Terra Incognita
Issue 13
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
December 1st, 2007
This weeks newsletter is a slightly expanded version of the normal one. It includes a book review as well as a philosophical essay, a critique of an advertising campaign and two essays on foreign countries: South Africa and Malaysia. I strongly encourage the readers to download the attachment because one of the articles includes a picture.
Men, Irresponsibility and the law: Cultures that encourage men to be irresponsible should not be surprised when their irresponsibility leads to law breaking and catastrophe and at the same time creates a nation of men who blame others for their own problems.
Through their Eyes? A new advertising campaign by the Guardian says much about how leftists and post-humanists view the world.
If Zuma wins, South Africa will die: Jacob Zuma is a threat to South Africa and the world should pay more attention to the fact that he is likely to be the country’s next president.
The other shoe drops: Malaysia: Malaysia is not an exotic diverse country with a free market that all can love, it is a racist country that should be shunned by tourists and the media.
Tolerance and empire: a review of Day of Empire by Amy Chua: Ms. Chua has crafted an interesting thesis: empires that base themselves on tolerance last longer and are bigger and better than those that base themselves on intolerance. The basis of her book is a complete fabrication of the evidence and even if it weren’t, who would want more empires?
Men, Irresponsibility and the law
Seth J. Frantzman
November 28th, 2007
Israeli law requires that every large apartment complex that is constructed and every neighborhood must have a bomb shelter. This has been the law since the 1991 gulf war when scuds fired by Saddam Hussein rained down on the country. In 2006 when Israel and Hezbollah went to war thousands of rockets fired by Hezbollah similarly rained down on the north of the country. When two Arab boys were killed by one of these rockets in Nazareth the media was quick to point out that Israeli racism was the true cause of their death. The Arab communities in Northern Israel didn't have the same number of bomb shelters per-person as the Jewish communities. For newspapers this comparison led to the obvious conclusion that racism must be behind this. No one ever asked why, for 15 years, the Arab construction companies that built houses in Nazareth and the city council of Nazareth never bothered to conform their buildings to Israeli law, despite being a city in Israel. The truth is they choose to break the law, the Israeli authorities did not enforce the law, because of fear of provoking or inciting Arabs to riot, and thus there were not enough bomb shelters.
On November 24th two Arab boys were riding around the streets of their suburban community outside Paris. They were riding a small dirt bike that was not 'street legal'. Furthermore they were riding without helmets, ignoring traffic signs and riding with two people on a bike designed for one. When they crashed into a police car, after having ignored a stop light, and they were both killed, their neighborhood immediately erupted in riots. Rioters declared 'this is war' and 'the policeman brought this on themselves, we will not stop until two policeman are dead.' The logic behind this is simple. Like the bomb shelters in Nazareth, there is a perception both by the community and by the press and by everyone else that breaking the law is not the problem, but if one dies because of their own actions, then it is the fault of the government and it must be due to racism.
In the film the Nanny Diaries which was based on the book by the same name, the protagonist opines that "male monogamy remains an elusive and much mythologized trait." She goes on to wax romantic about how exotic Bedouin men take more wives to show their power and that mistresses in France are 'de rigueur'. Its not a surprise to see a film passing itself off as feministic supplying the message that women should be pieces of meat discarded when the time seems right by men who use them as one uses a toilet. But there is a deeper question here. Monogamy may not be inherently natural to males, but what does it say about a society that encourages and celebrates the listlessness and irresponsibility of uncontrolled men who are not asked to live up to any standards of behavior?
Societies that encourage men to be polygamous or encourage them to take mistresses are destined to end up as societies that have irresponsible men. This is because the males are not requested to practice any form of self-denial. These traits of the male who has no responsibility are best on display in the most westernized and most Islamisized places. Whether it is the position of women as depicted on Fashion TV, or the position of women in Saudi Arabia, the same message is clear for the men of these cultures: do as you please, you do not have to obey any rules, you are a man, the women is but your beast, beat her, rape her, kill her if she displeases you, you are the man, you have no responsibility.
It is no surprise that the relation of man to personal responsibility is directly proportional to his amount of boasting, his ostentatious behavior and his cowardliness. Irresponsible men are at the same time arrogant and cowardly, they are the ones most likely to curse others and the ones most likely to get angry over their perception that their pride has been insulted or that they have been humiliated. They will be the first to take offense and the first to give offense. Needless to say, they will also be the first to disregard laws and the first to blame others when their disregard of the law causes them injury.
There is a direct connection between the Paris riots, the lack of bomb shelters in Nazareth, the lack of responsibility among men in those places, and their quickness to blame others, even to demand that others be murdered for their own irresponsibility, and the fact that their society has a disrespectful attitude towards women combined with an attitude that encourages men to do whatever they want whenever they want.
Saudi Arabia has set its personal goal of putting a stop to the licentious opulent decadence of the west. What may be of the greatest surprise to the teetotaling Muslim Islamist is that his peers have already beaten him to the west and have collaborated with and transformed it into the very palace of irresponsibility that they themselves have crafted in their own culture. The greatest question that should be posed to all mankind is 'who do I blame for my misfortune'? If the answer is anything but oneself then someone should then ask themselves 'who do I blame for cheating on my wife?' and if the answer is again anyone but oneself then one might find themselves at home in the Paris suburbs, Saudi Arabia, Nazareth, or any mosque or bordello in the world.
Through their Eyes?
Seth J. Frantzman
November 20th, 2007
There is a new brilliant advertising campaign that has been launched recently by the Guardian. It is entitled ‘through their eyes’ and is being placed on their webpages as well as others. The add is made up of five slides. The first three have the same basic theme. They show a person’s eye and the facial area around the eye. But the eye and face are transparent and beyond it we see what this person is seeing. We are thus seeing ‘through their eyes.’ The fourth frame declares in bold purple letters “see the world through their eyes.” The fifth frame adds to this, declaring “the Guardian weekly global network; first person accounts, analysis and discussion, theguardianweekly.co.uk.
The premise is that we are being shown the world ‘through their eyes.’ But what are we really being shown? The images depicted in the advertisement give a good idea of what world we are being exposed to. The first frame is of a white man with Henry Kissinger glasses. We see in the distance an anti-war rally which he no doubt is participating in. The next frame is an Arab woman wearing the niqab, or full face veil, which is obvious because we only see the world through a tiny slit which obscures all but her eye. But through this slit we see a fire burning, no doubt because she is in the midst of the Israeli occupation or the Iraq war. The third frame seems to be of a black man wearing giant protective goggles or Elvis Presley shades. Through his eyes we see a woman, perhaps black, crying and holding a child, who has no doubt been killed or is ding of famine.
The world we are being exposed to is not just the world that the BBC also exposes us to, where the situation is always describes as being the ‘worst’ or ‘most horrific’, but it is also the world of the liberal. Thus while we are shown the extreme right wing Islamist, we also see her collaborator in the west, the pacifist man in the anti-war parade. The role of the African, as the role of Africa in the world, is not quite clear, but his view is nevertheless miserable and certainly must inspire us to give more money to Oxfam or Live8, or Bono.
This idea of seeing the world ‘through their eyes’ is a hoax. We are not being exposed to 99% of the world. We are being exposed instead to the liberal world. We are seeing the world through the eyes of a liberal. What is particularly brilliant about this advertisement is that it expresses exactly the liberal worldview in a nutshell. The liberal has a certain view of the world. But because of his moral-relativism he knows that he must view the world through the cultural frames of the other. Thus he takes his world view, and smushes it through the eyes of the other and creates this transparent lens, the eyes of the other, whereby he still sees the world he wants, only now it is distorted by the eyes of the other. This is all too apparent in the causes liberal post-humanists promote in the west. They support radical Islamists and right wing fascists such as Nick Griffin, David Irving and Mahmud Ahmadinjed. They support dictators such as Chavez and Castro and they support terrorists and nationalists such as the Palestinians. But at home they support gay rights, abortion and they protest nationalism and the death penalty. They support anti-Semitism abroad but talk about their love for the ‘Jews’ at home. They support ethnic-cleansing abroad and at home they support diversity. They speak out against globalization abroad but they love their neighborhood Ethiopian restaurant their friend Viveck at the corner market. They read books on Atheism by Chris Hitchens at home but they attend mosque to show their tolerance, with their friends Mohamed and Aisha.
So the Guardian is inadvertently showing us exactly what the liberal worldview is. The liberal view is of a world in which they pretend to look through the eyes of others but they only selectively see and filter through what they want. They see the dead Palestinian children, they see the racist American soldier, they see the starving African child, and they see their anti-Zionist professor whose ‘free speech’ is being silenced by a Jewish lobby.
But what don’t they see? They don’t see 99% of the world. They don’t see the world through the eyes of a Dinka tribesmen whose Christian family has been murdered and whose daughter has been sold into slavery by an Arab from Khartoum. They don’t see the world through the eyes of a Tutsi farmer who has gone to the Congo to track down the Hutus who murdered his family while the world sat silent. They don’t see the world through the eyes of the Serb refugees thrown out of Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo by the west and their collaborators in the Balkan wars. They don’t see the world through the eyes of a poor Sephardic Jewish family living in Sderot whose roof has been destroyed by a Palestinian fired Kassam rocket. They don’t their see world through the eyes of Hindus or Sikhs or Buddhists. They don’t see the world through the eyes of Catholics (or Christians for that matter), unless they are from Northern Ireland. They don’t see the world through the eyes of Armenians or Copts or Ethiopians.
If you did a mental map of the mind of a liberal and whose eyes he sees the world through and you then composed a world based solely on those whose eyes the liberal looks through and those he has compassion for and those he hates then the world would be composed of 4 billion Muslims(2 billion of whome are women, refugees and children), 500 million jack boot wearing, blue eyed, shaved-headed, Israeli male soldiers, 1.5 billion Palestinians, 500 million starving black Africans, 10 million ‘Christian fundamentalists’, 10 million ‘Hindu nationalists’, 10 million Israeli settlers, 10 million ‘right wing racist xenophobic irredentist fascist extremists’, 3 members of a Serbian Human Rights Organization and Anna Poblovskaya.
Luckily we do not live in such a world. Luckily we have billions of Chinese, Indians and smiling Mexicans, none of whome are ever noticed by the Guardian or the BBC, who remind us everyday that we don’t live under the black flag of Islam yet and we don’t all have to listen to the wail of the minaret yet and we don’t have to all go volunteer to teach Africans how to plant corn, yet, and our society isn’t neatly broken down into ‘freedom fighters’ and ‘racist Israeli settlers’ yet and, most of all, we don’t all have to go on an ‘exotic’ pilgrimage to Mecca and call Mohammed a ‘prophet’ yet.
If Zuma wins, South Africa will die
Seth J. Frantzman
November 28th, 2007
8 Maon #9
Jerusalem, Israel
The author is Jerusalem based writer and can be reached at sfrantzman@hotmail.com.
For all those in the west that couldn't help but love the tender, mild, Nelson Mandel, they could be forgiven for not knowing who Jacob Zuma is. He was born in Ikandla, in kwa-Zulu in 1942, six years before the National party's victory that ensured Aparthied would become the official legal system of South Africa. Despite being a Zulu from the Msholozi clan he joined the ANC in 1959, setting himself on a track that would differ from many of his tribe. His big break came in 1963 when he was arrested outside Zeerust in the Transvaal with 45 members of an ANC militia and he was sentenced to 10 years on Robben island for conspiring to overthrow the government. After release from prison, where he become close with Mandela, he traveled to Mozambique and then Zambia serving on the ANC national Executive Committee and as head of 'Underground Structures', the terrorist wing of the ANC.
Since 1990 his star has done nothing but rise. He played a key role in ending viscious fighting between the ANC and Mangosutho Buthelezi's Inkatha Freedom party, a Zulu nationalist political party. He has served as Chairman of the ANC in Kwa-Zulu Natal and deputy President of the ANC. Today he is poised, with the backing of some two-thirds of the ANC to become the next leader of the party and thus, most probably, the next president of South Africa.
But there are many skeletons in the closet of Mr. Zuma that should make South Africa, Africa and the west wary of his climb to the top. Besides his terrorist background (a song sung at his rallies refers to bringing Zuma his machine gun, a throwback to his days as a 'freedom fighter') there is the fact that he has somewhere between two and five wives and at least 18 children. His first wife Sizakele still lives in his home town. His second wife, Dr. Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, who he divorced in 1998 was minister of foreign affairs for South Africa. His third wife, Kate committed suicide in 2000.
There are also the rape allegations and the corruption charges. Zuma was relieved of his position as Deputy president of the ANC by his former friend Tahbo Mbeki in 2005. In the same year he was charged with rape. In response to the allegations, amid rallies by his Zulu supporters, he noted that the woman in question, an AIDs awareness campaigner, had uncrossed her legs at a meeting with him, a sure sign that he was 'forced' to have sex with her. Furthermore he noted that he had taken a shower afterward to prevent himself from contracting AIDs. In 2006 he was found not-guilty of rape. In November of 2007 he received the endorsement of the ANC women's league, despite the fact that he was a rapist and probably masauginist.
But it only gets worse. Zuma's candidacy will split the Zulu vote in South Africa, and the ANC party base which is made up traditionally of the non-Zulu tribes of the country, such as the Xhosa, will support him, leaving the opposition to be composed of a significantly weakened IFP and the Democratic Alliance, which is mostly a party of South African whites with some Indians, blacks and Coloureds thrown in.
In truth there is only one party in South Africa, the ANC. The National assembly is composed of 400 seats, of which the ANC has 290. The Democratic Alliance has 47 and the IFP only 23. The UDM, which was founded by an Afrikaner, Roelf Meyer and the Xhosa Bantu Holomisa, the former leader of the Transkei under Apartheid, has only six seats, but is the fourth largest party in the country. There are another 11 parties in the National Assembly that have less than 6 members each including a parties for Indians(Minority Front), an Afrikaner party(Freedom Front), a Coloured party(Independent Democrats) and two Christian based parties(African Christian Democratic Party, United Christian Democratic Party). As was the case in Mexico between 1920 and 2000, one political party, the PRI, governed the country in a form of dictatorship. The same was the case in Italy when the Christian Democratic party ruled the country from 1945 to 1994. South Africa does not have a chance of having a real opposition until the ANC destroys itself or splits apart.
But the threat of Zuma may be more than continued ANC rule. His threat may entail a continued deterioration in the society of South Africa, rise in crime, further blandishments of propaganda by the government, attempts to control the media (already Mbeki has attempted to purchase the newspapers of his critics and curtail free speech on the internet while Zuma sued every paper that printed allegations of his rape), and a further slide towards Zimbabweazation of South Africa. Recent high profile crimes, such as the killing of mining magnate Brett Kebble in 2005 and reggae artist Lucky Dube in 2007 perhaps forseshadow worse to come. Although Time Magazine, always known for its brilliant insights into international affairs and foreign countries, opined that Dube's death was "another reminder of the violence fueled by ongoing social inequality". This may reflect Time's ignorance of the race of Dube, he was black, and instead reflect what the world wants to believe about South Africa. Social inequality is supposed to equal crime. According to that logic Zuma may be the right choice for pluralist, progressive South Africa, despite his gay bashing and raping and his multiple wives and his machine gun, he may succeed in doing to South Africa what Robert Mugabe has done so well for Zimbabwe; he may make everyone equal in their poverty, thus ending the social inequality and ending all crime. He will do what Communism has succeeded in doing elsewhere: making us all equally poor and wretched.
