Terra Incognita
Issue 16
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
December 23rd, 2007
1) Arrogance, the End of Days and Global Warming: The Global warming hysteria reaches new levels every month as people predict that the oceans will rise and consume us, the deserts will take over the world and ‘wild weather’ will cause a new ice age. It is oddly reminiscent of the old End of Days predictions of the 19th century.
2) Is Genocide Modern: Many authors take it for granted that genocide is a modern phenomenon restricted to the 20th century. But genocide is as old as mankind.
3) Hating the other: Ward Churchill, Michael Snatamauro and making the other an ‘eichmann’ in order to justify his murder: Many scholars, politicians and intellectuals these days revel in condemning everyone they disagree with as ‘nazis’. Furthermore they define civilians as ‘little eichmans’ in order to justify mass murder. This is a disturbing phenomenon and it says much about the way in which hating those who hate is used as an excuse to encourage the murder of perfectly innocent people under the pretext that those people are ‘nazis’.
Arrogance, the End of Days and Global Warming
Seth J. Frantzman
December 20th, 2007
Yossi Sarid, a respected journalist and leftist intellectual in Israel toted the line of many when he wrote recently that places in the world are going to "sink and disappear when the icebergs melt, the oceans rise, the storms intensify, the species become extinct and the deserts spread and cover the land." But if one were to think about this statement with some retrospect in mind they might realize that this is not such an original idea. The belief that the end of days is coming is as old as Christianity and has its origins in the Old testament and elsewhere. The fact that global warming hysterics have taken up the same tune should bother people when they come to consider questions surrounding the 'greenhouse affect' and 'global warming' and the latest obsession with environmental catastrophe.
There is a famous postcard of a naked man walking off into the desert while another man in a tweed jacket walking the other way gives him an alarming look. The caption reads "if everyone is thinking the same thing then someone isn't thinking." In the quest to alarm us all about global warming and the coming ice age we are being led into this trap where 'all' the scientists 'believe' the same thing and we are being asked to march in lock step with them.
There are two problems with the global warming hypothesis. The first is that it is extremist. It ascribes all the problems in the world to one simple thing and it claims that if we don't act now the world will end shortly. Listen to Mr. Sarid: "the deserts will spread and cover the land." Does this remind you more of science or something from Deuteronomy or Revelations? The apostle Paul also predicted all sorts of terrible catastrophes and so did half the other prophets in the Bible. Should we perhaps have awarded them the Nobel Peace prize instead of Al Gore for warning us of the coming catastrophe? The Hale-Bop comet people dressed themselves up in purple, cut off their own genitals and killed themselves because of the End of Days. Perhaps they too should join the pantheon of global warming crazies. Or perhaps we should look to the 19th century and all the insane movements that predicted an End of Days such as the Millenarians and the Millerites. Surely those people were no more extreme in their pronouncements than Mr. Sarid and his ilk.
The second problem with the Global warming movement is its emphases on man. Whereas in previous times the End of Days believers claimed that god was going to destroy the world or that Christ was going to return, our secular scientific age demands that it be man who is said to have caused the End of Days. This is a logical assumption since science cannot blame god for global warming and the coming desertification/ice melting/wild storms that will come. So science blames me. It blames you. It blames us. But it doesn't just blame us for triggering the problem, it actually claims something more. The Global warming people claim that we, you and I, have the power to destroy the world through our conspicuous consumption. This is the second problem. Global warming theories assume that man is capable of destroying the world. Its not the first time man arrogantly thought he could do so. The builders of the first nuclear bomb huddled in a concrete bunker outside of Alamagordo, New Mexico in 1945 and they too thought that the world might end. At the time some of them believed the detonation of a nuclear bomb would cause a chain reaction that would burn up all the Oxygen in the air. They didn't bother to tell us, the public, of this slight side affect of their new weapon. They went ahead and blew it up and low and behold it didn't destroy the world. Man has become more arrogant since. Man now thinks he has the power to destroy the earth. Is he kidding? One only has to abandon a building for a few years before nature begins to take back that building. Nature is far more powerful than man. Man is only superficially aware of his power. He cuts down an old growth forest and says "look what I have done!" There is an oil spill and he says "I have ruined the environment!" But man has done no such thing. He can only temporarily alter his environment in the most insignificant way. He might be able to kill off Dodo birds but he can't defeat pesky creatures like ants and cockroaches. Killing off Dodo birds is not the same as ending the world through the use of carbon. But man believes it. He believes it so much that he now purchases 'carbon offsets'. The money donated to offset his carbon use goes to NGOs who then pay people to drive around in SUVs and talk about offsetting carbon. Every penny spent on offsetting carbon only increases the amount of carbon being put out. But man is foolish. He says "I can be equal, I can fly my jet plane and donate 1,000 dollars to some obscure charity and I am now no longer guilty." Its no surprise that all the environmental campaigners seem to be the most conspicuous users of big fat carbon producing planes and SUVs. This alone should be enough reason not to trust them. The fact that people make a living, nay, make a career, on whining about the environment should be enough reason not to trust them. But we have the U.N to assure us that there is a 'catastrophic foot shortage' this year. Really? If there was a catastrophic food shortage then wouldn't there be more famines? But I haven't seen posters of any more starving African children with distended bellies being cared for by European women than last year. Are there simply not enough Norwegian women to put in all the pictures, so they haven't distributed them yet? Are they still developing the film?
It is ironic that those who complain about global warming are usually the same people who detest Foxnews. Foxnews has the most alarmist weather reports day after day. Any tiny thunder storm is described as 'Whicked Weather' with a special headline and introduction. According to Foxnews we are suffering the worst ______ everyday. If its not hurricanes its tornadoes and wind chill and ice storms.
When I was a boy I also had to be indoctrinated about global warming. I was even given an assignment to draw a picture of the 'greenhouse affect'. I had to draw a picture of a happy little salmon and how his stream is polluted by 'evil' factories and how dams are built and how pollution causes acid rain that inevitably kills the poor salmon. I was told about how the world would end lest we do something 'now'. I recall being in high school in Jim Wigren's history class and seeing the poster on the wall that predicted the rising sea levels and how much of the earth would disappear But isn't 95% of an ice berg submerged? That’s what I learned about the Titanic disaster. The ice berg was mostly under water so that’s why the captain couldn't see it. Remember? If the North Pole ice cap is going to melt and cause the seas to rise isn't there one slight problem with this hypothesis, namely that 95% of the ice cap is underwater and therefore only 5% stands to be added to the surface of the ocean, producing a one inch rise the world over? After all, what percentage of the sea is taken up by that scary ice cap. People look at Mercator projections and think 'by gosh its huge!' But the Mercator distorts the size of items at the poles, in reality it is not very big. The biggest tragedy of it melting is that people will no longer be able to walk to the pole.
There is no reasoning with 'science'. There is certainly no reasoning with scientific bodies set up the U.N to tell us that the entire world will end and that all the problems of the world are due to our harming the environment. If we wanted to do our part towards alleviating how much we harm the environment we would start by dismantling the U.N and its 60 billion dollar budget and its 100,000 employees and its army and its planes and all the cars and SUVs associated with it. Make the U.N workers ride bicycles, that will ease not only the traffic problem in New York, but also help end global warming, and then they won't have to purchase carbon off-sets.
I put it to you Mr. Ban Ki Moon: do your part to end Global warming and put your foot where your mouth is, put it to the peddle of bicycle the next time you ride to work.
Is Genocide Modern?
Seth J. Frantzman
December 20th, 2007
Mark Levene argues in the book Genocide in the age of the Nation State that genocide is a product of modernity created mostly by the west and especially used against native peoples through imperialism. Benjamin Lieberman makes a similar argument in Terrible Fate: Ethnic-Cleansing in the making of Modern Europe. Ben Kiernan and Robert Gellately have made similar claims. Gary Clayton Anderson in his book Conquest claims that the white man brought 'ethnic-cleansing' to Texas in the 19th century and Ward Churchill makes similar claims about the genocide of native-Americans. Samantha Power in A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide claims that America has sat by while many genocides took place and in doing so enabled them.
The problem with genocide, so some authors tell us, is in its definition. Many like to use the U.N's definition of genocide. But seeing as how that definition didn't seem to apply to the Rwandan genocide and yet got turned around so that Israel was accused of committing a genocide against the Palestinians and that the American border was in affect a 'genocide' against Mexican immigrants(see the book Annihilating Difference), one must be cautious to rely to heavily on it. Authors like to define genocide against modernity mostly in order to claim that the West is solely responsible for creating the idea of genocide. Certainly the origins of the word genocide are modern. It implies the destruction of people through the destruction of their genes and thus is linked to eugenics and modern ideas about race. But if we examine the most well know genocide of the 20th century: the Armenian, Cambodian, the Rwandan, the Sudanese and the Holocaust we find that what took place is both diverse and unique. In all but one case(Cambodia), the genocide was directed against an ethnic-linguistic-religious group. In the case of Cambodia the mass killing was only called a genocide because such a large number of people died.
In the 19th century the West is said to have laid the foundations for genocide through its destruction of native populations in the Americas and elsewhere. But here scholars are mistaken. The great killing of natives in the Americas took place long before the birth of the 'modern' world or the 'nation-state'. Before the treaty of Westphalia, most of the natives in the Americas were already dead. Scholars claim 90% died of disease. The subsequent genocide, was no so much a calculated genocide as a slow, grinding reduction of native rights and landholdings. As a percentage less died after 1700 than before. Few countries ever set out to exterminate the native tribes, even if in many cases that was the result. For instance General Crook who fought the Apache never had any hate for them, but his campaign resulted in their destruction. Kit Carson's campaign against the Navajo was especially brutal, but most Navajo survived. By contrast the California tribes were almost completely annihilated and yet few were destroyed in concerted campaigns. Claims that America invented ethnic-cleansing of the natives in Texas seems to ignore the fact that the Spanish had been up to it for years.
I have stated before that Nazism and the Holocaust can be seen as the highest form of Western civilization. This is because in one strange form western civilization produced this strange extremism, this mechanical dark age of cleansing and counting and efficiency gone mad. The Nazi genocide was unique only in its thoroughness. It was not even unique in its ability to kill large numbers of people. In the space of a few months the Hutus butchered, using machetes, 800,000 Tutsi in Rwanda. That was a much higher volume of killing, using primitive weapons, than the Nazis were able to do using modern machinery. Thus the Nazi genocide is unique not for the numbers killed or even the end result, but it is unique for its methods and its organization and bureaucracy of murder. No regime before ever perfected such a bureaucracy devoted to death.
But other regimes in the past perfected killing machines. Many have seen the western colonization of the world as a prelude to genocide. People point to the German campaign against the Herero between 1904 and 1907 that resulted in 80% of the tribe being killed. It is another one of those 'first' genocides of the 20th century along with the Armenian. But what befell the Heroro is not unique in history. Its not first time an empire set about destroying a people.
Tamarlane was famous for it. The Assyrain kings were famous for it. Mohammed did it. The Romans did it. Alexander did it. History is replete with stories of genocide disguised in our vocabulary as massacres. If one wants to find out where a genocide took place they merely need to find mentions of people in history who no longer exist. More often then not a genocide befell them. That is what happened to the Samaritans. It is also what happened to the Carthaginians. It is what happened to the Jewish tribes of Arabia. It is what happened for 2000 years in Africa as Arabs and then Europeans deported millions of Africans as slaves. Genocide is in no way modern, the only thing that is modern is terms like ‘genocide’ and ethnic-cleansing’.
Hating the other: Ward Churchill, Michael Snatamauro and making the other an ‘eichmann’ in order to justify his murder
Seth J. Frantzman
December 17th, 2007
On September 12th, Ward Churchill, an American professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder published an essay entitled Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens(later published as a booklet in 2003 titled On the Justice of Roosting Chickens: reflections on the consequences of U.S. imperial arrogance and criminality). Churchill has since become a cause celebre among the American left with solidarity networks, free speech campaigns, and articles at Chomsky’s website Znet devoted to him. In it he discussed his reflections on 9/11:
“As for those in the World Trade Center... Well, really, let's get a grip here, shall we? True enough, they were civilians of a sort. But innocent? Gimme a break. They formed a technocratic corps at the very heart of America's global financial empire - the "mighty engine of profit" to which the military dimension of U.S. policy has always been enslaved - and they did so both willingly and knowingly. Recourse to "ignorance" - a derivative, after all, of the word "ignore" - counts as less than an excuse among this relatively well-educated elite. To the extent that any of them were unaware of the costs and consequences to others of what they were involved in - and in many cases excelling at - it was because of their absolute refusal to see. More likely, it was because they were too busy braying, incessantly and self-importantly, into their cell phones, arranging power lunches and stock transactions, each of which translated, conveniently out of sight, mind and smelling distance, into the starved and rotting flesh of infants. If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers, I'd really be interested in hearing about it.”
In an essay attributed to Harold Thomas entitled ‘The Myth of the Innocent Civilian’ that appeared on a left wing website(http://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/2007/08/29/the-myth-of-the-innocent-civilian-audio-booklet/) which includes links to other ‘dissident’ websites and Al Jazeera we see an explanation of the theory:
“The Myth of the Innocent Civilian”, questions the relationship that people have with artificial entities such as governments and corporations. An artificial entity does not spring into existence on its own, has no will or intelligence of its own and cannot be held accountable for “behavior”. Only people can reason, act and take responsibility.
In exchange for a variety of benefits, citizens submit to “government” demands which include all manner of taxation, licensing, and even compelled servitude. Great numbers of citizens are even directly employed by government. Yet when confronted with evidence of gross misdeeds committed in the name of government, citizens typically do not see themselves as accountable or responsible in any way.”
Michael Santomauro is a prominent New York leftist who runs the website www.reportersnotebook.com/. He signs his blog with the word ‘peace’ and his essays have appeared on many leftist websites such as Counterpunch.org, alongside essays by people like Noam Chomsky. In his essay the “Myth of the Innocent Civilian he noted the following after 9/11:
“I think if the typical American does not make an attempt to understand the damage our weapons have inflicted on the Arabs by proxy with Israel and the continuous dishonest one-sided United States foreign policy in the region, then maybe we deserve more of what we got on Sept. 11, 2001…The typical, now dead American from 9/11 lived his life knowing these facts and not caring about it. The arrogance and the callousness was part of his everyday being. Was his life worth living if he didn't care how the American government was using his tax money to hurt people? - to destroy the livelihoods of an entire region?.... Nine-eleven should be a reminder that if more Americans have an early death, it is because of the end result of not caring. Peace.”
In a follow-up essay in which he declared why he wouldn’t apologize for his first essay he noted his observations after 9/11:
“I notice all the Muslim owned shops closed-up... Afraid….Actually, all the restaurants that are non-Muslim owned were open - packed with diners….he tells me that on Tuesday morning on 9/11 when the bank was getting ready to close early his Jewish clients had happy smirks on their face.”
A commentator named Sarah expanded on this theory in a discussion at Wikipedia over the content of Wikipedia’s ‘List of Massacres’. Apparently the discussion had something to do with Northern Ireland but her explanation of the question of innocence is what is important:
“Leaving aside the question of whether settlers (ie ethnic cleansers) can ever be ‘innocent’ - there was NO "Irish Government" at the time; there was the occupying Crown forces and their "plantations" (genocide and ethnic cleansing in modern parlance). Even conceding the bizarre notion of "settler innocence" there is no evidence of a massacre of settlers - just the battles against the yeomanry. On the other hand there is voluminous evidence of the massacres done by the planters during and after the rebellion. (Sarah777 (talk) 23:33, 16 December 2007 (UTC))”
These four extended quotes serve as the starting point for a discussion of the way in which the modern left or extreme left has created an ‘other’ in order to justify its need to hate something. It is interesting how this works. These leftists have decided that civilians are not interested based on them being complicit in their government’s harm of others and thus the civilians are re-defined as ‘eichmanns’ or Nazis and thus they are no longer innocent and deserve death by those who ‘push back’. What is most fascinating is that in doing this the leftist has re-defined all those he hates as ‘Nazis’ and then declared that Nazis deserve to be hated and killed. In doing so he doesn’t realize it but rather than simply stating that Nazis deserve death he has implicitly also revealed that all those he disagrees with, especially complacent civilians, deserve death. If only they were to be activists like a good leftist, then they could be spared by those who ‘push back’.
