Terra Incognita Journal

Terra Incognita The Global Economy 2012

2012-01-03T13:27:00.001-08:00

Terra Incognita: Rethinking the global economy in 2012
By SETH J. FRANTZMAN
01/03/2012 21:56

The economic forecast for this year isn’t all bad, but there are definitely changes in the air.

For some reason financial “experts” are predicting a good year in 2012. Wall Street strategist Brian Belski and Standard and Poor’s analyst Howard Silverblatt predict that stocks will rise about 10 percent. Everywhere are headlines like “pros see stocks rising in 2012” and “analysts see stocks climbing in 2012.”

That is all well and good except, as Bernard Condon at the Associated Press notes, the “experts” also predicted gains in 2011. It is worthwhile looking back over the past year to get an idea of what may be in store for next year’s global economy.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average, a gauge of the US financial market, is ending the year almost precisely where it started, at around 12,000 points. European and Asian markets generally had a worse year than New York’s stock exchange. US financial markets have recovered since the disaster they suffered in 2008, which was a long-term result of a sub-prime mortgage crises.

It turns out 2011 was a relatively good year for US home sales, which were up 7% in November. That means more people are buying homes, but the price of real estate has not changed, and has actually continued to decline, albeit slightly. The spike in home sales has been fueled by record-low interest rates: Wells Fargo, a major bank, estimates that a 30-year fixed-rate loan, which is a typical type of home loan, will come with a rate as low as 3.875%.

IF THE US economy seems to have weathered the storm in 2011 and recovered from many of its problems, it is no secret that the world’s real economic problems are in Europe. All of 2011 was overshadowed by discussions about Greece defaulting on her debts or leaving the Euro, plunging markets into chaos again and again.

The EU response has been tepid, as Germany and France, the largest economies, wrestle with possible solutions. Some fears have been allayed with news that Italy’s borrowing costs declined to 3.2% when it raised $11.8 billion in late December. Borrowing costs are a measure of volatility, so the fact that Italy is paying less interest is a sign that investors feel there is less risk of an Italian default.

In November, an auction of Italian bonds had forced the country to pay upwards of 6% to raise money. It was because of this that Italy was said to be the “next Greece” with fears that financial contagion would spread from Italy to Spain and Portugal and from there to the gates of Paris and Berlin.

However, Europe’s economy still suffers from other issues. The first is that the European Union has become more ham-handed in its regulatory behavior. In one instance it denied the right of mineral water makers to claim their products guarded against dehydration. In slapping record fines on Intel and Microsoft several years ago, it proved itself to be wary of foreign innovation and fearful of penetration of its markets.

In another case the EU continues to provide subsidies to Airbus, against a decision by the World Trade Organization. In that dispute the US has asked the WTO to impose trade sanctions of up to $7b. annually on the Europeans. Over-regulation and protectionist trade policies will hamper the continent’s long-term prospects, rather than protecting European consumers.

More worrying was Germany’s decision to to scrap its nuclear power stations. Nuclear power is the clean innovation of the future, a 20th-century technology that is perfect for the 21st century’s interest in clean energy. But the tsunami in Japan led to widespread irrational fears, and nuclear power is being rolled back. In the end this will be a long-term disaster for Europe and other places, as economies continue to rely on fossil fuels.

In thinking about fossil fuels it is important to recall that oil prices increased due to the Arab Spring, falling back to the $90 a barrel price range in the fall before climbing again to $99 a barrel in December following Iranian threats to close the Straits of Hormuz if sanctions are imposed. It should be recalled that the Iranians attempted something similar in 1984, with limited success, during the Iran-Iraq war.

Because of turmoil in the Arab world the oil fields in Iraq and Libya remain threatened and the Iranian problem casts a shadow over the future price of oil. At the same time the West’s dreams of electric car technology are not being realized. Only 6,142 Chevy Volts were sold in 2011 and only 8,720 Nissan Leefs. By contrast 11,375 Ford Focuses were sold in just November 2011.

This year is going to see several continuing trends. The “occupy” movement and various populist anti-capitalist protests will remain. At the same time the “second world” will continue to outpace the first, with the rise of the Chinese Yuan to record levels and reports that the Brazilian economy has overtaken that of the UK. Interest rates will remain high in Europe and the US dollar will remain pressured by the fact that US has no good plan to repay its deficit or balance its budget.

The good news from 2011 is that despite economic jitters related to the Euro the world economy continued to improve. The bad news, however, is that the long-term structural problems associated with European monetary integration and US debt issues have not been resolved.

The writer has a PhD from the Hebrew University and is a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies

Terra Incognita UnOriginal Shooting

2012-01-03T13:24:00.000-08:00

Terra Incognita: Un-original shooting
By SETH J. FRANTZMAN
12/27/2011 23:27

Photographer Fredric Brenner promised to portray Israel beyond the stereotypes in his latest project, but the artists have predictably created an orgy of clichés.

An attempt to create a traveling photographic exhibition of Israel has yielded predicable results; an orgy of clichés. Perhaps this is not surprising given the traditional mix of idealism, Jewish donors, fear of politicization, Israeli intellectuals as guides and requests that the project move beyond black and white stereotypes.

The project, called “Israel: Portrait of a Work in Progress,” was the brainchild of Frederic Brenner. A French photographer, he is best known for his book Diaspora: Homelands in Exile which was billed as “the most extensive visual record of Jewish life ever recorded.” He decided that he wanted to bring world renowned photographers to Israel in order to present a more diverse image of the country.

“[I was] very sad to see how Israel was being portrayed...We were in a binary paradigm – for and against, victim and perpetrator. There was such a lack of complexity in describing this place,” he said.

According to The New York Times participants were supposed to “spend six months exploring the country’s deep and many fault lines to create a body of work that might reframe the conversation about Israel.” To fund the project Brenner raised $3.5 million from Jewish donors in the US and Europe. Donors included the Laurie M. Tisch Illumination Fund, which aims (according to the website) to support projects that deal with “Jewish life,” foster tolerance and an “open an exchange of ideas that goes beyond politics and stereotypes to a place of rich complexity and understanding that is essential to shaping the future of Israel.”

The photographers were afraid of being “instrumentalized” so it was important that no money came from an Israeli government source. Nevertheless the project received support from Bezalel Academy of Arts and Mishkenot Sha’ananim.

SO THE artists came and, according to reports, Mr. Brenner decided that it would be important to hook them up with local Israeli “experts” who would operate as handlers and help them understand Israeli culture. Brenner choose people like philosophy researcher Moshe Halbertal, Beduin expert Clinton Bailey and Gilat Aloni of Bezalel. The project is scheduled to be finished in 2012, after which a travelling exhibition will display the work. Individual photographers taking part in the project will also publish their work separately.

But early reports indicate the outcome of all this work is 100 percent predictable. Suffice it to say, it will primarily be about Palestinians, Beduin, separation barriers, Palestinian Beduin, east Jerusalem Palestinians, the desert and Jenin. So much for the project about “Israel” that was not about “victims and perpetrators” and was supposed to be “complex.”

Fazal Sheikh, a 46-year-old photographer from New York City who has exhibited at the Tate Gallery, has produced work that deals with “displaced and marginalized communities around the world.” Apparently Sheikh felt his name might make his work in Israel problematic and he didn’t want to be viewed as an “apologist... I wanted to know who was backing the project and be sure we would be getting complete freedom.”

In the end he choose to photograph Beduin in the Negev, in order to illustrate the idea of “erasure.” Similarly, his project will focus on Palestinian refugees in the West Bank, probably to show how Israel has “erased” their villages.

Josef Koudelka, a Czech photographer, will explore the separation barrier. He began his work in the Jerusalem area. He describes the fence as a “crime against the landscape, in the most holy landscape for humanity.” Born in Czechoslovakia and having witnessed the Soviet invasion of 1968, he has said that his experiences under Soviet suppression “inform his view of the conflict in the region.”

Even though the project was supposed to be about “Israel,” Rosalind Solomon decided to focus her work on Jenin. Supposedly she ended up being “a few minutes away” when famed Israeli-Arab director Juliano Mer Khamis was gunned down in April, 2011 in front of the Jenin theater his mother had founded.

Gilles Peress, a French photographer, is photographing in Silwan, an Arab neighborhood in east Jerusalem that has been a flashpoint for violence between Jews who moved there and the local Arabs.

Nick Waplington, an English photographer who was born in Aden in the former British colony of Yemen, is reported to be shooting photos of settlers in the West Bank. He has done some work in Gush Etzion, but his webpage shows a giant photo of an Arab village and another of “the West Bank Separation Wall with Water Heaters.”

The group also includes Martin Kollar of Slovakia, Stephen Shore, a famous American photographer who seems to be focusing on archeological themes, Thomas Struth from Germany, who claimed he partly wanted to come to terms with his father’s Nazi past, and Jeff Wall, who is taking photos of the Ramon crater. Jungjin Lee, a Korean photographer, has been photographing diverse vistas, from the Golan Heights to the Negev and West Bank Beduin.

There is nothing intrinsically wrong with a project like this, just as there is nothing wrong with the themes the photographers choose to focus on. Where the project fails is in its claim to go beyond stereotypes. Is this because the artists cannot think in an original way? Is it because the Israeli experts chosen to Sherpa the artists around choose to only talk about Beduin and separation barriers? Is it because any project handsomely paid for by well-meaning Jewish donors and hosted at the Bezalel Academy inevitably gravitates towards Silwan, the “barrier” and Beduin? Is it because the organizer of the project said, “I did not bring people here to see the land of milk and honey. I brought them here to see the land that devours its inhabitants?”

We will never know, but we do know that this project has already failed.

The writer has a PhD from Hebrew University and is a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies.

Terra Incognita: Disingenous Taxation

2011-11-08T15:55:00.000-08:00

Terra Incognita: Disingenuous taxation
By SETH J. FRANTZMAN
10/04/2011 22:53

The ultra-wealthy in many countries are claiming that they want to be taxed more, but are they being serious?

Talkbacks (1)
The social protesters that took to the streets in Israel this summer often spoke about increasing taxation on the wealthy, particularly the mega-wealthy who control large parts of Israel’s economy. With the economic crisis that has swept the world this has become a common theme in many countries. Either out of self interest, to deflect criticism, or due to sincere belief that they are under-taxed, some wealthy tycoons have come forward in France and the US, demanding to be taxed more. It is worth examining a few cases of the “tax me more” crowd in order to understand why their claims are partly disingenuous.

American billionaire Warren Buffet in particular has gotten a lot of attention for his call for a new tax on the wealthy. It is his latest ploy to keep himself a media darling and add to his fame as the “Oracle of Omaha.” In a New York Times op-ed entitled “Stop Coddling the Super Rich,” he claimed that he and his “mega-rich” friends were left “untouched” by the latest pain being felt by the American taxpayer. He explained that last year “what I paid was only 17.4 percent of my taxable income – and that’s actually a lower percentage than was paid by any of the other 20 people in our office.

Their tax burdens ranged from 33 percent to 41 percent and averaged 36 percent” (New York Times, August 14) Buffet went on to detail how those earning salaries on a payroll tended to pay much a much higher percentage of their income in taxes than the super-rich.

He noted that 88 of the top 400 income earners in the US reported no wages at all and thus paid no payroll taxes. The Oracle suggested raising taxes on the 236,000 Americans who earn more than $1 million a year in income.

THE BUFFET analysis of the tax system’s inequality has an allure. It doesn’t make sense that someone who earns a good salary, such as $100,000 a year, pays a higher percentage of their income than someone whose income was $1 million from their investments.

But there Buffet’s claim that he pays less tax is extremely disingenuousness. He pays less tax primarily because he has always structured his income to pay less tax. If he wanted to pay his fair share of taxes, like his employees, he could simply pay himself his income as a salary, and thus contribute upwards of 25% of it in taxes. He has always chosen, like most of the mega-wealthy, to retain his income in investment vehicles, such as his own holding company, Berkshire Hathaway.

John Edwards, the 2004 vice presidential candidate, was another disingenuous tax promoter. He spoke often of the “two Americas... with two sets of books: one for those at the top who get all the breaks, and one for the rest who do all the work.”

He argued that “First, we must write a firm principle into the tax code: the wealth of the wealthiest can never be taxed less than the work of the rest of America. Today, wealthy Americans can shelter unlimited amounts of unearned (investment) income from being taxed at the rate working Americans pay...That’s wrong.” But it turns out Edwards was the king of the tax shelters. In one year he took a salary of only $360,000 from his law practice, but received $26 million in income from special distributions.

Now several wealthy Frenchman have stepped forward to argue for a Buffet tax of their own. Maurice Levy, chairman of the advertising firm Publicis, declared that it is “only fair that the most privileged members of our society take up a heavier share of this national burden... I do not love taxes, but right now this is important and just.”

The billionaire heiress of L’Oreal also chimed in, encouraging the government to tax her more.

It all sounds very nice, but the reality is that it will always be hard for the government to tax the very wealthy. Most wealthy people either inherited their money or they are owners of major businesses. Their wealth is therefore either in a bank account earning interest, or in assets and investments. Enacting a “wealth tax” is difficult. This is always the irony of wealthy people like Mr. Buffet encouraging higher taxes, they want higher taxes and they know that those taxes will never reach them, because the government can’t simply order Mr. Buffet to turn over 10% of his shares in Berkshire Hathaway every year.

The higher taxes debate will always falter on this problem. The government wants to tax people that it can find; going after vague investment accounts, structured partnerships, trusts and overseas numbered accounts is not something tax authorities excel at.

Since, in the case of each mega-wealthy person the way their wealth is structured is unique, it is hard to levy a flat tax on them. However, raising the taxes levied on salaried employees, say people making over NIS 10,000 a month or NIS 80,000 a month, is easy because the taxes are generally collected or withheld at their source, before the wage earner even receives the income. The Warren Buffet Tax and the French wealthy calling on the government to tax them is primarily a ploy to make them look like better people and to encourage the public to continue believing in the empty slogan; “tax the fat cats.”

The writer has a Ph.D from Hebrew University and is a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies

Terra Incognita: Acceptance Committees

2011-11-08T15:54:00.000-08:00

Terra Incognita: The acceptance committee conundrum
By SETH J. FRANTZMAN
10/22/2011 21:37

It should not be legal for kibbutzim founded many years ago to be allowed to uphold an institution that is considered illegal in other communities that were founded more recently.

Talkbacks (2)
In March 2011 the Knesset passed a law allowing small rural communities of up to 400 households in the north or south of the country to establish acceptance committees, or to maintain existing ones.. The final version of the law declared that “the acceptance committee will not refuse to accept a candidate for reasons of race, religion, sex, nationality, disability, personal status, age, parenthood, sexual proclivity, country of origin, opinions or political affiliation.”

But since the passage of this legislation, many groups, particularly those involved with the human rights lobby in Israel, have made a commotion. They threaten to petition the Supreme Court, claiming that the law is indirectly, or directly, aimed at discriminating against Arabs.

The Gush Shalom (“Peace Bloc”) organization posted on their website that “the purpose of this piece of legislation is manifestly clear: to provide a legal basis for the establishment of exclusively Jewish communal villages from which Arabs would be excluded, thus bypassing the court rulings prohibiting discrimination against Arabs.”

Writing in Haaretz, Dmitry Shumsky claimed: “There is no choice but to see the Acceptance Committee Law for communities as an expression of the anachronistic return to the open and callous ethno-centric nationalist racism of the old Europe of the previous century.”

Shlomo Molla, the lone Ethiopian MK, claimed the law’s wording, which permits rejecting applicants who do not meet certain social and cultural criteria, would result in discrimination against Ethiopians as well. Prof. Mordechai Kremnitzer, vice president of research at the Israel Democracy Institute, has argued that the law is “neither Jewish nor democratic.”

In the months following the passing of the law, several other news items have appeared that may have a bearing on the case.

In September, Ahmed and Fatina Zabeidat were finally allowed to take over a plot of land in the community of Rakefet in the Galilee. Five years ago they were rejected by the community’s admissions committee; Fatina was found to be “too individualistic” and Ahmed was said to “lack personal sophistication.” They were deemed “socially incompatible” with the community.

After years of their case wandering its way through the Israeli court system with the support of a number of human rights organizations supported by the New Israel Fund, they won their case.

In September, Kibbutz Ein Gedi, near the Dead Sea, announced that it was accepting its first new members in 15 years. The kibbutz had declined so many applications over the years that only 176 members remained, and their average age was 62. For the new members to be accepted a total of two-thirds of the existing members had to vote for their acceptance. The situation in Ein Gedi is similar to that of most kibbutzim in Israel, which have seen their populations age and their numbers decline since the 1980s.

WHAT IS interesting about the stories of Kibbutz Ein Gedi and Rakefet is that both communities maintain longstanding acceptance committees. Rakefet’s has apparently been in place since its founding in 1981, and Ein Gedi’s since 1956.

In fact, it turns out that all the 500-odd kibbutzim in Israel have acceptance committees, as do many other communities, such as moshavim.

It might be fair to estimate that approximately 1,000 communities around the country currently use acceptance committees. Yet the law defining the legality of such committees was only passed in 2011. Why the contradiction? Why the sudden outrage about this law? In reality, the very foundation of Israel is, for better or worse, grounded in the notion of the acceptance committee.

From the very beginning, all communal settlements in Israel were heavily “socialized,” with all sorts of committees and rhetoric about the “social compatibility” of residents.

Acceptance committees have long been part of the social fabric of this country. From tiny settlements in the West Bank established after 1967 to new communities in the Misgav regional council in the Galilee to the oldest kibbutz in the country, the institution has always existed in Israel.

The acceptance committee has also been one barrier preventing the integration of many Jewish (not to mention Arab) groups into the rural environment. It isn’t the main barrier, though.

Many Mizrahi and Sephardic Jews live in urban areas because the government settled them there; they never even thought of how they might like to live on a kibbutz.

The Arab population of Israel, much of which lives in semi-rural villages, has never wanted to move to nearby Jewish communities, preferring to simply expand their existing villages.

The hypocrisy that exists in certain sectors of Israeli society raises a fake outrage about a “segregation” law, a law that merely enshrines what has always existed. The notion of the acceptance committee and all its pseudosociological findings of “social unsuitability” smacks of elitism and in many cases may hide racism behind “cultural” excuses. But this is not the main problem.

The central issue is that when the Supreme Court considers this law it should consider whether the committees currently used by 1,000 communities in Israel are also valid. It should not be legal for kibbutzim founded many years ago to be allowed to uphold an institution that is considered illegal in other communities that were founded more recently. Either all be allowed to have acceptance committees or none should. It shouldn’t be considered “racist” for some and not for others.

The writer has a PhD from Hebrew University and is a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies.

Terra Incognita: Robert Ford's Heroic Diplomacy

2011-11-08T15:53:00.001-08:00

Terra Incognita: Robert Ford’s heroic diplomacy
By SETH J. FRANTZMAN
10/25/2011 23:09

US envoy to Syria's personal investigation of abuses and his shows of support for protestors is a welcome sign.

The American decision to withdraw Ambassador Robert Stephen Ford from Syria should raise eyebrows, not only because it represents a fundamental fear for his safety, but also because of what he has come to represent.

Through Ford’s courageous use of personal diplomacy, travelling to the most dangerous areas of Syria to show support for the protestors, he has carved out a niche for himself in the region, defying stereotypes about what diplomats can and should do.

On the face of it the ambassador’s position and biography don’t necessarily lend themselves to this type of action. A career diplomat , Mr. Ford, born in Denver, Colorado in 1958, is considered one of the foremost Arabists in the State Department.

He served in the Peace Corps and obtained a BA and MA from Johns Hopkins University before entering the US foreign service in 1985.

Since 1985 he has been posted throughout the Middle East, most notably in Iraq after the American invasion and in Algeria from 2006 to 2008.

His posting to Syria in late 2010 was considered important because the US had withdrawn its ambassador to Syria in 2005 after the assassination of Rafik Hariri, the Lebanese prime minister.

Ford’s work in Syria has almost all taken place against the backdrop of the “Arab Spring.” During his confirmation hearings with the US Senate, before being posted to Damascus, Ford had promised that “unfiltered straight talk with the Syrian government will be my mission priority.”

It is interesting that through June of 2011 he was in fact criticized for doing little to show support for the protestors that Bashar Assad’s regime was gunning down in the streets. Richard Grenell, writing at the Huffingtonpost.com, asked, “Shouldn’t Ford be calling attention to and showing the violence coming from Assad’s government?” He also thought the US should withdraw its ambassador to protest the crackdown.

In early July, however, Ford made an important and visible statement against the actions of the Syrian regime when he visited Hama with the French ambassador, Eric Chevallier. After his factfinding trip, which brought temporary respite to the besieged protestors in the city, he told media that “the violence that the Syrian government is inflicting on Syrian protesters, from our point of view, is grotesque. It’s abhorrent.”

He also articulated a new type of “muscular” diplomacy: “I don’t particularly care [if Syria is angry], because we have to show our solidarity with peaceful protesters. I’d do it again tomorrow if I had to... I’m going keep moving around the country. I can’t stop.”

Since July, Ford has been active in articulating opposition to the Syrian regime’s methods and showing support for those who oppose Assad. In September he travelled to meet with Hasan Abdel-Azim, an opposition figure. Pro-Assad protestors surrounded the ambassador’s vehicle, pelted him with tomatoes and eggs and temporarily interdicted his motorcade.

Stephen Ford is not the first US diplomat to find himself in harm’s way. One hundred and eleven US diplomats have been murdered or come to a bad end since 1780. Many died in Pakistan as a result of terrorism and most were not of ambassadorial rank.

One of the most famous cases of an American diplomat being murdered while at his post was that of Vice-Consul Robert Imbrie. Imbrie was beaten to death by a mob in Teheran in 1924 after being mistaken for a member of the Bahai faith. Local Islamists had whipped themselves into a rage, convinced that Bahais had poisoned a well .

Cleo Noel, US ambassador to the Sudan, was killed by Palestinian members of Black September in 1973. The US ambassador to Beirut, Frances Meloy, was murdered in 1977. Adolph Dubs, the US ambassador to Afghanistan was killed in 1979 when terrorists tried to kidnap him.

Ford’s departure from Syria is apparently based on credible intelligence that certain elements wanted him to meet a similar end.

The kind of blunt, heroic diplomacy that Ford has come to represent is a departure from the long-standing practice of US State Department functionaries, especially those considered Arabists, of toeing the line when it comes to dictators and human rights abuses.

Especially in the Middle East, US diplomats have been stricken with what is often termed “clientitis”; staying in a country too long and becoming too attached to it, rather than representing US interests.

US ambassadors in Saudi Arabia have been loathe to condemn killings in the Qatif region, in the Gulf states the US representatives do little to speak out on the mass human rights abuses, which amount to slavery, against foreign workers.

In Iraq, where it has just been announced that Iran and Turkey are both cooperating to suppress the Kurds, including incursions into Iraq, the US has remained silent.

There is obviously a question as to what constitutes going beyond the diplomatic mission’s purview, such as meeting with illegal opposition figures. But Mr. Ford’s personal investigation of abuses and his shows of support for protestors is a welcome sign, one that the US State Department might consider repeating in the future.

The writer received his PhD from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and is a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute of Market Studies.

Terra Incognita: Disgraceful Behavior

2011-11-08T15:52:00.001-08:00

Terra Incognita: Disgraceful behavior
By SETH J. FRANTZMAN
11/01/2011 22:53

The desecration of Sammy Ofer’s grave is but the latest in a shameful wave of hate directed at an Israeli success story.

Last week, shipping tycoon Sammy Ofer’s grave in Tel Aviv’s Trumpeldor Cemetery was vandalized. It could have been worse, to be sure. The vandal – no, the savage – drew only a small “price tag” on the grave. But the act was merely the latest in a series of disgraceful behavior directed at the Ofer family over the past six months.

By most accounts the Ofer brothers, quiet and unassuming but massively wealthy, were decent men. Sammy and his brother Yuli were born in Rumania in the early 1920s. Their family came to Mandatory Palestine in 1924 and resided in Haifa. Both men served in the Israeli army, Sammy in the nascent Navy because he had been in the Royal Navy, and his brother in the army. Sammy bought his first ship in 1950 and after his brother left the army, mustering out as a Major, the two men founded a shipping company which would become the basis for the Ofer Brothers Group.

As Nehemia Shtrasler of Haaretz tells it, Sammy Ofer made his bones abroad.

“The truth is that Ofer made his fortune abroad, and only afterward returned to Israel in order to invest the profits here....He left Israel in the late 1960s and went to live in London, where he founded a shipping company that was very successful. He took great risks, took out huge loans and purchased ships during times of crisis, when everyone was afraidli success story.�㛲��ᦗ�Last wl prepared in times of prosperity.”

With his brother Yuli, he acquired other assets besides shipping, including Bank Mizrahi, several chemical and oil businesses and dabbled in real estate. The Ofer brothers became Israel’s wealthiest people and grew their shipping business into one of the biggest in the world. They also gave handsomely to charity.

BUT SOME Israelis, it seems, hated them and felt suspicious of their wealth. They were the rich tycoons, the ones the protestors blame for the high rents and cottage cheese prices. They were the evil capitalists.

In May, the US State Department slapped sanctions on seven companies, the Ofer brothers’ among them, for dealing with Iran and barred them from receiving US export licenses and receiving loans of over $10 million from US financial institutions.

This revelation was accepted without question by the Israeli public, media and politicians, all of whom brandished their knives to strike down the company that could now be accused of putting profits above patriotism.

Israel’s politicians and media experts didn’t bother to digest what the Ofer brothers were accused of – the State Department claimed they didn’t do due diligence when they sold a tanker they owned jointly with another company to a straw company that was in fact acting on behalf of Iran.

Yossi Melman at Haaretz wrote that “the Ofer Brothers Group may be scurrying into damage control in Israel, Singapore, London and Washington, after the United States blacklisted it for trading with Iran, but Israel seems to be doing nothing to enforce international sanctions on Iran.”

Israel’s politicians across the political spectrum demanded an immediate investigation by the attorney-general and Knesset. Shelly Yacimovich of Labor claimed “the prime minister must protect Israel’s economy against such an occurrence and pursue justice against the companies’ owners.” A special Knesset panel was convened to investigate the supposed wrongdoing.

But then the knives were sheathed. The Knesset committee disappeared. The attorney- general did nothing.

Sammy Ofer died in early June. One Obituary read: “Israeli billionaire involved in Iran dealings dies in Tel Aviv.” At his funeral, his son Idan said, “for him, Zionism wasn’t merely an ideal, but a commandment to action.” Sammy’s brother Yuli died in September. Conveniently, the next day the press reported: “US drops Ofer brothers company from Iran Sanctions List” (Haaretz, Sept. 13).

Even though they were in their late 80s, the controversy may have driven the poor men to an early grave.

One thing that’s clear regarding the ordeal the Ofers were forced to go through is that, as far as I can tell, not one politician or media personality has apologized. Why should Shelly Yacimovich, Aryeh Eldad or Nachman Shai, among the accusers, say “we were wrong, it turns out that we jumped to conclusions”?

No, it is easier to have a savage outburst, to accuse men who gave their entire lives to Israel, who devoted themselves not only to the defense of the country but also to making it a world financial power, of wanting some piddling profit from the sale of one rusty tanker to an Iranian straw company.

One wonders, if the Ofers had simply left Israel in 1960 and not returned, building their fortune abroad, where all their money was made anyway, would not their lives have ended differently?

Sammy’s grave would probably not have been vandalized, at least not by his own people. Furthermore he wouldn’t have been hounded to his dying day.

Mr. Ofer couldn’t even donate money in Israel without people castigating him for it.

In 2006 when he had given money to the Tel Aviv Museum of Art he was slandered and libeled so much he withdrew the donation, writing, “Sorry for wanting to contribute, an open letter to the art lovers in Tel Aviv and Israel.”

That is a sad testament to the place the Ofers called home. Why is that? Why can’t Israelis look up to men like the Ofers, see success and feel proud? The Ofers represented one of the best success stories in the region. The country should have produced ten thousand more Ofers rather than producing ten thousand more critics capable of unfounded hateful accusations.

There should be outrage over the desecration at Trumpeldor Cemetery, just as there is outrage at all these heinous “price tag” attacks.

The writer has a Ph.D from Hebrew University and is a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies.
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Terra Incognita Misbehaving Sciences

2011-11-08T15:50:00.001-08:00

Terra incognita: Misbehaving sciences?
By SETH J. FRANTZMAN, Jerusalem Post
11/08/2011 23:42

In light of recent incitement by lecturers, it' s important to examine the freedom of expression and the “right” of academics to engage in extremist speech.

Two weeks ago it was reported that State Prosecutor Shai Nitzan had asked police to investigate Ben-Gurion University chemistry lecturer Eyal Nir for incitement because of a call he made to “break the necks” of a right-wing fringe group. The same week, Kent State University Professor Julio Pino yelled “death to Israel” during a lecture by Israeli diplomat Ishmael Khaldi. It is important to examine not only the merits of these cases but also the wider context of freedom of expression and the “right” of academics to engage in extremist speech while at the same time enjoying the presumption that their work with students remains unbiased and uninformed by their sometimes radical views.

The Nir incident took place in June, 2011, after Israelis marched through Jerusalem on Jerusalem Day. Some of the fringe part of the march included a group that chanted anti- Arab slogans and whose comments were posted on YouTube. Nir saw the YouTube video and linked to it on his Facebook page, with a comment in Hebrew that “gangs of bandits are swarming our country. I call on the world to come and help break these scoundrels’ necks.”

The comment drew criticism and numerous comments on Facebook but Nir stood by what he said. He wrote that the gang in question consisted of a few bullies and that they must be prevented from carrying out their threats.

“I believe my cry to stop them is reasonable,” said Nir.

It is worth noting that Eyal Nir is no stranger to radical politics in Israel. In 2010 he was photographed being arrested by the IDF during a protest at Nabi Salah in the West Bank. Blogger Alison Ramer wrote that “Nir was taken into an army jeep for insulting a soldier with a racial slur.”

Ben-Gurion University has seemingly stood by Nir, noting in a statement: “Dr. Nir published his comments as a private individual, on his personal Facebook page. The university does not take a side in the matter, and therefore justice should be sought in appropriate legal forum.”

Others took issue with the comments immediately, establishing an online petition to have him fired.

THE PROBLEM with Nir’s comments is not whether they constitute incitement under Israeli law, since the incitement law is, in my opinion, flawed. The issue that should be raised about Nir’s diatribe is how it impacts the university environment he teaches in. A review of cases abroad shows that most faculty members who have been fired for things they said had their jobs terminated only in connection to comments made in class or which were directly related to campus activities.

For instance, a Leeds University lecturer was suspended and took early retirement when he gave an interview to a student newspaper suggesting that Africans were less intelligent than Europeans. There do not seem to be any incidents of faculty members having been fired for statements made outside of the university setting.

However, Peter Van Onselen, writing in The Australian, recalled that a colleague once complained to his university about a column he had written. He took the “view that it brought the university [a previous employer] into disrepute, and requested that I be reprimanded for doing the university’s reputation damage,” wrote Onselen.

Do Nir’s comments bring Ben-Gurion University into disrepute? Considering the fact that the university has no shortage of radical leftists who do not hesitate to offer their opinion that Israel is a colonizing, racist country, it would seem that the university’s reputation could not be tangibly changed by these newest comments.

The story of the “death to Israel” comment by Julio Pino, a tenured professor at Kent State, is more nuanced. Pino is a native of Cuba and a convert to Islam. There is some irony in the fact that the visiting Israeli diplomat who drew Pino’s ire is himself a Muslim (Mr. Khaldi is Israel’s first Beduin deputy consul). His outburst took place on campus. Kent State President Lester Lefton condemned Pino’s outburst, however according to the American Association of University Professors, “Calling out a political slogan during a question period falls well within the speech rights of any member of a university community.”