Lo mthondo wakho udal’inyakanyaka, Awuleth Umshini wami
The other shoe drops: Malaysia
Seth J. Frantzman
November 27th, 2007
Malaysia does not evoke images of Islam or Islamism in our minds. We are accustomed to think of Malaysia as one of the 'little tigers' of Asia, a promising Asian democracy, like Singapore, full of splendor and wealth and a robust free market. This image, one constructed from the stock exchange at Kaula Lumpur and the famous Petronas towers, obscures the illness and racial-religious evils lurking beneath the surface of this country.
Malaysia's history is not unique. Its people were once Buddhists and Hindus with a great deal of influence from India and China. But its population was made up primarily of Malays, an ethnic group that differs greatly from its neighbors. When Islam came to Asia the Malays embraced the religion as a way to gain independence and primacy over their neighbors. Thus the country became split, like so many others, along ethnic and religious lines. The Malays became Muslims and the Chinese remained Buddhist. With colonialism this ethnic-religious divide only became more pronounced. The Chinese, balking at their colonial masters, the British, became ardent Communists, like their brothers to the north in mainland China. The Malays, who had been viewed as a 'martial race' by the British were only to happy to be recruited into the British trained local militia to hunt down their non-Muslim, non-Malay Communist enemies. Beginning in 1945 a full Communist scale insurgency rocked the country and the British unleashed the Malays against the Chinese minority leading to large scale ethnic cleansing. By 1957, with the Communists destroyed and many hundreds of thousands of Chinese peasants murdered or resettled, the country was granted independence. In 1963 it was joined in a federation by Singapore and the East Malaysian states of Sabah and Sarawak on the island of Borneo. Following further Malaysian riots in 1965 against ethnic Chinese the city-state of Singapore decided to quit the federation, based on the fact that Singapore was primarily a Chinese city and its leader Lee Kuan Hew did not appreciate the fact that the Malaysian government ignored the wide scale anti-Chinese riots, and the fact that the Malay majority armed forces refused to protect the Chinese. The same year, 1965 witnessed the murder of 500,000 ethnic Chinese in Indonesia by the Muslim regime of Suharto and the massacre of 200,000 Catholic East-Timorese. Although completely ignored by the outside world the years 1965-1967 in Asia were one long series of bloodbaths committed by Muslim regimes against non-Muslims in the name of ridding their country's of 'Communism.' Until today most scholarship on this fact has been blurred by the racial components of the ethnic-cleansing.
Between 1965 and the present the overriding concern of every Malaysian leader has been the preservation of the Malay grip on power and the suppression of all the minorities in the country, despite the fact that the Malays are only 50% of the population of the country. In fact the mass killings of Chinese have been directed to insure that the Malays make up greater than 50% of the country. According to recent statistics the Chinese make up only 23% while Indians make up 8% and 'indigenous' people make up another 7% and 'others' make up 7%. Religiously the country today is reported to be 60% Muslim, 20% Buddhist, 9% Christian and 6% Hindu.
Mahathir Bin Mohammed who ran the country as Prime Minister from 1981 to 2003 was credited with liberalizing the economy. For this he gained kudos in the west. But many people did not notice that his free market reforms did notog hand in hand with liberalizing civil society in general. Mahathir was no liberal. At the tenth Islamic Summit conference in Putrajaya (whose name betrays the non-Islamic history of the country), Malaysia on October 16th, 2003 the Prime Minister noted that:
" The Muslims will forever be oppressed and dominated by the Europeans and the Jews. It cannot be that there is no other way. 1.3 billion Muslims cannot be defeated by a few million Jews. There must be a way. We are actually very strong. 1.3 billion people cannot be simply wiped out. The Europeans killed 6 million Jews out of 12 million. But today the Jews rule this world by proxy. They get others to fight and die for them. They survived 2000 years of pogroms not by hitting back, but by thinking. They invented and successfully promoted Socialism, Communism, human rights and democracy so that persecuting them would appear to be wrong, so they may enjoy equal rights with others. With these they have now gained control of the most powerful countries and they, this tiny community, have become a world power. "
This was not the first such utterance by the esteemed Prime Minister of a modern state. In regards to Christians:
" Europeans, nominally at least are Christians and as Christians their old enmity towards Islam in particular still color their thinking (BBC Monitoring, June 4, 2003.)"
In regards to Sept. 11:
"If the Arabs who before were not terrorists are today willing to commit suicide in order to fight against the Israelis or Americans, there must be a reason for it. And the reason is that they feel that Americans and the Jews and the Europeans have been unjust to them." (BBC Monitoring, December 13, 2002.)"
Following the collapse of the stock exchange in Kuala Lumpur he noted that " We do not want to say that this is a plot by the Jews, but in reality it is a Jew who triggered the currency plunge, and coincidentally [George] Soros is a Jew. It is also a coincidence that Malaysians are mostly Moslem. Indeed, the Jews are not happy to see Moslems progress."
Like so many Muslim leaders he noted in September of 1986 that Jews in Israel had been "apt pupils of the late Dr. Goebbels." But in 1994 with the release of Shindlers List Malaysia banned the movie on the grounds that "it seems the illustration is propaganda with the purpose of asking for sympathy, as well as to tarnish the other [German] race." Like others he was unable to see the contradiction between insulting a country by comparing it to Nazi Germany and then at the same time denying the actions of the Nazis.
Hatred of Jews is usually a harbinger of worse things to come. But Mahathir's comments in 2003 were ignored. A picture captioned 'Malaysia is a multi-ethnic society with a range of faiths' was used to illustrate the 2002 BBC story entitled 'Malaysian state passes Islamic law.' The Islamic Party of Malaysia has gained further inroads in states such as Kelantan and Terengganu in the northeast of the country. Since 1993 there has been increasing Islamization across the country, including state laws enforcing dress codes and forcing women and men to stand in separate isles in supermarkets and enforcing death by stoning for adultery. Needless to say, as in all Islamic states, the only people ever convicted of adultery are women.
A recent case in which a Malay woman wanted to convert to Christianity in order to marry a Chinese man was struck down by the supreme court. According to the ruling a Malay could not convert from Islam to any other religion, a law modeled on Islamic law in most countries which makes apostasy illegal.
But religious discrimination, anti-semitism and Islamism is only one aspect of Malaysia. The other is the institutionalize racism that has been in place since independence in 1957. Under the guise of 'empowering' the Malaysian majority the government instituted a 'Malays first' affirmative action policy. Unlike in the West where affirmative action refers to the process of giving minorities greater access to jobs and education by discriminating against the majority, the Malaysian system gives the majority special opportunities and ensures that when they are up against a minority for a job they will receive the job. In most countries racism by the majority may ensure that the minority remains on the fringes of society, but in Malaysia the racism of the majority is enshrined in the legal system of the country.
On November 25th protests by ethnic Tamils broke out demanding equality and better treatment. These Tamils make up the majority of the Indians in Malaysia, who are 8% of the population. They also happen to be Hindu and therefore suffer the double discrimination of not being Malay and not being Muslim. Malaysia dealt with the protests by arresting the leaders, using water cannons to disperse them and threatening to embark on martial law, in a reply of the prelude to the ethnic cleansing of Chinese that took place in the 1950s.
It is no surprise that there will not be any condemnations of Malaysia in the west. The U.N will not condemn the treatment of these protestors. Neighboring Burma was singled out by the west and the U.N for condemnation, but Burma is a Buddhist country. Malaysia, like the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and almost all Muslim countries, is coddled by the West despite rampant human rights abuses, racism and religious discrimination. This is the modus operendi of the world. There are tourist boycotts of Burma, but not of Iran or Malaysia or the UAE. Malaysia is, after all, in the West's twisted was of seeing things, 'exotic'. Dictatorship, racism, and religious fanaticism are today's positive romantic and exotic images of the world. Any nation that does not include them, any nation that does not discriminate against women, is not on the tourist destination of the western elites or western college students. So it should be no surprise that Malaysia's fascist policies, and its disgusting regime, are not mentioned in the press and that its policies are never critiqued by the world. In fact the western press makes sure to frame the argument so that the Malaysian government comes out in a positive light.
Those who protest are described as "right-wing Hindu nationalist" by the Boston Globe(Monday, Nov. 26th, 2007, 'Malaysia's racial lines'). The protestors are mocked for being 'racist' because there is a 'racial dimension' to their protesting. The former Deputy Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim is quoted as saying "They should be more inclusive…We must champion the cause of the poor of all races not just Indians." Westerners eat this up with glee and they come away thinking that it is the 'right wing' who is racist and is protesting against the positive affirmative action policies of an inclusive government. It’s a brilliant way to frame something. Its like the way protests are described in the UAE. Protests by foreign workers who make up 80% of the UAE are also described as negative by the western press because the 'minority' Arab elites who control the country and brought all the foreign workers are now being threatened. Only a western newspaper like the Boston Globe could turn things around. But perhaps the Boston Globe writers should ask themselves if it is logical that the majority in America, whites, should receive affirmative action and if the minority, blacks, were to protest such discrimination, if they should be described as 'racist' merely for protesting. Who is the racist when the majority who are only 51% of a country forces its religious beliefs upon an entire country, when the government pays for religious pilgrimages for the 51% but not the other 49%, when the 51% receive special government sponsored jobs and benefits and scholarships and schooling, while the 49% do not, when the 51% get to have states where their religious law is the law, and the 49% get nothing, when the 51% ensure that supermarkets are divided between men and women and women are arrested for 'immoral behavior' and yet the 49% does not desire such laws. Only a left wing newspaper such as the Boston Globe could frame such a debate in a way where the minority, the 49% came off as the 'right wing' and the 'racist' and the majority which is discriminating comes off as the victim. One just hopes that the next time blacks march somewhere in America for some cause that the Boston Globe will describe the Black minority as 'racist' and 'right wing' for demanding equal rights. But like the BBC, the very comment that Malaysia is a 'multi-ethnic' society is supposed to make us think 'oh, its diverse, it’s a utopian model, how wonderful, its multi-cultural.' But once again we have seen how the mere existence of 'diversity' leads the commentator to assume that this society is positive. But Malaysia's diversity is like all diversity in Islamic countries, it exists at the bottom of society, marginalized, raped and abused, and should it protest it is imprisoned and murdered. It would be nice to see the likes of the BBC just once describe the American South in 1840 as 'diverse' and 'multi-cultural' because the American South had other races, such as blacks. Just because a country has lots of little minorities doesn’t mean that country is a just country. Malaysia is the prime example of a country where diversity and injustice go hand in hand.
Tolerance and empire: a review of Day of Empire by Amy Chua
November 24th, 2007
Seth J. Frantzman
Amy Chua’s Day of Empire presents an interesting thesis, namely that tolerant empires succeed and they fail when they become intolerant. She surveys Persia, Rome, Tang China, the Dutch empire, the British empire and the United States in her quest to prove that intolerance and close-mindedness have led empires to fall. Other reviewers were only too happy to see this thesis proved. Robert Kaplan at the Atlantic Monthly loved it. Andrew J. Bacevich, author of The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War writes enthusiastically that “great power lies in the ability to attract and assimilate, rather than to coerce or intimidate.” Amitai Etzioni, author of Security First notes that the “future cannot afford to ignore” this book. Niall Ferguson notes that “her ingenious thesis [is] that religious and racial tolerance was a prerequisite for global dominance, but also the slow solvent of that cultural "glue" which holds a great nation together.”
This is all very nice. We always like to see that what we want to believe is actually true, in this case that our current love for multi-culturalism actually means we will be a great empire and that ‘intolerance’ ala Bush will result in decline and catastrophe. If only we can be more like Rome and Britain and the Dutch and Islam and the Mongols and the Persians. Yes, they should be our model.
There are a number of major flaws in this thesis and they must be put on the table to illustrate just how far fetched this line of thinking is. First of all, not all tolerance loving peoples became excellent imperialists. In many cases they were crushed beneath the feet of their intolerant neighbors. The Xhosa and to a greater extent the San and Kokhoi of South Africa were reasonably tolerant. By contrast, their Dutch, British and Zulu neighbors rolled over them and subjugated them with ease. The Pasqua-Yaqui Indians of Southern Arizona and Northern Mexico were perfectly nice peaceful people. It is no surprise that their Apache neighbors and later the Mexicans and Americans had no trouble crushing them. The Black tribes of the Sudan have been peaceful nice folk for two thousand years, and for 1500 of those years they have been enslaved and murdered and slaughtered by Muslim Arab tribes that have penetrated and colonized their country. The Aboriginals of Australia were perfectly friendly and we all know where it got them, in contrast to the Maori’s of New Zealand who were especially vicious and have maintained their independence to a greater degree. One might remark on the differing fates of the Buddhists of Afghanistan, who no longer exist, and the Sikhs of the Punjab, one a religion of niceness, the other a religion that mandates each male carry a sword to protect himself.
But if tolerance doesn’t necessarily lead to expansion and empire then certainly Ms. Chua has proved that tolerant empires have always been successful. Or have they? The impact of Alexander on the civilizations he conquered was weakened by the fact that the Greeks were an overly tolerant people and Alexander was more interested in chronicling the people he had conquered than on bringing his way of life to them. It may be no surprise that with the exception of Alexandria (The Egyptian city being but one of dozens of such Alexandrias he founded), his mark has mostly been forgotten. The Mongols also were overly tolerant of the religions and customs of the people they conquered. It is why after a few generations they were absorbed into all of them and their empire disappeared.
But if tolerant empires have not always succeeded and tolerant people have not usually become good imperialists, then Ms. Chua must at least be correct in her assertion that the empires she was examined did indeed rise out of tolerance and fall due to intolerance. The evidence for this is scratchy at best, contradictory at worst. Rome was a tolerant society only insofar as it had lots of different people under its control. However Rome completely destroyed the civilizations of the people it conquered. From Carthage where it killed 90% of the people and sold the remaining 50,000 into slavery, to Gaul where it depopulated the entire country, to Spain and Anatolia where it did the same, to Judea where it killed two thirds of the Jewish people. Where was the tolerance in this empire? It didn’t include minorities in its government and only late in life did it use them in its army, and then only so they would die on campaign so ordinary Romans could enjoy the good life. By what stretch of the imagination was this a ‘tolerant’ empire? It massacred Jews and Christians throughout its dominions. Ahh, but we are told that Rome fell because of intolerance. Perhaps the persecutions of the Christians were the last gasp of a close-minded empire. But evidence does not bare this out either. The last hundred years of the western empire were ones in which non-Romans were the vast majority in Rome and which all manner of non-Roman peoples and religions began to overrun the empire. The army was completely composed of non-Romans by this time. In fact the last, pathetic, hundred years of the empire were the most diverse and it has led scholars such as Gibbon to conclude that this was exactly the cause of the empire’s fall.