But what is most fascinating about this dialogue of the left is what it reveals about hate. Leftists cast a lot of dispersions on those they regard as being hateful. The crime of the racist is that he hates. The Crime of the Republican is that he hates. The crime of the Homophobe is that he hates. The Crime of the Christian fundamentalist is that he hates. The crime of the Islamophobe is that he is a racist and that he hates. The Crime of the Nazi is that he hates. The Crime of George Bush is that he hates. Hate is usually what is behind the reason that leftists have a negative comment about something. Leftists are said to be ‘anti-hate’ or they march to ‘stop the hate’. But what is most fascinating about the way the hater is transformed into him who must be hated and deserves death is the transformation that takes place in the psyche of the leftist. In his campaign against hate he becomes as virulent and hateful as those he claims are the haters. In his campaign against racism he declares all white people racist. In his campaign against Israel he declares all Americans ‘little eichmanns’ for supporting the American government which supports Israel.
Hate is a strange thing. It may be typical of many people. But what is most fascinating is that hating those who hate is now the vague among the left. This is a very sad detail of the evolution of leftist. Radical hate is not pretty and its manifests itself in a very deep and instinctual way among those who describe themselves as leftists. It is why leftists have an increasingly knee jerk reaction against comments they deem ‘racist’ and against those they deem ‘racist’. But their extreme reaction merely reveals their own hate.
It is an irony that in the campaign to ‘stop the hate’ the protestors have themselves become hateful of those they have labeled haters. The campaign has grown to such proportions that civilians are described as ‘eichmann’ as an excuse to revel in their deaths. This re-labeling civilians as accomplices has a strange reverberation in the history of genocide. The way that genocidal regimes have been able to excuse the mass murder of people, in fact they way that Islamists have been able to justify murdering civilians, is by labeling them deserving of death. The liberal has done the same by labeling those he hates and civilians ‘eichmanns’. Since a Nazi deserves death in the eyes of the liberal by labeling all civilians collaborators with Nazism he has implicitly said that all civilians deserve death. This type of attitude is reminiscent of the Nazi and Stalinist era and its protestations that ‘no one is innocent’. The way in which Communist justified the mass killing of people was to label them ‘exploiters’ or ‘capitalists’ or ‘Kulaks’. Labels are an easy way to de-humanize people in order to justify killing them. The Hutus called the Tutsis ‘cockroaches’ in order to justify the murder of them.
Liberals are quite familiar with this. They always like to remind us that hateful people use labels to de-humanize people. They frequently claim that Israelis dehumanize Arabs by calling them ‘rats’ or some other label. But it is interesting to note that the leftist-liberal has not been able to escape this dehumanizing and labeling in his own hate.
Perhaps one should hate Nazis. But hating people is not a good policy, especially if one seeks to ‘stop the hate.’ Hate has a way of getting out of control, especially when one begins expanding the bounds of who deserves to be hated. One can see just how easily it was for the label Nazi to grow beyond its original use. Eichmann was one man but now his name is used to describe every American civilian. It is perhaps an irony that the same people who use the word Nazi so loosely to describe American civilians are the same ones who describe the bombing of German cities in the Second World War as war crime. However by this definition of the ‘myth of the innocent civilian’ the German inhabitants of Dresden were certainly less innocent than the American employees in the twin towers. But the leftist-liberal doesn’t see that. He doesn’t see that the German civilians in Dresden were culpable for Nazism. He does however think that Americans, and foreigners who had the ill fortune to work in the twin towers were guilty of being ‘little Eichmanns.’
One problem with terrorism is that it disproportionately affects working people. Very few intellectuals die in terror attacks. This is perhaps a shame. Intellectuals like to pontificate a lot about terrorism. They like to act as judge and jury regarding who deserves to be a victim of terrorism and who does not. They describe “settlers” as ‘ethnic-cleansers’ and property owners as genociders and thus declare that they deserve death. But where exactly does Noam Chomsky and his ilk think they came from? They can claim that their fellow Americans deserve death but they themselves are not very far removed from those Americans, despite their residence in the ivory tower. They are juiced into the capitalist market, they shop at the same stores and they receive American tax dollars to fund their rights to free speech at American Universities. Their ancestors were also ‘settlers’. The problem with history is it usually victimizes the wrong people. Academics rarely die in terrorist attacks because they are shielded from them by the fact that they are wealthy and work in un-crowded environments. In Israel the majority of the 1000 victims of the Second Intifada were working people who used buses for transportation and soldiers. Needless to say few academics use buses and none serve in the armed forces. People like Ward Churchill deserve to be dispatched to the front. For too long academics have escaped the dangers of the conflicts they themselves support and fuel with their hate. Professors may determine that I am no innocent civilian, but I do not think they are innocent. I think that if someone were to bring vengeance upon the intellectuals who have for too long called everyone else ‘Nazi’ that one would be warranted to do so. Ward Churchill speaks of those who ‘push back’. Perhaps one day people will tire of being described as Nazis and they will show Churchill how the Nazis actually dealt with those who insulted them. In fact the very existence of people like Mr. Churchill shows the degree to which we are not in fact Nazis, had we been Nazis people like Mr. Churchill would have been gassed long ago. He should glory in the fact that civilians and workers are so docile in the face of his hate and vitriol which is funded by their tax dollars. He should have been lynched long ago, then he might know the face of hate and then at least he would have an excuse to judge all of us and decide that we deserve death. Hitler once noted in a speech he gave that “when I hear the word ‘intellectual’ the first thing I do is draw my gun.” Perhaps those deemed ‘little eichmanns’ would do well to arm themselves. We are tired of being condemned to death because people think we are ‘nazis’. Too many nations which consist of perfectly decent people have already been trampled under foot because of this slander.
Sunday, December 30, 2007
Sunday, December 16, 2007
Newsletter 15 The New International Class and the Media
Terra Incognita
Issue 15
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
December 16th, 2007
This is a slightly new format, the first article is quite but it organized in a new and dynamic way.
1) Anthropology of the New International Class: There is a class of people that work for international organizations such as the Red Cross, the U.N, Amnesty International and Human Right Watch. I propose to examine this class using anthropology. What are its internal social norms? What does it eat, how does it speak, what are its working ways and its spiritual ways? What kind of family does it come from and what kind of lifestyle does it live, how does it speak? What is its heritage and how did it come about. I also propose to define this group as its own Class in the Marxist sense, a class of bourgeoisie people who do not work in a genuine manner and yet have a very powerful, domineering and colonialist-racist role in the world. I propose to also examine those groups who have actively resisted the imposition of this class, such as American citizens, Congolese generals and Al Quaida in the Islamic Maghreb. In short, the whole world has a role to play in combating this new imperialism.
2) The Media and the understanding of history: The media doesn’t so much manufacture consent as it manufactures history. It no longer plays the role of informing the public but rather it tells the public how to think. It is a nefarious thing and its main role in modern society is the purposeful distortion of reality.
Anthropology of the New International Class
Seth J. Frantzman
December 13th, 2007
The world bank just endorsed $5.6 billion dollars in aid for the Palestinians over the next three years. In order to disperse that aid and oversee its distribution a virtual army of people is required. That army is composed of people who are members of what should be called the New International Class.
Who they are; traditions, demographics, origins
Anthropology is usually used to tell us about the cultures, traditions and societies of 'simple' and 'savage' peoples. It applies best to nude people who usually live in jungles. Needless to say it is rarely used to examine Europeans or wealthy people. But important strides have been made in the field of cultural geography and anthropology. The book Albions Seed applies many classic anthropological descriptions to understand the four waves of British settlers who came to the Americas between 1600 and 1800. The book-turned movie Nanny Diaries makes a joking attempt to analyze the culture of women on the upper west side of Manhattan.
I have identified a class of people that exist that deserve to be studied anthropologically. Membership in this class is not based on tribe. In fact membership in this class is mostly based on membership or employment by an international organization, usually an NGO. Examples might include Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, any U.N organization(UNESCO, UNHCR) or the ICRC(International Committee of the Red Cross). The number of people that are members of this class may number in the millions worldwide. A study has never been to try to quantify their numbers or the amount of money spend on this tribe of internationals. Let us begin by trying to describe who they are.
These people are mostly born in Western European countries or the United States. A minority of them come from the rest of the world, such as South America, Asia and Africa. All of the members of this class are born into wealthy families in their home countries. They are likely to be descendents of people that were once landed gentry. The poorer the country they come from the more likely it is that they come from the absolute upper crust of society. In the United States a disproportionate number of them are Jews and Blue-bloods. Needless to say very few African-Americans become members of this class. The Europeans who become members of this class are invariably from the urban Bourgeoisie. All of the members of this class have college educations and some of them have second degrees. Almost all of them have never worked a job in their lives that was not in some way connected with an NGO or a governmental organization. They have never worked for a business or a company and they have never had a 'blue collar' job. Most of them have traveled in their lives. For the Americans that become members of this class most have traveled a great deal more than the average American.
Working habits
They are usually employed in countries they know nothing about, and it is not infrequent that they do not even speak the languages of the people of the country in which they 'work'. They almost always live alone in large houses paid for by their organization. Many of them receive cars from their 'employer'. They usually make between ten and one hundred time what the average salary is in the country in which they are employed. When they work in places like Africa they may make as much as 10,000 times what the average person in their host country earns.
Social rituals
They associate mostly with eachother. If they have friendships with people outside their International Class it is usually with journalists, government employees, diplomats or wealthy tourists from their home countries or European countries. They dine at the nicest restaurants. Many of them smoke. Many of them are alcoholics. They always know where the best bars are in every country they have visited and invariably they compare stories of where the best bar and 'secret wonderful' place to drink and club is. Even in the most backward country where people are the most poor, such as the Congo, the International Class will have their club and their bar that they know about and go to. Whether it is Ramallah or Gaza City they have their place of choice. Usually they provide the only income for these places so that the bar actually exists only to serve them. In countries where drinking is prohibited for the masses and where men and women rarely meet in public places after nightfall they will have a bar where men and women dance and drink together that caters only to them. In some countries, especially in Africa, they will be some of the only people in the country who drive expensive SUVs. In fact the SUV is part of their culture. Usually the SUV is white and has the symbol of their organization printed on it.
They are good at writing reports on the people they 'observe' as part of their 'work'. Many of them spend most of their day judging and condemning the citizens of the countries they are posted to. They frequently share stories about their experiences with the native population. Their experience may include endless stories about being ripped off by cab drivers or slumming it in their host cities red light district. In fact 'slumming it' and 'talking to the natives' is a major part of their culture. Frequently they receive praise and congratulations each time they describe an encounter with a 'native' to their friends. Their story may include going to a wedding of a native or observing a native in his house or having a native 'friend'. The friend is not a genuine friend for them but a token, a sort of badge they wear. So they may say things like "my Palestinian friend" or "my Kenyan friend". One can know the difference between a genuine friend and one of these token friends by the way there are introduced in a conversation. If the person is a genuine friend they are introduced by their name first. If they are a trophy or a token they are introduced first by their race, ethnicity, religion or country of origin. The reason for the difference is that members of this class view the 'natives' they meet as not being completely human and that is why they describe them first as a race or a religion rather than as a person. For them the only people that exist are members of their class or members of their home country.
Many of them wear clothes and act certain ways and do things in order to tell about it later. For instance one of them I examined wore a 'Taybeh beer shirt' that was brand new. He didn't wear the shirt because he liked it but because he wanted to use it as a conversation piece. He said "this shirt offends right wing people, I wear it see the reactions I get." Members of this class do not get genuine satisfaction out of experiences they have unless this experience can be relayed to a friend as part of an endless competition between members about who is more cultural and tolerant and diverse. They go to cultural events mostly to say they want rather than to appreciate them. Many times they will go to a country and know absolutely nothing about it but they will go to a wedding or some festival mostly to tell their friends about the festival. The female members of this class will go so far as to become sexually intimate with 'natives' in order to tell their girlfriends about it. Despite their claims of not being racist they will begin a sentence with "I went out with a black man" or "I saw a gorgeous black man" or "I once dated a Palestinian." The sentence reveals the fact that they didn't date the person because of a genuine interest in the native as a person but merely as a conquest the way a frat boy might say "we had an Asian stripper come over last night." Members of this class dwell in the exotic and the taboo. They decorate their houses with 'exotic' things but things that are not genuine. They mostly buy the decorations so they can talk about them, rather than because they genuinely like them. Most interestingly many members of this class do not keep pictures of their family in their houses but rather pictures of natives they have met. The pictures serve as another badge.
This class speaks about racism a lot. It is a subject of many of their conversations and they are quick to ostracize a member who has become a 'racist'. In one conversation I had with one of these people he was telling me how he had a 'Kenyan friend.' His friend didn't have a name. He was just "my Kenyan." So I asked with a devilish grin; "Is he black? Does he have big lips." This of course offended the person I was speaking to and he proceeded to make a mental note that I was a 'racist'. This is how this class thinks. It is quite sensitive to its perceptions of what racism is. It is often quite judgmental regarding the natives. While it may revel in attending the native ceremonies and cultures and festivals, it is quick to condemn certain aspects of the native society. The class has a contempt for the people they deal with on a daily basis and they revel in stories about how horrible the native makes their lives, while at the same time reveling in other stories about how exotic the natives are. The class also has a notable lack of honor. They revel in stories about fleeing cabs without paying and not paying for their drinks. They revel in stories about going out with their friend's ex-girlfriends and then allowing their same friends to beat on those ex-girlfriends, all the while playing the innocent victim of circumstances. In reality this is simply a class that lacks control. Unlike their ancestors who frequently exercised a great deal of self control and personal responsibility, these people do not have these concepts. They also do not understand the concepts of humiliation or honor. Members of this class never donate money to anything. They live on the donated money of others, but they themselves never give their own money to anyone or anything, unless they are paying too much for something in a foreign bizarre and then they excuse it by saying the 'local people are poor. Most members of this class do not have any interest in their own culture. They are not religious and they adhere to the philosophies of post-humanism, moral-relativism and secular-humanism. They usually know almost nothing about their own family background and while they may study the religions and intricate religious laws of others, they frequently know nothing about their own historical heritage. Even they are they the descendants of dirt poor refugees or Holocaust survivors they invariably will help the majority, such as Muslims in Morocco, rather than their own people or minorities (for instance one Jewish member of this class who works for the Red Cross and whose family were Holocaust survivors, when he learned that the author works for a Jewish charity, asked ‘I would like to know more about what they do for Palestinians’. Incidentally, during the Holocaust the Red Cross covered up Nazi crimes and actively collaborated with the Nazi regime, it is no surprise that a descendant of the very Jews the Red Cross helped murder would work for the Red Cross helping Muslims).
Historical roots
The New International Class came into existence in the aftermath of the Second World War when 'Wasp rot' set in among the wealthy classes of the west and rather then devoting themselves to working they devoted themselves to charity and aid and setting up organizations and trusts that would support themselves and their children. Towards this end they harnessed their home governments with huge obligations and they engaged in endless fundraising among the working wealthy to create giant organizations who sole purpose was the largesse associated with employing the children of the elite cultured classes of the west.
