Terra Incognita
Issue 96
“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
September 1, 2009
1) There will be no Protest For Leonard Karp: In a recent murder in Tel Aviv a man and his family were accosted by a group of young Arab Muslim men and their Jewish girlfriends. The gang proceeded to harass a father, his wife and his daughter and then beat the father to death. When he died there was no protest because Liberal secular western society is so immoral and devoid of humanity that it no longer cares for its fellow man.
2) From Gaza to Nigeria: Recently extremist Islamist cults have gotten into suicidal battles with their own governments, even in places where they already have Islamic law. It shows a growing trend of cult-radicalization in the Islamist society.
3) A Tragic Irony: No Fans of Israel: The three American hikers kidnapped by Iran should not be viewed as victims. They not only blatantly wandered around the Iranian border without a map but they have a long history of supporting and collaborating with Islamism and terrorism.
There will be no Protest For Leonard Karp
Seth J. Frantzman
August 17, 2009
There will be no protest for Leonard Karp. We don’t know much about this simple man. A resident of Petah Tikva in Israel at one time he moved from Petah Tikva to Ramat Aviv, north of Tel Aviv, when their two daughters decided to attend Tel Aviv University. We don’t know much about this man because he wasn’t a member of some special minority group. He wasn’t a homosexual. He wasn’t lynched in the American South. He was just a 59 year old Jewish man who decided to take his daughter and wife for a walk on the beach in Tel Aviv. And for that Liberalism murdered him.
There will be no protest for Leonard Karp. The life of Leonard Karp does not matter. It is a life that was not worth living. Leonard Karp was not a man in our eyes, in the eyes of the secular society from which he came. He was merely the end result of what Gideon Levy tells us is what happened when “Arabs from Jaljuliya, raise their heads and voice in social frustration.” Leonard Karp was thus what happens when social frustration takes place. His death, at the hands of 8 Arab men and two Jewish women, is due to social frustration.
There will be no protest for Leonard Karp. There was just a funeral of a few hundred people. His daughters said much about “peace.” They said “We wish that those who do good will receive good in return and that those who do bad will realize that they were wrong, repent and pay the price." Leonard Karp, this is our way, the secular society’s way, of saying goodbye. We don’t mention how you died. How your daughter was accosted by a gang of young men and their prostitute girlfriends. We don’t mention that you defended your daughter, Hila’s, honour. We don’t mention that they beat you, like an animal. We don’t mention that they chased your wife and beat her. We don’t mention that it took 8 men, 8 men at the height of their strength in their twenties to beat you, a 59 year old man, to death. We don’t mention how they took you to the water’s edge, to the pier, and they beat you and drowned you and threw you like garbage into the sea. We don’t mention that after they went back to a forest near Rosh Ha’Ayin and drank alchohol with their prostitutes who helped them and they felt no remorse. We don’t say anything like this. Because this is the West. This is the height of the progressive civilization. This is what we call modernity. We call it that because, Mr. Karp, we have no humanity.
There will be no protest for Leonard Karp. There was no protest for Caeser either when his friends stabbed him to death. Why should you expect any? When gays are shot down or African-Americans or when Arab refugees are removed from churches they occupy in Denmark, then there are protests. But Mr. Karp your skin is not black, your name is not Mohammed and you don’t have a rainbow bracelet. Oh, Mr. Karp, if only you had been a gay, if only you had converted to Islam, if only you had been a Muslim. Then they would have loved you. We would have loved you. Our society. Our culture. Our modern world. Then we would have had a great fanfare at your death. We would have remembered you like we do Rodney King or Matthew Shephard. But Karp you knew you were nothing when you got up in the morning. You meant nothing to this world, so when they beat you, treated you like garbage you should have expected it. Modern society long ago labeled you not worthy of living because long ago those who practice in our best institutions, our best intellectuals, our best and the brightest, they long ago said that you were not worth allowing to live because your life can be snapped away because of “social frustration.”
There will be no protest for Leonard Karp. Did you think your brother Ya’acov would call for revenge, or your daughters scream in the shrill screams that the Arabs have for their fallen dead? Did you think that you should have met your fate in a leftist liberal city where no one comes to the aid of another man the way they used to? The ancient law said that if a woman cries out during a rape and no one comes to her aid it is as if she did not cry out because the judges could not understand how, in a city, a woman might cry out and no one would help her. Such was the honour of the towns that when a women was assaulted the men would come to save her. But such is the dishonour we have long known in our settlements that a woman can be raped for half an hour in New York since the 1960s and not one will come. Such is the shame of the entire nation and yet every member of the nation no doubt thinks themselves innocent. But when one does not aid in the distress of the rape victim, is one not collaborating with the rapist? When one does not prevent their daughters from going out with murderers and gangs of young men who murder and harass women, is that father and mother not collaborating in the murder? When one does not fight to preserve the honour of their own daughters but allows them to go out with men who rape and abuse them, is that person not liable for the subsequent actions of their daughter and her friends?
There will be no protest for Leonard Karp. But all up and down the line society failed you Mr. Karp. It began with the Arabs in their village who society taught to be racist and sexually harass women. It was helped on its way by the Jewish prostitutes of Petah Tikva whose parents did not care for their honour. It was aided by a city of secular people who cared not about eachother. It was then allowed to continue, after your death, by your own family who did not gird their loins for revenge. And the final nail in your coffin was placed their by intellectuals who excused your death as part of “social frustration.” But Mr. Karp your death does not goo forgotten. There is within a few of us a morsel of decency who understands that you had a right to live. You had an inalieble right, a natural right. It was racism and hate and rapacious evil that took your life away. Only revenge, revenge against immorality and against the villages from whence your attackers came, can cleanse the stain of your death from the land. Alas those few who understand cannot take revenge, for it was the duty of your family to have that revenge. But we understand that it was the liberal secular society that murdered you, as much as the savage Islamist society murdered you. One held the knife and the other plunged it in. One excused the other, one enabled the other. Mr. Karp, we will protest for you, in our hearts, if not in the streets. We believe that from the failure that is the secular Western world, the greatest failure that the world ever produced, the greatest promise and the greatest let down, that through its failure will come a better world. A world in which Mr. Karp might have died peacefully in his bed.
From Gaza to Nigeria
Seth J. Frantzman
August 15, 2009
The sudden and bloody fighting that broke out at a mosque in the Gaza Strip on Friday, August 14th is emblematic of a new phenomenon within the Islamist movement. From Gaza to northern Nigeria and Pakistan, throughout the Islamic world, a new type of militancy has grown up, one that involves extremist preachers, their followers begging for martyrdom, and self-destructive battles that result in their deaths, usually at the hands of fellow Muslims.