Most respected academics know the value of having their students believe classes are not biased against certain individuals due to race, creed or gender. Since national-religious students in Israel clearly constitute a creed it is certainly possible that these students might feel that Nir’s “break their necks” comment was directed at them and would feel uncomfortable attending his classes. How can one study in such a hostile environment? Could a black student feel comfortable in a class where she knew that the lecturer had written in an op-ed that black activists should have their necks broken? Furthermore, why do academics enjoy a special type of free speech that no other occupation enjoys? Those defending these “outbursts” seem to misconstrue the notion of academic freedom, which means a freedom to research, with the idea that academics have the right to behave in the lowest manner possible, using outbursts that befit the village drunk more than they do a holder of a doctorate. When an academic’s behavior is as savage, unrestrained and brutish as that of someone leaving a pub sloshed at three in the morning, one wonders where our notion of what constitutes acceptable behavior, and speech, went wrong.

Terra Incognita the Pakistan Two Step

2011-09-27T14:53:00.001-07:00

Terra Incognita: The Pakistan two-step
By TERRA INCOGNITA
09/27/2011 07:14

It is time for the US to downgrade ties with this dangerous "ally."

‘Never before has a US official so publicly linked Pakistan to attacks on Americans. It is a sickening accusation given the fact that the US has been giving Pakistan nearly $2 billion a year, money to fight terrorism, not support it.”

Those were the words Martha Raddatz, senior foreign affairs correspondent at ABC news, on September 22. The man whose name has headlined these revelations is Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee, he declared: “In continuing to use violent extremism, as an instrument of policy, the government of Pakistan, army and ISI jeopardizes our strategic partnership.”

Sitting beside the four-star admiral was US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, who explained that “a very clear message [must be sent] to them and to others that they must take steps to prevent the safe havens that [terrorists] are using [in Pakistan].”

That Mullen made his blunt statement just days before he is due to retire suggests that he was asked to provide the stronger testimony before Congress whereas Panetta, who will remain secretary of defense, would set a softer tone.

The events at the heart of the recent allegations were an attack on the Intercontinental Hotel in Kabul and a September 13 attack on the US embassy there. The story that Pakistan’s intelligence service, the ISI, was behind the attacks, through the use of Islamist proxies, was headline news in many newspapers in the West.

The Pakistani press has also reported about Mullen’s comments. This has triggered a series of stories detailing meetings among Pakistani army officers aimed at “meeting amid tensions” with the US. The latest talking point being put forward by Pakistani commentators, such as Interior Minister Rehman Malik, is that the CIA was behind the creation of the Haqqani network.

The Haqqani network is actually a sort of family business that originated in the mountainous southern Afghan region of Paktia, which borders Pakistan’s North Waziristan province. It was founded by Jalaludin Haqqani (born about 1950) and is now run in cooperation with his son. During the 1980s Haqqani initially allied himself with the hardcore Islamist Afghani Gulbeddin Hekmatyar. Later, he found his way not only to Pakistan’s ISI but also to the CIA and US Congressman Charlie Wilson. He received arms and tens of thousands of dollars in US and Saudi aid to fight the Soviets, with much of the money and weapons being channeled through the ISI. This ISI-CIA campaign to throw the Soviets out of Afghanistan was the subject of the famous 2003 book Charlie Wilson’s War, which was later made into a movie.

THE “REVELATIONS” about the role of the ISI in Pakistan and the double game it plays have been common knowledge to anyone reporting about the conflict in the region for more than a decade. The story of the ISA-Taliban relationship has been told in several books and numerous articles by Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid. In an interview with Harpers, Rashid said, “This lack of US interest [after 2001] coincided with the interests of the Pakistani army: to go after al Qaida, but to allow the Taliban to resettle in Pakistan. Quite soon the Taliban was once again patronized by the ISI.”

Indian intelligence experts have long warned the US and the world that the ISI has been funding terrorist networks in Kashmir and Central Asia since the 1980s. Most recently, however, the US has come face to face with Pakistani complicity to an extent that is hard to ignore. The fact that Osama Bin Laden was found living in a town dominated by the Pakistani military clearly illustrated either the incompetence of Pakistan or it complicity in hiding him.

Some commentators have painted a picture of an ISI that is so autonomous that the Pakistani government cannot be held responsible for its actions. David Rohde at Reuters argues that “instead of blaming all Pakistanis for the action of the ISI, the United States must help moderate Pakistanis reform an out-of-step, out-of-control agency.”

This is a convenient story for those that like to imagine that intelligence organizations such as the CIA are engaged in so many “black” operations that they are a law unto themselves. But to judge from their statements, at least some of Pakistan’s politicians don’t subscribe to this notion, and make no distinction between the ISI and the government.

Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar responded to Mullen’s allegations by threatening the US: “You cannot afford to alienate Pakistan, you cannot afford to alienate the Pakistani people. If you are choosing to do so and if they are choosing to do so it will be at their own cost.”

This is the Pakistani quagmire; politicians either blaming the CIA, claiming they are helpless against the power of the ISI, or daring the US to severe ties with them. They accuse the US of “losing an ally” in Pakistan or “alienating” the Pakistani people.

The US government must respond to the reality. The Pakistani people cannot be “alienated,” and the US cannot “lose an ally” it doesn’t have. The US faced the same duplicity when it worked with the South Vietnamese government in the 1960s.

Some argue that the ISI and Pakistan do, from time to time, turn in Taliban commanders.

But the reality is that this should be viewed much like a mafia family that turns in other mafiosi just so that it can get stronger. Pakistan’s government has perfected the two-step, a dance routine where you step in one direction and then end up going the other way. Pakistan hands over the Taliban it doesn’t like, to weaken those factions it can’t control, while holding close to those like Haqqani who have been allies with the ISI since the 1980s. Pakistan paints a picture of a Mexican stand-off with the US, where the US can’t ditch its useless “ally,” but Mike Mullen’s statements may finally point the way to a realistic severing or downgrading of ties with this dangerous, unstable country.

The writer has a PhD from Hebrew University, and is a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies.

Terra Incognita: Angela Merkel, Stand Strong Against Euro-Bonds

2011-08-23T15:02:00.000-07:00

Angela Merkel, stand strong against Euro-bonds!
By SETH J. FRANTZMAN
Jerusalem Post
08/23/2011 22:56

Europe’s stronger economies must keep the financial barbarians at bay.

The writer has a PhD from Hebrew University, and is a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies.

The financial barbarians are at the gates of the Euro. Ironically, today it is Germany – home of the barbarians who destroyed Europe’s first common market, Rome – that is standing against the new debt-indulging savages.

In recent days European Union bureaucrats and other commentators have been arguing that a long term solution to the debt problems haunting certain European countries could be found in Euro bonds.

Olli Rehn, EU Economics and Monetary Affairs commissioner, has explained that “These euro securities would aim to strengthen fiscal discipline and increase stability in the euro area through the markets.”

President of the European Commission José Manuel Barroso has been arguing for months that a common Euro Zone bond might be a good idea. He said in December: “Let us not kill the euro bonds idea for the future, but let us concentrate now on what we can do quickly.”

A 2011 paper by Prof. Nicholas Economides and Prof. Roy Smith at NYU suggested a similar type of bond for Europe called a Trichet bond, after European Central Bank president Jean-Claude Trichet. In this scenario, the EU would issue bonds that could be exchanged for the rotting debt of certain EU nations.

“Present holders of sovereign debt will be exchanging low-quality bonds with limited liquidity for higher-quality bonds with greater liquidity.” They also argued that “without a workable EU remedy for the sovereign-debt problems, countries like Portugal, Spain and Italy are being treated by the market, (which so far has ignored the European rescue fund and related efforts to calm the crisis) as potential defaulters.”

The idea being presented is that the EU should issue a form of debt in order that junk bonds can be traded in for higher-quality bonds.

This is sort of like the collateralized debt obligations that allowed supprime mortgages to be resold as “safe” investments – the shenanigan that created the American financial meltdown of 2008. The idea for the Euro bond is only slightly different than the Trichet bond; it supposes that the EU create bonds that the 17-nation EU would be responsible for repaying in order to refinance the debt of countries that can’t keep themselves off the hooch.

GERMAN CHANCELLOR Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy have both rejected the idea of Euro bonds. Commentators have pointed out that issuing such bonds might go against the constitutions of member states. It would also increase the power of the EU, and diminish the budgetary independence of the member states.

Goldman Sachs economist Dirk Schumacher noted that it would mean “further change of the institutional setup of the euro zone, with more oversight and control from Brussels.”

Those promoting Euro bonds are trying to push them through the door when European countries are at their weakest. They claim they are the only way to save the Euro.

In essence they are using the crises to forever weaken the rights of hardworking, financially responsible Europeans, pushing through a new financial instrument that would compel the Germans and French to work forever in a form of indentured servitude so that Greek, Italian and Spanish governments can continue to rack up debts. It is a twisted form of Karl Marx’s 1875 creed “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”

The Germans and French have the ability, the others have the need.

The problem is that the Germans and French (and other responsible European nations) are already being forced to pay for the mistakes of weaker economies. In May 2010, as part of a rescue package to save European debtor nations, the European Central Bank (ECB) began purchasing the sovereign debt of those countries. So far it has bought 110 billion Euros worth of Spanish and Italian debt. The reason is to keep the borrowing costs of these nations lower, keeping their interest rates lower so they don’t get themselves even deeper in debt. This is a short-term solution of course; the ECB can’t buy debt forever. In fact, the cap on this latest bailout fund is 450 billion euros. But the ECB has been right to try to stem the flow, because some of the rise in interest rates on these nation’s bonds have been caused by speculators.

THE PROBLEM with the EU-bond scenario is that it would make Germany responsible for the actions of others. Greece has managed to rack up debt to a tune of 160% of its Gross Domestic Product (GDP), while Italy’s is at 120%. By contrast, Germany owes just 80% – still a high figure. Germany is Europe’s most productive nation, and the anchor of the Euro, yet it is being pushed into a corner. There is a belief that if Greece or Italy is allowed to default on its debt that the debt contagion would spread to France and then to Germany. To save Germany, therefore, the financial barbarians must be kept at bay.

But the problem is that the barbarians are already inside the gates, and are being allowed, every day, to eat away at the sound policies of other countries. The solution shouldn’t be to give the barbarians a blank check called Euro bonds that allows them to make other nations keep paying for their mistakes.

Terra Incognita The Boring Jewish State?

2011-08-16T16:05:00.000-07:00

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=234051
The Jerusalem Post
Terra Incognita: The boring Jewish state?
By SETH J. FRANTZMAN
08/17/2011 00:00

Why is there such a fear of taking Jews to see minorities of Israel? Why fear of them meeting Russians, Yemenites, Moroccans, Ethiopians?

‘I’m Japanese, but every time I go back to the home country, it’s just boring, the whole story of the mythical samurai past. Finally I got an opportunity to visit Japan via a Japanese cultural association with the goal of studying and interacting with the ‘other.’ We met North Korean refugees seeking asylum, Chinese minorities, an American working in a corporate firm, a member of an indigenous minority from Okinawa and gay activists. Only through meeting all these people could I finally appreciate Japan. Japanese-Americans are tired of hearing just Japan’s Japanese history; to relate to their ancient land, they must learn about the ‘other.’”

Of course, these words were never spoken by a Japanese person. How many Japanese-Americans, if they care about Japan, can only relate to it if they relate to the Chinese minorities there? How many Indian-Americans can only relate to mother India by relating to the Parsi minority in Mumbai? How many Iranian-Americans find they can care about Iran only through learning about its Azeri and Baluchi communities? Yet some portion of the world’s Jewish community finds that the only thing interesting in Israel is stories of Beduin, Israeli-Arabs, African refugees and Palestinians.

Israel is just downright boring, so long as it involves stories about the Jews.

Sarah Schonberg echoed these sentiments in an oped in The Forward: “American youth are indifferent to hearing just one story and being told to accept it without question.” She tells how she had little interest in Israel until she attended a Hebrew College trip aimed at introducing American Jews to the “other” there, namely Israeli Arabs. “To overlook a population of this size is akin to ignoring the entire black, Asian, Native-American and multi-racial populations in the US,” she wrote.

Her story is similar to many other stories of Jews who find Israel mundane, unless they can view the country through the prism of social justice and activism for minority rights.

Through generations of living as minorities in the Diaspora, Jews have been at the forefront of fighting for minority rights. It’s no surprise that it was a Jewish philosopher, Emmanuel Levinas, who came up with the concept of the “other.” So when Jews come to Israel, they immediately want to find the minorities, accustomed as they are to the concept that only minorities are interesting. Because Jews tend to view the concept of what constitutes a Jew through the prism with which they grew up, they also tend to homogenize the Jewish community in Israel. Thus, while Schonberg pays passing heed to the “cultural diversity that makes up the Jewish community in Israel,” she doesn’t mention any Jewish minorities.

The type of fact-finding trip that Hebrew College ran has become increasingly common. The New Israel Fund has been organizing them for a while, bringing Jews from the US to Israel to see the “other” on study tours. A standard trip consists of visits with Beduin, Israeli Arabs, African refugees, more Israeli Arabs, Palestinians, Palestinians in Hebron, and maybe, if people are lucky, more Beduin and, as an aside, an Ethiopian Jew.

In transit, the tour leaders point out the “Jews”: hotels in Tel Aviv, wineries in Zichron Ya’acov, everything to present Jews as the wealthiest, “whitest” elite in the country, in contrast to the poverty-stricken, discriminated- against “black” minorities. This plays well to American Jewish sentiments. As veterans in the civil rights struggle, American Jews are used to the dichotomy of white and black, and as fighters for immigrant rights, they are used to the Manichean absolutes of the wealthy and the poor.

The types of trips now being sold, primarily to American Jews, seek to “connect” them with Israel the only way the trip leaders know how: through the “others” with whom Jews feel naturally comfortable.

Contrast this with the Zionistic tours that give Jews “one story.”

But why is there no happy medium? Why is there such a fear of taking Jews to see the Jewish minorities of Israel? Why is there a fear of letting them meet Russians, Yemenites, Moroccans, Ethiopians and haredim, to name a few? The fear on the part of the birthright trips, and those like them, is that Jews might be shocked to see poverty and not think the country a success. The fear on the part of those like the New Israel Fund or Hebrew College is that they might not be able to push their agenda of the “other.”

It isn’t all the fault of the educators; people like Schonberg travel all over the world, and find most countries fascinating without spending all their time among the “other.” In Iran they don’t look for Baluchis, in Japan they don’t look for Koreans, in South Africa they don’t need Afrikaners, in Egypt they don’t want to meet Nubians. They are fine with majority narratives for every country except Israel and America. The cultural milieu from which they come ascribes boring traits to Jews.

There is nothing wrong with introducing people to the “other” in Israel, but it is essential that they see all the others, not just a cookie-cutter image from the West into which Israel is forced to be subsumed so it can be understood.

Terra Incognita: Baseless Hatred of the Haredim

2011-08-11T05:48:00.000-07:00

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=233169
Terra Incognita: Baseless hatred of the haredim
By SETH J. FRANTZMAN
08/10/2011 06:22

It is essential that people search their souls and ask why they acquiesce so easily to canards about the ultra-orthodox community and statements made against it.

One of the central messages of Tisha Be’av, which took place yesterday, is the consequences of Sinat Hinam or baseless hatred. During the period of the Second Temple Jews quarreled so much among themselves that it brought ruin upon the Jewish people.

Today, with the housing protests that have swept the country, it is worthwhile to pause and ponder one type of baseless hatred that is often not acknowledged: hatred of the Ultra-Orthodox or haredi community.

T

he savage hatred of haredim comes in many forms. It begins with the things people say; how the haredim are “parasites” who don’t pay taxes and don’t go to the army, that they beat their wives and create a “mini- Tehran” in their communities, that they are dirty, smelly “dosim” and that they “infiltrate” the wonderful utopian secular neighborhoods. Oh, and of course, they are ignorant donkeys who hate Zionism and are intolerant of homosexuals, Arabs and blacks.

This hate is on display everywhere in symbolic acts.

Swastikas sprayed on a synagogue in Kfar Yona, where the secular residents fear a haredi “takeover”. The Eruv (wire surrounding a religious community that allows them to carry items on Shabbat) is cut in Kiryat Yovel by self-proclaimed secular resistance fighters. The huge signs erected by Meretz during its campaign for Jerusalem city council in 2008 that read “End the Haredization of Jerusalem.” A student at Hebrew University does doctoral work analyzing how the haredim invaded Kiryat Yovel, as if anyone can imagine an open minded university sponsoring the work of someone wanting to analyze how Arabs “took over” the Wolfson neighborhood in Acre.

THE HATRED of the haredi population is greatest among those who preach tolerance. Meretz, a far left political party, campaigns to end the haredi infiltration of Jerusalem’s secular bastions, but at the same time it complains of racism when Jews don’t want Arabs moving into Pisgat Zeev. Righteous people denounce the “acceptance committee law” that allows small communities to reject applicants, but the same people don’t seem to mind if a secular community opposes haredim moving to the area simply because they might change the character of the neighborhood. There was an outcry in the country when Rabbis signed a letter asking people not to rent apartments to Arabs in Safed, but there is no outcry among the ‘civil rights’ lobby when Ram Fruman created the Forum for Secular Communities, whose sole goal is to prevent haredi people from moving to “secular” areas. Fruman says “Our association works on two levels – at the local level, in sharing experience, knowledge and resources; and at the national level, in creating a political lobby that can take the lead with public action.” One imagines if the haredim just disguised themselves as Arabs they would be welcomed by the “open minded” secular elites and their rights to move where they want would be defended at the highest levels.

The hatred of the haredi population transcends all political and ethnic groups in Israel; Arabs, leftists, the national religious, free market liberals, even Ethiopians, all have a generally visceral dislike for the black hat.

Nechamia Stressler, the usually level headed columnist at Haaretz says they offer only “rotten goods, rife with ignorance, superstition.” Ron Huldai, mayor of Tel Aviv, described them as “aloof and ignorant people who are growing at an alarming rate.” Yuval Tumarkin, artist and winner of the Israel Prize, once said “when one sees the haredim one understands why there was a Holocaust.”

HAREDIM KNOW they are hated. Aharon Yakter, who lives in Bnei Brak, recalls that “I grew up near Sheinkin street in Tel Aviv until the age of 18. They never yelled 'dos' back then.” But nowadays if a hated haredi shows his face on the trendy street the secular community would feel no qualms about banding together to oppose the “infiltration.” Every Israeli should be ashamed that they speak of the haredim the way they do. There is nothing honorable in denying religious Jews the ability to live where they want.

The myths used to justify baseless hatred of the haredim are legion. One accuses them of not going to the army, but there are an equal number of secular draft dodgers as there are haredi ones, and the secular draft dodgers aren’t forced to attend Yeshiva in lieu of army service. Yet we don’t call the secular population “parasites.”

The student unions and other social organizations rail against funding for Yeshiva students, but that funding, about NIS 135 million for 13,000 students in 2010, provides less than $250 a month to the religious students, similar or less than most secular student scholarships.

The student union complains about equality, but the reality is that the secular public drains the state’s coffers and drinks at the same trough as the haredi public.

And what about hatred of the state, do certain haredi groups (i.e Neturei Karta) hate the state at a greater rate than, say, university lecturers in the Cohn Institute of History and Philosophy at Tel Aviv University? At least the haredi public is not at the forefront of all the ‘human rights’ organizations that support boycotts and accuse the country of apartheid.

BASELESS HATRED didn’t disappear this Tisha Be’av, but it is essential that, at least every once in a while, people search their souls and ask why they acquiesce so easily to canards about the ultra-orthodox community and statements made against it. The haredim aren’t angels, and their community is not a utopia, but then again, neither are any of the communities in Israel. Recognizing that as a starting point will increase tolerance, for the better.

The writer has a PhD from Hebrew University, and is a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies.

Terra Incognita: The Foreign Worker Catch 22 in Israel

2011-07-12T14:07:00.000-07:00

The foreign workers’ ‘Catch-22'
In the Jerusalem Post
By SETH J. FRANTZMAN
http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=229060
07/12/2011 23:21

Rights and Responsibility: The migrant workers who choose to come to Israel are adults. It is time we started treating them as such.

Israel is increasingly living in a catch-22 regarding foreign workers and their rights. First of all, it is considered unacceptable to bind foreign workers to their employers. Second, the courts have determined that foreign workers who get pregnant may not be deported under the previous law that voided their work permits if they gave birth. Third, the courts have determined that it is also illegal to deport foreign workers who have just given birth.

The catch-22 is that the foreign workers are, by default, encouraged to have children in order to stay in the country. Once they have children, it becomes impossible to deport them because of all the petitions against deporting their children. For instance, in March 2011 the Interior Ministry postponed deporting foreign workers and their children because it didn’t want to “disrupt the studies of children enrolled in school.” It appears that once a female foreign worker enters the country, it is almost assured that she will not leave, and that ipso facto she and her children will receive unlimited rights to remain.

DISCUSSION ABOUT the foreign workers, of whom there are thought to be more than 300,000, always revolves around their “rights.” When Supreme Court Justice Ayala Procaccia overturned the policy of deporting those that were pregnant or had just had children, she said “it affects [the worker’s] right to be a parent, to have a family and to support herself. The policy is incongruent with Israeli labor laws that safeguard the rights of the woman both during and after birth.” But why does the supposed “right” to a family transcend the laws of a country where one has chosen to come as a worker? Let’s say, for arguments sake, that the foreign workers didn’t look so “foreign” and didn’t come across in photos as “victims.” If they looked like educated Europeans (still foreign, but not that foreign), would their case be as compelling? Do we have much compassion for a European couple that moves to Israel, for whatever reason, has a child here, and which the state subsequently orders deported for overstaying a visa? Would there be an outcry that the child might be yanked out of school? Be honest with yourself. If it was 300,000 Europeans in Tel Aviv and we read about them being deported, wouldn’t we shrug and say “well, they should have obeyed the law.”

So the reality of the foreign round-about is the feeling that somehow they are not educated enough and don’t look responsible enough to read the law and make responsible choices. This is a very real paternalistic, nay racist, reality. I have had American and European non-Jewish friends who got pregnant here or moved here with their children. They understand the strain they are putting the child under by raising it in a temporary foreign environment. Similarly, Americans and Europeans living in the Gulf Arab states, Japan, Mexico or wherever are not considered victims if they are deported, with their children, for overstaying a visa or violating the conditions of their employment contract.

By deporting foreign workers, their “rights” to a family are not being harmed; they are merely being asked to be responsible adults, responsible toward the law and their children. By always passing the buck and keeping them from being deported when pregnant, and then after giving birth, and then once the children are in kindergarten, the courts are merely belittling them and treating them as irresponsibles who can’t make choices about reproduction.

IN THE face of a wave of foreign workers, sense and responsibility has been checked at the border and incoherent paternalism has become the law of the land. We must look at foreign workers as people like us, and demand that they receive not only certain rights but also bear certain responsibilities. Once responsibility is part of the equation, the catch-22 that has become the norm will begin to correct itself.

The writer has a PhD from Hebrew University, and is a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies.

Terra Incognita: A Palestinian DInar

2011-06-24T15:22:00.000-07:00

A question of the Palestinian dinar
By SETH J. FRANTZMAN
Jerusalem Post
http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=225997
06/21/2011 23:54

Terra Incognita: What currency will the Palestinians use in the wake of their quest to seek recognition for a state in September?

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There is a Facebook page circulating that purports to show an unofficial Palestinian passport stamp designed by an artist named Kahled Jarrar. But Jarrar’s homemade stamp is less important than another pressing issue: What currency will the Palestinians use in the wake of their quest to seek recognition for their state in September?

It isn’t a simple matter, as history will show. After the US declared independence in 1776, it was 10 years before Congress actually approved the use of the dollar as the official currency. And it wasn’t until 1792 that the first US mint, sanctioned by the government to print money, was inaugurated in Philadelphia (then the American capital).

By the time of the Civil War, the question of currency had gained more urgency. Only a month after the Confederate States of America had been formed, it began to issue its own currency in April 1861. As is well known, the Confederate dollar quickly depreciated, since it was not backed by assets, and became virtually worthless by 1864.

To examine the successes and failures of new national currencies, it is worth looking at several examples.

East Timor seems to be a prime case. Slightly smaller than Israel, East Timor is at the end of the Indonesia archipelago. In 1975 its colonial occupier, Portugal, decided to withdraw, and the Timorese declared independence in November of that year. However, only a month later, it was invaded by Indonesia in a campaign of massacre that began 25 years of brutal rule. The UN never recognized Indonesian sovereignty, and declared the country a “non-self governing territory under Portuguese administration.”

In 1999, after Indonesian human rights violations became widely known, a UN-sponsored referendum resulted in the territory becoming independent.

The Timorese got rid of the hated Indonesian rupiah, but instead of adopting their own currency, they began using the US dollar. The imposition of the dollar on the Timorese was completely a product of the UN’s semi-colonial administration that ran the country in 2000, and whose tentacles have never been completely removed. For a brief period, the UN National Consultative Council favored using the Portuguese escudo, but that idea was scratched when it became clear that the Portuguese were embracing the euro. The rupiah couldn’t be retained, not only because it was disliked, but because it was an unstable currency, and it meant East Timor’s future would be tied to the Indonesian economy.

Luis Valdivieso, head of the IMF office in East Timor, said: “I think the main consideration has been one of pragmatic consideration given the fact that t is urgent now [in 2000] to receive the payments on execution of the budget.” Yet the local people wanted their own currency. A coalition of former resistance leaders noted: “We believe the national currency should be an affirmation of independence and sovereignty.”

To no avail; the East Timorese continue to be honorary Americans, in the economic sense.

Kosovo is another case in point. Kosovo became part of the Ottoman Empire in the 14th century, when the Turkish sultan overran what was then part of the Kingdom of Serbia. While it was once part of Serbia or Yugoslavia, a 1999 rebellion by Kosovo Albanians resulted in a bombing campaign by NATO and the occupation of the province by the UN. That year, the UN adopted the German mark as a replacement for the Serbian dinar. Use of the mark led directly to the imposition of the euro when the country declared independence in 2008. Yet, like East Timor, Kosovo remains in many ways a colony of the UN and various NGOs and international organizations. Because Kosovo hopes to join the EU one day, it has been using the euro rather than adopting the Albanian lek, the currency of its ethnically related neighbor.

Somaliland presents a more unique story. A large and sparsely populated country on the horn of Africa, Somaliland was initially colonized by the British. In 1960, after a few days of independence, it joined with Italian Somaliland to form modern-day Somalia. After years of misgovernment and a long running civil war, the territory decided to seek independence, which it declared in 1991. In 1994, Muhammad Haji Ibrahim Egal inaugurated a new currency, called the Somaliland shilling. The currency was briefly minted in England at the Pobjoy Mint, which prints money for 37 small countries and overseas territories. It doesn’t seem that the currency has been very successful, and it isn’t currently being minted.

Another breakaway republic, Western Sahara, was governed by its colonizer, Spain, until decolonization in 1975, when Morocco and Mauritania occupied the country.

The local independence movement briefly attempted to create its own currency called the Sahwari paseta, pegged to the old Spanish paseta.

Other countries have successfully established currencies. The post-Soviet states that gained independence in 1990 have mostly created their own currencies. Latvia, for instance, re-instituted the lats – once used in 1922 – to replace the ruble.

Perhaps it is interesting to look at Israeli history to see how a new currency can be created. The British invaded Palestine in 1917, but continued to use the Ottoman lira alongside the Egyptian pound until 1927.

In that year the Palestinian pound was introduced, and was pegged to the British pound. After independence, it took Israel four years to fully adopt the Israeli lira. By contrast, the Jordanians adopted the dinar in 1949. The Palestinian pound continued to circulate in the West Bank until 1950, when it was replaced by the Jordanian dinar, and in Gaza until 1951, when it was replaced by the Egyptian pound.

What do the Palestinians think they will use as a currency? On May 31, The Washington Post reported that there was some discussion about replacing the shekel, which is used in Gaza and the West Bank.

Jihad al-Wazir, governor of the Palestinian monetary authority, has noted that “all options are open.”

Some argue for bringing back the Palestinian pound. Others prefer a closer connection to the Jordanian dinar. One Palestinian woman with whom I spoke dismissed my confusion: “Won’t it be a Palestinian lira?”

The writer has a PhD from Hebrew University, and is a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies.

Interview with Alvin Rosenfled

2011-06-24T15:21:00.000-07:00

http://www.jpost.com/Features/InThespotlight/Article.aspx?ID=225867&R=R1
An interview with Alvin Rosenfeld,

Can we preserve the history, integrity of the Holocaust?
By SETH J. FRANTZMAN
06/21/2011 00:07

The Holocaust is “exploited for political or commercial gain,” engineered to “suit popular tastes and made into award-winning entertainments.”

Talkbacks (7)
The Holocaust is under siege. It is “exploited for political or commercial gain.” It is engineered to “suit popular tastes and made into award-winning entertainments,” and it is “embattled in ugly disputes about comparative victimization” – vulgarized, trivialized, contextualized. While some want to compare it to the plight of unborn children (abortion), others want to compare it to what has befallen the Palestinians.

Prof. Alvin H. Rosenfeld has placed himself astride the path of this out-of-control destructive tendency, attempting – as he writes in his book The End of the Holocaust – to articulate the “changing perception of the Holocaust within contemporary culture,” Rosenfeld is well-placed, as chair of Jewish Studies at Indiana University-Bloomington and director of the Indiana University Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism, to set the record straight.

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In an interview, he describes how this publication is a product of a lifetime of engagement with the subject.

“This book came from 40 years of reading Holocaust literature,” he says. “I’ve been writing on the subject for many years, but the deeper I go, the more I come to see a huge gap between how the Holocaust has been represented to the public in pop culture and other mass forms of dissemination, and what our best writers have said about it.”

Rosenfeld argues that many of these great writers, such as Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel and Jean Amery, “came to a sense of futility about their own work and a sense of despair. What was at the feet of that desolate feeling? I became convinced that it had to do with their perception that the Holocaust was being misrepresented and misunderstood. I set out to analyze this discrepancy.”

Levi died in 1987, and Amery died in the 1970s.

A good portion of the distortions of the Holocaust came after their deaths, so in fact they were concerned about a different distortion, one they saw in their own lifetimes.

“In both of their cases, what troubled them most of all was the response in Germany and the return of anti-Semitism, especially on the political Left,” says Rosenfeld. “Both of them identified with the Left, and they were surprised by [anti-Semitism’s] return.”

Emblematic of how the Holocaust can be distorted was the Bitburg affair. President Ronald Reagan planned to visit Germany in 1985, and he decided to visit a military cemetery in Bitburg that commemorated German war dead. This brought to the fore what Rosenfeld describes as “an extraordinary tension in historical awareness [and] moral evaluation” in America. Why should a US president pay respects to German war dead and ignore the Holocaust on a visit to Germany? But was this just a phenomenon of 1985? After all, a consciousness of the Holocaust has not diminished, and belief that the German soldiers were victims of the war has not grown.

Rosenfeld feels strongly that this is not the case: “Within Germany itself, the sense of victimhood has been developing very strongly over the last decades. While Germans in the main do acknowledge the crimes of the period, more and more, there has been a tendency to see themselves as victims, both of Hitler and of the firebombing campaign [by the Allies]. Some have gone so far as to call that a bombing holocaust. Reagan, in characteristic American fashion, wanted to put the past behind, to ‘move forward’ as Americans say. Reagan saw Holocaust memory as interfering with that relationship.”

The End of the Holocaust critiques “the steady domestication of the Holocaust [that] will blunt the horrors of this history and, over time, render them less outrageous, and ultimately less knowable.”

Is there a way to both communicate the history of the Holocaust to a mass audience and preserve its integrity? The author agrees that it is a tough question.

“My suggestion is for people to read the very best writers and see the very best films,” he says in the interview. “Pop culture gives us versions of the Holocaust, but the versions are often not as strong as the better accounts we have. We need to reconnect the Holocaust to history; it becomes disconnected in mass media and mass entertainment. I set out to describe and analyze the problem, but I’m not wise enough to come up with a solution.”

The problem of mass culture and the Holocaust inevitably brings up the controversy of Quentin Tarantino’s film Inglourious Basterds, which presents a fictionalized account of Jewish avengers who kill Hitler. Rosenfeld doesn’t object to this extreme fictionalization, noting that “it’s entertainment.”

One of the quintessential books dealing with the Holocaust is the diary of Anne Frank. But few are aware that Frank’s legacy was altered, partly by her own father, Otto, as Rosenfeld writes, “to place a preponderant emphasis on hope, peace and the advancement of tolerance.”

