Terra Incognita 98 Polanski, Failure of Feminism and Europeanism

Terra Incognita
Issue 98

“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”

A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel

Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/

October 1, 2009

1) What Polanski says about Europe: The arrest of filmmaker Roman Polanski in Switzerland on a 30 year old warrant for rape and sodomy of a 13 year old has opened up a rift between Europe and the U.S. The New York Times has defended the arrest of this predator but European philosophers and government officials have called the arrest “sinister” and referred to the rape as a “mistake”. Anti-Americanism is also clear in the condemnations. So what is wrong with a continent of people who support the rape of 13 year old girls. Does that continent have something in common, morally, with Somalia where a 13 year old girl was recently stoned to death for being raped?

2) The failure that is Feminism, Women’s education and women’s ‘rights’ in the West: A bunch of recent cases and revelations about Western women being “saved” from their abusive husbands in the West Bank sheds light once again on the phenomenon of women raised in free societies and given equality who desire nothing more than slavery and inequality. Black African women in 1800 had good enough sense to run from the slavers in West Africa who desired to take them in chains to the new world. But white women born today in Moscow, London or New York find a man who wishes to enslave them in Riyadh “exotic” and they run off to marry to him. This says much about the failure that is the West, feminism, women in the west, women’s education, empowerment for women and equality. Failures all.


2) Freeing ourselves from the Europeanism: More calls and more indictments by European courts of people around the world for “war crimes” once again remind us of the subtle hypocrisy that exists in a continent where the judicial system allows for “international jurisdiction” to prosecute people throughout the world but where the same states, such as Spain, give amnesty to their own criminals from the Franco period. The world that spurns this “justice” system is correct. How is it that the committers of the Holocaust are the ones today who preach to us about “human rights”?


What Polanski says about Europe
Seth J. Frantzman
October 1, 2009

In March of 1977 Roman Polanski, a French-born Polish Holocaust survivor, was enjoying himself in Los Angeles as an up and coming film director. He had made friends with Jack Nicholson. One night he met a 13 year old girl named Samantha Geimer who wanted to be a model. He convinced her to take several topless photos “for Vogue” and then invited her back to Nicholson’s Mulholland Drive villa. There he encouraged her to take her clothes off and enter a Jacuzzi, ostensibly for more of a “photo shoot”. He then plied her with alcohol and raped and sodomized her. Polanski was 43. His victim was 13. He was arrested a week later. The celebrity Polanski was given a plea deal that would allow him to serve no prison time, except the time he had spent in prison awaiting trial. When it seemed a Superior Court judge would not honour the deal he fled the United States. Since 1977 he has been on the run, having pled guilty to the crime of rape.

Polanski settled in France and purchased a home in Switzerland. At the time Europeans had no interest in honouring American requests to arrest him. For 30 years the case remained open until the 26th of September 2009 when he was suddenly arrested after disembarking from a plan in Zurich. Immediately people in Europe and Hollywood began leaping to his defense. Otto Weiser, a Swiss filmmaker, said he was “ashamed to be Swiss” and that Polanski made “a little mistake.” More than 130 other movie directors and stars signed a petition for his release. Among them were Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen (who married his own adopted daughter), Spanish director Pedro Almodovar and studio chief Harvey Weinstein. Weinstein claimed that Polanski had “served his time” for his “so-called crime.” Swiss Film Festival Jury President Debra Winger said she was shocked by the arrest and that they “await his release.” She added that she hoped the arrest warrant would be dropped because “it’s based on a three decade old case that is all but dead, except for a technicality.” The French Culture minister said that poor Polanski was being “thrown to the lions because of ancient history.” France’s foreign minister Bernard Kouchner said the arrest was “sinister.” He also said “all this just isn’t nice” because Polanksi had been honoured for his contributions to high culture. Culture Minister Frederic Mitterand expressed his outraged in anti-Americanism, “in the same way that there is a generous America that we like, there is also a scary America that has just shown its face.”

But in the U.s even the more leftist media organs such as the New York Times have tried to explain the logic behind the arrest. “we were glad to see other prominent Europeans beginning to point out that this case has nothing to do with Mr. Polanski’s work or his age. It is about an adult preying on a child. Mr. Polanski pleaded guilty to that crime and must account for it.”