The phenomenon of extremist religious movements surrounding inspired preachers is surely not new nor confined to Islam. Revivalist Christian sects such as the Branch Davidians and their leader David Koresh have clashed with police in the U.S and in India the Sikh leader Bhindranwale led a militant independence movement that resulted in thousands of deaths. The ‘Ghost Dance’ which swept up Native American communities in 1890 was led by the Paiute prophet known as Wovoka and resulted in the Wounded Knee Massacre. The practitioners believed their special religious garments would repel bullets. A similar phenomenon occurred in China in 1900 when a religious society known as the “Boxers” produced a wave of anti-Western militancy led by men who believed their devotion could protect them from bullets. Their movement was destroyed by the intervention of European armies.
A minority Muslim sect known as the Isma’ilis produced a radical sect known as the Assassins who spent the 11th and 12th centuries harassing and murdering Muslim and Christian leaders in the Middle East before being exterminated by the Mongols in 1256. In Israel’s War of Independence in 1948 an extremist Muslim Brotherhood unit wearing supposedly protective garments stormed Jewish Kfar Darom in Gaza resulting in the deaths of most of its members who had travelled from North Africa (Kfar Darom fell to the Egyptian army soon after). Indonesia has been stricken by Islamist revival movements since the 19th century, partly sparked, oddly, by the Krakatoa eruption of 1883, which today manifest themselves in the groups like Darul Islam and Jemaah Islamiyah.
Islamism it seems is beginning to produce more and more radical fringe movements that, far from being part of a unifying umbrella as Al Quieda intended, are “linked to Al Quieda” but succeed mostly in fighting Muslim governments and destroying themselves as well as civilians located near their mosques. The July 2007 Siege of the Red Mosque (Lal Masjid) was one such example. It was Led by brothers Maulana Abdul Aziz and Abdul Rashid Ghazi, sons of a radical preacher named Maulana Qari Abdullah who founded the Mosque in 1965. A series of escalating incidents led to an 8 day siege of the mosque in which 11 Pakistani special forces, 84 Mosque members and 14 civilians were killed.
On July 31, 2009, following days of fighting, Mohammed Yusuf of the Boko Haram sect was killed in northern Nigeria. His sect had launched a series of attacks on police stations, churches, and government offices in several northern Nigerian states. More than 200 people died before the army launched an assault on the organization’s mosque, capturing Yusuf who later died in custody.
But the most famous example of an extremist Islamist uprising is the siege of Mecca, so well documented in a recent book, The Siege of Mecca, by Yasoslav Trofimov. On November 20, 1979 some five hundred armed followers of Juhaiman ibn Muhammad ibn Saif al Utaibi, a member of a leading Saudi family, invaded the Grand Mosque in Mecca. A siege lasted 14 days during which 250 militants and 130 Saudi national guardsmen were killed. The leader of the group was later beheaded, along with 67 of his followers.
Then suddenly in the afternoon hours of August 14th, 2009 word came out of Gaza of a gun battle between radical Islamists who had proclaimed a caliphate and members of Hamas, which controls the Gaza strip. Some 100 members of Jund Ansar Allah led by Abdel-Latif Moussa, a radical preacher at the Ibn Taymiyah mosque, were confronted by Hamas security forces that surrounded the Mosque and a shootout developed. Initial reports claim up to 24 people died including six Hamas police officers and one civilian. The leader of the group reportedly blew himself up.
All of these examples point to a trend in Islamism. It was once thought that Islamists primarily viewed themselves at war with secular Muslim regimes. That later morphed into Al Quieda, which viewed itself as being at war with the entire non-Muslim world, inspiring movements from China to the Balkans. But now Islamists are turning on eachother. The BBC described the situation, in a tongue in cheek manner, as one group “accusing the Islamist group of not being Islamist enough.”
The one thing that unites all of these events is disappointment with unfulfilled Islamist government, guns, mosques and preachers who seek to revive an Islamic past, whether the Mahdi, as in Saudi Arabia’s siege, or the Caliphate, as in Gaza. A secondary problem is that it makes pernicious tyrannical government’s such as Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Gaza’s Hamas seem more benign because they are “fighting terrorism” or “they too are threatened by extremists.” In fact their support, or in the case of Nigeria, the appeasement, of Islamism helps breed further radicalism.
A Tragic Irony: No Fans of Israel
August 8th, 2009
Seth J. Frantzman
An analysis of the writings and photography of three Jewish Americans being held captive in Iran shows that one of them was a radical anti-Israel critic. On August 1st three Americans went missing in the mountains of Kurdistan. There had been four of them travelling and submitting articles for publication in Western and other media outlets. On July 31st Shon Meckfessel stayed behind in Sulaimania while Sarah Shourd, Josh Fattal and Shane Bauer went for a trip to a nearby town called Ahmed Awa. According to Shon they had no idea that Ahmad Awa was near the border with Iran; “not one of these people mentioned that Ahmed Awa was anywhere near the Iranian border.” There was no Lonely Planet for Iraqi Kurdistan and they couldn’t find it on the map they had. So three of them set off while the fourth stayed home sick.
The next day one of them phoned to say they were being taken into custody by Iranian border guards. On August 9th it was confirmed by Iran that they were being held. But the three “hikers” were not ordinary hiking enthusiasts. They were well heeled journalists. Joshua Fattal was a contributor to the Jewish Week. Shane Bauer, the most prolific, had recently been in Syria, Ethiopia and Sudan doing investigative and photojournalism. Shane has spent the last six years in the Middle East and Africa and his writings have appears in the L.A Times, Christian Science Monitor, Al Aljazeera, New American Media, Democracy Now! and elsewhere. He has also written for left wing American media outlets such as The Nation and Mother Jones.
Like Shane the other two hikers were Jewish and Joshua Fattal has contributed to the Jewish Week. The Vanguard News Network, a neo-nazi online forum noted that “maybe they were spying. They worked in journalism. That is a jew infested industry.” Angry hate-filled posts about the three followed. It seems that Iran, at least officially, believes the same thing and wishes to use the three as yet another state-sponsored unlawful hostage taking bargaining chip with the West.
But the connection of two of the journalists to Israel is worth mentioning. Shane has a photo on his website about the country titled “Neo-Nazi in Tel Aviv” taken on July 1, 2009. The photo shows an African woman and child in the foreground, but in the background is a woman with a three pronged swastika, which is usually used as a symbol by Afrikaner nationalists. The photojournalist, Mr. Bauer, might have pointed out the irony of the Afrikaner symbol next to the black woman and child on the streets of Tel Aviv. But instead he seemed to be wanting to say something more, something negative about Israel. It wasn’t titled “African woman in Tel Aviv.”