What of the Persian empire. Where was the tolerance here? When Persia was fed up with the Jews it deported most of them to Babylon and destroyed the ten tribes of the north in the Kingdom of Israel. But the Jews were the just the tip of the iceberg of the peoples Persia relocated and attempted to exterminate. In fact Persia built its imperial ambitions on destroying native cultures and resettling loyal people in newly conquered parts of the empire. Persia understood all too well that tenacious local people would undermine her hegemony, so she had an efficient system of Stalin like resettlement programs to make the empire stronger and to confuse locals by resettling them far away from their environments. If this is tolerance, then what is intolerance. Persia also had slavery, surely another mark of tolerance.
The Dutch and British empire were also tolerant only to the extent that they had lots of diverse peoples under their control. Neither the Dutch nor the British empire fell because they became intolerant. The Dutch were no more intolerant in 1939, on the eve of the conquest of Dutch Indonesia by the Japanese, than they were in 1600 when they began empire building. The British by contrast became more and more tolerant in the 20th century. They invited many of the people from their empire to study in England. Men such as Gandhi and Nkrumah learned about civil right and self determination in England. In fact, it was this enlightenment that led them to found resistance movements. England’s expansion of education to the locals led directly to the fall of her empire. However prior to that the British empire was hardly tolerant. Before it outlawed slavery it was engaged in the slave trade. British colonists in Australia and the Americas decimated the native tribes. In fact, the most tolerant periods of British rule came after the empire banned slavery in the 19th century and began allowing limited home rule, and it was only then that the empire began to decline.
But if Ms. Chua is wrong in claiming that tolerant people make good imperialists, and wrong in the fact that tolerant empires succeed and wrong in claiming that Rome, Persia and Great Britain were so tolerant, then she must at least be correct in asserting that intolerant people are bad imperialists. This doesn’t hold water either.
Most intolerant people have made the best imperialists. The Zulus are but one example. The Islamic empires were all intolerant in the utmost, enslaving people and massacring them wherever they went, and yet every Islamic empire was phenomenally successful, from the Arabs to the Ottomans and the Mughals. Their downfall came at the hands of eachother or less tolerant people such as the Crusaders or the Reconquista. The Spanish empire was also very successful in its early and most intolerant period between 1492 and 1600. However once it banned the enslavement of the Indians and its conquistadors set about inter-mixing with the locals, it was not so long before it declined. How exactly Chua decided that the British empire, where the British never intermarried with local people, was more tolerant than the Spanish empire where they did, is not clear. What is clear is that empires have never been founded on tolerance. The most warlike people, imbued with some fanaticism and efficient accounting systems seem to have made the best imperialists. From Alexander to Genghis, to Fredrick the Great, Shaka Zulu and Mohammed.
We would like to believe that tolerance is good for an empire and that therefore America should be more tolerant and her empire will grow. But tolerance has little to do with success in this arena. The most intolerant states are frequently successful, Saudi Arabia is but one example, but overly intolerant states such as Nazi Germany seem to burn themselves to death in their own feasts of blood. Tolerant states don’t seem to have any chance of success in the imperial arena. But that may be ok news. America never had pretensions of empire. In fact those who are continually condemning the American empire are mostly fighting a straw man. There is no American empire, certainly not in the typical definition of empire. That doesn’t mean America is not a hegemonic power in the world, it is. But empire and power are two different things. In the past one has usually equaled the other. Powerful states have expanded and weaker ones have retreated. Rarely have states been prudent and cautious and kept their power close at hand. Perhaps this is what makes America unique. But intolerant or tolerant at home and abroad, neither may make any difference in the overall success and longevity of American hegemonic power. America is not Rome and she is not the Dutch. She is Islam and she is not the Mongols. Neither were the Greeks like the Chinese. People are different. Rather than projecting our own fads back into the past to prove that our way forward is correct or incorrect we might do well to learn from the past by what it actually is. Therefore rather than labeling Persia tolerant and the late Roman empire intolerant, we might do well to look to them for what they might teach us, rather than pretend that we could have taught them something about being more tolerant and that they, therefore, would have had longer lasting empires. The Roman empire lasted long enough.
Sunday, December 16, 2007
Newsletter 12 The Other, stealing, offence and India
Terra Incognita
Issue 12
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
November 24th, 2007
The Other, ourselves: The paradigm of the ‘other’ has led to us knowing less about our own culture and heritage and more about those of the ‘other’. This means that increasingly our own heritage is foreign to us and therefore we are, in fact, the other to ourselves.
The temptation to steal: A recent article claimed that people tempt others to steal by their very presence or by leaving valuables around. However the real temptation to steal comes from lack of communal solidarity and increased diversity in urban areas.
Offense: The very concept of being ‘offended’ is one that is unique to modern society. Never before in human history did people get ‘offended’ when they heard one person insult another group of people who were not their own.
From Akbar's India to Muslim Spain to the Ottoman empire and Omar's Jerusalem: a history of tolerance: Tolerance is a myth of history and any attempt to project backwards our own concept of tolerance is fraught with deception, self-delusion and lies.
The Other, ourselves
November 24th, 2007
Seth J. Frantzman
In all the endless discussions of the ‘other’ from academia to portrayals on television we have been treated to a continuous beating over the head regarding our treatment and perception of the other. The other, as a paradigm, was designed to understand the way in which majorities view minorities. It took as its classic example the treatment and perception of Jews in European history. They were, so we are told, the classic other, the people that ‘good Christians’ always defined themselves against for centuries. We are also warned that stereotyping the other is not merely an innocent and natural fact of life, but also leads to things like the Holocaust and the Inquisition.
Even if we ignore the central problem with the concept of the other, namely that it does not recognize the fact that minorities also view majorities as an ‘other’ and that within the majority society there are also many ‘others’.
However the main flaw in this paradigm is the fact that much has changed in our perceptions of the ‘other’ and ourselves since the 19th century. We no longer view the ‘other’ as an inescapable stereotype. Today the ‘other’ is ourselves. We no longer know our own culture and we rarely revel in its greatness. We no longer have knowledge of our own heritage and we usually mock it. In contrast to our own self depreciation and self-mocking we revel in the heritage of the other, we learn his history before our own, we study his religion and we call his lifestyle exotic, while we condemn our lifestyle by calling it ‘silly’ and ‘stupid’ and ‘narrow minded’.
In many respects the heritage, history and lifestyle of the other has increasingly been adopted by ourselves while our own heritage, history and lifestyle has become foreign. Academics, intellectuals, the media and politicians use the foil of the other as a straw man to increasingly encourage us to push aside any interest we might have in our own communes and force us to take up the cause of the other in order to distance ourselves from the claim that he is being portrayed as the other.
This ridiculous self fulfilling prophecy, this viscous cycle has led to a complete abandonment of any knowledge of what it might mean to not be interested in the other. In a sense we have become the other to ourselves. Ourselves, or knowledge of what we are and where we came from and what our heritage encompasses, is completely foreign to most of us.
When an American says things such as ‘Americans are ignorant’ one can be assured that they do not know the first thing about American history. Yet their foil of ignorance does not lead them to acknowledge their own ignorance and want to research American history, their foil of ignorance is a way of saying ‘I want to know about other cultures.’ They have no even learned the first thing about their own culture and yet they want to know the religions and ideals and histories of other cultures. I once sat in a class entitled ‘world religions.’ The teacher began the class by putting Judaism, Islam and Christianity on the board. He then explained to us that ‘in this class we shall not study Christianity because all of you are Christians and know about Christianity.’ This is once again the straw man argument, the person sets up a supposed ‘knowledge’ so that it can be dismissed and knocked down so that he can talk about what he wants to talk about, namely the other. Another class I recall began with the professor explaining that ‘I know all of you are Zionists and were raised by Zionist families, therefore in this class I’m going to do something a little different, I’m going to present what you might consider radical, I’m going to present the other side.’ The brilliant professors assumption that the entire class was composed of ‘Zionists’ was perhaps bellied by the fact that more than half the class was composed of non-Jewish Europeans, surely people who were likely to be ‘Zionists.’ But the Professor didn’t believe the students really were ‘Zionists’ he merely had to set up the foil in order to justify his desire to teach the one thing he knew about, which was the ‘other side.’ I sat in classes as a young man in which Abraham Lincoln was described as a ‘honkie.’ I recall a cocktail party at which a white woman said to a Mexican man ‘I am just a dumb gringo, I don’t speak Spanish.’ I recall another class entitled Western Civilization in which not one student knew the number of the tribes of Israel, or the number of Commandments in the Bible. But these are integral parts of knowledge of the self, surely people should know this before they are asked by their colleges to learn about the difference between Shia and Sunni and learn the difference between Romadan and Sufism and Jihad. I recall a scene at a coffee shop where a young white woman lectured an Arab Muslim man about the ‘true’ meaning of some passage in the Koran. Only in the west would this be possible, that a white woman would be raised so that her knowledge of the Koran would be greater than some Muslim. One cannot imagine the scenario being turned around, no Arab Muslim woman would lecture a westerner on some obscure passage in the Old Testament. No Arab Muslim would be caught studying ‘Christian Cannon Law,’ but multitudes of western students have been deceived into studying ‘Islamic law in the 8th century Abbasid empire’ in order to better understand the ‘other’ so that the west can better integrate Muslims.
Gore Vidal once criticized American educated for imparting a great knowledge about the Holocaust than about the founding fathers. Basically he is correct. The Holocaust is an event with a universal message, but that doesn’t mean it should be taught before an American knows what the Bill of Rights is. After all how can a young American judge the immorality of the Holocaust and understand the processes that led to it, without understanding his own laws and his own rights that led his nation to be the one fighting against Nazism, rather than siding with it. A student raised today in the west may indeed reach maturity thinking that world history is composed only of Islamic legal thought and the Holocaust.
The concept of the other was derived to critique the fact that people were being raised in a manner that only exposed them to their heritage and way of life and increasingly meant that those who did not share their narrow way of life and their narrow view of history were castigated as ‘not us’ and usually portrayed negatively. But even in the time when the paradigm of the concept of the other was being developed it was already outdated. The idea of the other was supposed to be used as a way to understand why societies in the past frequently divided themselves along class, racial or religious lines. It was supposed to identify those positive societies where the ‘other’ was incorporated into society. Through the paradigm of the other the west was supposed to adopt a greater understanding about other people. It was not intended to replace our entire system of knowledge so that the only thing we knew about was the other and our own culture was discarded as being ‘stupid’, ‘ignorant’ and ‘racist’. Everytime one hears that a certain person ‘made great strides to understand the other’ one sill find a person who simply became the other, not someone who made any strides to understanding anything. Understanding the other is only possible in the context where one first understands themselves. Then it is possible to synthesize the heritage and history and lifestyle of the other and compare it with ones own. Devoting one’s entire life to learning about the other has nothing to do with understanding, it has everything to do with conversion. A European who spends his life learning Chinese and living in China hasn’t come to ‘understand the other’, he has simply become Chinese in all forms except for his pale skin, and while Chinese people will surely still view him as the other, he will have lost all knowledge or interest in his own heritage. In fact the greatest tragedy of the ‘us’-‘other’ dialogue is not just that it increasingly denies us the knowledge of ourselves, but it reinforces the continued hatreds and stereotypes of the other by never requesting that they too learn about us. Because most people who study the other have so little knowledge of themselves they are never able to share themselves with the other. Most people who study Islamic law, for instance, have no knowledge of their own non-Islamic religion, they implicitly accept the Islamic label for themselves as ‘kaffir’ and they never widen the Muslim’s view of the other, they merely reinforce his chauvinism by showing that non-Muslim kaffirs have nothing better to do in life than study Islamic law. For the dialogue of the ‘other’ to work both cultures must be interested in the other. For the logic to work one must realize that minorities see the majority as the other just as firmly as the majority sees the minority as the other. If one wants to end racial stereotyping one cannot simply say ‘I want to learn about the other’ one should say ‘I want to teach the other about myself and in so doing learn about the other.’ Every relationship between peoples that is not based on pride on both sides breaks down into hatred and violence, no matter the good intensions of one side. Self hatred, ignorance of the self and love for the other are not models of a society that will ever decrease hatred, in fact it may inadvertently increase hatred by encouraging greater nationalism and chauvinism on the part of the ‘other’ who is being worshipped.
The temptation to steal
November 18th, 2007
Seth J. Frantzman
A recent article I read noted that the presence of certain people engendered a ‘temptation to steal’ among other people. This is quite a common argument. If a rich person moves in next to poor people and he leaves his doors unlocked he is said to have created a ‘temptation to steal.’ Our society puts the onus on the victim. We claim that by not guarding your things sufficiently, your property, you are causing them to be stolen. But how did the onus get transferred from the robber to the robbed? Why is their more thievery in some places than others? Why are some cultures more prone to stealing than others?
The very suggestion that some people might be more likely to steal than others is open to the accusation of racism. According to most thought everyone is equally likely to steal regardless of their race, creed or color. The only thing that supposedly makes one more likely to steal is one’s economic standing, especially in relation to those around oneself. Therefore a society composed of a few wealthy people and many poor people, such as Mexico or South Africa, forces the poor people to steal. Only the differences in income causes this. Take the rich man, make him poor, and put him in Soweto and he will become a thief and take the Sowetan and put him in Beverly Hills and he will never think of stealing again. Makes perfect sense.
But theft, and other forms of crime, are not equally spread across of the world. Crime is most pronounced in urban areas and the highest crime rates are found in heterogenous cities, which is to say diverse, multi-cultural cities. Why? Why is the connection between greater diversity and more crime? The link should be obvious, but to the moral-relativist it will not be. Criminals generally target the ‘other.’ People are more likely to commit crimes against people who they perceive to be inhuman, or rather people they perceive to be different from themselves. The class origins of crime certainly fits into this. But the communal origins of crime are often ignored. Different communities frequently commit crimes against one another. People don’t like to hear this because they think this is an argument for racism.
But actually this is not exactly the case. Communities commit crimes against one another disproportionatly. Victims of crimes are disproportionalty less likely to be of the same race, religion or economic status as the criminal.
But because society has been told to be color-blind and see only the economic aspect of crime, people have begun to identify with their commune less and less. Instead they have replaced the commune with the belief in the self and the belief in multi-culturalism. Because of this they have come to hate and fear their neighbors. Since they believe they have nothing in common with people who look, speak, act and believe like they do, they have become suspicious of eachother as much as they are suspicious of the ‘other’. In a sense each person is today an ‘other’ to eachother. There is no such thing as communal solidarity. This means that the urban environment has become even more savage than it would otherwise be because the majority of people have come to distrust even those who might otherwise be closes to them. Their second-cousins cannot even be trusted.
Communal solidarity lessons crime in places where it is strong because crimes directed against one member of a community risk offending the entire community and setting off reprisals and retribution. In some communities, at least until recently, there existed the notion of the ‘100 year revenge.’ This meant that the family of a person who was wronged might wait 100 years to take revenge.
Rural communities are often homogenous and they therefore have less crime. But most rural communities have differences in economic levels. Nevertheless the communal solidarity of the rural environment ensures a decline in crime.
