge exorbitant amounts for health insurance, running into the hundreds of dollars a month. But these companies don’t make windfall profits. In fact they charge these huge amounts because they are forced to pay hospitals huge amounts in the off chance that their insured members must visit a hospital.
Americans and critics like to point to the ‘good old days’ before the insurance company when doctors made home visits. This story usually makes the listener believe that it was the advent of the insurance company which ruined this bucolic scene. But in fact insurance companies didn’t change the old practice of doctors going door to door. What changed is the doctors decision to stop going door to door and instead to charge millions of dollars for useless procedures and for doing absolutely nothing. Anyone who has visited a hospital can report that doctors do very little. They may complain they are overworked but that is not the fault of the patient, who barely gets to see a doctor these days. And the reason for there being overworked doctors is not because of the insurance companies but apparently because of the health care profession where fewer people become doctors or because of hospitals who don’t employ them, or some other reason. But what is true is that the doctor charges exorbitant amounts to his patients because he and the hospital know that few of the patients actually pay the bills and because of the huge malpractice insurance doctors must now pay.
Why do doctors and hospitals charge so much? It is partly because they want to bilk insurance companies and the government out of money, a fact for which they should be imprisoned for violating racketeering laws. However what actually causes it is the fact that so few of those who walk into a hospital actually pay their bills. There are 300 million Americans. Some 50 million are uninsured. Another 13 million are illegal aliens. They don’t pay for their health care or hospital visits but for all intents and purposes receive it free. F bills are sent they never come back except by “return to sender.” There are another 50 million Americans on medicare because they are over 65, a fact caused by the burgeoning number of old people living longer and who were part of the ‘baby-boom’ generation. Lastly there are the supposed 250 million insured Americans who are either insured by private insurers or by some government insurance for the poor. These insured Americans are the trough at which the hospital eats. For all the money that they cannot recoup from the sickly illegals and the poor uninsured there is an insurance company or a government which will cover. The government and insurance companies don’t know they are covering these 63 million but in affect they do because costs are passed on to them.
Consider it this way. If there is a clothing store that sells four shirts a week for $10 a shirt and during that week one of the people comes in and takes the shirt without paying and this goes on for weeks on end eventually the business must charge $13.33 for those same four shirts in order to recoup what it would have made on the four shirts. The slippage, or stolen shirt, is passed on to the paying consumers.
But consider our health care system. In that system there is a company that insurers people against needing a shirt. In the off chance that they need a shirt the insurance company pays for it. There is a government that also insurers old and poor people against needing a shirt. Now, given the same system, the shirt company finds it can charge whatever it wants for the shirts, knowing that people will need them and that someone else will pay. The more they charge for shirts the more the insurance company passes it on to the individual in a viscious cycle until the cost of a shirt might very well be $100. Meanwhile the people stealing the shirts, knowing that no one cares about them stealing, steal more and more and since poor people tend to be dirtier they need more shirts so they must steal more and more and more. And with time illegal aliens arrive and because a store can’t apparently charge them they too get free shirts, and when there are free shirts people are sure to take as many as possible. But the insurance company can very well tell the shirt buyers that “you only pay $10 a week” for that shirt. Same $10 as the shirt originally cost, except now the shirt costs $100 and yet it has remained the same shirt. This is what happened to health care.
The free-market has failed to solve this problem because free market theory and capitalism does not take into account a mixed system of government care for some people, free health care for certain other people, poor people who don’t have to pay, foreigners who don’t have to pay, and a small contingent of people who actually pay for a good. Free markets and economics speaks of supply and demand but is usually predicated on some sort of vacume that doesn’t take into account bankruptcy and insurance or honesty or illegal aliens and laws preventing hospitals from questioning them about their ‘status’. The tragedy of Americans confronting the health care evil foisted upon them is that they have continued to be honest in the face of it. In order to defeat the government mandated evil that allows foreigners to get better health care in the U.S than American tax payers the U.S tax payer should simply refuse to provide I.D and immigration status the next time he visits a hospital. As an illegal alien he will receive first class health care. I’ve seen this first hand with friends of mine and relatives of theirs. Foreigners don’t pay for hospital visits in the U.S and actually receive better care, because of NGOs and clinics, than Americans do. It is time for every American to become an illegal alien since they receive better services from the U.S government than Americans themselves.
