Terra Incognita
Issue 33
“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
May 3rd, 2008
1) Jews, Power and the creation of the Palestinians: This essay is partly a rebuttal and elaboration on A.B Yehoshua’s recent comments and writings regarding the roots of Anti-Semitism. It is also an exploration of the roots of Jewish anti-Zionism. More than that, it is an exploration of the nature of the ‘other’, indigenous people, the concept of the ‘west’ and it proposes a radical theory regarding the Palestinians, namely that leftist anti-Zionist Jews have created a motif whereby the Palestinians have become the New Jews. They have created the imagery of an Islam that is ‘native’ to Israel and a Palestinian nation that is ‘indigenous’ to Israel. This essay is a ruthless assault on the very foundations of liberalistic secularism, the concepts of Orientalism and moral-relativism. It posits the theory that Jewish power and the creation of a Jewish majority in a state has necessitated the creation of a new Jewish identity among internationalist humanist Jewish thinkers and intellectuals.
Jews, Power and the creation of the Palestinians
Seth J. Frantzman
May 3rd, 2008
Just prior to the founding of the state of Israel a group of left wing intellectuals became concerned about the implications of what having a ‘Jewish’ state would mean. What were the moral implications of having a state run by Jews where Jews were the majority. For intellectuals used to seeing Jews as the struggling suppressed weak, pathetic, always pogromed minority it was an unsettling thought. The moral high ground is always with the minority, the ‘other’. Once the Jews became a majority they would lose their moral high ground. The first attempt to avert this catastrophe was made by the president of the nascent Hebrew University, Judah Magnus, the leading Jewish intellectual Martin Buber and a variety of others. It didn’t work.
Since the failure to prevent the creation of a Jewish state Jews have had to struggle with the idea that a Jewish state exists. A.B Yehoshua, one of Israel’s most celebrated authors, has taken the recent rise in Anti-Semitism as a signal to explore the enduring nature of anti-semitism and he has come up with the following view: “I think a 'defined identity' has more responsibility; it has limits, it is responsible for what it does. Amorphousness is a way to get away from responsibility," he says, adding, "I describe the facts. The Jew changes all the time. He can be assimilated without any visual indications of his identity, or he can distinguish himself, as does an Orthodox Jew. At the same time, he assumes the identity of whichever nation he occupies.” Thus for A.B Yehoshua the existence of Jews necessitates anti-semitism. One engenders the other.
Other leading Jewish intellectuals have interpreted things differently. Tony Judt, a leading European intellectual, one of the foremost scholars on post-war Europe and who, as the Economist reminds us was “born in Britain into a family of Jewish refugees” sees things differently. For him the role of Israel in the world is endlessly pernicious. He claims in his recent book Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century, after noting that his opinion is a ‘lone voice’ that Israel “is widely regarded as a-the-leading threat to world peace.” The italics are his. Forgetting about how Mr. Judt has used both the argument that he is a ‘lone voice’ and the argument that ‘most people agree’ in the same sentence, his perception that Jews, or Israel, is the greatest threat to world peace is not necessarily an anti-Semitic notion. One could just as well conclude that Mr. Judt is simply ascribing astronomical powers to his own people. He is thus a philosemite.
The view of Judt and Yehoshua, both of whome are Jewish, is interesting. On the one hand the existence of the amorphous Jew and his country, Israel, which, according to Yehoshua after the Six-Day war became amorphous because "Israel's clear-cut borders faded, as the nation once again started mixing with another people," creates anti-semitism and on the other hand Judt perceives Jews as an all powerful source for evil, a nation of 13 million threatening the peace of the world.
But what is most fascinating is the question of the minority. For Judt and Yehoshua the power of Jews threatens the world and engenders the hatred of them. So let us return to the period of the innocent Jews, the Jews who died in the Holocaust or the pre-Holocaust pogroms of the Catholic church and the Cossacks. These Jews are universally liked by Jews and gentiles. Jewish historians rarely condemn these people as engendering their own deaths or accuse them of threatening world peace (Bar Ilan Prof. Ariel Toaff’s book Bloody Passover in which he claimed that Jews really did murder Christian children for human blood is an exception).
In her book Healing the land and the Nation: Malaria and the Zionist Project in Palestine Sandra Sufian argues that the project of eradicating malaria also took on a metaphorical dimension—erasing anti-Semitic stereotypes of the “parasitic” Diaspora Jew and creating strong, healthy Jews in Palestine. Sufian shows that, in reclaiming the land and the health of its people in Palestine, Zionists expressed key ideological and political elements of their nation-building project. But what is most fascinating is the fact that Sufian examines the “affects of land reclamation on the indigenous Palestinian population.” It is the word ‘indigenous’ that is most interesting here. Jane Kramer, a Jewish journalist and commentator recently authored an article in the New Yorker entitled ‘the Petition: Israel, Palestine and a tenure battle.’ In it she writes that Israeli archeology “dismissed or destroyed the evidence of other [non-Jewish] settlement, including fourteen hundred years of native Islam.” What is this ‘native Islam’ and who are these ‘indigenous’ Palestinians? Is it a coincidence that Jews, left wing intellectual Jews at least, have discovered indigenous Palestinians and ‘native’ Islam in Israel?
Leftist secular Jewish intellectuals in the early 20th century were primarily interested with either Socialism or the suffering of Jews. Secular Jews were interested in the fate of Jews in North Africa and the suppression of Jews in Eastern Europe. Through organizations such as the JDC or in France the Alliance Israelite, these Jewish minorities became cause celebres. They were the Darfur refugees of the 1920s. But with the destruction of European Jewry, the expulsion of the Jews of Muslim lands, the creation of Israel and the burgeoning wealth of the Jews in other countries the Jews lost there status as beleaguered minority. They simply were not the minority anymore because there were so few of them left in places such as Europe or North Africa. There were no more pogroms because there were few places that Jews still lived, outside the U.S and Israel, by the 1970s.
So Jewish intellectuals took an interest in Israel. They examined it through the new lenses of Anthropology and Sociology. They tried finding minority groups among the Jews in Israel. They discovered Mizrahim and Sephardim. But by and by these groups became uninteresting. They were suffering and there was much in the ‘Zionist narrative’ that could be condemned regarding their treatment at the hands of Israel, but they were part of the Jewish ‘hegemonic’ majority.
The generation of Jane Kramer and Sandra Sufian needed to find a Jewish minority to sympathize with. They found the Palestinians. This may seem strange. How can the Palestinians be a ‘Jewish minority’? The Palestinians were turned into Jews in order to suit the needs of Jewish leftists. The suppressors of the Palestinians took on the form of those who had long suppressed the Jews and Israel became an ‘Apartheid’ ‘Nazi’ state. Such labels are not rare among Jewish intellectuals. From Ilan Pappe to Noam Chomsky, Baruch Kimmerling, Norman Finkelstein, Neve Gordon and other well known Jewish academics and intellectuals the ‘Jewish State’ has become the new ‘Nazi’ and ‘Apartheid’ state, the sum of all evils. For Tony Judt it is the greatest threat to world peace.
Palestinian academics have become the new Jewish academics in the west. Edward Said and Walid Khalidi are widely adored by leftist Jews to the extent that one can even buy ‘I love Walid Khalidi’ T-shirts on Amazon.com. Jewish leftists invented the Palestinians. They didn’t invent them in the sense that they invented their existence but they helped invent their struggle and give them the stamp of ‘native’ and ‘indigenous’. Is it a coincidence that Jews found indigenous people in Israel? There are indigenous people in many countries in the world. But how is it that leftist Jews miraculously found indigenous people in Israel? It begs the question: what country are Jews indigenous to? For a leftist Jew like Jane Kramer, Tony Judt or Sandra Sufian there is no country that they are indigenous to. This is because they need to be members of the majority, the ‘hegemonic’ majority. It is not a coincidence that the same leftist Jews who describe Palestinians as ‘indigenous’ to Israel and describe Islam as ‘native’ to Israel are the same ones that describe themselves as ‘white’. Gerald Sorin, a Jewish Professor in New York, described himself in a recent Haaretz book review he wrote that he was “a white…Jewish guy.” He is not the first one to notice that Jews have become ‘white’ in the U.S. In How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says About Race in America Karen Brodkin explores the issue as has Eric Goldstein in The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity. Thus while secular leftist Jews have increasingly identified themselves as white, thus becoming part of the majority in America and Europe, they have increasingly discovered indigenous people who are not Jewish in Israel in order that the majority Jewish population can be defined as both ‘white’ and ‘colonialist’ and ‘racist’. Islam, a religion founded in the 7th century, has become ‘native’ to Israel. Certainly Judaism, which is 3,000 years old and Christianity which is 2,000 years old is not ‘native’ to the land of Israel.
Leftist Jews have a fear of being ‘native’. Ironically this amorphous identity is the one Yehoshua identifies as the one that is responsible for anti-semitism. Apparently Yehoshua is familiar with the basis of the Nazi hatred of Jews, which accused Jews of not being attached to the blood or soil of Germany. It is a fascinating story that has come full circle. In her polemic Jews and Power Ruth Wisse analyzes this very problematic conundrum, noting that “the way in which diaspora Jews' ‘harmful pattern’ of accommodation to majority power led them to look inward for culpability rather than outward toward their enemies.”
In the end the facts speak for themselves. Palestinians are not indigenous to Israel and Islam is not native. Both are invaders and colonists, albeit ones that showed up 1400 years ago. Israel is not the greatest threat to world peace, it is not possible that a country of 6 million can truly cause conflicts among 6 billion people (unless of course one adheres to the writings of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion). Jews have created the idea of indigenous Palestinians in order to avoid the question of Jewish power and the problem of being a majority and enjoying the notion of having their own country. Instead they have hidden behind extreme self-hate, delusion, blaming themselves for why people hate them and discovering other people that they can extend their sympathies to as the ‘new Jews’. It is no surprise that so many people compare the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza to the sufferings of the Warsaw ghetto and people say things like “how can we as Jews treat the Palestinians like this after our history of suffering.” Arnold Toynbee predicted in the 1950s that the Palestinians, because of their love for the land, would become the ‘new Jews’ if they were kept as refugees (he was also one of the first western writers to compare Zionism to Nazism). He couldn’t know how right he would be.
To some this idea seems far fetched and ridiculous. But how else can one explain the way in which those who hate Israel so much and blame it for causing all the conflicts in the world, people like Tony Judt, will also complain that it is unfair that Jews accuse them of being anti-semites. They say ‘on the contrary we believe the Jews should be a light unto the world, Tikkun Olam, Jews must be an example to the world.’ For them Israel is not Jewish and its people are not Jews, the Palestinians are the Jews because Jews are victims. They identify with the Palestinians and they compare their suffering to the suffering of Jews of old. The fact that the Palestinians have become ‘indigenous’ to Israel, the word Tony Judt also uses to describe them, shows how true this perception is. Modern leftist Jews aren’t the first to notice the connection. The Englishmen who worked for the Palestine Exploration Fund in the 19th century used to comment in the fund’s quarterly that the Palestinian peasants had ‘Jewish features’. It is no surprise that modern day archeology and especially the European and Palestinian variety supported by the ‘Denmark School’ and Israel Finkelstien argue that Judaism was neither monotheistic and nor was it ever indigenous to the land. Instead the Israelites, so these archeologists claim, borrowed their religion from the Assyrians, they even stole the so-called ‘Babylonian Job’ and co-opted it. Instead the Canaanites were the true inhabitants of the land of Israel and their blood flows in the Palestinian veins. Nadia Abu El Haj, who Jane Kramer defended in her New Yorker article is of such a belief. For Ms. Abu El Haj, Israeli archeology is the height of colonialism because it does not recognize the ‘native Islam’ and thus destroying sites Israel has deemed ‘Jewish’ such as Joseph’s Tomb (as the Palestinians did in 2001) is an act of resistance by Palestinians. Destroying history is thus ‘struggle’. Liberal Jews who see the Palestinians as the new Jews desire that this new Jewish history have its stamp on the land, what better way then to destroy the history of the other, the Israelite history.
The strange way in which Tony Judt sees the Israelis as being responsible for world conflict and at the same time writes so passionately about his fellow Jews such as Hannah Arendt and Arthur Koestler demonstrates that for him there is nothing Jewish about Israel. He cannot be an anti-Semite because he only hates Israel which would be like hating Somalia, it is so distant in relationship to him (except no one would be so far fetched as to blame Somalia for conflict throughout the world). In the film the Believer which depicts a Jewish Neo-Nazi in the U.S who is confronted by a former classmate turned Zionist, the Nazi says of the Israelis “those people aren’t Jews” and then notes “they act like storm troopers in the territories” to which another Jew replies “so do you hate them because they are Jewish or like them because they are like the Nazis?” Perhaps more poignantly the Neo-Nazi is later confronted with a right wing financial supporter of his group who he accuses of being a Jew and the man says to him “perhaps we are all Jews now.” The identity of Jewishness for Tony Judt, Sandra Sufian and Jane Kramer, is about being good. A Jew is good. A Jew heals the world. When a Jew does not live up to this expectation of being both good and a victim and an example then he ceases to be a Jew and scorn should be heaped upon him as a ‘Nazi’. A Croatian journalist living in Israel who was confronted once on why she would never visit a religious Jewish area and dress modestly but would wear a headscarf while visiting a religious Muslim place noted that “I expect more of the Jews.” Exactly. Religious Jews with their dirty sidelockes, their poverty stricken way of life. Those can’t be Jews because the Jew is intellectual, the Jew is always campaigning for some cause and he is a light unto the nations, healing the world, a humanist and an internationalist.
The recent letter signed by more than a hundred Jewish intellectuals in England merely proves the point. In the letter printed in the Manchester Guardian they noted that "We're not celebrating Israel's anniversary they will not be celebrating Israel' independence day… [Israel is] a state founded on terrorism, massacres and the dispossession of another people from their land…What the Holocaust is to the Jews, the Naqba is to the Palestinians…. We cannot celebrate the birthday of a state founded on terrorism, massacres and the dispossession of another people from their land. We cannot celebrate the birthday of a state that even now engages in ethnic cleansing, that violates international law, that is inflicting a monstrous collective punishment on the civilian population of Gaza and that continues to deny to Palestinians their human rights and national aspirations." Signatories include playwright Harold Pinter, and internationally known doctor Steven Rose, British Radio 4 broadcaster Mike Rosen, Daniel Machover, the judge who filed charges against IDF reservist Doron Almog, and Haim Bresheeth, the professor of communications at the University of East London. But what no one asked was why would they celebrate Israel's 60th anniversary? They are not Israeli. They are British citizens. They are not indigenous to anywhere. Their religion is not native to anywhere because they are of the opinion that the Palestinians are indigenous to Israel and that Islam is native to Palestine. Thus these Jews would never celebrate Israel's independence day. They aren’t Israeli. But it does beg the question why these British Jews celebrate any of the national holidays in the U.K given the fact that English history is also replete with massacres and the dispossession of other peoples. What rings true mostly is that here are Jewish people who are obsessed with a country that is not theirs. They don't issue statements in the Guardian decrying the independence day of any other country. Thus these people have come to view the Palestinians as Jews. This is clear because this level of vindictive visceral scorn towards Israel and its treatment of the native Palestinians is unique. Even before the Holocaust, with anti-semitism and the Nuremburg laws in Germany the Jews of England did not express such distaste for Nazism or Nazi Germany. These Jews have found an indigenous people in the one place where Judaism was born and that indigenous people they have labeled 'Palestinian' and they have put their national Jewish aspirations into the Palestinians and have an emotional bond with Palestinians to the degree that they support Palestinian self determination but never supported Jewish self determination, they label the Palestinians as 'native' but cannot label themselves as Jews as being native to anything, they learn Arabic and call Mohammed 'prophet' but they cannot speak Hebrew. This is the gulf that separates Israel from the Jews, especially leftist intellectual Jews. All over the world Jewish activists, for instance South Africa's Ronnia Kasrils and Nadine Gordimer, identify with every group that is not Jewish and they put their emotional love into these groups and identify so wholeheartedly with them that one must note that for these Jews these 'others' have become Jews.
Jewish philosophers were at the forefront of creating the theory of 'the Other'. Emannuel Levinas who was born in Lithuania in 1906 and emigrated to France where he became a philosopher was one of the central figures in fashioning this idea. He was an admirer of the philosopher Martin Heidegger (as was Hannah Arendt) but was dismayed when Heidegger worked hand in hand with the Nazi regime during the war (Hannah Arendt however was not dismayed, she continued a sexual affair after the war with this leading Nazi, testifying on his behalf even when she was penning Eichman in Jerusalem, an essay in which she blamed the Jews for their 'responsibility' for the Holocaust and in which she defined the Germans as merely 'banal' for their involvement). It is no surprise that the 'Other' was something Jews took note of since they were the classical other in European history. European anti-semites saw themselves as rooted in the soil and manly and brave and saw Jews as hook-nosed, rootless and cowardly. But what happens when Jews become a majority in their own country? Suddenly the 'other' becomes the majority that country and a new ‘other’ must be created. In Israel that means the Arabs. Thus the Arabs become the Jews. This is why Martin Buber and Judah Magnus were so afraid of having a Jewish state and why they formed Brit Shalom and argued for a bi-national Jewish-Arab state. For them the idea of a Jewish state was horrific because Jews would then become responsible and Jews would be to blame for having created an 'other' and that would necessitate Jewish intellectuals striving to skewer the Jewish state for its wrongs and its racism the way Jews had skewed European states for their wrongs towards minorities and Jews. But Israel was born. For Tony Judt and his ilk the breaking point was 1967. For Yehoshua the breaking point is also 1967 because it is then that the Jewish state became like the Jews of old in Europe: amorphous and without borders, rootless and nomadic, unattached to a soil. Twenty years. That was the gestation period. But in truth it is not twenty years. Already at the Eichmann trial in 1961 Hannah Arendt was noting the Jewish 'responsibility' for the Holocaust and already she was calling the hanging of Eichmann a 'crime' while making Eichmann's crimes merely 'banal'. It had already started, the drift of Jewish intellectuals away from Israel and towards the definition of the Palestinians as the classic 'other', or the New Jews. To understand the connection between Levinas, Magnus, Buber, Arendt, Judt and Yehoshua one does not have to step back to far. This is a small world of intellectualism. It is a world whose views should be obvious. But it is not obvious. Instead the views of these people are taken at face value. The views of the Jewish intellectuals in England who condemn Israel's independence day is taken at face value. They are merely concerned that Israel is not living up to her Jewish potential and they oppose her actions because they oppose all human rights violations. But no one dares ask: "do you celebrate independence day in the UK?". No one dares ask of Sufian or Judt or Kramer "What are you indigenous to? Where is your Judaism native?" Inevitably these are uncomfortable questions. But they are important questions. Anyone who claims the Palestinians are indigenous to Israel and Islam is native to the Holy land must then ask themselves "where am I indigenous to?" If Nadia Abu El Haj can be indigenous to Palestine, even though her mother is a Christian European, then Jane Kramer and Tony Judt and Sandra Sufian must be indigenous to something. Or is it, in Yehoshua's view, proper to hate Sufian, Judt and Kramer because they are not indigenous and therefore amorphous. But anti-semitism today is not directed at the rootless Jews such as Chomsky and Sufian. It is directed at the rooted ones in Israel. So Yehoshua has turned the whole state of Israel into a Jewish state, arguing that it does not play well with others. Judt too makes this claim in his book, asking Israel to 'grow up' and claiming that Europe has 'grown up' in the last sixty years. He means that Europe has become secular, has low birthrates and has no sense of nationalism. It has been easy for Europe to grow up. Europe already committed its crimes. But what type of putrid festering blood dimmed soil has Europe grown up on but the soil permeated with the destruction of European Jewry wrought by the Holocaust? Blood and Soil. That was the Nazi ethos. The Nazis did indeed soak the soil with blood, theirs and others. Judt cannot root himself in that soil. Israel has tried to mature but it is held back by others who accuse it of being 'conceived in sin' for its treatment of the Palestinians. One just wonders, are not the Europeans equally conceived in Sin because of their crimes in the Holocaust?