People should abandon the concept of ‘temptation to steal’ and embrace the idea that they are beholden to one another. Relying on the police and the government to take care of everything, especially when it comes to crime, is short sighted since the government cannot possibly prevent all forms of theft, especially in a liberal-democratic society where one cannot hang the thieves. In many ways society has gone to far, but small steps can be taken towards greater communal solidarity and one will be surprised how quickly this would lesson crime.
Offense
Seth J. Frantzman
November 19th, 2007
In the Sienfeld episode entitled ‘The Puerto Rican Day parade’ a Puerto Rican flag is inadvertently set on fire. Even before the episode was first aired it received protests. Jerry Sienfeld, the writer and producer of the show, met with a Puerto Rican leader to try an defuse the protests and accusations of racism. Sienfeld asked “how do you know there is something to protest when you haven’t even seen the show” to which the leader replied “we assume there is something offensive in it.”
The idea of something being offensive and taking offence to something is a modern idea. It has not always existed in human history. Because of the notion of people being ‘offended’ we have a society that now guards its actions and what it says more so than in the past. This has reached such levels that we have words like ‘political correctness’ to describe the action of guarding how one describes something. We also celebrate those rare characters who give us ‘strait talk’ or ‘tell it like it is’ or ‘keep it real.’
Because of the fear of offending others people have caged themselves mentally to the degree that they actually deny facts. It is a rare time in human history when people forcibly change their viewpoints and what they say and how they think because they are afraid it might hurt someone’s feelings. What is most interesting is that the notion of ‘being offended’ spreads beyond the people who actually take offense to include most wealthy and middle class western people, most of whome have no connection to the supposed offended party. This is why white people are offended by the word ‘niggardly’ and why strait people are offended by the word ‘gay’. This is why a strait white woman will take offense if a person tells her that Donatello, the famous Renaissance sculpture, was gay because he sculpted gay effeminate-looking young men and called those sculptures ‘king David.’ It is why a western white woman will be offended if she is told that most middle aged Arab women are overweight.
The notion of offense is fascinating. It is the idea that a person should get angry because they perceive that another person has insulted a third person. In the west this is called sensitivity. One is said to be ‘sensitive’ to racist remarks.
People today assume this is the natural order of things. People assume that this is the ‘correct’ way to live life. People have convinced themselves that constant mental self-policing of thoughts and speech is necessary to a healthy and progressive society. No one dares to challenge this concept, the concept which says that society should be self-regulating all the time in how it describes things and what it says.
But this self-policing is not healthy. It stagnates thought and lessens the ability of the brain to perceive and understand things. When one becomes blind, not through the loss of eyesight, but through the brain not permitting the eyes to see certain things, one has built a mental cage for themselves to live in. This cage is stronger than a prison, because people have the ability to get out of prison, whereas one can never free themselves from a mental cage once it is strongly constructed because they can no longer perceive the things that go on around them.
Think of the person who decides that the word ‘terrorist’ is offensive because it is ‘racist’ against Muslims. This is quite a common thought process among many leftists and intellectuals. It has led to the banning of the word at many news associations such as Reuters. When someone ceases to use the word terrorist and believes that the label of terrorist is racist they cease to be able to judge. When they are confronted with terrorism, say a bus blown up in front of their eyes, they no longer have empathy for the suffering civilians nor do they actually see what has happened. Linguists do not accept this line of reasoning. After the writing of the book 1984, in which certain words were banned so that people would no longer think them, linguists began to work hard to show that the absence of a word in a language does not necessarily mean that the concept behind the word does not exist. Just because there is no word for ‘freedom’ or ‘slavery’ doesn’t mean the two don’t exist. But in our case we are not dealing with a society in which these words do not exist, we are dealing with a society in which they do exist and yet society has convinced itself that they do not by mentally excising the thought process that lead to them. This is not like a normal brain of a person who comes from a word poor background but can nevertheless understand the meaning of the word ‘plethora’. Instead we are dealing with people who come from word rich backgrounds and yet they have taken away their ability to understand something. Linguistic tests never experimented with people who had done this, they merely tried to show that it was a fallacy that Eskimos(nay, ‘Inuits’ if you are a Canadian, ‘kaffirs’ if you are a Muslim) had more words for snow than other people.
Much of modern society is based on the idea that words can mean anything. Terrorism, justice, jihad, kaffir, fag. But changing the meaning of words such as peace is different than denying that peace exists. Modern society can change the meaning of words all it wants, this is the nature of the development of language. One no longer says “I smoked some fags” or “it was a gay ole time”. The word terrorism can only be used in regard to children as in “the cherubs terrorized their parents.”
The idea that concepts and thought processes and perception and realization can be excised from human thought it quite new and yet it is the most dangerous idea of all. The idea that society should chain its minds because of the fear of offending others is dangerous not only because is lessons the ability to think but because it entails a form of slavery. Breaking the bonds of fear which society has tried to instill in us, the fear of offending others, is essential to becoming a full human being. We are led to believe that offending others is wrong because it hurts them, because by saying certain words or making certain assertions we are causing them pain. But we should instead be asking why people have convinced themselves that the concept of being offended should exist at all.
Some segments of society invented the idea of being offended in the last decades. Slowly but surely they instilled this idea in others. They also began to instill the notion that one should not cause offense. They began to make people feel uncomfortable by telling people that they were making others uncomfortable. That is the genius of the offence and offended concept. Someone is told that by saying x they might make y uncomfortable. Even if there is no y around to here the x being said it still doesn’t matter because now z, a random person, might take offense on behalf of y. Therefore x is not relegated to the gutter and it is described as ‘racist’.
Society today is the most fake society that has ever existed. Never before in human history were people less genuine and more guarded with what they allowed themselves to think and what they allowed themselves to say. The same pathetic society that has worked so hard to control its own speech and thoughts still marvels when someone comes along who has not been brainwashed by these conventions. Those people are said to be ‘blunt’ and to ‘keep it real.’ Its strange that in only one generation people who said what they thought and told the truth are said to be unique and interesting, as if these are rare qualities. But they are rare qualities. Lying and self-deception are the only qualities society rewards.
From Akbar's India to Muslim Spain to the Ottoman empire and Omar's Jerusalem: a history of tolerance.
Seth Frantzman
November 20th, 2007
This has been discussed before and it is part of an in depth examination of the methods, manners and processes that lead us to celebrate 'tolerance' and 'diversity' in the past, when no such thing existed in the past.
Because our modern society prides itself on certain accomplishments in civil society and because we now value such things as diversity there is a quest to go find those 'good' places in the past where our modern society was replicated long ago. In a sense we want to create a dialectic to show that our modern craze for multi-cultural-diversity-tolerancism is not a unique phenomenon but has a deep and rich history. In order to find that history we usually have to look outside our traditional knowledge of western civilization. But this suits the west just fine because for the last three decades there has been a sharp decline in the teaching of 'western civ' and a focus on teaching 'comparative history' and 'non-western civ.' In most colleges such courses are now required. Most students today have replaced their parents decent knowledge of western history with blotchy, patchy, generalized history of the world. Every student now knows something about Africa and China and the Incas. They know little about Pope Alexander VI or St. Augustine. They know less about the difference between Plato and Aristotle and know absolutely nothing about Louis XIV.
This leads our modern cultural critics and historians to harken back to non-western societies as models for our western society. It is quite common, for instance, to hear people remark that we should 'live like the native Americans.' There is one slight problem however. 'living like native Americans' would entail the rich-Bourgeoisie people who recommend such a lifestyle to give up their SUVs and their houses in Aspen and their summer home on Lake Tahoe and their cabin in Montana. That would be a stretch for even the most enlightened liberal. Liberals perhaps forget that there are plenty of people in the world who still live like 'native Americans', except we are busy trying to reform their lifestyles by sending NGOs, Human rights activists and the U.N to tell them how to live in places such as Africa and the Amazon. The poor people of Bhutan were living 'like native Americans' until people kept banging on their door demanding the right to be tourists in their country and demanding that they have greater 'human rights.'
But lets return to the way in which we try to project our ideals back into history and find societies like ours. Since we can't find an example of a gay-loving, diverse society full of 'African-Americans' and 'native-Americans' in the west we are drawn to four different 'tolerant' societies that supposedly encompassed the diversity we love so much today. The societies are, in order of tolerance, Muslim Spain, Muslim India, Muslim Ottoman empire and Omar's Muslim Jerusalem. They have one thing in common: they are all Muslim. The leftist who worships these periods in history however would describe them thus:
"This millet identity can be termed communitarianism: the world-view and self-perception of Jews (and other non-Muslims) living in a multi-ethnic, multi-religious empire. There was a high level of toleration, communal autonomy, and cultural symbiosis among Muslims, Christians, and Jews (Joel Beinin, Egyptian Jewish identities)."
You might not know by reading this utopian vision of mutli-ethnic perfection that these wonderful places had slavery. That’s right, slavery. Slavery existed in Akbar's India. Slavery existed in Muslim Spain. Slavery existed in the Ottoman empire. Slavery existed in Omar's Jerusalem. But we are cautioned to recall that 'our values are not theirs, during that time it was quite common to have slaves.'
Slavery is a fascinating thing. Historically it has only been judged to be a negative part of society when it has been practiced by western Europeans and when the slaves have been black Africans. We do not often hear Rome condemned for slavery. We do not hear Islam or Africa condemned for slavery. We do not often hear the Byzantine empire condemned for slavery. By contrast we do not often hear the Christian church praised for having ended the institution of slavery in Europe. Yes, that is right, Christianity ended slavery in Europe. That is why for 1,000 years Europeans were not engaged in the slave trade. It wasn't until the Spanish conquest of the New World that the 'white man' was allowed to enslave people and even then the most passionate defenders of he rights of slaves have been Christian theologians. Bartholomew De Las Casas, a Christian cleric, was the first 'human rights activist' on behalf of enslaved native peoples. In fact it was because of him that the Spanish crown gradually made enslaving the native Americans (read Incas and Aztecs and Caribs) illegal and instead began importing Africans to do the slave labor in the Spanish New World. An irony he surely did not realize.
But modern westerners cannot find anything to love about Las Cases and the 16th century. Westerners cannot even find a hero in William Wilberforce, another devoted Christian who ended slavery in the British empire. He is no hero of the modern west. His society, along with that of Las Cases, was not diverse enough.
This is always the rub. Christianity outlawed slavery. It is the only religion to have ever done so. But Christianity doesn't win praises for this. After all the same Church that outlawed enslaving the natives was busy with the inquisition at home. The same Roman Catholic church that forbid the enslaving the Christians in Europe, did so only because there were no non-Christians left to enslave and did so when it was busy plotting the Crusades. So modern people cannot look back and forgive the warts of this period. We cannot say 'but that was their culture' when it comes to the Crusades and the Inquisition.
We, who are slaves ourselves of leftist academics, find it hard to love a culture that had no slavery. So we project our love, our quest for the perfect historical culture, towards Islam and there we find our heritage. That is right. Whereas people in the 1950s looked to Athenian democracy or John Locke or George Washington's America for their heritage, we look towards the Ottoman empire, Akbar's India, Muslim Spain or Omar's Jerusalem for a paradigm of the society we want today.
These places, these Islamic empires, were surely diverse. They certainly looked different, so we are told, from their neighbors. Muslim Spain was colorful, Christian Spain was drab. The Ottoman empire was full of all sorts of exotic people, including belly-dancers. Its Russian enemy was dark, cold and depressing. Akbar's India was exotic and colorful, while those few Hindus who resisted it were 'fanatical'. Omar's Jerusalem was exotic, his Byzantine enemies were, well, Byzantine.
Ours society should be judged for the history it chooses to worship. Since our society has so completely surrendered to an Islamic interpretation of history and since our modern society now looks to Islam as a model for our present world we deserve to be judged for exactly what we pride ourselves on. All these 'diverse' places were exactly that: they were diverse. But they were also places where one religion dominated. Places where members of one religion dealt in slaves of people considered kaffirs because they came from another religion. This is the society we worship; a society based on injustice of the highest order. We love such a society. A society not of democrats but of tyrants. We love such a society.
Our modern refusal to see beneath the veneer causes this worship. Our modern society that judges diversity based on the color of people's skin rather than the content of their character. Our modern society that says 'this company' or 'this college' is diverse because the company website and the college brochure include their token black and their Chinese guy and their white woman. Our modern society that says "I have a native American friend…but I don't know where he is from or what tribe he is a member of, but he sure is colorful." Our modern society that worships a heritage of tyranny and slavery. That is a sad society.
Athenian democracy, Protestant England, Adams' New England. Perhaps these were not perfect societies. Perhaps they were not ideal. They were not very diverse. They didn't have millets. They didn't have multi-culturalism. That’s true for the most part. But they didn't have sultans and jihads either. They didn't have the slave market where 13 year old girls were paraded around nude and sold to the highest bidder. I'll take my drab new England, I'll take my drab, cold foggy England, I'll take my gay Athenians any day of the week just to not have to worship a society of slaves and tyrants. Yes. Give me the cold, hard floor of a house of pilgrims in the New world. I'll swap that for the exoticism of the harem. I will swap it because the pilgrims had equality and because they had democracy. I will swap it because they spoke their minds. I will swap it because they lived modestly and did not boast of their wealth. I will swap it because they didn't deal in slaves. I will swap it just for that reason. That is enough.
The liberal and the leftist can have his diverse slave society. Societies that deal in the slaves of the world are sure to be diverse. The Brothels of Tel Aviv and New York and London and Las Vegas are diverse. In Vegas one can order up the 'petit Japanese teens' and 'Polish blondes'. Such diversity. But it is a diversity of the gutter. One finds diversity in a dumpster too. There are rotten tomatoes and rotten onions and rotten apples and perhaps a human body part. Its diverse, but is it really something to be worshipped? Diversity by itself doesn't equal decency. Diversity only works once the illness of society has been washed away. It only works when tyranny and slavery and rape have been washed away. The liberals can have all the Ottoman-Muslim-Akbarian-Muhammed diversity they want. The conservative will continue to have a diversity of decency.
Issue 12
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
November 24th, 2007
The Other, ourselves: The paradigm of the ‘other’ has led to us knowing less about our own culture and heritage and more about those of the ‘other’. This means that increasingly our own heritage is foreign to us and therefore we are, in fact, the other to ourselves.
The temptation to steal: A recent article claimed that people tempt others to steal by their very presence or by leaving valuables around. However the real temptation to steal comes from lack of communal solidarity and increased diversity in urban areas.
Offense: The very concept of being ‘offended’ is one that is unique to modern society. Never before in human history did people get ‘offended’ when they heard one person insult another group of people who were not their own.
From Akbar's India to Muslim Spain to the Ottoman empire and Omar's Jerusalem: a history of tolerance: Tolerance is a myth of history and any attempt to project backwards our own concept of tolerance is fraught with deception, self-delusion and lies.
The Other, ourselves
November 24th, 2007
Seth J. Frantzman
In all the endless discussions of the ‘other’ from academia to portrayals on television we have been treated to a continuous beating over the head regarding our treatment and perception of the other. The other, as a paradigm, was designed to understand the way in which majorities view minorities. It took as its classic example the treatment and perception of Jews in European history. They were, so we are told, the classic other, the people that ‘good Christians’ always defined themselves against for centuries. We are also warned that stereotyping the other is not merely an innocent and natural fact of life, but also leads to things like the Holocaust and the Inquisition.