Health care failed us. Rather than being bankrupted by health care costs it is time for Americans to declare war on a system that rewards foreigners over ourselves, to the degree that we should become foreigners in our own land in order to over-burden the system and force the government to change the law that allowed foreigners to get better health care than us and to stop NGOs from providing free health care, and better health care, to illegals. Capitalism has failed us in the mixed government-private funding for health care and rather that punish insurance companies for this failing it is better for doctors and hospitals to be punished and for those lawyers suing for malpractice to be punished through tort reform legislation. Making it illegal to charge $8,000 for a ten minute visit to an emergency room would be a start.
Issue 90
“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
June 31, 2009
1) Amazing stupidity: James Carrol, a leftist American who recently declared in support of Islamism ‘God is Greatest’ has claimed that the gun is the main tool of “white supremacy.” He perhaps forgets that Turkish soldiers armed with modern rifles defeated the Russians in the 1870s at Plevna. Hardly a tool of the ‘white man’.
2) Richard Bernstein’s blindness: In a recent book on sexual encounters between the East and West Mr. Bernstein makes many claims. He and those reviewing his book have once again become blind to the actual realities.
3) Where Health Care in the U.S Went wrong: Health care in America is so expensive not because of the insurance company bogey-man but because of hospitals that bilk people out of money and because of the existing government plans that don’t work, because of illegals and because of malpractice madness.
Amazing stupidity
Seth J. Frantzman
June 23, 2009
On June 23 James Carrol wrote a strange article in the New York Times entitled “More than mere lunacy.” He was talking about a white supremacist who murdered a black security guard at the Holocaust Memorial. He claims that the murder was because of “a set of extravagant hatreds combined with a mysticism of the weapon laying bare multiple connections.” He believes that it is due to “an effervescent lethality that is peculiar to the culture that comes from Europe. What we call ‘racism’ can be traced to the 15th century Iberian idea of ‘blood purity’…that idea combined at about the same time with assumptions of innate European superiority over the ‘savages’ encountered in the first wave of colonialism.”
Carrol tells us that European imperialism “unlike say the imperialism of ancient Rome, depended on the ideology of absolute ranking by race.” Carrol tells us that the murder of the Jews by the Nazis was merely the latest round of what the Europeans had done in South America and apparently in “Colorado.” And “one thing alone empowered Europeans to wreak such havoc wherever they went and that was the gun. The gun was the epochal tool of white male supremacy.”
Who knew? It just so happens that I have been reading American Rifle by Alexander Rose. The rifle was indeed invented by the White Man. But the gun wasn’t and neither was the first destructive affects of its cousin, the cannon, first felt by the “inferior savages.” In fact it was the15th century destruction of Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks which was carried out through the gun, in this case used by the Ottomans. The Ottoman army in fact employed not only small Abus guns (really cannons) but also flintlocks in their conquest of eastern Europe. Here they colonized and enslaved and dare say ranked the peoples according to race and according to religion. Later, as Alexander Rose informs us, it was the purchasing of Remington rifles by the Ottomans in the 19th century that led to the deaths of 40,000 Russian soldiers at the battle of Pleven (Plevna) in 1877.
The Europeans of the 15th century had no such belief in their superiority over any savages. Cortes and Pizarro were certainly true believers that God might well get them through their hardships while conquering the Aztec and Inca empires but neither was under any false notion that his was the superior force. Both were heavily outnumbered by the “savages” who would certainly have overwhelmed them if not for fortuitous events. In Cotez’s case it was the fact that many of locals helped him and in Pizarro’s case it was that he kidnapped the enemy king. There were few guns among Cortez’s men and his ‘army’ numbered only in the hundred anyway. But let us recall that the 15th and 16th century conquistadores were not actually setting out to conquer ‘ savage’ places but rather to skirt the Muslim empires’ control of the spice islands. While Europeans hacked and butchered their way through parts of Africa, South America and India they were never under the impression that they were always the stronger, in fact the bloodbaths, when they occurred, resulted from their know they were weak and would be overwhelmed if they didn’t strike first. Only some of the civilizations they encountered were truly primitive and those were in the Northern most parts of America and Australia.
Carrol, like most people in the West who cannot distinguish black from white and future from past and up from down, confuse the 15th century with the 19th century and anyway confuse battles like Rourke’s drift, where rifled firepower proved devastating against Zulu ranks, and Isandwala where the Zulus overwhelmed British units that were much better armed. Anyway the ‘savages’ certainly understood the importance of guns. The Native Americans were rumoured many times to be better armed than their American adversaries because they purchased modern rifles at times when the U.S army was still issuing muskets made at Springfield to its units.