Pop culture consumers seem to prefer hope-driven narratives, but perhaps a greater dose of reality is necessary.

“Americans are ready to face up, to a certain degree, to crimes of the past, but they don’t want to feel that they can’t get beyond them. But we are talking about genocidal crimes of mass murder. It is difficult to look at that and come out with messages that are hopeful,” he says. “Americans require hopeful endings. Those who create Holocaust productions know that and do what is necessary to end on an up note, rather than a down note.

Schindler’s List is a very powerful film that has done a great deal to educate about the Holocaust, and it ends in a Catholic cemetery with the sun shining.”

Another of Rosenfeld’s themes is that “for most people, a sense [of] the Nazi crimes against the Jews is formed less by the record of events established by professional historians than by individual stories and images.” However, at the same time, he recounts all the abuses to which the Holocaust has been subjected by certain revisionist scholars, such as Norman Finkelstein. There is thus a paradox-driven tension: While mass media do not convey the perfect image of the Holocaust, they may sometimes convey a much better message than the distortions it has undergone at the hands of Hannah Arendt, Finkelstein, Ward Churchill and a long list of intellectuals.

The author thinks the central problem is that “Holocaust studies has become embattled. There is the notion that those of us who teach courses on the Holocaust are too parochial, as if there is something illegitimate even to treat the Holocaust by itself. They argue that it should be seen in the wider framework of genocide studies and racism. I deal with some of that in the book in the chapter called ‘The End of the Holocaust’... There are scholars who are saying the Holocaust must be relativized, contextualized, universalized. If we can do that correctly, it is for the good, but we certainly have the right to understand it in its own terms.”

Where the book most excels is in recalling certain cases that are indicative of larger trends. One of the most egregious of these is the way Frank’s Jewishness was removed from certain productions of her diary “to the point of deracinating her.” Furthermore, in a German translation, all references to her German-Jewish origins and the Germans as persecutors were removed. Rosenfeld explains that these changes are “known among some scholars, but it is not widely known... The diary that this young girl wrote is an important document.”

How the Holocaust is transmitted to future generations is important. Rosenfeld notes that “one of the issues I dealt with [in my research was] Holocaust memory, and how it is distorted and vulgarized. I am keenly aware that we are living in a time of resurgent anti-Semitism. One of the writers covered in the book who I knew personally was Primo Levi. In his last book, in the conclusion, he wrote[that] ‘it happened, therefore it can happen again.’ I found those words haunting – not that I expect a second Holocaust to occur tomorrow, but one must be aware that it can happen again, and one way to have that happen is to undo its original happening.”

Terra Incognita Europe Re-discovers its borders

2011-05-17T14:40:00.000-07:00

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=221027
Terra Incognita: Europe rediscovers its borders
By SETH J. FRANTZMAN
05/17/2011 22:47

The mass of people making their way to EU countries as a result of the Arab Spring has tested the wisdom of the EU’s Schengen Agreement.

Every once in a while, people rediscover something they previously knew. The greatest symbol of this phenomenon was Raphael’s fresco The School of Athens, completed in 1511, which showcased how Renaissance Europe was breathing new life into Greek philosophy. But one might also look to Columbus’s “discovery” of America. Not only had it obviously already been discovered by people crossing a land-bridge from Asia, but there is compelling evidence that the Vikings even had a colony at Newfoundland in the 11th century.

Now it seems Europe is rediscovering its borders after 25 years. In 1985, on the Moselle riverboat Princess Marie-Astrid, five European countries signed the Schengen Agreement. Under its conditions, West Germany, France, Belgium, Luxembourg and The Netherlands would abolish passport checks in favor of visual surveillance at border crossings. The Schengen Area was incorporated into the main body of European Union laws, known as the acquis communautaire, in 1997. This meant that all EU member states would be bound by these conventions, which basically abolished many functions associated with borders. New EU member states must implement the convention, that calls for free movement of goods and people.

There are several exceptions. Norway and Iceland are not part of the EU, but are signatories to the Schengen agreement. England and Ireland, both of which are part of the EU, have an opt-out right under the Schengen agreement, which means they maintain the right to determine who enters their countries from other EU states. By 2008, 25 states had eliminated their internal borders. Bulgaria and Romania, which joined the EU in 2007, are still in the process of implementing the Schengen agreement. All countries have the right, under Article 2.2 of the treaty, to temporarily suspend the agreement, usually for less than 30 days, if they feel their national security is threatened. France re-imposed some restrictions in the wake of the 2005 bombing attacks in London. Several countries have imposed border checks due to large sporting events like the World Cup, apparently to interdict soccer hooligans.

Problems with Schengen have begun to wear on those states that have embraced it. The UK and Ireland have complained that workers from Eastern European EU countries have exploited the agreement to move in, take over jobs and get benefits. In one comment on a travel website named vegabondjourney.com in 2010, a man wrote: “come in to uk thay [sic] let every polish person in even if thay carnt [sic] speak english, any one can claim benifits [sic] so why not everyone.”

The problem with Schengen is that it applies to all members of the EU, but each country still has the ability to grant residency, citizenship and refugee/asylum status to individuals without consulting the other countries. This means that a person obtaining asylum in one country may end up as a burden on another. Many of those wishing to immigrate or work in Europe come from Africa and the Middle East, and usually attempt to cross into Europe via Greece or Italy. Their intention is to get through the border controls that these “front line” states have in place and, once in Europe, exploit the open borders to move where they want. This means that all the internal European countries must rely on the efficiency and zealousness of Italians and Greeks – qualities for which neither country is particularly known – to safeguard their immigration laws.

The flood of refugees from North Africa in the aftermath of the revolution in Tunisia and the rebellion in Libya has put huge strains on the agreement. In February, the Hungarian president of the EU summoned the interior ministers of several member countries to “look at ways of preventing Arab refugees from flooding Europe. They acknowledged that this is not only a problem for member states in Southern Europe, but also for the entire EU,” according to a report on europa-nu.nl.

In April, Italy granted around 20,000 Tunisians temporary residency permits. Prior to this, the 20,000, almost all men, had been the responsibility of Italy’s border police, who were forced to house them on Italian islands to which they had fled. But the day after the men received EU permits, they began moving to Tunisia’s former colonial ruler, France, where some had family ties.

In response, French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s office declared that “the governance of Schengen is failing. It seems there is a need to reflect on a mechanism that will allow a temporary suspension of the agreement, in case of a systemic failure of an external (EU) border..., to intervene through a provisional suspension, until such time as the weakness is corrected.”

France saw itself being invaded by unemployed men, some of whom began living in parks in Paris and elsewhere. Sarkozy initially attempted to close the Italian border to the Tunisians, but under pressure from human rights groups and warnings from the EU, he opened it again. Now Denmark has gone further than France, re-imposing checkpoints and customs at its land border with Germany and the bridge that links it to Sweden. Fifteen other EU member states support curtailing the most liberal policies of Schengen.

Andrei Fedyashin of the newspaper RIA Novosti commented that “it appears that Europe has succumbed to good old xenophobia.”

A May 14 headline at the Independent screamed, “Europe is in danger of eroding one of its greatest achievements,” and the editorial claimed that “making it easier for EU member states to close their borders is the worst possible response.”

Yet the Schengen agreement itself was, in a sense, xenophobic. It was initially signed by countries with a common history (Rome, Charlemagne), political system (democracy), economic status (wealthy) and religion (Christianity) – before the advent of mass African and Middle Eastern immigration. Right-wing and Euroskeptic parties such as Finland’s True Finns and the Freedom Party in The Netherlands are demanding that illegal immigrants and legal asylum-seekers not be allowed to overrun their countries. They are right; large numbers of immigrants place a disproportionate burden on small countries, eroding their cultural norms.

Europe is rediscovering its borders, and in doing so, it is realizing that common sense demands that a country not rely on its neighbors to guarantee its security or culture.

The writer has a PhD from Hebrew University, and is a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies.

Terra Incognita: The Revolution Won't be Democratic

2011-04-24T11:15:00.001-07:00

Terra Incognita: The revolution wont' be democratic
By SETH J. FRANTZMAN
Jerusalem Post 04/19/2011 23:57
http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=217208

There was never a second Arab Awakening as it was never bounded by ideas, not even the democratic-Islamic ones.

Talkbacks (2)
There will be no great democratic revolutions in Egypt, Libya or Tunisia a year from now. What are the signs? Let’s start with the obvious. US President Barack Obama has wished the people of the Middle East a happy Passover. He claims that the story of Pessah is being relived today in the “modern stories of liberation” taking place in the Middle East: “This year, that ancient instruction is reflected in the daily headlines, as we see modern stories of social transformation and liberation unfolding in the Middle East and North Africa.”

If Obama said it, there’s good reason to think it won’t happen. It isn’t because I don’t like Obama. Obama is great; a great orator, a crowd pleaser, a man who warms the hearts of many. But he tends to speak rather than do, in the apparent belief that history will record his words and forget that they were empty. Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize without doing anything peaceful. He promised to close Guantanamo Bay, and that didn’t happen (it would have been a real Pessah miracle if he had brought terrorist inmates from the American base in Cuba to trial). He talked about getting America completely out of Iraq and doing something about Bin Laden in Pakistan, and that hasn’t transpired either.

But it isn’t just because Obama has been talking about freedom that we can be assured freedom is far away. If we go back and read the headlines about Egypt, we see that the usual good-natured, well-intentioned souls were telling us about how exciting it was to see what was happening in Tahrir square.

REMEMBER LARRY Derfner’s claim that “the incredibly brave people in Egypt inspire just about everyone in the world except us [Israelis].” Or Nicholas Kristof, of The New York Times, claiming that “a crude stereotype lingers that some people – Arabs, Chinese and Africans – are incompatible with democracy… [but] The record is that after some missteps, countries usually pull through.”

Let’s just put it mildly: those people who are inspired by the Egyptian revolution are the people I’d least trust to tell me which way the wind is blowing.

Why? Because they are so often wrong. Some of them are part of the same Michael Foucault dialectic that thought the Iranian revolution was going to produce progressive liberal democracy. Today’s Foucault – the anti-Israel University of California feminist philosopher Judith Butler – has claimed that “If the Muslim Brotherhood is elected to positions in [the Egyptian] government, and the elections are free and unconstrained, then that is a democratic outcome.”

The same progressive feminist philosopher has claimed “understanding Hamas, Hezbollah as social movements that are progressive, that are on the Left, that are part of a global Left, is extremely important.”

If the Butlers and Foucaults are so often on the side of totalitarian religious fanaticism in the guise of democratization, then it is hard to believe that we will see democracy in the Middle East, precisely because totalitarian religious fanaticism is not conducive to democratic institutions. In fact, this is what people have missed in Indonesia, which has often been held up as an example of where the Middle East might go.

Indonesia is not a great democracy. It is a country where ethnic and religious hatreds are common. Just recently, pornography was banned – not anti-democratic in itself, but part of a larger conquest of the public square by moralizing Islamists. A 19th-century Islamic religious movement called Ahmadiyya, that has many followers, has been banned in parts of the country. Democracies, at least the good ones, generally don’t ban whole religious sects.

The New York Times has done some excellent reporting on what the masses of inspired people got wrong about Egypt. Michael Slackman documented in late March that “religion has emerged as a powerful religious force” in politics, and the Muslim Brotherhood has been “transformed into a tacit partner with the military government.”

It turns out that all those who shouted, like canaries in the mine, about the role of the Brotherhood are being vindicated.

THE LATEST actions of the military in Egypt, banning Mubarak’s political party and jailing a blogger who “insulted” the military, are not very democratic. The same is true in Libya. The Times reporter C.J Chivers noted on April 6 that Libyan rebels are “less an organized force than the martial manifestation of a popular uprising.”

Fox News commentator Geraldo Rivera thinks “They are the worst army I’ve ever seen in the field, absolutely incompetent.”

How are things going in Tunisia? We don’t know. Syria? There, the nepotistic leaders are killing people, and neither Al- Jazeera nor the US State Department seem to care. Bahrain? The kingdom is on the brink of outlawing its Shia opposition, and is sending thugs house--to-house to roust them out. The failure of the revolutions in the Middle East is not the fault of all the well-wishers. It isn’t really the fault of the secular progressive youths, the rock throwers, the Islamists or the feeble boastful rebels in Libya with their bulging ammo belts. The fault lies in the fact that there was never a second Arab Awakening. It was never bounded by ideas, not even the democratic-Islamic ones that Judith Butler tells us we should embrace. Sometimes riots produce successful revolutions, witness the Boston Tea Party in 1770 or the bread riots before the French Revolution.

But rebellion without ideas is like mortar without bricks – just a bunch of grey crap.

The writer has a PhD from Hebrew University, and is a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies.

Terra Incognita 140: Islamism, Sex and the Old South

2011-04-05T14:01:00.000-07:00

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=215305
Terra Incognita: Sex, Islamism and the Old South
By SETH J. FRANTZMAN
04/05/2011 22:54

The relationship between conservative Muslim societies, slavery and prostitution is more common than one thinks.

In a shocking article in Harper’s Magazine Lawrence Osborne tells of a “Pilgrimage of Sin: Booze, bombs and hookers in Islamic Thailand.”

He regales his readers with the seeming contradiction between Malay Islamists in southern Thailand and the brothel culture they patronize. He meets five Muslim Malay men from Malaysia who have crossed into Thailand to visit the Pink Lady brothel. The five come from a southern state where Shari’a law has been enacted, and where the government considers Valentine’s Day “synonymous with vice activities.”

The author interviews local Malay men (southern Thailand has a large Malay minority), and finds that while they support the Islamist insurgents who murder Buddhist priests and kill policemen, they also love the female Buddhist prostitutes at the Pink Lady.

The relationship between Islamism, sex trafficking and prostitution is more common than one thinks. The 9/11 hijackers, Maj. Nidal Hasan of the Fort Hood massacre and radical preachers Abu Hamza al-Masri and Anwar Awlaki were all frequenters of strip clubs or prostitutes.

A RECENT article in The New York Times by Aubrey Belford reveals the latest twist in “Indonesia’s culture war between peddlers of titillation and Islamist conservatives.”

Ody Mulya Hidayat, an Indonesian Muslim filmmaker, has found a new secret to success – cast Japanese porn stars, with their clothes on, in his B movies like Evil Nurse 2. Aubrey writes that “many in Muslimmajority Indonesia will pay to see foreign porn stars perform – clothed – in local films. Just don’t expect Indonesians to own up to it.”

Why the obsession with Japanese porn stars in the “conservative” society of Indonesia, where porn is illegal and volunteer religious police routinely harass women for not dressing in appropriate Islamic attire? Perhaps the answer can be found in the deserts of Sinai.

A December 13 report entitled “Hostages, Torture and Rape in the Sinai Desert” by Physicians for Human Rights in Israel revealed that African migrants were branded, whipped and routinely raped by the Sinai Beduin. One young woman from Ethiopia related that the Beduin “would take me into the front of the pickup and do whatever they liked with me. The distress of this was too much for my husband.”

A third of the women interviewed by PHR claim to have been raped, and it is thought that many more are raped but, due to the shame, do not tell interviewers about it.

But when you go to the Sinai, the Beduin tell you they are a conservative Muslim society. They circumcise young girls, and their women are swaddled in embroidered black hijabs. So why does this “conservative” society engage in sex crimes against migrants? The same migrants in Israel are not raped by their employers, at least not that we know of.

THE ANSWER may lie in Iraq and the Gulf states. A recent article by the BBC related that “Ugandan women were trafficked into domestic slavery in Iraq.”

The report found 146 women who signed up to work in the country. Upon arrival they found they had been sold to Iraqis for $3,500. One woman recalled that she had been forced to work from 5 a.m. to midnight. She was also raped. Other women that Anna Cavel interviewed were raped as well. But Iraq is a conservative society. The women wear the black abaya, and since the fall of Saddam Hussein, the country has become more religious.

The story continues in the Gulf states. Many of the female domestic slaves (“servants”) imported from Sri Lanka, Nepal, Indonesia, the Philippines and elsewhere are subjected to sexual abuse. According to the Nepalese embassy in Saudi Arabia, “A majority of these women are raped, sexually assaulted, physically assaulted and have endured inhumane behavior.”

Lawrence Osborne, in his article on Thailand, related that some of the brothels in Bangkok were frequented primarily by Saudis and Gulf Arabs – people whose own countries either banned women from driving or have imprisoned Europeans “caught” making out on beaches.

All the stories related here have one thing in common.

A conservative culture claims moral superiority, but subjects members of other cultures to dehumanizing treatment and sexual abuse. It doesn’t seem like it can all coexist. But a very similar society existed in the American Old South.

The Old South was a conservative place, with a culture in some ways similar to what is found in the Islamic world. It was a society of large families that guarded the honor of their women. It imported servants and slaves, and took pride in its hospitality.

Historian David Hacket Fischer relates in his excellent book Albion’s Seed that this patriarchal society “condemned as unnatural and even dangerous to society” single men and women, and that arranged marriage was common.

The Byrd household of 18th-century Virginia may have been typical. The slaves were beaten and burned with hot irons. “Women were held to the strictest standards of sexual virtue. Men were encouraged by the customs of the country to maintain a predatory attitude toward women.”

William Byrd II kept a diary of his sexual exploits.

In a month-long debauch he “played with Mrs. Chiswell and kissed her on the bed... I neglected my prayers... we saw Molly King, a pretty black girl...[and] Jenny, an Indian girl, had got drunk and made us good sport... at night I asked a negro girl to kiss me... came to Mrs. Johnson and rogered her twice...I went to Mrs. Fitzherbert’s... walked away and picked up a girl whom I carried to the bagnio [bathroom] and rogered her twice very well... endeavored to pick up a whore but could not.”

Byrd would not be out of place in today’s Islamist states, where conservative laws, slavery, rape and sexual avarice can all be found in the same place.

Byrd’s diary reveals both his religious feelings – he complains often of “neglecting” his prayers – and his outright disregard for sexual mores. The “negro” and “Indian” women he encountered, the prostitutes and domestic white servants, were all fair game because of his sense of entitlement.

Is there any reason to think that the Beduin of Sinai or the Malays of southern Thailand feel differently?

The writer has a PhD from Hebrew University, and is a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies.

Terra Incognita Marwan Barghouti, Amos Oz, Haim Oron and a tale of darkness

2011-03-30T13:12:00.001-07:00

Marwan Barghouti, Amos Oz, Haim Oron and a tale of darkness
By SETH J. FRANTZMAN
03/29/2011 22:47
Jerusalem Post; http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=214328

Terra Incognita: The next time someone decides to invite Oz or Oron to speak, they shouldn’t waste time; they should cut to the chase and invite Barghouti himself.

Talkbacks (12)
Assaf Harofeh Medical Center did something strange recently. It invited an author who dedicated and sent a copy of his book to a terrorist to speak at a ceremony for outstanding doctors. The doctors at Assaf Harofeh have often treated victims of terror.

On September 9, 2003 eight soldiers were killed and 32 wounded in a suicide bombing near the hospital entrance. So how did it come to invite a speaker who consorts with terrorists whose victims the doctors might treat? The answer is not simple. The author happens to be the country’s most famous writer, Israel Prize laureate Amos Oz. On March 16 Yediot Aharonot reported that Oz had sent a book to convicted Palestinian terror leader Marwan Barghouti. He had become aware that Meretz MK Haim Oron was in the habit of visiting Barghouti in prison, and Oz asked him to take a copy of his 2002 book A Tale of Love and Darkness. The book is a namedropping account of the author’s early life on Kibbutz Hulda, where he met many lions of the early Zionist movement. It also discusses his family’s successes, failures and passions.

Oz sent Barghouti an Arabic translation with the inscription: “This story is our story. I hope you read it and understand us better, as we attempt to understand you. Hoping to meet soon in peace and freedom.”

On March 24 it was announced that Assaf Harofeh had cancelled the affair. Reports noted that “a senior doctor threatened to disrupt the ceremony” if Oz attended. After the cancellation the “free speech” alarm was sounded. Haaretz reported that a senior doctor claimed“it is hard to believe that because of one doctor who has certain political opinions, they revoked Oz’s invitation to the conference... That’s political interference in hospital matters.”

Gideon Levy condemned the “really sick” hospital’s “censorship” and Soviet-style “witch-hunt,” adding: “Heaven forbid if Oz wants Barghouti to get to know us better. But in 2011 Israel, this was enough to provoke aggression and censorship. Now it isn’t just Barghouti who is labeled as a monster, but Oz, too.”

Levy called Oz “a middle-of-the-road, profoundly Zionist and patriotic author” who should make us all proud because his works have been translated into more than a dozen languages. Oz also “dares” to speak truth to power, writing in The New York Times in June that “Hamas is not just a terrorist organization. Hamas is an idea – a desperate and fanatical idea that grew out of the desolation and frustration of many Palestinians.

No idea has ever been defeated by force.”

I DON’T know what Oz’s personal feelings are for Barghouti. But the facts are clear. Barghouti was born in 1959 in a village north of Ramallah. He comes from a large, well-known Palestinian family. He joined Fatah at 15 and co-founded its youth movement. He was a long-time militant and student activist, eventually receiving both a BA and MA. During the second intifada he led Fatah’s most militant sections – Tanzim and the Aksa Martyrs Brigades. The brigades were responsible for killing more than 100 people, mostly civilians inside the Green Line, between 2001 and 2006. Barghouti was arrested in April 2002 and convicted of five counts of murder.

So why did Israel’s leading author support giving this man freedom? Why, furthermore, did a hospital invite such an author to speak? Why does it appear that only one leading doctor protested against this person giving the keynote speech? Why is it considered “political” to ban Oz, but not political to invite him? No one wants to censor Oz. He is entitled to his opinions. He can send his book to whomever he wants: Islamists, neo-Nazis, jailed members of the Ku Klux Klan, the African warlord Charles Taylor. But why must his opinion be forced upon doctors whose job is to save lives? Why must his opinions be forced upon public institutions, whether hospitals, high schools or universities? There is a fetishism in the support Barghouti receives. Oron is a major supporter. In a March interview he gave to Haaretz, the interviewer, Gidi Weitz, noted that “in the past few years, Oron has visited Hadarim Prison, in the center of the country, every few weeks to see his friend Marwan Barghouti.”

Oron believes Barghouti is a great supporter of the Israeli Left – a “super-significant figure” like a Nelson Mandela, a “partner for dialogue” who does not renounce his “right to an armed struggle.”

It seems to me that Oron and his friends support Barghouti partly out of a sense that history will judge them like it judged the Afrikaners who sat down with Mandela. They also support him because they believe only he can unify the Palestinians. But does it seem strange that within Israel there are so many wellknown, cultured, progressive Jewish voices who not only want to befriend a murderer but also believe it is important to unify Hamas and Fatah? Barghouti is a super-significant figure. But just because he can unify Palestinians doesn’t mean Jews should support him. It would be like Turks supporting the jailed Kurdish nationalist Abdullah Ocalan. It would be like the Palestinians supporting the release of Jewish nationalist settlers under the theory that only they can unify Israel against the Palestinians.

Oron and Oz work on behalf of the Palestinians to get Barghouti released. Oron calls Barghouti a “moderate,” but he is only moderate like Mussolini was moderate compared to Hitler or Lenin was moderate compared to Stalin. Barghouti is like summer at the North Pole; it is moderate compared to winter.

The next time someone decides to invite Oz or Oron to speak, they shouldn’t waste time; they should cut to the chase and invite Barghouti himself. At least that would be honest. And moderate.

The writer has a PhD from Hebrew University, and is a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies.

Terra Incognita 138 Libya's Big Mess

2011-03-23T08:52:00.000-07:00

Terra Incognita: A recipe for a big mess
By SETH J. FRANTZMAN at the Jerusalem Post
http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=213348
03/22/2011 23:43

The central problem with the intervention in Libya is the lack of a clear goal.

Talkbacks (8)
Take two parts Muammar Gaddafi. Add one part rebellion and a pinch of African and Eastern European mercenaries. Season with UN and NATO air strikes and let simmer. That is the dish being brewed in Libya. Every day, more news of nonsense comes out of that country. It’s worth summing up some of it and contemplating the chances for failure in light of this half-hearted foreign intervention.

“War in the desert is warfare in its purest form.”

Such were the words of Gen. Kress von Kressenstein upon observing the 1917 battle of Gaza, in which the British used tanks against the German defenses.

But the rebellion in Libya is far from pure warfare.

The battle for Libya is between feeble rebel units that display much bravado to reporters but little in battle, and Gaddafi’s wishy-washy army.

Like the current conflict, World War II in Africa was a seesaw affair. In 1940 Italy – which occupied Libya – invaded British-occupied Egypt. But, like the Libyan rebels, the Italian army, despite its bravado, became bogged down and the British quickly beat it back toward Tripoli. In March 1941 the Axis forces, now reinforced with Erwin Rommel’s German units, overran the British and forced them back to Egypt, much like Gaddafi rolled back the rebels. The Germans surrounded several British units in Tobruk, near the Egyptian border, and laid siege to them for 240 days. In June 1942 Rommel once again defeated the British, this time forcing them to within 70 miles of Alexandria. But as we know, the war did not end there; the Germans were again driven back, this time for good.

AS IN the desert war, the Libyan conflict has lurched from crisis to crisis. In late February, sporadic protests turned into a genuine rebellion. Rebels captured arms in Benghazi, capital of eastern Libya. For two weeks it seemed that the Libyan regime was finished. Newspapers printed maps showing most of Libya in rebel hands. But things apparently were changing. After defections by some army units, Gaddafi brought in African mercenaries to bolster his dwindling cadre of loyalists. By March 5, his army had been reorganized, and he unleashed it against rebel forces around Tripoli.

There have been reports that Gaddafi’s offensive was bolstered by Eastern European mercenaries, who, unlike the African recruits, would have been familiar with Soviet equipment such as T-72 tanks. Whatever the case, by March 10 the government forces had recaptured Zawiya near Tripoli and Ras Lanuf, between Tripoli and Benghazi. By March 16, both Brega and Ajdabiya were in government hands.

The rebels have repeatedly made blustery statements. Just prior to suffering a string of defeats around March 10, they had given Gaddafi mere hours to leave the country. They have made claims regarding recruitment, describing enlistment drives that armed 5,000 men and then another 8,000. But rebel spokesman Abdel Hafiz Ghoga claimed on March 20 that 8,000 rebels had been killed in fighting. The rebels have boasted of receiving defectors who have brought over tanks and airplanes.

They possess at least a few warplanes, but one of them, a MiG-23, was shot down on March 19. They have fired rockets wildly and adorned themselves with belts of ammo to give the impression of being well-armed. They talk about receiving military aid from Saudi Arabia and Egypt. On March 16 it was reported that Khalifa Belqasim Haftar, a former Libyan commando officer, had returned to fight alongside the rebels.

But the rebels show little military prowess. Nonetheless, they received a boost on March 17, when the UN imposed a no-fly zone over Libya. On March 19 French planes began bombing Libyan tanks in the suburbs of Benghazi.

Further raids by British and American planes followed. So now the road for the rebels is once again open between Benghazi and Adjabiya.

BUT THE central problem with the intervention in Libya is its lack of a goal. It is not about killing Gaddafi: US Defense Secretary Robert Gates has said it would be “unwise” to kill him, and UK Gen.

Sir David Roberts claims his country hasn’t targeted him because the UN does not permit such action.

It is not about helping the rebels: Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, has said there could very well be a stalemate in the aftermath of air strikes, and both President Barack Obama and British MPs have said there are no plans for ground troops. Justin Crump, a contributor to Al Jazeera on military affairs, correctly notes that airpower is not a panacea, and will almost certainly not be enough to tip the balance against Gaddafi.

The rebels seem incompetent. So unless the world is incredibly lucky, intervention there seems to be a recipe for a big mess. Unending conflict in Libya is not in the interest of anyone. With uncertainty already casting a pall over Egypt, Tunisia and increasingly over Yemen, Syria and Bahrain, and chaos having given rise to Hezbollah and Hamas in Lebanon and Gaza, it can’t possibly be good to have a long stalemate in Libya which, until a few months ago, had the highest GDP per capita in North Africa, at around $14,000 (Israel’s is $29,000). Egypt and Morocco were less than half that.

Plunging a relatively wealthy country back into the dark ages, akin to Saddam’s Iraq between 1985 and 2005, is not good either. And getting Libyans hooked on foreign aid, like Kosovo, East Timor, Haiti, Gaza and some African countries, will also spell trouble.

The dish being prepared in Libya needs to be tossed out in favor of a more positive future.

The writer has a PhD from Hebrew University, and is a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies.

Terra Incognita The decline of the Israel Prize

2011-03-15T14:00:00.001-07:00

Terra Incognita: The decline of the Israel Prize
By SETH FRANTZMAN
03/15/2011 22:29
http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=212298

Is this country so bereft of good people that none can be found who doesn’t describe Jews as ‘apes’ or compare Jewish politicians to Nazis?

How low did things have to get so that the Israel Prize – the country’s highest civilian honor – is routinely awarded to people who feel outright contempt for their fellow citizens? One was reminded of this last week, when it was revealed that singer Yehoram Gaon had said of Mizrahi music: “It’s rubbish that even the devil didn’t create.”

His comments were tame compared to those by prize laureate Natan Zach, who last year described Sephardi Jews as cave dwellers on national television.

Since its inception in 1953, the prize has been awarded to individuals in a variety of categories such as culture, sciences, the humanities and special contributions to the nation. Over the years more annual prizes have been awarded (14 in 2010), for a total of 633. Several people received the prize twice, and one – architect Ram Karmi – was the brother and son of recipients. Beginning in the 1990s, numerous anti-Israel people have received the prize.

Controversy began in 1992, when the Arab nationalist and communist Emile Habibi received the prize. The nomination caused scientist Yuval Neeman to return his.

Awarding the prize to people who don’t like Israel was inaugurated by education minister Shulamit Aloni in 1992 (she also received the prize in 2000). Aloni has declared that this is an apartheid state in the online magazine Counterpunch (January, 2007). She compared Yitzhak Rabin to Mussolini in 1989 and Binyamin Netanyahu to Joseph Goebbels in 1999.

The next controversial person to almost receive it was Yeshayahu Leibowitz, the philosophy professor who called this a “Judeo-Nazi” state. However, he declined the prize.

In 1997 the prize was almost awarded to Ma’ariv columnist Shmuel Shnitzer, who had written an article in 1994 entitled “Importing Death” (sometimes translated as “Importing Blood”), in which he argued that Ethiopian Jews were “thousands of apostates carrying dangerous diseases.” His nomination was only blocked by the High Court.

Aloni was given the prize in 2000 by her Meretz Party colleague Yossi Sarid when he was serving as education minister. No one asked whether there was a conflict of interest. In 2003 the prize was awarded to artist Moshe Gershoni, who refused to accept it because he didn’t want to shake hands with prime minister Ariel Sharon or education minister Limor Livnat.

In 2004 Yuval Tumarkin, a sculptor, received the prize. Tumarkin described religious Jews as “a mob... [of] primitives and monkeys... When one sees the haredim, one understands why there was a Holocaust.” oroccan Jews were “descended from a nation of primitive parasites.”

In 2005 Alex Levac, famed photographer of the bus 300 affair, received the prize. He said after that “although the prize was given to me by the officialdom, they are not the ones who choose me” – an apparent reference to his respect for the cultured members of the selection committee. He accepted his prize despite his revulsion at the “officials” who gave it to him.

Prof. Ze’ev Sternhell received the prize in 2008 despite a 2001 column in Haaretz in which he suggested that “there is no doubt about the legitimacy of armed resistance in the territories themselves. If the Palestinians had a little sense, they would concentrate their struggle against the settlements... and refrain from planting bombs west of the Green Line.”

NOT EVERYONE has stood silently by while the prizes were given to Israel-haters. Writer Carol Novis compared rewarding a prize to unsavory characters to appreciating Wagner, who was a great artist and a bad man. Uri Avnery went further, arguing that those who stirred controversy by getting the prize should be happy not to receive it, for the real prize is that they are moral people standing against the state. Jerusalem Post columnist Jonathan Rosenblum condemned the continuing awarding of the prize to intolerant individuals. But this misses the point.