Even if we ignore the central problem with the concept of the other, namely that it does not recognize the fact that minorities also view majorities as an ‘other’ and that within the majority society there are also many ‘others’.
However the main flaw in this paradigm is the fact that much has changed in our perceptions of the ‘other’ and ourselves since the 19th century. We no longer view the ‘other’ as an inescapable stereotype. Today the ‘other’ is ourselves. We no longer know our own culture and we rarely revel in its greatness. We no longer have knowledge of our own heritage and we usually mock it. In contrast to our own self depreciation and self-mocking we revel in the heritage of the other, we learn his history before our own, we study his religion and we call his lifestyle exotic, while we condemn our lifestyle by calling it ‘silly’ and ‘stupid’ and ‘narrow minded’.
In many respects the heritage, history and lifestyle of the other has increasingly been adopted by ourselves while our own heritage, history and lifestyle has become foreign. Academics, intellectuals, the media and politicians use the foil of the other as a straw man to increasingly encourage us to push aside any interest we might have in our own communes and force us to take up the cause of the other in order to distance ourselves from the claim that he is being portrayed as the other.
This ridiculous self fulfilling prophecy, this viscous cycle has led to a complete abandonment of any knowledge of what it might mean to not be interested in the other. In a sense we have become the other to ourselves. Ourselves, or knowledge of what we are and where we came from and what our heritage encompasses, is completely foreign to most of us.
When an American says things such as ‘Americans are ignorant’ one can be assured that they do not know the first thing about American history. Yet their foil of ignorance does not lead them to acknowledge their own ignorance and want to research American history, their foil of ignorance is a way of saying ‘I want to know about other cultures.’ They have no even learned the first thing about their own culture and yet they want to know the religions and ideals and histories of other cultures. I once sat in a class entitled ‘world religions.’ The teacher began the class by putting Judaism, Islam and Christianity on the board. He then explained to us that ‘in this class we shall not study Christianity because all of you are Christians and know about Christianity.’ This is once again the straw man argument, the person sets up a supposed ‘knowledge’ so that it can be dismissed and knocked down so that he can talk about what he wants to talk about, namely the other. Another class I recall began with the professor explaining that ‘I know all of you are Zionists and were raised by Zionist families, therefore in this class I’m going to do something a little different, I’m going to present what you might consider radical, I’m going to present the other side.’ The brilliant professors assumption that the entire class was composed of ‘Zionists’ was perhaps bellied by the fact that more than half the class was composed of non-Jewish Europeans, surely people who were likely to be ‘Zionists.’ But the Professor didn’t believe the students really were ‘Zionists’ he merely had to set up the foil in order to justify his desire to teach the one thing he knew about, which was the ‘other side.’ I sat in classes as a young man in which Abraham Lincoln was described as a ‘honkie.’ I recall a cocktail party at which a white woman said to a Mexican man ‘I am just a dumb gringo, I don’t speak Spanish.’ I recall another class entitled Western Civilization in which not one student knew the number of the tribes of Israel, or the number of Commandments in the Bible. But these are integral parts of knowledge of the self, surely people should know this before they are asked by their colleges to learn about the difference between Shia and Sunni and learn the difference between Romadan and Sufism and Jihad. I recall a scene at a coffee shop where a young white woman lectured an Arab Muslim man about the ‘true’ meaning of some passage in the Koran. Only in the west would this be possible, that a white woman would be raised so that her knowledge of the Koran would be greater than some Muslim. One cannot imagine the scenario being turned around, no Arab Muslim woman would lecture a westerner on some obscure passage in the Old Testament. No Arab Muslim would be caught studying ‘Christian Cannon Law,’ but multitudes of western students have been deceived into studying ‘Islamic law in the 8th century Abbasid empire’ in order to better understand the ‘other’ so that the west can better integrate Muslims.
Gore Vidal once criticized American educated for imparting a great knowledge about the Holocaust than about the founding fathers. Basically he is correct. The Holocaust is an event with a universal message, but that doesn’t mean it should be taught before an American knows what the Bill of Rights is. After all how can a young American judge the immorality of the Holocaust and understand the processes that led to it, without understanding his own laws and his own rights that led his nation to be the one fighting against Nazism, rather than siding with it. A student raised today in the west may indeed reach maturity thinking that world history is composed only of Islamic legal thought and the Holocaust.
The concept of the other was derived to critique the fact that people were being raised in a manner that only exposed them to their heritage and way of life and increasingly meant that those who did not share their narrow way of life and their narrow view of history were castigated as ‘not us’ and usually portrayed negatively. But even in the time when the paradigm of the concept of the other was being developed it was already outdated. The idea of the other was supposed to be used as a way to understand why societies in the past frequently divided themselves along class, racial or religious lines. It was supposed to identify those positive societies where the ‘other’ was incorporated into society. Through the paradigm of the other the west was supposed to adopt a greater understanding about other people. It was not intended to replace our entire system of knowledge so that the only thing we knew about was the other and our own culture was discarded as being ‘stupid’, ‘ignorant’ and ‘racist’. Everytime one hears that a certain person ‘made great strides to understand the other’ one sill find a person who simply became the other, not someone who made any strides to understanding anything. Understanding the other is only possible in the context where one first understands themselves. Then it is possible to synthesize the heritage and history and lifestyle of the other and compare it with ones own. Devoting one’s entire life to learning about the other has nothing to do with understanding, it has everything to do with conversion. A European who spends his life learning Chinese and living in China hasn’t come to ‘understand the other’, he has simply become Chinese in all forms except for his pale skin, and while Chinese people will surely still view him as the other, he will have lost all knowledge or interest in his own heritage. In fact the greatest tragedy of the ‘us’-‘other’ dialogue is not just that it increasingly denies us the knowledge of ourselves, but it reinforces the continued hatreds and stereotypes of the other by never requesting that they too learn about us. Because most people who study the other have so little knowledge of themselves they are never able to share themselves with the other. Most people who study Islamic law, for instance, have no knowledge of their own non-Islamic religion, they implicitly accept the Islamic label for themselves as ‘kaffir’ and they never widen the Muslim’s view of the other, they merely reinforce his chauvinism by showing that non-Muslim kaffirs have nothing better to do in life than study Islamic law. For the dialogue of the ‘other’ to work both cultures must be interested in the other. For the logic to work one must realize that minorities see the majority as the other just as firmly as the majority sees the minority as the other. If one wants to end racial stereotyping one cannot simply say ‘I want to learn about the other’ one should say ‘I want to teach the other about myself and in so doing learn about the other.’ Every relationship between peoples that is not based on pride on both sides breaks down into hatred and violence, no matter the good intensions of one side. Self hatred, ignorance of the self and love for the other are not models of a society that will ever decrease hatred, in fact it may inadvertently increase hatred by encouraging greater nationalism and chauvinism on the part of the ‘other’ who is being worshipped.
The temptation to steal
November 18th, 2007
Seth J. Frantzman
A recent article I read noted that the presence of certain people engendered a ‘temptation to steal’ among other people. This is quite a common argument. If a rich person moves in next to poor people and he leaves his doors unlocked he is said to have created a ‘temptation to steal.’ Our society puts the onus on the victim. We claim that by not guarding your things sufficiently, your property, you are causing them to be stolen. But how did the onus get transferred from the robber to the robbed? Why is their more thievery in some places than others? Why are some cultures more prone to stealing than others?
The very suggestion that some people might be more likely to steal than others is open to the accusation of racism. According to most thought everyone is equally likely to steal regardless of their race, creed or color. The only thing that supposedly makes one more likely to steal is one’s economic standing, especially in relation to those around oneself. Therefore a society composed of a few wealthy people and many poor people, such as Mexico or South Africa, forces the poor people to steal. Only the differences in income causes this. Take the rich man, make him poor, and put him in Soweto and he will become a thief and take the Sowetan and put him in Beverly Hills and he will never think of stealing again. Makes perfect sense.
But theft, and other forms of crime, are not equally spread across of the world. Crime is most pronounced in urban areas and the highest crime rates are found in heterogenous cities, which is to say diverse, multi-cultural cities. Why? Why is the connection between greater diversity and more crime? The link should be obvious, but to the moral-relativist it will not be. Criminals generally target the ‘other.’ People are more likely to commit crimes against people who they perceive to be inhuman, or rather people they perceive to be different from themselves. The class origins of crime certainly fits into this. But the communal origins of crime are often ignored. Different communities frequently commit crimes against one another. People don’t like to hear this because they think this is an argument for racism.
But actually this is not exactly the case. Communities commit crimes against one another disproportionatly. Victims of crimes are disproportionalty less likely to be of the same race, religion or economic status as the criminal.
But because society has been told to be color-blind and see only the economic aspect of crime, people have begun to identify with their commune less and less. Instead they have replaced the commune with the belief in the self and the belief in multi-culturalism. Because of this they have come to hate and fear their neighbors. Since they believe they have nothing in common with people who look, speak, act and believe like they do, they have become suspicious of eachother as much as they are suspicious of the ‘other’. In a sense each person is today an ‘other’ to eachother. There is no such thing as communal solidarity. This means that the urban environment has become even more savage than it would otherwise be because the majority of people have come to distrust even those who might otherwise be closes to them. Their second-cousins cannot even be trusted.
Communal solidarity lessons crime in places where it is strong because crimes directed against one member of a community risk offending the entire community and setting off reprisals and retribution. In some communities, at least until recently, there existed the notion of the ‘100 year revenge.’ This meant that the family of a person who was wronged might wait 100 years to take revenge.
Rural communities are often homogenous and they therefore have less crime. But most rural communities have differences in economic levels. Nevertheless the communal solidarity of the rural environment ensures a decline in crime.
People should abandon the concept of ‘temptation to steal’ and embrace the idea that they are beholden to one another. Relying on the police and the government to take care of everything, especially when it comes to crime, is short sighted since the government cannot possibly prevent all forms of theft, especially in a liberal-democratic society where one cannot hang the thieves. In many ways society has gone to far, but small steps can be taken towards greater communal solidarity and one will be surprised how quickly this would lesson crime.
Offense
Seth J. Frantzman
November 19th, 2007
In the Sienfeld episode entitled ‘The Puerto Rican Day parade’ a Puerto Rican flag is inadvertently set on fire. Even before the episode was first aired it received protests. Jerry Sienfeld, the writer and producer of the show, met with a Puerto Rican leader to try an defuse the protests and accusations of racism. Sienfeld asked “how do you know there is something to protest when you haven’t even seen the show” to which the leader replied “we assume there is something offensive in it.”
The idea of something being offensive and taking offence to something is a modern idea. It has not always existed in human history. Because of the notion of people being ‘offended’ we have a society that now guards its actions and what it says more so than in the past. This has reached such levels that we have words like ‘political correctness’ to describe the action of guarding how one describes something. We also celebrate those rare characters who give us ‘strait talk’ or ‘tell it like it is’ or ‘keep it real.’
Because of the fear of offending others people have caged themselves mentally to the degree that they actually deny facts. It is a rare time in human history when people forcibly change their viewpoints and what they say and how they think because they are afraid it might hurt someone’s feelings. What is most interesting is that the notion of ‘being offended’ spreads beyond the people who actually take offense to include most wealthy and middle class western people, most of whome have no connection to the supposed offended party. This is why white people are offended by the word ‘niggardly’ and why strait people are offended by the word ‘gay’. This is why a strait white woman will take offense if a person tells her that Donatello, the famous Renaissance sculpture, was gay because he sculpted gay effeminate-looking young men and called those sculptures ‘king David.’ It is why a western white woman will be offended if she is told that most middle aged Arab women are overweight.
The notion of offense is fascinating. It is the idea that a person should get angry because they perceive that another person has insulted a third person. In the west this is called sensitivity. One is said to be ‘sensitive’ to racist remarks.
People today assume this is the natural order of things. People assume that this is the ‘correct’ way to live life. People have convinced themselves that constant mental self-policing of thoughts and speech is necessary to a healthy and progressive society. No one dares to challenge this concept, the concept which says that society should be self-regulating all the time in how it describes things and what it says.
But this self-policing is not healthy. It stagnates thought and lessens the ability of the brain to perceive and understand things. When one becomes blind, not through the loss of eyesight, but through the brain not permitting the eyes to see certain things, one has built a mental cage for themselves to live in. This cage is stronger than a prison, because people have the ability to get out of prison, whereas one can never free themselves from a mental cage once it is strongly constructed because they can no longer perceive the things that go on around them.
Think of the person who decides that the word ‘terrorist’ is offensive because it is ‘racist’ against Muslims. This is quite a common thought process among many leftists and intellectuals. It has led to the banning of the word at many news associations such as Reuters. When someone ceases to use the word terrorist and believes that the label of terrorist is racist they cease to be able to judge. When they are confronted with terrorism, say a bus blown up in front of their eyes, they no longer have empathy for the suffering civilians nor do they actually see what has happened. Linguists do not accept this line of reasoning. After the writing of the book 1984, in which certain words were banned so that people would no longer think them, linguists began to work hard to show that the absence of a word in a language does not necessarily mean that the concept behind the word does not exist. Just because there is no word for ‘freedom’ or ‘slavery’ doesn’t mean the two don’t exist. But in our case we are not dealing with a society in which these words do not exist, we are dealing with a society in which they do exist and yet society has convinced itself that they do not by mentally excising the thought process that lead to them. This is not like a normal brain of a person who comes from a word poor background but can nevertheless understand the meaning of the word ‘plethora’. Instead we are dealing with people who come from word rich backgrounds and yet they have taken away their ability to understand something. Linguistic tests never experimented with people who had done this, they merely tried to show that it was a fallacy that Eskimos(nay, ‘Inuits’ if you are a Canadian, ‘kaffirs’ if you are a Muslim) had more words for snow than other people.
Much of modern society is based on the idea that words can mean anything. Terrorism, justice, jihad, kaffir, fag. But changing the meaning of words such as peace is different than denying that peace exists. Modern society can change the meaning of words all it wants, this is the nature of the development of language. One no longer says “I smoked some fags” or “it was a gay ole time”. The word terrorism can only be used in regard to children as in “the cherubs terrorized their parents.”
The idea that concepts and thought processes and perception and realization can be excised from human thought it quite new and yet it is the most dangerous idea of all. The idea that society should chain its minds because of the fear of offending others is dangerous not only because is lessons the ability to think but because it entails a form of slavery. Breaking the bonds of fear which society has tried to instill in us, the fear of offending others, is essential to becoming a full human being. We are led to believe that offending others is wrong because it hurts them, because by saying certain words or making certain assertions we are causing them pain. But we should instead be asking why people have convinced themselves that the concept of being offended should exist at all.
Some segments of society invented the idea of being offended in the last decades. Slowly but surely they instilled this idea in others. They also began to instill the notion that one should not cause offense. They began to make people feel uncomfortable by telling people that they were making others uncomfortable. That is the genius of the offence and offended concept. Someone is told that by saying x they might make y uncomfortable. Even if there is no y around to here the x being said it still doesn’t matter because now z, a random person, might take offense on behalf of y. Therefore x is not relegated to the gutter and it is described as ‘racist’.