Conflict, growth and geographic structure
But the New International Class is not completely safe in the bubbles of security and wealth it creates in foreign countries. Despite the fact that it shuttles from expensive first class seats on an airline to a five star hotel and then to its expensive apartment in the most prestigious part of town(the U.N office in Algiers in the prestigious Hydra neighborhood for instance) and then to work in a large building guarded by locals it is not completely immune from what goes on around it. Sometimes the native resistance against the foreign New International Class consists of minor things such as theft, mugging or harassment. Sometimes it consists of stone throwing. Sometimes this can get worse. Sometimes members of the class are murdered and raped. Very infrequently a local resistance organization will blow up a building the houses members of the International Class. This has been the case in bombings of U.N compounds in Afghanistan, Iraq, Gaza and most recently in Algeria. But the New International Class is pernicious. Its reports can harm the international standing and reputation of the countries that the class reports upon. Thus like a parasite the class is able to have a stranglehold over a country's ability to get rid of it. Expelling members of the U.N or Amnesty International or the Red Cross merely makes the country seem evil and increases the chances of sanctions and boycotts of that country. If the country is particularly offensive to members of the International Class the class may be able to rally western countries to bomb, invade and occupy the country. This has been the case in Kosovo, Bosnia, East Timor and Haiti to name a few places. In some cases the International Class is able to take over the judicial systems of other countries, deporting leaders it doesn't like such as Charles Taylor and Slobodan Milosevic and jailing them in the west. Other times the International Class merely sets up judicial shop in a country such as Cambodia and then presumes to prosecute former war criminals in that country. The International Class assumes that locals cannot do any of these things themselves. Corruption is usually the word that is uses by the International Class to tar the countries that they don't like. When a country is said to be 'Corrupt' then the International Class has an excuse to move in to begin taking over the country, whether it is the judicial system or the banks. Countries have a hard time extricating themselves from this cancer once it has infested a country. The International Class never leaves once it has gotten a foothold. Organizations such as the Temporary International Presence in Hebron (TIPH) are infamously not temporary. They never leave once they have a 'mandate' to do something. They are self supporting in the sense that they employ a certain number of the International Class who now lobby their home country to keep supporting their 'important, significant and necessary' work. One of the only countries to extricate itself from this horror in recent years has been Eritrea and even it was only able to expel the international aid organizations. Aid and charitable organizations are especially adept in Africa at creating dependence among the 'natives' so that the aid organization then becomes necessary to the survival of the local population. Because the International Class has no expertise at doing anything that involves working with their hands they are incapable of providing genuine aid that might help people survive, so the International Class provides hand outs in the form of food stuffs that create dependency. Then more jobs are created for wealth white westerners and their SUVs to move in to distribute more food. The International Class is not entirely benign when it comes to the sex slave trade either. Many countries such as Djibouti offer girls as young as 10 to clients who more often than not are members of the International Class. In some countries U.N workers and thus members of the Class were found to have traded food for sex with teenage girls and boys.
Resistance
The New International Class is a pariah, a cancer, a parasite. It is a thing that sucks the life blood out of nations and destroys the souls of the people it comes in contact with. Staffed by secular cynical addicted westerners, it spreads its sickness throughout the globe. Few organizations have the wherewithal to combat it. Those organizations such as Al Quieda in the Islamic Maghreb that have set as their goal the cleansing of North Africa of non-Muslims may target members of the Class but they also murder innocent people in the process (a recent bombing in Algeirs killed five U.N workers and 26 civilians). While the prospect of Islamism in places like Egypt may not be something the west likes very much it may turn out that this is the only way to remove the parasite from the body. I heard the members of this class talking this week about their days drinking in Egypt and going to the brothels and running away from cabbies who were trying to scam them and giggling about how the 'tourist police' beat down the natives who dared to try anything. Wouldn't Egypt be better off without these people? Wouldn't Africa be better off if all the money that is spent on the white charity workers and their SUVs went instead to local people? The parasite of Internationalism should spend its time fixing the ills in its home country. Human Rights Watch should be on the streets of suburban Paris. There should be a Temporary International presence there.
General Nkunda's solution
One can barely open a newspaper without seeing article after article discussing the role of this Class in the world. An article entitled 'A battered Congo again in convulsions' in the Herald Tribune on December 13th noted that "UN peacekeepers swept in late Tuesday to occupy the town as the Congolese Army fled. The fight came only a year after Western nations helped organize and pay for an election…the violence is also unfolding despite years of military and diplomatic intervention by the United Nations, the European Union and the United States…to create, for the first time since its independence from Belgium in 1960, a stable and prosperous Congo. 'The fundamental issues that led to the Congo war have never really been dealt with' said Anneke Van Woudenberg of Human Rights Watch.' " The article describes how General Nkunda has been trying to protect the Tutsi minority in Eastern Congo from being massacred by U.N supported Hutu militias, the same militias driven out of Rwanda in 1994 because of their involvement in the genocide. Notice how this article reveals the usual suspects meddling in another country's affairs: the U.N, the E.U and Human Rights Watch all have their fangs in the Congo. A white woman named Anneke is the 'expert' on the Congo, certainly the media couldn't interview one of the 'blacks'. Although the U.N and the International Class portray this as a warlord, Mr. Nkunda, fighting the government of the Congo it is really about a General fighting to save his people from a U.N sponsored genocide. Nkunda, like Al Quieda in North Africa, is resisting the International Class's attempt to re-colonize the Congo. Note how the article admits that the U.N and the E.U are trying to bring Congo back to the 'peace' that she experienced under Belgium colonialism. In fact the EU and the UN and Human Rights Watch are trying to impose a new imperial order in the Congo. Some people in the Congo don't appreciate it. Meanwhile at the Hague the Un Yugoslav War Crimes tribunal, which is staffed by whig wearing members of the International Class, sentenced a Serb general named Dragomir Milosevic to 33 years in prison for bombarding Sarajevo. His crime was using artillery against a city during a siege. Its odd that in European history they never convicted any other western Europeans of this crime. America dropped an atomic bomb on a city and no one convicted those who ordered that of 'war crimes'. Nato bombed the civilian inhabited capital of Serbia and yet that was not an 'illegal' act or a war crime for which the American Commander Wesley Clark was ever put on trial for. Yasser Arafat conducted a bombing campaign against Israel. According to the article "the use of indiscriminate weapons is illegal." Also according to the article Mr. Milosevic caused shoppers to be "terrified". Oddly enough when Jewish shoppers were terrified of Palestinian bombers between 2000 and 2004 the same International Class accused Israel of war crimes and described those who murdered Israeli shoppers as 'freedom fighters.' It is odd that this illegality only applies to people that the International Class doesn't like. Not one of those responsible for the Sudanese genocide will ever be brought to justice, for instance.
The American Solution and the potential for cultural change
I recall once I saw a bumper sticker in the United States that said 'warning to evil' and it depicted a U.N helmet with a bullet hole in it. Ordinary Americans are famous for their hatred of the New International Class. What the world needs to learn, particularly the countries being victimized by this class, is a lesson from America. More firearms and an independent spirit make for less U.N workers. Al Quaida in the Islamic Maghreb is a pathetic organization that will never succeed in freeing its country from the International Cancer. Only popular resistance can rid one of the menace. The day will come when this Class will be washed away. Most likely however this will come about not because of an uprising in the host countries but because the west is being overrun by poverty stricken immigrants who will eventually plunge the west into a downward economic spiral and thus the resources for the support of the Class will evaporate and all the wealthy bourgeoisie people who made up the recruits for this class will find themselves having to get real jobs where they work with their hands, perhaps in the soil. Only then will they be returned to a genuine spirit and only then perhaps, after many years, when one of the members of this Class is working in a field with his hands next to a man named Robert who happens to come from Kenya, only then will the member of this Class refer to his friend as Robert rather than "my Kenyan" or "my black friend."
A complete re-write of history: The media's role in crafting what we think and how we remember.
Seth J. Frantzman
December 11th, 2007
The media plays the most nefarious role in creating history, in creating a selective history based on the outlook and beliefs of those who write for the media, journalists. The media does not so much convey the news to the public but rather it frames the news so that the public is deceived into viewing the world their the lens that the media places in front of us.
Take very simple things. The BBC informs readers, on a report about a road trip around South Africa, that "Mr Majozi was born in 1948, the year the National Party came to power and began implementing apartheid." This is, however, untrue. The system of Apartheid, almost all of the racial basis for it, were created long before 1948 by the British colonial administration of the country. 1948 marked the victory of the National party, a predominantly Afrikaner based political party that made Apartheid a pillar of the country, adding greater emphasis to it. The News desires simple answers. So its answer is to create a mythical history by enshrining a date with historical significance.
BBC writers inform us that a town in South Africa is "a soulless place where even the atmosphere in the local taxi rank is subdued." It is nice to have such editorializing in a 'news' story, but many people would prefer to live without this. Who is a white journalist from an upper class family in England to judge what is soulless? Perhaps many of us would consider England, with is dismal weather, its rampant crime, and its arrogant news organizations to be a soulless place.
Showing his discomfort with what the author considers is the "old South Africa" he notes that "The streets still bear the names of Afrikaner heroes such as Paul Kruger. That is not in the least bit unusual in predominantly Afrikaans-speaking towns, but I am surprised to find myself in 'President' Kruger Street." It is strange to hear an Englishmen speak this way since it was, after all, his ancestors who colonized South Africa, who named half the country with English names (Ladysmith, Queenstown, King William Town, East London, Jamestown, Port Elizabeth). It was the English crown that sent 350,000 men to fight the Boers in 1899 and to destroy the independence of President Kruger's Boer Republic. In doing so they managed to build the first concentration camps and murder 24,000 Afrikaner women and children. It is perhaps no surprise then that a BBC journalist today would wince at the sight of a President Kruger Street. Surely the same BBC journalist is annoyed at the fact that the capital of the United States is named Washington after another independence minded president who didn't appreciate English colonialism.
But there is something insidious in the way the journalist writes "still bear the names" as if the journalist objects, as if he feels he should have a right to change the names to fit his image of how people should live. It is strange that journalists reporting on the Soviet Union in the 1930s had no problem with all the name changes going on there at the time. It is perhaps no surprise that journalists in the 1930s covered up Stalin's genocide in the Ukraine and that they were even awarded Pulitzer prizes for having done so.
What is this profession then? This journalism? Chomsky called it an attempt to 'manufacture consent'. But journalists and the media don't manufacture consent so much as they manufacture opinion and history. What is most fascinating is that the media likes to publish polls of what people think. Take all the polls we see that are published regarding global warming. The media tells us that a huge percentage of people now believe global warming to be the greatest threat to the world and the greatest threat to their daily lives. But this perception of global warming as the End of Days wasn't thought up by the public overnight. The public didn't have an epiphany and all wake up believing that Global Warming would end life on earth as we know it within the coming years. The public was told to believe this by the media. The media fashioned a massive number of hysterical reports about global warming and then produced survey after survey showing us, the public, getting more concerned. Everyone's initial reaction to a survey that shows that 90% of people believe something is to immediately ask themselves "why don't I believe that…everyone else does…I should too." People are innately programmed to go along and if they find out that everyone else is scared to death of global warming it is no surprise that in order to fit in they now feel global warming is a great menace. The only exception is people that are naturally and instinctually contrarian who believe that if everyone else believes something then they should believe the opposite. But whether it is the follower or the contrarian both of them are affected by the way in which the media warps people's minds.
All the studies of media bias always seem to come to grief on the fact that those doing the research are seemingly incapable of measuring the bias, usually because the researchers themselves are biased. For this reason researchers have found rampant bias in Fox News but inexplicably have not found any Bias in CNN or the BBC. But it all hinges on what questions are being asked in their studies. One study I was privileged to work on investigated bias in the American and Israeli media. The variable it hinged on was how often certain people from certain political parties were mentioned in news reports and whether or not they were quoted. The professors involved, Drs Tamir Schaefer and Dr. Gadi Wolfsfeld of the Hebrew University thought they were measuring bias. They thought they were showing that a given news outlet quoted or mentioned one political party more than another. But the media is too shrewd to be caught in its bias by a simple study like this. Take our British reporter at the BBC and his report on South Africa. A simple test like this would show that he mentioned all the races and people of South Africa. He duly interviewed a white person and a black person. He mentioned Kruger and Mandela. What is important is not how often the news media mentions something but the way in which is frames its discussion of the thing. The Nazi run media in Germany mentioned the Jews a great deal. By the Shafer/Wolfsfeld model we would be led to believe that it was biased in favor of the Jews, because they got so much press. But just because something is mentioned a lot doesn't mean it is being mentioned in a positive or negative manner, and it is this framing that the media uses to alter public opinion. It doesn't matter if the media mentioned Hilary Clinton as often as it does Barak Obama in the run up to the 2008 Democratic primaries. If each mention of Clinton makes her out to be honorable and good and each mention of Barak describes him as inept and fumbling, we know what the media is trying to tell us. Some might claim that the media is telling us the truth. But one can be assured when dealing with the media that it does not engage in the truth.
The media has one function in society and that is to propagandize and manipulate public feelings, to craft and distort history and to lie to the public to such a degree that it makes the existence of a free press almost useless, given that fact that an unfree press can lie to the public just as well. The only difference between a free press and that run by a dictatorship is the likelihood that a free society may produce marginal voices that contradict the mainstream press's account of things. But in a place such as the United Kingdom the most popular news outlets such as the BBC, the Independent and the Guardian all march in lock step in their extreme emotional propagandistic view of events in the world and their interpretation of history. The only difference between the press in Stalinist Russia and that the New York Times in the 1930s was that the New York Times was written in English. No substantial difference existed between their portrayal of the socialist utopia being created by Comrade Uncle Joe Stalin.
The Press cannot help but to lie and manufacture history, since that is its job. One should not read any news publication without first asking "what is the narrative frame we are being asked to view these events through?" "Who is the author and what is his or her point of view?" Every news article should be read twice with these questions in mind. One should pay careful attention to any pictures that accompany the article to see how they may portray the people mentioned.
Lets do a simple analysis of a news article the BBC published on December 10th, 2007 entitled "In Pictures: West Bank Bedouin cling to traditions amid settlement pressure." According to the report 50,000 Bedouin live in the West Bank and 'Life has always been tough for these nomadic Arab tribes, but they now face a great challenge from the Israeli authorities settling Israeli citizens in the area." The author has already set the scene for us. There is already a good and an evil. The good or rather the victim, is the Bedouin. The evil is the Israeli. But now a face must go with the good. It is the face of Shaeb Hadolim, a 61 year old man who was "forced from Beersheba in 1948 by Jewish fighters." Now we begin to see more of the story. A wonderful picture of the saddened and poverty stricken victim, Mr. Hadolim, accompanies the article. He wears his traditional exotic Khaffiyeh or Arab headdress like Lawrence of Arabia, evoking our sympathy and our love of the 'other.' The heading of this section was 'flight'. The heading of the next section is "squeezed" and we see how in 1981 an Israeli "settlement" was built beside Mr. Hadolim's "home". Recall that in the first section these Bedouin were described as "nomads". The article explains that the Israeli settlements are "illegal under almost every interpretation of international law" and that they "squeeze" Mr. Hadolim off his land. The next section entitled 'Permission denied" explains that Mr. Hadolim once had an easy time building his encampment but now he cannot obtain permission. The next section of the article shows the Jew, Mr. Ron Tsorel, who lives in the settlement and says "God gave us the land." The Jew wears western clothing like any person in London might and sits in his well watered suburban yard. His is the wealthy oppressor. Whereas the camera angle on Mr. Hadolim was strait towards him, showing him as an equal to the reader, the camera angle portraying the Israeli Jew shows him towering over us with a smug nasty expression on his face. The next section is entitled "survival" and shows an Arab woman in all black bending over but not facing the camera. The BBC surely knows it would offend Arab sensibilities to show the women's face, so he complies. The article describes how there is not electricity for the Bedouin family and how they must live on handouts. Next we see a picture of the happy Bedouin children, smiling little girls, which make us more sympathetic. The last section is described as "until death" and includes a quote to this affect from Mr. Hadolim. He is at once heroic and a victim.
But what isn't included in this little vignette of good and evil of power versus weakness of government versus individual of Jew versus Arab? First of all Mr. Hadolim was only 2 years old when he was "forced" from Beersheba. Second of all why was he, a nomad' forced from a settled town? Neither one of these 'facts' seems very strong. Next one should ask about the way in which Mr. Hadolim and his family obtained the land that he was subsequently "squeezed" from. Did he pay for it or did he just build a camp there that consisted of a camel hair Bedouin tent? And what is the nature of the "home" that this man is being squeezed from if we were informed earlier that he was a "nomad." And what of the other 54,999 Bedouin who live in the West Bank? The article insinuates that they are all being thrown off their land by Israel. What percentage of them live next to settlements that were established after the Bedouin had already built encampments? Furthermore the article insinuates that the Bedouin "cling to traditions amid settlement pressure." What does this mean? It means the settlements are taking away their tradition of nomadism? But would'nt nomadism solve the problem depicted in this story? If Mr. Hadolim was a real nomad then would'nt he move from place to place every year, like the Bedouin used to do and then the existence of a small settlement wouldn't make no difference to him. What percent of the lands of the West Bank are taken up by Israeli settlements? In addition what percentage are taken up by settled Arab villages? What percentage does that leave Mr. Hadolim to use as his nomadic grazing land?