While Bauer and Fattal don’t appear to have written much about Israel, Sarah Shourd has written numerous malicious things praising Syria and condemning Israel. She identifies herself as “teacher-activist-writer from California currently based in the Middle East. She loves fresh broccoli, Zapatistas [a radical leftist anti-Government insurgency in Mexico] and anyone who can change her mind.” On her website (http://unfetteredeyes.wordpress.com) she wears a khaffiya proudly and praises anti-Israel documentaries such as ‘Palestinian Blues’, ‘Leila Khaled: Hijacker’ and ‘Occupation 101’.
A May 3, 2009 post on her blog notes “It’s been more than 4 months since the Israeli Massacre in Gaza.” Shourd speaks of Hamas winning “what many consider to be the first truly democratic election in the Middle East.” Apparently Israel is not in the Middle East. Gaza is “one of the most populated places in the world.” She apparently means by population density. She speaks of how Israel is “killing resistance” and “all our love for Gaza.”
She mocks the Western perception of Syria; “The hazy sketch of Syria we get in U.S. becomes progressively more hazy as to almost loose all definition once you are here. Dangerous? Conservative? Anti-American? Oppressive to women? Backwards? Extremist? It’s not nearly as simplistic as that.” It is perhaps ironic because only last month Syria changed a law regarding honor killings of women which had made the maximum sentence for men accused of murdering their female relatives only one year. Now the minimum is two years. She explains that “Large, reassuring shots of President Al-Assad adorn almost every shop window in Damascus.” Shourd mentions that in Yemen “many Yemenis have challenged me, saying my analysis falls short. They say that I am too apologetic towards the terrorists, framing them as victims rather than the perpetrators.”
It is perhaps an irony that Bauer and Shourd were arrested hiking in the Kurdish hills. Is there a difference between the perception of Israel by Iran and its president and that of Shourd? Whatever the case the Israel connection is there. We can only hope the experience of these three in custody will change their opinion of Israel or Gaza. But for now Mr. Bauer’s Israel will only be the “Neo-Nazi in Tel Aviv” and for Shourd Israel will only be the country that massacres and places people in giant prisons.
Monday, August 31, 2009
Friday, August 14, 2009
Terra Incognita 95 women, self hate and 'the white man's burden'
Terra Incognita
Issue 95
“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
August 9th, 2009
1) How Modernity let down women: Recent stories from Japan about middle class women preferring the job of ‘hostessing’ t other jobs once again shows the failure of the West in terms of educating women and creating women who value themselves, their lives and their freedom.
2) The people of illogic: Notes on Jewish self hate: Jewish self hate is one of the most fascinating phenomenon’s. While many nations now produce intellectuals who have self-hate the Jews seem especially adept at it. It is worth examining a few cases to understand that self-hate is primarily based on illogical concepts.
3) The White man’s two burdens: The White man once took upon himself the burden of civilizing the world. Later he took upon himself the burden of feeling guilty for having attempted to civilize. Now he spreads that burden around to other people he deems white, hoping to make us all feel guilty for an endeavor that was not of our making and one that there is no reason to have any guilt for.
How Modernity let down women
Seth J. Frantzman
July 31, 2009
In a recent article about Japan we learn that “club hostesses lose their stigma.” The article explains that young women now “view them as well paid role models.” The article explains that this is “among the most lucrative jobs available to women”. According to a recent study it was the 12th most popular job choice for women graduating high school.
The story of most young women yearning to be “hostesses” in Japan is not surprising. “Hostessing” in Japan is not being a hostess at a restaurant. It is a form of semi-prostitution where clubs of male clientele have young women in swank dresses who sit with the men, chat with them and encourage them to buy drinks. Sometimes the women sleep with the men. The clubs are located in red light districts much like strip clubs.
The fact that in the most wealthy countries where women have been obtained and been granted western freedoms they desire nothing more in life than to be objects for men’s affections, t be paid for their time to service men sexually, to work as strippers, porn stars, models or some manner of the three combined points to a severe problem in the trajectory of this thing called “west” and “freedom”. Women that are bought and sold in the sex slave trade of prostitution, as slaves, are not women from uneducated and impoverished backgrounds, they are from lower middle class educated backgrounds and all of them come from countries where women were granted equality with men and freedom long ago, such as Ukraine or Russia.
Is the failure of the hopes of the West due to women or due to the West? The answer lies in both. Both are equally at fault. Consider the situation in Japan. Women do not find work in business or other places that pay well. This is part of the fault of society that has not opened up the workplace to women, despite granting them equality and freedom. But the next choice, the choice to become a prostitute, lies entirely with the women. That women value, as highest among the occupations, modeling or hostessing, this is entirely the fault of women.
It is the same among western women who choose to convert to Islam and marry men who commit honour killings. Consider the hypocrisy of the western woman who marries a traditional Muslim man. She first dresses immodestly in her western culture, using the freedom granted her in the West to dress as she pleases. Through this behavior she meets a Muslim man who, denied the ability to see his own women who he has placed in Burkas now spends his days looking for immodest and immoral western women who will sleep with him. She then converts to Islam to marry into a religion where, if her daughter behaves as she did and dates outside her community the daughter will be killed. This is the hypocrisy that is natural and part and parcel of the West: the need to cleanse and destroy all figments of tradition to make people secular and un-believing. The result is the mass conversion of those people to any religion they are exposed to that fills them up with tradition and god. So the fact that the western woman converts to Islam or finds it exotic and interesting is not her fault, it is the fault of the West which has not provided her with tradition or religion or order or any foundation or patriotism or anything. But her decision to marry traditional fundamentalist men, traditional men, the same men she hated and spurned in her own society, is her fault. The contradiction of her marrying he man that, were she his daughter he would kill for her behavior is her fault.
Thus the West creates the basis for the society in which women are left with the choice to destroy their lives. Western society frequently denies them many of the god choices they might otherwise have made. Western society brainwashes women to be leftist and secular and immodest and immoral. Women’s rights groups describe prostitution as “sex work” and tell women to become involved with it. Popular culture encourages women to be models in the West and “hostesses” in Japan by valuing only those women who expose themselves nude in public. All these are the evils of the west that took women who were not much more than chattel in the 19th century and, after 100 years of liberalism, turned them back into chattel, lowering their station to worse than it was before. But the west’s self-destructiveness is matched by the collaboration of women with degrading activities that transform them into little more than cattle. In this the western woman is more dehumanized than her Islamic counterpart. Muslim women are, oddly considering all they are denied, the pillars of their culture and its greatest defenders. Western women are, oddly considering all they are given, the weakest link in their culture and the first to insult and degrade it and condemn it and desert it. It s not surprising that in the liberal-homo-self-hating culture of the West that patriotism is considered chauvinistic and so is religion. But for a western women to don a khaffiyeh and become a militant for Islam or don a burka and birth 13 children for some man in the East this is considered “female empowerment” and for a woman to work as a prostitute and be bought and sold in bathroom stalls and auditioned for work as a “sex worker”, this is part of “empowerment”. The evil is inter-twined. The West long ago failed women when the first feminists became advocates of porn work for women and when the first one’s became admirers of the Iranian revolution.