But the supposed “white supremacy” and love of the gun that propelled it was not directed so much at the ‘savages’ as it was directed against other whites. More whites died from white made bullets than ‘savages’ ever died from them. How many native Americans are supposed to have died in what the extremist Ward Churchill called the “American genocide.” 100,000? 200,000? But how many American whites died in the Civil War, which was waged of course to set a bunch of those “inferior savages” free? 500,000. How many whites died in the Great War? Millions. And how many in the Second World War? 40 million (not including Jews and Asians).
The gun has been the major killer of white people, not blacks and Asians and “savages” and “inferior” people. That white supremacists use the gun is because the gun is a reasonably cheap advanced weapon. Oddly for Mr. Carrol when Muslims use the suicide bomb vest he doesn’t speak of it being the “epochal tool of Muslim male supremacy.” But that is because the worldview of Carrol and those like him is imbued with endless drudgery of “races” and “Savages” and “inferior people” and “blood purity.” If one were to add up all the people like the white supremacist, who was himself not very supreme but rather some hapless savage individual, who opened fire at the Holocaust Memorial and one were to add up all the leftists like Carrol one would find there are more leftists who divide the world into “races” than there are racists who do. The perpetuation of race theory and discussion of “racial purity” and ridiculously racist and ignorant statements like “one thing alone empowered Europeans to wreak such havoc wherever they went and that was the gun. The gun was the epochal tool of white male supremacy” is entirely the province of leftists. Only the end of the weird obsession to be racist in order to condemn racism will end the idiotic idea of race that wasn’t invented in the 15th century but rather in the late 20th, primarily as a straw man for people to oppose.
Richard Bernstein’s blindness
Seth J. Frantzman
June 23, 2009
Richard Bernstein was born in 1944 and apparently grew up on a poultry farm. He attended the University Connecticut and at Harvard. In 1973 he went to work for Time magazine. Later he became a bureau chief for that magazine in China which began a life-long obsession with that country. While living there he married a “beautiful Chinese dancer” named Zhongman Li. This became his “vision of the East.” Bernstein seemed to be on the right track in 1994 when he wrote Dictatorship of Virtue: Multiculturalism and the Battle for America’s Future in which he noted “we find ourselves immured in an Orwellian culture, where language has become an instrument of political coercion and institutions created for intellectual enlightenment have been turned into bureaucracies of untruth.”
But now he has gone one step further with The East, The West and Sex: A History of Erotic Encounters. Bernstein decided to do what Edward Said has done with Orientalism but do so through the medium of sex. He decides to describe the “East” as everything from North Africa to Japan, including the pacific islands. Yet his expertise and apparent experience is mostly with China. No matter. His book argues that the east was “a place where sexual pleasure was not commonly associated with sin” Reviewing the book Toni Bentley, whose qualification to review it is that he was a dancer “with the New York City Ballet for 10 years and author” agrees mostly with Bernstein’s views but faults him for writing a “not very sexy book about a very sexy subject.”
Bentley writes that the Mormons should be given “credit” for trying to bring “Harem culture” to the uptight west. He argues that “India was playing twister-the Kama Sutra version” more than a thousand years before Columbus.” Bernstein argues that until the 19th century “most of world still subscribed to what I have been calling the harem culture.” Bernstein likes this culture because it is “more realistic about male sexual desire than Western culture.” Bernstein appears to disagree with Said, the West didn’t create a fake eroticized East, it was in fact more erotic. According to Bentley “many of the different cultures that Bernstein studies do have ancient histories of sexual sophistication and often sweetness far beyond what’s been attained in the West.” Christianity simply has no “interest in exploring human sexual desire or potential.” Bernstein claims that it was Western men who met the erotic east and had sex with most of it and have continued to do up until today through the ‘sex tourism’ of places like Thailand. Meanwhile “it would seem implausible, if not entirely impossible, for there to be a story of say a Frenchwoman who falls in love with a Persian or Arab adventurer.” Bentley elaborates that the Western men and their Eastern women leave “Western women and Eastern men awkwardly conversing in the Jacuzzi.” And according to these two experts the Eastern woman is “more plumlike than melonlike of breast, spare rather than full of buttocks and hips.”