Leftist voices have been the main defenders of Polanski. The World Socialist Website published an editorial accusing the New York Times of “throwing Polanski under the bus.” It accused the evils of the ‘law and order’ lobby of prosecuting Polanski and spoke of “humanitarian considerations and the spirit of forgiveness” being ignored. It accused “reactionary voices” of applauding. The Socialists claimed that “human rights” had been violated in the arrest. It accused the L.A prosecutors of attempting to ruin Polanski’s life the way they had “mercilessly pursued Michael Jackson.” The Socialists accused the Times of catering to the “extreme right” and bowing down to “family values” and other “filthy social elements.” They speak of “Polanski’s plight” as if he is some refugee. The left argues that by arresting him his “personality and entire life” are being judged. The left even goes so far as to claim that Polanski’s hard life, in which his mother died in a Nazi concentration camp and his first wife was murdered by Charles Manson, forced him to rape a 13 year old. The left asks can his past “be entirely unrelated to the crime for which Polanski was charged and to which he pled guilty? What possible value could his imprisonment serve at this time? What danger does he represent to society?” The left concludes “if the worst occurs, the editors [of the Times] will share responsibility for any tragic outcome.”

How can one understand the support for Mr. Polanski? It is not merely the support of friends and family, but the support of the most powerful, the most wealthy, major makers of culture, governments and ministers. It is not merely the support one provides to a friend but attacks on a “so-called crime” and a “little mistake.” They also speak of an “ancient” case. Consider how the French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy described Polanski’s arrest in his petition. He speaks of Polanski being “apprehended like a common terrorist.” He notes that he “risks extradition for an episode that happened years ago.” He notes that prosecution for such a crime would no longer be possible in Europe due to the expiration of the “statute of limitations.” He even says that the arrest is not “worthy of two democracies” like Switzerland and the U.S. Among those signing his petition are Salmon Rushdie and William Shawcross, the latter a U.K intellectual.
This is the way Europe and the left view the Polanski affair. Why is it that in Europe the rape of a 13 year old girl is not a crime? Why is it that in Europe such a rape is just a “little mistake” or a “so-called crime” or an “episode” that “happened years ago”? The reason is partly because of the souless secular nature of the modern day European. Europeans, especially those in Western Europe, don’t have children. They have no understanding of what it means for an elderly man to rape a 13 year old girl because none of them have daughters. Furthermore many Europeans engage in sex-tourism either in Europe with sex-slaves from Eastern Europe, or abroad in Thailand, with teenage girls. This means that don’t feel that raping a 13 year old is a crime or a mistake, it is just something that grown men do.

But there are other reasons for the rampant immorality that is clear from the statements of support for Polanski. Europe is like an Islamic culture. In its liberalism it has become Islamic in its treatment of women. In Islamic societies the rape of a woman is not a crime and in fact she is frequently punished, even by death, for being raped. In one case in Pakistan the rape of a teenage girl resulted in a court ordering the rape of the sister of one of the rapists. In a case in Somalia a 13 year old girl who was gang raped was then stoned to death for “adultery”. Islam views the legal status of a 13 year old girl in much the same way Western Europe views her. Europe is primarily a Muslim culture in is treatment of women, its hatred of them and its spurning of their rights.

But there is more to the case of Mr. Polanski. When Europeans speak of “ancient history” this is part and parcel of a larger European secular culture that has no history. Europeans view the 1970s as “ancient history” precisely because they hate their history, they have no memory, no culture, no heritage. In fact that belief that any crime committed a decade ago is ‘ancient history’ is part and parcel of the way in which Europe frees those who committed the Holocaust. Europe frees Nazis and known terrorists, such as the Lockerbie bomber, because their crimes are “ancient history” and because they are no longer “threats to the public.” But Mr. Polanski is a threat to the public. He is a predator who plied a barely pubescent girl with drugs and alcohol and raped her. Grand Jury testimony from the original crime even show the sickness of Mr. Polanski. He asked the girl when her last period was and if she was on birth control. This was his excuse to sodomize her. When driving her home, after raping her he said “don’t tell your mom about this.” This was no youthful indiscretion of some 19 year old celebrity who meets a 13 year old girl who is pretending to be 17. This is a 40 year old man who lies to a 13 year old girl, tempts her to become a “model” and then plies her with drugs and booze to rape her. This is a sick person. His illness, his criminal behavior, is not because of his having suffered the Holocaust or because the Manson family murdered his wife Sharon Tate. No. There is no connection and his friends playing the “he is a Holocaust survivor” card is beyond disgusting. The fact that European law has a sort statute of limitations on such crimes is not something Europeans should be proud of but in fact means that Europe is a land of criminals who merely have to avoid prosecution for crimes for a few years and can then walk free.