Case Study: Haim Bresheeth
Haim Bresheeth is not a name that is well known in anti-Israel circles. He is not on the level of a Pappe or a Chomsky. But he is part of the second tier of anti-Israel intellectuals (the third tier is the groupies and students with the 'I love Khalidi t-shirts). Haim Bresheeth's name came up when he signed the letter in the Guardian declaring that he, along with 100 other Jewish anti-Zionists, were not celebrating Israel's independence day. His letter included references such as asking us all to "acknowledge the narrative of the price paid by another people for European anti-Semitism and Hitler's genocidal policies." But to understand Mr. Bresheeth and see how he is a case study in our discussion we must examine him as a specimen of an anti-Israel fanatic.
His B.A and MA were from Tel Aviv University. His PhD, which he received in 1979, was from the Royal College of Arts and his PhD topic was "film language". He is the chair of Media and Cultural studies at the University of East London. He has taught in Israel at Sapir College and at Hebrew University. According to his biography he wrote a best selling introduction to the Holocaust called 'Holocaust for beginners in 1993. He also publishes regularly in Cairo's Al Ahram newspaper. His most recent scholarly publications have been on the subject of " The Continued Trauma and the Palestinian Struggle: Recent Cinematic Representations of the Nakba." He has written such edifying editorials as 'Sharon's Willing Accomplices' (a play on the famous book 'Hitler's willing executions') and 'Resisting Israel's Apartheid.' He has also written an editorial entitled 'Its not anti-semitic to criticize Israel.' He also considers himself an expert on "subjects such as Nazi films and their historical representation strategies, Fascist cinema of the spectacle." As an expert in film and television he authored a study commission by Israel's Ministry of Science and Culture entitled 'A comprehensive report on the state of Public Broadcasting in Israel, and outlining the necessary changes required in order to modernize the system.' In 1989 he authored a scholarly article entitled “The Israeli Self and Palestinian Other.” In his research on the other he became interested in Vampire movies and wrote ' Marking the Social other by Blood: The Vampire Genre.' As an academic he has received various grants including one research grant ($27,000 per annum) from the Israel Science Foundation, The Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities for research on 'The Other and Stranger in Recent European Cinema.' Despite receiving this money he is not, as he made clear, celebrating Israel's independence day. In the letter he signed that appeared in the Guardian he noted that the 'indigenous' Palestinians who fled Ramla and Lod referred to their ordeal as a 'Death March'.
Prof. Bresheeth is a fascinating case precisely because he combines so many interesting contradictions and themes. He is an expert on the Holocaust and has written about the development of the 'other' in European cinema. Thus he exhibits the classic Jewish interest in the 'other' which portrays Jews as an 'other' in Europe. He is very sympathetic to Jews who were victims of Europeans, the 'good Jews' who died in the Holocaust. He received his credentials from Israel. In fact Israel, the country he hates so much, has provided him with sustenance and teaching opportunities. This is a classic liberalistic reaction: bite the hand that feeds. When it comes to Arab daily newspapers such as Al-Ahram he preaches to the converted, instead of asking them to learn about the 'other' he preaches to the converted, calling upon them to hate Israel and asking them to care for their 'brothers' the Palestinians. The theory of the 'other' does not go for all societies, some societies, such as Muslim societies, get to wallow in the self. This is another classic liberal way of doing things. The liberal preaches self-critique at home, he opposes religion at home and he supports gay rights and recognition of the other, but when he is abroad in a place like Saudi Arabia he dons the necessary clothing and marches in lock-step with the prevailing opinion. He is the nationalist for the other. In Israel he is interested in Sunni Arabs. In Egypt he is interested in Sunni Arabs (as opposed to the Egyptian 'other', the Coptic Christians).
What is fascinating to note is how the narrative and dialectic of Nazism permeates the thinking of Bresheeth. He is an 'expert' on the Holocaust and he uses that imagery to define the things he hates today: Israel. Thus the Palestinians suffered a 'death march'. He claims that they called it a 'death march'. But it is not they who used this word, it is him. He created this element of Palestinian historiography in order to make the Palestinians into the Jews, since the Jews of Europe suffered a 'death march' then the Palestinians must have suffered one at the hands of the Zionist Nazis. Israel is the 'apartheid' state, a term that has been borrowed from radically like Bresheeth, Dugard, Gordimer, Virginia Tilley, Tutu and Kasrils by Palestinian activists. For Bresheeth the Jews are positive when they are the 'other' in Europe, but when they are known as Israeli then they become negative and a new 'other' appears; The Palestinians. Bresheeth is interested in the Holocaust and the Nakba because for him the two peoples are the same. The Jews who went to the gas chambers are like their Palestinian cousins who went on the Death March from Ramla. They are linked.
Bresheeth is the case study. He is not indigenous to anywhere. He notes that the Palestinians are 'indigenous' to Israel. He doesn't celebrate Israeli independence day but he takes $50,000 a year from the Israeli government and the Israeli taxpayer. For someone who compares Israel to a Nazi Apartheid state he is quite a collaborator. Luckily for Bresheeth his type of collaboration is not punished the way Palestinian collaborators (accused of giving Israel information) are by their fellow Palestinians. They are made to kneel on the ground and they are shot in the back of the head. Their families are exiled and their daughters raped. But those who shoot them in the back of the head are part of the 'armed struggle', they are 'freedom fighters' and they are the intellectual fellow travelers of Mr. Bresheeth, they are the 'other'. When an 'other' shoots someone in the back of the head it is called 'armed struggle'.
Back to the West
Judt wants to drag Israel kicking and screaming back to Europe. He claims that Israel is a European state made up of Europeans with European ideology, wrongly noting that the Ashkenazim are a majority in Israeli society, he claims that these European Jews (Ashkenazim as opposed to Sephardim) created a European state in the Middle East. Yair Sheleg, author of a recent editorial in Haaretz also says of Israel that "Israel is indeed discriminated against by the criticism leveled at it; not necessarily because it is a Jewish state, but rather mainly because it is a Western state." But Mr. Sheleg (whose name means 'snow' in Hebrew) would do better to note that it is perceived as a Western State. Ina Friedman of Holland wrote recently in a review of A Grave in Gaza that “for Western and especially Israeli readers, who have been isolated from their Palestinian neighbors by fiat, fear or enmity, it [the book] humanizes a community that ‘s largely been reduced to stereotypes and caricatures in our minds (in this description the Israelis are even more western than the westerners).” The dialectic of Israel is constructed so that it is Western so that its critics can continue the tradition, invented in the West, of finding an ‘other’. Since Israel is European and Western there should be Jews in Israel, there should be an 'other'. There are no more Jews in Europe, since the Holocaust, so Israel, being the last European country, the country that ceases to grow up, must have Jews, and those Jews are the Palestinians. There is no doubt in the minds of Sufian, Judt, Chomsky or Kramer or all the others that Israel is European. Demographics won't fool them. Even if they are forced to admit that of the Ashkenazim in Israel an ever increasing number are made up of religious Jews, the Shtetle Jews of old, the 'Ostjuden' who were so despised by Intellectual German Jewry (so despised in fact that after the Holocaust in Munich when some Ostjuden survivors demanded to have a share of the remaining Jewish assets in the city the 70 remaining German-Jewish survivors that had lived in the city before the war refused to share anything with their cousins from the East), the leftist will not admit that Israel is decidedly un-western. But how many 'western' people exist in Israel? Outside of the 25,000 Europeans who reside full time as aid-workers in Ramallah there are few Westerners in Israel. There are the aging Yekkes (German-Jews), but these make up a tiny segment of the population and their cultural flowering, which took place in the 1930s, and their attempt to dominate the academy, has long since run its course. There are French Jewish immigrants, but 90% of these are descendants of Algerian Jews, not Ashkenazim from France. There are the American Jewish immigrants but these are made up to a great extent of Yeshiva students or the newly religious, all of whome have embraced decidedly non-western views of the state and of life. The Russian Jews cannot be called Western as historically Western-Civilization has seen the Russian, the Orthodox Mongol Bolshevik horde, as an 'other'. In order for Israel to be western the leftist must ignore the decidedly brown features of many of the inhabitants of the country. Such is the reason that historiography of Israel latches on to the period 1948-1969. Judt speaks of the German-Jewish moshavs where the Jews spoke German and replicated Germany in their building materials (perhaps a fanciful belief, he is probably thinking of the actual German Templar communities of German Christians who became Nazis and were forced to leave Palestine by the British. Their five moshavs such as Bethlehem of the Galilee, Sarona, Wilhelma, and the two 'German colonies' were turned over to Jews in 1948). Judt remarks that the German-Jews looked down on the Arabs or ignored the existence of the Arabs, thus creating 'colonies' where Judt recalls them 'sipping lemonade' much as the British did in Kenya's 'white highlands'. Thus the German Jews become the Nazis, the colonists, the Yekkee immigration of the 1930s, which was caused by the Nazi rise to power, replicated the Nazi racism in Israel. So Israel is forced to assume the guilt of having allowed the German-Jews in because it is German-Jews who brought their European civilization to Israel. This is fanciful. Judt would say that Zionism is a version of European nationalism bred of the 19th century. Thus Israel becomes European. But by this logic so to the resistant movements of Africa, almost all of which were devoted to Socialism and Nationalism, were 'European'. But no one today would characterize Robert Mugabe or Laurent Kabila as 'western'. Why not?
This motif is a circle. It is a circle of self-definition and re-definition of the self and creation of the ‘other’ in order to please the self. It is the innermost need of every western self-hating leftist to find the ‘other’ to find something that he can blame himself for creating, to find some simple definition of the world that divides people into disadvantaged ‘black’ people and oppressive evil ‘conceived in sin’ ‘white’ people. He will go to any lengths to do it. He will re-define Jews as white. Then he will re-define Hispanics as white. Whatever it takes. He will turn non-western people into westerners. He will turn Sinhalese Buddhists and Indian Hindus into ‘radical fundamentalists’ just so that he can say ‘all world religions have fundamentalist terrorism’. Within every condemnation and every ‘human rights report’ and every protest and every editorial and every lecture one must find the seed that is the lie, the central problem that always reveals the truth behind seemingly benign intellectualism. When someone uses the word ‘indigenous’ or the word ‘native’ one must vigorously oppose and question the meaning of such words. When the word ‘other’ crops up it must be assaulted and brought out so that it can be seen for what it truly is. Words like ‘so-called’ must be examined to find their inconsistency. The mother of all insults ‘western’ and ‘nazi’ and ‘fascist’ and ‘fundamentalist’ and ‘colonialist’ and ‘imperialist’ must always be questioned and critiqued. The word ‘race’ and related words such as ‘multi-racial’ and ‘diversity’ and ‘multi-ethnic’ and ‘multi-cultural’ and ‘moral-relativism’ must always be latched onto so at to not allow people to infuse their beliefs with such strange ideas that Barack Obama is a ‘mixed-race, multi-ethnic African American’(An actual quote from Gerald Sorin). When Obama’s pastor, the now infamous Rev. Jeremiah Wright, was speaking recently to a black congregation he gave a convoluted explanation of how the ‘white brain’ is subject oriented and the ‘black brain’ is object oriented to convey his theory that standardized testing and teaching is racist. But Mr. Wright. You are half white so which brain are you thinking with today? It reminds one of the old riddle. A man comes to a cross roads and there is a man there. The person declares that he lies every other day. What question can you answer him to find out which way to go (assuming he knows the way)?
‘If I asked you yesterday which way to go what would you have said?’ Whatever he says, do the opposite.
The same could be said for liberalism. Whatever it says, whether it is telling us that prostitution is actually feminism or that genocide is justice or that terrorism is armed struggle or that Palestinians are native. Do the opposite. Assume the opposite.
Sunday, May 4, 2008
Thursday, May 1, 2008
Terra Incognita 32 Straw men, American military in film and diplomacy
Terra Incognita
Issue 32
“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
April 27th, 2008
1) Fighting the straw man: national narrative, miscegenation and a foil of lies: A series of recent books have argued that they are presenting an ‘original’ narrative of some forgotten figure who was ‘ahead of his time’ in opposing racism or colonialism or in viewing Native-Americans as people. A closer examination shows that these ‘lone men’ are not so alone and that the liberalistic desire to oppose the straw man which they call the ‘traditional nationalist narrative’ is merely a foil used to force us all to read un-original books about people who were only marginally interesting.
2) Murderers, rapists and innocent Arabs: the American military as depicted in film: Since the end of the Cold War a dozen American films have been made about the American military in the post-war environment. These films universally portray American soldiers as crazy suicidal murderers who commit war crimes. At the same time other films portray Muslim Arabs as innocent victims of the war on terror. From Rendition to Valley of Elah these movies give a jaded, biased and unfair portrayal of men under arms and terrorism.
3) The new god: diplomacy and dialogue: When Jimmy Carter explained why he had to hug Hamas officials in Ramallah, Cairo and Damascus he explained that ‘diplomacy, communication and dialogue’ can solve all the worlds problems and that they must always be explored. This is a mantra. It is part of a new religion. But history tells us a different story. Rarely has diplomacy prevented conflict, not in 1939 and not in 1914. This is a dangerous god to bow down to and we should realize that talking and communicating usually solve nothing. Force of arms and deterrence tell a different story.
Fighting the straw man: national narrative, miscegenation and a foil of lies
Seth J. Frantzman
April 18th, 2008
It is common for new history books to seek to explode ‘national narratives’ and ‘national myths’. Eventually after the myth has been shown to be false the new ‘explosion’ literature becomes its own genre and becomes so popular that every book written about history is in this ‘radical’ narrative. Every book then repeats the mantra that ‘in the old nationalist narrative’. The book thus gives its reason de eitre as fighting against the old racist nationalist view and thus the book is ‘original’. But one Haaretz review of books for the month of March showed how deliberate a scam this is. Every single book mentioned a ‘traditional Zionist narrative’ and every single book was telling an ‘unknown’ story of something outside this narrative. Whether it was S. Smilansky’s Khirbet story of the IDF cleansing a Palestinian village, written in 1950 mind you, or a story of some Iraqi Jew who loves the Arabic language it was always the same. “This book is important because it explodes the national narrative”. Tom Segev’s career has been based on this. Whether it is demoting Naomi Shemer’s ‘Yerushalaim Shel Zahav (Jerusalem of Gold)’ song and showing it to be stolen from Gypsy music (perhaps not noticing that this in itself, the Gypsy-Jewish musical connection is of interest) or showing that some other ‘Zionist’ story of a heroic dead soldier is actually the story of friendly-fire, here is a man who is always ‘paving new ground’.
But what if all these mythical stereotypes were themselves stereotypes, a sort of straw man, a foil, set up by post-humanism in order to create a new narrative, one that always existed, but the foil allows it to be shoved down our throats so that while we consume it we think we are being original. State sponsored press in many countries that lack a free press give up a daily dose of this type of ‘unique’ and ‘original’ thought. The ‘continual’ revolution of Mao became nothing more than State sponsored ‘revolution’ against itself, a contradiction in terms since a state cannot sponsor a revolution against itself without making the ‘revolution’ invalid.
Consider these national myths. The American treatment of blacks is the American original Sin and since Americans didn’t begin atoning for this sin until the 1960s it remains a stain on American history, on that is ill recognized (this from Roger Cohen’s recent editorial in the Herald Tribune).
Racism began in South Africa in the 17th century with the arrival of the first Dutch Colonists. There was always racism and everyone thought the blacks uncivilized and abused them until 1994 when South Africa became a democracy. (this from the official minutes of the final findings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission).
Americans always thought the Native-Americans uncivilized and they were always treated as if they were ‘savages’ and few people recognized their humanity. A genocide was committed against them for which the U.S has never atoned. (this courtesy of Tom Chaffin and his book Pathfinder and also of Ward Churchill and his A Little Matter of Genocide).
Zionist history always saw a ‘land without a people’ and Zionism commited an ‘original sin’ in ethnically-cleansing the indigenous Palestinians. Israelis were taught to believe that the Zionist conquest was clean and that they had revived the land. (this courtesy of Ilan Pappe and Tom Segev and Haaretz).
What is most fascinating is how many books today are written about characters from these periods and show them to be ‘going against the grain’ or ‘ahead of their time’ in their treatment of the ‘indigenous people’ or their championing of rights for blacks. Thus George Crook and John Fremont were ‘ahead of their time’ in viewing the Native-Americans as people and championing their rights. Goodbye Bafana tells “the true story of a white South African racist whose life was profoundly altered by the black prisoner he guarded for twenty years.” James Gregory is this South African who was ‘ahead of his time’. Ronnie Kasrils, the Jewish South African member of the ANC, was likewise ‘ahead of his time’ as was Bram Fischer, the ‘Afrikaner Marxist Revolutionary’. John Brown who has been aptly named an ‘American Terrorist’ in a recent book was ‘ahead of his time’ in opposing slavery and his uniqueness or ‘lone voice’ was not heard again until the time of the Freedom Riders.