The entire story is a fabrication anyway. A close examination of the pictures show that the settlement has no impact on the lifestyle of Mr. Hadolim and the Israeli army does not demolish structures on the West Bank, unless they are used by terrorists or if they are illegally built Jewish outposts. Israel doesn't engage in town planning for Arabs in the West Bank, which is evident to anyone who uses Google Earth to examine the Arab settlement pattern in the West Bank. In addition Israel doesn't interfere with the Bedouin of the West Bank, who small in number, poor and who take no interest in the political situation. The only time Bedouins in the west bank run afoul of Israel is when they engage in smuggling of weapons. For the most part they were unaffected by the second intifada and by all the Arab-Israeli wars.
The news story fabricated an event and a conflict where none exists. But the news story has nothing to do with Bedouin. It has everything to do with the Jews and Israel and the settlements and the interest of the BBC to find a reason to portray Israel in a negative light. The BBC uses the story of this Bedouin to do so. The pictures serve as a perfect frame for the argument and they help convince the reader of what is right and what is wrong. This article is a perfect example of what journalism is.
From describing the murder of Hindus at the hands of a Muslim mob in India as "100 Hindus were immolated" so as to make it seem that they died by mistake while claiming that the Hindu Governor of Gujarat was responsible for the deaths of Muslims killed in retaliation, to describing the Balkan conflict in 1998 as "Milosevic's war against the Albanian people" without mentioning the activities of the KLA or the Nato bombing campaign, the media is one massive instrument in the hands of elites who seek to distort history and make the public believe certain things.
What would it be like if the media and its journalists didn't have an opinion? Imagine a story about the West Bank Bedouin that was just a factual story about them, without some massive political agenda where they were being used as pawns to portray someone else in a bad light. Imagine if journalists didn't have to use words like 'soulless' as if they were writing a fiction novel rather than doing the news. Journalism is a dishonorable profession that uses the perception of honesty and fairness to hide its insidious motives and very extreme viewpoints. British journalists especially should never be trusted, they seem to believe that the roll of the media is only to convince people of things, rather than to inform people and it is why one will never find a news story that comes out of Britain that is unbiased, factual and does not express an obvious opinion or frame the story in some sort of 'good versus evil' scenario.
Issue 15
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
December 16th, 2007
This is a slightly new format, the first article is quite but it organized in a new and dynamic way.
1) Anthropology of the New International Class: There is a class of people that work for international organizations such as the Red Cross, the U.N, Amnesty International and Human Right Watch. I propose to examine this class using anthropology. What are its internal social norms? What does it eat, how does it speak, what are its working ways and its spiritual ways? What kind of family does it come from and what kind of lifestyle does it live, how does it speak? What is its heritage and how did it come about. I also propose to define this group as its own Class in the Marxist sense, a class of bourgeoisie people who do not work in a genuine manner and yet have a very powerful, domineering and colonialist-racist role in the world. I propose to also examine those groups who have actively resisted the imposition of this class, such as American citizens, Congolese generals and Al Quaida in the Islamic Maghreb. In short, the whole world has a role to play in combating this new imperialism.
2) The Media and the understanding of history: The media doesn’t so much manufacture consent as it manufactures history. It no longer plays the role of informing the public but rather it tells the public how to think. It is a nefarious thing and its main role in modern society is the purposeful distortion of reality.
Anthropology of the New International Class
Seth J. Frantzman
December 13th, 2007
The world bank just endorsed $5.6 billion dollars in aid for the Palestinians over the next three years. In order to disperse that aid and oversee its distribution a virtual army of people is required. That army is composed of people who are members of what should be called the New International Class.
Who they are; traditions, demographics, origins
Anthropology is usually used to tell us about the cultures, traditions and societies of 'simple' and 'savage' peoples. It applies best to nude people who usually live in jungles. Needless to say it is rarely used to examine Europeans or wealthy people. But important strides have been made in the field of cultural geography and anthropology. The book Albions Seed applies many classic anthropological descriptions to understand the four waves of British settlers who came to the Americas between 1600 and 1800. The book-turned movie Nanny Diaries makes a joking attempt to analyze the culture of women on the upper west side of Manhattan.
I have identified a class of people that exist that deserve to be studied anthropologically. Membership in this class is not based on tribe. In fact membership in this class is mostly based on membership or employment by an international organization, usually an NGO. Examples might include Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, any U.N organization(UNESCO, UNHCR) or the ICRC(International Committee of the Red Cross). The number of people that are members of this class may number in the millions worldwide. A study has never been to try to quantify their numbers or the amount of money spend on this tribe of internationals. Let us begin by trying to describe who they are.
These people are mostly born in Western European countries or the United States. A minority of them come from the rest of the world, such as South America, Asia and Africa. All of the members of this class are born into wealthy families in their home countries. They are likely to be descendents of people that were once landed gentry. The poorer the country they come from the more likely it is that they come from the absolute upper crust of society. In the United States a disproportionate number of them are Jews and Blue-bloods. Needless to say very few African-Americans become members of this class. The Europeans who become members of this class are invariably from the urban Bourgeoisie. All of the members of this class have college educations and some of them have second degrees. Almost all of them have never worked a job in their lives that was not in some way connected with an NGO or a governmental organization. They have never worked for a business or a company and they have never had a 'blue collar' job. Most of them have traveled in their lives. For the Americans that become members of this class most have traveled a great deal more than the average American.
Working habits
They are usually employed in countries they know nothing about, and it is not infrequent that they do not even speak the languages of the people of the country in which they 'work'. They almost always live alone in large houses paid for by their organization. Many of them receive cars from their 'employer'. They usually make between ten and one hundred time what the average salary is in the country in which they are employed. When they work in places like Africa they may make as much as 10,000 times what the average person in their host country earns.
Social rituals
They associate mostly with eachother. If they have friendships with people outside their International Class it is usually with journalists, government employees, diplomats or wealthy tourists from their home countries or European countries. They dine at the nicest restaurants. Many of them smoke. Many of them are alcoholics. They always know where the best bars are in every country they have visited and invariably they compare stories of where the best bar and 'secret wonderful' place to drink and club is. Even in the most backward country where people are the most poor, such as the Congo, the International Class will have their club and their bar that they know about and go to. Whether it is Ramallah or Gaza City they have their place of choice. Usually they provide the only income for these places so that the bar actually exists only to serve them. In countries where drinking is prohibited for the masses and where men and women rarely meet in public places after nightfall they will have a bar where men and women dance and drink together that caters only to them. In some countries, especially in Africa, they will be some of the only people in the country who drive expensive SUVs. In fact the SUV is part of their culture. Usually the SUV is white and has the symbol of their organization printed on it.
They are good at writing reports on the people they 'observe' as part of their 'work'. Many of them spend most of their day judging and condemning the citizens of the countries they are posted to. They frequently share stories about their experiences with the native population. Their experience may include endless stories about being ripped off by cab drivers or slumming it in their host cities red light district. In fact 'slumming it' and 'talking to the natives' is a major part of their culture. Frequently they receive praise and congratulations each time they describe an encounter with a 'native' to their friends. Their story may include going to a wedding of a native or observing a native in his house or having a native 'friend'. The friend is not a genuine friend for them but a token, a sort of badge they wear. So they may say things like "my Palestinian friend" or "my Kenyan friend". One can know the difference between a genuine friend and one of these token friends by the way there are introduced in a conversation. If the person is a genuine friend they are introduced by their name first. If they are a trophy or a token they are introduced first by their race, ethnicity, religion or country of origin. The reason for the difference is that members of this class view the 'natives' they meet as not being completely human and that is why they describe them first as a race or a religion rather than as a person. For them the only people that exist are members of their class or members of their home country.
Many of them wear clothes and act certain ways and do things in order to tell about it later. For instance one of them I examined wore a 'Taybeh beer shirt' that was brand new. He didn't wear the shirt because he liked it but because he wanted to use it as a conversation piece. He said "this shirt offends right wing people, I wear it see the reactions I get." Members of this class do not get genuine satisfaction out of experiences they have unless this experience can be relayed to a friend as part of an endless competition between members about who is more cultural and tolerant and diverse. They go to cultural events mostly to say they want rather than to appreciate them. Many times they will go to a country and know absolutely nothing about it but they will go to a wedding or some festival mostly to tell their friends about the festival. The female members of this class will go so far as to become sexually intimate with 'natives' in order to tell their girlfriends about it. Despite their claims of not being racist they will begin a sentence with "I went out with a black man" or "I saw a gorgeous black man" or "I once dated a Palestinian." The sentence reveals the fact that they didn't date the person because of a genuine interest in the native as a person but merely as a conquest the way a frat boy might say "we had an Asian stripper come over last night." Members of this class dwell in the exotic and the taboo. They decorate their houses with 'exotic' things but things that are not genuine. They mostly buy the decorations so they can talk about them, rather than because they genuinely like them. Most interestingly many members of this class do not keep pictures of their family in their houses but rather pictures of natives they have met. The pictures serve as another badge.
This class speaks about racism a lot. It is a subject of many of their conversations and they are quick to ostracize a member who has become a 'racist'. In one conversation I had with one of these people he was telling me how he had a 'Kenyan friend.' His friend didn't have a name. He was just "my Kenyan." So I asked with a devilish grin; "Is he black? Does he have big lips." This of course offended the person I was speaking to and he proceeded to make a mental note that I was a 'racist'. This is how this class thinks. It is quite sensitive to its perceptions of what racism is. It is often quite judgmental regarding the natives. While it may revel in attending the native ceremonies and cultures and festivals, it is quick to condemn certain aspects of the native society. The class has a contempt for the people they deal with on a daily basis and they revel in stories about how horrible the native makes their lives, while at the same time reveling in other stories about how exotic the natives are. The class also has a notable lack of honor. They revel in stories about fleeing cabs without paying and not paying for their drinks. They revel in stories about going out with their friend's ex-girlfriends and then allowing their same friends to beat on those ex-girlfriends, all the while playing the innocent victim of circumstances. In reality this is simply a class that lacks control. Unlike their ancestors who frequently exercised a great deal of self control and personal responsibility, these people do not have these concepts. They also do not understand the concepts of humiliation or honor. Members of this class never donate money to anything. They live on the donated money of others, but they themselves never give their own money to anyone or anything, unless they are paying too much for something in a foreign bizarre and then they excuse it by saying the 'local people are poor. Most members of this class do not have any interest in their own culture. They are not religious and they adhere to the philosophies of post-humanism, moral-relativism and secular-humanism. They usually know almost nothing about their own family background and while they may study the religions and intricate religious laws of others, they frequently know nothing about their own historical heritage. Even they are they the descendants of dirt poor refugees or Holocaust survivors they invariably will help the majority, such as Muslims in Morocco, rather than their own people or minorities (for instance one Jewish member of this class who works for the Red Cross and whose family were Holocaust survivors, when he learned that the author works for a Jewish charity, asked ‘I would like to know more about what they do for Palestinians’. Incidentally, during the Holocaust the Red Cross covered up Nazi crimes and actively collaborated with the Nazi regime, it is no surprise that a descendant of the very Jews the Red Cross helped murder would work for the Red Cross helping Muslims).
Historical roots
The New International Class came into existence in the aftermath of the Second World War when 'Wasp rot' set in among the wealthy classes of the west and rather then devoting themselves to working they devoted themselves to charity and aid and setting up organizations and trusts that would support themselves and their children. Towards this end they harnessed their home governments with huge obligations and they engaged in endless fundraising among the working wealthy to create giant organizations who sole purpose was the largesse associated with employing the children of the elite cultured classes of the west.
Conflict, growth and geographic structure
But the New International Class is not completely safe in the bubbles of security and wealth it creates in foreign countries. Despite the fact that it shuttles from expensive first class seats on an airline to a five star hotel and then to its expensive apartment in the most prestigious part of town(the U.N office in Algiers in the prestigious Hydra neighborhood for instance) and then to work in a large building guarded by locals it is not completely immune from what goes on around it. Sometimes the native resistance against the foreign New International Class consists of minor things such as theft, mugging or harassment. Sometimes it consists of stone throwing. Sometimes this can get worse. Sometimes members of the class are murdered and raped. Very infrequently a local resistance organization will blow up a building the houses members of the International Class. This has been the case in bombings of U.N compounds in Afghanistan, Iraq, Gaza and most recently in Algeria. But the New International Class is pernicious. Its reports can harm the international standing and reputation of the countries that the class reports upon. Thus like a parasite the class is able to have a stranglehold over a country's ability to get rid of it. Expelling members of the U.N or Amnesty International or the Red Cross merely makes the country seem evil and increases the chances of sanctions and boycotts of that country. If the country is particularly offensive to members of the International Class the class may be able to rally western countries to bomb, invade and occupy the country. This has been the case in Kosovo, Bosnia, East Timor and Haiti to name a few places. In some cases the International Class is able to take over the judicial systems of other countries, deporting leaders it doesn't like such as Charles Taylor and Slobodan Milosevic and jailing them in the west. Other times the International Class merely sets up judicial shop in a country such as Cambodia and then presumes to prosecute former war criminals in that country. The International Class assumes that locals cannot do any of these things themselves. Corruption is usually the word that is uses by the International Class to tar the countries that they don't like. When a country is said to be 'Corrupt' then the International Class has an excuse to move in to begin taking over the country, whether it is the judicial system or the banks. Countries have a hard time extricating themselves from this cancer once it has infested a country. The International Class never leaves once it has gotten a foothold. Organizations such as the Temporary International Presence in Hebron (TIPH) are infamously not temporary. They never leave once they have a 'mandate' to do something. They are self supporting in the sense that they employ a certain number of the International Class who now lobby their home country to keep supporting their 'important, significant and necessary' work. One of the only countries to extricate itself from this horror in recent years has been Eritrea and even it was only able to expel the international aid organizations. Aid and charitable organizations are especially adept in Africa at creating dependence among the 'natives' so that the aid organization then becomes necessary to the survival of the local population. Because the International Class has no expertise at doing anything that involves working with their hands they are incapable of providing genuine aid that might help people survive, so the International Class provides hand outs in the form of food stuffs that create dependency. Then more jobs are created for wealth white westerners and their SUVs to move in to distribute more food. The International Class is not entirely benign when it comes to the sex slave trade either. Many countries such as Djibouti offer girls as young as 10 to clients who more often than not are members of the International Class. In some countries U.N workers and thus members of the Class were found to have traded food for sex with teenage girls and boys.
Resistance
The New International Class is a pariah, a cancer, a parasite. It is a thing that sucks the life blood out of nations and destroys the souls of the people it comes in contact with. Staffed by secular cynical addicted westerners, it spreads its sickness throughout the globe. Few organizations have the wherewithal to combat it. Those organizations such as Al Quieda in the Islamic Maghreb that have set as their goal the cleansing of North Africa of non-Muslims may target members of the Class but they also murder innocent people in the process (a recent bombing in Algeirs killed five U.N workers and 26 civilians). While the prospect of Islamism in places like Egypt may not be something the west likes very much it may turn out that this is the only way to remove the parasite from the body. I heard the members of this class talking this week about their days drinking in Egypt and going to the brothels and running away from cabbies who were trying to scam them and giggling about how the 'tourist police' beat down the natives who dared to try anything. Wouldn't Egypt be better off without these people? Wouldn't Africa be better off if all the money that is spent on the white charity workers and their SUVs went instead to local people? The parasite of Internationalism should spend its time fixing the ills in its home country. Human Rights Watch should be on the streets of suburban Paris. There should be a Temporary International presence there.