The reaction to the Polanski arrest by Europe’s best and brightest, the intercession by her government officials and ministers, all of this says a great deal about the fact that Europe is very much like a Polanski. It committed the Holocaust and now hopes the statute of limitations has run out on its criminal behavior. Europe established courts with “international jurisdiction” so it can prosecute people all over the world for “war crimes” when it gives its own war criminals amnesty at home. Europeans run around the world on protest tours lecturing people about “human rights” when their continent is drowning in human rights violations. They want the 1970s to be ancient history so that they can live in the mirage that they have a right to tell others how to live. But it is they who are guilty. They are guilty of adopting Islamic law. They are guilty of treating women the way Islam treats them. They are guilty of rape, rape of the soul, rape of humanity, rape of decency, rape of logic, rape of modernity. Polanski has found his greatest support in Europe and among Hollywood’s perverted elite, such as Woody Allen and Harvey Weinstein, both apparent child predators. The support for Polanski is a litmus test for what is good and what is bad in the world.





The failure that is Feminism, Women’s education and women’s ‘rights’ in the West
Seth J. Frantzman
September 17, 2009

Three articles easily located in the press shed light on the West’s failure in its education and nurturing of women. There is no value that the West teaches women that gives them the tools to live the independent life that western feminism supposedly promised them. Let us examine the evidence. In October 1st of 2008 we learn of Colleen Barghouti, a former American waitress turned whining American woman pleading to get her daughters back from her Palestinian husband. Ms. Bargouti had all the freedom that the West could provide. She got spoon fed all the nonsense about women being equal and empowered. She read all the mandatory women’s magazines. And then she locked herself in a prison cell and sold herself into slavery. Her slavery was called Yasser Barghouti, who she met while waitressing when he was a college student in 1993.
Colleen, a single mother apparently, converted to Islam, had her son, Rick, adopted by Yasser and moved to the West Bank village of Kobar in June of 2007. Colleen three good Muslim children for her husband and allowed him to beat her while she lived with him.

Then her romantic exotic life began to fall apart and she left, fleeing back to Chicago. She then began to whine and complain about getting her kids back. She was concerned that her daughters were being forced to wear headscarves in their Islamic school that they attend. Meanwhile Mr. Barghouti works for a UN funded “worker’s rights” organization. The complaining of Mrs. Barghouti eventually resulted in the involvement of the U.S consulate in a situation that she is entirely at fault for. But we in the West have gotten used to these “not without my daughter” stories. No one bothers to ask; when a woman leaves her home country marries a foreign man, converts to his religion, has three children with him, allows herself to get beaten, goes from a culture with equal rights to a culture with sub-standard rights for women, hasn’t she made enough wrong choices that she no longer deserves our interest or support? Isn’t she enough of a traitor to the Western culture that invested money and time in raising her and had to watch her spurn that culture in favor of the foreign “exotic” culture, she we no longer have to waste time and effort on this person. She wanted the exotic life, no doubt she called her friends racist when they objected to her leaving and called others “ignorant” when they noted that Islam has few rights for women. She was arrogant, so why must we now pay the price for her arrogance?

But hers is only one story. In an August 2009 incident the Palestinian police had to intervene to “save” an Israeli Jewish woman. This woman was born into a free culture with equal rights for women. She too wanted to “exotic” lifestyle. She found an exotic Palestinian boyfriend. She went to his house in Hebron and he beat her. He then locked her in the house. She was already known to the Israeli police who man checkpoints outside Arab Hebron because as an Israeli it is illegal for her to enter the city. But she did so anyway, flaunting her relationship to the Jewish Israeli soldiers and showing off her “exotic” Muslim boyfriend. The Jewish men were not good enough for her. But when she needed help suddenly she dialed the Israeli police, whining and complaining of her predicament. The Palestinian police eventually had to intervene to “rescue” this western woman.
Then there is the September 2009 story of another American woman who met an ‘exotic’ Muslim in America and moved with him to a village near the Palestinian town of Tulkarm. She had a child with her new husband. Then the husband, who already had a wife and four children, began to lock her in the house and hit her. The Western woman became unhappy and whined and complained. Her family intervened and hired some Israeli former commandos to go rescue her, risking their lives because of the stupid choices of another Western women. These three cases are just a few in an area of a few hundred square kilometers that is the West bank. All over the world are hundreds of thousands of cases like these, most going un-reported, where the Western Woman, born with equal rights, knowingly gives herself over to slavery, beatings, rape and servitude.
The point must come in the West, when hundreds of thousands of women willingly give themselves into slavery, when we must ask ourselves if the Western system and its “women’s rights” and “female empowerment” is a system that works or is logical. If you educate women to have equal rights and then you find out that large numbers of them prefer a religion where they have half the rights of a man and many of them marry men who beat them and many of them willingly leave the country that grants them equal rights to go to a foreign country where they have no rights, where they don’t know the language and then allow themselves to get pregnant and have a bunch of children and then allow themselves to get beaten, how is the Western system succeeding in terms of these women?