Bernstein should be congratulated for attacking a controversial subject and for daring to pin prick the evils and wrongheadedness of Orientalism. But he should not be congratulated for being blind. By blind I mean he is blind on many levels. He is blind on the physical level. While Bernstein’s “vision of the East” in the form of his Chinese wife may be slender of breast and buttocks, he seems to have ignored the rest of the female East and mistaken the silicone implants so common among Western women with their actual appearance. Western women are not “melonlike” of breast and neither are they “full of buttocks.” Let us be honest. They are more flat chested and poorly endowed than they let on, with some exceptions. Western Woman have better diets today than they used to but even with them the European obsession with being skinny has kept them poorly endowed. With some exceptions of hybrid vigor, found in Texas and California, they have remained less well endowed. And Bernstein is comparing the wrong women, he is comparing Chinese women with what he is familiar with in New York. He should be opening his eyes a little bit because the diversity of breast and buttocks is hardly what he makes it out to be. But alas here it is not his fault. He can’t be expected to have done research on this issue among the half billion Muslim women that make up his “east” because they are all covered up with chadors, burkas, purdah, abbays, veils, hijabs and niqabs. So unlike the Arab slavers of the 19th century who used to strip the female slaves they took from Africa and Ukraine naked to examine them, he can be forgiven.
But let us move on to more blindness. We are told that the Indians are more liberal in sex because of the Kama Sutra. But the Kama Sutra in the second century CE. Bentley and Bernstein have seemingly projected the Christian West of the 18th century back to the Second. But despite the fact that Christ and lived and died by that time it is not true that the ‘bad’ uptight ways of Western Sex had yet destroyed the greatness of what was once a very sexual Roman and Greek culture. The Greeks of course must be slightly forgiven, theirs was not a Kama Sutra that involved women, but they apparently enjoyed sex greatly. The Romans were not prudes, they had sex with lots of women on their marching back and forth across the Mediterranean. Their sin was that they didn’t have enough harem apparently. But they did have slaves, so Bernstein and Bentley should forgive the West. We had slavery into the 19th century, just like the East, and anyone who has read Albion’s Seed is familiar that the Southern plantation owners “sexual mores” were far from Victorian. They had a lot of sex with all sorts of people, mostly their slaves, sort of like the Arab slavers. So they should be celebrated. The Portuguese in Brazil and Spanish elsewhere in the 16th century developed many harem cultures. So rather than condemned as uptight we should also celebrate them. If not for those obnoxious voices such as Abraham Lincoln and Bartholomew De Las Casas we might have had our own ‘harem culture’ and then we could be as open minded as the East. So we too were “realistic” about the sexual needs of the male. Maybe we should have kept this realistic culture up. We too used to beat our wives; one Russian nobleman even wrote a book about the proper way to do it. Men in the West also used to go out on benders and have sex with lots of women while their women stayed home modestly. We used to be more “realistic”. From the appearances of Amsterdam where men can stroll along the street where women sit naked in the windows and choose what they want it seems we are still “realistic.” So why all the condemnation. We had slavery and harems and rape and lots of sex. The problem seems to have been our abolition of the institution of slavery and equal rights for women, but the institutionalization of the sex slave trade seems to be bringing us back to a “realistic” view of the male humans need.
According to Bentley the East has done better because it understands the male “potential” and “Sweetness” and “sophistication.” Part of this sophistication, so we are told, is the fact that the Ottoman Sultan had “1,60 virgins, each hoping to be chosen for one night of honor” with the sultan. Yes, this is more sophisticated, at least for the few men who become sultan. It is more sweet, apparently, for those men. Is it sweet to the women, most of whome were kidnapped as slaves from Africa, India, Eastern Europe and elsewhere by Muslim slavers and pirates and sold to the harem? I guess it must have been sweet for those women like Sarah la Preta from Ethiopia, taken from her Christian family at 8 by Muslim raiders and transported to Jerusalem and sold in a slave market. Sweet and sophisticated. And her potential was fulfilled. When she died she had no last name except that attached to her by the family that purchased her. Very sophisticated. But we in West were just as sophisticated as anyone who has read or watched Roots can testify. We took those Negroes from Africa and we raped the women and kept them as mistresses and took their names and tribes from them. They fulfilled their potential too. So why the insults for the West. The Boers in South Africa fathered an entire nation through sophistication and so did the Spanish conquistadors.