The West failed women and western women in turn failed themselves. They failed the test of freedom much the way early democracies of the 1920s failed that test, must the way Russia failed that brief test in 1917, much the way the French Revolutionaries transformed the rights of man into bathing in the blood of man. The death of the West in its own blood of self-hate is only part of the longer self-consuming evils of numerous revolutions that promised man freedom only for man to destroy that freedom as quickly as possible.
The people of illogic: Notes on Jewish self hate
Seth J. Frantzman
July 26, 2009
Recently the German government gave one of its highest civilian awards, the Federal Cross of Merit, to Felicia Langer, a supporter of the Palestinians who calls Israel the “apartheid of the present” and a defender of Iranian president Mahmud Ahmadinjad. She noted that the Holocaust denying Iranian president “is right” when “speaking about the suffering of the Palestinians”. He had left Israel in 1990 “because for the Palestinians, unfortunately we cannot obtain Justice.” She speaks often of how the Holocaust has harmed her family and when in Israel spoke of being part of the “other Israel” and noted “I'm for justice and against all those for whom the conclusion of the holocaust is hatred, cruelty and insensitivity.” Al Ahram described her as “a beautiful and petite women with intense blue eyes” who “married Mieciu Langer, a Holocaust Survivor” and when she was given the award the spokesmen noted it was partly due to how “her own background as massively affected by the Holocaust.”
Then in late July Prof. Yuri Pines wrote in an email to student about the threat of an Israeli soldier who died in a recent war having his home removed by the government that “I hope that not only the Major’s home will be destroyed, but the entire settlement, and that the settlers will all be gone with the wind… I favor a complete annihilation of the settlement enterprise…they are my enemy.” In an earlier interview the professor had said “I was... disgusted and astonished by the belief in Jews being the ‘chosen people’, in the ‘eternal Jewish rights’ and in the need of all Jews to gather in Palestine.” He encouraged Israeli soldiers to “betray” their country.
These two cases of angry and fanatical Jews who live and thrive off of condemning other Jews is illustrative of most of the shrill and angry hatred by some Jews of other Jews. This strain of anger and those who practice it should be termed “the people of illogic”. Consider a few more examples. Meir Margolit, Meretz representative on the Jerusalem City Council, noted about a new Jewish housing complex on the border with East Jerusalem “The Jews will change the Palestinian profile of east Jerusalem, and this will be an obstacle for peace in the Middle East. I say thank you to these Jews who are coming now because this is a provocation, and we will take advantage of this provocation." Note the anger against “the Jews” and the idea that this will be used as a “provocation” by Meretz in order o encourage Palestinian violence against those Jews.
Consider Professor Bill Freedman, an American immigrant to Israel, who declared that he would begin publically celebrating the Nakba, the day of mourning that Palestinians mark on Israel’s independence day, instead of Israel’s independence day. Freedman said “I can not sit on the sidelines while Israel descends into anti-democratic fascism… I am American originally, and the subject of freedom of speech is ingrained deep inside of me.” Note the anger at his adopted country which he now calls ‘fascist.’
Naomi Klien, who frequently stresses that she is a Jew, came to Israel for a book tour recently. She published her book Shock Doctrine in Hebrew through a publisher run by Jews(Andalus) that specializes in Arabic books and donated all proceeds from it to the Palestinians. She went to Bilin to throw stones at Israeli soldiers and noted “Boycott is a tactic …we’re trying to create a dynamic which was the dynamic that ultimately ended apartheid in South Africa..It’s an extraordinarily important part of Israel’s identity to be able to have the illusion of Western normalcy,” the Canadian writer and activist said. “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.”
Then there are rabbis Brian Walt, former executive director of Rabbis for Human Rights-North America and Brant Rosen of the Jewish Reconstructionist Congregation in Evanston who began, along with 13 other rabbis, a “Taanit Tzedek-Jewish fast for Gaza.” The group supports dialogue with Hamas, and asks “why does Israel need other countries to agree to the nature of its existence… why should other parties affirm the Jewishness of Israel?"
On July 1 Jacques Serving and Igor Vamos withdrew their film “The Yes Men” from the Jerusalem Film Festival in solidarity with the boycott and divestment and sanctions campaign against Israel. They spoke of how they “shared with” other participants “our Jewish roots, as well as the trauma of the Holocaust, in which both our grandfathers died.” They wrote that “. In the 1980s, there was a call from the people of South Africa to artists and others to boycott that regime, and it helped end apartheid there. Today, there is a clear call for a boycott from Palestinian civil society. Obeying it is our only hope, as filmmakers and activists, of helping put pressure on the Israeli government to comply with international law.” They said “its embarrassing as Jews to hear constantly what’s going on in Israel”
Lastly there is Rosanne Barr and Josh Neuman, the former a comedian and the latter the publisher of Heeb magazine, a “jewish” magazine. Both are “Jews”. In a recent photo shoot Rosanne Barr, who recently compared Israel’s actions in gaza to Nazism, dressed up like Hitler and was photographed baking cookies in an oven (a gas oven?) and eating them. Such a stunt could not be made up and who else would publish such a thing but a Jewish magazine. Rosanne blogged about anti-semitism as her reason for doing this, but the same woman who compares Israel to nazim dressing up like the chief nazi, it all seems illogical.