Society today is the most fake society that has ever existed. Never before in human history were people less genuine and more guarded with what they allowed themselves to think and what they allowed themselves to say. The same pathetic society that has worked so hard to control its own speech and thoughts still marvels when someone comes along who has not been brainwashed by these conventions. Those people are said to be ‘blunt’ and to ‘keep it real.’ Its strange that in only one generation people who said what they thought and told the truth are said to be unique and interesting, as if these are rare qualities. But they are rare qualities. Lying and self-deception are the only qualities society rewards.
From Akbar's India to Muslim Spain to the Ottoman empire and Omar's Jerusalem: a history of tolerance.
Seth Frantzman
November 20th, 2007
This has been discussed before and it is part of an in depth examination of the methods, manners and processes that lead us to celebrate 'tolerance' and 'diversity' in the past, when no such thing existed in the past.
Because our modern society prides itself on certain accomplishments in civil society and because we now value such things as diversity there is a quest to go find those 'good' places in the past where our modern society was replicated long ago. In a sense we want to create a dialectic to show that our modern craze for multi-cultural-diversity-tolerancism is not a unique phenomenon but has a deep and rich history. In order to find that history we usually have to look outside our traditional knowledge of western civilization. But this suits the west just fine because for the last three decades there has been a sharp decline in the teaching of 'western civ' and a focus on teaching 'comparative history' and 'non-western civ.' In most colleges such courses are now required. Most students today have replaced their parents decent knowledge of western history with blotchy, patchy, generalized history of the world. Every student now knows something about Africa and China and the Incas. They know little about Pope Alexander VI or St. Augustine. They know less about the difference between Plato and Aristotle and know absolutely nothing about Louis XIV.
This leads our modern cultural critics and historians to harken back to non-western societies as models for our western society. It is quite common, for instance, to hear people remark that we should 'live like the native Americans.' There is one slight problem however. 'living like native Americans' would entail the rich-Bourgeoisie people who recommend such a lifestyle to give up their SUVs and their houses in Aspen and their summer home on Lake Tahoe and their cabin in Montana. That would be a stretch for even the most enlightened liberal. Liberals perhaps forget that there are plenty of people in the world who still live like 'native Americans', except we are busy trying to reform their lifestyles by sending NGOs, Human rights activists and the U.N to tell them how to live in places such as Africa and the Amazon. The poor people of Bhutan were living 'like native Americans' until people kept banging on their door demanding the right to be tourists in their country and demanding that they have greater 'human rights.'
But lets return to the way in which we try to project our ideals back into history and find societies like ours. Since we can't find an example of a gay-loving, diverse society full of 'African-Americans' and 'native-Americans' in the west we are drawn to four different 'tolerant' societies that supposedly encompassed the diversity we love so much today. The societies are, in order of tolerance, Muslim Spain, Muslim India, Muslim Ottoman empire and Omar's Muslim Jerusalem. They have one thing in common: they are all Muslim. The leftist who worships these periods in history however would describe them thus:
"This millet identity can be termed communitarianism: the world-view and self-perception of Jews (and other non-Muslims) living in a multi-ethnic, multi-religious empire. There was a high level of toleration, communal autonomy, and cultural symbiosis among Muslims, Christians, and Jews (Joel Beinin, Egyptian Jewish identities)."
You might not know by reading this utopian vision of mutli-ethnic perfection that these wonderful places had slavery. That’s right, slavery. Slavery existed in Akbar's India. Slavery existed in Muslim Spain. Slavery existed in the Ottoman empire. Slavery existed in Omar's Jerusalem. But we are cautioned to recall that 'our values are not theirs, during that time it was quite common to have slaves.'
Slavery is a fascinating thing. Historically it has only been judged to be a negative part of society when it has been practiced by western Europeans and when the slaves have been black Africans. We do not often hear Rome condemned for slavery. We do not hear Islam or Africa condemned for slavery. We do not often hear the Byzantine empire condemned for slavery. By contrast we do not often hear the Christian church praised for having ended the institution of slavery in Europe. Yes, that is right, Christianity ended slavery in Europe. That is why for 1,000 years Europeans were not engaged in the slave trade. It wasn't until the Spanish conquest of the New World that the 'white man' was allowed to enslave people and even then the most passionate defenders of he rights of slaves have been Christian theologians. Bartholomew De Las Casas, a Christian cleric, was the first 'human rights activist' on behalf of enslaved native peoples. In fact it was because of him that the Spanish crown gradually made enslaving the native Americans (read Incas and Aztecs and Caribs) illegal and instead began importing Africans to do the slave labor in the Spanish New World. An irony he surely did not realize.
But modern westerners cannot find anything to love about Las Cases and the 16th century. Westerners cannot even find a hero in William Wilberforce, another devoted Christian who ended slavery in the British empire. He is no hero of the modern west. His society, along with that of Las Cases, was not diverse enough.
This is always the rub. Christianity outlawed slavery. It is the only religion to have ever done so. But Christianity doesn't win praises for this. After all the same Church that outlawed enslaving the natives was busy with the inquisition at home. The same Roman Catholic church that forbid the enslaving the Christians in Europe, did so only because there were no non-Christians left to enslave and did so when it was busy plotting the Crusades. So modern people cannot look back and forgive the warts of this period. We cannot say 'but that was their culture' when it comes to the Crusades and the Inquisition.
We, who are slaves ourselves of leftist academics, find it hard to love a culture that had no slavery. So we project our love, our quest for the perfect historical culture, towards Islam and there we find our heritage. That is right. Whereas people in the 1950s looked to Athenian democracy or John Locke or George Washington's America for their heritage, we look towards the Ottoman empire, Akbar's India, Muslim Spain or Omar's Jerusalem for a paradigm of the society we want today.
These places, these Islamic empires, were surely diverse. They certainly looked different, so we are told, from their neighbors. Muslim Spain was colorful, Christian Spain was drab. The Ottoman empire was full of all sorts of exotic people, including belly-dancers. Its Russian enemy was dark, cold and depressing. Akbar's India was exotic and colorful, while those few Hindus who resisted it were 'fanatical'. Omar's Jerusalem was exotic, his Byzantine enemies were, well, Byzantine.
Ours society should be judged for the history it chooses to worship. Since our society has so completely surrendered to an Islamic interpretation of history and since our modern society now looks to Islam as a model for our present world we deserve to be judged for exactly what we pride ourselves on. All these 'diverse' places were exactly that: they were diverse. But they were also places where one religion dominated. Places where members of one religion dealt in slaves of people considered kaffirs because they came from another religion. This is the society we worship; a society based on injustice of the highest order. We love such a society. A society not of democrats but of tyrants. We love such a society.
Our modern refusal to see beneath the veneer causes this worship. Our modern society that judges diversity based on the color of people's skin rather than the content of their character. Our modern society that says 'this company' or 'this college' is diverse because the company website and the college brochure include their token black and their Chinese guy and their white woman. Our modern society that says "I have a native American friend…but I don't know where he is from or what tribe he is a member of, but he sure is colorful." Our modern society that worships a heritage of tyranny and slavery. That is a sad society.
Athenian democracy, Protestant England, Adams' New England. Perhaps these were not perfect societies. Perhaps they were not ideal. They were not very diverse. They didn't have millets. They didn't have multi-culturalism. That’s true for the most part. But they didn't have sultans and jihads either. They didn't have the slave market where 13 year old girls were paraded around nude and sold to the highest bidder. I'll take my drab new England, I'll take my drab, cold foggy England, I'll take my gay Athenians any day of the week just to not have to worship a society of slaves and tyrants. Yes. Give me the cold, hard floor of a house of pilgrims in the New world. I'll swap that for the exoticism of the harem. I will swap it because the pilgrims had equality and because they had democracy. I will swap it because they spoke their minds. I will swap it because they lived modestly and did not boast of their wealth. I will swap it because they didn't deal in slaves. I will swap it just for that reason. That is enough.
The liberal and the leftist can have his diverse slave society. Societies that deal in the slaves of the world are sure to be diverse. The Brothels of Tel Aviv and New York and London and Las Vegas are diverse. In Vegas one can order up the 'petit Japanese teens' and 'Polish blondes'. Such diversity. But it is a diversity of the gutter. One finds diversity in a dumpster too. There are rotten tomatoes and rotten onions and rotten apples and perhaps a human body part. Its diverse, but is it really something to be worshipped? Diversity by itself doesn't equal decency. Diversity only works once the illness of society has been washed away. It only works when tyranny and slavery and rape have been washed away. The liberals can have all the Ottoman-Muslim-Akbarian-Muhammed diversity they want. The conservative will continue to have a diversity of decency.
Newsletter 11 Saudis, Free Speech and the One State Solution
Terra Incognita
Issue 11
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
November 16th, 2007
Why aren't Saudi students changed by coming to America? Saudi Students studying in America bring billions of dollars to the U.S economy. But their exposure to American culture, American society and the liberal University atmosphere doesn’t lead them to become socially progressive activists in their home country. Why not?
Free speech and the free market. The Free Market limits our exposure to unpopular ideas and relegates extreme speech to the public park rather than the newsstand. Attempts by professors and other intellectuals to claim that their free speech rights are being violated when their books aren’t published or they aren’t invited to speak is an attempt to control the market and force it to sell their unpopular product. In the end they have a right to free speech but we have a right to ignore it.
Why the one state solution, now? Suddenly every anti-Israel leftist professor, politician and activist is speaking about how a two-state solution is unworkable and the one state solution is the only way to ‘solve’ the Israel-Palestinian dispute. It’s a return to the bi-national rhetoric of the 1940s. It didn’t work then, it hasn’t worked since and it won’t work now. But perhaps something else is behind this latest drive for one state west of the Jordan.
Why aren't Saudi students changed by coming to America?
Seth J. Frantzman
November 12th, 2007
People always seem surprised that so many Saudi students (twice as many in 2006 as 2005) come to the United States and return to their country and yet nothing changes in Saudi Arabia. Shouldn't four years of frat parties, strip clubs and 'freedom' rub off somewhere? People must be surprised that despite all the diversity in the U.S. and the collegiate events such as 'national coming out day' and 'holocaust awareness week' and 'gay black man month', that Saudi students don't seem to internalize any of it. They go back to a country where non-Muslims may not worship, where foreigners are denied citizenship but are forced to do most of the work, where women are imported from abroad as slaves for use in homes, and where women may not drive. The Saudis don't go back as good progressive liberals and protest their archaic backward unjust country (in which, for instance, a woman was recently sentenced to 200 lashes for having been gang raped. She violated the Islamic prohibition against adultery and being alone with a man who was not her husband).
But why is this such a surprise? People always think that American freedom and diversity should cause other cultures to imitate the west in their self critique. But evidence and history do not bare this out. In Egypt American students study in an intolerant dictatorial society. These are the same students who won't travel to Israel because of the occupation and support a boycott of Burma because of the junta. One might be surprised to find out that these student cavort with the sons and daughters of Egypt's 'progressives'. This week when Egyptian singer Gaber el-Beltagui dared to speak of greater peace with Israel at the 100th anniversary of the opening of Cairo's main synagogue he was blacklisted by his progressive secular friends. Beltagui was told on a talkshow, by the host mind you, that he might deserve physical harm for his actions. Egyptian Baha Jahin, whose father wrote the words to 'Song of Peace', publicly declared that Beltagui would be forbidden to sing the song. A year previously when Egyptian writer Ali Salem published a book about his trip to Israel he was expelled from the Egyptian writers union. Haaretz seemed to capture the dilemma of Egypt well when it explained that "opponents of normalization [with Israel] fall into two main categories; supporters of the Muslim brotherhood and secular nationalists and leftists. ('In Egypt calls for peace bring waves of rebuke' Nov. 12th, 2007)"
The Center for Arabic Study Abroad (CASA) which runs a program at the American University of Cairo is chock full of American students, mostly women, who have no objections to the Egyptian society they study in. They would never lift a finger to protest it. Pictures posted by them on their private websites reveal costume parties where they dress up like Hamas members (some also dressed up like 'Jews' wearing phones with the words 'banks' and 'natural disasters' written on them. The caption of the photo read 'Hamas encounters the Zionist entity next to the water cooler').
If American students can so easily be duped into becoming Arab nationalists, anti-Semites and Islamists while studying abroad then why aren’t the Saudis duped into becoming freedom loving, gay tolerating, women respecting, equal rights crusaders? Perhaps an example from Jerusalem will further illustrate what is going on. Among the booths set up by student clubs weekly at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem there is almost always the Arab Communist booth and a Peace Now booth. The former is an Arab nationalist club, the latter is an Israeli leftist human rights club. One is nationalist, the other internationalist. One is nominally right wing, despite being 'Communist', the other is extremely left wing. Each booth is usually stocked with the same people: light skinned women with flowing hair and tall skinny men. The only difference is that the Arabs usually wear Khaffiyas around their necks. But there is a more subtle difference. The majority of Arab women in Israel and the Palestinian areas wear headscarves. But the Arab women at this Communist booth usually do not. They are, after all, progressive. But they are also nationalists. Even the minority Arab Christians are members of these nationalist parties, usually prominent members. Thus one finds that the most open minded 'progressive' Arab women, even the minorities, are nationalists.
Now let's recall something here. Leftism in the United States leads to majorities becoming more self-critical and minorities becoming more assertive. It leads Americans to go abroad and become nationalists for the causes of others. This is the key to understanding why Saudis don't change. First of all, 98% of the Saudi students studying in the United States are Saudi men. Saudi exports men, its women are not permitted to travel without the permission of male relatives and they therefore must stay at home, lest they be exposed to a country where women are equal. While in America the men are not encouraged to become American. Just as Israel transforms secular Arabs into self hating Jews, or rather Arab nationalists, America does a good job of transforming Saudi men into self hating Americans, or rather it doesn't change them at all. In the spirit of diversity the Saudis are encouraged to host 'Muslim cultural month' and give speeches about diversity. They are worshipped for being 'exotic oil-rich princes' and they are doted upon at all times by servants imported from their home country or hired in the United States. Their culture of dominating their women doesn't change in the United States, there are endless numbers of self hating American college women that desire nothing more than to be controlled and dominated.
There was a time when people came to America and took American ideas home with them. The French were the first people to be influenced by America in this way. When individual French intellectuals came to the United States in its early years they were told about freedom and they were encouraged to liberate themselves from their monarchy. Americans didn't want to learn about French culture in 1781, they were happy to tell the French what was good for them. Americans didn't reinforce and learn respect for the monarchy and the Catholic church when they traveled to France, rather they scoffed at both. Down throughout the years many people were influenced by the United States in this way. Many national liberation movements drew their inspiration from the United States, from the Haitian and Cuban revolutionaries of the 19th century to Ho Chi Minh. Edward Said's father was influenced by the United States after having served in her army during the First World War.