But what is fascinating, especially in Israeli history, is how often these ‘lone voices’ seem to crop up, until eventually they become a crescendo. Aaron Aaronsohn, who is the subject of at least three new biographies (Aaronsohn’s maps and Lawrence and Aaronsohn), is the new darling, another ‘lone voice’. But when you have too many ‘lone voices’ you start to have a crowd and then you start to have a crescendo.
Its obvious why history books claim to be offering something new. No one wants to read a book that says “someone else already wrote this so this book is not original but it illuminates an interesting person who happens to have not been unique.” Everyone wants to read about the ‘one man’ who saw slavery as a vice. But everyone seems to forget that this need to find the ‘lone voice’ is a petty trend that ignores not only history but also bastardizes the view of history as a ‘national myth’, one that must always be torn down by illuminating a nation’s ‘sins’. As an aside it cannot go without mention the degree to which this secular, post-humanist need to find an ‘original’ sin of every nation, from Israel to the U.S. seems to speak to a strange religious characteristic in secularism. The secular view of history is akin to the Catholic view of man.
The problem with these lone voices is that while many of these people were extraordinary individuals, few of them were original. What is most surprising is to realize the degree to which the idea of a ‘nationalist narrative’ is a creation of modernity, a creation of the left, a straw man or foil, created so that it can be beaten down.
The Indians were not viewed as human. Bartoleme De Las Casas already challenged this in the 16th century. He arrived in Hispanola (The Dominican Republic) in 1502. How many years was that after Columbus came upon the New World. How many? Lets think. Lets ponder. Ten years. Ten years. Only ten years after Ward Churchill tells us the American Genocide of the Natives began there was already a man campaigning for their human rights. Ten years. So why is it surprising to Mr. Chaffin that John Charles Fremont, that famous 19th century American explorer of the American West, respected the Indians? Benjamin Franklin had respect for them in the 18th century. Why is it so surprising that George Crook, Al Sieber, George Bent, Kit Carson and Charles Gatewood and Nelson Miles and so many others had sympathy for the fate of the American Indian? Where was this ‘myth’. It simply did not exist. This idea that every ‘white man’ thought the Indians ‘savages’ is simply not true. The only degree to which it is true is the fact that the basest people viewed the Indians as ‘savage’. To pretend that the ‘national narrative’ reflects the basest people’s observations and petty hatreds is unfair to a history that was filled with so many leading personalities who respected, learned from and cared about the Native-Americans.
It is impossible to go through every example to show the degree to which every national narrative has been warped by people in order to serve a modern political agenda. Suffice it to say that the same will be found elsewhere. The early Zionists who respected the Palestinian Arabs were not few and far between. From Moshe Dayan to Rehavam Zeevi to Aaronsohn and Weizmann, they all did not believe this ridiculous ‘myth’ of a ‘land without a people’. But they could not be blind to the fact that they had witnessed the entire Coastal Plain of Israel being drained of malarial swamps and giving birth to cities where desert had once been. To characterize this as a ‘myth’ as Sandra Sufian and Baruch Kimmerling have done (see her book Healing the Land and the Nation) one must ignore reality. Aerial photos of the period don’t lie. Israel is the only country in the world to have a net increase in forests and trees in the last 60 years. Its not a myth. It’s a fact. If Hertzl didn’t see any Arabs on his way from Jaffa to Jerusalem that is because there were few Arab villages along the road. There are still today, when Israel’s population has increased ten fold from the time of Herzl’s visit, few villages or towns on the road of Jaffa to Jerusalem and one could still remark that the land could hold more people.
Roger Cohen is wrong to claim that America has not recognized the ‘sin’ of slavery. For a Jewish writer, and Cohen is Jewish, it is strange that he views history as one involving Sin. Apparently his secularism overrides his Judaism in this concept of history. Americans have recognized this ‘sin’ since the time of the founding fathers. Huge numbers have recognized it since the 1850s. Millions of Americans died to end slavery in the American South during the Civil War, making America the only country in the history of the world that has waged a civil war in order to end slavery (by contrast there is not one single instance in the Islamic world of Muslims killing fellow Muslims in order to set free non-Muslims enslaved throughout the centuries of Muslim colonization of Eastern Europe, Africa, India and the Middle East. Oddly we do not hear about Islam’s ‘original sin’ of enslaving others). Europeans judge Americans harshly for slavery, odd when it is an institution that America inherited from them. From the very beginnings of American history there has been an antipathy towards slavery, especially eminating from the Yankee part of America, which was never slave owning. The great irony is that the ‘sin’ of slavery is foisted upon the WASP founders of America when it was the most WASPy of them, men such as John Adams, who abhorred the institution. To characterize the founders as slave owners is disingenuous to say the least. Fifty-Six men signed the Declaration of Independence. Among them Samuel Adams, Stephen Hopkins, Benjamin Rush, Elbridge Gerry, James Wilson, John Adams, Roger Sherman, John Witherspoon, and Benjamin Franklin were abolitionists. No more than 21 of them lived in states where slave-owning was prevalent and many of those did not own slaves.
To touch on one final subject where a myth has been created that is completely false it is worthwhile to quickly examine the history of Miscegenation laws in the U.S. Most people today assume the laws were created by racist southerners to prevent white women from marrying black men. The first anti-miscegenation law in the Americas was passed in Virginia in 1691. Slavery only began in Virginia in the 1650s and was not codified until 1705. Slaves inherited the status of their mothers. The logic behind the Miscegenation laws was racist in the sense that it wanted to prevent white slave owners from having intercourse with their female slaves and producing offspring that would then become a ‘mixed’ class whose status would be unclear. If slaves remained black then any African in the colony could be considered a slave. The first people sentenced under the law were all white male slave owners, a number of whome were sentenced to be whipped, according to the book, The Birth of America by William R. Polk. The painting by John Gabiel Stedman entitled ‘Flagellation of a female samboe slave’ from the period 1772-1777 confirms that this was a common occurrence: “Stedman witnessed this punishment in 1774. The woman being whipped was an eighteen-year old girl who was given 200 lashes for having refused to have intercourse with an overseer.” The book The Senator and the Socialite by Lawrence Otis Graham confirms the fact further. Both his characters, Blanche Bruce, the first Black Senator in the U.S (elected in the 1870s) and Josephine Willson were descendants of white fathers and black mothers. This hidden history of miscegenation existed up until the period of Strom Thurmond, the American senator and one time presidential contender who father children with a black mistress. When Trent Lott praised Thurmond after his death, Senator Lott was criticized for eulogizing the ‘segregationist’ Mr. Thurmond. Oddly enough Thurmond’s segregation did not extend to the bedroom where he took after many of his white Southern ancestors. The modern liberal forgets this history in his desire to see racism as a one way street that fits his needs. When this author pointed out the actual history of miscegenation laws (“Miscegenation laws were originally passed to stop Slave masters from raping their slaves, not to stop black men from marrying white women”) in a review a liberal by the name of Michael Shaub wrote on a website called bookslut.com (http://www.bookslut.com/propaganda/2004_12_003821.php) that only a “right wing gullible nutcase” could believe such a thing. Liberals can’t stomach the idea that miscegenation was adopted to prevent the blurring of slave-free color lines in the 17th century, not adopted by a reactionary south in the 1950s to prevent alluring black men such as Paul Robeson, Fredrick Douglas, O.J Simpson, Kofi Annon and Barack Obama Sr. from marrying white women, which each of the above did. Fredrick Douglas must be the standout here, he somehow managed to marry a white woman even in the days when miscegenation laws still existed. They were only struck down by the Supreme Court in 1967 in the case Loving v. Virginia. Who was Richard Loving? He was a white man. Who did he want to marry? Mildred Jeter, a black woman. It must be hard for leftists to learn that their beloved racial hobby-horse, miscegenation laws, were brought low by a white man and his black wife. It wasn’t a black man who was ‘breaking boundaries’, ‘shattering stereotypes’, ‘ahead of his time’ and ‘paving new ground’. I put it to you Mr. Schaub, you bourgeoisie, un-authentic leftist, liberal, progressive, post-humanist. Whose the gullible one?
Murderers, rapists and innocent Arabs: the American military as depicted in film
Seth J. Frantzman
April 19th, 2008
Rendition (2007), Stop-Loss (2008), Strip-Search (2004), Valley of Elah (2007), A Few Good Men (1992), The General’s Daughter (1999), Basic (2003), Rules of Engagement(2000), Road to Guantanamo(2006) and Courage under fire (1996).
Between the end of the Cold War and 2008 there have been about a dozen films regarding the American military in the post-Cold War world. With the exception of Jarhead (2005) few of them have presented the military in a positive light. Meanwhile films depicting American soldiers from previous eras have shown them in positive lights, including We Were Soldiers Once (2002), Saving Private Ryan (1998) and Band of Brothers (2001). As time has gone films depicting the modern post-Gulf War soldier have become increasingly jaded, portraying every character in uniform as demented, crazy, murderous and suicidal. Meanwhile films portraying the enemy, terrorists, have only depicted them as innocent, always being wrongly accused and brutally carted off by thuggish Americans to holding cells in Guantanamo.
This portrayal is both disturbing and unfair but mostly it is not only indicative of Hollywood’s view of the U.S but also increasingly brainwashing audiences into believing that the American military is thuggish and terrorists are all innocent. It began with the end of the Cold War. To be sure the American military did not have a sterling reputation on screen before that. The Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now, Casualties of War, Hamburger Hill, Full Metal Jacket and Platoon all depicted the tragedies of Vietnam. But each one included soldiers who were positive models along side those who were not. All of them included a main character who wore the uniform and was a moral center.
When we examine Paul Haggis’s Valley of Elah we see that every soldier is depicted in a negative way. The film tells the story of an entire squad of men who return from Iraq and murder one of their own. The father of the murdered boy (Tommy Lee Jones), who has been cut up and burned by his own men, must investigate. There is not one men among the squad who is portrayed as positive and on being found guilty one says “if we hadn’t killed him he would have done the same to us” showing that they are all bloodthirsty murderers. The film concludes with the American flag being flown upside down. Kimberly Pierce’s Stop-loss portrays almost the same thing. A group of soldiers return to a small town and one of them is called back to active duty after thinking he will be discharged. He goes AWOL while one of his fellow soldiers kills himself and another beats his girlfriend. These two films exist in the shadow of the war in Iraq and are trying to claim that every member of the American military who returns from Iraq is psychologically unbalanced, prone to murder, beat their wives and kill themselves.
But before 9/11 the view of the American Military was little better. It began with A Few Good Men which depicts a ‘good’ JAG lawyer who must defend two marines accused of killing a third marine. It turns out they were ordered to beat their fellow marine by their Guantanamo base commander, played by Jack Nicholas. Then there was Courage Under Fire where a woman is being granted a medal for bravery and it turns out her story may have been fabricated and includes friendly fire incidents. In The General’s Daughter John Travolta must investigate the murder and rape of the general’s daughter. In Basic Mr. Travolta returns, this time to investigate the murder of a legendary Army Ranger by his own men. In Rules of Engagement Tommy Lee Jones must defend an old friend of his who, while posted as a marine in Yemen, shot down a crowd of civilians. All the stories are related and even involve the same actors. Each depicts the same story: men in the military are unstable and they become killing machines and frequently murder eachother whenever they have the chance. In Valley of Elah the murder victim is depicted in self made movies torturing people in Iraq and in Stop-Loss the main character kills civilians by mistake.
The role of the enemy in the film, when the enemy is not the U.S government or some cover-up, is always that of innocent civilian. Arab-Muslims are always portrayed in a positive light. In fact they are portrayed as innocent victims. In Sidney Lumet’s Strip-Search the story of an innocent Arab being strip searched by a female American investigator is juxtaposed with an American woman accused of ‘terrorism’ in China and strip-searched by a Chinese soldier. The idea is that America has become as thuggish as China. The highly improbably film has the female investigator slapping the Arab man’s genitals in order to humiliate him. In Mat Whitecross’s Road to Guantanamo we are shown the ‘true’ story of three Muslim men with British citizenship who are arrested in Afghanistan and sent to Guantanamo. The movie tells us they are just ‘innocent’ men who happened to be in Afghanistan. Rendition takes the idea one step further depicting an ‘innocent’ Egyptian man named Anwar El-Ibrahimi being abducted by the CIA and tortured while his American wife, played by Reese Witherspoon sits at home anxiously awaiting his return.
Where is the movie that depicts terrorists as they really are? Paradise Now (2005) depicts the ‘poor’ Palestinian who is forced into terrorism. More often than not the terrorists are depicted as right wing neo-Nazi types as in Sum of All Fears (2002) or as they were in 24. Sometimes they are disgruntled Soviets, East Germans or Serbs. They are even white Westerners sometimes as was the case in Fight Club and Vendetta. In Edward Zwick’s The Siege (1992), which was protested by Muslims as being ‘anti-Muslim’, the terrorists are shown to be friends of the CIA and the bad guys are the American military who are depicted as rounding up all the Muslim Arabs in the New York City in order to stop the terrorism. Luckily FBI agent Denzel Washington and his Arab sidekick Agent Frank Haddad save the day.
Reihan Salam has summed this up in an article entitled ‘The Sum of all PC: Hollywood’s reverse racial profiling’ in Slate magazine which he penned on May 28th, 2002. He notes “you'd be hard-pressed to find Muslim terrorists in any of today's blockbuster action movies” he documents how Director of Sum of All Fears Phil Alden Robinson bowed down to the likes of the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR): “I hope you will be reassured that I have no intention of promoting negative images of Muslims or Arabs, and I wish you the best in your continuing efforts to combat discrimination.” Actor Ben Affleck noted that “the Arab terrorist thing has been done a million times in the movies.” Leftists would have us believe differently in such books as 100 years of anti-Arab Stereotyping by Marzin Qumsiyeh and UC Berkeley’s Images of Arabs and the Middle East archive.
The last film to accurately depict the heroism of Americans and the evils of terrorism was probably the 1988 comedy Naked Gun which opens with Lt. Frank Drebin bursting in on a meeting of Arafat, Khadafi, Khomeini, Idi Amin and Gorbachev in Beirut and beating up all of the thugs.
It is unfortunate the filmmakers think they can get better ratings and be more ‘original’ by depicting soldiers as rapists and murderers and depicting Muslim Arabs as ‘innocent victims. It is an enticing argument and leaves the viewer believing that the war in Iraq is ‘ruining’ all of the 650,000 Americans who have served there. But if the movies are to be believed, that one in six of those returning commits suicide and one in six murders another of the six and the rest go AWOL then we wouldn’t have much of an Army left in the U.S and we would have 100,000 more murders a year and 200,000 dead American servicemen. Oddly enough the statistics don’t bear this out. If all Muslim Arabs are not terrorists than why did three thousand Americans die on 9/11, why did hundreds of Spaniards die in Madrid and fifty Englishmen die in London. Who has been behind all the terrorism in Iraq and who was responsible for the 900 dead Israelis between 2000 and 2008? The movie industry’s decision to depict Muslims only in positive roles or as victims is as illogical as movies depicting Germans in positive roles in movies about the Second World War. Why does our movie industry lie to us? Almost all terrorist acts that will be committed this year against civilians will be carried out by Muslims. Almost all the atrocities committed in the Second World War were carried out by Germans. These are unfortunate facts but they are true and to depict them on film is not to stereotype people but to depict people as they really are.
The new god: diplomacy and dialogue
Seth J. Frantzman
May 16th, 2008
The new mantra of every leftist is 'dialogue'. That is the term used by the left to describe the need for a 'diplomatic' solution to the Iranian nuclear program and the need to 'dialogue' with Hamas and 'speak' to Bin Laden. For the liberal this is the magic wand. Speaking to people is always supposed to magically solve everything. How did this become the god of liberalism? How did liberalism take on the ethos of the old classical conservative such as Neville Chamberlain and Stanley Baldwin who believed Hitler could be 'talked' into peace?
The idea of 'dialogue' is inviting. It speaks of peace. It seems enticing. If people hate you what can be harmed by sitting down and 'talking' to them. This idea that 'conversation' solves things is predicated upon the idea that 'dialogue' is essential to peace. But where is the evidence for this? Ulysses S. Grant, the Civil War General was known by the moniker 'Unconditional Surrender' Grant for his uncompromising treatment of Confederates who dared to ask for terms of surrender. Grant's response was always the same "no conditions." This uncompromising attitude gained him the respect of Abe Lincoln and brought success in the Civil War, after years of failure when timid Union generals had been unable to bring the Confederate army to heel. This uncompromising attitude has been at the basis of American foreign policy for some time. There was no negotiation with Spain over Cuba. There was no negotiation with the Japanese Empire or the Nazis. There is no negotiation with terrorists. This is actually part of the official policy of the American government. America does not negotiate with terrorists. There is no negotiation to get back kidnapped Americans. There is no negotiations over ransom. There are no prisoner swaps. Terrorists know that there can be no dialogue with the U.S. Peaceniks argue that this is why the likes of Nick Berg or Daniel Pearl ended up dead. But how many more would be dead if everytime a terrorist captured an American the U.S released a hundred terrorist inmates in exchange the way Israel does. Studies have shown that the Israel policy of always negotiating with the terrorists and releasing Palestinian prisoners has led to the deaths of hundreds of Israeli civilians. During the Second Intifada most of the terror attacks were committed by Palestinians who had been released from Israeli prisons as part of the Oslo 'peace' process in the 1990s.
There is no evidence that diplomacy and 'talking' has ever accomplished anything. Diplomacy is a scam. It is a European theory invented by Europeans during the 17th and 18th centuries to formalize the relations between nation states. The idea of diplomats playing such a large role in the relations of nations was invented to appease a class of nobles who had little to do with their lives and needed a role to fulfill. What better role than spending the summers in the capital of another nations and drinking wine and partying with other nobles from across the continent?
Have diplomats ever averted a war? When they were needed most, in 1914, they were completely useless. Here was a time when diplomacy should have averted catastrophe. History tells us that when the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated on June 28th, 1914 it set off a 'chain reaction' that lead to the deaths of ten million people. But where were the diplomats? On July 23rd Austria-Hungary served Serbia with an ultimatum to arrest the men who had assassinated the archduke. On the 24th of July Serbia asked her Slavic brother, the Russian empire, for support and refused to hand over the assassins the next day. On the 28th the Austro-Hungarian Empire declared war on Serbia. On the 1st of August Austria-Hungary's ally, the German Empire, declared war on Russia. On the 3rd of August Germany declared war on Russia's ally, France. The next day soldiers wearing the Pickelhaube (spiked German Helmet) swept across the border into neutral Belgium to execute Germany's Schlieffen plan for the invasion of France. On that day London sent a cable to the Kaiser ordering Germany to remove her troops from Belgium by midnight. When Big Ben struck twelve and the German troops were still pouring across Britain found herself at war with Germany.