General Nkunda's solution
One can barely open a newspaper without seeing article after article discussing the role of this Class in the world. An article entitled 'A battered Congo again in convulsions' in the Herald Tribune on December 13th noted that "UN peacekeepers swept in late Tuesday to occupy the town as the Congolese Army fled. The fight came only a year after Western nations helped organize and pay for an election…the violence is also unfolding despite years of military and diplomatic intervention by the United Nations, the European Union and the United States…to create, for the first time since its independence from Belgium in 1960, a stable and prosperous Congo. 'The fundamental issues that led to the Congo war have never really been dealt with' said Anneke Van Woudenberg of Human Rights Watch.' " The article describes how General Nkunda has been trying to protect the Tutsi minority in Eastern Congo from being massacred by U.N supported Hutu militias, the same militias driven out of Rwanda in 1994 because of their involvement in the genocide. Notice how this article reveals the usual suspects meddling in another country's affairs: the U.N, the E.U and Human Rights Watch all have their fangs in the Congo. A white woman named Anneke is the 'expert' on the Congo, certainly the media couldn't interview one of the 'blacks'. Although the U.N and the International Class portray this as a warlord, Mr. Nkunda, fighting the government of the Congo it is really about a General fighting to save his people from a U.N sponsored genocide. Nkunda, like Al Quieda in North Africa, is resisting the International Class's attempt to re-colonize the Congo. Note how the article admits that the U.N and the E.U are trying to bring Congo back to the 'peace' that she experienced under Belgium colonialism. In fact the EU and the UN and Human Rights Watch are trying to impose a new imperial order in the Congo. Some people in the Congo don't appreciate it. Meanwhile at the Hague the Un Yugoslav War Crimes tribunal, which is staffed by whig wearing members of the International Class, sentenced a Serb general named Dragomir Milosevic to 33 years in prison for bombarding Sarajevo. His crime was using artillery against a city during a siege. Its odd that in European history they never convicted any other western Europeans of this crime. America dropped an atomic bomb on a city and no one convicted those who ordered that of 'war crimes'. Nato bombed the civilian inhabited capital of Serbia and yet that was not an 'illegal' act or a war crime for which the American Commander Wesley Clark was ever put on trial for. Yasser Arafat conducted a bombing campaign against Israel. According to the article "the use of indiscriminate weapons is illegal." Also according to the article Mr. Milosevic caused shoppers to be "terrified". Oddly enough when Jewish shoppers were terrified of Palestinian bombers between 2000 and 2004 the same International Class accused Israel of war crimes and described those who murdered Israeli shoppers as 'freedom fighters.' It is odd that this illegality only applies to people that the International Class doesn't like. Not one of those responsible for the Sudanese genocide will ever be brought to justice, for instance.
The American Solution and the potential for cultural change
I recall once I saw a bumper sticker in the United States that said 'warning to evil' and it depicted a U.N helmet with a bullet hole in it. Ordinary Americans are famous for their hatred of the New International Class. What the world needs to learn, particularly the countries being victimized by this class, is a lesson from America. More firearms and an independent spirit make for less U.N workers. Al Quaida in the Islamic Maghreb is a pathetic organization that will never succeed in freeing its country from the International Cancer. Only popular resistance can rid one of the menace. The day will come when this Class will be washed away. Most likely however this will come about not because of an uprising in the host countries but because the west is being overrun by poverty stricken immigrants who will eventually plunge the west into a downward economic spiral and thus the resources for the support of the Class will evaporate and all the wealthy bourgeoisie people who made up the recruits for this class will find themselves having to get real jobs where they work with their hands, perhaps in the soil. Only then will they be returned to a genuine spirit and only then perhaps, after many years, when one of the members of this Class is working in a field with his hands next to a man named Robert who happens to come from Kenya, only then will the member of this Class refer to his friend as Robert rather than "my Kenyan" or "my black friend."
A complete re-write of history: The media's role in crafting what we think and how we remember.
Seth J. Frantzman
December 11th, 2007
The media plays the most nefarious role in creating history, in creating a selective history based on the outlook and beliefs of those who write for the media, journalists. The media does not so much convey the news to the public but rather it frames the news so that the public is deceived into viewing the world their the lens that the media places in front of us.
Take very simple things. The BBC informs readers, on a report about a road trip around South Africa, that "Mr Majozi was born in 1948, the year the National Party came to power and began implementing apartheid." This is, however, untrue. The system of Apartheid, almost all of the racial basis for it, were created long before 1948 by the British colonial administration of the country. 1948 marked the victory of the National party, a predominantly Afrikaner based political party that made Apartheid a pillar of the country, adding greater emphasis to it. The News desires simple answers. So its answer is to create a mythical history by enshrining a date with historical significance.
BBC writers inform us that a town in South Africa is "a soulless place where even the atmosphere in the local taxi rank is subdued." It is nice to have such editorializing in a 'news' story, but many people would prefer to live without this. Who is a white journalist from an upper class family in England to judge what is soulless? Perhaps many of us would consider England, with is dismal weather, its rampant crime, and its arrogant news organizations to be a soulless place.
Showing his discomfort with what the author considers is the "old South Africa" he notes that "The streets still bear the names of Afrikaner heroes such as Paul Kruger. That is not in the least bit unusual in predominantly Afrikaans-speaking towns, but I am surprised to find myself in 'President' Kruger Street." It is strange to hear an Englishmen speak this way since it was, after all, his ancestors who colonized South Africa, who named half the country with English names (Ladysmith, Queenstown, King William Town, East London, Jamestown, Port Elizabeth). It was the English crown that sent 350,000 men to fight the Boers in 1899 and to destroy the independence of President Kruger's Boer Republic. In doing so they managed to build the first concentration camps and murder 24,000 Afrikaner women and children. It is perhaps no surprise then that a BBC journalist today would wince at the sight of a President Kruger Street. Surely the same BBC journalist is annoyed at the fact that the capital of the United States is named Washington after another independence minded president who didn't appreciate English colonialism.
But there is something insidious in the way the journalist writes "still bear the names" as if the journalist objects, as if he feels he should have a right to change the names to fit his image of how people should live. It is strange that journalists reporting on the Soviet Union in the 1930s had no problem with all the name changes going on there at the time. It is perhaps no surprise that journalists in the 1930s covered up Stalin's genocide in the Ukraine and that they were even awarded Pulitzer prizes for having done so.
What is this profession then? This journalism? Chomsky called it an attempt to 'manufacture consent'. But journalists and the media don't manufacture consent so much as they manufacture opinion and history. What is most fascinating is that the media likes to publish polls of what people think. Take all the polls we see that are published regarding global warming. The media tells us that a huge percentage of people now believe global warming to be the greatest threat to the world and the greatest threat to their daily lives. But this perception of global warming as the End of Days wasn't thought up by the public overnight. The public didn't have an epiphany and all wake up believing that Global Warming would end life on earth as we know it within the coming years. The public was told to believe this by the media. The media fashioned a massive number of hysterical reports about global warming and then produced survey after survey showing us, the public, getting more concerned. Everyone's initial reaction to a survey that shows that 90% of people believe something is to immediately ask themselves "why don't I believe that…everyone else does…I should too." People are innately programmed to go along and if they find out that everyone else is scared to death of global warming it is no surprise that in order to fit in they now feel global warming is a great menace. The only exception is people that are naturally and instinctually contrarian who believe that if everyone else believes something then they should believe the opposite. But whether it is the follower or the contrarian both of them are affected by the way in which the media warps people's minds.
All the studies of media bias always seem to come to grief on the fact that those doing the research are seemingly incapable of measuring the bias, usually because the researchers themselves are biased. For this reason researchers have found rampant bias in Fox News but inexplicably have not found any Bias in CNN or the BBC. But it all hinges on what questions are being asked in their studies. One study I was privileged to work on investigated bias in the American and Israeli media. The variable it hinged on was how often certain people from certain political parties were mentioned in news reports and whether or not they were quoted. The professors involved, Drs Tamir Schaefer and Dr. Gadi Wolfsfeld of the Hebrew University thought they were measuring bias. They thought they were showing that a given news outlet quoted or mentioned one political party more than another. But the media is too shrewd to be caught in its bias by a simple study like this. Take our British reporter at the BBC and his report on South Africa. A simple test like this would show that he mentioned all the races and people of South Africa. He duly interviewed a white person and a black person. He mentioned Kruger and Mandela. What is important is not how often the news media mentions something but the way in which is frames its discussion of the thing. The Nazi run media in Germany mentioned the Jews a great deal. By the Shafer/Wolfsfeld model we would be led to believe that it was biased in favor of the Jews, because they got so much press. But just because something is mentioned a lot doesn't mean it is being mentioned in a positive or negative manner, and it is this framing that the media uses to alter public opinion. It doesn't matter if the media mentioned Hilary Clinton as often as it does Barak Obama in the run up to the 2008 Democratic primaries. If each mention of Clinton makes her out to be honorable and good and each mention of Barak describes him as inept and fumbling, we know what the media is trying to tell us. Some might claim that the media is telling us the truth. But one can be assured when dealing with the media that it does not engage in the truth.
The media has one function in society and that is to propagandize and manipulate public feelings, to craft and distort history and to lie to the public to such a degree that it makes the existence of a free press almost useless, given that fact that an unfree press can lie to the public just as well. The only difference between a free press and that run by a dictatorship is the likelihood that a free society may produce marginal voices that contradict the mainstream press's account of things. But in a place such as the United Kingdom the most popular news outlets such as the BBC, the Independent and the Guardian all march in lock step in their extreme emotional propagandistic view of events in the world and their interpretation of history. The only difference between the press in Stalinist Russia and that the New York Times in the 1930s was that the New York Times was written in English. No substantial difference existed between their portrayal of the socialist utopia being created by Comrade Uncle Joe Stalin.
The Press cannot help but to lie and manufacture history, since that is its job. One should not read any news publication without first asking "what is the narrative frame we are being asked to view these events through?" "Who is the author and what is his or her point of view?" Every news article should be read twice with these questions in mind. One should pay careful attention to any pictures that accompany the article to see how they may portray the people mentioned.
Lets do a simple analysis of a news article the BBC published on December 10th, 2007 entitled "In Pictures: West Bank Bedouin cling to traditions amid settlement pressure." According to the report 50,000 Bedouin live in the West Bank and 'Life has always been tough for these nomadic Arab tribes, but they now face a great challenge from the Israeli authorities settling Israeli citizens in the area." The author has already set the scene for us. There is already a good and an evil. The good or rather the victim, is the Bedouin. The evil is the Israeli. But now a face must go with the good. It is the face of Shaeb Hadolim, a 61 year old man who was "forced from Beersheba in 1948 by Jewish fighters." Now we begin to see more of the story. A wonderful picture of the saddened and poverty stricken victim, Mr. Hadolim, accompanies the article. He wears his traditional exotic Khaffiyeh or Arab headdress like Lawrence of Arabia, evoking our sympathy and our love of the 'other.' The heading of this section was 'flight'. The heading of the next section is "squeezed" and we see how in 1981 an Israeli "settlement" was built beside Mr. Hadolim's "home". Recall that in the first section these Bedouin were described as "nomads". The article explains that the Israeli settlements are "illegal under almost every interpretation of international law" and that they "squeeze" Mr. Hadolim off his land. The next section entitled 'Permission denied" explains that Mr. Hadolim once had an easy time building his encampment but now he cannot obtain permission. The next section of the article shows the Jew, Mr. Ron Tsorel, who lives in the settlement and says "God gave us the land." The Jew wears western clothing like any person in London might and sits in his well watered suburban yard. His is the wealthy oppressor. Whereas the camera angle on Mr. Hadolim was strait towards him, showing him as an equal to the reader, the camera angle portraying the Israeli Jew shows him towering over us with a smug nasty expression on his face. The next section is entitled "survival" and shows an Arab woman in all black bending over but not facing the camera. The BBC surely knows it would offend Arab sensibilities to show the women's face, so he complies. The article describes how there is not electricity for the Bedouin family and how they must live on handouts. Next we see a picture of the happy Bedouin children, smiling little girls, which make us more sympathetic. The last section is described as "until death" and includes a quote to this affect from Mr. Hadolim. He is at once heroic and a victim.
But what isn't included in this little vignette of good and evil of power versus weakness of government versus individual of Jew versus Arab? First of all Mr. Hadolim was only 2 years old when he was "forced" from Beersheba. Second of all why was he, a nomad' forced from a settled town? Neither one of these 'facts' seems very strong. Next one should ask about the way in which Mr. Hadolim and his family obtained the land that he was subsequently "squeezed" from. Did he pay for it or did he just build a camp there that consisted of a camel hair Bedouin tent? And what is the nature of the "home" that this man is being squeezed from if we were informed earlier that he was a "nomad." And what of the other 54,999 Bedouin who live in the West Bank? The article insinuates that they are all being thrown off their land by Israel. What percentage of them live next to settlements that were established after the Bedouin had already built encampments? Furthermore the article insinuates that the Bedouin "cling to traditions amid settlement pressure." What does this mean? It means the settlements are taking away their tradition of nomadism? But would'nt nomadism solve the problem depicted in this story? If Mr. Hadolim was a real nomad then would'nt he move from place to place every year, like the Bedouin used to do and then the existence of a small settlement wouldn't make no difference to him. What percent of the lands of the West Bank are taken up by Israeli settlements? In addition what percentage are taken up by settled Arab villages? What percentage does that leave Mr. Hadolim to use as his nomadic grazing land?
The entire story is a fabrication anyway. A close examination of the pictures show that the settlement has no impact on the lifestyle of Mr. Hadolim and the Israeli army does not demolish structures on the West Bank, unless they are used by terrorists or if they are illegally built Jewish outposts. Israel doesn't engage in town planning for Arabs in the West Bank, which is evident to anyone who uses Google Earth to examine the Arab settlement pattern in the West Bank. In addition Israel doesn't interfere with the Bedouin of the West Bank, who small in number, poor and who take no interest in the political situation. The only time Bedouins in the west bank run afoul of Israel is when they engage in smuggling of weapons. For the most part they were unaffected by the second intifada and by all the Arab-Israeli wars.
The news story fabricated an event and a conflict where none exists. But the news story has nothing to do with Bedouin. It has everything to do with the Jews and Israel and the settlements and the interest of the BBC to find a reason to portray Israel in a negative light. The BBC uses the story of this Bedouin to do so. The pictures serve as a perfect frame for the argument and they help convince the reader of what is right and what is wrong. This article is a perfect example of what journalism is.
From describing the murder of Hindus at the hands of a Muslim mob in India as "100 Hindus were immolated" so as to make it seem that they died by mistake while claiming that the Hindu Governor of Gujarat was responsible for the deaths of Muslims killed in retaliation, to describing the Balkan conflict in 1998 as "Milosevic's war against the Albanian people" without mentioning the activities of the KLA or the Nato bombing campaign, the media is one massive instrument in the hands of elites who seek to distort history and make the public believe certain things.
What would it be like if the media and its journalists didn't have an opinion? Imagine a story about the West Bank Bedouin that was just a factual story about them, without some massive political agenda where they were being used as pawns to portray someone else in a bad light. Imagine if journalists didn't have to use words like 'soulless' as if they were writing a fiction novel rather than doing the news. Journalism is a dishonorable profession that uses the perception of honesty and fairness to hide its insidious motives and very extreme viewpoints. British journalists especially should never be trusted, they seem to believe that the roll of the media is only to convince people of things, rather than to inform people and it is why one will never find a news story that comes out of Britain that is unbiased, factual and does not express an obvious opinion or frame the story in some sort of 'good versus evil' scenario.
Newsletter 14 Borders, Archeology, Gillian Gibbons, Women
Terra Incognita
Issue 14
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
December 8th, 2007
Europeans and borders: The reason that Europeans always oppose the borders of Israel, and the reason they still claim Israel is the ‘occupying power’ of Gaza, is because European countries do not believe that non-Europeans have a right to determine their own borders. Since 1945 no country in the world has been allowed to re-draw its own borders without European consent, and those that have done so have not had their new borders recognized by the ‘international community’.
Archeology and Islam: A newly tenured professor at Bernard college named Nadia Abu el-Haj argues that when Palestinians destroy archeological finds they are conducting an act of ‘resistance’ against the Jewish attempt to create a ‘fake’ history of Jewish attachment to the Holy Land. It is no surprise that an academic would support the destruction of history, what is interesting is that Ms. Haj’s model is precisely the model of Islamic behavior towards non-Islamic historical sites.