But look at the difference in influence between the younger and elder Said. The older one respected America. He respected the openness and freedoms that American society gave him. Most of all he respected the business environment in the United States. When the resided in Cairo in the 1940s he used these skills. But the younger Said was educated in a different time. The younger Said fled Egypt when the nationalist government took all the properties of foreigners. Said studied in the United States. But he was learning American self-critique by this time. Soon he became an Arab nationalist. He didn't want to free his country from bondage like the French or the Cubans, instead he wanted his nation to be more chauvinist and more fascist. Instead of taking anything positive from America he wrote one of the most scathing indictments of the West ever written, Orientalism. Ignoring his own past and his own secular upbringing, he joined forces with religious fanatics throughout the Muslim world to oppose the West. He traveled to Lebanon and threw stones at Israeli troops. Rather than argue for greater freedom and democracy in the Arab world, he became a supporter of each and every dictatorial regime the area could offer. He became a passionate hater certain people, directing most of his hatred against the United States and Israel. That’s what he learned from America: how to hate.
Why did this happen? Why do some people draw such inspiration from the United States, men such as Ninoy Aquino of the Philippines, and some draw such terrible lessons. We know what lessons the Japanese drew from learning about America in the 1920s when a large number of them studied at American Universities. They believed America was weak and that it would give in, that American boys could never give up their 'Susie' and their 'drive-in movies.' We also know that one of them, Admiral Yamamoto, drew the opposite conclusion; that America could never be defeated by Japan, that its economic power was unstoppable in any war over the Pacific. This is why, while the former encouraged the expansion of the Japanese empire and the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the latter cautioned against such a rash and terrible decision that would bring only ruin to their nation;
Foreigners today draw the wrong lessons from America because America disseminates the wrong lessons about itself. Just as America managed to convince the Japanese, by mistake, that it was weak, so America has convinced foreigners today to hate it. Reports show that foreign student enrollment brings 14 billion dollars into the United States annually. Yet it primarily produces foreign students who hate the United States. The 19 Sept. 11 hijackers are no exception.
They learn to hate America for the same reason that American 19 year old women go to Egypt to learn Islamic law. America no longer exports values, it only imports them. Muslims come from a dictatorship to America and we desire to learn about their 'culture'. While abortion might be illegal in America and anyone who opposes it is known as a right wing fanatic, we applaud when some foreigner speaks of his faith-based hatred of abortion.
We weren't always like this and luckily so. We didn't revel in learning about French monarchist culture. We didn't want to adopt the Catholic culture of all of 19th century Irish and Italian immigrants. Except for Henry Ford and Charles Lindberg we didn't learn any Nazi culture. We never celebrated cultural attributes that we knew to be mistaken in the 19th and early 20th century. American women didn't go abroad to Rome and study Catholic cannon law in the 1870s. The very notion of such a thing would have been laughable. Americans disdained and hated dictatorships in the 19th century. Men such as Mark Twain poked fun at the snobbish and backward cultures he found throughout Europe and the Mediterranean. In today's Middle Eastern Studies departments students are taught hat cultures where slavery was legal, such as Abbasid or Ottoman Islam, are tolerant cultures to be respected. 19th century Americans, except for a few unrepentant southerners, would have barfed at such an idea. America is full of respect for all those things today that our forefathers held in contempt. Whether it is waxing eloquent about the 'Great Islamic empire' or speaking of tolerance in countries where there is no tolerance, or studying under dictatorships, or sucking up to countries that forbid free speech, or importing foreigners from the most brutal dictatorships, we are full of respect for terrible notions.
This is why Saudis will never learn anything from America and why American freedom and democracy will inspire contempt from them and they will go back more nationalistic and religious than they came. We teach them nothing but critique for America. They are assigned nothing but Chomsky to read and they are encouraged to watch nothing but Michael Moore. What we should be hoping is not that they learn something from American academia, but rather that like all those Japanese who studied in the U.S in the 1920s, that they are taking away the wrong message from the wrong people and that deep down, under all the bourgeoisie snobby leftists on the surface there are good decent Americans who are beholden to their good values and who have no interest in Islamic law or slavery or empire or dictatorship.
Free speech and the free market
Seth J. Frantzman
November 7th, 2007
In a recent interview Bard college professor Joel Kovel spoke about the controversy surrounding the publication of his book, 'Overcoming Zionism.'
"Very powerful institutions in our country take it upon themselves to defend Israel at all costs, and in doing so, they frequently cross the line of a constitutional right to freedom of speech."
His line of reasoning is part of a new discussion regarding freedom of speech. The argument is that lobbies and corporations and other private non-governmental groups are interfering with freedom of speech. They do this by pressuring publishers and universities and corporations to remove the content of certain people. In doing so they are supposedly denying people freedom of speech. But what is the interaction between the free market and freedom of speech? Is speech affected by the same hidden hand as the market, or is speech above the market and are we thus constitutionally bound to listen to speech we disagree with?
The first amendment of the U.S Constitution reads:
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."
By contrast Professor Kovel has noted that:
"The notion of freedom of speech predates the Constitution and extends beyond the Constitution. It is, however, “grounded” in the Constitution, that is, given the solidity of a basic principle of a good society. One does not simply struggle for this right by legal means, as important and necessary as these are. One fights for it throughout civil society, where its manifestations include the openness of dialogue about important issues of the day. Anyone who thinks that such a dialogue exists about Israel/Palestine in the US has his head in the sand."
The idea of free speech may be grounded in our natural rights (Locke), but it is these natural rights that only the government can deny us, that was the main gist of Locke and other thinkers. They did not direct their thoughts towards what a private individual might do to another individual.
Does free speech mean that a newspaper may not defame someone? Does it mean that the ADL and Dershowitz may not defame an author who criticizes Israel? David Irving sued Penguin publishing because Deborah Lipstadt had 'libeled' him by publishing a book that called him a holocaust denier. Now who was silencing whose speech in that case? The libel suit was directed at silencing a book and its speech. Ideally free speech laws, at least in the United States, grant someone the right to defame someone else. Kovel defamed Zionism, or exposed it depending on the point of view, and that is part of free speech. But it is equally part of our free speech that one should be allowed to tell others not to listen to someone else's speech, for instance by saying they should not read or publish your book.
Not every author has a 'right' to be published, just as Ahmadinjed does not have a 'right' to speak at Columbia University. Free speech goes to the core of our rights as individuals to express ourselves. It does not preclude the fact that individuals will disagree, and condemn eachothers speech. What is most important is for the government not to interfere in this free exchange of ideas. Were the government to pass a law mandating that we listen to an 'open and impartial debate regarding the Jewish lobby' it seems this would be a complete reversal of the logic of free speech. Free speech also entitles us to the freedom not to listen. The freedom to ignore. The freedom to boycott. The freedom, yes, to hate. To hate in our hearts. The freedom to be a racist. The freedom to imagine the most terrible things. And I suggest, implicit in this freedom, as Xenophon noted, is the ability to say 'no'. No, I shall not publish. No, I shall not distribute this book. No, I shall not read this. No, I shall not open my mind to this line of thought. All are freedoms. All are imbedded in the U.S Constitution. The day that we are not free to think all these things and voice our opinion on them, the day we are forced to read certain things, we will have lost that inalieble right to freedom of speech.
The free market plays the most unique role in what speech we are exposed to. A vibrant society, full of many ideas, such as the United States, nevertheless does not have room in the marketplace for all of them. Instead the market regulates what speech we hear by the very nature of our own interest in the speech itself. We do not desire hate speech and therefore we are not exposed to it at Barnes and Noble or any major retailer. Nevertheless much of the new media such as the internet has a low entry cost thus illustrating that there is no market failure in regard to products that lack widespread demand. For example, Professor Kovel has a blog and website devoted to his ideas.
But the free market also controls our access to free speech in a different way. Political pressure groups, lobbyists and individuals may pressure corporations or publishers or entertainment outlets to remove certain content. The case of Don Imus, an NBC radio show host, comes to mind. He was removed from the airwaves for using the words 'nappy-headed hoes.' He had the freedom to issue forth this type of speech, but the market regulated the speech when advertisers pulled their paid advertising from NBC in response to pressure from Al Sharpton and other black leaders. This is the essence of the free market and freedom of speech. Don Imus was not denied his freedom of speech, but NBC choose to stop paying to expose people to it.
The claim that what certain people say is being 'silenced' because publishers and colleges and newspapers and broadcasters will not support their speech is not only wrongheaded but it also indirectly claims that we must be exposed to certain types of speech, regardless of the market. Those who claim we must be exposed to their speech are not only denying us the right that we have to say no to their speech as a consumer but they are trying to alter to laws of the market by placing themselves above it. This was another byproduct of the Soviet Union. Not only was the market part of a planned economy but speech was also planned and controlled. Is it a surprise that the two go hand in hand? Countries that try to deny the consumer what he desires through Communism or price controls are the same countries that deny people the right to freedom of speech. They are the same countries that mandate the only certain types of speech and certain ideas are heard.
How did Pravda measure its 'ratings?' It didn't have to because people were forced to consume it along with the Volga cars produced by the Soviet Union. When a college professor claims that he is being denied his freedom of speech due to his point of view that no one is interested in hearing or purchasing he is implicitly stating that he wishes he lived in a non-capitalist society in which the market is forced to buy his unpopular product, in this case his ideas.
Why the one state solution, now?
Seth J. Frantzman
November 15th, 2007
Suddenly people are talking about the 'one-state solution' again. The Oxford Union has debated the subject with such luminaries as Avi Shlaim and Norman Finkelstein invited to the debate. Norm Chomsky has chimed in. Virginia Tilley, a veteran condemner of Israel, has spoken her mind. Students, intellectuals and professors across the world are once again championing the bi-national solution to the problems between Israel and the Palestinians.
But is it just a coincidence that the one-state solution is back in the news? Alongside discussion of bi-nationalism is further condemnation of the Israeli 'occupation' of the Gaza strip. The U.N and many Human Rights organizations have pointed out that according to 'international law' Israel is still considered the 'occupying power' of the Gaza strip. Where exactly it says this in 'international law' is now clear, but it remains an easy solution for NGOs and the U.N to hold Israel responsible for all that happens in the strip.
The reason that the one-state solution is back in the news and that professors such as Joel Kovel are getting kudos for books such as Overcoming Zionism is because the extreme anti-Israel left is worried that a two-state solution is finally in the making. Most Israelis and most Palestinians have come to accept the idea that there will be two states west of the Jordan. This scares the anti-Israel lobby and the anti-Israel intelligentsia who have devoted so much work to condemning Israel. Once the occupation ends they will have to find new excuses to refer to Israel as an 'aparthied-nazi state.'
The solution is to declare that Israel is still in occupation of Gaza, that the Palestinians can never form a 'viable' state in the West bank because of the security fence and that therefore the only solution is one state west of the Jordan. The only people that support this concept today are those who have said time and again that they reject the very notion that a Jewish state should exist in the first place. Saed Erakat's statements rejecting Israel as a Jewish state are in line with this thought process.
The reason that the one-state solution gains more prominence the more that Israelis want to give up the West Bank is because the anti-Israel lobby is concerned that if there is a final divorce between Israel and the Palestinians then they will have lost a card to play. Since the one-state solution theorists reject the very notion of a Jewish state they know the best way to destroy the Jewish part of a democratic Israel is to make the country a majority Muslim and Arab. But with a Palestinian state next to an Israeli one they realize that demographics will no longer solve their problem, because most of the Palestinians will be members of the Palestinian state.
All of those who mention the idea of a 'one-state' or 'bi-national' solution have in mind, not one state, but the disappearance of Israel and the disappearance of a nation that is a majority Jewish. While these people would never suggest that Germany and France should merge or that Japan and China should merge, or Mexico and America, they have no qualms debating what should happen in Israel. That is there prerogative. The genius of their blind slavish devotion to this idea is that they ignore the fact that every bi-national state, except Switzerland has been a patent failure. From the Sudan to Yugoslavia to Belgium and Lebanon, every state that includes two ethnic-religious groups in equal numbers has proved disastrous. But perhaps that is what the extreme anti-Israel lobby really desires, a bloodbath and total destruction in the Holy Land so that the international community can once again run the affairs of Jerusalem.
Issue 11
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
November 16th, 2007
Why aren't Saudi students changed by coming to America? Saudi Students studying in America bring billions of dollars to the U.S economy. But their exposure to American culture, American society and the liberal University atmosphere doesn’t lead them to become socially progressive activists in their home country. Why not?
Free speech and the free market. The Free Market limits our exposure to unpopular ideas and relegates extreme speech to the public park rather than the newsstand. Attempts by professors and other intellectuals to claim that their free speech rights are being violated when their books aren’t published or they aren’t invited to speak is an attempt to control the market and force it to sell their unpopular product. In the end they have a right to free speech but we have a right to ignore it.
Why the one state solution, now? Suddenly every anti-Israel leftist professor, politician and activist is speaking about how a two-state solution is unworkable and the one state solution is the only way to ‘solve’ the Israel-Palestinian dispute. It’s a return to the bi-national rhetoric of the 1940s. It didn’t work then, it hasn’t worked since and it won’t work now. But perhaps something else is behind this latest drive for one state west of the Jordan.
Why aren't Saudi students changed by coming to America?
Seth J. Frantzman
November 12th, 2007
People always seem surprised that so many Saudi students (twice as many in 2006 as 2005) come to the United States and return to their country and yet nothing changes in Saudi Arabia. Shouldn't four years of frat parties, strip clubs and 'freedom' rub off somewhere? People must be surprised that despite all the diversity in the U.S. and the collegiate events such as 'national coming out day' and 'holocaust awareness week' and 'gay black man month', that Saudi students don't seem to internalize any of it. They go back to a country where non-Muslims may not worship, where foreigners are denied citizenship but are forced to do most of the work, where women are imported from abroad as slaves for use in homes, and where women may not drive. The Saudis don't go back as good progressive liberals and protest their archaic backward unjust country (in which, for instance, a woman was recently sentenced to 200 lashes for having been gang raped. She violated the Islamic prohibition against adultery and being alone with a man who was not her husband).
But why is this such a surprise? People always think that American freedom and diversity should cause other cultures to imitate the west in their self critique. But evidence and history do not bare this out. In Egypt American students study in an intolerant dictatorial society. These are the same students who won't travel to Israel because of the occupation and support a boycott of Burma because of the junta. One might be surprised to find out that these student cavort with the sons and daughters of Egypt's 'progressives'. This week when Egyptian singer Gaber el-Beltagui dared to speak of greater peace with Israel at the 100th anniversary of the opening of Cairo's main synagogue he was blacklisted by his progressive secular friends. Beltagui was told on a talkshow, by the host mind you, that he might deserve physical harm for his actions. Egyptian Baha Jahin, whose father wrote the words to 'Song of Peace', publicly declared that Beltagui would be forbidden to sing the song. A year previously when Egyptian writer Ali Salem published a book about his trip to Israel he was expelled from the Egyptian writers union. Haaretz seemed to capture the dilemma of Egypt well when it explained that "opponents of normalization [with Israel] fall into two main categories; supporters of the Muslim brotherhood and secular nationalists and leftists. ('In Egypt calls for peace bring waves of rebuke' Nov. 12th, 2007)"
The Center for Arabic Study Abroad (CASA) which runs a program at the American University of Cairo is chock full of American students, mostly women, who have no objections to the Egyptian society they study in. They would never lift a finger to protest it. Pictures posted by them on their private websites reveal costume parties where they dress up like Hamas members (some also dressed up like 'Jews' wearing phones with the words 'banks' and 'natural disasters' written on them. The caption of the photo read 'Hamas encounters the Zionist entity next to the water cooler').