Is Israel so bereft of good and brilliant people that none can be found who has contributed greatly to arts and culture and who doesn’t describe Jews as “apes” or compare Jewish politicians to Nazis? Why did Aloni receive the prize but not Shimon Peres or Menahem Porush? Perhaps when it comes to the latter it is because the prize has almost never been awarded to a religious Jew (let alone a Sephardi one).

Jews from Muslim countries make up a third of the population, yet, by my own estimate, only about 2 percent of Israel Prizes have gone to them. Unfortunately, the prize is generally awarded to people from a very narrow, selfappointed elite. In these circles it seems that comments about Sephardim being “from caves” and haredim being “monkeys” are acceptable. No member of this elite seems to recall which culture produced the Holocaust.

YUVAL NEEMAN was right to return the prize; it has become, like some Groucho Marx joke, a club to which one would not want to belong.

The fact that people like Zach are only “outed” as racists years after receiving the prize doesn’t say much. If they describe Sephardim as cave-dwellers on national television, what do they do in private? If they write in a major paper that Ethiopian Jews are disease-ridden, what curses must they hurl in the company of friends? And it’s not about “freedom of speech.” The freedom of Zach and Tumarkin to hate other Jews is not in question; they are welcome to wallow in their sewer of hate. It’s just that a sewer shouldn’t deserve an award for being the best cesspool on the block.

The writer has a PhD from Hebrew University, and is a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies.

Terra Incognita 138 Libya Many Collaborators, Little Romance

2011-03-08T13:08:00.001-08:00

Terra Incognita: Libya: Many collaborators, little romance
By SETH J. FRANTZMAN
Jerusalem Post
http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Op-EdContributors/Article.aspx?id=211331

03/08/2011 22:47

The long-running attachment West had to Gaddafi puts in perspective the subsequent lack of interest in rebels now fighting his tyranny.

Can someone tell me why the world’s press rushed to Tahrir Square in Cairo and cooed about how wonderful that uprising was, yet cares little for Libya?

By all standards, the Libyan situation seems more heroic. Photos show jury-rigged pickups with anti-aircraft guns mounted atop them to shield the protesters from Muammar Gaddafi’s Russian-made aircraft. They show old men waving antique rifles and swords while fighting marauding gangs of mercenaries who shoot into crowds. Isn’t all that more courageous than the protesters at Tahrir who, for the most part, were not harmed on such a large scale?

But there are few op-eds waxing poetic about Libyan freedom fighters. Nicholas Kristof, the inveterate New York Times columnist, is a good example. He wrote four laudatory columns between February 1 and 6 about Egypt. They included “Exhilarated by hope in Cairo” and “We are all Egyptians.”

But on Libya he was bored, noting on February 24 that “it’s time to nudge Col. Muammar Gaddafi from power.”

Nudge? And on March 2 he really got down to business with, “Let’s ratchet up the pressure toward a peaceful outcome.”

Such strong language!

Kristof is typical of a malaise about Libya. Is it really just because the press got used to rebellion in the Middle East? It seems that the big yawn is more about the fact that Libya doesn’t fit the right model. Gaddafi is an anti- Western socialist in the mold of Fidel Castro, an exotic part-time crazy person. He banged his fists at the UN; he carted around a big Beduin tent that he forced countries to allow him to pitch where he pleased. He postured and posed in robes that seemed like they came from the set of a movie about 1970s pimps. He wasn’t a fat, US-funded dictator and friend of Israel.

Because, for all the talk about how the Egyptian revolution wasn’t about Israel, there sure were a lot of headlines in the Economist, BBC and New York Times about how Israelis were sourpusses for not celebrating the downfall of Mubarak.

Had Gaddafi been the best friend of the Jewish state, would we not be hearing more about the inspiration of the Arabs throwing off the dictator? Or had he been some Western- supported regime, like Mubarak, with US airplanes bombing the protesters, wouldn’t there be some huge outcry about the “propped-up dictator” murdering Arabs in the street?

WE WILL never know why Libya didn’t inspire. We won’t ever know why Palestinians with slingshots and checkered keffiyehs make people weak in the knees, while the same people 1,000 miles away are boring.

But the lack of romance hides a more intriguing question: Why, for decades, did so many people and countries collaborate with the barbaric regime in Tripoli? I’m not speaking only of business interests like British Petroleum, but politicians, prominent leftist activists, academics, human rights programs and universities. The latest scandal involves the London School of Economics, which accepted $488,000 from Gaddafi’s son, Saif al-Islam. Saif also received a doctorate from LSE, which is now being probed for plagiarism and was invited to give a speech at the university in 2010. Reports noted that he declared democracy to be the best system of government for his country.

But the ties between the LSE and Gaddafi are only the tip of a giant iceberg.

The West was wooed by Gaddafi after 9/11, when the regime attempted to portray itself as fighting Islamic terrorism. After the 2003 Iraq War, Gaddafi ostentatiously abandoned a nuclear weapons program. In murky dealings that are still not clear, the Scottish government released the Lockerbie bomber, Abdelbaset al-Mughrabi, in 2009 because he was supposedly dying of cancer. Mughrabi was given a hero’s welcome in Libya, and is still alive. Now it appears the UK government had some underhanded role in that release.

But releasing terrorists and giving the crooked sons of a dictator PhDs isn’t enough. The UN time and again gave Gaddafi a stamp of approval, first in 2003 when Libya was elected leader of the UN Commission on Human Rights. In 2010, 155 countries voted to put Libya on the Human Rights Council. Just prior to that event Ali Treki – a Libyan diplomat – was elected president of the UN General Assembly. This, despite the fact that he said in a 1983 speech: “Is it not the Jews who are exploiting the American people and trying to debase them? If we succeed in eliminating that entity, we shall by the same token save the American and European peoples.”

But why would a raving anti-Semite not head part of the UN, and a brutal dictatorship not be in charge of human rights?

Leading celebrities time and again patronized the Gaddafi family. Usher, Nelly Furtado, Beyonce and Mariah Carey all performed at lavish parties for them. When Gaddafi was in Italy in June of 2009, he asked to meet 1,000 prominent Italian women. And, no surprise, they came in droves to sit and listen to the dictator, much like Columbia University lapped up Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s speech in 2007.

According to one report, “there were leading figures from politics, culture and industry; ministers posed for cameras, lawyers talked earnestly... in their seats and reality TV personalities blew kisses across the aisles.”

Human Rights Watch has been accused of “marketing Gaddafi” by praising his son Saif for creating “an expanded space for discussion and debate.”

Groups of activists, including Israeli- Arab MK Haneen Zoabi, have made pilgrimages to Tripoli.

The long-running attachment the West had to Gaddafi puts in perspective the subsequent lack of interest in the rebels now fighting his tyranny. Gaddafi and his henchmen should never have been given a pulpit at the UN, in Italy, at the LSE, or anywhere else, and hopefully sooner rather than later the rebels will remove them from power.

The writer has a PhD from Hebrew University, and is a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies.

Terra Incognita The Sky is Falling

2011-03-08T13:07:00.001-08:00

Terra Incognita: The sky is falling (maybe)!
By SETH FRANTZMAN
Jerusalem Post
03/01/2011 22:54

Things are always ‘exploding’ or ‘ticking’ or ‘being pushed toward an uprising’ or ‘civil war’ in this country.
Talkbacks (5)
If this country were a coal mine, it would be full of canaries. The canary is, so we are told, especially sensitive to noxious gas, so when it stops singing, it means disaster is coming. There are lots of canaries here. They sing and sing, but they don’t stop. Consider what they sing about.

The coming Druse intifada. In 2009, a group of Druse protested outside the Prime Ministers Office. According to reports “Hamud Jabar, the head of a Druse regional council in northern Israel, warned in remarks to Ynet that if the demands presented on Sunday are not met, the Druse may launch an intifada of their own, similar to the Palestinian terrorist campaigns against Israel.”

The Druse demanded cancellation of taxes, and complained of budgetary discrimination.

One sign read: “A Druse is as good as a Jew in war, but when it comes to budgets, 10 Druse children are equal to one Jewish child.”

But it was the same in 2007. In that yearHaaretz ran a headline titled “A Druse intifada?” What prompted the accompanying article was an incident in Yirka in which a Jewish man, Ari Tal, appointed to run the local council, was abused and thrown out of the village, which was about NIS 68 million in debt. The reason was that only 14 percent of the residents paid taxes, and only 8% paid their electric bills. Yet the article noted that the village “has become one of the biggest shopping complexes in the North.”

As a message to the next person who might be appointed to run the village, a coffin was placed outside the municipality.

The statement was clear: let us run our own affairs, or else. The former council head, Rafik Salameh, claimed, “It’s impossible to protect him. And I fear that his arrival in the village will be the opening salvo of the Druse intifada.”

After riots in the Druse village of Peki’in in October 2007, more talk was heard about the coming “explosion.”

But it hasn’t happened, yet.

The imminent Negev Beduin uprising.

Because the government will not give the Negev Beduin some 800,000 dunams of land and won’t recognize their 50 illegally constructed villages there is, supposedly, an imminent danger they may rise up.

Most often in the news is the hamlet of al- Arakib – site of a few ramshackle structures that has become a hot spot in the Beduin squatting campaign. Month after month the Beduin settlers return, and month after month the Israel Lands Authority and police destroy the place.

MK Taleb a-Sanaa (United Arab List- Ta’al), who is a Beduin, claimed “the state is pushing its Beduin citizens to the point where they may launch a popular intifada, which will have severe results.”

In 2010 Haaretz noted: “It’s hard to understand why Israel is pushing a significant sector of its citizens toward extremism and crime.”

But we have heard it before. In 1998, Dr. Elie Rekhes of Tel Aviv University’s Program on Arab Policies warned The Jerusalem Post of a “Beduin intifada” unless urgent steps were taken. Am Johal reported on Antiwar.com in 2004 that people are “predicting a coming Beduin intifada.”

Muhammad Zeidan, head of the Arab Human Rights Association, noted “they are being pushed to do this.”

Max Marshall of the College of New Jersey called it “a ticking time bomb” in 2006. It’s still ticking, evidently.

The eventual boiling over of ‘mixed’ towns.

This is always a cause for concern. The “gentrification” or “Judaization” of Jaffa, Ramle, Haifa, Lod and Acre is always, supposedly, pushing people toward an intifada. Kenneth Bandler writing at The Jerusalem Post noted last year that MK Haneen Zoabi was warning of a “third Palestinian intifada... this time the uprising will come from within Israel.”

Similar things were heard in 2007, after rioting by Arabs and Jews in Acre on Yom Kippur. In 2002, Effi Oshaya of the Labor Party warned of an Israeli-Arab intifada in an interview with a publication called Let’s Talk Peace.

WHAT ELSE is boiling over? Well, Gaza and the West Bank, to be sure. East Jerusalem: Meir Margalit claimed in these pages that “the daily humiliation suffered by residents is reaching a boiling point, and it’s only a matter of time until a conflagration erupts... the Arabs of east Jerusalem have been humiliated and trampled upon for years. Here too, patience is running out.”

He titled his article, “The 10 plagues of east Jerusalem.” He had written a similar article for Occupation magazine in 2009.

Then it was: “Several moves have made their lives unbearable and – the most difficult to bear – they feel their honor is being trodden underfoot.”

AND LEBANON. Egypt. Jordan. Things are always “exploding” or “ticking” or “being pushed toward an uprising.” The haredim, are they on the brink too? What of the foreign workers? And who recalls now all the talk of a “civil war” with the settlers? Remember the insights about “radicalization,” “alienation” and the “wild weeds.”

And the radical academics and anti-Israel crazies – are they also being “pushed” toward an intifada? We might be lucky the government doesn’t care too much. It means that grievances aren’t being addressed, but it also means officials don’t run around as if the sky is falling trying to fix problems partly of their own making.

Maybe there will be intifadas, but there’s very little that can be done about it except to abandon the Negev to squatters, stop asking Druse villages to pay taxes or relinquish control of east Jerusalem. And that won’t happen.

In coal mines, the canaries stopped singing when an explosion was actually imminent. Too bad human prognosticators aren’t as reliable. The least they could do is be quiet, but that too won’t happen.

The writer has a PhD from Hebrew University, and is a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies.

Terra Incognita 136 Honor Killings in Israel

2011-03-04T00:42:00.001-08:00

Terra Incognita: A communal state of denial
By SETH J. FRANTZMAN
02/22/2011 23:11

Another day, another honor killing that goes unpunished.

Talkbacks (3)
On January 20, sometime after nightfall a pretty, dark-haired, 19-year-old woman arrived at the Central Bus Station in Ramle. At the corner of Herzl and Bialik streets, she hailed a taxi and asked to be taken to the Jawarish neighborhood on the eastern outskirts of the town. She didn’t get very far. The taxi stopped at a light and a man from a neighboring car got out and shot her several times.

Initial news reports minimized and confused the story, saying she got shot while getting out of the taxi. Another early report made it seem like the bullet was a stray. Ramle is a rough town, and it seems that some people assumed this was just a tragic accident. Eventually it emerged that the woman, Alla Dahar, was a promising medical student and a resident of the upper-class neighborhood of Kababir in Haifa – a community composed of the tiny Ahmadiyya Muslim sect.

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Within hours of her murder the police had arrested a suspect, Hassam Abu Ghanem, 24, a former boyfriend. It turns out Dahar was not a passive victim. She had complained to the police in Haifa in May that her boyfriend had threatened to kill her, and had assaulted her when she expressed a desire to study abroad. For 10 days the police did nothing. When they informed the police in Ramle of the complaint, the police there closed the file; by then, Dahar was already abroad, so why cause trouble?

Some people will be quick to say that the lack of police interest is entirely related to the Arab ethnicity of the people involved. But that’s not the whole story. It’s not the first time police received complaints from a woman, Jewish or Arab, about abuse and didn’t do anything. The police sometimes do embarrassingly little to investigate serious cases, as is clear from the story about Neta Blatt- Sorek, whose murder at the hand of terrorists at Beit Jimal was initially ruled a suicide.

THE REAL story about the Dahar murder is not just about police incompetence. It isn’t just about an enterprising young woman who wanted to make something of herself, and whose only mistake was to go out with the wrong man. It is also about the great and terrible stae of denial regarding ‘honor’ killings, and the conspiracy of silence and lies surrounding them. After Dahar was murdered her mother, Marwa, told the media her daughter had never been in a relationship with the suspect, or been threatened.

But ‘honor’ killings and denial in Ramle are a sort of national pasttime.

In 2007, 20 female relatives of the Abu Ghanem clan came forward to police with stories of a reign of terror in their neighborhood. The Abu Ghanems are a Beduin clan that moved to Ramle in the 1950s and number around 2,000 people. They dominate the Jawarish neighborhood.

Over an eight-year period, nine female members of the family had been murdered to defend “family honor.”

In 2008, Dalia Abu Ghanem, a 16- year-old mother, disappeared. In 2000 her mother had been murdered, and in 2006 her sister, who was 15, was also murdered. Hamda Abu Ghanem, 18, wanted to be a nurse. Instead, she was beaten by her brother in 2007, ostensibly because she refused an arranged marriage. She called the police, and they appear to have done nothing. Then she was murdered, shot nine times in bed.

Reem Abu Ghanem, 19, was strangled to death.

Murder after murder, a long line of blood and body bags for just one community. The women are buried in unmarked graves – typical of cases where “honor” is involved. But the public receives the story in a different way. In neighboring Lod (another mixed town), two women were murdered in October. In total 20 Muslim women were slain in Ramle and Lod between 2005 and 2010.

After the spate of murders in Lod there were protests. Not against the men doing the killing. Not against the culture of “honor” which values a woman less than a car. The protest was against the government. This was a typical line of approach to the murders in Lod: It’s all about neglect, a lack of investment in the police force and the Arab community.

Arab MKs led the way. Jamal Zahalka (Balad) said: “I am against sweeping anything under the carpet, and in our community – just like in any community – there are men who use violence against women for all sorts of reasons, especially to prove their masculinity.” Afo Agbaria (Hadash): “The media is always so quick to label these murders honor killings, but we have to take these words out of our lexicon because every murder of a woman must be viewed as a murder, and nothing more.” Ahmed Tibi (Raam Ta’al) suggested banning the use of the phrase “honor killing” when referring to these types of crimes, and making it easier for relatives to sue the newspapers that describe the killings this way.

THIS IS the state of denial. The police do very little to prevent these killings, because the Arab community won’t cooperate with them, they lack resources and they are, unfortunately, incompetent. The community claims the killings don’t even happen, it’s all “mistaken identity” (you might ask yourself here, why then so many men aren’t being gunned down by stray bullets and buried in unmarked graves). For the Arab leadership, the words should simply disappear. For the Jewish public it is about neglect, and it is the government’s fault.

The extreme sense of hopelessness and denial can be seen in the statement by one Arab woman from Lod to the media: “The minute the police describe a murder as an ‘honor killing,’ it severely damages [the reputation of] the family for generations to come.”

The tragedy of this point of view is palpable. Honor killings can be stopped. The first step should be the passage of a bill to make them like hate crimes and crimes involving criminal conspiracy in the US. This will provide special tools to prosecutors and the police. The criminals involved should receive twice, maybe three times the normal sentence for murder.

But it mustn’t end with enforcement. Women in Arab communities must be empowered to speak out, whether via better witness protection or more avenues, and to feel that their culture and hardships are understood and respected.

The writer has a PhD from Hebrew University and is a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies.
http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=209432

Terra Incognita 135 Israel's Prophets of Doom

2011-03-04T00:40:00.001-08:00

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=210393
Terra Incognita: The sky is falling (maybe)!
By SETH FRANTZMAN
03/01/2011 22:54

Things are always ‘exploding’ or ‘ticking’ or ‘being pushed toward an uprising’ or ‘civil war’ in this country.

Talkbacks (5)
If this country were a coal mine, it would be full of canaries. The canary is, so we are told, especially sensitive to noxious gas, so when it stops singing, it means disaster is coming. There are lots of canaries here. They sing and sing, but they don’t stop. Consider what they sing about.

The coming Druse intifada. In 2009, a group of Druse protested outside the Prime Ministers Office. According to reports “Hamud Jabar, the head of a Druse regional council in northern Israel, warned in remarks to Ynet that if the demands presented on Sunday are not met, the Druse may launch an intifada of their own, similar to the Palestinian terrorist campaigns against Israel.”

The Druse demanded cancellation of taxes, and complained of budgetary discrimination.

One sign read: “A Druse is as good as a Jew in war, but when it comes to budgets, 10 Druse children are equal to one Jewish child.”

But it was the same in 2007. In that year Haaretz ran a headline titled “A Druse intifada?” What prompted the accompanying article was an incident in Yirka in which a Jewish man, Ari Tal, appointed to run the local council, was abused and thrown out of the village, which was about NIS 68 million in debt. The reason was that only 14 percent of the residents paid taxes, and only 8% paid their electric bills. Yet the article noted that the village “has become one of the biggest shopping complexes in the North.”

As a message to the next person who might be appointed to run the village, a coffin was placed outside the municipality.

The statement was clear: let us run our own affairs, or else. The former council head, Rafik Salameh, claimed, “It’s impossible to protect him. And I fear that his arrival in the village will be the opening salvo of the Druse intifada.”

After riots in the Druse village of Peki’in in October 2007, more talk was heard about the coming “explosion.”

But it hasn’t happened, yet.

The imminent Negev Beduin uprising.

Because the government will not give the Negev Beduin some 800,000 dunams of land and won’t recognize their 50 illegally constructed villages there is, supposedly, an imminent danger they may rise up.

Most often in the news is the hamlet of al- Arakib – site of a few ramshackle structures that has become a hot spot in the Beduin squatting campaign. Month after month the Beduin settlers return, and month after month the Israel Lands Authority and police destroy the place.

MK Taleb a-Sanaa (United Arab List- Ta’al), who is a Beduin, claimed “the state is pushing its Beduin citizens to the point where they may launch a popular intifada, which will have severe results.”

In 2010 Haaretz noted: “It’s hard to understand why Israel is pushing a significant sector of its citizens toward extremism and crime.”

But we have heard it before. In 1998, Dr. Elie Rekhes of Tel Aviv University’s Program on Arab Policies warned The Jerusalem Post of a “Beduin intifada” unless urgent steps were taken. Am Johal reported on Antiwar.com in 2004 that people are “predicting a coming Beduin intifada.”

Muhammad Zeidan, head of the Arab Human Rights Association, noted “they are being pushed to do this.”

Max Marshall of the College of New Jersey called it “a ticking time bomb” in 2006. It’s still ticking, evidently.

The eventual boiling over of ‘mixed’ towns.

This is always a cause for concern. The “gentrification” or “Judaization” of Jaffa, Ramle, Haifa, Lod and Acre is always, supposedly, pushing people toward an intifada. Kenneth Bandler writing at The Jerusalem Post noted last year that MK Haneen Zoabi was warning of a “third Palestinian intifada... this time the uprising will come from within Israel.”

Similar things were heard in 2007, after rioting by Arabs and Jews in Acre on Yom Kippur. In 2002, Effi Oshaya of the Labor Party warned of an Israeli-Arab intifada in an interview with a publication called Let’s Talk Peace.

WHAT ELSE is boiling over? Well, Gaza and the West Bank, to be sure. East Jerusalem: Meir Margalit claimed in these pages that “the daily humiliation suffered by residents is reaching a boiling point, and it’s only a matter of time until a conflagration erupts... the Arabs of east Jerusalem have been humiliated and trampled upon for years. Here too, patience is running out.”

He titled his article, “The 10 plagues of east Jerusalem.” He had written a similar article for Occupation magazine in 2009.

Then it was: “Several moves have made their lives unbearable and – the most difficult to bear – they feel their honor is being trodden underfoot.”

AND LEBANON. Egypt. Jordan. Things are always “exploding” or “ticking” or “being pushed toward an uprising.” The haredim, are they on the brink too? What of the foreign workers? And who recalls now all the talk of a “civil war” with the settlers? Remember the insights about “radicalization,” “alienation” and the “wild weeds.”

And the radical academics and anti-Israel crazies – are they also being “pushed” toward an intifada? We might be lucky the government doesn’t care too much. It means that grievances aren’t being addressed, but it also means officials don’t run around as if the sky is falling trying to fix problems partly of their own making.

Maybe there will be intifadas, but there’s very little that can be done about it except to abandon the Negev to squatters, stop asking Druse villages to pay taxes or relinquish control of east Jerusalem. And that won’t happen.

In coal mines, the canaries stopped singing when an explosion was actually imminent. Too bad human prognosticators aren’t as reliable. The least they could do is be quiet, but that too won’t happen.

The writer has a PhD from Hebrew University, and is a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies.

Terra Incognita 134 Between "we" and "They"

2011-02-16T12:43:00.000-08:00

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Op-EdContributors/Article.aspx?id=208389
Terra Incognita: Between 'we' and 'they'
By SETH J. FRANTZMAN
02/15/2011 22:21

Some here ascribe all sorts of fabricated evils to Israelis.

Talkbacks (9)
In a recent article on Egypt, Larry Derfner repeats an unoriginal theme when he ascribes to “us” all sorts of values and opinions merely to place himself above and outside our society. “It’s not that we’re against democracy, goes the Israeli line on Egypt, it’s that we’re afraid of the Islamists and radical Arab nationalists taking over... we’ve taken sides against popular revolts that could hardly have cared less about the Israeli-Arab conflict... we’re tarring the Egyptian masses now as radicals... We have no problem supporting dictators or opposing democrats... We were doing to other people what we’d always hated other people doing to us.”

“We” is used no less than 48 times. And yet surely Derfner is not suggesting he is responsible; he isn’t speaking as someone who actually was part of the “we,” such as the government officials who met with their South African counterparts in the 1970s. What he really means is “they” – the bad Israelis, the Israelis to whom he ascribes all these things. But by saying “we,” many in Israel ascribe terrible sins to “us” only to take part in some banal self-flagellation and present themselves as lone righteous voices.

There is this never-ending self-lashing, this “oh, woe is me... we are so evil... our society is so terrible....”

To ascribe all these uniquely obnoxious traits to their own society, they portray that society as a distorted nightmare, like some Picasso drawing. Yossi Sarid, a former education minister, writes in Haaretz: “This was a civil uprising [in Egypt], one that did not suit the wild and violent image we insist on ascribing to all Arabs and to all Muslims... if only Israeli flags had been burned in the streets, we could frighten ourselves and the whole world, saying we were right again... can only Israel enjoy its limited democracy? The Exodus from Egypt, from slavery to freedom, is for Hebrews only, not for Arabs... finally we fit into the region.”

What is Sarid getting at? When he says “we,” does he mean that when he was education minister he worked hard to promote democracy in the Arab world, or does he mean that he too viewed the Arabs as insufferable extremists?

Well it seems he neither promoted democracy nor held this racist view. So who is “we”?

What he means is “they” – those bad Israelis, the ones who hate Arabs. Which Israeli ever said freedom is for Jews only? Yet suddenly that outlandish view becomes “we,” merely so “we” can be racist and hateful and reactionary.

Anshel Pfeffer writes, also in Haaretz, “are we afraid we won’t be able to bask in the title of ‘the only democracy in the Middle East’? Doesn’t Egypt deserve democracy too?” Which “we” is this? Where, ever, did someone complain that we won’t be able to bask in the title of the only democracy in the Middle East? Never were such words uttered, and yet this apparently becomes the normal notion of so many of “us.”

Bradley Burston writes on his blog on Haaretz.com: “I want you [Egyptians] to show us the last thing we expected to see. Because it is only when we see our best consensus assessments proven dead wrong, when the wholly unanticipated stuns us, when the inconceivable turns overnight into the inevitable, that change comes to this place... why has this Israeli government done its best to emulate in two years repressive measures Hosni Mubarak took 30 years to refine?”

At the end of his column Burston explains, “We deserve to build settlements because we have suffered and the Arabs are violent.” Once again, “we” is not the author, and the actual people referred to, the settlers, would never describe their reasoning this way.

TO TURN “us” into the a bogeyman, reality must be skewed so that the labels of “we” and “us” can be placed on it. Haaretz’s Akiva Eldar writes, “True, in Israel they do not arrest bloggers for insulting the president’s honor. On the other hand, Egypt does not hold for more than 43 years millions of people under military occupation.”

Eldar, like all his fellow travelers, imagines an Egypt that is democratic and an Israel that is a dictatorship. Egypt, he forgets, has had decades of emergency rule and lives under military dictatorship even today.

Derfner argues that our fears are “part of the story of why the incredibly brave people in Egypt inspire just about everyone in the world except us.”

Yet he knows very well that many people in the Gulf states, Iran, China and all over the world are not so inspired by Egypt, and he also knows that in Israel the Egyptian uprising inspired many. So he misleads on two accounts, he makes “us” into freedom haters, and makes the world into something it is not.

Why does Sarid write that Israel has “limited democracy”? He knows all too well, from having been in the Knesset, that this is a fabrication. In the Hebrew press it is the same: “we, us, ours, all of us.”

Part of the reason for the plethora of “we” that oozes into every piece of punditry is simply group think. In two of four February 13 op-eds in Haaretz, “Orientalism” is the topic. That isn’t coincidence; it stems from the same people all sitting around and telling the same nonsense to each other; “we live in a racist society, Orientalism finally is proven wrong by Egypt’s democracy, we believe democracy is only for us...”

And the readers, do they suffer from a mass psychosis? They should know very well that “we” is a stand in for “they.”

The over-emphasis on “we” stems from a prophetic tradition, but also betrays a deeper self-hate. In Judaism the child at Passover who indicates inclusion is “wise,” while the one who places himself outside is “wicked.”

Not wanting to be wicked, many of those who truly abhor Israel ascribe all sorts of nonsense and evils to it and its people. They style themselves “we” and “us,” when they do not actually view themselves as one of us, for they have only contempt for our society, which they paint as brutish, racist, savage and ignorant.

The writer has a PhD from Hebrew University and is a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies.

Two Articles on Jerusalem

2011-02-13T02:42:00.000-08:00

End of the Tunnel? Hotzot Hayotzer, the Artists Colony in Jerusalem, faces eviction after 40 years of pioneering Judaica

Seth J. Frantzman

Published in the Jerusalem Post on February 6

George Goldstein speaks with a soft voice, tinged by a French accent, when he recalls moving into the Hotzot Hayotzer 40 years ago. In his hand is a slightly faded photo of him at his loom with Jerusalem mayor Teddy Kollek and artist Mordechai Ardon looking on. Despite the fact that he and more than tweny other artists at the Jerusalem Artists Colony face eviction in 22 days, he seems resigned to whatever fate will come; “I opened my workshop here in September of 1969 with the support of Kollek and Yigal Allon [then minister of education and culture] and it was the first place for traditional tapestry and weaving and is it still the only tapestry workshop in the country making things in the traditional way.” Goldstein came to Israel in 1960 and his work has enjoyed great success over the years, with large tapestries hanging in the Great Synagogue of Strasburg, Jerusalem’s Shaare Tzedek hospital and at Yeshiva University in New York.

Hotzot Hayotzer was once a pioneering project to bring culture and people to the ruined no man’s land that separated East and West Jerusalem. When once Jordanian snipers had sat atop the parapets of the Old City Walls, in 1967 the city was re-unified and the mayor desired to link the city together. By bringing dynamic artists and setting them up with workshops and galleries next to the Old City walls the municipality and government was showing its commitment to reviving this part of Jerusalem. That was in 1969. Today things have changed. The grand villas of Kefar David and the rejuvenated Yemin Moshe peer over into the row of workshops that is Hotzot Hayotzer. Nearby a dilapidated park is being remade by the Jerusalem Foundation into Teddy Kollek park. The Artists Colony has been left untouched. Although a restaurant, Eucalyptus, opened there over a year ago, the retinue of artists has remained unchanged, it seems, for almost a decade.

One of the “new” arrivals is Oshrit Raffeld, whose positive energy bubbles over as she describes the tragedy that is befalling the place; “It isn’t packed with tourists, but that is because Kefar David changed the route people take to the Old City…we were once the main way for tourists to get to Jaffa gate. At our own expense we paid the municipality to put up signs, we advertised and marketed ourselves.” For her, and for the other artists, it is the landlord, the East Jerusalem Development Company, that is to blame for the problems.

The East Jerusalem Development Company, despite its connotation as being involved with “East Jerusalem” was actually set up in 1966, before the Six Day War. It is owned jointly by the Jerusalem Municipality and the Ministry of Tourism. The company currently manages several projects and properties, including Yemin Moshe, the famous old village created by Moses Montefiore in 1891, The Davidson Archeological Park next to the Western Wall, Zedekiah’s cave (Solomon’s quarries) near Damascus Gate and the Old City Walls walkway. The Artist Colony seems to be one of its least impressive projects, considering the beauty of Yemin Moshe and vibrancy of the Davidson Center. So what went wrong?

A little over a year ago the tenants of the Artist Colony were sent letters of eviction but the order was postponed for a year and the EJDC raised the rents by 30%. Raffeld recalls that “in the past they renewed our contracts yearly…but suddenly everyone was told to leave, no matter if the artists open their shops regularly. The company now claims that we didn’t agree to the rent raise, we didn’t object but we want contracts that protect us.” According to Gideon Shamir, director of the EJDC, it is primarily about the unpaid rent. The artists refuse to pay the higher rate and therefore they must go; “they pay a very low rent, we wanted to raise it to a more realistic price [According to Raffeld the price of the rent is 45 NIS per square meter]. There was a deadlock and the court order is for them to leave, I can tell you that we approve of thinking about the future of this place, but there is no connection between the future and the fact that the artists refuse to pay. We want this to be a place of culture and tourism.”

There is no doubt that the Artists Colony does not attract tourists. It is hard to find and there is no public parking. The new Mamilla mall funnels tourists into the Old City in a way that would make it surprising if any of them wandered down to the area of the colony. However some tourists do chance upon it. A couple from Toronto remarked after passing, “it looked closed to us, maybe it’s open later, there is nobody there.” They were wrong, half the workshops were open at 10:30am when they had passed, but they looked very much closed from a distance. Majd Ashhab who works in Mamilla and used to park near the place recalls that “they are closed always and they don’t allow us to park there, I’ve never seen anyone walking there.” However three students at the Jerusalem University College who study nearby were surprised to find such a special place in Jerusalem. After wandering by several times they chanced upon the workshops and were delighted to meet the artisans. Lauren Walker from Minnesota thinks that although the steep prices dissuaded her it was nice to meet the artists in the flesh. Josiah Sinclair, another student, who bought a leather belt says “this place is more authentic from the rest of the touristy places, this is how I imagined Jerusalem.”