But now that we have proved that the West did just as good as Islam and the East let us also prove that the second corollary of this book is a myth. Bernstein claims that the Eastern man and the Western man are being left out of this sexual equation. This is his apparent experience in China where few white women arrive to find Asian men to date. But that is an accident of history which has painted the Asian male as not very well endowed, sexy or interesting. But Western women have, for a very long, time been meeting Eastern men in other milieus. From Othello to the slave markets of Istanbul and Cairo, where Greek, Ukrainian and Georgian women were still on sale in the mid 19th century, the Western woman has met lots of Eastern men. And from books such as The Lustful Turk to movies such as Under the Sheltering Sky or the 1986 film Harem where “Jessica, a young British girl, goes off to Arabia with her father to be with her fiancé when he's called there suddenly on diplomatic duty. On a tourist journey she's kidnapped by what appears to be a Bedouin tribe and sold into the harem of the Sultan” there is enough imagination about Western women and the erotic Eastern man.
Bernstein’s book had a good premise but in its insinuation that the West didn’t do enough to duplicate the “realistic harem culture” he has made a serious error. There are lots of things that might be more realistic in our society that we might well adopt from the wonderful east. Beating women for infidelity or killing our daughters for defaming family honour might be realistic. It would certainly prevent what has happened in Moldova and Ukraine where one in four women seems to have sold herself into sex slavery and there are few women left in some small towns. Slavery is pretty realistic. Maybe we should bring it back. It is a very unrealistic idea that all of us should have to work when we could just kidnap others to do it for us. Genocide is quite realistic, along with religious extremism, after all no one wants to have live next to people that aren’t like them. And legalizing rape is realistic, as Islam has done by stoning and whipping women for the ‘crime’ of adultery when they are raped, because men need to rape, they can’t control themselves. Bernstein and Bentley are correct. The East was more “realistic”. But Bentley and Bernstein might be unhappy to find out that their Jewish and peasant stock from which the former and latter came might not have brought them the plaudits they have received in our unrealistic boring Western society. Bernstein would be back in his realistic ghetto making shoes for the sultan or selling his wares on the streets and cleaning the gutters on Shabbat and wearing a blue turban, as Jews were forced to do in Muslim countries. And Bentley, we he would be some useless Fellahin, some peasant considered less than a dog to be whipped and beaten at his masters will. Realistic. Sophisticated. And don’t worry Mr. Bernstein and Bentley, your wives and daughters will be in the sultans harem being treated with sweetness.
Where Health Care in the U.S Went wrong
Seth J. Frantzman
June 28, 2009
The Economist recently reported that the U.S pays almost twice what most European countries do on health care per capita. That includes both public and private spending. What is more shocking is that the U.S public spending is about equal to what European countries spend per capita. To make sense of this think of it this way: the U.S government spends exactly the same amount as European governments do to insure less than 25% of the people. Even if the U.S abolished all of the private insurance funded health care and private individuals paying for health care it would still spend as much as the Europeans and yet most Americans would therefore not even be receiving health care.
Why is it like this? Is it because Americans are less healthy? Do they go to the doctor more? Do they simply like to spend more money? Is it because the availability of private health care means wealthy individuals pay huge amounts for special health care regimes that are not available in the socialized systems elsewhere? No. But if that is not the culprit then surely it must be the American Health Insurance system of private insurers who charge individuals too much? No.
What causes the U.S to spend so much on health care is consists of the following; Government funded health care regimes such as medicare that are bilked by hospitals which charge ten times what other countries charge for simple procedures, needless operations and drug companies that bilk them out of huge amounts for prescription drugs. Second is he uninsured mass of 50 million Americans who visit hospitals, and being poor visit them more than the wealthy, and don’t pay their bills forcing the hospitals to pass that on to insurance companies and the government. Third is the ability of the hospitals and doctors to bilk insurance companies by charging whatever they please for whatever, sometimes non-existent, things they want to charge for. Thus in the U.S a visit to the emergency room by a patient who is perfectly healthy can result in tens of thousands of dollars in charges for a few hour stay. Staying overnight in the hospital can result in tens of thousands of dollars in bills and an operation or being seen by a doctor can run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars in bills.
Those who set their sights on the HMO or private insurer as the bogey-man of the U.S health care system are missing where the actual charges are coming from. Insurance companies charge exorbitant amounts for health insurance, running into the hundreds of dollars a month. But these companies don’t make windfall profits. In fact they charge these huge amounts because they are forced to pay hospitals huge amounts in the off chance that their insured members must visit a hospital.