Sympathy for Gillian Gibbons?: Gillian Gibbons, the English teacher arrested and subsequently pardoned in Sudan for naming a Teddy Bear ‘Mohammed’ does not deserve our sympathy. She knowingly went to a state that is committing genocide and gave a free education to the children of those who are leading the genocide. Furthermore she now tells us all how much she loved that country. Leftist Europeans have a strange habit of always supporting genocidal regimes because of their moral-relativist lenses.
A War on Women: The existence of Islam and countries run by Islamic law constitutes a veritable war on women. Whether it is ‘honor killing’ or whipping rape victims the Islamic religion is based on one concept: the control, suppression, enslavement and dehumanization of women. The fact that western women represent the greatest supporters of Islam today and constitute the bulk of the converts to Islam is no surprise given the perverse fact that western freedom ensures that westerners will desire only slavery.
Europeans and borders
Seth J. Frantzman
November 28th, 2007
Europeans and their allies at the U.N have constantly reminded Israel that her disengagement from the Gaza strip does not constitute the end of her ‘legal responsibility’ and ‘occupation’ of the Gaza strip. Therefore she is still the ‘responsible power’ for the strip and thus anything that goes wrong there, from power failures to sewage leaks, to Hamas murdering people, to kidnappings and famine, all are the fault of Israel. The message is clear: Israel cannot determine her borders without international, which is to say European, say so.
What is most fascinating, when one thinks about it, is that since 1945 no non-European country in the world has been allowed to determine their own borders. From the Balkans to East Timor to Israel Europeans have inserted themselves in some manner in every border dispute in the world. Even places where de-facto borders have been created, such as the India-Pakistan border or the India-China border or in the Western Sahara and Cyprus, none of these new borders have been recognized internationally since Europeans have not been allowed to play a role. In fact the Cyprus problem owes most of its history to the fact that Europeans would not help the Greeks expel the Turks, who have colonized half the island and ethnically cleansed it, or recognize Turkish Cyprus. From Transdnistria to Ngorno-Karabagh to Kurdistan to Northern Somalia, Chechnya and Abkhazia we can see that without European interference break-away republics receive no recognition in the world.
Two case studies of the European role in Israel and South Africa paint an even clearer picture of the European role in creating border disputes and then condemning their former colonies for daring to try to adjudicate them by themselves.
In Israel the British created the Palestine mandate. In 1920 part of that mandate was made into Jordan. In 1948 the mandate was split into two parts, one Arab and one Jewish. Nothing but conflict has followed. But since Europeans were not allowed to exercise their control over the creation of the borders of Israel or her Arab neighbors after 1948 they have spent their time criticizing and condemning rather than letting locals make their own borders. Thus what was allowed in 1948, the partition of a country, was not allowed again afterwards. It would be hard to not conclude that the fact that no border afterward has been recognized has at least something to do with the fact that Europeans were not allowed or invited to draw the borders afterward. Before 1948 they had plenty of fun drawing Palestine’s borders with Jordan, Egypt, Syria and Lebanon, just as they had fun drawing and redrawing their own borders in 1648, 1815, 1918 and 1945. Thus Gaza is part of Israel, not because Gazans want to be part of Israel or because Israelis want Gazans, but because Europeans were not invited to decide the borders of Gaza. Had Europeans been asked to do so one can be assured that today Gaza’s borders would be recognized by the international community.
In South Africa the British were happy to pick up where the Dutch left off and colonize the country. They fought a war with the local Zulus and the Afrikaners in order to do so. The Zulu state and the Afrikaner states were dismantled to make way for a greater South Africa. After the First World War the British added German Southwest Africa to the mix. But Britain was not content simply to add. She also subtracted Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), Zambia and Botswana from South Africa’s control. In addition she subtracted Swaziland and Lesotho from South Africa, setting these tribal kingdoms up as countries and granting them independence. When South Africa became independent for the first time in 1934 it was left with a festering problem of an Apartheid system, already put in place for the most part under British rule, and a large mix of ethnic-tribal groups. It would take 60 years before majority rule was brought to the country. But during that time the government granted a number of tribal groups their independence. Beginning with the Xhosa homeland of Transkei in 1976, Bophuthatswana in 1977, Venda in 1979 and Ciskei in 1981 a total of four new countries were created by the South African government in much the same way England had created Lesotho and Swaziland. But unlike Lesotho and Swaziland which were both granted independence from England in 1968 and recognized as such by the world, there was to be such recognition forthcoming for the homelands. One might say that this was the difference that 8 years made, the world simply didn’t want more independent African countries. Most have pointed to the fact that the world perceived the independence of these homelands as a racist policy whereby South Africa was ridding itself of its majority black population by making the parts of the country that had a high population of black ‘independent’ so that the country would eventually have a white majority. Perhaps that was the cynical reason. But what was the reason behind the rest of the gerrymandering that Europeans did in Africa, or gerrymandering in American electoral districts for that matter.
What changed between 1968 and 1976 was that it was South Africa, a nominally non-European country, that was involved in giving countries their independence. But there is one rule to be followed when granting people their independence. Only Europeans can do that. Other countries can’t go about declaring independence and creating new borders without the say so of a European or a European court of human rights or a European committee of the U.N. Without some involvement of a man named Steve or Mike or Charles or Chris there can be no creating of borders or gerrymandering of countries and creating of Bantustans.
People will point to the fact that no non-European country recognized Cyprus as independent, except Turkey, and that no non-European country recognized the South African homelands as independent and that no non-European country wants to accept that Israeli responsibility for Gaza has ended. This is the sad fact of world affairs. Independence minded people such as Anguillans, who declared independence from nearby Britain, St. Kitts and Nevis(the two neighboring Islands England had forced her into a confederation with) in 1967, have been stopped in their tracks because Europeans have not recognized them(in the case of Anguilla the British invaded the island in 1969). There is not one place in the world since 1945 that has been able to gain her independence without the consent and recognition of European countries. It is strange because there are some 200 other independent countries in the world and yet they are dominated by the decisions of some 30 European countries as to who to recognize and when to recognize them.
The world should have gotten an early inkling of how ridiculous this system was in the 1950s when mainland China was not recognized as ‘China’ on the U.N Security Council, rather Taiwan was ‘China’ and had a permanent seat on the council. Indeed the U.N has a large role to play in the fact that borders are still determined by Europeans. All the countries on the Security Council are European save the United States and China.
Archeology and Islam
Seth J. Frantzman
December 1st, 2007
Bernard College, which is part of Columbia, recently awarded tenure to Nadia Abu el-Haj, whose only published work describes the destruction of archeology as ‘legitimate resistance’ against colonialism. For her the destruction of archeological finds is the elimination of “facts on the ground” set up by the occupying colonial power. Ms. Haj of course directs her entire life’s work towards an analysis of Israeli archeology and what she called the “Jewish settler-colonial nation building.” For her “the work of archeology in Palestine/Israel is a cardinal institutional location for the ongoing practice of colonial nationhood, producing facts through which historical-national claims, territorial transformations, heritage objects and historicities ‘happen.’” This is quite a brilliant thesis and no doubt the fact that she managed to base her theory on Edward Said’s ‘Orientalism’ means she certainly deserves tenure at a prestigious American University since academics at Universities have the primary role of indoctrinating students to agree with them and their pet theories, no matter how outlandish or hate-mongering.
But what is most fascinating about the argument that destruction of archeology is in fact a legitimate weapon of national struggle is how neatly this dovetails with the history of Islam and its treatment of archeology. In fact Ms. Haj’s theory is not so brilliant or original. When Cortez built church’s upon the pagan temples of Aztec empire he was practicing her thesis. All the stories of idol breaking in the Bible were part of Ms. Haj’s thesis. The lopping off of the heads of Greek statues and carving out of their eyes and smashing of their genital organs was all in line with the view of Ms. Haj.
Islam however refined her ideas to a science. Wherever Islam went, whatever countries it conquered it tried its best to silence the past by means of destroying every structure or temple it came across. From the burning of the library of Alexandria to building a mosque in the place of the Temple Mount and in the place of Hagia Sophia. In India Mohammed of Ghazni, one of the fiercest Muslim warlords to colonize that land, bragged about destroying hundreds of ‘infidel’ temples. The blowing up of the Bamiyan Buddhas in 2001 by the Taliban was merely the latest manifestation of this Islamic method of dealing with history. Since Islam views all pre-Islamic history as evil it prefers that evidence of such a history not exist. Egyptian Islamist Muslims in the 20th century have even argued for blowing up the pyramids.
Ms. Haj thinks she is being brilliant by justifying the destruction of historical artifacts by pretending that those artifacts are being used as tools in a nationals struggle and thus must be destroyed. It is not worth pointing out the fact that Israeli archeology has been responsible for uncovering the history of many other cultures, including Canaanite and Pheonician and Greek and Muslim. Yes, Israeli archeology has also revealed archeological finds from the first Muslim period in Palestine. Ms. Haj would surely prefer that those good Muslim relics remain, relics like the Dome of the Rock or the tomb of the Patriarchs.
But perhaps Ms. Haj is correct. Perhaps archeology should be destroyed lest it become a tool of national-governments and movements. Muslims always seem to be ‘discovering’ graves of some companion of the prophet everywhere and demanding that a mosque be built wherever these ‘discoveries’ are made, such as in Nazareth. So these discoveries should be washed away, blasted from the soil so that no record of anyone’s past exists, lest those people one day show up and demand that they be allowed some connection with that place that their ancestors once lived. The Turks are expert at this, they have erased almost any trace of the fact that Armenians once lived in eastern Turkey.
But Ms. Haj’s thesis would please another ideology besides Islamism. She would have been at home among the Communists. In China and Russia the Communists spent half their time destroying the past in order to build a socialist present. They dynamited churches and synagogues and museums and everything they could find that they felt must be removed in order to make way for the socialist Utopia. In China Mao made sure to plow as many Buddhist monasteries and temples into the ground to erase any evidence that China had once been host to a fascinating civilization.
Ms. Haj and her Communist, Byzantine, Conquistador, Islamist friends are not brilliant people. Erasing history is easy. Most of human history has been erased which is why archeology only rarely yields great finds that truly re-write what we know. When is the last time Archeologists found something truly gigantic? Humans are great at destroying one another and burying eachothers civilizations under the dirt and sowing salt into the fields of ancient cities. What is difficult is preserving history. People would like to say that all archeology is political, and indeed much of it has been politicized. But the politization of archeology is a direct result of people like Ms. Haj who sixty years ago decided they had to wield archeology as their own tool against ‘colonialism.’ Now they have changed their tune and advocate the destruction of history. But they will not have to wait long. History has shown that those who enjoy destroying history are quite popular and because their actions can never be redeemed, their destructions cannot be rebuilt (like the Bamiyan Buddhas), one can be assured another round of iconoclasm is coming soon. What is most funny is to see that it will be an American college and its leftist liberal academics who will have been some of the first to support this new round of history destroying hateful fanaticism. But who else is good at destroying history more than the very people who write it, such as Ms. Haj. Its no surprise that the best Nazis learned Hebrew.
One might be surprised that the motto of the proto-Fascist Futurist movement was “we will destroy the museums, libraries, academics of every kind, will fight moralism, feminism, every opportunistic or utilitarian cowardice.” It may be a surprise to some that the modern leftist speaks like the 1920s fascist, that in many respects modern day leftist thought is merely fascist thought. So long as leftists think they are supporting ‘good causes’ or the ‘downtrodden’ or ‘Islam’ or ‘Palestinian nationalism’ or ‘resistance’ they will support the most disgusting things, the very things they combat in their own society at home. This is the tragedy of liberalism and it is a tragedy that is strangling society.
Sympathy for Gillian Gibbons?
Seth J. Frantzman
November 30th, 2007
The case of Gillian Gibbons, on the face of it, cries out for sympathy. Like so many British people in recent years (recall the Marines in Iran) she has ended up being put on trial by a savage foreign government. She is accused of defaming or insulting the Muslim religion by allowing children she was teaching at the Unity school in Khartoum, Sudan to name a teddy bear after the ‘prophet’ Mohammed.
One should certainly pity the injustice of her being put on trial. But no one seems to have looked deeper into what she was doing there in the first place. She was teaching at a charitable school funded by westerners. Her school provided a free education to children in Sudan’s capital. Furthermore it provided a free education to the children of Sudan’s upper class. These upper class are composed entirely of Muslim Arabs. They are all loyalists of the regime in Khartoum. Each one of the children in her class was a descendant of the same elites who have been carrying out a genocide against Sudan’s blacks and Christians for the last half century.
Gillian Gibbons, like most westerners who travel as tourists never bothered to judge the country that she was traveling to. Like a good moral relativist she went to an Islamist country that was in the middle of committing a genocide and decided to teach their children for free so that those kids could grow up to be good Islamists and carry on their genocide.
She provided charity for the richest families in Sudan. She never provided charity for the people who need charity in Sudan, the blacks and the Christians who have been thrown off their lands in the millions and sold into slavery by the Sudanese government and their Arab Janjaweed allies.
Why does Ms. Gibbons deserve our sympathy? Ms. Gibbons is like so many westerners who have no qualms traveling to Malaysia, Zimbabwe, Saudi Arabia, the UAE or Iran. She should have learned something about the country she was visiting before she traveled there. She should not have volunteered her time to contribute to a genocidal regime. If she had stopped being a moral relativist and instead had a conscience then she would have traveled to Darfur to help the victims of genocide or she would have traveled to Southern Sudan to teach the Christian Dinka tribe, whose members have been slaughtered and butchered by the Sudanese Islamist Arab government.
Would the British people have had sympathy for Ms. Gibbons if she had gone to Apartheid South Africa in 1985 and given a free education to the children of Pretoria’s white elite? Would they have been so sympathetic if she had provided the children of the leaders of Apartheid South Africa with a free education and helped reinforce the values of Apartheid to those children? I doubt people would have been so sympathetic if she had subsequently been put on trial for insulting Christianity by naming a bear Jesus. The difference is that in the 1980s people like Ms. Gibbons went down to South Africa to help the blacks after reading about the situation there. Today’s westerner has no such judgment. If there is a racist genocidal regime in the Middle East most westerners have no qualms traveling there and volunteering to help in the genocide. Its no surprise that I recently heard a friend of mine tell me how she dearly wanted to travel to Zimbabwe. Why not? Zimbabwe and Sudan are the most ‘exotic’ countries in Africa. Exotic entails any country that has a racist, genocidal government and is a dictatorship. Surely Botswana is not exotic enough, there is no genocide there, no dictatorship, no mass murder. Not exotic. Thus it doesn’t deserve people like our friend Ms. Gibbons. There should be no sympathy for any westerner who travels to Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, Iran, or Sudan or the UAE and subsequently gets themselves into trouble. These countries are barbaric, and they do not deserve tourism or charity, unless that tourism and charity is going to the victims of these disgusting inhuman regimes. If westerners want sympathy they should have a conscience when they travel and when they do their requisite charity work for ‘coloured-exotic’ people.
In reply to an article noting that Ms. Gibbons had been released one European white woman named Kelly Chandler from London noted that “It's so obviously unintentional [the naming of the bear] and it does seem like they have over-reacted. But when you go to another country, you should live by their rules, however strict they may be.” A Muslim (or perhaps a Jew) named Hanna noted that “This is why people who have no idea of the religion [Islam] only see this side of it - because this is the type of story that makes the newspapers.” Another white European named Pete from Leicester noted that by condemning Sudan people were being “racist” and that “Whether or not she (or you, or I) agrees with the sentiment behind the offence caused, cause it she most certainly did - and most probably through ignorance.”
Upon being pardoned by the Sudanese government last week Ms. Gibbons declared: “I am very sorry to leave Sudan. I had a fabulous time. It is a beautiful place and I had a chance to see some of the countryside. The Sudanese people I found to be extremely kind and generous and until this happened I only had a good experience.” Note: there is no critique of the genocide in Darfur, apparently her tour of the ‘countryside’ didn’t include watching African children being burned to death in their huts as their mothers were led off to be gang raped by the Janjaweed. ( One just wonders how many Englishwomen like Ms. Gibbons would travel to Israel and not mention the ‘occupation’.)