What all these people share and the thousands like them is a claim that they are Jewish, a claim that they were affected by the Holocaust, a focus on Israel although usually they are not born there and an attachment to the Palestinians. But what they also share is a lack of logic. Consider Mrs. Langer. Langer is not a Holocaust survivor. She was born in Poland and fled the German invasion to Russia where her father supposedly died in Stalin’s gulag. But she married a Holocaust survivor and from that point began to claim that she was affected by the Holocaust. Now with that supposed connection to the Holocaust she moved to Israel. In Israel she became an immediate supporter of the Palestinians who she identified with. Later she then left Israel, a country she had no sympathy or identification with and went into “exile” in Germany where she then became a “German Jew” even though, in reality, she was a Polish Jew who was not a Holocaust survivor. As a “German Jew” she not peddled her Holocaust credentials more as someone who, wither her Holocaust background, was an automatic expert on human rights and “as a Jew” had a moral “obligation” to speak out about Israel. Thus the very fact of being “Jewish” means condemning Israel. That was then taken one step further by her, in her identification with the Palestinians, she supported the Iranian president in his hatred of Israel, even as he denied the Holocaust and called Israel a “nazi” state. But consider this problem. Without the Holocaust Langer could not longer be “massively affected by the Holocaust.” Illogic is the center of the Langer ideology. Without the Holocaust there are no Nazis to compare Israel to and there is no Holocaust to make Langer seem like a moral beacon who must “sound the alarm” about Israel. Without the Holocaust, in short, there is no Langer, she is just another “petite blue eyed” woman.
But Yuri Pines illogic is even more interesting. Here is a “Jewish” person who grew up in Russia and opposed Communism, supposedly. He then moved to Israel where he immediately identified with the Palestinians and joined the Communist party in Israel which he found comforting in its calls for a Jewish-Arab brotherhood. He believes the existence of Israel to be illegal and hates settlers, yet he himself settles on the land, land he believes was illegally stolen from Palestinians. He encourages the murder and annihilation of settlers and the destruction of their homes, all the while living as a settler in Israel. Furthermore he condemns the Jews for claiming to be a “chosen people”, a claim that they do not make but one foisted upon them by him. He condemns Zionism for choosing Palestine as a Jewish home and yet he makes his home in Israel, in Palestine. In Russia Yuri hated Communism so he came to Israel in order to hate it as well, condemning it for being Jewish which was the very thing that allowed him as a “Jew” to immigrate there. His Communist Palestinian-Israeli state would, of course, cancel the ‘right of return’ that allowed him to come.
Every extreme anti-Israel hater has the same illogic in their bones. Bill Freedman, an American who celebrated July 4th independence day in the U.S, moves to Israel, as a “jew”, only to then identify with the Palestinians to such an extent that he mourns their Nakba but not his newly adopted state’s independence day. Why didn’t he just move to Jordan or the Palestinian territories or stay in the U.S? Why move to a state that one feels is “fascist”?
Naomi Klein, a Canadian, comes to Israel and claims to know that it is very important for it to be “western”. Towards this end she claims to want to cancel “rock concerts” and “symphonies” from coming to Israel because she believes most Israelis value these things. But most Israelis can’t ever afford to see the expensive rock concerts in Tel Aviv and no one in Israel except the Israel-hating bourgouise left in North Tel Aviv go to “symphonies”.
The “rabbis” in the U.S who fast on behalf of Gaza are equally illogical. Of all the things that as “humanistic Jews” they might fast for Gaza should be low on the list. But there is no fast for Darfur, there is a fast for Gaza precisely because it is next to Israel. Palestinian identity therefore defines these rabbis Jewish identity.
And Jacques Serving and Igor Vamos are even more confused. Neither has a Jewish last name but both claim to be Jewish and both claim to be connected to the Holocaust. Yet while they don’t have any connection to Israel, aren’t citizens or even visitors, they claim to be “embarrassed” by its behavior and “embarrassed” because other people call it “fascist”. Consider the logic in this. A person living in a far off land suddenly decides he has some familial connection with people 5,000 miles away. He then find out other people call those people “fascist” and finds out those people he thought he had a familial connection to don’t behave nicely. He then becomes “embarrassed”? Does this seem logical? Finding out that neighbours of this family these people suddenly are embarrassed by are calling for a boycott they then boycott this people. Its twisted because Mr. Serving and Vamos never had to pretend to have a connection to Israel in the first place and the connection to the Holocaust is entirely contrived, the “Holocaust survivor” connection only informs their hatred of Israel.
Ruth Bronner, a Jerusalem based researcher has shown that in fact the self-hatred of the Jews begins with the German Jews and the Holocaust. For leading Jews such as Hannah Arendt and Victor Klemperer the Nazis “were not German.” In addition “everything Jewish was foreign.” Consider how this works. The Nazis, who sprang from the bosom of Germany, were not the “real” Germans, because that was reserved for the Arendts and Klemperers, assimilated German Jews. Yet the actual Jews, mostly Ostjuden, who were hated and disdained by the German Jews, were “foreign”. So the Nazis and the real Jews were both foreign. So how does that translate down to the present? For the German Jews and those who pretended to be German Jews like Langer (Klemperer too was born in Poland, like Rosa Luxembourg-Klemperer and Langer were also supporters of the Communist regime in East Germany and collaborated with it in its creation of the largest police state ever created) the Nazis and Jews were equally foreign and thus Israel, a Jewish state, can easily be transfigured into a Nazi state, as it has been in the language of many German Jewish intellectuals such as Hebrew University Professors Moshe Zimmerman, Zuckerman, Baruch Kimmerling and others. Thus the logic by which non-Israeli Jews object to Israel being a Jewish state has a logic, they believe that they are the true Jews and Israel, as a foreign thing, a Nazi apartheid fascist thing, is not Jewish and cannot be Jewish because to be Jewish is to be German-Jewish and therefore to be a Holocaust survivor. For these people there are two Judaisms, there are the foreign Jews and there is the self-Jews, those Jews for whome everything Jewish is foreign but who nevertheless need their Jewishness to be unique, because otherwise they fade into the larger mass of humanity and can no longer pretend to be “Jews for Justice in Palestine” or “Rabbis for Human rights”.
The White man’s two burdens
Seth J. Frantzman
August 2, 2009
In the 19th century the White man took upon himself the burden of bringing progress to the rest of the world. He brought them law and order, roads, technology and freedom from tyrannical oppression and slavery and arbitrary savagery. He brought them freedom from the chaos of borderless states and armed gangs. He brought them, in some cases, Christianity. He civilized them.
Later this burden which he had carried, of bringing light to the nations, was condemned as racist, colonialistic, Eurocentric, evil and imperialistic. So the White man gave his former colonies freedom. The people he had saved from slavery he returned them to a state of slavery, slavery to the petty dictators that arose when he left. In some cases some remnant of what he had brought remained. Rail networks, factories, systems of law, even whigs. All sorts of strange things remained behind. He left his own human stain on the environment as well. He had mixed with the locals and he had sent his own colonists abroad who he abandoned, or whome achieved their own forms of independence.
Then in the second half of the 20th century the White man became burdened once more. He became burdened with the guilt over his creation. Much like the tale of the heathen pagan who cuts down a tree and makes a god out of the very thing he himself has cut down, the White man made a god out of the savage people he had once ruled. They became perfect, unique and blameless. They became exotic and wonderful and the center of attention of white women.