Where were the diplomats. Literally thousands of men were employed across the continent that summer, supposedly to prevent wars such as this. But where were they for that fateful month as Europe teetered on the balance. Where were the manicured men, those titled men of Europe who were charged with keeping the peace? Were they in the arms of their mistresses? Were they sipping tea? What were they doing for a month?
If we are to believe Jimmy Carter and his prognostications about Hamas then dialogue solves all. If we are to believe the leftist and Islamist scholars who make up the Middle East Studies departments in the U.S then 'dialogue' and diplomatic solutions will cause Iran to stop her nuclear program, stop denying the Holocaust, and of late, stop denying 9/11. But if the best bred men of Europe could not prevent the apocalypse of the Great War then how can a man who the KGB judged as "having the mind and manners of a man whose occupation is the farming of peanuts" get Hamas to stop murdering children? How exactly can jimmy Carter accomplish anything in terms of 'diplomacy' when he is busy laying a wreath at Yassir Arafat's grave (the man who ordered the murder of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympic games among other things) and hugging Hamas leaders (whose terror has killed more then 250 civilians).
The diplomat is a useless fixture of the world. Terrorism is not prevented by diplomats. When the FBI wanted to stop the mafia it didn't use diplomacy to do it. When it wanted to stop the KKK it didn't need a 'dialogue' to do it. But we are meant to believe that certain terror groups need to be spoken to while others need to simply be arrested. But why? Perhaps we should have had a 'dialogue' with the Grand Dragon of the KKK. Perhaps we should have hugged him and 'listened' to him. The liberal mantra of 'it can't hurt' could have been used as an excuse. Liberals only think some terrorists need to be 'dialogued' with. There is no dialogue for those who bomb abortion clinics. There is no dialogue with them. Why not? Isn't there something to 'discuss' with the bomber of an abortion clinic? What separates Tim Mcveigh from Bin Laden? Perhaps we should have dialogued with him? What of those Branch Dividians at Waco. When Janet Reno and her liberal hordes had the chance to dialogue with David Koresh they used tanks and snipers to do so and ended up killing 80 American citizens in Waco Texas. Where was the 'conversation' then. Where was the liberal desire to 'talk it out' when it came to the Christian fundamentalist cult at Waco? Where was Jimmy Carter? Jimmy. Where were you? Where were you? David Koresh had a beard, just like Hamas. David Koresh and his friends loved their guns, just like Hamas. So why was there no love for Koresh? We conservatives would like an explanation. Why was there a scorched earth policy at Waco but with Hamas there is a 'dialogue'? Why is the bomber of an abortion clinic given no quarter but the bomber of a synagogue is dialogued with?
There are times when dialogue can help. There are times to negotiate. At the siege of Wounded Knee in 1973 when 300 American Indian Movement activists occupied the site of an 1890 massacre of Native-Americans they were placed under siege by U.S Marshalls and probably by units of the U.S military (despite the Posse Comitatus act which forbids the U.S military to be used against American citizens on American soil). The siege lasted 71 days during which two Indian activists were killed and one U.S Marshall was severely wounded. But Alexander Haig, who was delegated by President Richard Nixon to handle the siege, which was taking place on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, did not order the Marshals to go in. The Marshals had at their disposal snipers, helicopters, 15 armored personnel carriers equipped with .50-caliber machine guns and plenty of manpower. The Indians were armed with rifles and although a number of the AIM activists such as Dennis Banks had served in the U.S military they could have been easily crushed. But the government held back, realizing that the AIM men couldn't escape, they laid siege and despite the cost in dollars the government felt it was more prudent than causing the loss of lives. With no hostages being kept it didn't matter how long the activists were left under siege. Eventually negotiations led to the surrender of the AIM activists.
The same type of prudent action was taken in response to the Piracy of the 88 meter luxury Yacht Le Ponant. Its 22 member crew was taken hostage on the 4th of April when the boat was stormed by pirates of Somalia. A ransom of 1. 3 million Euros was paid, apparently by the company, for the release of the hostages. But hours later, as the Muslim pirates sat counting their loot in Puntland, Somalia, French Special forces rousted them from their glee, killing three people, and took the pirates back to Djibouti and onward to France for prosecution. Perhaps forgetting history the French Defense Minister claimed "This is the first time a country has decided not to let itself be extorted, but also to take matters into its own hands."
In both cases pragmatic behavior saved lives and resulted in the capture of criminals. Instead of supporting the criminality by affirming it and hugging it the government made sure that justice was done in parallel with a minute loss of life. Those, like Jimmy Carter, who argue for open ended negotiations with no use of force and desire nothing in return accomplish nothing. They affirm the terrorists through embracing them and praying with them and laying wreaths at their graves and in affect they become terrorists through their intellectual support and their moral support by not condemning the actions of the terrorist. Diplomacy accomplishes nothing. It has never accomplished anything. Diplomacy is the guise used by the dictator and the terrorist to bide time. Remember Stalin and his negotiations with Hitler in 1939. He was biding time. Hitler too was biding time. That was affective diplomacy but neither Molotov nor Ribbentrop were members of the Jimmy Carter 'we must speak to them' mantra, instead both worked for their national interests and used Diplomacy in order to further their war aims. When Jimmy Carter meets with Hamas he is meeting with a Molotov or a Ribbentrop, a loyal servant of the terrorist or dictatorial regime, but Jimmy Carter is not representing the interests of anyone but himself, he is not accomplishing anything. He does not bring peace. He never has. In fact his track record as President vis-à-vis Iran show that he only helped usher in Islamism, genocide and war by mismanaging the crises in Iran in 1979. It is no surprise that the Islamists helped bring Carter down in the 1980 election by waiting until Reagan was inaugurated to release the hostages. The Jimmy Carter ethos only brings genocide, appeasement and mass killing. It is essentially a Byzantine view of the world, one that only preserves the inevitable, just as the Byzantine empire preserved itself for 1000 years not by opposing anything but simply by hiding behind its walls and giving away its princesses as wives to every dictator it could, hoping that it could trade sex for peace. All it did was wet the appetite of its enemies for more Byzantine virgins and slaves.. When one reads the account of Bin Laden's brother Salem proposing marriage to four western women at the same time we see that the same perverted logic exists in the west: if only we export enough Ukrainian prostitutes (our version of the Byzantine brides for the Turkish hordes) to the Muslim world perhaps they will leave us alone. Too bad we can't sell Jimmy Carter into sex slavery as well.
Issue 32
“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
April 27th, 2008
1) Fighting the straw man: national narrative, miscegenation and a foil of lies: A series of recent books have argued that they are presenting an ‘original’ narrative of some forgotten figure who was ‘ahead of his time’ in opposing racism or colonialism or in viewing Native-Americans as people. A closer examination shows that these ‘lone men’ are not so alone and that the liberalistic desire to oppose the straw man which they call the ‘traditional nationalist narrative’ is merely a foil used to force us all to read un-original books about people who were only marginally interesting.
2) Murderers, rapists and innocent Arabs: the American military as depicted in film: Since the end of the Cold War a dozen American films have been made about the American military in the post-war environment. These films universally portray American soldiers as crazy suicidal murderers who commit war crimes. At the same time other films portray Muslim Arabs as innocent victims of the war on terror. From Rendition to Valley of Elah these movies give a jaded, biased and unfair portrayal of men under arms and terrorism.
3) The new god: diplomacy and dialogue: When Jimmy Carter explained why he had to hug Hamas officials in Ramallah, Cairo and Damascus he explained that ‘diplomacy, communication and dialogue’ can solve all the worlds problems and that they must always be explored. This is a mantra. It is part of a new religion. But history tells us a different story. Rarely has diplomacy prevented conflict, not in 1939 and not in 1914. This is a dangerous god to bow down to and we should realize that talking and communicating usually solve nothing. Force of arms and deterrence tell a different story.
Fighting the straw man: national narrative, miscegenation and a foil of lies
Seth J. Frantzman
April 18th, 2008
It is common for new history books to seek to explode ‘national narratives’ and ‘national myths’. Eventually after the myth has been shown to be false the new ‘explosion’ literature becomes its own genre and becomes so popular that every book written about history is in this ‘radical’ narrative. Every book then repeats the mantra that ‘in the old nationalist narrative’. The book thus gives its reason de eitre as fighting against the old racist nationalist view and thus the book is ‘original’. But one Haaretz review of books for the month of March showed how deliberate a scam this is. Every single book mentioned a ‘traditional Zionist narrative’ and every single book was telling an ‘unknown’ story of something outside this narrative. Whether it was S. Smilansky’s Khirbet story of the IDF cleansing a Palestinian village, written in 1950 mind you, or a story of some Iraqi Jew who loves the Arabic language it was always the same. “This book is important because it explodes the national narrative”. Tom Segev’s career has been based on this. Whether it is demoting Naomi Shemer’s ‘Yerushalaim Shel Zahav (Jerusalem of Gold)’ song and showing it to be stolen from Gypsy music (perhaps not noticing that this in itself, the Gypsy-Jewish musical connection is of interest) or showing that some other ‘Zionist’ story of a heroic dead soldier is actually the story of friendly-fire, here is a man who is always ‘paving new ground’.
But what if all these mythical stereotypes were themselves stereotypes, a sort of straw man, a foil, set up by post-humanism in order to create a new narrative, one that always existed, but the foil allows it to be shoved down our throats so that while we consume it we think we are being original. State sponsored press in many countries that lack a free press give up a daily dose of this type of ‘unique’ and ‘original’ thought. The ‘continual’ revolution of Mao became nothing more than State sponsored ‘revolution’ against itself, a contradiction in terms since a state cannot sponsor a revolution against itself without making the ‘revolution’ invalid.
Consider these national myths. The American treatment of blacks is the American original Sin and since Americans didn’t begin atoning for this sin until the 1960s it remains a stain on American history, on that is ill recognized (this from Roger Cohen’s recent editorial in the Herald Tribune).
Racism began in South Africa in the 17th century with the arrival of the first Dutch Colonists. There was always racism and everyone thought the blacks uncivilized and abused them until 1994 when South Africa became a democracy. (this from the official minutes of the final findings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission).
Americans always thought the Native-Americans uncivilized and they were always treated as if they were ‘savages’ and few people recognized their humanity. A genocide was committed against them for which the U.S has never atoned. (this courtesy of Tom Chaffin and his book Pathfinder and also of Ward Churchill and his A Little Matter of Genocide).
Zionist history always saw a ‘land without a people’ and Zionism commited an ‘original sin’ in ethnically-cleansing the indigenous Palestinians. Israelis were taught to believe that the Zionist conquest was clean and that they had revived the land. (this courtesy of Ilan Pappe and Tom Segev and Haaretz).
What is most fascinating is how many books today are written about characters from these periods and show them to be ‘going against the grain’ or ‘ahead of their time’ in their treatment of the ‘indigenous people’ or their championing of rights for blacks. Thus George Crook and John Fremont were ‘ahead of their time’ in viewing the Native-Americans as people and championing their rights. Goodbye Bafana tells “the true story of a white South African racist whose life was profoundly altered by the black prisoner he guarded for twenty years.” James Gregory is this South African who was ‘ahead of his time’. Ronnie Kasrils, the Jewish South African member of the ANC, was likewise ‘ahead of his time’ as was Bram Fischer, the ‘Afrikaner Marxist Revolutionary’. John Brown who has been aptly named an ‘American Terrorist’ in a recent book was ‘ahead of his time’ in opposing slavery and his uniqueness or ‘lone voice’ was not heard again until the time of the Freedom Riders.
But what is fascinating, especially in Israeli history, is how often these ‘lone voices’ seem to crop up, until eventually they become a crescendo. Aaron Aaronsohn, who is the subject of at least three new biographies (Aaronsohn’s maps and Lawrence and Aaronsohn), is the new darling, another ‘lone voice’. But when you have too many ‘lone voices’ you start to have a crowd and then you start to have a crescendo.
Its obvious why history books claim to be offering something new. No one wants to read a book that says “someone else already wrote this so this book is not original but it illuminates an interesting person who happens to have not been unique.” Everyone wants to read about the ‘one man’ who saw slavery as a vice. But everyone seems to forget that this need to find the ‘lone voice’ is a petty trend that ignores not only history but also bastardizes the view of history as a ‘national myth’, one that must always be torn down by illuminating a nation’s ‘sins’. As an aside it cannot go without mention the degree to which this secular, post-humanist need to find an ‘original’ sin of every nation, from Israel to the U.S. seems to speak to a strange religious characteristic in secularism. The secular view of history is akin to the Catholic view of man.
The problem with these lone voices is that while many of these people were extraordinary individuals, few of them were original. What is most surprising is to realize the degree to which the idea of a ‘nationalist narrative’ is a creation of modernity, a creation of the left, a straw man or foil, created so that it can be beaten down.
The Indians were not viewed as human. Bartoleme De Las Casas already challenged this in the 16th century. He arrived in Hispanola (The Dominican Republic) in 1502. How many years was that after Columbus came upon the New World. How many? Lets think. Lets ponder. Ten years. Ten years. Only ten years after Ward Churchill tells us the American Genocide of the Natives began there was already a man campaigning for their human rights. Ten years. So why is it surprising to Mr. Chaffin that John Charles Fremont, that famous 19th century American explorer of the American West, respected the Indians? Benjamin Franklin had respect for them in the 18th century. Why is it so surprising that George Crook, Al Sieber, George Bent, Kit Carson and Charles Gatewood and Nelson Miles and so many others had sympathy for the fate of the American Indian? Where was this ‘myth’. It simply did not exist. This idea that every ‘white man’ thought the Indians ‘savages’ is simply not true. The only degree to which it is true is the fact that the basest people viewed the Indians as ‘savage’. To pretend that the ‘national narrative’ reflects the basest people’s observations and petty hatreds is unfair to a history that was filled with so many leading personalities who respected, learned from and cared about the Native-Americans.
It is impossible to go through every example to show the degree to which every national narrative has been warped by people in order to serve a modern political agenda. Suffice it to say that the same will be found elsewhere. The early Zionists who respected the Palestinian Arabs were not few and far between. From Moshe Dayan to Rehavam Zeevi to Aaronsohn and Weizmann, they all did not believe this ridiculous ‘myth’ of a ‘land without a people’. But they could not be blind to the fact that they had witnessed the entire Coastal Plain of Israel being drained of malarial swamps and giving birth to cities where desert had once been. To characterize this as a ‘myth’ as Sandra Sufian and Baruch Kimmerling have done (see her book Healing the Land and the Nation) one must ignore reality. Aerial photos of the period don’t lie. Israel is the only country in the world to have a net increase in forests and trees in the last 60 years. Its not a myth. It’s a fact. If Hertzl didn’t see any Arabs on his way from Jaffa to Jerusalem that is because there were few Arab villages along the road. There are still today, when Israel’s population has increased ten fold from the time of Herzl’s visit, few villages or towns on the road of Jaffa to Jerusalem and one could still remark that the land could hold more people.
Roger Cohen is wrong to claim that America has not recognized the ‘sin’ of slavery. For a Jewish writer, and Cohen is Jewish, it is strange that he views history as one involving Sin. Apparently his secularism overrides his Judaism in this concept of history. Americans have recognized this ‘sin’ since the time of the founding fathers. Huge numbers have recognized it since the 1850s. Millions of Americans died to end slavery in the American South during the Civil War, making America the only country in the history of the world that has waged a civil war in order to end slavery (by contrast there is not one single instance in the Islamic world of Muslims killing fellow Muslims in order to set free non-Muslims enslaved throughout the centuries of Muslim colonization of Eastern Europe, Africa, India and the Middle East. Oddly we do not hear about Islam’s ‘original sin’ of enslaving others). Europeans judge Americans harshly for slavery, odd when it is an institution that America inherited from them. From the very beginnings of American history there has been an antipathy towards slavery, especially eminating from the Yankee part of America, which was never slave owning. The great irony is that the ‘sin’ of slavery is foisted upon the WASP founders of America when it was the most WASPy of them, men such as John Adams, who abhorred the institution. To characterize the founders as slave owners is disingenuous to say the least. Fifty-Six men signed the Declaration of Independence. Among them Samuel Adams, Stephen Hopkins, Benjamin Rush, Elbridge Gerry, James Wilson, John Adams, Roger Sherman, John Witherspoon, and Benjamin Franklin were abolitionists. No more than 21 of them lived in states where slave-owning was prevalent and many of those did not own slaves.
To touch on one final subject where a myth has been created that is completely false it is worthwhile to quickly examine the history of Miscegenation laws in the U.S. Most people today assume the laws were created by racist southerners to prevent white women from marrying black men. The first anti-miscegenation law in the Americas was passed in Virginia in 1691. Slavery only began in Virginia in the 1650s and was not codified until 1705. Slaves inherited the status of their mothers. The logic behind the Miscegenation laws was racist in the sense that it wanted to prevent white slave owners from having intercourse with their female slaves and producing offspring that would then become a ‘mixed’ class whose status would be unclear. If slaves remained black then any African in the colony could be considered a slave. The first people sentenced under the law were all white male slave owners, a number of whome were sentenced to be whipped, according to the book, The Birth of America by William R. Polk. The painting by John Gabiel Stedman entitled ‘Flagellation of a female samboe slave’ from the period 1772-1777 confirms that this was a common occurrence: “Stedman witnessed this punishment in 1774. The woman being whipped was an eighteen-year old girl who was given 200 lashes for having refused to have intercourse with an overseer.” The book The Senator and the Socialite by Lawrence Otis Graham confirms the fact further. Both his characters, Blanche Bruce, the first Black Senator in the U.S (elected in the 1870s) and Josephine Willson were descendants of white fathers and black mothers. This hidden history of miscegenation existed up until the period of Strom Thurmond, the American senator and one time presidential contender who father children with a black mistress. When Trent Lott praised Thurmond after his death, Senator Lott was criticized for eulogizing the ‘segregationist’ Mr. Thurmond. Oddly enough Thurmond’s segregation did not extend to the bedroom where he took after many of his white Southern ancestors. The modern liberal forgets this history in his desire to see racism as a one way street that fits his needs. When this author pointed out the actual history of miscegenation laws (“Miscegenation laws were originally passed to stop Slave masters from raping their slaves, not to stop black men from marrying white women”) in a review a liberal by the name of Michael Shaub wrote on a website called bookslut.com (http://www.bookslut.com/propaganda/2004_12_003821.php) that only a “right wing gullible nutcase” could believe such a thing. Liberals can’t stomach the idea that miscegenation was adopted to prevent the blurring of slave-free color lines in the 17th century, not adopted by a reactionary south in the 1950s to prevent alluring black men such as Paul Robeson, Fredrick Douglas, O.J Simpson, Kofi Annon and Barack Obama Sr. from marrying white women, which each of the above did. Fredrick Douglas must be the standout here, he somehow managed to marry a white woman even in the days when miscegenation laws still existed. They were only struck down by the Supreme Court in 1967 in the case Loving v. Virginia. Who was Richard Loving? He was a white man. Who did he want to marry? Mildred Jeter, a black woman. It must be hard for leftists to learn that their beloved racial hobby-horse, miscegenation laws, were brought low by a white man and his black wife. It wasn’t a black man who was ‘breaking boundaries’, ‘shattering stereotypes’, ‘ahead of his time’ and ‘paving new ground’. I put it to you Mr. Schaub, you bourgeoisie, un-authentic leftist, liberal, progressive, post-humanist. Whose the gullible one?