In fact the Western system of women’s rights is a charade. Every culture that has granted women equal rights has found that they do not want those rights and that they do everything possible to leave the countries that grant them these rights. Women from the former USSR, which granted women abortions as early as the 1920s, have fled their countries like the plague, selling themselves in the millions into sex slavery from the UAE to Japan. Consider this. For three or four generations the USSR educated women, gave them rights, gave them the right to an abortion and one finds that in brothels throughout the world that it is these women, the ones with the most rights, who make up the largest number of women trafficked in the world. But are they really being “trafficked”. We are told to feel sorry for the “natashas” imprisoned in brothels and forced to have sex with 13 men a day and beaten and raped and murdered. But why have sympathy? These women created this situation. Without the existence of the USSR, say had it been a Muslim rather than a Communist nation, there would be millions less prostitutes. The Western world excuses the existence of sex slavery by calling it the “oldest profession”. But it doesn’t add up. Muslim women from Gaza don’t sell themselves into sex slavery. Gaza isn’t over-flowing with brothels. But the UAE is overflowing, not with Muslim prostitutes, but with sex slaves from every country in the world that has given women rights, from India to Russia to Poland to Armenia. Find women who are free and you will find women who will sign up to be beaten, raped, tortured and sold into slavery.

That is the irony of the Western world. The savage Africans who were beaten, raped and sold into slavery, as shown in the slightly fanciful film Roots had enough sense to run away from the slavers. They had little knowledge of the outside world, no high science, no university, no geometry or algebra. They didn’t have Vogue or any number of women’s magazines. They didn’t have the vote or abortion. But they knew to run away when people came to enslave them. That means that they were more advanced then we are today. Yes, the West Coast of Africa in 1800 was more advanced than New York or London or Moscow in 2009. That is all one needs to know about Western Civilization and its treatment or its “success” in the realm of women and women’s rights. A woman born today in London, New York or Moscow will have less rights and less of a chance to live a life of freedom than one born in 1790s West Africa. That is the tombstone to the entire movement called “feminism” and the entire lie that has been called “progressive” and “humanistic” in the West.


Freeing ourselves from the Europeanism
Seth J. Frantzman
September 20, 2009

A recent article in the New York Times spoke of the spread of human rights. It was written by Richard Gowan and Franziska Brantner. The writers complained that “this tragedy [of backsliding on human rights] was indicative of a wider erosion of support for Western positions on human rights.” They furthermore complained that “Of the U.N.’s 192 members, 117 voted with the European Union less than half the time on human rights issues in the General Assembly over the last year.” The writers assumed that only the Europeans and the “Western powers” could be correct on human rights. They ignored the possibility that the west is wrong about human rights.

It might seem as odd that a mere fifty years after the Europeans were happily packing people into gas chambers that they should dictate to the world what is right and wrong when it comes to treatment of humans. How did the people who a mere forty years ago still held colonies that had been the scenes of genocide and slavery could dictate to the world about right and wrong. And yet that is what has happened. Human rights, international humanitarian law and all their related concepts are European exclusively. Europeans voted for Nazi and fascist parties and now it is they who call much of the “nazi” and “fascist” and expect us to accept their judgments as based on fact and logical ‘western’ reasoning because only they can know what a human rights violation is, only they can produce international law and only they are qualified to judge war crimes. The supposed basis for this is that they know it because they invented it. They invented systematic genocide and the use of gas and other war crimes. They invented ethnic-cleansing, so only they can know it when it happens.

But is there not something hypocritical about countries like Spain that give their courts “international jurisdiction” so that they can prosecute human rights violations throughout the world and then pass laws giving amnesty to their own Franco era human rights criminals? Is there not something strange about the fact that England and Belgium, both of whome committed human rights violations recently in Northern Ireland and the Congo, also giving their courts the right to investigate crimes throughout the world and yet not prosecuting the aging criminals in their midst who massacred people in Belfast and Kinshasa?

In a logical world free from hypocrisy it would be the opposite. The victims of the Europeans and their hundreds of years of colonialism, genocide, slave trade and Holocaust would dictate to the world about human rights. The Congolese, the Jews, the Aboriginals and Australia, they would be the ones writing human rights law and international humanitarian law. The victims of the endless wars engendered by Europeans would be the one’s writing war crimes law. Countries like Russia which was twice the victim of German aggression would be the one writing about the law of war, not Germany and Italy (ironically the author of the theory of ‘proportionality’ and the home of the ‘Rome statue’ respectively).

Those 70 odd countries who refuse to vote with the Europeans at the UN are not the outsiders but the logical countries. European invented human rights law has become so twisted and hypocritical, a tool in the hand of terrorists and dictators, and one that was invented by the same inventors of the gas chamber and the firebombing, that the world must once and for all free itself from the yoke of Europeanism.