The White man took on the burden of guilt and whining and self hate for his own creation. Every evil in the former colonizes became the fault of the white man and he flagellated himself, much as the Christian monks of old, for his sins. But then he did something more. He forced the poor people, the people who had themselves been the victims of the White man’s power, to also burden themselves. In the former colonies of the White man all sorts of wretched immigrants were subsumed under the category “white” and forced to carry the burden for which others ascribed guilt to themselves. In countries such as England where the wealthy aristocracy had been the leaders of empire the middle class and poorer white classes were told that they too were racist colonizers, when in fact they had had nothing to do with the project. In Eastern Europe, where it was the whites who had been colonized by Turks, the White man extended his burden, forcing Rumanian and Slavs and Greeks to feel sorry for their former colonizers. The burden was shifted to the masses and spread out. Southern Italians, relabeled whites out of convenience, were now part of those who had to be burdened. Furthermore Jews, who themselves had suffered, were told that they too much shoulder the burden. Thus did the White man burden himself twice and thus did he shift the burden to others. The question is, when will people throw off the White man’s burden once and for all?
Issue 95
“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
August 9th, 2009
1) How Modernity let down women: Recent stories from Japan about middle class women preferring the job of ‘hostessing’ t other jobs once again shows the failure of the West in terms of educating women and creating women who value themselves, their lives and their freedom.
2) The people of illogic: Notes on Jewish self hate: Jewish self hate is one of the most fascinating phenomenon’s. While many nations now produce intellectuals who have self-hate the Jews seem especially adept at it. It is worth examining a few cases to understand that self-hate is primarily based on illogical concepts.
3) The White man’s two burdens: The White man once took upon himself the burden of civilizing the world. Later he took upon himself the burden of feeling guilty for having attempted to civilize. Now he spreads that burden around to other people he deems white, hoping to make us all feel guilty for an endeavor that was not of our making and one that there is no reason to have any guilt for.
How Modernity let down women
Seth J. Frantzman
July 31, 2009
In a recent article about Japan we learn that “club hostesses lose their stigma.” The article explains that young women now “view them as well paid role models.” The article explains that this is “among the most lucrative jobs available to women”. According to a recent study it was the 12th most popular job choice for women graduating high school.
The story of most young women yearning to be “hostesses” in Japan is not surprising. “Hostessing” in Japan is not being a hostess at a restaurant. It is a form of semi-prostitution where clubs of male clientele have young women in swank dresses who sit with the men, chat with them and encourage them to buy drinks. Sometimes the women sleep with the men. The clubs are located in red light districts much like strip clubs.
The fact that in the most wealthy countries where women have been obtained and been granted western freedoms they desire nothing more in life than to be objects for men’s affections, t be paid for their time to service men sexually, to work as strippers, porn stars, models or some manner of the three combined points to a severe problem in the trajectory of this thing called “west” and “freedom”. Women that are bought and sold in the sex slave trade of prostitution, as slaves, are not women from uneducated and impoverished backgrounds, they are from lower middle class educated backgrounds and all of them come from countries where women were granted equality with men and freedom long ago, such as Ukraine or Russia.
Is the failure of the hopes of the West due to women or due to the West? The answer lies in both. Both are equally at fault. Consider the situation in Japan. Women do not find work in business or other places that pay well. This is part of the fault of society that has not opened up the workplace to women, despite granting them equality and freedom. But the next choice, the choice to become a prostitute, lies entirely with the women. That women value, as highest among the occupations, modeling or hostessing, this is entirely the fault of women.
It is the same among western women who choose to convert to Islam and marry men who commit honour killings. Consider the hypocrisy of the western woman who marries a traditional Muslim man. She first dresses immodestly in her western culture, using the freedom granted her in the West to dress as she pleases. Through this behavior she meets a Muslim man who, denied the ability to see his own women who he has placed in Burkas now spends his days looking for immodest and immoral western women who will sleep with him. She then converts to Islam to marry into a religion where, if her daughter behaves as she did and dates outside her community the daughter will be killed. This is the hypocrisy that is natural and part and parcel of the West: the need to cleanse and destroy all figments of tradition to make people secular and un-believing. The result is the mass conversion of those people to any religion they are exposed to that fills them up with tradition and god. So the fact that the western woman converts to Islam or finds it exotic and interesting is not her fault, it is the fault of the West which has not provided her with tradition or religion or order or any foundation or patriotism or anything. But her decision to marry traditional fundamentalist men, traditional men, the same men she hated and spurned in her own society, is her fault. The contradiction of her marrying he man that, were she his daughter he would kill for her behavior is her fault.
Thus the West creates the basis for the society in which women are left with the choice to destroy their lives. Western society frequently denies them many of the god choices they might otherwise have made. Western society brainwashes women to be leftist and secular and immodest and immoral. Women’s rights groups describe prostitution as “sex work” and tell women to become involved with it. Popular culture encourages women to be models in the West and “hostesses” in Japan by valuing only those women who expose themselves nude in public. All these are the evils of the west that took women who were not much more than chattel in the 19th century and, after 100 years of liberalism, turned them back into chattel, lowering their station to worse than it was before. But the west’s self-destructiveness is matched by the collaboration of women with degrading activities that transform them into little more than cattle. In this the western woman is more dehumanized than her Islamic counterpart. Muslim women are, oddly considering all they are denied, the pillars of their culture and its greatest defenders. Western women are, oddly considering all they are given, the weakest link in their culture and the first to insult and degrade it and condemn it and desert it. It s not surprising that in the liberal-homo-self-hating culture of the West that patriotism is considered chauvinistic and so is religion. But for a western women to don a khaffiyeh and become a militant for Islam or don a burka and birth 13 children for some man in the East this is considered “female empowerment” and for a woman to work as a prostitute and be bought and sold in bathroom stalls and auditioned for work as a “sex worker”, this is part of “empowerment”. The evil is inter-twined. The West long ago failed women when the first feminists became advocates of porn work for women and when the first one’s became admirers of the Iranian revolution.
The West failed women and western women in turn failed themselves. They failed the test of freedom much the way early democracies of the 1920s failed that test, must the way Russia failed that brief test in 1917, much the way the French Revolutionaries transformed the rights of man into bathing in the blood of man. The death of the West in its own blood of self-hate is only part of the longer self-consuming evils of numerous revolutions that promised man freedom only for man to destroy that freedom as quickly as possible.