Hotzot Hayotzher faces an uphill battle. The connection between the artists and their landlord seems completely broken. Every year the municipality hosts an artist’s festival called “Hotzot Hayotzer”, but over the past years the artists who have shops in the colony complain of being excluded. Most of the support for the artists comes from personal connections they have made. Goldstein recalls “I made many friends in forty years.” Letters of support have been sent from abroad and are being collected by Anat Galili-Blum, spokesperson of the artists. She believes there is going to be a “protest letter storm, hundreds of letters” from all over the world urging for the eviction to be cancelled. Judging by the connections and high quality craftsmanship that has brought attention to the artists it isn’t an exaggeration. Silversmith Yaacov Greenvurcel’s Judaica has been shown at museums around the world, including the Jewish Museums of Berlin and Vienna. For him “this is a microcosm of what is happening in Israel, the bureaucracy, the mall culture.” Accusations that the artist’s work is outdated are belied by the fact that the artwork of Greenvurcel, Raffeld and Yossi Sagi, among others, appears modern, cutting edge and even chic.
In the end only time will tell whether the EJDC gets its way and the recalcitrant artists are removed. While it is true that the site is not a burgeoning center of tourism, the artists are right that it is a unique space, a street of workshops where pioneering Jewish artists are creating dynamic creations. The question for the city and the tourism ministry is whether the current location is worth preserving when compared to other options. As of press time the tourism ministry had not replied to a request for comment on the situation.

Sold Out? A small Jewish neighborhood in Jerusalem suddenly finds its future up in the air

Published in Jerusalem Post on January 3

Joe and Rozanne Polansky are soft spoken but determined. As they sit in their living room, with its beautiful panoramic view of the Old City and East Jerusalem, they relate what drew them to the place. In 2008 they first saw Nof Zion, the Jerusalem community they now call home. It was an empty shell, precariously overlooking the Old City basin and surrounded on three sides by the Arab neighborhood of Jebel Mukaber. When they returned in April of 2009 however things were thriving; "we loved the community, it was full of life and affection and gave us a great feeling." The Polanskis are from North Bellmore, Long Island. Joe worked in construction before going back to school and becoming a state inspector of schools for the blind. Initially they envisioned spending six months out of the year in the new community. But the enchantment of it all led them to place their house in the U.S up for sale and move to Jerusalem permanently.

For outsiders it might seem a strange choice. Nof Zion strikes the visitor as being half built and it feels isolated, even though it is only a ten minute walk from the U.N headquarters and Armon Ha Natziv. This is no accident. The developers never bothered to finish the job. They completed only around 100 units out of a promised 400. They never constructed a synagogue, despite claiming on their website that “the synagogue will be the first pubic building erected.” Ground wasn’t broken for a hotel, country club, and a number of other amenities. The rest of the project is just a sea of earth and weeds. Sad patches of grass attempt to break through the hardscrabble earth of the “garden” apartments, trying to put down roots like the new residents themselves. The seven buildings that were constructed are home to some 75, mostly middle class Israeli families and several renters, including one U.N worker and two basketball players.

Dawn Yonah, another resident who relocated from the Washington D.C area, relates a similar story to the Polanskis. When she had first signed a contract on the property there had been few residents. But she believed in the vision of Digal, the developers of Nof Zion; "we were aware of the location of it but as Zionists it didn't bother us, we received a special feeling immediately from the residents." The unbeatable view of the Old City, the promises and the price tag all made the choice easy. But little seems to have turned out as hoped. It was a struggle to get bus service and mail is delivered intermittently. The owners were promised 24 hour security but that never materialized and now residents volunteer to do their own neighborhood watch.

A year and a half ago Yonah relates that “there were rumors of financial problems with Digal, a lot of Americans refused to sign contracts for their apartments.” Joe recalls that it didn’t seem like Nof Zion would be affected; “we heard rumors only of it affecting other properties.” Digal’s website lists six other projects that they are involved in, including three residences in Rumania, a synagogue and hotels in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. The story of what has befallen Nof Zion has been widely related in the media. Following Digal’s financial difficulties a Palestinian businessman named Bashar al Masri stepped forward with an offer to buy the property. Currently there is a campaign to find a Jewish buyer to match his offer or place pressure on the developers and creditors not to cave in.

Masri’s role is worth considering. He was born in Nablus and is a Palestinian entrepreneur. His uncle is Munib al-Masri, an extremely wealthy Palestinian who made his money abroad and is now a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council and owner of a famous Italian renaissance style palace above Nablus. Bashar is the manager of Massar International and the brainchild behind the Qatari backed Rawabi development, the first planned Arab city in the West Bank which is currently under construction and will house 40,000 wealthy and middle class Palestinians. Requests for an interview were not returned as of press time.

The residents of Nof Zion are undaunted in their desire to see their community succeed but they are also wary of the future. “We don’t want to see this beautiful Jewish community broken apart, we will build and do whatever it takes, people here are determined to see our community continue to thrive” says Dawn. “Our community is like a large family, we aren’t disconnected. There are more than seventy children here.” Currently some of the children attend a day care in the temporary synagogue which is located in a neighbor’s unused apartment. Up until recently there was some deal between the owners and the other residents but now even that seems up in the air and the synagogue may have to move elsewhere.
Miranda Jones, Dawn’s daughter, has put her feelings down in writing in an article titled ‘an Oleh’s view of Nof Zion.’ She stresses that “this is not a matter of political right versus left…Nof Zion is a private, legal community that is growing each day as new families move into the apartments…virtually every family has an amazing story, with historical roots that go deep into Israeli soil, and lofty visions of a glorious future.” Many of the Residents stress this point: there are no tensions with the Arab neighbors. Miranda writes that the “playground is visited daily by both Jewish and Arab children.” During the tensions over Silwan in the fall there was some vandalism but the situation is generally quiet.

The residents have been proactive in defending their interests. They have purchased bonds of the developer in order to have a say in any final decision. Motti Mintzer, an attorney and one of the first people to move into Nof Zion, has been instrumental in bringing families to live there and giving voice to the residents’ concerns; “I don’t mind who owns it as long as they carry through on their plans and the promised Jewish character remains the same, as well as the security of its residents. If this basic character of the project is changed - the company, Bank Leumi and the potential investor are exposed to lawsuits in an amount which is more than triple than the amount proposed in Weissglas' [representing Masri’s] offer.” As of press time no decision had been made regarding the Palestinian bid to acquire Digal’s assets but it seems whatever happens the people of Nof Zion will doggedly press on in their desire to make the community succeed.

Two Book reviews

2011-02-13T02:40:00.000-08:00

A New Shoah, Meotti $15.95
Reviewed by Seth J. Frantzman
Tel 97-57-855-4551, sfrantzman@hotmail.com
4 Baruch Ben Nariah, Jerusalem, 94502
February 2010
When I made Aliyah to Israel, at the tail end of the Second Intifada I was surprised by the lack of memorials to the victims of terror. The Palestinians and their friends in Israel call this the “presence of absence” when they describe the lack of commemoration for their former villages. However, a closer look reveals that there are a plethora of tiny signs and memorials for the all too numerous victims. Giulio Meotti, an Italian journalist, has set out to do these victims justice.
This is a tough and necessary job. There have been few books in English that chronicled the Second Intifada from this point of view. There have been even fewer that dared to examine the suffering inflicted on Israelis by the murderous attacks. This is primarily because of the content. It’s easier to write some puff piece about crying Palestinian children and their mother sheltering in a tent outside their freshly ruined house that was supposedly just demolished by a tank to make a road wider. It’s easier to write about soldiers than it is about blown up buses. And in general the supporters of Israel tend to shy away from the gore, from the semi-pornographic obsession with death and the slaughtered, preferring a different moral high ground.
Meotti’s point of departure is that there is a line that connects the victims of terror in Israel and the victims of the Holocaust. Hence the title, which many will consider over the top, A New Shoah. For him there are two reasons to draw this parallel. First is that those who carry out terrorism are often motivated by similar types of anti-semitic hatred; “Hamas and Hezbollah, two of the terrorist organizations that seek the destruction of Israel, call the Jews ‘pigs’, ‘cancer’” and other terms that conjure up a dark era. But the author also aims his argument at the West which he believes has betrayed the Israeli victims of terror; “why is Ofir’s story never held up as an example of what ethnic-religious hatred can do?” He continues, “whenever a Palestinian dies, even a suicide bomber, the newspapers fall all over themselves to publish his story and photographs…today in the West there is a faulty conscience-indifferent to the parade of young Palestinians putting on explosive belts....[this] has obliterated the fate of thousands of Israelis murdered because they were Jews.”
Meotti attempts to create a memorial for those who lost their lives in terrorism through a large number of vignettes. Many of the stories seem oddly similar in their tragedy. Take Corporal Ronald Beer who had “arrived from Russia 14 years before he was killed.” He desired to go the army because “someone has to protect them. If I don’t do it, who will?” There is Gadi Rajwan, an immigrant from Iraq, who employed seventy Arabs. And there is Nava Applebaum, daughter of an American immigrant.
The author tries to emphasize the humanity of the victims. He provides them with a story, a history and a future that was cut short. Like so many other he emphasizes how humane they were and how humane Israeli society is in general; “during the Second Intifada, Israeli hospitals continued to provide medical care to Palestinian patients.” Too many of the victims are sons and daughters or grandchildren of Holocaust survivors. Too many, it seems to the reader, are immigrants. Too many are on their way to get married.
Meotti’s book is jarring as it is a little scatterbrained. There doesn’t appear to be a great deal of organization, from one vignette to the other. But the overhanging theme never changes; Israeli Jews deserve to have their stories told and those that have ignored them under the banner of anti-Zionism are simply anti-semities in a new garb. The author isn’t always exact on his facts. He notes that there were “eighty-six Israelis [who] lost their lives during the First Gulf War, killed by Iraqi missiles, by panic, by suffocation.” This is a massive exaggeration, only 2 Israelis were killed and 230 injured. Where did he come up with 86? But this slight mistake can be overlooked, he has provided an important testament to the victims of terror. It is too bad there are not more like him.

Book Review
The Future of Islam by John L. Esposito, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 234 pages, (Hardcover), 2010 $24.95
Engaging the Muslim World by Juan Cole, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 281 pages, (Hardcover), 2010, $269.95
Reviewed by Seth J. Frantzman
Tel 97-57-855-4551, sfrantzman@hotmail.com
4 Baruch Ben Nariah, Jerusalem, 94502
December 2010
Most Muslims are moderate, are lurching towards pluralism, support women’s rights and if only we in the West will take the “next step” and “recognize that the Children of Abraham are part of a rich Judeo-Christian-Islamic history”, abandoning “Islamophobia”, we can move beyond the clash of civilizations. This, in essence, is the message of John Esposito, Professor of religion and international affairs at Georgetown University and founding director of the Alwaleed Bin-Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding.
Juan Cole, a Professor of history at the University of Michigan, argues in his lukewarm account that we need to engage with the Muslim world and dispel the myths about it which have grown up in the West where “Islam Anxiety” has become wide spread. Cole provides a laundry list of apologies for every Islamic fanatic society, from Saudi Arabia’s gender apartheid to Iran. He even goes so far as to make outlandish claims: There is “lack of good evidence for an Iranian nuclear weapons program”; “The [Muslim] Brotherhood has never been big enough [in Egypt] to count as a mass movement”; He calls the Bin Laden “a wealthy and much better organized version of Timothy McVeigh” the Oklahoma City bomber; “Lebanon and Senegal, have much better human rights records [than Saudi Arabia]”; “the [Persian] Gulf is actually among the more cosmopolitan places in the world.”
Is it worth debunking these assertions? Iran is developing nuclear weapons, the Muslim Brotherhood is a mass movement, Bin Laden is not comparable to Timothy McVeigh, Lebanon does not have a wonderful human rights record even compared with Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf states can only be considered “cosmopolitan” in a 19th century slavery owning American South kind of way. After all, what other societies in the world house foreign workers, who make up a majority of the population, in work camps where their passports are confiscated and they are worked like slaves so that a tiny minority of wealthy people may enjoy the good life?
Cole, Esposito and Karen Armstrong, who writes the forward to Esposito’s book, are examples of popular Muslim apologists in the West. According to Armstrong there is an “entrenched reluctance to see Islam in a more favorable light” in the West and it is the responsibility of people in the U.S and Europe to not only view Islam in a positive light but change their foreign policies and cultures to take into account the feelings of Muslims since “western foreign policy has been one of the causes of the current malaise in the [Muslim] region.” Like Armstrong (who was a nun), Esposito burnishes his “Christian” credentials and talks about how he spent years in a “Capuchin Franciscan monastery.” The author notes in The Future of Islam that his two former books, What Everyone Needs to know about Islam and Unholy War: Terror in the Name of Islam, were included on a “reading list” for high ranking soldiers being deployed to Iraq. It is not clear how Future of Islam differs from his previous two books in terms of explaining “what Muslims really think” (the title of another of Esposito’s books) but he claims to introduce us to Islam, again, show how religion plays a role in Muslim politics, examine Muslim reform initiatives and discuss America’s role in the Muslim world.
The main problem with Esposito’s book is that, despite his claim that he has attempted to organize it into themes, there is almost no logic to the way in which the argument is presented. The author is careful to make use of Muslim converts who have Western names. Towards this end he discusses the case of “Dr. Ingrid Mattson”, a Canadian convert to Islam and scholar at Hartford Seminary who was involved in a controversy at the Democratic National convention in 2008. There is also Timothy Winter, a Cambridge University Professor and “prominent Muslim religious leader” who “rejects extremists” and believes Islam should return to its “classical cannons” of Islamic law. But how many Muslims have heard of Winter and Mattson?
Esposito, who is mired in the swamp of American politics, tends to believe that his reader is deeply familiar with American evangelical preachers. Thus the name John Hagee appears numerous times alongside other “preachers of hate” and “hard-line Christian Zionists” such as “Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson [and] Rob Parsley.” Cole uses a similar tactic, comparing radical Islamists to the “gun culture” in the United States. Esposito wants us to believe that Muslim fundamentalists are “like that of the radical Christian Right.” The problem here is that this gives these preachers and right wing gun owners more importance than they have in order to set up a straw man that can be compared to Islamic extremism. Let’s be honest, Islamic terrorists have killed tens of thousands of people in the last decades from India to Africa and the New World. How many people have American gun loving terrorists like McVeigh or followers of pastors like Hagee killed? Less than 200. Even compensating for the population differences from whence the radicals are drawn, 350 million Americans versus 1.3 billion Muslims, there is no comparison.
Future of Islam oddly provides a sort of how to guide on how to convert to Islam (“there is no God and Muhammad is the messenger of God”), for some reason in the chapter entitled “the many faces of Islam.” Yet both authors acknowledges that “Islamic law in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Sudan and the Taliban’s Afghanistan has been used to restrict women’s rights and to mandate stoning of women charged with adultery (Esposito)” and other savage punishments.
In the end Esposito’s book is like blast from a shotgun. The author believes that if he lays out enough short little arguments that some of them will hit the mark. Cole prefers a more direct refutation of the West’s long held beliefs about Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Pakistan and Iran. Unfortunately for him, the West is correct, these countries are either run by nefarious regimes or are cauldrons of violent extremism.

Terra Incognita 131 Misunderstanding Egyptian Democracy

2011-02-13T02:39:00.001-08:00

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=207387
Terra Incognita: Careful what we wish for
By SETH J. FRANTZMAN
02/08/2011 22:16

Chaos has a much better track record of producing more tyranny and fascism, than it does democracy.

Talkbacks (2)
‘Egyptians want what Americans have, they want freedom. [US President Barack] Obama needs to tell [Egyptian President Hosni] Mubarak, ‘You are not leaving in September, you are leaving now; we are not giving you seven months.’” Those were the words of Fox News contributor Tamara Holder.

The mantra that Egyptians want freedom and democracy has swept the world. Alongside this argument is a romantic attachment to the Egyptian protesters, a weird admiration for the “people” and the “mob.”

All the misinformed support ignores the reality: Just because people riot or protest for something doesn’t mean they are democracy-loving moderates.

The lesson being taught to the Egyptian people by statements like “Mubarak must go now” is that democracy is about rioting and protests. Roger Cohen of The New York Times argues that an “election in September is unimaginable.” Maybe an election in America in November is unimaginable, if enough people protest, say 2 percent as in Egypt; perhaps we too should just change elections based on their demands. Haaretz asks, “Is a democratic Egypt too much for Israelis to take?” But what we are seeing isn’t a “democratic” Egypt.

The Israeli and American Left is especially euphoric in its embrace of the Egyptian masses.

Anshel Pfeffer writes that “people are scaring us with talk of an Islamist takeover of our big neighbor.

But doesn’t Egypt deserve democracy too?” He elaborates: “We’re all suffering from Orientalism, not to say racism, if the sight of an entire people throwing off the yoke of tyranny and courageously demanding free elections fills us with fear rather than uplifting us, just because they’re Arabs.”

According to the doyens of the Left, Israel is a “Western outpost” that does not integrate into the Middle East and thus didn’t prepare for the uprising in Egypt.

IN THE US, all the op-eds by the likes of David Brooks and Maureen Dowd are toasting the crowds in Egypt. Robert Kagan of the Brookings Institute explained that we must not fear an Islamist takeover. “We overlearned that lesson and we need to get beyond that panicky response. There’s no way for us to go through the long evolution of history without allowing Islamists to participate in democratic society.”

Kagan also argues that the US shouldn’t support a slow transition from Mubarak, like elections in September, but rather the immediate removal of the tyrant.

The message is clear from all over the Western world: Egypt’s protesters are true democrats. They are romantic; they are Americans without knowing it and to support them we need to have the government of Egypt vanish overnight and have some sort of chaotic transition. There is no greater sign of democracy than chaos. The Islamists all want democracy; we shouldn’t fear them, but embrace them because they represent the genuine feelings of the people. We are racists because we see large numbers of people marching, shouting and burning, and we fear their rage.

Democracy isn’t about burning down the headquarters of the other party. It isn’t about paralyzing the state so that no business can be conducted and nothing can happen. Oddly, democracy isn’t about mass protests and riots. Democracy is primarily about voting and peaceful transitions of power. The other freedoms that follow from that, like the press, assembly, religion, equality and free speech, are products, hopefully, of democracy.

Democracy has, since its inception in ancient Greece, always been plagued by its evil twins, fascism and tyranny. It is strange to hear, but democracy’s opposite is not tyranny; it is monarchy.

Tyranny is the antecedent or result of democracy.

“Tyranny” comes from the Greek word tyrannos, defined by Plato as “one who rules without law, looks to his own advantage rather than that of his subjects and uses extreme and cruel tactics – against his own people as well as others.”

Tyranny came about through the rise of popular cults associated with war heroes and wealthy men who seized power through coups. Syracuse, an ancient city state, was a democracy from 467 BCE but in 407 a man named Dionysius I seized power and became a military dictator. The philosopher Plato, a product of Athenian democracy and a democrat himself, became a friend and supporter of this tyrant.

Rome, a republic for many years before it became an empire, suffered from tyranny as well. Sulla, a military leader, was made “dictator” by the Roman Senate for the purpose of “making of laws and for the settling of the constitution.” Like the tyrant of Syracuse, Sulla murdered those he suspected to be enemies of the state.

TO UNDERSTAND tyranny’s relationship with popular democracy, we must fast forward to the period 1917 to 1950. In that period almost all of the liberal democracies in Europe were brushed aside by popular fascist or communist movements. It began with Russia where a brief period of democratic government in 1917 was followed by the communist seizure of power.

The fascists and their enemies used mass protests and chaos, including rioting, to secure power against weak democratically elected patricians who proved incapable of dealing with the street. Yet those who look to Egypt and admire the protesters don’t see that these types of mass protests, while they demand democracy, also walk hand in hand with dictatorship.

It isn’t about the Egyptians being Arabs. It isn’t about Israel “integrating” into its region. It’s about the fact that no one notices that what is going on in Egypt is not a sign of democracy, it is just a sign of chaos and mass protest. Mass protest may cause a government to implement democratic reforms.

But as we have seen in Tunisia, when the government simply collapses and runs away, that doesn’t represent a “democratic transition.”

Chaos, as there is in Egypt, has a much better track record of producing more tyranny and fascism, than it does at producing democracy.

Those who journeyed to Iran in 1979, like the popular French philosopher Michel Foucault, believed they were witnessing “democracy.”

But they were witnessing the rise of Islamic fascism.

No one remembers that. No one who teaches Plato and Foucault recalls that despite all their ideals, they flirted with tyranny; it was sexy, it was strong, it was popular and muscular and in the streets. Our philosophers were wrong. And we are wrong today when the very existence of a mob, rather than orderly lines at the ballot box, makes us feel that “democracy is happening.”

The writer has a PhD from Hebrew University and is a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies.

Terra Incognita 130 The Western Academy and Middle East Tyranny

2011-02-01T14:07:00.001-08:00

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=206279
Terra Incognita: Deathly silence
By SETH J. FRANTZMAN
02/01/2011 23:11

The Western academy and tyranny in the Middle East.

In coming years we will all be treated to the “expert” opinion of Western academics that the Egyptian dictatorship was propped up by the West, and that any rise of the Muslim Brotherhood was the “fault” of the US and Israel. Before that happens, it should be recalled that whatever support the West provided Egypt’s government, that collaboration was matched by the Western academy, which has consistently turned a blind eye to tyranny in the Middle East. If the academy and its democracy-loving humanists truly supported democracy, they would have long ago stopped shipping legions of students to these countries, and stopped propping up institutions in the Middle East.

Over the decade I’ve spent at university, there doesn’t seem to have been a dictatorship where students didn’t want to study. Colleagues ventured to Yemen, Egypt, Syria and Morocco to learn Arabic and Middle Eastern studies. They joined the Peace Corps to work in Jordan. They rarely questioned the regimes in which they had chosen to study.

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In Jordan, my friend hid her Star of David necklace so as not to “offend” the local people she was “aiding.” In Yemen, another friend donned the burka to “blend” in to that culture. In one weird incident, American students at the American University in Cairo played dress up; one girl was the “Zionist entity” and the other students dressed as Hamas.

COLLABORATION WITH the regimes’ dictators was par for the course. One champion of study abroad is the Center for Arabic Study Abroad (CASA), which maintains relations with 36 universities and colleges in the US. In 2009-2010 the program received 162 applicants, of which 39 received tuition-sponsored fellowships. Under the website’s “Frequently Asked Questions,” there are no questions alluding to the fact that study-abroad destinations are brutal dictatorships. The fact that local women are killed for ‘honor,’ or that recent studies showed 83 percent of Egyptian women report being sexually harassed in public was not part of the information provided to prospective candidates.

According to CASA’s annual report on Syria, its “cultural program... introduce[ s] students to the host culture and help[s] them interact with Syrians.” As part of the Syrian program there were field trips, visits to the cinema and meetings with actors. There was even a “student-led debate,” although it didn’t touch on politics but rather modern Arabic literary texts.

The list of participants in the program include highly qualified students from elite institutions; Georgetown, Yale and Harvard. So why is it that the best students in Middle Eastern studies are happy to drink dictatorial Kool- Aid in Damascus and Cairo? The answer the universities will provide is that it is best to study Arabic and the Middle East in the Middle East. There is no doubt about that. But the troubling aspect is whether the students who go to these countries ever question the abuses that are the daily fare there.

In her book The Bread of Angels, Stephanie Saldana described study in Damascus. She was taken aback, as I am, by the odd popularity of these dictatorships with American Jewish students. No matter that Syria suppresses its Jewish community, Saldana recalled, “there are so many [American] Jewish foreigners studying in Damascus that they may as well open their own yeshiva.”

They all hide their Jewishness, of course.

Rachel Levine, another Jewish woman who studied in Syria, recalled that “speaking with Syrian nationals about visits to Israel, tuning in to radio stations from the other side of the border or speaking Hebrew are all ill-advised.”

Saldana mentions in her book: “I’m tired of wondering which shopkeeper is watching me for the secret police. I just want something resembling a carefree day.”

IN OCTOBER, Morocco expelled Al Jazeera (Egypt has now followed suit) from the country. Morocco didn’t ban it for collaborating with terrorists, but rather for “irresponsible” reporting. It turns out the Qatar-based station had “tarnished Morocco’s image, downplaying its achievements in development, infrastructure projects, democracy and human rights.” It had “reported critically on poverty in Morocco and on its policies in the Western Sahara [occupied by Morocco in 1975].”

Western media, like the BBC and New York Times, know better than to go off the beaten track; they report that Morocco is a beacon of progress. Western- educated university students do the same as they are funneled in by programs at the universities of Montana, Kentucky and Georgia.

The SIT Study Abroad, which Brandeis offers its students, is “based in the cosmopolitan city of Rabat, [where] students study Arabic and acquire an indepth appreciation of a rich and rapidly changing society in Morocco.”

And to make sure the students don’t experience the fate of the Qatari journalists, they learn about “contemporary development challenges.”

Suffice it to say, the students aren’t going to the Western Sahara to ask about Morocco’s colonization of that country.

Likewise, the overthrow of the Tunisian dictator should remind us all of the blinders that our academic society has long worn regarding dictatorships in the Middle East. In August 2008 the International Geographical Union held its international conference in Tunis. Amid the festivities there was no inkling that the thousands of academics from around the world were being duped by a thuggish regime. You wouldn’t have known it either from the panel discussions at the conference, the field trips or back at the hotels. There wasn’t one discussion among the leading academics about the fact that this was a dictatorship.

But this isn’t surprising. Academics who preach about democracy at home in Europe, the US or Israel tend to have no hesitation about travelling to countries whose rulers do not share their political outlook. Consider the widespread Western academic collaboration with the United Arab Emirates. George Mason University, Michigan State, Harvard Medical School and Boston University all maintain satellite campuses there.

The UAE is a vile dictatorship, an apartheid country where only the 19% who are of Arab-Emirati descent have citizenship, and where millions of foreign workers are forced to slave in substandard conditions building a playground for wealthy Europeans and Saudis. These workers are housed in “work camps” outside the major cities, their passports confiscated, and kept conveniently out of the way so that no one must be bothered by their presence.

My friends who visited the Gulf related that local Emiratis brag about running over Indian and Pakistani foreign workers for fun, or beating their maids. In one of the more heinous reports related by the BBC, a Sri Lankan maid was tortured for months by her employer, who hammered nails into her body. A survey by Colombo University found that a quarter of the 600,000 Sri Lankan women who work as maids abroad had been beaten and raped and/or not received payment. At one employment agency, “the maids are advised not to run away from their employer if they encounter problems, but to maintain a positive attitude.”

Western universities have maintained that same brainwashed positive attitude.

The writer has a PhD from Hebrew University and is a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies.

Terra Incognita in Korea Times Middle East chaos in historical perspective

2011-02-01T00:38:00.000-08:00

Middle East chaos in historical perspective
http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/opinon/2011/01/161_80661.html
By Seth J. Frantzman

The chaos that has seemingly engulfed one Arab country after another in the last five years, and now appears to be swamping Egypt and Yemen, is part of a broader pattern that a clear reading of history reveals.

The U.S invasion of Iraq in 2003 seemingly began a process of democratization and hope that has unraveled several Arab countries. The resulting insurgency in Iraq didn’t peak until 2005-2007.

At around the same time Prime Minister of Lebanon Rafic Hariri was murdered in a massive car bombing unleashing protests, which forced Syria to withdraw from that country. Then in January of 2006 Hamas won the Palestinian elections ushering in a year-and-a-half of low level violence that resulted in Hamas’ conquest of the Gaza Strip. That was followed by the sudden collapse of Tunisia’s government.

The internal pattern played out in these four countries has been roughly similar. Each was previously ruled by secular-nationalist governments led by strongmen. In Iraq it was Saddam Hussein who ruled for roughly 24 years. In Lebanon it was Syria which occupied the country for almost 30 years.

The fall of Zine el Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia ended a 24-year reign and has seemingly sealed the fate of the ruling party which has been in power since 1957.

In the Palestinian territories the rise of Hamas didn’t overthrow the ruling Fatah party but it seriously challenged its power. Fatah, the main political element in the Palestinian Authority, has been the leading power behind the Palestinian movement for 30 years.

What becomes clear is that the process of collapse has taken place after years of political stagnation and one party rule. But the internal logic behind the descent into chaos has been brought on by a number of factors and has affected, so far, only a certain type of regime.

Tunisia, Egypt, Iraq, Palestine and Lebanon are all legacies of the 1950s Arab nationalist awakening. It must be remembered that until 1918 many of these countries were under Ottoman Turkish imperial rule. In the case of Tunisia and Egypt the two countries fell under colonial rule, by the French and British respectively, in 1881-1882. Prior the 1880s both Egypt and Tunis were ruled by hereditary monarchies.

After the defeat of the Ottomans in World War I, the Middle East entered an interesting period. An Arab revolt led by a leading family from Mecca and supported by the British and various Bedouin tribes helped to drive the Turks out of the region. The leaders of this revolt, the Hussein family, attempted to install themselves in power.

Eventually they were able to retain only the kingdoms of Jordan and Iraq. In Palestine the British mandate resulted in division of the country between Jews and Arabs. In Lebanon the French mandate ensured the creation of a unique sectarian political system that ensured power sharing between its various groups.

The major movement in the Arab world from the 1920s was a type of Arab nationalism that borrowed heavily from imported European ideas and blended modernity, democracy, secularism and socialism. The Arab revolutionary regimes that came to power in the 1950s in Egypt (1952), Tunisia (1957) and Iraq (1958) proclaimed their countries to be republics.

While the regimes were different and often at odds with one another they shared hostility to the traditional monarchies found in Jordan and Saudi Arabia and viewed themselves as secular and socialist. They tended to side with the non-aligned nations during the Cold War but received weaponry and advisors from the U.S.S.R.

After 1973 Egypt increasingly found itself a key ally of the U.S. Saddam, a U.S ally in the 1980s, fell out of favor after the momentous invasion of Kuwait in 1990. The Palestinian leadership under Yasser Arafat also moved from a Soviet oriented orbit to moderation and understanding with the U.S. in the 1990s. Lebanon has been a key Western ally since its independence in 1943, an alliance that saw American soldiers arriving in the country in 1958 and the 1980s to prevent civil strife.

Now however these secular-national regimes appear to be on their last legs. Fifty-eight years of rule by the Nasserist political party of Egypt have stagnated the country. The opposition is made up of secular liberals and Islamists from the Muslim Brotherhood.

The same types of opposition, in different forms, are found in Lebanon, Iraq, Tunisia and Palestine. In Lebanon Hezbullah, a Shia Islamist party, has now played a key role in bringing down the government and appointing the most recent Prime Minister Najib Mikati. Iraq’s Prime Minister Nuri al Malaki began his career as an Islamist Shia dissident of the Dawa party.

As noted above, Palestine’s political landscape is divided between the secular-nationalist government in Ramallah run by Mahmud Abbas and the Islamist Hamas in Gaza. Tunisia’s Islamist movement is quite small compared to the other countries surveyed.

The fall, like dominos, of the secular-national governments in the Middle East mirrors a process that stretches back to the 19th century. It is part of a larger cycle. Whether the current wave of chaotic political change will also affect the Gulf monarchies, Jordan, Libya or Morocco awaits to be seen.

The author is a post-doctoral researcher at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute of Market Studies. He can be reached at sfrantzman@hotmail.com.

Terra Incognita Pre-Islamic or Cemented by Islam

2011-01-22T08:09:00.000-08:00

Terra Incognita: Pre-Islamic but retained by Islam
By SETH J. FRANTZMAN
01/11/2011 23:32

From face veiling to female circumcision, many practices are said to have nothing to do with religion, but why, after 1,300 years, are they still practiced?

Talkbacks (7)
From face veiling to female circumcision, one hears that many practices perceived as negative in the West have nothing to do with Islam, the religion, the culture or the famed civilization.