Murderers, rapists and innocent Arabs: the American military as depicted in film
Seth J. Frantzman
April 19th, 2008
Rendition (2007), Stop-Loss (2008), Strip-Search (2004), Valley of Elah (2007), A Few Good Men (1992), The General’s Daughter (1999), Basic (2003), Rules of Engagement(2000), Road to Guantanamo(2006) and Courage under fire (1996).
Between the end of the Cold War and 2008 there have been about a dozen films regarding the American military in the post-Cold War world. With the exception of Jarhead (2005) few of them have presented the military in a positive light. Meanwhile films depicting American soldiers from previous eras have shown them in positive lights, including We Were Soldiers Once (2002), Saving Private Ryan (1998) and Band of Brothers (2001). As time has gone films depicting the modern post-Gulf War soldier have become increasingly jaded, portraying every character in uniform as demented, crazy, murderous and suicidal. Meanwhile films portraying the enemy, terrorists, have only depicted them as innocent, always being wrongly accused and brutally carted off by thuggish Americans to holding cells in Guantanamo.
This portrayal is both disturbing and unfair but mostly it is not only indicative of Hollywood’s view of the U.S but also increasingly brainwashing audiences into believing that the American military is thuggish and terrorists are all innocent. It began with the end of the Cold War. To be sure the American military did not have a sterling reputation on screen before that. The Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now, Casualties of War, Hamburger Hill, Full Metal Jacket and Platoon all depicted the tragedies of Vietnam. But each one included soldiers who were positive models along side those who were not. All of them included a main character who wore the uniform and was a moral center.
When we examine Paul Haggis’s Valley of Elah we see that every soldier is depicted in a negative way. The film tells the story of an entire squad of men who return from Iraq and murder one of their own. The father of the murdered boy (Tommy Lee Jones), who has been cut up and burned by his own men, must investigate. There is not one men among the squad who is portrayed as positive and on being found guilty one says “if we hadn’t killed him he would have done the same to us” showing that they are all bloodthirsty murderers. The film concludes with the American flag being flown upside down. Kimberly Pierce’s Stop-loss portrays almost the same thing. A group of soldiers return to a small town and one of them is called back to active duty after thinking he will be discharged. He goes AWOL while one of his fellow soldiers kills himself and another beats his girlfriend. These two films exist in the shadow of the war in Iraq and are trying to claim that every member of the American military who returns from Iraq is psychologically unbalanced, prone to murder, beat their wives and kill themselves.
But before 9/11 the view of the American Military was little better. It began with A Few Good Men which depicts a ‘good’ JAG lawyer who must defend two marines accused of killing a third marine. It turns out they were ordered to beat their fellow marine by their Guantanamo base commander, played by Jack Nicholas. Then there was Courage Under Fire where a woman is being granted a medal for bravery and it turns out her story may have been fabricated and includes friendly fire incidents. In The General’s Daughter John Travolta must investigate the murder and rape of the general’s daughter. In Basic Mr. Travolta returns, this time to investigate the murder of a legendary Army Ranger by his own men. In Rules of Engagement Tommy Lee Jones must defend an old friend of his who, while posted as a marine in Yemen, shot down a crowd of civilians. All the stories are related and even involve the same actors. Each depicts the same story: men in the military are unstable and they become killing machines and frequently murder eachother whenever they have the chance. In Valley of Elah the murder victim is depicted in self made movies torturing people in Iraq and in Stop-Loss the main character kills civilians by mistake.
The role of the enemy in the film, when the enemy is not the U.S government or some cover-up, is always that of innocent civilian. Arab-Muslims are always portrayed in a positive light. In fact they are portrayed as innocent victims. In Sidney Lumet’s Strip-Search the story of an innocent Arab being strip searched by a female American investigator is juxtaposed with an American woman accused of ‘terrorism’ in China and strip-searched by a Chinese soldier. The idea is that America has become as thuggish as China. The highly improbably film has the female investigator slapping the Arab man’s genitals in order to humiliate him. In Mat Whitecross’s Road to Guantanamo we are shown the ‘true’ story of three Muslim men with British citizenship who are arrested in Afghanistan and sent to Guantanamo. The movie tells us they are just ‘innocent’ men who happened to be in Afghanistan. Rendition takes the idea one step further depicting an ‘innocent’ Egyptian man named Anwar El-Ibrahimi being abducted by the CIA and tortured while his American wife, played by Reese Witherspoon sits at home anxiously awaiting his return.
Where is the movie that depicts terrorists as they really are? Paradise Now (2005) depicts the ‘poor’ Palestinian who is forced into terrorism. More often than not the terrorists are depicted as right wing neo-Nazi types as in Sum of All Fears (2002) or as they were in 24. Sometimes they are disgruntled Soviets, East Germans or Serbs. They are even white Westerners sometimes as was the case in Fight Club and Vendetta. In Edward Zwick’s The Siege (1992), which was protested by Muslims as being ‘anti-Muslim’, the terrorists are shown to be friends of the CIA and the bad guys are the American military who are depicted as rounding up all the Muslim Arabs in the New York City in order to stop the terrorism. Luckily FBI agent Denzel Washington and his Arab sidekick Agent Frank Haddad save the day.
Reihan Salam has summed this up in an article entitled ‘The Sum of all PC: Hollywood’s reverse racial profiling’ in Slate magazine which he penned on May 28th, 2002. He notes “you'd be hard-pressed to find Muslim terrorists in any of today's blockbuster action movies” he documents how Director of Sum of All Fears Phil Alden Robinson bowed down to the likes of the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR): “I hope you will be reassured that I have no intention of promoting negative images of Muslims or Arabs, and I wish you the best in your continuing efforts to combat discrimination.” Actor Ben Affleck noted that “the Arab terrorist thing has been done a million times in the movies.” Leftists would have us believe differently in such books as 100 years of anti-Arab Stereotyping by Marzin Qumsiyeh and UC Berkeley’s Images of Arabs and the Middle East archive.
The last film to accurately depict the heroism of Americans and the evils of terrorism was probably the 1988 comedy Naked Gun which opens with Lt. Frank Drebin bursting in on a meeting of Arafat, Khadafi, Khomeini, Idi Amin and Gorbachev in Beirut and beating up all of the thugs.
It is unfortunate the filmmakers think they can get better ratings and be more ‘original’ by depicting soldiers as rapists and murderers and depicting Muslim Arabs as ‘innocent victims. It is an enticing argument and leaves the viewer believing that the war in Iraq is ‘ruining’ all of the 650,000 Americans who have served there. But if the movies are to be believed, that one in six of those returning commits suicide and one in six murders another of the six and the rest go AWOL then we wouldn’t have much of an Army left in the U.S and we would have 100,000 more murders a year and 200,000 dead American servicemen. Oddly enough the statistics don’t bear this out. If all Muslim Arabs are not terrorists than why did three thousand Americans die on 9/11, why did hundreds of Spaniards die in Madrid and fifty Englishmen die in London. Who has been behind all the terrorism in Iraq and who was responsible for the 900 dead Israelis between 2000 and 2008? The movie industry’s decision to depict Muslims only in positive roles or as victims is as illogical as movies depicting Germans in positive roles in movies about the Second World War. Why does our movie industry lie to us? Almost all terrorist acts that will be committed this year against civilians will be carried out by Muslims. Almost all the atrocities committed in the Second World War were carried out by Germans. These are unfortunate facts but they are true and to depict them on film is not to stereotype people but to depict people as they really are.
The new god: diplomacy and dialogue
Seth J. Frantzman
May 16th, 2008
The new mantra of every leftist is 'dialogue'. That is the term used by the left to describe the need for a 'diplomatic' solution to the Iranian nuclear program and the need to 'dialogue' with Hamas and 'speak' to Bin Laden. For the liberal this is the magic wand. Speaking to people is always supposed to magically solve everything. How did this become the god of liberalism? How did liberalism take on the ethos of the old classical conservative such as Neville Chamberlain and Stanley Baldwin who believed Hitler could be 'talked' into peace?
The idea of 'dialogue' is inviting. It speaks of peace. It seems enticing. If people hate you what can be harmed by sitting down and 'talking' to them. This idea that 'conversation' solves things is predicated upon the idea that 'dialogue' is essential to peace. But where is the evidence for this? Ulysses S. Grant, the Civil War General was known by the moniker 'Unconditional Surrender' Grant for his uncompromising treatment of Confederates who dared to ask for terms of surrender. Grant's response was always the same "no conditions." This uncompromising attitude gained him the respect of Abe Lincoln and brought success in the Civil War, after years of failure when timid Union generals had been unable to bring the Confederate army to heel. This uncompromising attitude has been at the basis of American foreign policy for some time. There was no negotiation with Spain over Cuba. There was no negotiation with the Japanese Empire or the Nazis. There is no negotiation with terrorists. This is actually part of the official policy of the American government. America does not negotiate with terrorists. There is no negotiation to get back kidnapped Americans. There is no negotiations over ransom. There are no prisoner swaps. Terrorists know that there can be no dialogue with the U.S. Peaceniks argue that this is why the likes of Nick Berg or Daniel Pearl ended up dead. But how many more would be dead if everytime a terrorist captured an American the U.S released a hundred terrorist inmates in exchange the way Israel does. Studies have shown that the Israel policy of always negotiating with the terrorists and releasing Palestinian prisoners has led to the deaths of hundreds of Israeli civilians. During the Second Intifada most of the terror attacks were committed by Palestinians who had been released from Israeli prisons as part of the Oslo 'peace' process in the 1990s.
There is no evidence that diplomacy and 'talking' has ever accomplished anything. Diplomacy is a scam. It is a European theory invented by Europeans during the 17th and 18th centuries to formalize the relations between nation states. The idea of diplomats playing such a large role in the relations of nations was invented to appease a class of nobles who had little to do with their lives and needed a role to fulfill. What better role than spending the summers in the capital of another nations and drinking wine and partying with other nobles from across the continent?
Have diplomats ever averted a war? When they were needed most, in 1914, they were completely useless. Here was a time when diplomacy should have averted catastrophe. History tells us that when the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated on June 28th, 1914 it set off a 'chain reaction' that lead to the deaths of ten million people. But where were the diplomats? On July 23rd Austria-Hungary served Serbia with an ultimatum to arrest the men who had assassinated the archduke. On the 24th of July Serbia asked her Slavic brother, the Russian empire, for support and refused to hand over the assassins the next day. On the 28th the Austro-Hungarian Empire declared war on Serbia. On the 1st of August Austria-Hungary's ally, the German Empire, declared war on Russia. On the 3rd of August Germany declared war on Russia's ally, France. The next day soldiers wearing the Pickelhaube (spiked German Helmet) swept across the border into neutral Belgium to execute Germany's Schlieffen plan for the invasion of France. On that day London sent a cable to the Kaiser ordering Germany to remove her troops from Belgium by midnight. When Big Ben struck twelve and the German troops were still pouring across Britain found herself at war with Germany.
Where were the diplomats. Literally thousands of men were employed across the continent that summer, supposedly to prevent wars such as this. But where were they for that fateful month as Europe teetered on the balance. Where were the manicured men, those titled men of Europe who were charged with keeping the peace? Were they in the arms of their mistresses? Were they sipping tea? What were they doing for a month?
If we are to believe Jimmy Carter and his prognostications about Hamas then dialogue solves all. If we are to believe the leftist and Islamist scholars who make up the Middle East Studies departments in the U.S then 'dialogue' and diplomatic solutions will cause Iran to stop her nuclear program, stop denying the Holocaust, and of late, stop denying 9/11. But if the best bred men of Europe could not prevent the apocalypse of the Great War then how can a man who the KGB judged as "having the mind and manners of a man whose occupation is the farming of peanuts" get Hamas to stop murdering children? How exactly can jimmy Carter accomplish anything in terms of 'diplomacy' when he is busy laying a wreath at Yassir Arafat's grave (the man who ordered the murder of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympic games among other things) and hugging Hamas leaders (whose terror has killed more then 250 civilians).
The diplomat is a useless fixture of the world. Terrorism is not prevented by diplomats. When the FBI wanted to stop the mafia it didn't use diplomacy to do it. When it wanted to stop the KKK it didn't need a 'dialogue' to do it. But we are meant to believe that certain terror groups need to be spoken to while others need to simply be arrested. But why? Perhaps we should have had a 'dialogue' with the Grand Dragon of the KKK. Perhaps we should have hugged him and 'listened' to him. The liberal mantra of 'it can't hurt' could have been used as an excuse. Liberals only think some terrorists need to be 'dialogued' with. There is no dialogue for those who bomb abortion clinics. There is no dialogue with them. Why not? Isn't there something to 'discuss' with the bomber of an abortion clinic? What separates Tim Mcveigh from Bin Laden? Perhaps we should have dialogued with him? What of those Branch Dividians at Waco. When Janet Reno and her liberal hordes had the chance to dialogue with David Koresh they used tanks and snipers to do so and ended up killing 80 American citizens in Waco Texas. Where was the 'conversation' then. Where was the liberal desire to 'talk it out' when it came to the Christian fundamentalist cult at Waco? Where was Jimmy Carter? Jimmy. Where were you? Where were you? David Koresh had a beard, just like Hamas. David Koresh and his friends loved their guns, just like Hamas. So why was there no love for Koresh? We conservatives would like an explanation. Why was there a scorched earth policy at Waco but with Hamas there is a 'dialogue'? Why is the bomber of an abortion clinic given no quarter but the bomber of a synagogue is dialogued with?
There are times when dialogue can help. There are times to negotiate. At the siege of Wounded Knee in 1973 when 300 American Indian Movement activists occupied the site of an 1890 massacre of Native-Americans they were placed under siege by U.S Marshalls and probably by units of the U.S military (despite the Posse Comitatus act which forbids the U.S military to be used against American citizens on American soil). The siege lasted 71 days during which two Indian activists were killed and one U.S Marshall was severely wounded. But Alexander Haig, who was delegated by President Richard Nixon to handle the siege, which was taking place on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, did not order the Marshals to go in. The Marshals had at their disposal snipers, helicopters, 15 armored personnel carriers equipped with .50-caliber machine guns and plenty of manpower. The Indians were armed with rifles and although a number of the AIM activists such as Dennis Banks had served in the U.S military they could have been easily crushed. But the government held back, realizing that the AIM men couldn't escape, they laid siege and despite the cost in dollars the government felt it was more prudent than causing the loss of lives. With no hostages being kept it didn't matter how long the activists were left under siege. Eventually negotiations led to the surrender of the AIM activists.
The same type of prudent action was taken in response to the Piracy of the 88 meter luxury Yacht Le Ponant. Its 22 member crew was taken hostage on the 4th of April when the boat was stormed by pirates of Somalia. A ransom of 1. 3 million Euros was paid, apparently by the company, for the release of the hostages. But hours later, as the Muslim pirates sat counting their loot in Puntland, Somalia, French Special forces rousted them from their glee, killing three people, and took the pirates back to Djibouti and onward to France for prosecution. Perhaps forgetting history the French Defense Minister claimed "This is the first time a country has decided not to let itself be extorted, but also to take matters into its own hands."
In both cases pragmatic behavior saved lives and resulted in the capture of criminals. Instead of supporting the criminality by affirming it and hugging it the government made sure that justice was done in parallel with a minute loss of life. Those, like Jimmy Carter, who argue for open ended negotiations with no use of force and desire nothing in return accomplish nothing. They affirm the terrorists through embracing them and praying with them and laying wreaths at their graves and in affect they become terrorists through their intellectual support and their moral support by not condemning the actions of the terrorist. Diplomacy accomplishes nothing. It has never accomplished anything. Diplomacy is the guise used by the dictator and the terrorist to bide time. Remember Stalin and his negotiations with Hitler in 1939. He was biding time. Hitler too was biding time. That was affective diplomacy but neither Molotov nor Ribbentrop were members of the Jimmy Carter 'we must speak to them' mantra, instead both worked for their national interests and used Diplomacy in order to further their war aims. When Jimmy Carter meets with Hamas he is meeting with a Molotov or a Ribbentrop, a loyal servant of the terrorist or dictatorial regime, but Jimmy Carter is not representing the interests of anyone but himself, he is not accomplishing anything. He does not bring peace. He never has. In fact his track record as President vis-à-vis Iran show that he only helped usher in Islamism, genocide and war by mismanaging the crises in Iran in 1979. It is no surprise that the Islamists helped bring Carter down in the 1980 election by waiting until Reagan was inaugurated to release the hostages. The Jimmy Carter ethos only brings genocide, appeasement and mass killing. It is essentially a Byzantine view of the world, one that only preserves the inevitable, just as the Byzantine empire preserved itself for 1000 years not by opposing anything but simply by hiding behind its walls and giving away its princesses as wives to every dictator it could, hoping that it could trade sex for peace. All it did was wet the appetite of its enemies for more Byzantine virgins and slaves.. When one reads the account of Bin Laden's brother Salem proposing marriage to four western women at the same time we see that the same perverted logic exists in the west: if only we export enough Ukrainian prostitutes (our version of the Byzantine brides for the Turkish hordes) to the Muslim world perhaps they will leave us alone. Too bad we can't sell Jimmy Carter into sex slavery as well.