There is a message that should go out to all white Europeans: Stop supporting genocidal regimes, that way you won’t have to behave by the rules of those countries. According to the modern post-human leftist European logic if one is in a country and that country is a fascist state that is committing a genocide you should go along and volunteer to help out in the genocide out of respect for the culture and to ‘live by their rules.’ Europeans and Muslims pretend that this news story is why people have a bad view of Islam, but it is Islam that prosecutes people and whips them for naming a bear after their ‘prophet’. Islam gives itself a bad name through thousands of acts of terrorism a year and through genocide and religious intolerance, and then it pretends that this is the fault of the ‘media’. Its not racism to condemn fascist hateful states and their fascist disgusting laws, that’s called free speech and its called honesty. Europeans have a problem with honesty. And one last thing: Just because people cause offense doesn’t mean people should have been offended. The Nazis were offended at the very sight of a Jew, that doesn’t imply that the Jew did something wrong by offending the Nazis through his existence. The Sudanese genocidal regime deserves to be offended every day of the week, every hour of the day, every minute of every hour and every second of every minute until it is destroyed and salt is sown into the sand that produced it. If Europeans want to do some good this Christmas they can support the Sudanese Liberation Army or any of the other Black tribes fighting for their freedom from Khartoum. A few shillings could go a long way towards giving a Dinka tribesman an AK-47, boots, and a belt of ammo.
A War on Women
Seth J. Frantzman
December 3, 2007
The very existence of Islam represents a virtual war on women. That may surprise all the liberal leftist feminists in the west who devote half their time to reading the Koran and apologizing for Islam and attending Ramadan dinners but this is the fact of what Islam actually is.
Take four recent cases. In the West Bank town of Sebastia the Kiwan brothers locked their sister in a special cell they had built in their house for three years. Her crime? She had been divorced. But before she was divorced by her husband she had been sold into that marriage as part of a 'swap marriage' where two brothers married eachother's sisters, without consulting the women of course. She lost three years of her life, and of course all the other years before that. Today Amirah Kidwan is 40. She is a 'shame' to her family. Her 15 year old son was not permitted to see her during her 'incarceration.' Neighbors knew of the imprisonment and did nothing, considering it the business of the Kiwan family and as well know, Muslims don't interfere in eachother's business when it comes to a man's property: his women.
In Saudi Arabia five men gang raped a woman and recorded their 'fun' with a cell phone. When the woman informed police the police arrested her and sentenced her to be whipped 200 times for the crime of 'being alone with a man who is not her husband' which is a violation of Islamic law.
In Ramleh eight women have been murdered in the last three years. All of them have been members of the same Al-Ghanam extended family. All of their crimes have been crimes of immorality. They were perceived to have brought 'shame' on their family. So they all had to die. Each was killed by her own male relatives.
Between 2004 and 2006 six men from the Muslim Arab village of Bir al Maksour gang-raped four women and girls in the Galilee, one who was 13. In the same period another gang of four men from Kalunsuwa, another Arab village, raped two girls in Netanya and a man from Tireh, another Arab Muslim village, raped two girls in Kochav Yair.
These are only a few cases. 99% of Muslim crimes against women go unreported because, as in the case in Sebastia and in Ramleh until recently, most of these crimes are considered ones of 'honor' or they are simply not reported because Muslims feel it is not their duty to interfere in the rule of a man over his household. They aren’t reported for another reason: women are not considered human in Islam, they are objects to be disposed of like an old car, like a CD player that stops working. All of the western white educated intellectual academic Islamic scholars studying in departments of Middle Eastern Studies will dissuade us of this terrible accusation. They will point out, like Ahamdinjad did at Columbia, that Islam thinks women are different, and in fact women are the 'most highly prized sex in Islam.' Highly prized like one prizes a show horse. But what happens to that show horse when it hurts one of its legs? It gets put down. Women are treated differently. That is the excuse we often here from Muslims. In the west women are equal and in Islam they are 'different'. Different, like a human is different than a dog, a dog that when it gets out of hand has to be put down. Yes, we understand the code word 'different'. We understand what it means to be 'prized'.
One would like to see evidence of how Islam 'prizes' women. In Pakistan and Saudi Arabia and Iran if a woman dares to complain that she was raped she immediately bring dishonor on herself. If she is married she is accused of committing adultery. If she cannot bring four male witnesses to the rape then she is accused of having faked it and she then is put on trial for having unlawful sexual contact with men who were not her husband and she risks being stoned to death, whipped or imprisoned. In one case in Pakistan the rape of a young village girl resulted in her family raping a girl from the village that was accused of the original rape. Two rapes apparently made a right in this case. But what of the women. Their 'honor' is forever tarnished and likely they will be murdered by their own brothers for having brought shame on the family.
Imagine a culture where the brother murders his own sister rather than protect her. Islam is the exact opposite of western culture in this respect. Western culture is full of stories of men taking vengeance on other men who have wronged their sisters, mothers or daughters. But in Islamic society, from Iran to Pakistan to Indonesia, the women are to blame, not so much because they caused themselves to be raped, but because they have been perceived to have brought dishonor on a family. In the west the presence of a rapist in the family dishonors the family, in Islam the presence of a rape victim does so.
We are always treated in the west to explanations of how charitable the Islamic custom of divorce is. We are told that although the Catholic church forbids divorce, that Islam is more feministic and has always made it easy. One caveat though: It is only easy for the man. Women can not sue for divorce in Islam. Men can receive a divorce by simply saying "I divorce thee" three times in front of a male witness. That is the Islamic divorce law. It is very charitable for women. Women receive up to three months in Alimony, and if it is feared they are pregnant there is a longer period to determine if they are. In the famous case of Shah Bano in India a Muslim wife of some fifty years was disposed of in this manner, so that the husband could marry other women. She of course receives shame and dishonors her family, just as was the case in the Arab village of Sebastia.
Where does the Islamic hatred of women come from? Is it because of Mohammed and his twelve wives, one of whome was 6 years old at marriage. It must be hard to respect women when the most revered person in a religion spent his time having sex with as many as possible while instructing his followers that they might only have four wives and 'as many concubines obtained through warfare and in the slave market as one pleases.' Perhaps that is where the Islamic 'respect' for women came from: the fact that the Koran and the Hadith detail all the salve girls, that Mohammed and his follower s acquired and raped. Mohammed, if he hadn't been a prophet, would have fit in well in the 18th century American south, lest we forget all the dallying the Southern 'gentry' did with the slave girls, so much raping and dallying in fact that to find an American black who does not have some white ancestry is quite difficult.
Whetever the source is of the Islamic treatment of women, what is most intriguing is the degree to which western female intellectuals and academics excuse that treatment. At least 70% of those studying Arabic today in various programs throughout the Middle East are western women. More then 80% of the converts to Islam on a given year in any western country are western women. When Gaza was taken over by Hamas the first people to be evacuated were 200 Russian women, wives of Muslim Palestinians. They were evacuated with their Muslim husbands. Many prominent Muslim intellectuals have married western women and despite their claims to 'secularism' have encouraged their wives to convert, which the women have done with glee (I speak here of Said K. Aburish and Sari Nusseibeh as two examples). Prominent western women have converted to Islam from Tony Blair's niece to Sir John Goldsmith's daughter. The newest American film, Rendition portrays an American female convert, played by Reece Witherspoon, whose husband is an Egyptian Muslim. There have been cases of western women going to Iraq to blow themselves up and many of the Muslim organizations in the West such as CAIR have prominent western female converts wearing the requisite headscarf. One cannot understand this. Why don't western women embrace a religion that treats them well? Why do they hunger for the slavery offered up in Islam? Furthermore why to academics and leftists and progressives devote so much time to defending a religion, that even if it weren't for its treatment of women, hates abortion and promises the death penalty to criminals.
Why?
Issue 14
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
December 8th, 2007
Europeans and borders: The reason that Europeans always oppose the borders of Israel, and the reason they still claim Israel is the ‘occupying power’ of Gaza, is because European countries do not believe that non-Europeans have a right to determine their own borders. Since 1945 no country in the world has been allowed to re-draw its own borders without European consent, and those that have done so have not had their new borders recognized by the ‘international community’.
Archeology and Islam: A newly tenured professor at Bernard college named Nadia Abu el-Haj argues that when Palestinians destroy archeological finds they are conducting an act of ‘resistance’ against the Jewish attempt to create a ‘fake’ history of Jewish attachment to the Holy Land. It is no surprise that an academic would support the destruction of history, what is interesting is that Ms. Haj’s model is precisely the model of Islamic behavior towards non-Islamic historical sites.
Sympathy for Gillian Gibbons?: Gillian Gibbons, the English teacher arrested and subsequently pardoned in Sudan for naming a Teddy Bear ‘Mohammed’ does not deserve our sympathy. She knowingly went to a state that is committing genocide and gave a free education to the children of those who are leading the genocide. Furthermore she now tells us all how much she loved that country. Leftist Europeans have a strange habit of always supporting genocidal regimes because of their moral-relativist lenses.
A War on Women: The existence of Islam and countries run by Islamic law constitutes a veritable war on women. Whether it is ‘honor killing’ or whipping rape victims the Islamic religion is based on one concept: the control, suppression, enslavement and dehumanization of women. The fact that western women represent the greatest supporters of Islam today and constitute the bulk of the converts to Islam is no surprise given the perverse fact that western freedom ensures that westerners will desire only slavery.
Europeans and borders
Seth J. Frantzman
November 28th, 2007
Europeans and their allies at the U.N have constantly reminded Israel that her disengagement from the Gaza strip does not constitute the end of her ‘legal responsibility’ and ‘occupation’ of the Gaza strip. Therefore she is still the ‘responsible power’ for the strip and thus anything that goes wrong there, from power failures to sewage leaks, to Hamas murdering people, to kidnappings and famine, all are the fault of Israel. The message is clear: Israel cannot determine her borders without international, which is to say European, say so.
What is most fascinating, when one thinks about it, is that since 1945 no non-European country in the world has been allowed to determine their own borders. From the Balkans to East Timor to Israel Europeans have inserted themselves in some manner in every border dispute in the world. Even places where de-facto borders have been created, such as the India-Pakistan border or the India-China border or in the Western Sahara and Cyprus, none of these new borders have been recognized internationally since Europeans have not been allowed to play a role. In fact the Cyprus problem owes most of its history to the fact that Europeans would not help the Greeks expel the Turks, who have colonized half the island and ethnically cleansed it, or recognize Turkish Cyprus. From Transdnistria to Ngorno-Karabagh to Kurdistan to Northern Somalia, Chechnya and Abkhazia we can see that without European interference break-away republics receive no recognition in the world.
Two case studies of the European role in Israel and South Africa paint an even clearer picture of the European role in creating border disputes and then condemning their former colonies for daring to try to adjudicate them by themselves.
In Israel the British created the Palestine mandate. In 1920 part of that mandate was made into Jordan. In 1948 the mandate was split into two parts, one Arab and one Jewish. Nothing but conflict has followed. But since Europeans were not allowed to exercise their control over the creation of the borders of Israel or her Arab neighbors after 1948 they have spent their time criticizing and condemning rather than letting locals make their own borders. Thus what was allowed in 1948, the partition of a country, was not allowed again afterwards. It would be hard to not conclude that the fact that no border afterward has been recognized has at least something to do with the fact that Europeans were not allowed or invited to draw the borders afterward. Before 1948 they had plenty of fun drawing Palestine’s borders with Jordan, Egypt, Syria and Lebanon, just as they had fun drawing and redrawing their own borders in 1648, 1815, 1918 and 1945. Thus Gaza is part of Israel, not because Gazans want to be part of Israel or because Israelis want Gazans, but because Europeans were not invited to decide the borders of Gaza. Had Europeans been asked to do so one can be assured that today Gaza’s borders would be recognized by the international community.
In South Africa the British were happy to pick up where the Dutch left off and colonize the country. They fought a war with the local Zulus and the Afrikaners in order to do so. The Zulu state and the Afrikaner states were dismantled to make way for a greater South Africa. After the First World War the British added German Southwest Africa to the mix. But Britain was not content simply to add. She also subtracted Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), Zambia and Botswana from South Africa’s control. In addition she subtracted Swaziland and Lesotho from South Africa, setting these tribal kingdoms up as countries and granting them independence. When South Africa became independent for the first time in 1934 it was left with a festering problem of an Apartheid system, already put in place for the most part under British rule, and a large mix of ethnic-tribal groups. It would take 60 years before majority rule was brought to the country. But during that time the government granted a number of tribal groups their independence. Beginning with the Xhosa homeland of Transkei in 1976, Bophuthatswana in 1977, Venda in 1979 and Ciskei in 1981 a total of four new countries were created by the South African government in much the same way England had created Lesotho and Swaziland. But unlike Lesotho and Swaziland which were both granted independence from England in 1968 and recognized as such by the world, there was to be such recognition forthcoming for the homelands. One might say that this was the difference that 8 years made, the world simply didn’t want more independent African countries. Most have pointed to the fact that the world perceived the independence of these homelands as a racist policy whereby South Africa was ridding itself of its majority black population by making the parts of the country that had a high population of black ‘independent’ so that the country would eventually have a white majority. Perhaps that was the cynical reason. But what was the reason behind the rest of the gerrymandering that Europeans did in Africa, or gerrymandering in American electoral districts for that matter.
What changed between 1968 and 1976 was that it was South Africa, a nominally non-European country, that was involved in giving countries their independence. But there is one rule to be followed when granting people their independence. Only Europeans can do that. Other countries can’t go about declaring independence and creating new borders without the say so of a European or a European court of human rights or a European committee of the U.N. Without some involvement of a man named Steve or Mike or Charles or Chris there can be no creating of borders or gerrymandering of countries and creating of Bantustans.
People will point to the fact that no non-European country recognized Cyprus as independent, except Turkey, and that no non-European country recognized the South African homelands as independent and that no non-European country wants to accept that Israeli responsibility for Gaza has ended. This is the sad fact of world affairs. Independence minded people such as Anguillans, who declared independence from nearby Britain, St. Kitts and Nevis(the two neighboring Islands England had forced her into a confederation with) in 1967, have been stopped in their tracks because Europeans have not recognized them(in the case of Anguilla the British invaded the island in 1969). There is not one place in the world since 1945 that has been able to gain her independence without the consent and recognition of European countries. It is strange because there are some 200 other independent countries in the world and yet they are dominated by the decisions of some 30 European countries as to who to recognize and when to recognize them.
The world should have gotten an early inkling of how ridiculous this system was in the 1950s when mainland China was not recognized as ‘China’ on the U.N Security Council, rather Taiwan was ‘China’ and had a permanent seat on the council. Indeed the U.N has a large role to play in the fact that borders are still determined by Europeans. All the countries on the Security Council are European save the United States and China.
Archeology and Islam
Seth J. Frantzman
December 1st, 2007
Bernard College, which is part of Columbia, recently awarded tenure to Nadia Abu el-Haj, whose only published work describes the destruction of archeology as ‘legitimate resistance’ against colonialism. For her the destruction of archeological finds is the elimination of “facts on the ground” set up by the occupying colonial power. Ms. Haj of course directs her entire life’s work towards an analysis of Israeli archeology and what she called the “Jewish settler-colonial nation building.” For her “the work of archeology in Palestine/Israel is a cardinal institutional location for the ongoing practice of colonial nationhood, producing facts through which historical-national claims, territorial transformations, heritage objects and historicities ‘happen.’” This is quite a brilliant thesis and no doubt the fact that she managed to base her theory on Edward Said’s ‘Orientalism’ means she certainly deserves tenure at a prestigious American University since academics at Universities have the primary role of indoctrinating students to agree with them and their pet theories, no matter how outlandish or hate-mongering.
But what is most fascinating about the argument that destruction of archeology is in fact a legitimate weapon of national struggle is how neatly this dovetails with the history of Islam and its treatment of archeology. In fact Ms. Haj’s theory is not so brilliant or original. When Cortez built church’s upon the pagan temples of Aztec empire he was practicing her thesis. All the stories of idol breaking in the Bible were part of Ms. Haj’s thesis. The lopping off of the heads of Greek statues and carving out of their eyes and smashing of their genital organs was all in line with the view of Ms. Haj.