If American students can so easily be duped into becoming Arab nationalists, anti-Semites and Islamists while studying abroad then why aren’t the Saudis duped into becoming freedom loving, gay tolerating, women respecting, equal rights crusaders? Perhaps an example from Jerusalem will further illustrate what is going on. Among the booths set up by student clubs weekly at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem there is almost always the Arab Communist booth and a Peace Now booth. The former is an Arab nationalist club, the latter is an Israeli leftist human rights club. One is nationalist, the other internationalist. One is nominally right wing, despite being 'Communist', the other is extremely left wing. Each booth is usually stocked with the same people: light skinned women with flowing hair and tall skinny men. The only difference is that the Arabs usually wear Khaffiyas around their necks. But there is a more subtle difference. The majority of Arab women in Israel and the Palestinian areas wear headscarves. But the Arab women at this Communist booth usually do not. They are, after all, progressive. But they are also nationalists. Even the minority Arab Christians are members of these nationalist parties, usually prominent members. Thus one finds that the most open minded 'progressive' Arab women, even the minorities, are nationalists.
Now let's recall something here. Leftism in the United States leads to majorities becoming more self-critical and minorities becoming more assertive. It leads Americans to go abroad and become nationalists for the causes of others. This is the key to understanding why Saudis don't change. First of all, 98% of the Saudi students studying in the United States are Saudi men. Saudi exports men, its women are not permitted to travel without the permission of male relatives and they therefore must stay at home, lest they be exposed to a country where women are equal. While in America the men are not encouraged to become American. Just as Israel transforms secular Arabs into self hating Jews, or rather Arab nationalists, America does a good job of transforming Saudi men into self hating Americans, or rather it doesn't change them at all. In the spirit of diversity the Saudis are encouraged to host 'Muslim cultural month' and give speeches about diversity. They are worshipped for being 'exotic oil-rich princes' and they are doted upon at all times by servants imported from their home country or hired in the United States. Their culture of dominating their women doesn't change in the United States, there are endless numbers of self hating American college women that desire nothing more than to be controlled and dominated.
There was a time when people came to America and took American ideas home with them. The French were the first people to be influenced by America in this way. When individual French intellectuals came to the United States in its early years they were told about freedom and they were encouraged to liberate themselves from their monarchy. Americans didn't want to learn about French culture in 1781, they were happy to tell the French what was good for them. Americans didn't reinforce and learn respect for the monarchy and the Catholic church when they traveled to France, rather they scoffed at both. Down throughout the years many people were influenced by the United States in this way. Many national liberation movements drew their inspiration from the United States, from the Haitian and Cuban revolutionaries of the 19th century to Ho Chi Minh. Edward Said's father was influenced by the United States after having served in her army during the First World War.
But look at the difference in influence between the younger and elder Said. The older one respected America. He respected the openness and freedoms that American society gave him. Most of all he respected the business environment in the United States. When the resided in Cairo in the 1940s he used these skills. But the younger Said was educated in a different time. The younger Said fled Egypt when the nationalist government took all the properties of foreigners. Said studied in the United States. But he was learning American self-critique by this time. Soon he became an Arab nationalist. He didn't want to free his country from bondage like the French or the Cubans, instead he wanted his nation to be more chauvinist and more fascist. Instead of taking anything positive from America he wrote one of the most scathing indictments of the West ever written, Orientalism. Ignoring his own past and his own secular upbringing, he joined forces with religious fanatics throughout the Muslim world to oppose the West. He traveled to Lebanon and threw stones at Israeli troops. Rather than argue for greater freedom and democracy in the Arab world, he became a supporter of each and every dictatorial regime the area could offer. He became a passionate hater certain people, directing most of his hatred against the United States and Israel. That’s what he learned from America: how to hate.
Why did this happen? Why do some people draw such inspiration from the United States, men such as Ninoy Aquino of the Philippines, and some draw such terrible lessons. We know what lessons the Japanese drew from learning about America in the 1920s when a large number of them studied at American Universities. They believed America was weak and that it would give in, that American boys could never give up their 'Susie' and their 'drive-in movies.' We also know that one of them, Admiral Yamamoto, drew the opposite conclusion; that America could never be defeated by Japan, that its economic power was unstoppable in any war over the Pacific. This is why, while the former encouraged the expansion of the Japanese empire and the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the latter cautioned against such a rash and terrible decision that would bring only ruin to their nation;
Foreigners today draw the wrong lessons from America because America disseminates the wrong lessons about itself. Just as America managed to convince the Japanese, by mistake, that it was weak, so America has convinced foreigners today to hate it. Reports show that foreign student enrollment brings 14 billion dollars into the United States annually. Yet it primarily produces foreign students who hate the United States. The 19 Sept. 11 hijackers are no exception.
They learn to hate America for the same reason that American 19 year old women go to Egypt to learn Islamic law. America no longer exports values, it only imports them. Muslims come from a dictatorship to America and we desire to learn about their 'culture'. While abortion might be illegal in America and anyone who opposes it is known as a right wing fanatic, we applaud when some foreigner speaks of his faith-based hatred of abortion.
We weren't always like this and luckily so. We didn't revel in learning about French monarchist culture. We didn't want to adopt the Catholic culture of all of 19th century Irish and Italian immigrants. Except for Henry Ford and Charles Lindberg we didn't learn any Nazi culture. We never celebrated cultural attributes that we knew to be mistaken in the 19th and early 20th century. American women didn't go abroad to Rome and study Catholic cannon law in the 1870s. The very notion of such a thing would have been laughable. Americans disdained and hated dictatorships in the 19th century. Men such as Mark Twain poked fun at the snobbish and backward cultures he found throughout Europe and the Mediterranean. In today's Middle Eastern Studies departments students are taught hat cultures where slavery was legal, such as Abbasid or Ottoman Islam, are tolerant cultures to be respected. 19th century Americans, except for a few unrepentant southerners, would have barfed at such an idea. America is full of respect for all those things today that our forefathers held in contempt. Whether it is waxing eloquent about the 'Great Islamic empire' or speaking of tolerance in countries where there is no tolerance, or studying under dictatorships, or sucking up to countries that forbid free speech, or importing foreigners from the most brutal dictatorships, we are full of respect for terrible notions.
This is why Saudis will never learn anything from America and why American freedom and democracy will inspire contempt from them and they will go back more nationalistic and religious than they came. We teach them nothing but critique for America. They are assigned nothing but Chomsky to read and they are encouraged to watch nothing but Michael Moore. What we should be hoping is not that they learn something from American academia, but rather that like all those Japanese who studied in the U.S in the 1920s, that they are taking away the wrong message from the wrong people and that deep down, under all the bourgeoisie snobby leftists on the surface there are good decent Americans who are beholden to their good values and who have no interest in Islamic law or slavery or empire or dictatorship.
Free speech and the free market
Seth J. Frantzman
November 7th, 2007
In a recent interview Bard college professor Joel Kovel spoke about the controversy surrounding the publication of his book, 'Overcoming Zionism.'
"Very powerful institutions in our country take it upon themselves to defend Israel at all costs, and in doing so, they frequently cross the line of a constitutional right to freedom of speech."
His line of reasoning is part of a new discussion regarding freedom of speech. The argument is that lobbies and corporations and other private non-governmental groups are interfering with freedom of speech. They do this by pressuring publishers and universities and corporations to remove the content of certain people. In doing so they are supposedly denying people freedom of speech. But what is the interaction between the free market and freedom of speech? Is speech affected by the same hidden hand as the market, or is speech above the market and are we thus constitutionally bound to listen to speech we disagree with?
The first amendment of the U.S Constitution reads:
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."
By contrast Professor Kovel has noted that:
"The notion of freedom of speech predates the Constitution and extends beyond the Constitution. It is, however, “grounded” in the Constitution, that is, given the solidity of a basic principle of a good society. One does not simply struggle for this right by legal means, as important and necessary as these are. One fights for it throughout civil society, where its manifestations include the openness of dialogue about important issues of the day. Anyone who thinks that such a dialogue exists about Israel/Palestine in the US has his head in the sand."
The idea of free speech may be grounded in our natural rights (Locke), but it is these natural rights that only the government can deny us, that was the main gist of Locke and other thinkers. They did not direct their thoughts towards what a private individual might do to another individual.
Does free speech mean that a newspaper may not defame someone? Does it mean that the ADL and Dershowitz may not defame an author who criticizes Israel? David Irving sued Penguin publishing because Deborah Lipstadt had 'libeled' him by publishing a book that called him a holocaust denier. Now who was silencing whose speech in that case? The libel suit was directed at silencing a book and its speech. Ideally free speech laws, at least in the United States, grant someone the right to defame someone else. Kovel defamed Zionism, or exposed it depending on the point of view, and that is part of free speech. But it is equally part of our free speech that one should be allowed to tell others not to listen to someone else's speech, for instance by saying they should not read or publish your book.
Not every author has a 'right' to be published, just as Ahmadinjed does not have a 'right' to speak at Columbia University. Free speech goes to the core of our rights as individuals to express ourselves. It does not preclude the fact that individuals will disagree, and condemn eachothers speech. What is most important is for the government not to interfere in this free exchange of ideas. Were the government to pass a law mandating that we listen to an 'open and impartial debate regarding the Jewish lobby' it seems this would be a complete reversal of the logic of free speech. Free speech also entitles us to the freedom not to listen. The freedom to ignore. The freedom to boycott. The freedom, yes, to hate. To hate in our hearts. The freedom to be a racist. The freedom to imagine the most terrible things. And I suggest, implicit in this freedom, as Xenophon noted, is the ability to say 'no'. No, I shall not publish. No, I shall not distribute this book. No, I shall not read this. No, I shall not open my mind to this line of thought. All are freedoms. All are imbedded in the U.S Constitution. The day that we are not free to think all these things and voice our opinion on them, the day we are forced to read certain things, we will have lost that inalieble right to freedom of speech.
The free market plays the most unique role in what speech we are exposed to. A vibrant society, full of many ideas, such as the United States, nevertheless does not have room in the marketplace for all of them. Instead the market regulates what speech we hear by the very nature of our own interest in the speech itself. We do not desire hate speech and therefore we are not exposed to it at Barnes and Noble or any major retailer. Nevertheless much of the new media such as the internet has a low entry cost thus illustrating that there is no market failure in regard to products that lack widespread demand. For example, Professor Kovel has a blog and website devoted to his ideas.
But the free market also controls our access to free speech in a different way. Political pressure groups, lobbyists and individuals may pressure corporations or publishers or entertainment outlets to remove certain content. The case of Don Imus, an NBC radio show host, comes to mind. He was removed from the airwaves for using the words 'nappy-headed hoes.' He had the freedom to issue forth this type of speech, but the market regulated the speech when advertisers pulled their paid advertising from NBC in response to pressure from Al Sharpton and other black leaders. This is the essence of the free market and freedom of speech. Don Imus was not denied his freedom of speech, but NBC choose to stop paying to expose people to it.
The claim that what certain people say is being 'silenced' because publishers and colleges and newspapers and broadcasters will not support their speech is not only wrongheaded but it also indirectly claims that we must be exposed to certain types of speech, regardless of the market. Those who claim we must be exposed to their speech are not only denying us the right that we have to say no to their speech as a consumer but they are trying to alter to laws of the market by placing themselves above it. This was another byproduct of the Soviet Union. Not only was the market part of a planned economy but speech was also planned and controlled. Is it a surprise that the two go hand in hand? Countries that try to deny the consumer what he desires through Communism or price controls are the same countries that deny people the right to freedom of speech. They are the same countries that mandate the only certain types of speech and certain ideas are heard.
How did Pravda measure its 'ratings?' It didn't have to because people were forced to consume it along with the Volga cars produced by the Soviet Union. When a college professor claims that he is being denied his freedom of speech due to his point of view that no one is interested in hearing or purchasing he is implicitly stating that he wishes he lived in a non-capitalist society in which the market is forced to buy his unpopular product, in this case his ideas.
Why the one state solution, now?
Seth J. Frantzman
November 15th, 2007
Suddenly people are talking about the 'one-state solution' again. The Oxford Union has debated the subject with such luminaries as Avi Shlaim and Norman Finkelstein invited to the debate. Norm Chomsky has chimed in. Virginia Tilley, a veteran condemner of Israel, has spoken her mind. Students, intellectuals and professors across the world are once again championing the bi-national solution to the problems between Israel and the Palestinians.
But is it just a coincidence that the one-state solution is back in the news? Alongside discussion of bi-nationalism is further condemnation of the Israeli 'occupation' of the Gaza strip. The U.N and many Human Rights organizations have pointed out that according to 'international law' Israel is still considered the 'occupying power' of the Gaza strip. Where exactly it says this in 'international law' is now clear, but it remains an easy solution for NGOs and the U.N to hold Israel responsible for all that happens in the strip.
The reason that the one-state solution is back in the news and that professors such as Joel Kovel are getting kudos for books such as Overcoming Zionism is because the extreme anti-Israel left is worried that a two-state solution is finally in the making. Most Israelis and most Palestinians have come to accept the idea that there will be two states west of the Jordan. This scares the anti-Israel lobby and the anti-Israel intelligentsia who have devoted so much work to condemning Israel. Once the occupation ends they will have to find new excuses to refer to Israel as an 'aparthied-nazi state.'
The solution is to declare that Israel is still in occupation of Gaza, that the Palestinians can never form a 'viable' state in the West bank because of the security fence and that therefore the only solution is one state west of the Jordan. The only people that support this concept today are those who have said time and again that they reject the very notion that a Jewish state should exist in the first place. Saed Erakat's statements rejecting Israel as a Jewish state are in line with this thought process.
The reason that the one-state solution gains more prominence the more that Israelis want to give up the West Bank is because the anti-Israel lobby is concerned that if there is a final divorce between Israel and the Palestinians then they will have lost a card to play. Since the one-state solution theorists reject the very notion of a Jewish state they know the best way to destroy the Jewish part of a democratic Israel is to make the country a majority Muslim and Arab. But with a Palestinian state next to an Israeli one they realize that demographics will no longer solve their problem, because most of the Palestinians will be members of the Palestinian state.
All of those who mention the idea of a 'one-state' or 'bi-national' solution have in mind, not one state, but the disappearance of Israel and the disappearance of a nation that is a majority Jewish. While these people would never suggest that Germany and France should merge or that Japan and China should merge, or Mexico and America, they have no qualms debating what should happen in Israel. That is there prerogative. The genius of their blind slavish devotion to this idea is that they ignore the fact that every bi-national state, except Switzerland has been a patent failure. From the Sudan to Yugoslavia to Belgium and Lebanon, every state that includes two ethnic-religious groups in equal numbers has proved disastrous. But perhaps that is what the extreme anti-Israel lobby really desires, a bloodbath and total destruction in the Holy Land so that the international community can once again run the affairs of Jerusalem.
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