Terra Incognita 31 Passover, The Economist and Israel and Jimmy Carter
Terra Incognita
Issue 31
“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
April 19th, 2008
1) The secular-pagan roots of Passover: Tis a Jewish holiday which means it is the season to find the ‘true’ roots of Judaism in some pagan religion. This time its Passover which it turns out, according to secular ‘scholars’, is actually stolen from the Greeks and Romans. Passover predates the Roman occupation of 61 B.C. No matter. Modern day Romans don’t eat the type of food found at the Passover seder. So are the Jews the last remaining link to what Rome was really like?
2) Who knew? The Economist’s forecast of Doom for Israel: The Economist’s recent Special Report included 14 pages describing the most doom and gloom prophecies against the nation of Israel since the time of Jeremiah. Who knew for instance the Israel’s economy is ‘strong’ but built on ‘weak’ fundamentals. Only Europeans and especially the English, whose country lacks a constitution and uses proportional representation could criticize Israel for the exact same things. But whose economy has the ‘weak fundamentals’? Israel is writing down billions of dollars in losses from the housing crises.
3) The Great Disgrace: Jimmy Carter in the age of terror: Jimmy Carter told the press this week that speaking with dictators is easier than dealing with democracies because you only have to speak to one person and he “speaks for all the people.” Only an arrogant former American president and post-humanist could speak so highly of a dictatorship and condemn democracies for having a diversity of opinion.
4) The frontlines of Liberalistic racism: double talking jive: A whole slew of idiocratic statements on race have come out of late. We hear that ‘blacks can’t be racist’ in reference to Rev. Wright and that in an Oregon town where athletes are converging to practice for the Olympics the people are being sensitized to know what types of food black people eat so restaurants can have appropriate tolerance oriented menus (surely all blacks throughout the world eat the same cuisine and they all can’t be bothered to try anything else?). And someone has coined a new term for Barak Obama: ‘mixed-race, multi-ethnic, African-American’. Who comes up with these ridiculous ideas?
The secular-pagan roots of Passover
Seth J. Frantzman
April 19th, 2008
It is Passover. So it is the season for archeologists, scientists, historians and leftists to heap scorn on the Jewish holiday by shedding light on its non-Jewish roots in order to show how the Jews stole their religion and their ritual from other sources. Ronit Vered writes in Haaretz magazine (‘Why is this night different April 18th 2008) about ‘What the Passover seder owes to the Greek and Roman banquet and how the rabbis adapted it to Judaism. According to the author “some claim that the Jewish seder is closely tied to the Greek feast and the Roman banquet…some of the characteristics of the seder meal are suspiciously similar to demonstratively different, i.e. the same, only the opposite of the Greek and Roman customs.” The article mentions the well known hellenization that took place in the Middle East after Alexander’s invasion. The author notes how the Jews invented their tradition “whoever wanted to fight these harmful influences [of Hellenization] was compelled to put together a clever and scrupulously different plan for the holiday meal, that would alternatively adopt and reject the temptations and influences of the spirit of the time.” The author implores the secular reader to “enjoy this thing known as the seder night and reflect upon how the seder is connected to the history of festive meals.”
Vered tells us that when the Temple was destroyed the Jews “had to find an individual and family substitute for the impressive and educations affect of pilgrimage and the influence of the Passover sacrifice.” The author tells us that the Greeks celebrated holidays with meals and Greek meals only included men and that they did not include more than 10 diners. So the Jews did the opposite, they included the women and children, but they borrowed the idea of having a meal during a holiday. Instead of 10 diners they allowed the number to be unlimited. This is obvious because no other culture in the world celebrates religious holidays with meals. Chinese people don’t. Do they? Hindus don’t? Do they? It turns out almost all cultures celebrate holidays with meals and when a holiday isn’t celebrated with a meal it can be interpreted to be ‘demonstratively different’ and thus the opposite. So by Vered’s logic all of the cultures in the world stole from the Greeks. But one might wonder how the Aztecs got their culture from the Greeks. What of the Ancient Egyptians? They had meals too and they lived before the Greeks. So how did they take from the Greeks? No matter.
The Greeks reclined on sofas during meals a custom Vered tells us “they copied from the Phoenicians and Assyrians and subsequently bequeathed to the Romans.” The author reminds us that while the Greeks each got their own sofa the Romans crowded together but in both cases they meals were followed with orgies. The author tells us that “in first century Palestine [because even in the 1st century it was Palestine, certainly not Judea] meals were generally eastern Mediterranean style…but for festive meals they followed the Roman custom, as for example at Jesus’ Last Supper.” The Roman occupation of the Holy Land dates from 61 B.C. So we are to believe that in this short period, by the time of Jesus in 30 A.D, the Jews had already stolen from the Romans. After all, the Jews never had a culture to themselves, they were like sponges.
Vered tells us that the food itself is ‘evidence’ of the influence. “Believers in the theory that the Passover seder is closely related to the Roman meal point to the recipe for the haroset, the matza sandwich, the herbs and ingredients like a hard boiled egg as the opening course as common Roman customs…the attempt to achieve a balance of flavors, the bitter herbs versus the sweet haroset…is also typical of Roman principles of nutrition.” The same author has contradicted herself in the article by noting that “the eating of matzot and the Passover sacrifice in the Temple have older origins.” So where did that matza sandwich come from? A balance in the types of food eaten is ‘evidence’ of Roman influence? But other cultures have such ‘balance’ in their diet. Are we to assume that India and China stole from the Romans as well? And why has the Roman tradition not survived in Europe but only among the Jews? Modern Italians don’t eat all these things so popular to eat on Passover. They are eating Italian food. So the descendants of the Romans don’t eat Roman food, but the Jews, alone among the world’s peoples, stole their traditions from the Romans and have kept them ever since, not borrowing from other cultures afterward. Thus the Jews opened up from the period 61 B.C to 30 AD and absorbed the cultures of others for Passover, and never before invented anything original and have never since borrowed?
The boozing that is tied up with Passover is also Greek inspired. Vered tells us that “Greeks and Romans made a clear separation between the meal and the drinking that came afterward…wine was diluted with water, a custom that differentiated barbarians from civilized types.” Thus the Jews, choosing to be barbarian, chose to drink their wine full bodied?
Vered wraps up with the observation that “the Passover Haggadah can be viewed as a theatrical work…all meant to keep the audience attentive in the name of preserving tradition….the Greek symposium, a post-banquet party, often concluded with a public celebration or even an orgy…in order to prevent these despicable customs from infiltrating Judaism, the custom was converted into the eating of the Afikoman, and the Haggadah strictly instructs that this shall be the final act of the evening.”
It is amazing how leftists seek to pervert Jewish tradition and religion in order to make it merely a copy of the traditions of others. Jews are said to have been Pagans, stealing their religion from either the Egyptians or the Babylonians. For every Jewish tradition and holiday and part of the Bible the ‘biblical scholar’ finds a parallel with other religions and thus assumes the Jews borrowed, never that others borrowed from the Jews or that the traditions arose in different places for different reasons, independent of eachother. In order to explain the Jews hatred of pork or mixing milk and meat the ‘scholar’ decides that this is an ‘opposite’ so that the Jews stole this too by doing the opposite. Thus while a ‘scholar’ studying the Mayans will read a Mayan religious inscription and accept it at face value and believe that it reflects Mayan history the same scholar on reading the Jewish Bible finds in it different authors and foreign influences. Needless to say the Mayan religion is unique, the Jewish religion is not. If a leftist comes upon a Sioux Sun Dance or some other Native-American festival he will marvel at its colorful diversity. When he comes upon Passover he finds Greeks and Romans.
It is not a coincidence that leftist secular people can’t find anything to love in Passover. It is not a surprise that they can only enjoy it when reminding themselves of its Pagan-leftist-secular roots. If it’s Greek and full of gaiety then it is positive. If its archaic and Jewish then it is un-interesting.
But if Jews wanted to do the opposite of the heathen Greeks why did the Jews eat anything at all. The opposite of a banquet meal is to not have a meal and starve oneself. The scholar cannot explain how and why the Jews picked and choose certain things to copy, certain things to throw out and certain things to do the opposite. This is the problem. All religious festivals from Japan to Patagonia have things in common and things that are different. That doesn’t mean they influenced eachother. It merely shows that people are both similar and diverse. Why can’t leftist Jews ever celebrate their own religion and find diversity within it. Why can’t they appreciate it the way they appreciate a Sufi festival or an Apache dance? Why must they always find that it ‘secretly’ is borrowed from others and come up with the most complicated, bizarre and random explanations for how it was stolen. It merely shows the secular hatred for tradition, the great secular hypocrisy, to love in others what one hates in their own society.
Who knew? The Economist’s forecast of Doom for Israel
Seth J. Frantzman
April 15th, 2008
The Economist recently published a 14 page special report on Israel. Although it was subtitled ‘the Next Generation’ it seemed to argue that this next generation would most likely live outside Israel. Eight articles spelled out its view of Israel. In ‘Fenced in’ it argued that the Security Fence had failed, that Israel is responsible for the economy of the West Bank (“if allows the West Bank’s economy to thrive”), that Israel was providing martyrs by killing Palestinians (“the very workings Israeli security doom the plan to failure.”), that Palestinians serve prison terms in Israeli jails on ‘dubious’ charges, that the ‘collective punishment’ of Gaza is “crude…cynical, unethical and prohibited by international law”, that $5.4 billion is required to get the Palestinian “forces up to scratch”, that Hamas won elections in 2006 “because Israel had spent years sidelining Fatah’s leader”, that Fatah “backed by Israel and America tried to de-stabilize the Hamas government” and led to Hamas’s takeover of Gaza, that Israel created Hassan Nasrallah and Hizbullah and that Israel assassinated “centrist Hamas leaders Ahmed Yassin and Abdel Aziz Rantisi” and boycotts “another centrist, Ismail Haniyeh” (centrist in this case refers to three Hamas leaders who have presided over the murder of 250 Israeli civilians, the firing of 9,000 rockets at a civilian city, the bombing of countless churches in Gaza, the imposition of Islamic law, the discrimination against women and gays, and the kidnapping of an Israeli soldier. If those are the centrists who are the radicals?)
In ‘to Fight, Perchance to die’ the Economist argues that the IDF’s ‘soul’ has been eroded because some people get out of service through medical exams and mental health problems. The accompanying graph however shows that these “medically unfit” people have remained almost the same percent of the total exemptions since 1979, only the number of religious exemptions have grown.
In another graph entitled “an unequal struggle” the Economist seems to imply that because more Palestinians have been killed in the war between Israel and the Palestinians that therefore something is unfair.
In the article ‘Miracles and mirages’ the subtitle sums up Israel’s economy as “a strong economy built on weak fundamentals.” The article then ‘proves’ this assertion by showing that there is greater income inequality, something all nations face and a strange reason to forecast economic doom.
In ‘A house of many mansions’ the article details how Israeli Jews are becoming more diverse and more tolerant of eachother. The article primarily examines the role of the religious Jews in society and how they present problems due to their being right wing and religious.
In a box entitled ‘hanging on’ the article describes how Palestinians recall their past through visiting ruined villages and how religious Jewish settlers “resemble the Palestinians more than they do their fellow Jews in their near fetishistic attachment to particular bits of land.” This is a strange argument given the fact that many of the world’s peoples, such as the Tibetans or Black South Africans were not condemned for a ‘fetishistic’ attachment to their land.
In ‘how the other fifth lives’ the article decries how “Arab-Israelis are increasingly treated as the enemy within” but does not reveal the fact that the Arab-Israelis rioted in 2000 in support of Arafat and protested the recent siege of Gaza by comparing Israeli actions to Nazism and that a leading Arab member of the Knesset, Azmi Bishara, fled the country after it turned out he was aiding Hizbullah. Perhaps the author of the article has forgotten that between 1948 and 1967 the Israeli-Arabs were under a military government in their villages and towns because of the real fear that they were the enemy within.
In ‘A systematic problem’ the article notes that “many of Israel’s problems stem from its political system.” The article condemns Israel for not having a constitution, something the U.K lacks as well. Odd that the Economist forgot that its own home country has this in common with the pariah Israel. The article then condemns Israel for having a “pure proportional model” of representation that is says was born of Israel’s focusing on other manners at her founding and “it had no time to devise an appropriate political model.” Once again the European edited Economist seems to forget that it was European democracies that instituted proportional representation in the 20th century and that Israel only learned from them. The complaint apparently is that Israel has too much diversity in its political parties, an ironic critique coming from the European continent where diversity is a sort of god.
In ‘The Next Zionist Revolution’ the article notes that outside Israel Jews are “questioning all the traditional Zionist assumptions” and that “traditional forms of Jewish support for Israel are changing.” The article notes with frustration that “like it or not, Zionism is Israel’s official ideology and will probably remain so as long as Jews are in the majority there…Can Zionism evolve enough to allow Israel’s non-Jewish citizens to feel truly part of the country?” Once again, odd questions coming from Europe where millions of Muslims immigrants up to the third generation still do not feel part of their host countries. Odd historically considering the fact that up until the 1980s most Jews were not Zionists n the Diaspora and religious Jewish groups had a deep antipathy towards Zionism. Rather than the world’s Jews suddenly questioning Zionism it is rather the other way around.
What can one make of this vitriolic critique. The Economist seems to think of Israel as its personal grind stone. It is so familiar with Israel that it scolds the country like a child and hates it like a brother. It is a deep scorn bred of deep European contempt that comes through. No other country profiled by the Economist has ever come in for such a deep criticism that assaults the very heart of the country. The Economist would never lament the fact that Ireland was Irish the way it laments the fact that Jews are a majority in Israel. It would never challenge a democracy so deeply and assault every piece of its democratic model, calling it an outright failure. But what is worse is that the Economist invents whole ideologies in Israel that most Israelis are unaware exist. The Economist speaks of the new Hardal movement of religious Zionists who are becoming Haredi. This must be something an Economist reported picked up at Café Joe (also mentioned in the text as new glass building no one would have thought possible during the Intifada. What he means is no European reporter based in Jerusalem would have thought such a thing possible) while talking to some cerebral professor who has never been to the settlements or men religious Jews. The Economist claims that 15% of Israelis will leave the country if Iran gets the bomb. Its graphs don’t bear out any of its claims. For instance the Economist condemns the check-points but then claims the security fence doesn’t work and that “most bombers are caught or deterred by over 550 checkpoints and roadblocks.” Well which is it? Is the fence good or are the checkpoints a good system? The graph on the same page shows clearly that the number of Israeli casualties have fallen 90% since the fence was completed in many parts of the country and contrary to forecasts from the Economist at the time it runs along the Green line and does not create ‘bantustans’. The Economist is angry that “Israel’s new wealth is highly concentrated.” Well isn’t that true in the U.K as well? Isn’t that usually the case with ‘new money’? At least its concentrated in new hands rather than in the old aristocracy which Europeans are so familiar with.
The worst aspect of the article in the Economist is that it deems every choice of the Palestinians to have been orchestrated by Israel, as if they have no cultural undercurrents of their own. It claims the rise of Hamas is entirely because of Israel. But perhaps the Palestinians themselves had something to do with this? Perhaps the rise of Islamism all throughout the Muslim world is part of this? It blames Israel for Hizbullah but doesn’t see the rise of Shiism as a revolutionary force from Iran to Lebanon as playing a part, as if the Shia are mere sheep commanded by Israel. How can it be that so much of what goes on in the Arab world is because of some reaction to what Israel has done first? This is the old argument that the Arab world lacks democracy because it needs dictatorship to fight Israel or that the Arab world is poor (which it isn’t) because it must spend its resources to fight Israel. The Economist’s own graph shows that hundreds of Palestinians died in 2007 in inter-Palestinian fighting and the civil war in Gaza. Far from being an attempt by Israel and Fatah to “de-stabilize” the Hamas government this infighting was a very real Civil War between Fatah and Hamas, just as Civil wars have taken place in Algeria, Lebanon and most recently in Iraq. How does the Economist ignore the Arab role in Arab affairs and not give the Arab agency to make his own decisions?
The Economist did get one thing right when it complained that “Jerusalem…the ancient city…is now populated mostly by Palestinians with Israeli residence permits, religious Jews of various kinds, aid workers and foreign journalists, and is one of the country’s poorest municipalities.” True enough. In this respect it is an ‘international’ city because, like Kosovo, East Timor and Haiti the U.N and the NGOs and Europeans have tried to colonize it. This colonization by the New International Class has not been successful but as the author notes, Jerusalem is a dumping ground for spoiled western children. Some of those spoiled children drink coffee at Café Joe, where the Economist journalists apparently hang out.
The Economist should not be ashamed of itself, the way Jimmy Carter should be for his ill begotten deeds in Syria, but it should shine the same harsh lens on the U.K as it has on Israel. If it were to do so it would find a virtual police state with 1 CCTV camera for every four citizens, with libel laws and censorship laws that pervert the free press and a viscous arrogance that churns out people like those at the Economist who complain about other democracies and multi-culturalism in other states without first learning about their own problems. No matter. The British will be boycotting the Olympics, perhaps forgetting about their own little occupation of a little place called Northern Ireland. Forgetting about the wealth gaps in their own society they will condemn others. Forgetting about their own lack of a constitution they will condemn others. That is what being a European is all about.
The Great Disgrace: Jimmy Carter in the age of terror
Seth J. Frantzman
April, 14th, 2008
Preaching "peace and justice" for the Arab states Jimmy Carter arrived in the Levant on April 13th for a week long odyssey that was scheduled to include meeting the dictators of Syria, Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia as well as meeting the terrorist chief of Hamas, Khaled Meshaal, in Damascus. Fresh off his book tour of Palestine: Peace not Apartheid and fresh off of making statements to the affect that Israel's occupation of the West Bank "perpetrates even worse instances of apartness, or apartheid, than we witnessed even in South Africa' Jimmy" Carter also spoke in high platitudes about the need to "Talk to someone who disagrees with you" and his desire to bring peace as a honest broker. Riding on his own coattails, he told the story, again and again, of how he had single handedly brought peace between Israel and Egypt.
According to Jimmy Carter "At Camp David I wrote every word of every proposal" and "when I was elected there was no pressure on me to even initiate a peace process between Israel and its Arab neighbors."