Babak Darvish argued on his blog in June that “Islamic law teaches that the face and hands should be uncovered. Meaning that if somebody follows the traditional Sunni school of thought in Islam, they should not practice the pre- Islamic tradition of face veiling or Niqab.”

Another blogger notes “the wearing of a veil predates all the Abrahamic religions.” A website called Hilalplaze.com informs believers that “cultural dress is referred to in the ancient pre-Islamic era (Jahiliyah). Yet it is the veil from the ‘pre-Islamic’ era that is considered ‘traditional,’ and which stops women from contributing in society.”

The writer argues that the activities of the Taliban were typical of this un-Islamic society.

Greek writers about Persia described many upper-class women as veiled. There is no mention in the Koran of a new institution regarding female dress. But if the veil and all its permutations – niqab, hijab, chador, abbaya, burka, purdah – are pre- Islamic, then why has Islamic society been so good at cementing their appearance? In fact, despite the spread of Islamic piety from Bosnia to Cambodia, one finds a startling similarity in the veil.

Where once some Central Asian Muslim women were garbed in horrid long horsehair burkas that made movement all but impossible (they were banned by the Soviets), now one finds those same women wearing the same head scarf so common throughout the Middle East and Europe.

Another controversial concept widespread in the Muslim world is “honor killing.”

On the website islamonline.

net, Sheikh Ahmad Kutty, a senior lecturer at the Islamic Institute of Toronto, is quoted as saying; “There is no such concept in Islam.”

An esteemed writer on the website reiterates “so-called honor killing is based on ignorance and disregard of morals and laws, which cannot be abolished except by disciplinary punishments.”

John Esposito and Sheila Lalwani, the former a well known American writer and defender of Islam, note that “these [honor] murders occur in the Islamic world, but they also take place in other countries such as India, and victims can be Muslim, Christian, Hindu or Sikh.”

Yotam Feldner, writing in Middle East Forum, notes that “the religious establishment in Jordan views honor killing as a remnant of pre-Islamic Arab tribalism.”

MK Ahmed Tibi has even proposed passing a law that would ban the use of the term by officials or the media. So here again a crime prevalent among modern Muslims becomes a “pre-Islamic” crime, or even one whose name should be abolished, lest it stigmatize Muslims. In fact, it turns out other communities are probably just as guilty as Muslims. When non-Muslims are victims of honor killings in the Middle East it receives widespread coverage. This was the case with Mariam Atef Khilla, a Coptic Christian girl who converted to Islam and was subsequently murdered.

BUT THE numbers and stories betray a deeper truth.

Robert Fisk, the usually anti- Israel writer at the Independent, wrote in September that 20,000 women are murdered a year, and that while it is a crime which Hindus and Christians also commit, it is all too common throughout the Muslim Middle East.

Honor killings have now come to shock the Western world when Muslim immigrant communities are implicated.

As with the veil, the question is the same – if it’s not part of Islam, why is it so common among Muslims? Fisk, Esposito and others like them might be right; women are murdered throughout the world. But are they drowned, strangled, shot, beaten, raped and sprayed with acid by their own relatives? Do the men express pride when confronted by police? It seems the answer is generally no.

Take Arab Christians, for example. Sometimes Arab Christian women who convert to Islam or run off with Muslim men are murdered by relatives. Until recently some families took out death notices in papers rather than actually murdering them. But Arab Christian women, to my knowledge, are never murdered for being “immodest” or because of “rumors.”

Arab Christian women often never wore a veil in the first place, not in Egypt, Lebanon, Syria or Jordan.

The last subject labelled a “pre-Islamic” tradition is female circumcision. Suffice it to say that this practice indeed predated Islam in Egypt, Africa and parts of Arabia.

According to one hadith (Islamic tradition), “circumcision is obligated for men, and an honorable thing for women.”

All four Islamic schools of jurisprudence agree that the practice is honorable for women. Dr. Adb’ al-Rahman ibn Hasan al-Nafisah, an editor of an Islamic jurisprudence journal in Saudi Arabia, notes, “We conclude that female circumcision is merely a cultural practice.”

But here again we have traditions that are pre-Islamic and yet which Islam helped cement.

The same is true of other unsavory practices, from wife-beating to slavery – all pre-Islamic –which were not eradicated by Islam. The same is not generally true of the Christian relationship with pre-Christian practices.

Christianity helped suppress slavery, after many centuries of tolerating it.

Drunkenness – surely a pre- Christian practice – has been semi-enshrined on St.

Patrick’s Day, but temperance movements were largely Christian in origin. The Mafia revenge culture of Sicily is intertwined with the Catholic faith, but priests have condemned it.

Without being a shill for Christianity, it seems obvious that “traditional” practices that receive little purchase in modern Western society thrive under Islam.

Excusing them as “pre- Islamic” is a misnomer; after 1,300 years, they are “Islamic,” and only Islamic jurisprudence can change them.

The writer has a PhD from Hebrew University and is a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies.

Terra Incognita: Corporate world's new marketing strategy
By SETH J. FRANTZMAN
01/19/2011 00:11

There is something suspicious about how the new socially conscious ad campaigns play on our society’s stereotypical charitable views

Talkbacks (3)
In the Seinfeld episode “The Airport,” Jerry meets a model and she shows him a recent photo of her that appeared in Esquire where she is mostly nude, having just stepped out of a shower. It turns out the ad is for jeans. No surprise. We all know the mantra that “sex sells.”

Advertising companies have long realized that the main subject of an ad need not be the product. Watch companies show images of Mount Everest and sailing. Other firms pitch you a lifestyle that goes along with a product. From time to time, oddly, some products are actually marketed through ads that declare them to be the best; Oracle claims it has “the fastest ever database performance.”

But there is a new trend in advertising that, while it may not be sweeping the world, is becoming more pronounced. It is the “socially conscious” ad campaign. In a fold-out ad by Du Pont on the inside cover of the recent issue of National Geographic, the reader is shown an Indian train packed to the gills. The ad was specially designed for the January issue, whose main article was about “Population 7 billion: How your world will change.”

Lo and behold, we learn that Du Pont “has a rich history of scientific discovery that has enabled countless innovations and made life better for people everywhere.”

The company, it turns out, is not only making “higher quality food available,” it also plays a role in the body armor that has saved “more than 3,000 law-enforcement lives.”

It is not clear what connects any of this to the people on the train, but somehow the idea is that Du Pont is helping them.

IN THE latest issues of The Atlantic and the Economist are ads featuring a middle-aged African woman. It turns out that Chevron “helped thousands of entrepreneurs get ahead with microloans.”

This woman, whose emphatic stare takes up half the page, must be one of the beneficiaries, although we aren’t told how. The Chevron’s slogan is “Big Oil should support small business.”

But this isn’t the most egregious play on the social consciousness of the reader. That award must go to British Airways, which claims “the best part of giving soccer balls to kids in Africa is seeing the look on their faces.”

What is British Airways’ connection to this? It isn’t clear. The ad claims that “last year at British Airways, we put hundreds of small business owners in front of the people they needed to see – for free.”

And somehow this is connected to Tommy Clark, Grassroots Soccer founder, who “uses soccer balls to teach kids in Africa about AIDS.” It doesn’t really matter what exactly British Airways’ involvement is, because the ad alone draws you in.

Every well-meaning person wants to portray him or herself as saving Africans. Let’s be honest, we all know the photos of NGO projects, volunteer abroad programs and anything connected to “save children” has a smiling African kid, usually posing with a white person who has “saved” him.

So these new socially conscious ad campaigns play on our society’s stereotypical charitable views. There is definitely something suspicious about them. Who decided that disguising an oil company or an airline as a promoter of aid to Africa, and putting smiling African kids or women prominently on display would be good for business? The companies don’t really seem to be giving aid; they are claiming that somehow, by helping “small business” or inventing new products, their revenues are trickling down to benefit people.

And this brings us to the last problem with all this socially conscious advertising. It’s ridiculous. I should want to fly British Airways, not because it makes me feel that I, in some tortured roundabout way, am putting smiles on African AIDS victims’ faces, but because it is a better airline. I should go to a Chevron station because it offers cheaper and better gas, not because it supposedly supports a small business in Kenya.

There is something to be said for not buying from companies that are particularly heinous in their treatment of people or the environment. But the latest craze is all part of an elaborate scam. BP rebranded itself as “green” in 2000, when it replaced it’s stodgy shield with a green “helios” or sun logo. In 2008, Greenpeace UK awarded BP the Emerald Paintbrush award for “greenwashing” its image. Greenpeace spokesman James Turned noted: “You wouldn’t know it from their adverts, but BP bosses are pumping billions into their oil and gas business and investing peanuts in renewable [energy].”

The logo became even more embarrassing with the huge BP spill in 2010. A website called Climagegreenwash.org is now devoted to tracking companies that fake their environmentalism.

What concerns me isn’t the lack of corporate social responsibility; a company’s duty is to its shareholders, customers and employees. What is most annoying is that this is just part of a larger picture of misleading sloganeering. Whether it is President Barack Obama’s platitudes and lack of policy (he won the Nobel Peace Prize just for giving us “hope”), or all the lying NGOs who pretended to be helping Haiti but merely served as outlets for unemployed Europeans to do well-paid charity work, the new motto is “put an African child in the photo and feel good about yourself.”

NGOs don’t help Africa, and neither does British Airways, and yet we feel better about ourselves for choosing to fly BA and throwing a few cents at the Red Cross, buying a book that is printed on “green” paper and then eating some nonsense “organic” meal.

From one lie to the next we go through each day. Socially conscious advertising is just the tip of the iceberg.

Terra Incognita 125 Bashir Gemayel's prediction

2011-01-05T05:46:00.001-08:00

Terra Incognita: Bashir Gemayel’s long prediction
By SETH J. FRANTZMAN
01/04/2011 22:26

We blame extremists, but the truth is that the murder of minorities in the Mideast is integral to the fabric of the region.

Talkbacks (2)
In 1980 Bashir Gemayel, the leader of Lebanon’s Maronite Christian militia, the Lebanese Forces, provided an explanation for his militancy: “With all due respect to the people concerned, we refuse to be put on a par with the Copts of Egypt, or the Christians of certain Arab countries.”

Today Gemayel is remembered by many Christian Lebanese, especially those who live abroad, as a patriot and romantic icon of his people. Others recall his name only because his assassination in 1982, after having been elected president of Lebanon, provoked the Sabra and Shatilla massacres.

The Gemayels are an important Lebanese political family. Bashir’s father Sheikh Pierre Gemayel was the founder of the Phalange party, and his brother Amin served as president of Lebanon from 1982 to 1988. Amin’s son, also Pierre, was assassinated in 2006. Amin was in the news again on January 3, when he reacted angrily to the murder of Christians on New Year’s Eve in Alexandria, Egypt: “Massacres are taking place for no reason and without any justification against Christians. It is only because they are Christians.”

He was referring not only the attacks in Egypt that left 21 dead, but also recent attacks in Iraq. In October, 2010 Islamic terrorists burst into the Our Lady of Salvation Church in Baghdad. A subsequent rescue operation left 53 Christians dead. The Christian community suffered more attacks just after Christmas when bombs were detonated in a Baghdad Christian neighborhood. Three days later a Christian woman was shot in her sleep during another attack.

In Egypt the Copts have become increasingly enraged by the terror directed at them. The New Year’s massacre outside the al-Qiddissin church has resulted in days of rioting. Egyptian Copts know that it is Islamists who are to blame. One declared, “A lot of us think that this is a plan to make Christians go away from Egypt. The planner is al-Qaida.”

They also blame the government for a lack of security. The riots come after tensions flared in November in Cairo’s Giza district over the building of a church. Egypt throws up numerous obstacles to the construction of new churches and when a recent construction project was banned by the government, riots resulted.

In other places, attacks on Christians were reported over the holidays. In Nigeria, a number of bombs were set off, one near a church in the city of Jos. It was reported by the Times of India that “the state police commissioner Abdulrahman Akano blamed the bombing and clashes on the political elite and maintained that they were not religious or ethnic in nature.”

This story, of attacks on Christians, particularly on their holidays, and excuses about their nature is typical throughout the Middle East and Africa. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak has claimed the bombing was made by “foreign hands.”

What is interesting is that little has changed over time. When Bat Ye’or penned Islam and Dhimmitude in 2002, she included a quote from Fehmi Hilal, who described “a peaceful war of extermination, which aims to kill one member after another of the body of Christians, so that the suffering be not severe and the cries not heard.”

Even in 2002 it was the same story of Muslims and Christians uniting after the attacks to confront the mysterious nebulous extremism. We see the same calls today for uniting in the face of extremism in Nigeria, Iraq, Lebanon and Egypt.

ONE PLACE that there is less uniting and more marked extermination is in southern Sudan, set to go to the polls on Sunday to vote on secession. South Sudan, which is dominated by Christians and pagans, fought two civil wars to obtain the right to leave Sudan, whose central government has generally been controlled by Muslim Arabs since independence in 1956. Millions died in these savage conflicts but with the poll on January 9 this hitherto minority group may obtain the independence that Gemayel once desired for his Maronites in Lebanon.

It is an autonomy that other Christian groups in the region have suffered heinously for desiring.

Armenians demanded rights from Ottoman Turkey and in 1915 that resulted in a genocide and the their complete ethnic-cleansing from Turkey. The same thing befell the Assyrian Christians in Iraq and Turkey between 1915 and 1932 and the Greeks of Turkey in 1920. Greek Cypriots were cleansed from northern Cyprus in 1974. Recent revelations have brought to light the terrible crimes inflicted on the Serbian Orthodox community in Croatia’s Krajina and in Kosovo at the hands Croatian Catholic and Kosovar Muslim militias.

In our own backyard, attacks on Christians are less common but equally heinous. In Gaza it has become unbearable. One recent article in Haaretz relates the story of one Christian: “When his wife and daughter go out on the street, they are subject to stares and sometimes even verbal abuse; Muslim men yell at them to cover their hair.”

In 2008 a bomb was set off outside the Rosary Sisters school and last year Rami Ayad, a Christian, was kidnapped and murdered.

We tend to take the attacks in stride. A murder here, a bombing there, soon forgotten. We blame extremists because we don’t want to label whole countries intolerant. But all that obscures the reality. The murder of minorities, carried out by the extremists, is integral to the fabric of the region.

It is the region’s tragedy.

The writer has a PhD from Hebrew University and is a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies.

Terra Incognita: From beauty to brutalism The rise and decline of architecture in Israel

2010-12-21T13:24:00.000-08:00

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Op-EdContributors/Article.aspx?id=200477

Terra Incognita: From beauty to brutalism
By SETH J. FRANTZMAN
12/21/2010 22:39

The rise and decline of architecture in Israel.

Conrad Schick arrived in Jaffa in 1846. Born in the village of Bitz in the old German kingdom of Wurttemberg, his sharp mind brought him to the attention of Christian Fredrich Spittler, a clergyman who had a plan to revive the Holy Land, to bring the gospel to the East, and he needed missionaries. So he settled on the Schick to create a German Protestant foothold under the auspices of St. Chrischona Pilgrims Mission.

It doesn’t seem it was ever Schick’s destiny to convert the East. However his arrival in Jerusalem was to revolutionize the city in another way, through his architectural creations. It is not clear what professional training Schick had in architecture, but he had a keen eye for detail. He taught himself locksmithing, mechanics and watchmaking, and became a qualified amateur archeologist, scholar on the Holy Land and model maker.

Initially he worked out of a bruderhaus, a fraternity, that he rented with other missionaries. Lonely and quiet he tinkered on his clocks while the other brothers worked at soap making and other crafts.

He apparently wrestled with fears that he was becoming too worldly. It seems the death of his patron, Spittler, in 1867 may have freed him from his obligations. Or perhaps his finances ran low. In that year he took on a commission to excavate an area around a tomb that was to become the famed Garden Tomb in east Jerusalem, which some Protestants believe to be the true holy sepulchre.

Schick planned several Jerusalem neighborhoods, among them Mea She’arim, which was constructed in 1874, and the Bukharan Quarter. He designed the Bukharan Quarter to look like a European neighborhood, with wider streets than was then common in Jerusalem. His plans for Mea She’arim called for open spaces and courtyards and the use of the most modern technologies, such as street lights. Not all of his ideas were incorporated, but he left an indelible mark on both neighborhoods.

SCHICK DESIGNED beautiful buildings as well. In 1882 he built a house for himself on Rehov Hanevi’im, an unforgettable gem, which he called Tabor House. He designed Jesushilfe in 1867, a leper hospital in Talbiyeh that was run by a German organization. In the same year he began supervision of the construction of Talitha Kumi, a Christian girl’s school that once stood next to Hamashbir on King George Avenue. The building was considered of such architectural value that when it had to be torn down to make way for modern works, its façade was preserved.

His work on St. Paul’s Anglican Chapel on Rehov Hanevi’im is considered a gem of Victorian “gingerbread” style. He also designed part of the German Deaconess Hospital, which is now the eastern wing of Bikur Cholim. Schick dedicated his life to Jerusalem and died there in 1901.

His architectural gingerbread was followed by Antonio Barluzzi’s often neo-renaissance style pilgrimage churches. It seems that, like Schick’s overall influence in 19th century Jerusalem, no great Catholic building was built in the land of Israel without Barluzzi’s hands having been dipped into the mold. Born in 1884 in Rome, his life did not seem destined for architecture. He obtained a degree in engineering and spent time in the army overseeing archeological excavations. For a while he worked as a builder, rising to director of construction before enlisting once again during World War I. He became a chaplain and somehow got himself torpedoed off the coast of Gaza and ended up in Jerusalem in 1918.

For the next 42 years until his death, he designed and restored some 24 major churches and Christian institutions, from the Church of the Visitation in Ein Kerem to the Church of Beatitudes that overlooks the Sea of Galilee.

Later he wrote: “Whenever possible – as now – it is the duty of all Christians to save these relics and to give them the honor that is due. And in this I do not believe that too much can be done, since no materials or work could be precious enough to be worthy custodians of such holy treasures.”

IF SCHICK devoted his energies to designing original structures and neighborhoods in Jerusalem, and Barluzzi devoted his religious faith to the Church’s attempt to reclaim the holy sites, then Ram Karmi’s achievement has been to translate the socialist pragmatism of Zionist planners into reality. Karmi was born in Jerusalem in 1931, served in the army and studied at the Technion and in London. The son of an important architect, the discipline ran in his veins and it was his expertise.

Like Schick and Barluzzi, his hands reached wide and he grasped many of the great projects of his day, from playing a role in the design of the Knesset, to building that great beast known as the new Central Bus Station in Tel Aviv. He was the chief architect of the Construction and Housing Ministry until 1979, built the Supreme Court and has been hired to restore the famed Habimah Theater in Tel Aviv.

In contrast to Barluzzi’s neo-renaissance style that sprang directly from his faith and Schick’s tinkering, Karmi has been devoted to the Brutalist style. There is nothing more brutal than to behold a Karmi building. Endless reams of concrete flow across the landscape coming together in imposing fortress like structures. The Central Bus Station in Tel Aviv, one of the most horrid large buildings in the world, is a monument to the fact that the person who designed it probably never envisioned using it himself.

And this is the tragedy of the country’s Brutalist architecture. It escaped the roots from whence it springs, the people, and devotes itself to the stringent socialist belief in the way people “should” live. This is the essence of the planned neighborhoods. Consider the difference between the buildings that Schick hoped to bequeath to his Jewish clients, the courtyards and open spaces, and the ugly decaying tenements the Brutalists have designed for millions of new immigrants. As Paul Barker and Philippa Louis argued in The Freedoms of Suburbia: “It is about the way people wish to live. Why should their wishes be trampled on, in the name of the plan?”

Zionism has put down roots in the Holy Land in the shadow of three great architects, one who loved Jerusalem, one who loved the Church in Rome and one who loved the concrete plan. We would do well to return to a Schick building and ponder what the next 100 years should bring us in terms of freedom, as best symbolized by what we build.

The writer is a PhD researcher at Hebrew University and a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies.

Terra Incognita 122

2010-12-14T14:49:00.001-08:00

Terra Incognita: The Israeli archipelago
By SETH J.FRANTZMAN
Published in the Jerusalem Post 12/14/2010 23:22

The Jewish state is a country of islands. Each community, each town, each village, each neighborhood is its own society.
Art project: Take one large sheet of white paper and write “Israel” at the top. Do not draw borders.

In the Palestinian territories and on the Golan, place dark green dots on the Palestinian villages and towns. Place orange dots for the Jewish villages and towns (settlements). For the four Druse villages of the Golan, place purple dots. For the village of Ghajer, the lone Alawite village, place a tan dot.

Inside the Green Line, place red dots for the 268 kibbutzim and dark blue dots for the 500 moshavim.

For all the Muslim Arab villages, place a green dot. For the two Circassian villages, place dark brown dots. For the 17 Druse villages and towns, place light purple dots. For the Maronite village of Jish in the Galilee, place a light blue dot. For the Christian villages, most of which are shared with Druse or Muslims, but several of which are mostly Christian (Kafr Yasif, Eilabun and Mi’ilya), place yellow dots. For the 49 illegal Beduin villages of the Negev, place dark grey dots.

For the 30-40 development towns – home to Russians, Ethiopians and Mizrahi Jews – place grey dots.

For the haredi towns, neighborhoods and villages, place black dots. For Jerusalem, Haifa and Tel Aviv, place large empty circles (if you have done this project correctly, they should already have dots in several of them representing the Muslim, Christian and haredi communities).

The map you have drawn is a map of Israel. Of course there are no borders, there need not be. This is not the Israel you commonly think of, the wedge of land between the Jordan and the sea, with or without the Palestinian territories. This is the Israeli archipelago, and it represents much better the reality than the one found on any map. For Israel is more a country of islands, like those found in the Caribbean or the South Pacific. Each community, each town, each village, each neighborhood is its own island. Forget the myth that people “mix” at the university or in the army. For the most part, they do not.

THE REALITY of the Israeli archipelago confronts us on a daily basis. It is a cultural and socioeconomic reality and it transcends many factors in society. A recent article by Amos Harel described the country’s largest city as “the draft-dodging state of Tel Aviv [which]... resembles the haredi city of Bnei Brak in its percentage of draft dodgers.”

He points out that “most of the draft dodgers from Bnei Brak, Jerusalem and Tel Aviv studied at specific educational institutions – the former in a certain type of yeshiva, the latter in certain [secular] high schools.”

It turns out that Tel Aviv is ranked worse than the Beduin town of Rahat in draft statistics compiled by the army. The national religious sector accounts for a massively disproportionate number of officers and combat soldiers in the army. But alongside the disproportionate service is the disproportionate lack of service in the Arab, haredi and wealthy secular Jewish sectors.

Also, almost half of all Jewish women do not serve.

In the final analysis 52-55% of citizens do not do any sort of national service.

Statistics show such shocking dissimilarities among other places in society. Take the murder of women by their husbands and lovers; 18 were killed this year – seven Arabs, three Ethiopians and three Russians.

To put it simply, your chance of dying as a woman at the hands of your partner is not the same in Modi’in as in Lod and Ramle. And two communities don’t even share the same language for the murder of women – the Arab community, by and large, denies that honor killings even happen, while the Israeli Jewish community tends to excuse the killings as a cultural problem for the Arabs.

And suicides; who is killing themselves? Statistics show it is mostly people in towns with economically vulnerable and high immigrant populations. Of the 10 most common places for people to commit suicide, based on statistics from 1998-2004, we find Kiryat Yam, Kiryat Motzkin, Hadera, Kiryat Bialik, Bat Yam and Kiryat Gat. New immigrants from the Soviet Union and Ethiopia made up 32% of all suicides in 2004, which is out of all proportion to their numbers in the population. In contrast, few people in Nazareth or Bnei Brak are at risk of becoming a statistic.

So there are islands of death and wife killings in our society. But those are just a few of them.

THERE ARE islands in the media. The only place one will find people from the poorer or minority communities is on the reality shows (Big Brother, Master Chef, A Star Is Born, etc.); the rest of Israeli TV is dominated, culturally and physically, by a few elite communities.

There are islands of illegality, of squatters on state lands who do not pay taxes. Those are the 49 unrecognized/ illegal Beduin communities in the Negev, not to be confused with the seven legal ones the government built in the 1970s and 1980s. And the island of the foreign workers, stuck in South Tel Aviv, is helped by the islanders from North Tel Aviv who champion their rights.

There are islands of differing taxes for water. While the public was asked to pay extra for water in 2009 due to the shortage, the kibbutzim not only didn’t pay extra, but according to writer Nehemia Shtrasler they don’t even pay the same amount as everyone else for household consumption.

Consider the fracas over the Knesset bill that would allow communities to reject people based on internal criteria, or what is taking place in Safed or Jaffa between the local community and others who want to move there. “Racism! Racism!” we hear. But why is it not racism that 268 kibbutzim have been subjecting potential members to “selection criteria” for 62 years of the country’s existence? There is no greater pastime than pointing fingers at a group and demanding they live with the “other,” while your community fanatically keeps others out.

Israel is an archipelago, each community segregated from the others. Some rely on fences to keep the unwanted masses away, some live on state lands for free, and some are called “racist” in Karmiel or Safed for, oddly, asking that they be allowed to do what the others have done all along, and have an island to themselves. For better or worse, that’s the way it is; the least we can do is demand that those who want to break down the barriers between the islands first tear down the fences around their communities.

The writer is a PhD researcher at Hebrew University and a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies

Terra Incognita 121 Why Eli Yishai Must Not Resign

2010-12-07T14:13:00.001-08:00

Terra Incognita: Why Eli Yishai must not resign
By SETH J. FRANTZMAN
Published in the Jerusalem Post 12/07/2010 23:51
http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=198438

His departure would add an injustice to the death and ruination the fire left behind. Leaving means walking out on responsibility, not owning up to it.

Last week, after being shocked by initial reports that 40 had perished in a fire on the Carmel, I was glued to the news and Internet trying to find out about the great natural catastrophe.

Always in the back of my mind was the worrying sense that it would not take long for the recriminations and complaints to start circulating.

Sadly the prediction came true. Yossi Sarid, a former education minister and Meretz MK, was the first to chime in. He must have begun writing his op-ed soon after learning of the fire, because it was ready by the early morning of December 3. He titled his rant “Israel devours its own people – this time with fire” and explained to readers that “you don’t have to be a genius to predict horrible disasters... Israel is a stupid, lawbreaking state.”

He appears to have been the first wellknown person to point fingers at Interior Minister Eli Yishai. “I also wrote about the minister in charge, the interior minister who is in no hurry when everything goes up in flames. He relies on God, whose salvation is instantaneous, like the blink of an eye. The minister is ready to set Jerusalem on fire at any moment as well.”

As if taking their cue, the blamers began the mantra: Eli Yishai must be the fall guy.

On December 6 Haaretz’s main editorial screamed: “In the wake of the Carmel fire, Eli Yishai must resign.” The grand poobahs intoned that “Yishai is responsible for the state’s fire-fighting forces, which were insufficiently prepared to contend with the massive blaze in the Carmel... Perhaps this is the way of a religious man, who prays with great intent and leaves the execution to a higher power.”

Noam Sheizaf, writing on 972mag.com declared “if Israel’s prime minister doesn’t show his racist and incompetent interior minister the way out immediately, he should face consequences, too.”

Inane comparisons came fast and furious.

Headlines blared that the fire was the “Yom Kippur War” of the fire services and “Netanyahu’s Katrina.”

Why is the initial reaction so unoriginal, so base, so ridiculous? Why are the comments so personal, castigating the interior minister and making fun of his belief in God? Had he been a secular Jew, or more improbably an Arab, what diatribes would have been cast on him? Yishai has defended himself. He and his friends have argued that the assault on him is a “lynching” due to people’s hatred of his political, ethnic and religious views.

Judging by the comments above, it is obvious that his religion has been a lightning rod for criticism.

MANY OTHERS have commented on Yishai’s past political behavior. A blogger at Tikkun Olam asked: “Do you think the corrupt Interior Minister Eli Yishai – someone far more concerned with deporting children of foreign workers from Israel than fighting fires – will resign?” Monday’s Knesset session, which should have been a solemn moment to reflect on the tragic loss of life, included calls for Yishai to go. Nitzan Horowitz of Meretz declared: “The interior minister should resign, because he has direct ministerial responsibility for the fire-fighting services.”

To their shame Shlomo Molla (Kadima) and Eitan Cabel (Labor) joined in. Using their logic, maybe it is Molla’s friends in Kadima who should resign, as they did little to improve the fire-fighting services when they were in charge.

But Yishai must not leave. His resignation would add an injustice to the death and ruination the fire left behind.

Leaving means walking out on responsibility, not owning up to it.

Resignation would send the message that the blamers, the whiners, the shrill voices are winning. All too often in recent Israeli history, they have been the winning voices. Those who cast the most aspersions, those who hate the most and scream the most are the ones who get the most attention. All too often in recent times “finding the culprit” has carried the day, rather than reasoned progress toward a better future. More often than not, the long knives have come out rather than the notebooks.

The only action of Yishai that is suspect is based on a Jerusalem Post report that shows he severed relations with a major pro-Israel Christian charity that wanted to donate more fire trucks (it had donated eight in 2009). But the accusations are confusing.

The organization wanted a photoop with the haredi politician, and for him to attend an event, “but they said no, and we dropped it.”

This doesn’t hold water; if the organization cared so deeply, it could have donated the trucks to the Fire and Rescue Service and, to be sure, its officers would have been happy to be in the photos.

Why did they need Yishai to be there; it was obvious it would run against his feelings toward a Christian Evangelical group.

When the Orthodox have accepted pro- Israel Christian donations, they have been ridiculed for it.

Did Yishai err here? It’s not clear.

Not one solid fact shows Yishai to have been negligent. During the previous decade, he was one of the voices in the Knesset calling for increased funding for fire-fighting services. Ze’ev Segal writes in Haaretz that “it is no surprise that documents have already been produced that show that the minister responsible for the Fire and Rescue Service, Interior Minister Eli Yishai, had in the past demanded an increase in the fire service budget.”

Yishai must not resign. The bullying rhetoric must not be rewarded. Instead, Yishai must go back to work and make good on his desire to see more funding go to the firefighting services.

The writer is a PhD researcher at Hebrew University and a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies.

Terra Incognita 120 The Iranian "octopus" and Wikileaks

2010-12-01T07:14:00.000-08:00

Terra Incognita: WikiLeaks and the Iranian octopus
By SETH J.FRANTZMAN
http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=197470
12/01/2010 05:52

The documents show that the Arab world understands the threat coming from the Islamic Republic better than the Americans do.

"[Hizbullah leader Hassan] Nasrallah always told us that the Arab regimes were collaborating, not only against their own people, but with others against the Arabs and now these WikiLeaks just prove how correct he always was.” That comes from an educated secular Muslim Palestinian woman, surely the kind of “base” that should be counted on to vote for Mahmoud Abbas. However the base is fickle and is captivated by the Iranian juggernaut.

The WikiLeaks documents have shown that not only are the Arab, and other Muslim governments, candid in their wish that Iran be crushed, they also have insights into how the Americans should fight terrorism.

LET’S BEGIN in Azerbaijan, a non- Arab state that borders Iran. There, President Ilham Aliyev said to the US on February 25 that “he supported economic isolation and believed it could be effective if enforced by a broad coalition.” Azerbaijan’s population is made up of Azeri Muslims, who are also a badly treated minority in Iran. Iran helped Christian Armenia against the Azeris in the wars of the 1990s.

The Saudis come out in WikiLeaks documents with a clear and strong voice in favor of attacking Iran. However they won’t send troops. One official in an April 2008 cable “recalled the king’s frequent exhortations to the US to attack Iran and so put an end to its nuclear weapons program. ‘He told you to cut off the head of the snake’... Prince Muqrin echoed these views, emphasizing that some sanctions could be implemented without UN approval.”