Americans and critics like to point to the ‘good old days’ before the insurance company when doctors made home visits. This story usually makes the listener believe that it was the advent of the insurance company which ruined this bucolic scene. But in fact insurance companies didn’t change the old practice of doctors going door to door. What changed is the doctors decision to stop going door to door and instead to charge millions of dollars for useless procedures and for doing absolutely nothing. Anyone who has visited a hospital can report that doctors do very little. They may complain they are overworked but that is not the fault of the patient, who barely gets to see a doctor these days. And the reason for there being overworked doctors is not because of the insurance companies but apparently because of the health care profession where fewer people become doctors or because of hospitals who don’t employ them, or some other reason. But what is true is that the doctor charges exorbitant amounts to his patients because he and the hospital know that few of the patients actually pay the bills and because of the huge malpractice insurance doctors must now pay.
Why do doctors and hospitals charge so much? It is partly because they want to bilk insurance companies and the government out of money, a fact for which they should be imprisoned for violating racketeering laws. However what actually causes it is the fact that so few of those who walk into a hospital actually pay their bills. There are 300 million Americans. Some 50 million are uninsured. Another 13 million are illegal aliens. They don’t pay for their health care or hospital visits but for all intents and purposes receive it free. F bills are sent they never come back except by “return to sender.” There are another 50 million Americans on medicare because they are over 65, a fact caused by the burgeoning number of old people living longer and who were part of the ‘baby-boom’ generation. Lastly there are the supposed 250 million insured Americans who are either insured by private insurers or by some government insurance for the poor. These insured Americans are the trough at which the hospital eats. For all the money that they cannot recoup from the sickly illegals and the poor uninsured there is an insurance company or a government which will cover. The government and insurance companies don’t know they are covering these 63 million but in affect they do because costs are passed on to them.
Consider it this way. If there is a clothing store that sells four shirts a week for $10 a shirt and during that week one of the people comes in and takes the shirt without paying and this goes on for weeks on end eventually the business must charge $13.33 for those same four shirts in order to recoup what it would have made on the four shirts. The slippage, or stolen shirt, is passed on to the paying consumers.
But consider our health care system. In that system there is a company that insurers people against needing a shirt. In the off chance that they need a shirt the insurance company pays for it. There is a government that also insurers old and poor people against needing a shirt. Now, given the same system, the shirt company finds it can charge whatever it wants for the shirts, knowing that people will need them and that someone else will pay. The more they charge for shirts the more the insurance company passes it on to the individual in a viscious cycle until the cost of a shirt might very well be $100. Meanwhile the people stealing the shirts, knowing that no one cares about them stealing, steal more and more and since poor people tend to be dirtier they need more shirts so they must steal more and more and more. And with time illegal aliens arrive and because a store can’t apparently charge them they too get free shirts, and when there are free shirts people are sure to take as many as possible. But the insurance company can very well tell the shirt buyers that “you only pay $10 a week” for that shirt. Same $10 as the shirt originally cost, except now the shirt costs $100 and yet it has remained the same shirt. This is what happened to health care.
The free-market has failed to solve this problem because free market theory and capitalism does not take into account a mixed system of government care for some people, free health care for certain other people, poor people who don’t have to pay, foreigners who don’t have to pay, and a small contingent of people who actually pay for a good. Free markets and economics speaks of supply and demand but is usually predicated on some sort of vacume that doesn’t take into account bankruptcy and insurance or honesty or illegal aliens and laws preventing hospitals from questioning them about their ‘status’. The tragedy of Americans confronting the health care evil foisted upon them is that they have continued to be honest in the face of it. In order to defeat the government mandated evil that allows foreigners to get better health care in the U.S than American tax payers the U.S tax payer should simply refuse to provide I.D and immigration status the next time he visits a hospital. As an illegal alien he will receive first class health care. I’ve seen this first hand with friends of mine and relatives of theirs. Foreigners don’t pay for hospital visits in the U.S and actually receive better care, because of NGOs and clinics, than Americans do. It is time for every American to become an illegal alien since they receive better services from the U.S government than Americans themselves.
Health care failed us. Rather than being bankrupted by health care costs it is time for Americans to declare war on a system that rewards foreigners over ourselves, to the degree that we should become foreigners in our own land in order to over-burden the system and force the government to change the law that allowed foreigners to get better health care than us and to stop NGOs from providing free health care, and better health care, to illegals. Capitalism has failed us in the mixed government-private funding for health care and rather that punish insurance companies for this failing it is better for doctors and hospitals to be punished and for those lawyers suing for malpractice to be punished through tort reform legislation. Making it illegal to charge $8,000 for a ten minute visit to an emergency room would be a start.
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