But Carter's high minded rhetoric disguises a deeply disturbing mentality. When questioned about the fact that the Prime Minister of Israel, the leader of the opposition and the leader of the Labor party had all refused to meet with Carter he responded that "When I go to a dictatorship, I only have to talk to one person and that’s the dictator, because he speaks for all the people." Speaks for all the people? This is the Carter view. The Carter ideology supports dictatorship not only because he frequently meets with dictators but also because he believes that when he speaks to them that they represent "all the people". This is a startling comment for a former American president to make. Carter is insinuating that the trouble with democracies is that they have factions and opposition and that people don't all have to toe the party line. Carter admitted his close relationship with the Syrian regime when he noted "I have known the president of Syria since he was a college student." Basher Assad was born in 1965 and studied ophthalmology at Damascus University in 1988 and in 1992 transferred to London in 1992 to complete his studies. Apparently this is when he got to know Jimmy Carter. He did not assume the Presidency of Syria until 2000 which means Jimmy Carter had 8 years of a relationship with him in which to encourage him to adopt human rights reforms and democracy in Syria. The fact that Carter seems to have only befriended the dictator and was unable to have any positive impression on the college student is quite strange. Perhaps Bashar's knowledge that the famous human rights campaigner was a friend of his has made him feel that there is no need to reform his regime.
But Carter's comments became more disturbing when it became clear that he was not only speaking with Hamas but that he was speaking for them. "Hamas' position is that they are perfectly willing for Abu Mazen (the President of the Palestinian authority) to represent them in all direct negotiations with the Israelis." Carter has come to the point where instead of speaking about what Hamas claims to want he has actually become a spokesman for Hamas, representing their views to the press.
Jimmy Carter is simply a disgrace to America and a disgrace to democracy. His antics aside it has become clear that he has a deeply disturbing relationship with dictators and terrorists and that he not only accepts them but also supports them and speaks for them to the press. How could an American president sink so low? How can a former American president distance himself so much from the ideals of America, the ideals of democracy and equal rights for all? Jimmy Carter speaks of Apartheid. When he is driving in Saudi Arabia to his next meeting and he sees the signs near Mecca that direct all 'non-Muslims' to veer off the highway onto a separate road that skirts around the holy city while only Muslims are allowed to continue, lest the 'infidels' defile Mecca, one wonders if Jimmy Carter will be reminded of Apartheid. When he is chumming it up with the Saudis one wonders if he will speak of human rights and the fact that foreign workers are often imprisoned in Saudi Arabia and kept as slaves and beheaded when they rebel. One wonders if he will speak of the treatment of women in the Kingdom and the fact that they may not drive. Carter will not see these Apartheid aspects of Saudi. No, he will only see the dictator who 'speaks for all the people'. Perhaps it is another friend of his from his college days?
The frontlines of Liberalistic racism: double talking jive
Seth J. Frantzman
April 19th, 2008
On April 2nd, 2008 Larry Derfner, a leftist columnist for the Jerusalem Post finally put in writing what has been said time and again by leftists in an article entitled ‘If Obama were white’(which is, in itself, a funny title since Mr. Obama is half white and is thus as ‘white’ as he is ‘black’ leaving it to modern race theorists to determine what he ‘really’ is):
Speaking about Barack Obama’s pastor Jeremiah Wright, Larry Derfner said: “Still, he should not be equated with a white racist preacher. Wright may be bad news, but I wouldn't call him evil; a disseminator of white racism is evil. You can't equate black resentment of whites with white contempt for blacks. You can't equate the residual antagonism of history's victims with the residual cruelty of history's victimizers. If a Jew, even a rabbi in a synagogue, speaks bitterly about ‘the goyim,’ it's not the same as a gentile, let's say a preacher in church, speaking bitterly about ‘the Jews,’ is it?”
This is the essence of the post-humanistic, moral-relative leftist-liberal secular progressive thought that has perverted logic and is now used to justify the most extreme things. This is what differentiates the conservative from the leftist. This is where the difference becomes clear. This quote is the litmus test.
It is a quote that has been said time and again in different ways. On the simple minded shrill show The View the ‘white conservative’ panelist challenged Rev. Wright’s statements and also called him racist. Leaping up to defend Wright was the stand in for Rosie O’Donnel, another pudgy leftist. The leftist said “I took sociology in college and my professors explained to me that blacks cannot be racist because they are suppressed, they are the minority and I think that is the scientific definition of racism, Wright can’t be racist.” At Verde Valley high school in Sedona, Arizona a teacher named Ryan handed out a column to his students entitled ‘Abraham Lincoln: Honkie or Egalitarian.” This high school teach would never have handed out a similar pamphlet entitled ‘Malcolm X: Nigger or egalitarian’.
“Can’t be racist”. Imagine that world. Imagine the world where certain people, because of their skin color, couldn’t be racist. Its an interesting supposition that relies primarily on the stupidity of intellectuals and such pseudo-scientific definitions as can be invented in the field of ‘sociology’. There are two ways to challenge this assertion. The first is to assault the very idea of race and to draw out the basis of ‘racism’. Racism is based on the theory that people are better or worse or have certain qualities because of their race or skin color. Based on this theory some people are inferior or superior. Based on this fact the idea of racism can be present anywhere. It can exist in any society. The Japanese were racist against other Asian peoples during the Second World War. This is a fact. This definition of racism does not hang on anything more than its existence.
The second reason to condemn this theory is based on the shear immorality of it. Racism is, according to our society, a bad thing. By the logic that only certain peoples can be racist this implies that certain types of hate are therefore legitimate, acceptable, excusable and not to be condemned. This is an interesting problem historically. Suppose we said that the German people, due to the suppression of the Versailles treaty, could not be ‘racist’ because of their defeat in the war. Thus their hate that manifested itself later could be seen as a mere reaction and thus become acceptable. This is problematic.
This bring us to the last problem. Who decides which society is the one that cannot be ‘racist’? According to the ‘sociologist’ the dominant race is the only one that can be ‘racist’. According to Derfner it is up to him. He decides that a ‘white preacher’ can be racist while a non-white one cannot. This hangs on Mr. Derfner’s decision about who is white. For him the Jews are not ‘white’. For those that complain about Apartheid in Israel the Jews are very much ‘white’. Even the sociologist must necessarily re-define whiteness and dominance in order to satisfy himself. In the old days it was easy to blame racism on WASP culture. But WASPs make up an increasingly smaller percentage of America. Hispanics are increasing as a percentage and thus the sociologist now re-defines them as ‘white’. But this doesn’t jive with the theory that the ‘racist’ group must be the dominant one. Hispanics are not ‘dominant’ in America. The other newly white people, the Irish, Jews, Italians, Hindus and Asians, are also not dominant. But together, after being lumped in with the WASPs, they are a majority. Thus groups that have been traditionally discriminated against, including Jews, Catholics and Hispanics, all become ‘dominant’ and they become part of the ‘racist’ majority. This is not very fair to them. They have never been given the chance to be the ‘suppressed’ group and thus allow their ‘racism’ to be merely a ‘reaction’. The way in which Hispanics become arbitrarily ‘white’ could just have easily been applied to blacks. Thus who is a ‘racist’ is determined by a wealthy white race theorist, an intellectual, who ironically is not so far replaced from the original race theorists of the 19th century who were also celebrated academics practicing a pseudo-science.
When the Rwandans were slaughtering eachother and committing genocide it is good to know that they weren’t racist when they did so.
Gerad Sorin in a review of the book The End of the Jews remarked that Barak Obama was “a mixed-race, multi-ethnic African-American man.” How many descriptive terms is that. How can he be all three? Don’t they cancel eachother out? A mixed-race person is already ‘multi-ethnic’ because race is higher on the totem pole of difference than ethnicity. But how can someone be ‘mixed-race’ and ‘African-American’? Can someone be ‘mixed-race’ and ‘white’? Take Carol Channing, a famous American singer and actress, who revealed at age 81 that she had been living as a white person but was really an ‘African-American’ because one of her grandmothers was part black. This strange ‘one quarter’ scam is reminiscent of the pseudo-race-sciences that determined under Nazism who was a Jew. Society judges anyone who has the most miniscule amount of ‘black’ in them to be ‘African-America’ which benefits the recipient by allowing them to be a ‘minority’ but in reality is a scam that mirrors the way in which miscegenation laws and other racist laws defined multi-racial children as being products of the discriminated against race. By adding so many adjectives Mr. Sorin perpetuates idiocy and race-theory lunacy.
In Oregon recently it turned out that a large number of track athletes were going to be coming to town to train for the Olympic try outs. “When local representatives of Eugene, Oregon pitched Eugene to be the host, USA Track & Field officials expressed concern about Eugene’s racial demographics and whether athletes would feel welcome, said Angel Jones, Eugene city manager.” Diversity training will include “alerting visiting athletes to the kinds of restaurant foods, hair care salons or religious services that they might be accustomed to frequenting…not assuming every unfamiliar black person is an athlete… certain greetings might be appropriate in some instances between two black people, but less so if made by a white person to a black person.” Shawn Fincher, the race specialist, who heads the ‘Blacks on Track Team’ project notes the goal is to “educate Trials volunteers about the need for cultural sensitivity when greeting the hundreds of African-American athletes, fans and family members expected to land in Eugene next summer.” Angel Jones, the City Manager wants to make sure the blacks know the location of Papa’s Soul Food Kitchen so they will feel at home with their own type of food. Jones noted that “people who often are just trying to be nice can also be offensive.” Although Jones notes that she is concerned all the townspeople will mistake all blacks for athletes she also claims the townspeople might ‘shadow’ the blacks in stores and treat them suspiciously. One wonders. Are they all the same those blacks? Apparently they all eat the same food. Who is the racist here?
Issue 31
“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
April 19th, 2008
1) The secular-pagan roots of Passover: Tis a Jewish holiday which means it is the season to find the ‘true’ roots of Judaism in some pagan religion. This time its Passover which it turns out, according to secular ‘scholars’, is actually stolen from the Greeks and Romans. Passover predates the Roman occupation of 61 B.C. No matter. Modern day Romans don’t eat the type of food found at the Passover seder. So are the Jews the last remaining link to what Rome was really like?
2) Who knew? The Economist’s forecast of Doom for Israel: The Economist’s recent Special Report included 14 pages describing the most doom and gloom prophecies against the nation of Israel since the time of Jeremiah. Who knew for instance the Israel’s economy is ‘strong’ but built on ‘weak’ fundamentals. Only Europeans and especially the English, whose country lacks a constitution and uses proportional representation could criticize Israel for the exact same things. But whose economy has the ‘weak fundamentals’? Israel is writing down billions of dollars in losses from the housing crises.
3) The Great Disgrace: Jimmy Carter in the age of terror: Jimmy Carter told the press this week that speaking with dictators is easier than dealing with democracies because you only have to speak to one person and he “speaks for all the people.” Only an arrogant former American president and post-humanist could speak so highly of a dictatorship and condemn democracies for having a diversity of opinion.
4) The frontlines of Liberalistic racism: double talking jive: A whole slew of idiocratic statements on race have come out of late. We hear that ‘blacks can’t be racist’ in reference to Rev. Wright and that in an Oregon town where athletes are converging to practice for the Olympics the people are being sensitized to know what types of food black people eat so restaurants can have appropriate tolerance oriented menus (surely all blacks throughout the world eat the same cuisine and they all can’t be bothered to try anything else?). And someone has coined a new term for Barak Obama: ‘mixed-race, multi-ethnic, African-American’. Who comes up with these ridiculous ideas?
The secular-pagan roots of Passover
Seth J. Frantzman
April 19th, 2008
It is Passover. So it is the season for archeologists, scientists, historians and leftists to heap scorn on the Jewish holiday by shedding light on its non-Jewish roots in order to show how the Jews stole their religion and their ritual from other sources. Ronit Vered writes in Haaretz magazine (‘Why is this night different April 18th 2008) about ‘What the Passover seder owes to the Greek and Roman banquet and how the rabbis adapted it to Judaism. According to the author “some claim that the Jewish seder is closely tied to the Greek feast and the Roman banquet…some of the characteristics of the seder meal are suspiciously similar to demonstratively different, i.e. the same, only the opposite of the Greek and Roman customs.” The article mentions the well known hellenization that took place in the Middle East after Alexander’s invasion. The author notes how the Jews invented their tradition “whoever wanted to fight these harmful influences [of Hellenization] was compelled to put together a clever and scrupulously different plan for the holiday meal, that would alternatively adopt and reject the temptations and influences of the spirit of the time.” The author implores the secular reader to “enjoy this thing known as the seder night and reflect upon how the seder is connected to the history of festive meals.”
Vered tells us that when the Temple was destroyed the Jews “had to find an individual and family substitute for the impressive and educations affect of pilgrimage and the influence of the Passover sacrifice.” The author tells us that the Greeks celebrated holidays with meals and Greek meals only included men and that they did not include more than 10 diners. So the Jews did the opposite, they included the women and children, but they borrowed the idea of having a meal during a holiday. Instead of 10 diners they allowed the number to be unlimited. This is obvious because no other culture in the world celebrates religious holidays with meals. Chinese people don’t. Do they? Hindus don’t? Do they? It turns out almost all cultures celebrate holidays with meals and when a holiday isn’t celebrated with a meal it can be interpreted to be ‘demonstratively different’ and thus the opposite. So by Vered’s logic all of the cultures in the world stole from the Greeks. But one might wonder how the Aztecs got their culture from the Greeks. What of the Ancient Egyptians? They had meals too and they lived before the Greeks. So how did they take from the Greeks? No matter.
The Greeks reclined on sofas during meals a custom Vered tells us “they copied from the Phoenicians and Assyrians and subsequently bequeathed to the Romans.” The author reminds us that while the Greeks each got their own sofa the Romans crowded together but in both cases they meals were followed with orgies. The author tells us that “in first century Palestine [because even in the 1st century it was Palestine, certainly not Judea] meals were generally eastern Mediterranean style…but for festive meals they followed the Roman custom, as for example at Jesus’ Last Supper.” The Roman occupation of the Holy Land dates from 61 B.C. So we are to believe that in this short period, by the time of Jesus in 30 A.D, the Jews had already stolen from the Romans. After all, the Jews never had a culture to themselves, they were like sponges.
Vered tells us that the food itself is ‘evidence’ of the influence. “Believers in the theory that the Passover seder is closely related to the Roman meal point to the recipe for the haroset, the matza sandwich, the herbs and ingredients like a hard boiled egg as the opening course as common Roman customs…the attempt to achieve a balance of flavors, the bitter herbs versus the sweet haroset…is also typical of Roman principles of nutrition.” The same author has contradicted herself in the article by noting that “the eating of matzot and the Passover sacrifice in the Temple have older origins.” So where did that matza sandwich come from? A balance in the types of food eaten is ‘evidence’ of Roman influence? But other cultures have such ‘balance’ in their diet. Are we to assume that India and China stole from the Romans as well? And why has the Roman tradition not survived in Europe but only among the Jews? Modern Italians don’t eat all these things so popular to eat on Passover. They are eating Italian food. So the descendants of the Romans don’t eat Roman food, but the Jews, alone among the world’s peoples, stole their traditions from the Romans and have kept them ever since, not borrowing from other cultures afterward. Thus the Jews opened up from the period 61 B.C to 30 AD and absorbed the cultures of others for Passover, and never before invented anything original and have never since borrowed?
The boozing that is tied up with Passover is also Greek inspired. Vered tells us that “Greeks and Romans made a clear separation between the meal and the drinking that came afterward…wine was diluted with water, a custom that differentiated barbarians from civilized types.” Thus the Jews, choosing to be barbarian, chose to drink their wine full bodied?
Vered wraps up with the observation that “the Passover Haggadah can be viewed as a theatrical work…all meant to keep the audience attentive in the name of preserving tradition….the Greek symposium, a post-banquet party, often concluded with a public celebration or even an orgy…in order to prevent these despicable customs from infiltrating Judaism, the custom was converted into the eating of the Afikoman, and the Haggadah strictly instructs that this shall be the final act of the evening.”
It is amazing how leftists seek to pervert Jewish tradition and religion in order to make it merely a copy of the traditions of others. Jews are said to have been Pagans, stealing their religion from either the Egyptians or the Babylonians. For every Jewish tradition and holiday and part of the Bible the ‘biblical scholar’ finds a parallel with other religions and thus assumes the Jews borrowed, never that others borrowed from the Jews or that the traditions arose in different places for different reasons, independent of eachother. In order to explain the Jews hatred of pork or mixing milk and meat the ‘scholar’ decides that this is an ‘opposite’ so that the Jews stole this too by doing the opposite. Thus while a ‘scholar’ studying the Mayans will read a Mayan religious inscription and accept it at face value and believe that it reflects Mayan history the same scholar on reading the Jewish Bible finds in it different authors and foreign influences. Needless to say the Mayan religion is unique, the Jewish religion is not. If a leftist comes upon a Sioux Sun Dance or some other Native-American festival he will marvel at its colorful diversity. When he comes upon Passover he finds Greeks and Romans.
It is not a coincidence that leftist secular people can’t find anything to love in Passover. It is not a surprise that they can only enjoy it when reminding themselves of its Pagan-leftist-secular roots. If it’s Greek and full of gaiety then it is positive. If its archaic and Jewish then it is un-interesting.
But if Jews wanted to do the opposite of the heathen Greeks why did the Jews eat anything at all. The opposite of a banquet meal is to not have a meal and starve oneself. The scholar cannot explain how and why the Jews picked and choose certain things to copy, certain things to throw out and certain things to do the opposite. This is the problem. All religious festivals from Japan to Patagonia have things in common and things that are different. That doesn’t mean they influenced eachother. It merely shows that people are both similar and diverse. Why can’t leftist Jews ever celebrate their own religion and find diversity within it. Why can’t they appreciate it the way they appreciate a Sufi festival or an Apache dance? Why must they always find that it ‘secretly’ is borrowed from others and come up with the most complicated, bizarre and random explanations for how it was stolen. It merely shows the secular hatred for tradition, the great secular hypocrisy, to love in others what one hates in their own society.
Who knew? The Economist’s forecast of Doom for Israel
Seth J. Frantzman
April 15th, 2008
The Economist recently published a 14 page special report on Israel. Although it was subtitled ‘the Next Generation’ it seemed to argue that this next generation would most likely live outside Israel. Eight articles spelled out its view of Israel. In ‘Fenced in’ it argued that the Security Fence had failed, that Israel is responsible for the economy of the West Bank (“if allows the West Bank’s economy to thrive”), that Israel was providing martyrs by killing Palestinians (“the very workings Israeli security doom the plan to failure.”), that Palestinians serve prison terms in Israeli jails on ‘dubious’ charges, that the ‘collective punishment’ of Gaza is “crude…cynical, unethical and prohibited by international law”, that $5.4 billion is required to get the Palestinian “forces up to scratch”, that Hamas won elections in 2006 “because Israel had spent years sidelining Fatah’s leader”, that Fatah “backed by Israel and America tried to de-stabilize the Hamas government” and led to Hamas’s takeover of Gaza, that Israel created Hassan Nasrallah and Hizbullah and that Israel assassinated “centrist Hamas leaders Ahmed Yassin and Abdel Aziz Rantisi” and boycotts “another centrist, Ismail Haniyeh” (centrist in this case refers to three Hamas leaders who have presided over the murder of 250 Israeli civilians, the firing of 9,000 rockets at a civilian city, the bombing of countless churches in Gaza, the imposition of Islamic law, the discrimination against women and gays, and the kidnapping of an Israeli soldier. If those are the centrists who are the radicals?)