Islam however refined her ideas to a science. Wherever Islam went, whatever countries it conquered it tried its best to silence the past by means of destroying every structure or temple it came across. From the burning of the library of Alexandria to building a mosque in the place of the Temple Mount and in the place of Hagia Sophia. In India Mohammed of Ghazni, one of the fiercest Muslim warlords to colonize that land, bragged about destroying hundreds of ‘infidel’ temples. The blowing up of the Bamiyan Buddhas in 2001 by the Taliban was merely the latest manifestation of this Islamic method of dealing with history. Since Islam views all pre-Islamic history as evil it prefers that evidence of such a history not exist. Egyptian Islamist Muslims in the 20th century have even argued for blowing up the pyramids.
Ms. Haj thinks she is being brilliant by justifying the destruction of historical artifacts by pretending that those artifacts are being used as tools in a nationals struggle and thus must be destroyed. It is not worth pointing out the fact that Israeli archeology has been responsible for uncovering the history of many other cultures, including Canaanite and Pheonician and Greek and Muslim. Yes, Israeli archeology has also revealed archeological finds from the first Muslim period in Palestine. Ms. Haj would surely prefer that those good Muslim relics remain, relics like the Dome of the Rock or the tomb of the Patriarchs.
But perhaps Ms. Haj is correct. Perhaps archeology should be destroyed lest it become a tool of national-governments and movements. Muslims always seem to be ‘discovering’ graves of some companion of the prophet everywhere and demanding that a mosque be built wherever these ‘discoveries’ are made, such as in Nazareth. So these discoveries should be washed away, blasted from the soil so that no record of anyone’s past exists, lest those people one day show up and demand that they be allowed some connection with that place that their ancestors once lived. The Turks are expert at this, they have erased almost any trace of the fact that Armenians once lived in eastern Turkey.
But Ms. Haj’s thesis would please another ideology besides Islamism. She would have been at home among the Communists. In China and Russia the Communists spent half their time destroying the past in order to build a socialist present. They dynamited churches and synagogues and museums and everything they could find that they felt must be removed in order to make way for the socialist Utopia. In China Mao made sure to plow as many Buddhist monasteries and temples into the ground to erase any evidence that China had once been host to a fascinating civilization.
Ms. Haj and her Communist, Byzantine, Conquistador, Islamist friends are not brilliant people. Erasing history is easy. Most of human history has been erased which is why archeology only rarely yields great finds that truly re-write what we know. When is the last time Archeologists found something truly gigantic? Humans are great at destroying one another and burying eachothers civilizations under the dirt and sowing salt into the fields of ancient cities. What is difficult is preserving history. People would like to say that all archeology is political, and indeed much of it has been politicized. But the politization of archeology is a direct result of people like Ms. Haj who sixty years ago decided they had to wield archeology as their own tool against ‘colonialism.’ Now they have changed their tune and advocate the destruction of history. But they will not have to wait long. History has shown that those who enjoy destroying history are quite popular and because their actions can never be redeemed, their destructions cannot be rebuilt (like the Bamiyan Buddhas), one can be assured another round of iconoclasm is coming soon. What is most funny is to see that it will be an American college and its leftist liberal academics who will have been some of the first to support this new round of history destroying hateful fanaticism. But who else is good at destroying history more than the very people who write it, such as Ms. Haj. Its no surprise that the best Nazis learned Hebrew.
One might be surprised that the motto of the proto-Fascist Futurist movement was “we will destroy the museums, libraries, academics of every kind, will fight moralism, feminism, every opportunistic or utilitarian cowardice.” It may be a surprise to some that the modern leftist speaks like the 1920s fascist, that in many respects modern day leftist thought is merely fascist thought. So long as leftists think they are supporting ‘good causes’ or the ‘downtrodden’ or ‘Islam’ or ‘Palestinian nationalism’ or ‘resistance’ they will support the most disgusting things, the very things they combat in their own society at home. This is the tragedy of liberalism and it is a tragedy that is strangling society.
Sympathy for Gillian Gibbons?
Seth J. Frantzman
November 30th, 2007
The case of Gillian Gibbons, on the face of it, cries out for sympathy. Like so many British people in recent years (recall the Marines in Iran) she has ended up being put on trial by a savage foreign government. She is accused of defaming or insulting the Muslim religion by allowing children she was teaching at the Unity school in Khartoum, Sudan to name a teddy bear after the ‘prophet’ Mohammed.
One should certainly pity the injustice of her being put on trial. But no one seems to have looked deeper into what she was doing there in the first place. She was teaching at a charitable school funded by westerners. Her school provided a free education to children in Sudan’s capital. Furthermore it provided a free education to the children of Sudan’s upper class. These upper class are composed entirely of Muslim Arabs. They are all loyalists of the regime in Khartoum. Each one of the children in her class was a descendant of the same elites who have been carrying out a genocide against Sudan’s blacks and Christians for the last half century.
Gillian Gibbons, like most westerners who travel as tourists never bothered to judge the country that she was traveling to. Like a good moral relativist she went to an Islamist country that was in the middle of committing a genocide and decided to teach their children for free so that those kids could grow up to be good Islamists and carry on their genocide.
She provided charity for the richest families in Sudan. She never provided charity for the people who need charity in Sudan, the blacks and the Christians who have been thrown off their lands in the millions and sold into slavery by the Sudanese government and their Arab Janjaweed allies.
Why does Ms. Gibbons deserve our sympathy? Ms. Gibbons is like so many westerners who have no qualms traveling to Malaysia, Zimbabwe, Saudi Arabia, the UAE or Iran. She should have learned something about the country she was visiting before she traveled there. She should not have volunteered her time to contribute to a genocidal regime. If she had stopped being a moral relativist and instead had a conscience then she would have traveled to Darfur to help the victims of genocide or she would have traveled to Southern Sudan to teach the Christian Dinka tribe, whose members have been slaughtered and butchered by the Sudanese Islamist Arab government.
Would the British people have had sympathy for Ms. Gibbons if she had gone to Apartheid South Africa in 1985 and given a free education to the children of Pretoria’s white elite? Would they have been so sympathetic if she had provided the children of the leaders of Apartheid South Africa with a free education and helped reinforce the values of Apartheid to those children? I doubt people would have been so sympathetic if she had subsequently been put on trial for insulting Christianity by naming a bear Jesus. The difference is that in the 1980s people like Ms. Gibbons went down to South Africa to help the blacks after reading about the situation there. Today’s westerner has no such judgment. If there is a racist genocidal regime in the Middle East most westerners have no qualms traveling there and volunteering to help in the genocide. Its no surprise that I recently heard a friend of mine tell me how she dearly wanted to travel to Zimbabwe. Why not? Zimbabwe and Sudan are the most ‘exotic’ countries in Africa. Exotic entails any country that has a racist, genocidal government and is a dictatorship. Surely Botswana is not exotic enough, there is no genocide there, no dictatorship, no mass murder. Not exotic. Thus it doesn’t deserve people like our friend Ms. Gibbons. There should be no sympathy for any westerner who travels to Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, Iran, or Sudan or the UAE and subsequently gets themselves into trouble. These countries are barbaric, and they do not deserve tourism or charity, unless that tourism and charity is going to the victims of these disgusting inhuman regimes. If westerners want sympathy they should have a conscience when they travel and when they do their requisite charity work for ‘coloured-exotic’ people.
In reply to an article noting that Ms. Gibbons had been released one European white woman named Kelly Chandler from London noted that “It's so obviously unintentional [the naming of the bear] and it does seem like they have over-reacted. But when you go to another country, you should live by their rules, however strict they may be.” A Muslim (or perhaps a Jew) named Hanna noted that “This is why people who have no idea of the religion [Islam] only see this side of it - because this is the type of story that makes the newspapers.” Another white European named Pete from Leicester noted that by condemning Sudan people were being “racist” and that “Whether or not she (or you, or I) agrees with the sentiment behind the offence caused, cause it she most certainly did - and most probably through ignorance.”
Upon being pardoned by the Sudanese government last week Ms. Gibbons declared: “I am very sorry to leave Sudan. I had a fabulous time. It is a beautiful place and I had a chance to see some of the countryside. The Sudanese people I found to be extremely kind and generous and until this happened I only had a good experience.” Note: there is no critique of the genocide in Darfur, apparently her tour of the ‘countryside’ didn’t include watching African children being burned to death in their huts as their mothers were led off to be gang raped by the Janjaweed. ( One just wonders how many Englishwomen like Ms. Gibbons would travel to Israel and not mention the ‘occupation’.)
There is a message that should go out to all white Europeans: Stop supporting genocidal regimes, that way you won’t have to behave by the rules of those countries. According to the modern post-human leftist European logic if one is in a country and that country is a fascist state that is committing a genocide you should go along and volunteer to help out in the genocide out of respect for the culture and to ‘live by their rules.’ Europeans and Muslims pretend that this news story is why people have a bad view of Islam, but it is Islam that prosecutes people and whips them for naming a bear after their ‘prophet’. Islam gives itself a bad name through thousands of acts of terrorism a year and through genocide and religious intolerance, and then it pretends that this is the fault of the ‘media’. Its not racism to condemn fascist hateful states and their fascist disgusting laws, that’s called free speech and its called honesty. Europeans have a problem with honesty. And one last thing: Just because people cause offense doesn’t mean people should have been offended. The Nazis were offended at the very sight of a Jew, that doesn’t imply that the Jew did something wrong by offending the Nazis through his existence. The Sudanese genocidal regime deserves to be offended every day of the week, every hour of the day, every minute of every hour and every second of every minute until it is destroyed and salt is sown into the sand that produced it. If Europeans want to do some good this Christmas they can support the Sudanese Liberation Army or any of the other Black tribes fighting for their freedom from Khartoum. A few shillings could go a long way towards giving a Dinka tribesman an AK-47, boots, and a belt of ammo.
A War on Women
Seth J. Frantzman
December 3, 2007
The very existence of Islam represents a virtual war on women. That may surprise all the liberal leftist feminists in the west who devote half their time to reading the Koran and apologizing for Islam and attending Ramadan dinners but this is the fact of what Islam actually is.
Take four recent cases. In the West Bank town of Sebastia the Kiwan brothers locked their sister in a special cell they had built in their house for three years. Her crime? She had been divorced. But before she was divorced by her husband she had been sold into that marriage as part of a 'swap marriage' where two brothers married eachother's sisters, without consulting the women of course. She lost three years of her life, and of course all the other years before that. Today Amirah Kidwan is 40. She is a 'shame' to her family. Her 15 year old son was not permitted to see her during her 'incarceration.' Neighbors knew of the imprisonment and did nothing, considering it the business of the Kiwan family and as well know, Muslims don't interfere in eachother's business when it comes to a man's property: his women.
In Saudi Arabia five men gang raped a woman and recorded their 'fun' with a cell phone. When the woman informed police the police arrested her and sentenced her to be whipped 200 times for the crime of 'being alone with a man who is not her husband' which is a violation of Islamic law.
In Ramleh eight women have been murdered in the last three years. All of them have been members of the same Al-Ghanam extended family. All of their crimes have been crimes of immorality. They were perceived to have brought 'shame' on their family. So they all had to die. Each was killed by her own male relatives.
Between 2004 and 2006 six men from the Muslim Arab village of Bir al Maksour gang-raped four women and girls in the Galilee, one who was 13. In the same period another gang of four men from Kalunsuwa, another Arab village, raped two girls in Netanya and a man from Tireh, another Arab Muslim village, raped two girls in Kochav Yair.
These are only a few cases. 99% of Muslim crimes against women go unreported because, as in the case in Sebastia and in Ramleh until recently, most of these crimes are considered ones of 'honor' or they are simply not reported because Muslims feel it is not their duty to interfere in the rule of a man over his household. They aren’t reported for another reason: women are not considered human in Islam, they are objects to be disposed of like an old car, like a CD player that stops working. All of the western white educated intellectual academic Islamic scholars studying in departments of Middle Eastern Studies will dissuade us of this terrible accusation. They will point out, like Ahamdinjad did at Columbia, that Islam thinks women are different, and in fact women are the 'most highly prized sex in Islam.' Highly prized like one prizes a show horse. But what happens to that show horse when it hurts one of its legs? It gets put down. Women are treated differently. That is the excuse we often here from Muslims. In the west women are equal and in Islam they are 'different'. Different, like a human is different than a dog, a dog that when it gets out of hand has to be put down. Yes, we understand the code word 'different'. We understand what it means to be 'prized'.
One would like to see evidence of how Islam 'prizes' women. In Pakistan and Saudi Arabia and Iran if a woman dares to complain that she was raped she immediately bring dishonor on herself. If she is married she is accused of committing adultery. If she cannot bring four male witnesses to the rape then she is accused of having faked it and she then is put on trial for having unlawful sexual contact with men who were not her husband and she risks being stoned to death, whipped or imprisoned. In one case in Pakistan the rape of a young village girl resulted in her family raping a girl from the village that was accused of the original rape. Two rapes apparently made a right in this case. But what of the women. Their 'honor' is forever tarnished and likely they will be murdered by their own brothers for having brought shame on the family.
Imagine a culture where the brother murders his own sister rather than protect her. Islam is the exact opposite of western culture in this respect. Western culture is full of stories of men taking vengeance on other men who have wronged their sisters, mothers or daughters. But in Islamic society, from Iran to Pakistan to Indonesia, the women are to blame, not so much because they caused themselves to be raped, but because they have been perceived to have brought dishonor on a family. In the west the presence of a rapist in the family dishonors the family, in Islam the presence of a rape victim does so.
We are always treated in the west to explanations of how charitable the Islamic custom of divorce is. We are told that although the Catholic church forbids divorce, that Islam is more feministic and has always made it easy. One caveat though: It is only easy for the man. Women can not sue for divorce in Islam. Men can receive a divorce by simply saying "I divorce thee" three times in front of a male witness. That is the Islamic divorce law. It is very charitable for women. Women receive up to three months in Alimony, and if it is feared they are pregnant there is a longer period to determine if they are. In the famous case of Shah Bano in India a Muslim wife of some fifty years was disposed of in this manner, so that the husband could marry other women. She of course receives shame and dishonors her family, just as was the case in the Arab village of Sebastia.
Where does the Islamic hatred of women come from? Is it because of Mohammed and his twelve wives, one of whome was 6 years old at marriage. It must be hard to respect women when the most revered person in a religion spent his time having sex with as many as possible while instructing his followers that they might only have four wives and 'as many concubines obtained through warfare and in the slave market as one pleases.' Perhaps that is where the Islamic 'respect' for women came from: the fact that the Koran and the Hadith detail all the salve girls, that Mohammed and his follower s acquired and raped. Mohammed, if he hadn't been a prophet, would have fit in well in the 18th century American south, lest we forget all the dallying the Southern 'gentry' did with the slave girls, so much raping and dallying in fact that to find an American black who does not have some white ancestry is quite difficult.
Whetever the source is of the Islamic treatment of women, what is most intriguing is the degree to which western female intellectuals and academics excuse that treatment. At least 70% of those studying Arabic today in various programs throughout the Middle East are western women. More then 80% of the converts to Islam on a given year in any western country are western women. When Gaza was taken over by Hamas the first people to be evacuated were 200 Russian women, wives of Muslim Palestinians. They were evacuated with their Muslim husbands. Many prominent Muslim intellectuals have married western women and despite their claims to 'secularism' have encouraged their wives to convert, which the women have done with glee (I speak here of Said K. Aburish and Sari Nusseibeh as two examples). Prominent western women have converted to Islam from Tony Blair's niece to Sir John Goldsmith's daughter. The newest American film, Rendition portrays an American female convert, played by Reece Witherspoon, whose husband is an Egyptian Muslim. There have been cases of western women going to Iraq to blow themselves up and many of the Muslim organizations in the West such as CAIR have prominent western female converts wearing the requisite headscarf. One cannot understand this. Why don't western women embrace a religion that treats them well? Why do they hunger for the slavery offered up in Islam? Furthermore why to academics and leftists and progressives devote so much time to defending a religion, that even if it weren't for its treatment of women, hates abortion and promises the death penalty to criminals.
Why?
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