The people of illogic: Notes on Jewish self hate
Seth J. Frantzman
July 26, 2009
Recently the German government gave one of its highest civilian awards, the Federal Cross of Merit, to Felicia Langer, a supporter of the Palestinians who calls Israel the “apartheid of the present” and a defender of Iranian president Mahmud Ahmadinjad. She noted that the Holocaust denying Iranian president “is right” when “speaking about the suffering of the Palestinians”. He had left Israel in 1990 “because for the Palestinians, unfortunately we cannot obtain Justice.” She speaks often of how the Holocaust has harmed her family and when in Israel spoke of being part of the “other Israel” and noted “I'm for justice and against all those for whom the conclusion of the holocaust is hatred, cruelty and insensitivity.” Al Ahram described her as “a beautiful and petite women with intense blue eyes” who “married Mieciu Langer, a Holocaust Survivor” and when she was given the award the spokesmen noted it was partly due to how “her own background as massively affected by the Holocaust.”
Then in late July Prof. Yuri Pines wrote in an email to student about the threat of an Israeli soldier who died in a recent war having his home removed by the government that “I hope that not only the Major’s home will be destroyed, but the entire settlement, and that the settlers will all be gone with the wind… I favor a complete annihilation of the settlement enterprise…they are my enemy.” In an earlier interview the professor had said “I was... disgusted and astonished by the belief in Jews being the ‘chosen people’, in the ‘eternal Jewish rights’ and in the need of all Jews to gather in Palestine.” He encouraged Israeli soldiers to “betray” their country.
These two cases of angry and fanatical Jews who live and thrive off of condemning other Jews is illustrative of most of the shrill and angry hatred by some Jews of other Jews. This strain of anger and those who practice it should be termed “the people of illogic”. Consider a few more examples. Meir Margolit, Meretz representative on the Jerusalem City Council, noted about a new Jewish housing complex on the border with East Jerusalem “The Jews will change the Palestinian profile of east Jerusalem, and this will be an obstacle for peace in the Middle East. I say thank you to these Jews who are coming now because this is a provocation, and we will take advantage of this provocation." Note the anger against “the Jews” and the idea that this will be used as a “provocation” by Meretz in order o encourage Palestinian violence against those Jews.
Consider Professor Bill Freedman, an American immigrant to Israel, who declared that he would begin publically celebrating the Nakba, the day of mourning that Palestinians mark on Israel’s independence day, instead of Israel’s independence day. Freedman said “I can not sit on the sidelines while Israel descends into anti-democratic fascism… I am American originally, and the subject of freedom of speech is ingrained deep inside of me.” Note the anger at his adopted country which he now calls ‘fascist.’
Naomi Klien, who frequently stresses that she is a Jew, came to Israel for a book tour recently. She published her book Shock Doctrine in Hebrew through a publisher run by Jews(Andalus) that specializes in Arabic books and donated all proceeds from it to the Palestinians. She went to Bilin to throw stones at Israeli soldiers and noted “Boycott is a tactic …we’re trying to create a dynamic which was the dynamic that ultimately ended apartheid in South Africa..It’s an extraordinarily important part of Israel’s identity to be able to have the illusion of Western normalcy,” the Canadian writer and activist said. “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.”
Then there are rabbis Brian Walt, former executive director of Rabbis for Human Rights-North America and Brant Rosen of the Jewish Reconstructionist Congregation in Evanston who began, along with 13 other rabbis, a “Taanit Tzedek-Jewish fast for Gaza.” The group supports dialogue with Hamas, and asks “why does Israel need other countries to agree to the nature of its existence… why should other parties affirm the Jewishness of Israel?"
On July 1 Jacques Serving and Igor Vamos withdrew their film “The Yes Men” from the Jerusalem Film Festival in solidarity with the boycott and divestment and sanctions campaign against Israel. They spoke of how they “shared with” other participants “our Jewish roots, as well as the trauma of the Holocaust, in which both our grandfathers died.” They wrote that “. In the 1980s, there was a call from the people of South Africa to artists and others to boycott that regime, and it helped end apartheid there. Today, there is a clear call for a boycott from Palestinian civil society. Obeying it is our only hope, as filmmakers and activists, of helping put pressure on the Israeli government to comply with international law.” They said “its embarrassing as Jews to hear constantly what’s going on in Israel”
Lastly there is Rosanne Barr and Josh Neuman, the former a comedian and the latter the publisher of Heeb magazine, a “jewish” magazine. Both are “Jews”. In a recent photo shoot Rosanne Barr, who recently compared Israel’s actions in gaza to Nazism, dressed up like Hitler and was photographed baking cookies in an oven (a gas oven?) and eating them. Such a stunt could not be made up and who else would publish such a thing but a Jewish magazine. Rosanne blogged about anti-semitism as her reason for doing this, but the same woman who compares Israel to nazim dressing up like the chief nazi, it all seems illogical.
What all these people share and the thousands like them is a claim that they are Jewish, a claim that they were affected by the Holocaust, a focus on Israel although usually they are not born there and an attachment to the Palestinians. But what they also share is a lack of logic. Consider Mrs. Langer. Langer is not a Holocaust survivor. She was born in Poland and fled the German invasion to Russia where her father supposedly died in Stalin’s gulag. But she married a Holocaust survivor and from that point began to claim that she was affected by the Holocaust. Now with that supposed connection to the Holocaust she moved to Israel. In Israel she became an immediate supporter of the Palestinians who she identified with. Later she then left Israel, a country she had no sympathy or identification with and went into “exile” in Germany where she then became a “German Jew” even though, in reality, she was a Polish Jew who was not a Holocaust survivor. As a “German Jew” she not peddled her Holocaust credentials more as someone who, wither her Holocaust background, was an automatic expert on human rights and “as a Jew” had a moral “obligation” to speak out about Israel. Thus the very fact of being “Jewish” means condemning Israel. That was then taken one step further by her, in her identification with the Palestinians, she supported the Iranian president in his hatred of Israel, even as he denied the Holocaust and called Israel a “nazi” state. But consider this problem. Without the Holocaust Langer could not longer be “massively affected by the Holocaust.” Illogic is the center of the Langer ideology. Without the Holocaust there are no Nazis to compare Israel to and there is no Holocaust to make Langer seem like a moral beacon who must “sound the alarm” about Israel. Without the Holocaust, in short, there is no Langer, she is just another “petite blue eyed” woman.