The Gulf Arab states were particularly wary of Iran and encouraged the US to beat back the threat. According to a May 2005 cable, the crown prince of Abu Dhabi expressed interest in a harsh US response to Iran; “[he] agreed with [a] tough line with Teheran... A nuclear-armed Iran would destabilize the Gulf region and possibly allow terrorist access to WMD. [He] asked Lt.-Gen. Dunn whether it would be possible for anyone to ‘take out’ all locations of concern in Iran via air power.” In December 2009 he reiterated his concerns, noting that Iran believes itself to be a superpower and could not be dealt with like North Korea. Like other Arab leaders, he stressed that a deal with Iran would not transpire. The United Arab Emirates foreign minister noted in a February meeting that “the nuclear issue is only one aspect of the Iran problem, and that Iran’s regional meddling was a serious concern. He pledged the UAE’s backing as the US rallies support for new sanctions but questioned whether they would achieve the desired effect.”

Qatar’s prime minister noted in December 2009 that in regards to Iran, “they lie to us, and we lie to them.” Furthermore the Qatari leadership understood that military force would eventually result and didn’t seem to express any objections. In a November 2009 conversation with the American ambassador, the king of Bahrain expressed his support for the use of force against Iran. “King Hamad pointed to Iran as the source of much of the trouble in both Iraq and Afghanistan. He argued forcefully for taking action to terminate their nuclear program.”

Oman was on board as well.In an August 2007 meeting “Lieutenant- General Ali bin Majid al-Ma’amari, reviewed Oman’s view on Iran from a security perspective, highlighting Omani awareness of Iran’s deceptive tactics and expansionist ideological desires in the region.” Furthermore “Oman would not oppose imposition of further measures against Iran by the international bodies; however, Oman did not want to play an active role in advocating for such measures itself.” An April 2009 document reveals the degree to which the Jordanians understand the Iranian threat. This is interesting considering Jordan is neither a front line state nor does it have a consequential Shi’ite minority.

According to the American who met with Jordanian officials, “The metaphor most commonly deployed by Jordanian officials when discussing Iran is of an octopus whose tentacles reach out insidiously to manipulate, foment, and undermine the best laid plans of the West and regional moderates. Iran’s tentacles include its allies Qatar and Syria, Hizbullah in Lebanon, Hamas in the Palestinian territories, an Iraqi government sometimes seen as supplicant to Teheran, and Shi’ite communities throughout the region.”

The Jordanians “doubt” the US knows how to effectively deal with Iran. Furthermore “Upper House [of the Jordanian Parliament] President Zeid Rifai has predicted that dialogue with Iran will lead nowhere... military force becomes the only option: ‘Bomb Iran, or live with an Iranian bomb. Sanctions, carrots, incentives won’t matter.’” WHAT THE leaked documents make clear is that the region fears Iran. Everyone wants it to be contained, sanctioned and probably attacked.

However they want Americans, Israelis or Europeans to do it for them. None of them discussed any activities of their own. None of them is shipping weapons to the Ahwazi Arabs in southern Iran or Azeris in the north. No one is arming the Baluchi or Kurdish separatists. They all fear Iranian intrigues in Iraq, yet none of them will counter them.

The most Yemen’s deputy prime minister would do is admit to lying to his own parliament while President Ali Abdullah Saleh promised “we’ll continue saying the bombs [directed at Yemeni terrorists by the US] are ours, not yours.” The Kuwaitis apparently encouraged the Americans to take the Guantanamo detainees and drop them into combat zones in Iraq to “get rid of them.” That would be better than having Kuwait take back the “rotten” people. King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia suggested implanting the inmates with a chip and then releasing them. They could be tracked like horses or falcons. If they got out of line, a Predator drone could pay them a visit. These are inventive ideas (I’ve always felt the latter one would have been a good choice when Israel released the Lebanese terrorist Samir Kuntar in 2008) but they aren’t substantive.

There was a time when the Arabs did fight the Iranians, sort of. Al- Qaida members in Afghanistan, most of whom were Arab, hunted down Shi’ites and Iranian agents and murdered them in the 1990s. From 1980 to 1988 Iraqis died in droves to fight the Iranians. In that war, Saddam Hussein was bribed by Kuwait, the Gulf states and the Saudis to get his Iraqis to die to defend the other Arab states from Shi’ite fundamentalism. The Arab members of the Israelibacked South Lebanese Army fought Hizbullah for a decade.

Today’s Arab states are afraid even to tell their own base that Iran is a threat. Saad Hariri and Walid Jumblatt in Lebanon are begging Syria to save them from Hizbullah, even though it was Syria which probably arranged the murder their fathers. The WikiLeaks documents illustrate the complete breakdown and failure of the Arab leaders to realistically confront their problems, especially concerning Iran.

The writer is a PhD researcher at Hebrew University and a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies.

Terra Incognita

2010-11-24T10:16:00.000-08:00

Tera Incognita: Bloody coexistence
By SETH J.FRANTZMAN
11/23/2010 22:48

The bizarre horror and roots of the Kosovo organ-trafficking ring; almost all those involved were respected professionals in their communities.
In mid-November, the world media reported that Interpol was hunting for seven members of an organ-trafficking ring. They were accused of operating a clinic called Medicus in Pristina, the capital of Kosovo. Most news media were excited to reveal that two Israelis were among those named in the 46-page Interpol report. Less interest was shown in the other international members of the ring – Turkish and Albanian Muslims.

Only one Israeli, Moshe Harel, was wanted by Interpol in connection with the ring. The other Israeli, Zaki Shapira, was listed as an unindicted coconspirator. A Turkish doctor and five Albanians were also indicted for their role in diverse criminal activities such as “trafficking in persons and unlawful exercise of medical activity.”

THE ORIGINS of the ring appear relatively recent. According to reports, Lutfi Dervishi, a urologist and professor at Pristina University, visited Istanbul in 2006 to attend a conference. At the conference he let it be known that he was looking for someone who could perform organ transplants. He was contacted by Yusuf Sonmez, a Turkish national and surgeon who has a history of involvement with illegal organ harvesting.

Sonmez maintains a website which claims he completed his residency in surgery at Istanbul University medical faculty in 1984 and was an expert in kidney transplants. According to a November 3 article in Hurriyet he also worked at the Ministry of Health. He completed his first transplant from a live donor in 1993, and by 2006 claimed he had performed more than,1,300 kidney transplants. In 2005 he was running a private hospital in Istanbul. Turkish websites indicate that his hospital was shut down in 2007 after a police raid, during which his brother Bulent was also detained. He received a suspended sentence.

Sonmez again fell out with the law over organ thefts in 2008. His medical license was revoked and he was banned from the profession for six months – which news outlets criticized as too weak a punishment. At the time Turkish articles called him the “the Turkish butcher” and Hurriyet referred to him as “Frankenstein.” In 2010, when it emerged that he was involved with organ trafficking in Kosovo, he turned up inAzerbaijan, apparently free to go about his bloody business. His status at present is not clear.

In 2006, while at the height of his power, operating his own clinic prior to the police raids, he contacted Dervishi. Sonmez then contacted a Turkish-Israeli, Harel, who according to the government of Kosovo was born in 1950 in Turkey. Harel later allegedly “identified, recruited and transported the victims, as well as managed the cash payments before the surgeries.” Sonmez, it seems, was also the contact for Shapira, who has a history of brushes with the law regarding organ harvesting.

Shapira was once head of kidney transplant services at Beilinson Medical Center in Petah Tikva. He was also a member of the Bellagio Task Force on global transport ethics. In the 1990s he ran afoul of ethics charges in Israel and moved to Turkey. In 2007 Shapira was arrested in Turkey; it seems he was already connected with Sonmez’s hospital. Now Sonmez brought Harel and Shapira to Pristina to help run Dervishi’s clinic. The clinic was operated by Dervishi’s son, Arban. Illir Rrecaj, a Kosovo Health Ministry official, granted the clinic a license to do urological checkups but was, according to Interpol, privy to the actual goings on there.

In October 2008 police suspicions were raised when a poor man was dumped at the Pristina airport and it was found his kidney had been removed. A raid on the Medicus clinic discovered that the organ harvesting ring had been bringing in poverty stricken patients from countries such as Turkey and Russia, promising them 15,000 euros, and then selling their organs for upward of 100,000 euros. Rrecaj was dismissed from his post. On November 4, Harel was arrested.

BUT ACCORDING to other sources it appears the tentacles of the case go deeper.

The Serbian newspaper Blic claims that Dervishi was also involved in the murder and harvesting of organs from Serbs who were captured by ethnic Albanian terrorists during the Kosovo war of 1999. After the war there were rumors that Kosovar Albanians were keeping Serb prisoners in camps near the Kosovo border with Albania.

A Spanish KFOR contingent attempted to penetrate the village of Vrelo but was called back. Carla Del Ponte, the former chief prosecutor of the UN for war crimes committed in Yugoslavia, claimed in her 2008 book that as many as 300 Serbs were murdered for their organs just across the border in the Albanian town of Burrel. The infamous “clinic” in Burrel became known as the “yellow house,” but not until 2004 was it visited by a UN team to investigate the accusations. By then, only a few traces of blood remained.

According to Blic, in 1998 during the Kosovo crises, “[a] witness told Serbian war crimes prosecutors that he saw Dr. Lutfi Dervishi at locations where it was suspected that organs had been extracted from civilian prisoners and sold later.” Another Serbian source alleges that Shapira was also involved in 1999 in instructing those who harvested the organs, and according to the Croatian magazine Politika, he showed up in Macedonia in the same year, connected to a similar operation.

This claim is based on the fact that he had Turkish connections who were supporting the Kosovars during the war.

Whatever the case, it seems the recent organ-trafficking scandal is merely the latest emergence of the dark cloud that has hung over Kosovo for years; it has become a center for human and organ trafficking in Europe.

What makes the present case so shocking is that almost all those involved were respected professionals in their communities.A professor from Pristina, a member of the Kosovo Health Ministry, an Istanbul doctor and pioneer in organ transplants and a former head of transplant services at Beilinson. What made these men turn evil? What sort of strange dark coexistence is this, where Turks and Israelis work together to steal organs?

Does their ring have its origins in the dirty war fought in Kosovo in 1998-1999? The anti-Israel and anti-Semitic media like to shed light on supposed Israeli involvement in organ trafficking, but what this case shows is that the networks behind the story have much deeper and more disturbing roots.

The Enigma of Tariq Aziz

2010-11-16T17:46:00.001-08:00

Terra Incognita: The enigma of Iraq’s Tariq Aziz
By SETH J. FRANTZMAN
11/16/2010 23:10

Saddam Hussein’s foreign minister, charged with several crimes, may soon find himself at the end of a rope.

When Tariq Aziz is hung, and most likely he will be, he won’t be the first foreign minister to have been executed for taking part in the government of a lethal regime. Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hitler’s minister of foreign affairs during World War II, was executed after being found guilty at the Nuremburg trials. He also feigned innocence, claiming that he was not responsible for the crimes or even the warpath that his country embarked on from 1939.

Aziz, the indomitable foreign minister of Iraq from 1983 to 1991 and deputy prime minister from 1979 to 2003, has been sounding a familiar tune. In a long ranging, and rare, interview with The Guardian in August, he complained that the US was “leaving Iraq to the wolves” and claimed he did not commit any crimes against civilians.

The Iraqi High Tribunal, the court that has sentenced numerous former regime members, disagrees. He has been convicted of a role in the deaths of 42 merchants executed in 1992, planning the displacement of Kurds and persecuting Islamic political parties.

Aziz hasn’t been swiftly executed, as was the case with Saddam Hussein, and demands for clemency have poured in. The Vatican, the EU, the UN and the Greek and Russian governments have all expressed their displeasure over his death sentence. As a Christian, he has received support from Iraq’s bishops. The Chaldean patriarchal vicar, Shlemon Waduni, and the Latin archbishop, Jean Sleiman, have both expressed opposition to the death penalty. Some others have gone further. Muriel Mirak-Weissbach, a radical leftist journalist who has covered Armenia and the Palestinians, wrote in September in Dissident Voice that “Tariq Aziz should be released.”

THE ENIGMA of Aziz is a story that captures both the past and the present of Iraq and the Middle East. He was born Mikhail Yuhanna in 1936 near Bakhdida, a major Assyrian Christian town in northern Iraq. Educated in Baghdad, like many Arab Christians of his generation he became interested in Arab nationalism and socialism. His life mirrored other Christian Arab nationalist leaders who became influential diplomats, such as Boutros Boutros-Ghali (born 1922) of Egypt and the Palestinian Afif Safieh (born 1950). Aziz became the editor of the Ba’ath Party newspaper Al Thawra.

In a declassified interview with the FBI’s George Piro in 2004, Saddam Hussein remembered that in those early days of the party no one distinguished between Christians, Shi’ites, Kurds and Sunnis. Saddam claimed “it was only later that [I] learned that one of the party’s leaders, Tariq Aziz, was a Christian.”

Aziz was seen as a formidable member of the party and became very close to Saddam. In April 1980 members of the Shi’ite Islamic Dawa party attempted to assassinate this Christian consigliore. This was against the backdrop of increasing border tensions between Iran and Iraq. At the time the Dawa party’s headquarters had been relocated to Teheran, whose radical Shi’ite fundamentalist leaders were using it as a tool to topple the Arab socialist regime in Iraq. Saddam’s reaction was calculated. He waited five months and then launched a surprise attack on the mullahs. His model for the attack: Israel’s lightning victory of 1967.

One story that emerged from the FBI interviews with Saddam was that Mahmoud Abbas was present in Iraq at some point and that he “requested money, training, weapons and transportation to carry out missions to attack Israel.” What role Aziz played is not clear and will likely go with him to the gallows.

In the 1980s Aziz was the point man for Iraq’s relations with the West. Donald Rumsfeld, later to be George W. Bush’s secretary of defense, came to Baghdad in 1983 and met with Aziz and Saddam. He agreed that the “U.S and Iraq... [share] many common interests.” In 1984 assistant secretary of state Richard Murphy met with Aziz and discussed possible arms shipments. At this time Aziz was described as a cigar-chomping dandy who sported a military uniform, despite not being a soldier, and wore a pearl handled revolved. He was at the infamous July 25, 1990 meeting with US ambassador April Glaspie at which the Iraqis believed they received a “green light” to invade Kuwait.

The Kuwait crises, which was a strange result of the Iran-Iraq War, brought Aziz into the international limelight. He was tasked with heading off war and met with secretary of state James Baker in Geneva in January, 1991. In the seven-hour meeting he mentioned that the Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait should be tied to the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The US and its allies would have none of it and on January 17 the bombing of Iraq began.

The cigars now discarded, Aziz took on a harried look in the years that followed. His son was arrested for corruption in 2000 and sentenced to prison, although he was subsequently released. Nevertheless he faithfully served his friend Saddam through 2003 when he was tasked with getting the Vatican to intervene on Iraq’s behalf and prevent the US invasion. His Catholic upbringing was often touted during these meetings. But to no avail. On March 20 US troops crossed the sand berms that separate Kuwait from Iraq.

On April 24, 14 days after Baghdad fell, Aziz emerged from hiding and surrendered. He now complains that he wished he had been martyred. At the time he had more pressing concerns. He told The Guardian’s Martin Chulov, “I told the Americans that if they took my family to Amman, they could take me to prison. My family left on an American plane. And I went to prison on a Thursday.”

SO HE has sat in prison for more than seven years, growing gaunt, frail and now looking every bit his 74 years. Ayad Allawi, a Shi’ite former Ba’athist and now head of the Iraqiya bloc of political parties that won a plurality of the vote in 2010 parliamentary elections, has said that Aziz is his friend. It is no surprise. Nuri al-Malaki’s party, the second largest in Iraq, is a religious and ideological descendant of the same Iranian backed Dawa terrorists who tried to assassinate Aziz in 1980. Aziz’s hometown votes heavily for Allawi. So things come full circle.

But was Aziz’s “Christianity” just a shill? Chulov found him wearing a Muslim prayer cap in his recent interview. Did he work to improve the lives of Christian Iraqis under Saddam? It seems that in that period the Christians at least had greater security. Since the US invasion and the terrorist-sectarian chaos that followed, the Christian population has declined almost by half from 1.1 million to 600,000 or less. Their priests have been beheaded and their churches bombed. They have been thrown to the wolves. And their last representative, a member of that uniquely 20th century class, the Christian Arab nationalist, may soon find himself at the end of a rope. He remains a mystery wrapped in an enigma.

Terra Incognita 101 False Progressives in the Muslim World

2010-02-02T15:08:00.001-08:00

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=167617

Terra Incognita 100 The Fort Hood Massacre and U.S Post-Humanism

2009-11-09T05:59:00.000-08:00

Terra Incognita
Issue 100

“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”

A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel

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

November 9, 2009

1) Déjà vu all over Again: Post-Humanism and the Fort Hood shooting: The Fort Hood massacre has all the hallmarks of a typical Islamist terrorist incident and tells us much about the post-human liberal world we live in. It includes the typical devices of liberals: Anti-racism as an excuse not to police people, support for terrorism by not wanting to offend others, different standards for different people based solely on ideas of victimhood, turning the perpetrator into the victim, disregard for the actual victims. All were present when Major Hasan walked onto Fort Hood army base and gunned down 13 men and women from different religious and ethnic backgrounds. Major Hasan murdered diversity and engaged in terrorism because those at the temple of post-humanism would not secure citizens in their own country in the name of not offending others.

Déjà vu all over again: The Fort Hood shooting
Seth J. Frantzman

The dead in the Fort Hood Massacre are: Michael Grant Cahill (62), Major L Eduardo Caraveo (52), Staff Sgt Justin M DeCrow (32), Capt John P Gaffaney (56), Spc. Frederick Greene (29), Spc. Jason Dean Hunt (22), Sgt Amy Krueger (29), Pfc. Aaron Thomas Nemelka (19), Pfc. Michael Pearson (22), Capt Russell Seager, (41), Pvt Francheska Velez (21), Lt Col Juanita Warman (55), and Spc. Kham Xiong (23).
The two policemen who ended the massacre were: Police Sergeant Kimberly Munley Sergeant Mark Todd.

Another mass murder. Another time when we must learn all the details about the “cause” and “reasons” behind the man who murdered people. Another time when the religious community and ideology that spawned the murder is said to be the “victim”, rather than the actual victims. Another time when we learn nothing about the victims, who become another nameless number. Another terrorist act which isn’t called “terrorism”. Another long list of excuses about the “motives” so that by the time you finish hearing them you believe that the killer was actually the real victim because he faced “harassment” or “stress” or “trauma” or “discrimination”.

The November 10th issue of the New York Times explained that despite the fact that the murdered shouted “God is Great (Allahu Akhbar)” as he shot unarmed people down, that he was not motivated by religion. He was a solitary individual. And if we read the rest of the details that the media is telling us we learn more about the supposed victimhood of the murderer. He was supposedly called a “camel jockey” by fellow soldiers. Supposedly he suffered from stress, despite the fact that it was his job as an army psychiatrist to help others with that problem.

We learn other things as well. When the murders became public knowledge on Thursday, November 5th the news media, including Fox News refused to name the killer. The Fox news commentators even admitted “we have a name, but we don’t want to share it, we don’t want people to jump to conclusions, we want to be sure this is the right name, because this name means a lot…” What they meant was that Major Nidal Malik Hasan, the murderer and terrorist, was the name and that his name might lead one to conclude that he was a Muslim. But in order to ensure us that he wasn’t a “real” Muslim, Fox News originally informed the public that in fact he was a convert. It was only after a phone call from his cousin that the media admitted that, Mr. Hasan was in fact a real Muslim, born of a Muslim father.

Outside the major media outlets one can learn a few more details about the life of Mr. Hasan. He attended the Dar al Hijrah mosque in Falls Church, Virginia. The same mosque was attended by at least two 9/11 hijackers (Hizmi and Hanjour and perhaps Midhar). The radical preacher of the mosque, Anwar al –Awlaki (Aulaqi) also knew one of the 9/11 hijackers.

It gets better. During the 2007-2008 year Mr. Hasan had shared his anti-American views with students at a military college (whose name has as yet not been released by the FBI). He supported suicide bombing and said Shariah law should supplant the Constitution. The FBI, of course, did nothing because it did not want to be accused of profiling Muslims in the American military. The FBI was aware that a man called Nidal Hasan had compared the “heroics” of suicide bombing to the heroism of a soldier who throws himself on a grenade. He said “If one suicide bomber can kill 100 enemy soldiers because they were caught off guard that would be considered a strategic victory.” The FBI did not question the Major or keep any tabs on him. For these reasons the Major purchased handguns unimpeded in Texas, said his goodbyes to his friends, gave away all of his furniture to a neighbor and got onto the Fort Hood base, where he worked, with his weapons, which were not supposed to be in his possession on the base.
The Army, prior to the Major’s murdering of its members, had been good to him. He had enlisted as a teenager and it had paid his way through college at Virginia Tech and for training as a psychiatrist at Bethesda’s Uniformed Services University. He was then given the soft job of being a psychiatrist at Walter Reed medical center. He rose quickly through the ranks and as a Major, after receiving several less than great reviews, was sent to Fort Hood Darnell Army Medical Center.

Major Hasan’s family were Palestinians from the Jerusalem area. One of his brothers apparently still lives there. He supposedly became “more devout” after the death of his parents, who had both prospered in the U.S, owning a restaurant and other businesses.
We learn from reports that Hasan was not a very good psychiatrist, that he himself needed counseling. It is not clear but his hatred of the mission the soldiers were carrying out in Iraq and his support of their murder by suicide bombers may not have helped his job in counseling them for PTSD (Post-traumatic stress disorder). Whatever the case, when he was informed that he would be sent to Iraq he hired a lawyer to get out of his service. However the military, which had paid for his two degrees, would not let him leave. Finally they said he would only be deployed to Afghanistan, not Iraq, in deferential treatment to his sensibilities as a Muslim Arab.

Let us review the things Mr. Hasan received in life. His parents were immigrants who came to the U.S and became middle class. The son received two degrees for free. He was given a good job in the army and allowed to remain near home. He progressed through the ranks faster than other individuals even though he received low grades on reviews by superiors. Affirmitive action by those in the Military who wanted to show that the U.S army is good to Muslims helped him succeed. When he was set to be deployed he, unlike the million other soldiers in the army who have seen action in Iraq, received special treatment as a Muslim and was told he would go to a different location. He was allowed, through free speech, to encourage the murder of the same troops he was supposed to counsel. The FBI did not investigate his pro-terror views or his connections to 9/11 hijackers because he was a Muslim and the FBI didn’t want to be perceived as racist. Even the police officers who ended the rampage suffered from a bit of liberalism. After Hasan was wounded soldiers shouted “give him two more” to finish him off but the police officer didn’t. He handcuffed the wounded terrorist. It is a shame, while liberalism says people should’nt “confirm the kill”, this is the best method, by leaving the terrorist alive one must then spend more public money (as if enough hasn’t been wasted on Mr. Hasan) to put him on trial and keep him in prison.

Mr. Hasan prosletyzed t the patients he “counseled.” He wore a white robe type and headcovering as is typical among religious Muslims (although usually only for peasants in Egypt, Saudis and Imams, Mr. Hasan evidently wore it to express himself and because he knew it would shield him from criticism because people would fear profiling a Muslim). While at Fort Hood for the few months he was stationed there he attended a strip club regularly and purchased lap dances, as did most religious-terrorist Muslims such as the 9/11 hijackers (Muslims who critique the west complain about its decadence but it is the most extreme of them who enjoy that decadence the most, the ‘hook’ Imam in London Abu Hamza was a bouncer for a strip club, all the 9/11 hijackers attended them and Saudi royalty usually hire retinues of them when they travel, it is part of the larger Islamist hypocrisy where men do as they please but expect Muslim women to be “moral” all the while the Islamist-Muslim male engages western women in acts of immorality, immorality the Western women supports because she herself is usually blind to hypocrisy and is told by society not to be “racist” against the “other”).

After murdering 13 people and wounding 29, all of whome were unarmed and some of whome were civilians he was hospitalized at an army hospital where he now received free medical care from the same army he tried to murder. As for November 9th few people in the U.S or the world know the names of the victims. However the secretary of the army, a general, has said that the real message of the massacre is that Muslims might face a backlash. Secretary of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano, has warned that she was “part of efforts to reassure the Arab world that US authorities were taking measures to quell anti-Islam sentiments after last week's rampage by an American-born Muslim serving as US Army psychiatrist. “ when speaking of the tragedy she noted “this was a terrible tragedy for all involved…obviously we object to [the fact] that any anti-Muslim sentiment should emenate from this” she said in Dubai while on a trip. So the tragedy is actually the anti-Muslim sentiment, not the murder by a Muslim fanatic of 13 people. She then noted that “her agency is working with state and local groups to try to deflect any anti-Muslim anger.”

General George Casey, the U.S Army Chief of Staff, has instructed soldiers to be on the lookout for anti-Muslim reaction. He said it was “important not to get caught up in speculation” about Major Hasan’s Muslim faith.” He claimed that ‘focusing on the Islamic roots of the gunmen “could heighten backlash” and that “diversity” gives the military strength.

So let’s understand this. The FBI didn’t investigate Hasan because it feared it would be called “racism.” But this allowed Hasan to engage in his own racist murder of non-Muslims, his own murdering of diversity since he gunned down Asians, Hispanics and whites simply because they were’nt Muslim. Thus in pursuit of protecting “diversity” the post-humanists ensure the murdering of that same diversity at the hands of the extremist.

The Army, whose security at Fort Hood was lazy and which could have prevented this massacre by investigating the complaints of soldiers who had received “treatment” by Hasan, has said that the real threat is anti-American backlash. Homeland Security, whose job it is to protect Americans from people like Major Hasan has said that the real victims are Muslims, not the 13 people who were massacred. Had Homeland Security, the FBI and the Army not been obsessed with “diversity” and fearful of being called racist and done their jobs in terms of security than the massacre would have been prevented. Mr. Hasan would be in prison and discharged from the army and 13 people would be alive. Instead what has happened is that liberal let the rot set in and everyone said “I don’t have this hot potato” and passed the buck, even transferring Mr. Hasan rather than punishing him and than giving him more second chances by letting him choose where to be deployed to because of his religion. The agencies and government discriminated in favor of Mr. Hasan, but his pistols did not discriminate when they gunned our soldiers down. The government now claims the “real” victims are American Muslims and the supposed backlash they might receive. This is liberal at its height. It doesn’t do anything to protect the lives of the citizen and then when the citizen is dead it feels sorry for the person who murdered him. Good police work and a color-blind system would have caught Mr. Hasan, instead the same liberalism that created Hasan and let him run wild is the same one that now whines about a backlash, a backlash that doesn’t exist, solely to transfer blame to others.

It may be a supreme irony that the same Homeland Security that refuses to even examine American Muslims for terror potential, a year ago warned that the real terrorism might come from right wing Christian “militias” and discharged soldiers. Homeland Security wasn’t afraid to tar all American Christians veterans as potential terrorists. Had Mr. Hasan been a right wing Christian, rather than a right wing Muslim, would General Casey and Janet Napolitano warn about an anti-Christian backlash? Or would good police work have uncovered a psychiatrist who praised the murder of soldiers on the internet and to fellow soldiers and who gave away all his furniture and purchased two pistols and drove with them onto the base? 13 people are dead because of liberalism, because of the coddling of Muslims, because of General Casey and Janet Napolitano. That is why they are dead. They are dead because of the FBI. The backlash should’nt just be against the extremists at the Falls Church Mosque, but against the government in general which dispatched our people to war and then doesn’t defend them at home, which disarms our soldiers on their bases but lets the terrorist come on the base with his guns, which send our quiet men and women to war but when they whine and complain and have lawyers they get their pick at where and when they are deployed. There should be a backlash, and it should be broad and deep.

Terra Incognia 99 Chosen Trauma, Why they hate us and Israeli universities

2009-10-22T06:31:00.000-07:00

Terra Incognita
Issue 99

“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”

A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel

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

October 22, 2009

1) There is no such thing as ‘chosen trauma’: The idea of a “chosen trauma” is a recent development. It is to psychiatry what the “other” is to philosophy and is part and parcel of the post-humanist undermining of history and truth. People do not “choose” to have trauma, they actually have trauma when people commit genocide against them or deport them from their land. Caring about the trauma of the group is not “racist” because it “excludes” others. It is a natural human emotion.

2) Why they hate us?: The West is hated by two groups: Islam and Western women. Not all Muslims hate the West and neither do all Western women. However one can find, in the western female coddling of Islam and the belief that Islam is “exotic” or the feeling sorry for Muslim minorities and the conversion of western women to Islam that western women, freed by the west, desire nothing more than the slavery of Islam. The West fails in its granting of freedom to people and educating them because it educates contempt and its freedom fails when those who benefit the most have the most contempt for it.

2) A Story about Justice and the University in Israel: The University in Israel speaks often of justice. But is it justice when that university protects its academics but those academics, who receive pay from the state, encourage terrorists to murder the students and destroy the state?

There is no such thing as a “chosen trauma”
Seth J. Frantzman
October 22, 2009

In order to punish victims and attempt to destroy identity, post-humanism has created something called “chosen trauma”. Describing what ‘Chosen trauma’ is Vamik Volkan in the publication Group Analysis (2001 University of Virginia) describes it thus “subjective experience of thousands or millions of people who are linked by a persistent sense of sameness.” It is the “mental representation of a massive trauma that the group’s ancestors suffered.” But we also learn that this is inherently negative; “when a group regresses, its chosen trauma is reactivated in order to support the group’s threatened identity. This reactivation may have dramatic and destructive consequences.” Thus any sort of rememberance of suffering is negative in the eyes of post-humanism because it inevitably leads to group identification and causes the group to potentially mistreat others. At the very least it means that the group may identify with itself and thus be “racist”.

Another description of the idea of “chosen trauma” can be found in an article by Ayse Karabat in The Daily Zaman in Istanbul. He describes it as “the mental representation of an event that causes a group to feel victimized. The group mythologizes an event and draws it into its identity, passing the mental representation, along with associated feelings and defenses, from generation to generation.” In writing about the “chosen trauma” he was speaking about Armenians in Turkey and their preservation of their community and attempts by youth to free themselves from the cautious behavior of the “elders” who view themselves, according to the article, too often as victims.
H.D.S. Greenway of the New York Times uses the term to describe the Turkish and Greek Cypriots. He creates yet another definition; “to described the way nations, as well as individuals, can seize upon a wrong done to them to the exclusion of any wrongs committed by themselves.”

The invention of the term “chosen trauma” is deeply connected to the Turks and Cyprus.
Greenway didn’t bother to do the background research and missed the fact that Vamik Volkan, who invented the term, is a Turkis-Cypriot. Born in 1932 he moved the United States at some point. He has done much of his work on the psychology of conflict. Had he been involved in Philosophy he would have preached to us about the idea of the “other” but he has transferred this idea to his own work. In 1988 he spoke of the “need to have enemies and allies”. He has written on “killing in the name of identity” and “from ethnic pride to ethnic terrorism”. He has also written on homosexuality, cross breeding plan species, as well the “animal” and “primitive” instincts and psychological problems that exist within us. For Mr. Volkan it is obvious the experience of being a Turkish Cypriot (a Muslim group that complains of its own victimhood and at the same time has used that as an excuse to cleanse its portion of the island of minorities) lodged deeply in his mind and he has connected all human instincts that involve group identity, pride and dislike of others with being “primitive” and “animal.” It reminds this author of a college textbook on anthropology that spoke of how “primitive people once identified themselves first with their group and were suspicious of outsiders.”

But what about the revenge of the primitive? Post-humanism has tried to convince us that trauma can be “chosen” and that trauma is a “myth” and that its consequence is violence against the “other.” The group “excludes” the things it does in order to remember what was done to it. This discussion therefore concludes that any rememberance of a trauma is not only wrong but that it is primarily mythological and therefore not based on truth. This is part and parcel of modernity’s assault on history.
There are real traumas. When a community is partially destroyed, its women raped and its land stolen it is indeed a trauma. Modernity would tell us that there is no truth behind such events as the Armenians genocide, the Rwandan genocide, the Trail of Tears, the Great Trek, the Holocaust or any other event. It is merely a “chosen trauma”. When the Jews describe the Holocaust as something that “happened to Jews” they are “excluding” the Gypsies and gays and Russians murdered by the Nazis. Thus in remembering their ‘chosen trauma’ they are racist. And, to take the argument one step further, the Jews then use the Holocaust as an excuse to abuse Palestinians, in the words of Avraham Burg they “manipulate the Holocaust.”