In ‘to Fight, Perchance to die’ the Economist argues that the IDF’s ‘soul’ has been eroded because some people get out of service through medical exams and mental health problems. The accompanying graph however shows that these “medically unfit” people have remained almost the same percent of the total exemptions since 1979, only the number of religious exemptions have grown.
In another graph entitled “an unequal struggle” the Economist seems to imply that because more Palestinians have been killed in the war between Israel and the Palestinians that therefore something is unfair.
In the article ‘Miracles and mirages’ the subtitle sums up Israel’s economy as “a strong economy built on weak fundamentals.” The article then ‘proves’ this assertion by showing that there is greater income inequality, something all nations face and a strange reason to forecast economic doom.
In ‘A house of many mansions’ the article details how Israeli Jews are becoming more diverse and more tolerant of eachother. The article primarily examines the role of the religious Jews in society and how they present problems due to their being right wing and religious.
In a box entitled ‘hanging on’ the article describes how Palestinians recall their past through visiting ruined villages and how religious Jewish settlers “resemble the Palestinians more than they do their fellow Jews in their near fetishistic attachment to particular bits of land.” This is a strange argument given the fact that many of the world’s peoples, such as the Tibetans or Black South Africans were not condemned for a ‘fetishistic’ attachment to their land.
In ‘how the other fifth lives’ the article decries how “Arab-Israelis are increasingly treated as the enemy within” but does not reveal the fact that the Arab-Israelis rioted in 2000 in support of Arafat and protested the recent siege of Gaza by comparing Israeli actions to Nazism and that a leading Arab member of the Knesset, Azmi Bishara, fled the country after it turned out he was aiding Hizbullah. Perhaps the author of the article has forgotten that between 1948 and 1967 the Israeli-Arabs were under a military government in their villages and towns because of the real fear that they were the enemy within.
In ‘A systematic problem’ the article notes that “many of Israel’s problems stem from its political system.” The article condemns Israel for not having a constitution, something the U.K lacks as well. Odd that the Economist forgot that its own home country has this in common with the pariah Israel. The article then condemns Israel for having a “pure proportional model” of representation that is says was born of Israel’s focusing on other manners at her founding and “it had no time to devise an appropriate political model.” Once again the European edited Economist seems to forget that it was European democracies that instituted proportional representation in the 20th century and that Israel only learned from them. The complaint apparently is that Israel has too much diversity in its political parties, an ironic critique coming from the European continent where diversity is a sort of god.
In ‘The Next Zionist Revolution’ the article notes that outside Israel Jews are “questioning all the traditional Zionist assumptions” and that “traditional forms of Jewish support for Israel are changing.” The article notes with frustration that “like it or not, Zionism is Israel’s official ideology and will probably remain so as long as Jews are in the majority there…Can Zionism evolve enough to allow Israel’s non-Jewish citizens to feel truly part of the country?” Once again, odd questions coming from Europe where millions of Muslims immigrants up to the third generation still do not feel part of their host countries. Odd historically considering the fact that up until the 1980s most Jews were not Zionists n the Diaspora and religious Jewish groups had a deep antipathy towards Zionism. Rather than the world’s Jews suddenly questioning Zionism it is rather the other way around.
What can one make of this vitriolic critique. The Economist seems to think of Israel as its personal grind stone. It is so familiar with Israel that it scolds the country like a child and hates it like a brother. It is a deep scorn bred of deep European contempt that comes through. No other country profiled by the Economist has ever come in for such a deep criticism that assaults the very heart of the country. The Economist would never lament the fact that Ireland was Irish the way it laments the fact that Jews are a majority in Israel. It would never challenge a democracy so deeply and assault every piece of its democratic model, calling it an outright failure. But what is worse is that the Economist invents whole ideologies in Israel that most Israelis are unaware exist. The Economist speaks of the new Hardal movement of religious Zionists who are becoming Haredi. This must be something an Economist reported picked up at Café Joe (also mentioned in the text as new glass building no one would have thought possible during the Intifada. What he means is no European reporter based in Jerusalem would have thought such a thing possible) while talking to some cerebral professor who has never been to the settlements or men religious Jews. The Economist claims that 15% of Israelis will leave the country if Iran gets the bomb. Its graphs don’t bear out any of its claims. For instance the Economist condemns the check-points but then claims the security fence doesn’t work and that “most bombers are caught or deterred by over 550 checkpoints and roadblocks.” Well which is it? Is the fence good or are the checkpoints a good system? The graph on the same page shows clearly that the number of Israeli casualties have fallen 90% since the fence was completed in many parts of the country and contrary to forecasts from the Economist at the time it runs along the Green line and does not create ‘bantustans’. The Economist is angry that “Israel’s new wealth is highly concentrated.” Well isn’t that true in the U.K as well? Isn’t that usually the case with ‘new money’? At least its concentrated in new hands rather than in the old aristocracy which Europeans are so familiar with.
The worst aspect of the article in the Economist is that it deems every choice of the Palestinians to have been orchestrated by Israel, as if they have no cultural undercurrents of their own. It claims the rise of Hamas is entirely because of Israel. But perhaps the Palestinians themselves had something to do with this? Perhaps the rise of Islamism all throughout the Muslim world is part of this? It blames Israel for Hizbullah but doesn’t see the rise of Shiism as a revolutionary force from Iran to Lebanon as playing a part, as if the Shia are mere sheep commanded by Israel. How can it be that so much of what goes on in the Arab world is because of some reaction to what Israel has done first? This is the old argument that the Arab world lacks democracy because it needs dictatorship to fight Israel or that the Arab world is poor (which it isn’t) because it must spend its resources to fight Israel. The Economist’s own graph shows that hundreds of Palestinians died in 2007 in inter-Palestinian fighting and the civil war in Gaza. Far from being an attempt by Israel and Fatah to “de-stabilize” the Hamas government this infighting was a very real Civil War between Fatah and Hamas, just as Civil wars have taken place in Algeria, Lebanon and most recently in Iraq. How does the Economist ignore the Arab role in Arab affairs and not give the Arab agency to make his own decisions?
The Economist did get one thing right when it complained that “Jerusalem…the ancient city…is now populated mostly by Palestinians with Israeli residence permits, religious Jews of various kinds, aid workers and foreign journalists, and is one of the country’s poorest municipalities.” True enough. In this respect it is an ‘international’ city because, like Kosovo, East Timor and Haiti the U.N and the NGOs and Europeans have tried to colonize it. This colonization by the New International Class has not been successful but as the author notes, Jerusalem is a dumping ground for spoiled western children. Some of those spoiled children drink coffee at Café Joe, where the Economist journalists apparently hang out.
The Economist should not be ashamed of itself, the way Jimmy Carter should be for his ill begotten deeds in Syria, but it should shine the same harsh lens on the U.K as it has on Israel. If it were to do so it would find a virtual police state with 1 CCTV camera for every four citizens, with libel laws and censorship laws that pervert the free press and a viscous arrogance that churns out people like those at the Economist who complain about other democracies and multi-culturalism in other states without first learning about their own problems. No matter. The British will be boycotting the Olympics, perhaps forgetting about their own little occupation of a little place called Northern Ireland. Forgetting about the wealth gaps in their own society they will condemn others. Forgetting about their own lack of a constitution they will condemn others. That is what being a European is all about.
The Great Disgrace: Jimmy Carter in the age of terror
Seth J. Frantzman
April, 14th, 2008
Preaching "peace and justice" for the Arab states Jimmy Carter arrived in the Levant on April 13th for a week long odyssey that was scheduled to include meeting the dictators of Syria, Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia as well as meeting the terrorist chief of Hamas, Khaled Meshaal, in Damascus. Fresh off his book tour of Palestine: Peace not Apartheid and fresh off of making statements to the affect that Israel's occupation of the West Bank "perpetrates even worse instances of apartness, or apartheid, than we witnessed even in South Africa' Jimmy" Carter also spoke in high platitudes about the need to "Talk to someone who disagrees with you" and his desire to bring peace as a honest broker. Riding on his own coattails, he told the story, again and again, of how he had single handedly brought peace between Israel and Egypt.
According to Jimmy Carter "At Camp David I wrote every word of every proposal" and "when I was elected there was no pressure on me to even initiate a peace process between Israel and its Arab neighbors."
But Carter's high minded rhetoric disguises a deeply disturbing mentality. When questioned about the fact that the Prime Minister of Israel, the leader of the opposition and the leader of the Labor party had all refused to meet with Carter he responded that "When I go to a dictatorship, I only have to talk to one person and that’s the dictator, because he speaks for all the people." Speaks for all the people? This is the Carter view. The Carter ideology supports dictatorship not only because he frequently meets with dictators but also because he believes that when he speaks to them that they represent "all the people". This is a startling comment for a former American president to make. Carter is insinuating that the trouble with democracies is that they have factions and opposition and that people don't all have to toe the party line. Carter admitted his close relationship with the Syrian regime when he noted "I have known the president of Syria since he was a college student." Basher Assad was born in 1965 and studied ophthalmology at Damascus University in 1988 and in 1992 transferred to London in 1992 to complete his studies. Apparently this is when he got to know Jimmy Carter. He did not assume the Presidency of Syria until 2000 which means Jimmy Carter had 8 years of a relationship with him in which to encourage him to adopt human rights reforms and democracy in Syria. The fact that Carter seems to have only befriended the dictator and was unable to have any positive impression on the college student is quite strange. Perhaps Bashar's knowledge that the famous human rights campaigner was a friend of his has made him feel that there is no need to reform his regime.
But Carter's comments became more disturbing when it became clear that he was not only speaking with Hamas but that he was speaking for them. "Hamas' position is that they are perfectly willing for Abu Mazen (the President of the Palestinian authority) to represent them in all direct negotiations with the Israelis." Carter has come to the point where instead of speaking about what Hamas claims to want he has actually become a spokesman for Hamas, representing their views to the press.
Jimmy Carter is simply a disgrace to America and a disgrace to democracy. His antics aside it has become clear that he has a deeply disturbing relationship with dictators and terrorists and that he not only accepts them but also supports them and speaks for them to the press. How could an American president sink so low? How can a former American president distance himself so much from the ideals of America, the ideals of democracy and equal rights for all? Jimmy Carter speaks of Apartheid. When he is driving in Saudi Arabia to his next meeting and he sees the signs near Mecca that direct all 'non-Muslims' to veer off the highway onto a separate road that skirts around the holy city while only Muslims are allowed to continue, lest the 'infidels' defile Mecca, one wonders if Jimmy Carter will be reminded of Apartheid. When he is chumming it up with the Saudis one wonders if he will speak of human rights and the fact that foreign workers are often imprisoned in Saudi Arabia and kept as slaves and beheaded when they rebel. One wonders if he will speak of the treatment of women in the Kingdom and the fact that they may not drive. Carter will not see these Apartheid aspects of Saudi. No, he will only see the dictator who 'speaks for all the people'. Perhaps it is another friend of his from his college days?
The frontlines of Liberalistic racism: double talking jive
Seth J. Frantzman
April 19th, 2008
On April 2nd, 2008 Larry Derfner, a leftist columnist for the Jerusalem Post finally put in writing what has been said time and again by leftists in an article entitled ‘If Obama were white’(which is, in itself, a funny title since Mr. Obama is half white and is thus as ‘white’ as he is ‘black’ leaving it to modern race theorists to determine what he ‘really’ is):
Speaking about Barack Obama’s pastor Jeremiah Wright, Larry Derfner said: “Still, he should not be equated with a white racist preacher. Wright may be bad news, but I wouldn't call him evil; a disseminator of white racism is evil. You can't equate black resentment of whites with white contempt for blacks. You can't equate the residual antagonism of history's victims with the residual cruelty of history's victimizers. If a Jew, even a rabbi in a synagogue, speaks bitterly about ‘the goyim,’ it's not the same as a gentile, let's say a preacher in church, speaking bitterly about ‘the Jews,’ is it?”
This is the essence of the post-humanistic, moral-relative leftist-liberal secular progressive thought that has perverted logic and is now used to justify the most extreme things. This is what differentiates the conservative from the leftist. This is where the difference becomes clear. This quote is the litmus test.
It is a quote that has been said time and again in different ways. On the simple minded shrill show The View the ‘white conservative’ panelist challenged Rev. Wright’s statements and also called him racist. Leaping up to defend Wright was the stand in for Rosie O’Donnel, another pudgy leftist. The leftist said “I took sociology in college and my professors explained to me that blacks cannot be racist because they are suppressed, they are the minority and I think that is the scientific definition of racism, Wright can’t be racist.” At Verde Valley high school in Sedona, Arizona a teacher named Ryan handed out a column to his students entitled ‘Abraham Lincoln: Honkie or Egalitarian.” This high school teach would never have handed out a similar pamphlet entitled ‘Malcolm X: Nigger or egalitarian’.
“Can’t be racist”. Imagine that world. Imagine the world where certain people, because of their skin color, couldn’t be racist. Its an interesting supposition that relies primarily on the stupidity of intellectuals and such pseudo-scientific definitions as can be invented in the field of ‘sociology’. There are two ways to challenge this assertion. The first is to assault the very idea of race and to draw out the basis of ‘racism’. Racism is based on the theory that people are better or worse or have certain qualities because of their race or skin color. Based on this theory some people are inferior or superior. Based on this fact the idea of racism can be present anywhere. It can exist in any society. The Japanese were racist against other Asian peoples during the Second World War. This is a fact. This definition of racism does not hang on anything more than its existence.
The second reason to condemn this theory is based on the shear immorality of it. Racism is, according to our society, a bad thing. By the logic that only certain peoples can be racist this implies that certain types of hate are therefore legitimate, acceptable, excusable and not to be condemned. This is an interesting problem historically. Suppose we said that the German people, due to the suppression of the Versailles treaty, could not be ‘racist’ because of their defeat in the war. Thus their hate that manifested itself later could be seen as a mere reaction and thus become acceptable. This is problematic.
This bring us to the last problem. Who decides which society is the one that cannot be ‘racist’? According to the ‘sociologist’ the dominant race is the only one that can be ‘racist’. According to Derfner it is up to him. He decides that a ‘white preacher’ can be racist while a non-white one cannot. This hangs on Mr. Derfner’s decision about who is white. For him the Jews are not ‘white’. For those that complain about Apartheid in Israel the Jews are very much ‘white’. Even the sociologist must necessarily re-define whiteness and dominance in order to satisfy himself. In the old days it was easy to blame racism on WASP culture. But WASPs make up an increasingly smaller percentage of America. Hispanics are increasing as a percentage and thus the sociologist now re-defines them as ‘white’. But this doesn’t jive with the theory that the ‘racist’ group must be the dominant one. Hispanics are not ‘dominant’ in America. The other newly white people, the Irish, Jews, Italians, Hindus and Asians, are also not dominant. But together, after being lumped in with the WASPs, they are a majority. Thus groups that have been traditionally discriminated against, including Jews, Catholics and Hispanics, all become ‘dominant’ and they become part of the ‘racist’ majority. This is not very fair to them. They have never been given the chance to be the ‘suppressed’ group and thus allow their ‘racism’ to be merely a ‘reaction’. The way in which Hispanics become arbitrarily ‘white’ could just have easily been applied to blacks. Thus who is a ‘racist’ is determined by a wealthy white race theorist, an intellectual, who ironically is not so far replaced from the original race theorists of the 19th century who were also celebrated academics practicing a pseudo-science.
When the Rwandans were slaughtering eachother and committing genocide it is good to know that they weren’t racist when they did so.
Gerad Sorin in a review of the book The End of the Jews remarked that Barak Obama was “a mixed-race, multi-ethnic African-American man.” How many descriptive terms is that. How can he be all three? Don’t they cancel eachother out? A mixed-race person is already ‘multi-ethnic’ because race is higher on the totem pole of difference than ethnicity. But how can someone be ‘mixed-race’ and ‘African-American’? Can someone be ‘mixed-race’ and ‘white’? Take Carol Channing, a famous American singer and actress, who revealed at age 81 that she had been living as a white person but was really an ‘African-American’ because one of her grandmothers was part black. This strange ‘one quarter’ scam is reminiscent of the pseudo-race-sciences that determined under Nazism who was a Jew. Society judges anyone who has the most miniscule amount of ‘black’ in them to be ‘African-America’ which benefits the recipient by allowing them to be a ‘minority’ but in reality is a scam that mirrors the way in which miscegenation laws and other racist laws defined multi-racial children as being products of the discriminated against race. By adding so many adjectives Mr. Sorin perpetuates idiocy and race-theory lunacy.
In Oregon recently it turned out that a large number of track athletes were going to be coming to town to train for the Olympic try outs. “When local representatives of Eugene, Oregon pitched Eugene to be the host, USA Track & Field officials expressed concern about Eugene’s racial demographics and whether athletes would feel welcome, said Angel Jones, Eugene city manager.” Diversity training will include “alerting visiting athletes to the kinds of restaurant foods, hair care salons or religious services that they might be accustomed to frequenting…not assuming every unfamiliar black person is an athlete… certain greetings might be appropriate in some instances between two black people, but less so if made by a white person to a black person.” Shawn Fincher, the race specialist, who heads the ‘Blacks on Track Team’ project notes the goal is to “educate Trials volunteers about the need for cultural sensitivity when greeting the hundreds of African-American athletes, fans and family members expected to land in Eugene next summer.” Angel Jones, the City Manager wants to make sure the blacks know the location of Papa’s Soul Food Kitchen so they will feel at home with their own type of food. Jones noted that “people who often are just trying to be nice can also be offensive.” Although Jones notes that she is concerned all the townspeople will mistake all blacks for athletes she also claims the townspeople might ‘shadow’ the blacks in stores and treat them suspiciously. One wonders. Are they all the same those blacks? Apparently they all eat the same food. Who is the racist here?
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