But Yuri Pines illogic is even more interesting. Here is a “Jewish” person who grew up in Russia and opposed Communism, supposedly. He then moved to Israel where he immediately identified with the Palestinians and joined the Communist party in Israel which he found comforting in its calls for a Jewish-Arab brotherhood. He believes the existence of Israel to be illegal and hates settlers, yet he himself settles on the land, land he believes was illegally stolen from Palestinians. He encourages the murder and annihilation of settlers and the destruction of their homes, all the while living as a settler in Israel. Furthermore he condemns the Jews for claiming to be a “chosen people”, a claim that they do not make but one foisted upon them by him. He condemns Zionism for choosing Palestine as a Jewish home and yet he makes his home in Israel, in Palestine. In Russia Yuri hated Communism so he came to Israel in order to hate it as well, condemning it for being Jewish which was the very thing that allowed him as a “Jew” to immigrate there. His Communist Palestinian-Israeli state would, of course, cancel the ‘right of return’ that allowed him to come.
Every extreme anti-Israel hater has the same illogic in their bones. Bill Freedman, an American who celebrated July 4th independence day in the U.S, moves to Israel, as a “jew”, only to then identify with the Palestinians to such an extent that he mourns their Nakba but not his newly adopted state’s independence day. Why didn’t he just move to Jordan or the Palestinian territories or stay in the U.S? Why move to a state that one feels is “fascist”?
Naomi Klein, a Canadian, comes to Israel and claims to know that it is very important for it to be “western”. Towards this end she claims to want to cancel “rock concerts” and “symphonies” from coming to Israel because she believes most Israelis value these things. But most Israelis can’t ever afford to see the expensive rock concerts in Tel Aviv and no one in Israel except the Israel-hating bourgouise left in North Tel Aviv go to “symphonies”.
The “rabbis” in the U.S who fast on behalf of Gaza are equally illogical. Of all the things that as “humanistic Jews” they might fast for Gaza should be low on the list. But there is no fast for Darfur, there is a fast for Gaza precisely because it is next to Israel. Palestinian identity therefore defines these rabbis Jewish identity.
And Jacques Serving and Igor Vamos are even more confused. Neither has a Jewish last name but both claim to be Jewish and both claim to be connected to the Holocaust. Yet while they don’t have any connection to Israel, aren’t citizens or even visitors, they claim to be “embarrassed” by its behavior and “embarrassed” because other people call it “fascist”. Consider the logic in this. A person living in a far off land suddenly decides he has some familial connection with people 5,000 miles away. He then find out other people call those people “fascist” and finds out those people he thought he had a familial connection to don’t behave nicely. He then becomes “embarrassed”? Does this seem logical? Finding out that neighbours of this family these people suddenly are embarrassed by are calling for a boycott they then boycott this people. Its twisted because Mr. Serving and Vamos never had to pretend to have a connection to Israel in the first place and the connection to the Holocaust is entirely contrived, the “Holocaust survivor” connection only informs their hatred of Israel.
Ruth Bronner, a Jerusalem based researcher has shown that in fact the self-hatred of the Jews begins with the German Jews and the Holocaust. For leading Jews such as Hannah Arendt and Victor Klemperer the Nazis “were not German.” In addition “everything Jewish was foreign.” Consider how this works. The Nazis, who sprang from the bosom of Germany, were not the “real” Germans, because that was reserved for the Arendts and Klemperers, assimilated German Jews. Yet the actual Jews, mostly Ostjuden, who were hated and disdained by the German Jews, were “foreign”. So the Nazis and the real Jews were both foreign. So how does that translate down to the present? For the German Jews and those who pretended to be German Jews like Langer (Klemperer too was born in Poland, like Rosa Luxembourg-Klemperer and Langer were also supporters of the Communist regime in East Germany and collaborated with it in its creation of the largest police state ever created) the Nazis and Jews were equally foreign and thus Israel, a Jewish state, can easily be transfigured into a Nazi state, as it has been in the language of many German Jewish intellectuals such as Hebrew University Professors Moshe Zimmerman, Zuckerman, Baruch Kimmerling and others. Thus the logic by which non-Israeli Jews object to Israel being a Jewish state has a logic, they believe that they are the true Jews and Israel, as a foreign thing, a Nazi apartheid fascist thing, is not Jewish and cannot be Jewish because to be Jewish is to be German-Jewish and therefore to be a Holocaust survivor. For these people there are two Judaisms, there are the foreign Jews and there is the self-Jews, those Jews for whome everything Jewish is foreign but who nevertheless need their Jewishness to be unique, because otherwise they fade into the larger mass of humanity and can no longer pretend to be “Jews for Justice in Palestine” or “Rabbis for Human rights”.
The White man’s two burdens
Seth J. Frantzman
August 2, 2009
In the 19th century the White man took upon himself the burden of bringing progress to the rest of the world. He brought them law and order, roads, technology and freedom from tyrannical oppression and slavery and arbitrary savagery. He brought them freedom from the chaos of borderless states and armed gangs. He brought them, in some cases, Christianity. He civilized them.
Later this burden which he had carried, of bringing light to the nations, was condemned as racist, colonialistic, Eurocentric, evil and imperialistic. So the White man gave his former colonies freedom. The people he had saved from slavery he returned them to a state of slavery, slavery to the petty dictators that arose when he left. In some cases some remnant of what he had brought remained. Rail networks, factories, systems of law, even whigs. All sorts of strange things remained behind. He left his own human stain on the environment as well. He had mixed with the locals and he had sent his own colonists abroad who he abandoned, or whome achieved their own forms of independence.
Then in the second half of the 20th century the White man became burdened once more. He became burdened with the guilt over his creation. Much like the tale of the heathen pagan who cuts down a tree and makes a god out of the very thing he himself has cut down, the White man made a god out of the savage people he had once ruled. They became perfect, unique and blameless. They became exotic and wonderful and the center of attention of white women.
The White man took on the burden of guilt and whining and self hate for his own creation. Every evil in the former colonizes became the fault of the white man and he flagellated himself, much as the Christian monks of old, for his sins. But then he did something more. He forced the poor people, the people who had themselves been the victims of the White man’s power, to also burden themselves. In the former colonies of the White man all sorts of wretched immigrants were subsumed under the category “white” and forced to carry the burden for which others ascribed guilt to themselves. In countries such as England where the wealthy aristocracy had been the leaders of empire the middle class and poorer white classes were told that they too were racist colonizers, when in fact they had had nothing to do with the project. In Eastern Europe, where it was the whites who had been colonized by Turks, the White man extended his burden, forcing Rumanian and Slavs and Greeks to feel sorry for their former colonizers. The burden was shifted to the masses and spread out. Southern Italians, relabeled whites out of convenience, were now part of those who had to be burdened. Furthermore Jews, who themselves had suffered, were told that they too much shoulder the burden. Thus did the White man burden himself twice and thus did he shift the burden to others. The question is, when will people throw off the White man’s burden once and for all?
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