This is why people speak of a chosen trauma. The brainwashing of individuals to have no attachment to the group is quite successful. At the Israeli university, which is one of the more liberal and self-hating in the world, the three or four Ethiopian Jewish students who are enrolled there are raised to believe that it is racist for them to take any special interest in their Ethiopian community. Instead they are convinced that the Arabs are the group, the “other”, that they should work to help. Thus poor Ethiopians who live in tenements find themselves graduating with bachelors degrees in sociology and going out to give their free time and energy protesting “Ethiopian jewish racism against Arabs” and defending Muslim cemetaries in Israel. Such is the degree of communal destruction that the leftist post-human university can take people who are penniless and who suffered a terrible trauma coming to Israel (in which tens of thousands died of starvations and thousands were raped) and turn them into people who believe that loving their own community is “racist” and one must work tirelessly for the “other.”

By describing history as “myth” the post-human ideology of “chosen trauma” deconstructs that history. Thus the murder of millions in the Holocaust becomes part of a “Jewish myth of suffering.” Who speaks that way? No liberal would dare say that. But they say it about the Armenians. The Armenians have a “chosen trauma” and they should get over it.

The use of the word “chosen” in “chosen trauma” also degrades the existence of the trauma. The idea is that the individual should choose not to have a trauma. He should mature and become modern and throw off the shackles of the past, a past which involved memory and identity and exclusion. Modern man is just man, by himself, with no group. There is but one race: human.

The question that should be posed about “chosen trauma” is two-fold. Why do certain groups get to have their chosen trauma. African-Americans can never seem to forget the trauma of slavery and they are aided and abeted in this by the same liberal who tells the Armenians or others to forget their trauma. Black blame all their problems on slavery. Whether it is the fact that 80% of black American children are born out of wedlock (what people now glorify as “my baby daddy”) or the fact that black women “relax” their hair, it is all due to slavery, even though it isn’t. But no one tells the blacks to abandon their “chosen trauma” or that in having pride in being black that they are ‘excluding’ others. The same should be said of the Muslims, especially Palestinians. No one asks them to get rid of their chosen trauma of the “nakba” or for Muslims to forget the “crusades”. Instead the west blames all of the problems in the Middle East on colonialism and “western oppression” and the “humiliation of the Crusades and the Israeli Occupation.” So where is the complaints about the Palestinians “excluding” others or the consequences that their obsession with their trauma has on the peace process?

The other question that should be posed is whether or not the murder of leftists can be also described as a “chosen trauma”. We often hear leftists whining when a few of them get suppressed. Whether it is the attempted bombing of Prof. Sternhell or the tyranny of Pinochet, one must always hear about the assault on a few leftists and “dissidents” here and there. But is that not also a “chosen trauma”? Is it not also part of a “myth”?
The last problem with the concept of the “chosen trauma” is that it implies there is no truth. Greenway tells us that in Cyprus the Turks and Greeks each have a “narrative” which excludes the suffering of the other. The Turks don’t mention the expulsion of the Greeks and the importation of settlers. The Greeks don’t mention the assaults on Turks the preceeded the Turkish invasion. Greenway and the promulgators of “chosen trauma” tell us that because the two communities disagree that therefore there is no truth, there is just a “chosen trauma.” But this is an assault on fact and history.

If a hundred people are killed and one group says it was “revenge” and the other group says it was “spontaneous rioting” and another group says it was “freedom fighting” it doesn’t mean that the 100 people did not die. It may be true that the Germans in Poland that were expelled in 1945 were expelled because they were “settlers” or to ‘ensure peace’ or because “it was war” but none of it means that there were millions of Germans living in Poland and the Czech Republic before 1945. People mistake the fact that different people interpret right and wrong differently in order to pretend there are no facts. Did the killers of Gandhi do it out of patriotism or evil, was the deed wrong or did it save a nation from the appeasement of Gandhi. Surely some say that the killing of Gandhi was a great and honorable deed. Most disagree and view it as abhorrent. But that doesn’t mean Gandhi wasn’t killed. In fact we even know why he was killed. Whether that killing was right or wrong cannot be determined, perhaps, but the motives of the killer can, in fact, be explored. When terrorists strike liberals like to say that the terrorist has his own motives and that because he uses the “weapon of the poor” or because he perceived himself as “humiliated” that his actions are justified. Those who disagree that people should blow themselves up and kill children do not define terrorism as “resistance”. They condemn it as wrong. The fact that people disagree on interpreting an event doesn’t mean it is part of a “myth”. It is not a “chosen trauma” that the victims of terror want to commemorate being victims. They are actually victims. Liberalism murders the victim by saying he can “choose” to not have trauma. In fact some liberals do choose to not have humanity. Some victims of terror have sympathy for the terrorists. But that is not an example of the flexibility of victimhood, it is merely another example of the inhumanity of modernity. Modernity murders the soul of man. One more example of the murder of that soul is the idea of “chosen trauma”. The real trauma we face is suffering through modernity until it can finally be destroyed so that we can all return to our “primitive” and “animal” past when we “mistakenly identified with the group and were suspicious of outsiders.”

Why they hate us?
Seth J. Frantzman
There are two groups of people who hate Western Civilization, one is Islam and the other is Western Woman.

Consider the recent events in Israel. The riots in Nazareth in 2001 and at Yom Kippur in Acre in 2008 were both partially caused by pent up anger at Arabs harassing Jewish women. An attempted lynching of two Arabs in Pisgat Zeev in 2008 was for the same reason. The murderer of Dana Bennet and the murderers of Leonard Karp were both aided by Jewish women, in one case a Jewish soldier woman. There are now groups in Pisgat Zeev and Petah Tikva aimed at discouraging Jewish women from dating Arab men. The Ethiopian community is hosting a seminar on the issue. In Kiryat Gat a Jewish 15 year old dated Beoduin men, went to night clubs with them and was then taken by them, handcuffed to a pole and burned to death with gasoline. In the Galilee an Arab gang operated for three years raping Jewish women.

When all these incidents take place one must ask why. The usual explanation by women in Israel is that the Arab men give vulnerable young Jewish women presents and flatter them and that the women come from troubled homes with either absent fathers or abusive strict fathers. This always seems to be the “answer” and no one seems to ask more questions.

However the truth is much more complicated. Arab women also come from broken homes with abusive fathers and strict traditional cultures. Yet they don’t rebel by going out with Jewish men. The excuse of the westerner to this observation is to say “well that’s because their society would kill them.” But this excuse isn’t good enough. I’ve known Arab women, mostly from secular backgrounds, not so different backgrounds than the Sephardie and Ethiopian girls in ‘vulnerable” neighbourhoods who are enticed so often by Arab men. These women don’t mind hanging out with Jewish men and from time to time they are taken with the “exotic” idea of what it would be like to go out with them. But they generally hold themselves back from such behavior. Not because of the men in their society but because they believe they would be betraying their culture. No matter how liberal and open minded they are repelled by the idea. Now why is that? Why is it that the Arab Muslim culture, which beats women, which maligns them, which allows men to go out with all sorts of women, which gives men four wives, which puts women in headscarves and expects them to stay at home and beat children, why does that society, even at its most liberal, produce women who like it, honour it and are patriots for it. Even the women who hate the Hamas brand of the Muslim religion, even the women who find Arab men obnoxious in their behavior, even those women honour their culture and faith. Why? In short, why does the western culture fail when it comes to women?
What does the west not provide the women that she would make her stay part of her own culture and not love the “other” and find the “other” exotic? Is it because the western man is metro-sexy and gay and in touch with his feminine side? Is it because the Western man no longer provides? Or is it the western education system and feminism in general that produce women who hate themselves and their culture? Is it freedom, does freedom ensure that humans, women in this case, will beg for a return to slavery, their natural state? Is the western education system, the idea of freedom, and secularism, a failure?

We in the West condemn those religious groups among us that seem to produce women who actually like being part of the group. Consider the religious Jews. Their women don’t find others “exotic”. They don’t want to learn the language, religion and culture of the “other”. Yet we are told by secular society that they are prisoners, suppressed and beaten. But the secular man who would liberate them would liberate them only to find that they don’t desire him but desire another repressive religious culture, such as that found among the Muslims. Isn’t this a puzzle? The West liberates the woman, only to find that the woman hates the West and prefers other religions and cultures that reminds her of the way it used to be in the “bad old days” of the 1950s or the Victorian period. The same women that will condemn the “conservative, chauvinist” style of the 1950s is the same women that yearns to learn Arabic, to know the difference between the Eids and the various ins and outs of Islamic law. She is the same woman who takes the belly-dancing lessons and travels abroad alone to meet and marry foreign men, never returning home. In fact she yearns precisely for the 1950s culture, because is there any culture that is more like the 1950s in terms of its view of women than Arab culture, is there any culture that is more like Victorian England and its mores and dress codes than that of the Muslims?

This is the brutal truth about the Western world and its system and its promise and its future that few want to admit. The West can be summed up with one word: failure. It is a failure. It may appear a success from certain points of view such as economics or democracy. That is all well and good. We have rights to a free trial and such things like that. But the future of society depends on women and children. The long term future depends on these essential ingredients. In nations such as China and India they murder women in the womb (such is the benefit of that western science called abortion). The brilliant Chinese allow Muslims to have as many children as they want but restrict Han Chinese to one child. Most families abort female babies and have males as their one child. There is now a gender gap in China, with millions of missing women. Muslim countries by contrast happily give birth to women and marry them in the fours to men so as to increase their population. But in Russia and Japan and other highly secular country the birth rate is less than one child for every two people. They simply don’t want children, lest the little brats ruin their pursuit of the secular life. Failure. Failure. Failure. Failure. Yes, those societies are all failures.

Europe is a failure. Its women, and I see them from time to time, are butch, mannish, small breasted, unhappy, self-hating, short-haired, and if they are not, if they are pretty and friendly, then they are only interested in African or Muslim men. Such is the European male and his uselessness as a man that he spends his days pursuing things other than women, dressing like a homosexual and generally expressing no interest in personal responsibility, work or women. The European male is gay and the European women acts like a man. Both are objectionable.

The West failed its women completely and utterly. It’s not a matter of women “getting taken advantage of” or “poor women who are vulnerable”. We have been fed this for years. This was the excuse why half of all Ukrainian women have been trafficked as sex slaves abroad. Its not poverty that caused them to be trafficked. It was teaching them to read. Yes. Isn’t that a sad commentary. They could read the adds for “housekeepers in Turkey” or whatever and they gave away their passports and allowed themselves to become slaves. It wasn’t just teaching them to read but teaching them that they should hate their culture and spurn their men and that they were “independent”. That “independence” led them to servitude. What independence it was! Poverty doesn’t turn whole nations into brothels, like Moldova. No. Yemen is poor and the women are whores. Gaza is poor and the women aren’t whores. The difference between the poor western woman and her Muslim counterpart is that the Muslim women wears a visible prison (the burka) and works as a slave for her husband. The poor trafficked Western women lives in a prison (the sex slave brothel wherever she has sold herself) and works as a sex slave for a dozen men a day. Lets be honest, there is no substantial difference between the position of the Muslim women in Gaza or the western women working as a slave in the UAE. Its not poverty that caused this or “the lure of fast money”. It is independence, equal rights and freedom and the West. It is the western male and his useless impotent culture. It is the West and its culture.

A Story about Justice and the University in Israel
October 20, 2009
Seth J. Frantzman

The University and all its humanism likes to talk about “justice” a lot. It likes to educate students about a “just” society of “equals”. The University serves as a brainwashing tool to mint students who do not think. While the University claims to want people who “think critically” the actual affect of its program is to mint people who all think the same. It is no different in Israel. The Israeli university takes people from a variety of backgrounds and, at least in the social sciences and humanities, mints students who all hate the country they live in and desire to “challenge” its existence and support the Arabs.

The Israeli university system, in terms of the Humanities and Social Sciences, is primarily composed of group think and homogeneity. It is almost exclusively Ashkenazi and leftist and it is primarily male. It excels at signing petitions against the very country it exists in. In one such petition 358 university professors and lecturer signed a petition supporting Israeli soldiers who refuse to serve in the army.

But let us be honest about this. The University prides itself on justice. But let us discuss justice for a moment. Is it justice when a wealthy University professor who receives a huge salary from the government and drives a car home to his village every night supports those who refuse to serve in the army. Is it justice that a student from a poor background must go to the army or face jail time and that this student may die in his service? Is it justice that a student from a poor background ends up working security at the university and must ride the bus back and forth to his tiny apartment and because of riding the bus or working as a security guard that student may die at the hands of terrorism? Is it justice that the student from the poor background must die for the professor who receives his salary from the state and supports the very terrorist who murders the poor? What justice is it when the wealthy who receive the most and who work for the government are the ones who support the murder of the poor?

The wealthy in the states of old may have abused the poor but at least they didn’t encourage those who murdered them? The question at the Israeli university is whether the academics deserve security? Do they deserve that the army should defend their “right” to free speech? When the right to free speech encourages those who murder the students, when the state actually pays those who encourage breaking the laws of the state then what does it say about the “right” of free speech?

One Professor at an Israeli University even told the terrorists who to target and who not to. He said they should murder only “settlers” but not good justice seekers from wealthy neighbourhoods such as himself. The army and the security guards at the university should heed the professors. The Universities in Israel operate on occupied Palestinian land, all of them are, in some way or another, involved in occupying the lands of former Arab villages. So, yes, the security guards should refuse to go to work at the University and the army should refuse to serve in any area near the university.

It is time for the professors to live the life that the rest of the nation has been forced to live. It is time for their neighbourhoods to have no security and no protection. They want to encourage the terrorists to “concentrate their attacks on the settlements”. If the university wants justice the only real justice will be in stripping the professorial elite of their diamond protection plans, stripping them of their villages and their BMWs. Send the professors in Israel to the development towns, to Sderot, to Kiryat Gat, to Kiryat Malaki and Lod and Ramla. The intellectual elite in Israel dumped the immigrants to the country in these neighbhourood and now that same cultural elite encourages terrorists to murder those people who have so little. Those who have nothing and live in poor places are drafted into the army and go without question while the wealthy high school students, the children of the cultured elite, refuse to do their service and go abroad with their European passports. It is impossible to call it justice when the poor must die so that the rich can critique their country.

No, the country does not have justice. There is no justice when those paid salaries by the state encourage the murder of other members of the state. When those paid by the state are ensured security by a state they hate there is no justice.

Terra Incognita 98 Polanski, Failure of Feminism and Europeanism

2009-10-22T06:27:00.003-07:00

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.

Terra Incognita part 3

2009-09-16T00:26:00.001-07:00

The Euro-Islamist alliance
Seth J. Frantzman
September 1, 2009

With seventy years having past since the Nazi-Soviet pact the world is watching as Putin is attempting to re-write the history of that pact. Yet before our very eyes a different pact is being signed, one between the secular European and the religious Muslim. The modern day pact has much in common with the pact of old, both set out to dominate the world with their values and both seek to destroy the souls of all mankind and destroy all the diverse communities, which have souls, that inhabit the world. The difference is that whereas the Soviets and Nazis used force of arms, the modern axis of Euro-Islam penetrates us through ideas and through procreation, killing us from above through the mind (murdering the spirit, shackling the mind) and from below.

The latest example of the alliance is a Swedish newspaper which published accounts of Israelis supposedly stealing Palestinian organs. The collaborator, a European journalist and his Muslim source. But its just the tip of the iceberg. In addition there is the International Criminal Court and the entire European justice system. At the ICC men who defended their nations, such as Slobodan Milosevic, never get their day in court but rot in prison until they die. But the Libyan Lockerbie bomber and former Nazis walk free. This is part and parcel of the alliance.

Consider the conflict over the Mohammed cartoons. A Danish newspaper publishes cartoons of Mohammed. In response the Arab press in Europe and abroad publishes cartoons against Jews, denying the Holocaust, a Holocaust that the Europeans themselves perpetrated. One of those groups who published Holocaust denial cartoons was the Arab European League. The European press expands on this war against the Jews in a variety of ways. The major Swedish daily Aftonbladet publishes stories about Israel harvesting Palestinian organs to sell. Then in September the Spanish daily El Monde, to commemorate 70 years since the outbreak of WWII publishes David Irving, the Holocaust denier, as part of its “free speech” discussion of whether the Holocaust actually took place, a Holocaust the Spanish actually collaborated in by providing aid and shelter to the Nazis during and after the war. In addition the UN, a European funded organization, does not teach about the Holocaust in the schools in runs in Gaza. And in England the Holocaust is no longer taught in several schools because it might “offend” the Muslim students that England has imported over the years. And loe and behold Mr. Irving is invited to the Oxford Student Union debating society as part of its “free speech” agenda.

This is Europe. Europe commits the Holocaust, then imports Muslims to draw cartoons denying it and then in the name of the theory of “free speech” the European publishes articles denying the Holocaust and claiming Jews harvest organs for sale. Europe is a cesspool and in its spiritual sewer it allies itself with Islamism.
Other recent examples of the European alliance with Islam include a NATO admiral blaming Israel for piracy, the Norwegian government divesting from Israel’s Elbit company, and the latest book by a Norwegian author in which he volunteered at a Gaza hospital and reports that Israel murdered only civilians in its war in Gaza, the Norwegian “doctor” also claims that Sept. 11 was a good thing. This is the face of the European. It is the face of Holocaust denial posing as free speech, support for terrorism (i.e the release of the lockerbie bomber) and racism and anti-semitism in general in which Europeans ally with Muslim regimes in their war against the world.

The revelation of the broad spectrum of European hatred shows the degree to which the ‘West’ is a myth. There is nothing European worth preserving in Europe. There are no secular-humanistic “progressive” values in Europe that anyone can learn from. It is a tainted continent, poisoned. Only when its individual peoples throw off the yoke of Europeanism, secularism and Islamism can it emerge from its immoral, self-hating, Islamist-supporting, terror-nurturing, America-hating, Arrogant self obsessed value-less cesspool.

Terra Incognita 97 part 2

2009-09-16T00:25:00.000-07:00

How to Make a black under class
Seth J. Frantzman
Sept. 6, 2009

Every once in a while in life a person with given the chance to watch the creation of a problem from its inception. Every once in a while one is given the chance to witness an ideology that will lead to terrible outcomes. In Israel it seems one gets a chance to witness these things more often than one would like. The situation brooding in Tel Aviv with foreign workers and immigrants. We know where that will end up; ethnic riots, crime, prostitution, drug use, human rights whining and the creation of a vast foreign worker slum. The Bedouin villages in the Negev, we all know where that is going; the conquest of the land by lawless nomads because the state is unwilling to enforce its own laws and guard its own lands. The teaching of the “Nakhba” and the allowance of Arabs not to sing the national anthem in Arab schools in Israel; will lead to the creation of an Israel-hating minority population completely unconnected to the country and its history.

But what concerns us here is not these, probably more dire, problems. What if one could go back in time to witness the creation of the American black underclass and its inability to succeed and its increasing cultural problems that make its success less and less likely rather than more and more. What if one could go back in time to find the fountainhead, the find the well meaning leftist mentality that led to the separating of the blacks from the American way of life to the extent that all other minority groups, no matter how poor or how different, have succeeded to a greater extent economically and culturally. What if one could go back and find the problem and set right what once went wrong?
In Israel we get to witness the well meaning racist leftist views that will eventually lead to the creation of a black Ethiopian underclass and destroy a once proud people, the Ethiopians. What is interesting is that the creation of a black underclass does not happen because people are poor and savage. Most people are convinced that the creation of such an underclass is directly because of the poor and tragic circumstances from which the blacks were derived; i.e slavery in the U.S and immigration from a pre-modern rural nation in Israel. But in fact this is not the case. Left to their own devices and untouched by the leftist and the well meaning liberal these people would not necessarily succeed greatly but they would also not become trapped in a cycle of failure.

It is the creation of the cycle, the mechanism, the organism, of failure, an entire system designed to perpetuate poverty, cultural problems, whining, complaining, chip-on-the-shoulder, “I can’t succeed”, which comes about because of the intervention of the well meaning leftist. TO see how it is created, to see the fountainhead of it, we must go no further than Shlomo Goren’s article in the Jerusalem Post on September 6th, 2009.
Goren is writing about the enrollment of Ethiopian children in first grade in a prestigious semi-private school in the Israeli town of Petah Tikva. He speaks about Ethiopian children “fresh from the absorption center wish little to know basic education.” It would be interesting to know, since these are first graders, what “basic education” their non-Ethiopian peers supposedly have that makes them better? Did they learn to breast feed faster when they were babies? But Goren informs us that these savage Ethiopians can’t possibly be expected to “successfully integrate” in a “high achieving, high pressure” school environment. Mr. Goren’s evidence is that he himself once knew a black student and that student was a “troublemaker.” But Goren adds a caveat, he has known a few of those black faced individuals who have achieved, they were, amazingly given their black skin, “integrate well enough to succeed in high level academic institutions.” Their success should be something for the history book surely, after all they are not expected to do so well, and what on earth are they doing infiltrating the elite preserve of a “high level academic institution?”

Goren explains that “Ethiopian integration is a slower process than that of other immigrations.” Therefore they need “system prepared to accept anyone who is ready in an unbiased manner.” What they need is “separate tutoring.” But this separate tutoring is aimed at “helping those students rise up to the level of their peers.” But for Goren it is all with good intentions. He notes that this separate system will help “the students acclimate at their own pace.” Goren himself has volunteered in these segregated settings to teach the bushmen, to wit Ethiopians, to learn to chop wood, or whatever rudimentary lesson they are learning to prepare them for the “proper integration at their own pace. “Integration” is the center piece of the Goren narrative. In order to “integrate” them we must educate them separately and given them all sorts of separate special help. Surely, this makes them feel integrated. Goren provides yet one more nugget of insight into “integration” at the end of his diatribe; he argues that they need to “integrate at a healthy and productive pace, albeit a slower one than today's ‘instant’ culture.”

The Goren thesis is the liberal-leftist thesis. The idea is that in order to help people we must give them all sorts of special help, this supposedly helps them feel a part of society, even while they are entirely educated with people like them, and supposedly prepares them to “succeed at their own pace.” But this coddling leads to failure. Much like bi-lingual education created generations of Hispanic Americans who couldn’t speak English or Spanish, the coddling creates a generation of failure, a generation used to being educated together, never exposed to the “other” and one that then fails completely. Liberalism strangles minorities through its good intentions, through its interest in “helping” people. If you want people to fail give them affirmative action. If you want them to fail then educated them at “their own pace” and in their own language. Make exceptions for them, give them all sorts of special programs, just for them and then ask them to be like everyone else. Educating failure is what happens when, rather than expecting the best out of people in a high pressure learning environment, you set them aside and provide them a special learning environment and then after years of this slovenly behavior throw them into society and say “oh, whoops they failed and sunk to the bottom.”

Goren speaks of saddling the Ethiopians with a “system”. The last thing they need is a system and the last thing they need is the Gorens of the world “helping” them and tutoring them. Helping people is a ticket to failure. If you want to destroy a community just provide it with help and assistance, make it dependent, tell it that it learns at “its own pace”. Racists could not have dreamed up any better system to destroy minority groups, perhaps in fact that is what it is all about, racist leftists want to create a system that is self-perpetuating so that the well meaning liberal and his children will always have a job “helping” the savage minority rather than being displaced by him. In Israel the first generation of Ethiopian immigrants succeeded beyond most people’s dreams, and yet now society sees them receiving a few PhDs and says “oh my God, these people might take my job one day, give them a system to keep them down there in the gutter where they belong so I can keep teaching about ‘racism.’” After all, is not racism and the need for it in society primarily grist for the mill of the left, an entire industry that keeps wealthy leftists and their children in riding britches?

Terra Incognita 97 Caster Semanya, underclasses and the Euro-Islamist alliance part1

2009-09-16T00:24:00.000-07:00

Liberalism and Caster Semanya
Seth J. Frantzman
September 13, 2009

In July of 2009 South African Caster Semanya was seemingly on track to become a phenomenal runner. The 18 year old was beating her own best times again and again. In August she won the 800 meter at the World Athletic Championship in Berlin. Then questions began to be asked about the competitor’s gender. The International Association of Athletics Federations decided to order the athlete to submit to a wide variety of gender tests. Nick Davies of the IAAF noted that “There is chromosome testing, gynecological investigation, all manner of things, organs, X-rays, scans. … It’s very, very comprehensive.”

South African sports officials proudly defended their native son. One sports minister threatened a war over the accusations. Leaonard Chuene, President of Athletics South Africa claimed; “you denounce my child as a boy when she’s a girl? If you did that to my child, I’d shoot you.” This might not be so un-typical in a country whose President once had a song written about him entitled “Bring me my machine gun.” But actually there seems something touching about a nation defending the honour of one of its own against the invasive prodding of obnoxious sports scientists.

What is not touching is that liberalism has sunk its fangs into the case of Ms. Semanya. If Semanya is being raped once by the IAAF it turns out that the post-humanists want seconds. Kai Wright, writing at the online magazine The Root, decided that the Semanya case was not merely racist but was also raised questions about gender. She noted that the case was really about “Western culture’s desperate, frightened effort to maintain the fiction of binary, fixed gender.” Wight claimed that Semanya’s “Humanity” had been sacrificed to western culture and “science” which Wight puts in quotes, as if here is no such thing. Wight also speaks of “white folks imposing their self-centered notions of feminity, once again.” According to Wight the runner “could be both [boy and girl]. And who cares? It happens. Our social certainty about the male-female divide is not supported by biology.” Consider that the author of this polemic has questioned “science” when dealing with gender testing rules but here we now must bow down to what “biology” tells us about the difference between men and women.

One liberal biology professor was quoted by Wight as saying “humans like categories neat, but nature is a slob.” As evidence of this Wight notes that “People have large, protruding clitorises; scrotums divided such that they look like labia; inactive hormone receptors and on and on.” Furthermore supposedly one in 2,000 children are born with similar issues and must have “cruel” plastic surgery to “correct perfectly natural variations.” Supposedly people are “mutilated to fit comfortably inside our mythical gender boxes.” As evidence of the evil of gender testing in sports Ms. Wight notes that men are not subjected to gender to tests. The claim is counter-intuitive. Gender tests exist to keep men out of women’s sports. Ms. Wight seems to forget that rarely do women try to sneak into male events and compete as men, anyway if they do they don’t win against males in such things as running, so there is no suspicion that Usain Bolt, the fastest man in the world, is in fact a woman. Its unfortunate that women athletes are sometimes humiliated in this manner, but it is because there must be a line drawn in sports as to what a “man” and “woman” is, and its not as simple, apparently, as having them drop their shorts.

But that’s not the point here. Wight tells us that this whole thing is due to the West and its fake concepts of male and female. Wight is part of the liberal parthenon that always tells us that other cultures are better than the “West.” So the West, which liberalism has been attempting to make gender-neutral (i.e that there is no difference in dress, in work, in rights or even in appearance of men and women) for decades. And they have suceeded. Many women in the West look like men and men have become increasingly effeminate. Yet the West is still condemned for its “desperate, frightened effort to maintain the fiction of binary, fixed gender” But if this is what the “West” is doing than that implies that in the East they have no such issues with women who are not women, women with both sets of genitalia or women without wombs (as Semanya apparently has been shown to lack.) Is Wight kidding. Like all liberals she fantisizes about an Islam that is gender nuetral where the Burka is part of “women’s liberation” and the veil is part of “empowerment”. Like Michel Faucault who condemned the west for not accepting his gayness, the liberal believes that the other countries are open to homosexuality and transvestites and hermaphodites and all manner of sexual difference. Unfortunatly none of the myths are true. The East tends to know what a woman is better than the West, rather than blurring the lines between the two as Wight would have us believe, women are more defined as pronounced as women. But liberalism would have us believe that it is the “white folks imposing their notion of femininity.” Hardly. I recently witnessed some Europeans travelling to a museum in Israel. Its not clear what scandanvaian or Low country they were from but the men were all effeminate and weak and the women were tall, mannish and all had short cropped hair, like boys. It is the whites who blurred the gender lines, not the coloured folk of the earth. It is people like Ms. Wight who made it so we can’t determine what a man and a woman are anymore.

And Ms. Wight is not even correct about biology. Nature is not a “slob”. Like all things that create it does a pretty good job creating neat categories while producing minor deviations within the grand scheme. Most women have all the sexual organs of a woman and most men do as well. Its not as if thirty percent of all women are born without wombs and have testosterone levels equal to men, if that were the case than the human race would’nt reproduce successfully. Most people don’t have “both genitalia”. Most have just one, despite the fantasies of the post-humanists who would love a world without sex or gender. We didn’t create a fake binary defnition, rather we are used to seeing on a daily basis the normative sexual creations of nature (i.e women with breasts and so on and men with penises and so on). All of the other variations are not the norm. 1 in 2000 is not the norm. If one out of 2,000 times you saw a dog it bit you would you say “we should dis-abuse ourselves of this normative notion that most dogs don’t bite”?
But liberalism wasn’t done with Ms. Semenya. A New York Times editorial by Mark Gevisser positioned her story amidst South Africa’s past and her politics of ‘angst.’ Gevisser noted the angry reaction of South Africans to questions about their athelete’s sex. The A.N.C. youth leader Julius Malema called sex testing a “racist attack on a beautiful woman,” and Leonard Chuene, asked: “Who are white people to question the makeup of an African girl?” He also said that they should not “allow Europeans to define how our children should look ...” Indeed, if they allow the Europeans to get their hands on African women the women will come out flat chested, secular, lesbian and self hating, the only thing they will have in common with South African women is that they will find black men sexually appealing.

Mr. Gevisser calls the defense of Semenya by athletic officials “jingoism.” And we can’t have jingoism in our pristine self hating world. The word “normative” which is a favorite of the post-humanist writers finds its way into Gevisser’s critique just as it did Wights; “How, in a macho culture that accepts such behavior as normative, does one entrench the values of dignity and privacy that Mr. Zuma himself lauded when he welcomed Ms. Semenya home?” So now a different liberal is condemning South Africa for being too macho, the opposite of Wight’s accusation that it was the macho west determining the sex of the gender neutral Africans? Mr. Gevisser’s commentary, which is hard to follow, concludes that “compels us all to ask tough questions about how we understand the old binary oppositions of masculinity and femininity.”

Mr. Gevisser insinuates that Semanya is the victim of “cruel experimentation” by her formerly East German coach who once worked as some sort of evil German scientist in an old 007 movie. He insinuates that she was slipped some sort of anabolic steroid cocktail and that she was therefore turned into a modern day Sarah Baartman, “the ‘Hottentot Venus’ of the early 19th century, a singer and dancer of the Khoi people who was born into slavery and brought over to Europe by impressarios who put her on public display because of her unusually large [compared to the West European woman who has unusually small] buttocks and genitals.”

Are the post-humanists kidding themselves? First we are told that it is a white-male western conspiracy about normative binary sexual categories that harmed Semanya. Then we are told that she is part of an evil German scientific plot at cruel experimentation, akin to some sort of 19th century racist carnival freak show. In fact the story is much simpler. Semanya won a race. Someone on some committee decided she was too good and that she didn’t look much like a woman. She was subjected to tests. The results of the tests have not been released but rumours show that they determined she has “male and female sex organs - but no womb.” Now the question will be what the rules of the IAAF say determines what a “woman” is and whether she will compete more and keep her medals. Such is life. Its not racism. Its not the West forcing anything on South Africa. Its not the West determining what women should look like or what “normative” gender is.

Terra Incognita 96 Leonard Karp, Islamism and Iran

2009-08-31T23:11:00.000-07:00

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.

Terra Incognita 95 women, self hate and 'the white man's burden'

2009-08-14T09:52:00.001-07:00

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?

Terra Incognita 94 Colonizing the Conflict (Jpost column reprint)

2009-07-31T07:11:00.001-07:00

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?

Terra Incognita 94 Part 2 Ayn Rand in Tehran

2009-07-31T07:09:00.000-07:00

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.

Terra Incognita 94 part 1 Goldman Sachs' success

2009-07-31T07:08:00.000-07:00

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.

Terra Incognita 93 News from the Islamist world

2009-07-22T12:56:00.001-07:00

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.