Terra Incognita: WikiLeaks and the Iranian octopus
By SETH J.FRANTZMAN
http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=197470
12/01/2010 05:52
The documents show that the Arab world understands the threat coming from the Islamic Republic better than the Americans do.
"[Hizbullah leader Hassan] Nasrallah always told us that the Arab regimes were collaborating, not only against their own people, but with others against the Arabs and now these WikiLeaks just prove how correct he always was.” That comes from an educated secular Muslim Palestinian woman, surely the kind of “base” that should be counted on to vote for Mahmoud Abbas. However the base is fickle and is captivated by the Iranian juggernaut.
The WikiLeaks documents have shown that not only are the Arab, and other Muslim governments, candid in their wish that Iran be crushed, they also have insights into how the Americans should fight terrorism.
LET’S BEGIN in Azerbaijan, a non- Arab state that borders Iran. There, President Ilham Aliyev said to the US on February 25 that “he supported economic isolation and believed it could be effective if enforced by a broad coalition.” Azerbaijan’s population is made up of Azeri Muslims, who are also a badly treated minority in Iran. Iran helped Christian Armenia against the Azeris in the wars of the 1990s.
The Saudis come out in WikiLeaks documents with a clear and strong voice in favor of attacking Iran. However they won’t send troops. One official in an April 2008 cable “recalled the king’s frequent exhortations to the US to attack Iran and so put an end to its nuclear weapons program. ‘He told you to cut off the head of the snake’... Prince Muqrin echoed these views, emphasizing that some sanctions could be implemented without UN approval.”
The Gulf Arab states were particularly wary of Iran and encouraged the US to beat back the threat. According to a May 2005 cable, the crown prince of Abu Dhabi expressed interest in a harsh US response to Iran; “[he] agreed with [a] tough line with Teheran... A nuclear-armed Iran would destabilize the Gulf region and possibly allow terrorist access to WMD. [He] asked Lt.-Gen. Dunn whether it would be possible for anyone to ‘take out’ all locations of concern in Iran via air power.” In December 2009 he reiterated his concerns, noting that Iran believes itself to be a superpower and could not be dealt with like North Korea. Like other Arab leaders, he stressed that a deal with Iran would not transpire. The United Arab Emirates foreign minister noted in a February meeting that “the nuclear issue is only one aspect of the Iran problem, and that Iran’s regional meddling was a serious concern. He pledged the UAE’s backing as the US rallies support for new sanctions but questioned whether they would achieve the desired effect.”
Qatar’s prime minister noted in December 2009 that in regards to Iran, “they lie to us, and we lie to them.” Furthermore the Qatari leadership understood that military force would eventually result and didn’t seem to express any objections. In a November 2009 conversation with the American ambassador, the king of Bahrain expressed his support for the use of force against Iran. “King Hamad pointed to Iran as the source of much of the trouble in both Iraq and Afghanistan. He argued forcefully for taking action to terminate their nuclear program.”
Oman was on board as well.In an August 2007 meeting “Lieutenant- General Ali bin Majid al-Ma’amari, reviewed Oman’s view on Iran from a security perspective, highlighting Omani awareness of Iran’s deceptive tactics and expansionist ideological desires in the region.” Furthermore “Oman would not oppose imposition of further measures against Iran by the international bodies; however, Oman did not want to play an active role in advocating for such measures itself.” An April 2009 document reveals the degree to which the Jordanians understand the Iranian threat. This is interesting considering Jordan is neither a front line state nor does it have a consequential Shi’ite minority.
According to the American who met with Jordanian officials, “The metaphor most commonly deployed by Jordanian officials when discussing Iran is of an octopus whose tentacles reach out insidiously to manipulate, foment, and undermine the best laid plans of the West and regional moderates. Iran’s tentacles include its allies Qatar and Syria, Hizbullah in Lebanon, Hamas in the Palestinian territories, an Iraqi government sometimes seen as supplicant to Teheran, and Shi’ite communities throughout the region.”
The Jordanians “doubt” the US knows how to effectively deal with Iran. Furthermore “Upper House [of the Jordanian Parliament] President Zeid Rifai has predicted that dialogue with Iran will lead nowhere... military force becomes the only option: ‘Bomb Iran, or live with an Iranian bomb. Sanctions, carrots, incentives won’t matter.’” WHAT THE leaked documents make clear is that the region fears Iran. Everyone wants it to be contained, sanctioned and probably attacked.
However they want Americans, Israelis or Europeans to do it for them. None of them discussed any activities of their own. None of them is shipping weapons to the Ahwazi Arabs in southern Iran or Azeris in the north. No one is arming the Baluchi or Kurdish separatists. They all fear Iranian intrigues in Iraq, yet none of them will counter them.
The most Yemen’s deputy prime minister would do is admit to lying to his own parliament while President Ali Abdullah Saleh promised “we’ll continue saying the bombs [directed at Yemeni terrorists by the US] are ours, not yours.” The Kuwaitis apparently encouraged the Americans to take the Guantanamo detainees and drop them into combat zones in Iraq to “get rid of them.” That would be better than having Kuwait take back the “rotten” people. King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia suggested implanting the inmates with a chip and then releasing them. They could be tracked like horses or falcons. If they got out of line, a Predator drone could pay them a visit. These are inventive ideas (I’ve always felt the latter one would have been a good choice when Israel released the Lebanese terrorist Samir Kuntar in 2008) but they aren’t substantive.
There was a time when the Arabs did fight the Iranians, sort of. Al- Qaida members in Afghanistan, most of whom were Arab, hunted down Shi’ites and Iranian agents and murdered them in the 1990s. From 1980 to 1988 Iraqis died in droves to fight the Iranians. In that war, Saddam Hussein was bribed by Kuwait, the Gulf states and the Saudis to get his Iraqis to die to defend the other Arab states from Shi’ite fundamentalism. The Arab members of the Israelibacked South Lebanese Army fought Hizbullah for a decade.
Today’s Arab states are afraid even to tell their own base that Iran is a threat. Saad Hariri and Walid Jumblatt in Lebanon are begging Syria to save them from Hizbullah, even though it was Syria which probably arranged the murder their fathers. The WikiLeaks documents illustrate the complete breakdown and failure of the Arab leaders to realistically confront their problems, especially concerning Iran.
The writer is a PhD researcher at Hebrew University and a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies.
Wednesday, December 1, 2010
Wednesday, November 24, 2010
Terra Incognita
Tera Incognita: Bloody coexistence
By SETH J.FRANTZMAN
11/23/2010 22:48
The bizarre horror and roots of the Kosovo organ-trafficking ring; almost all those involved were respected professionals in their communities.
In mid-November, the world media reported that Interpol was hunting for seven members of an organ-trafficking ring. They were accused of operating a clinic called Medicus in Pristina, the capital of Kosovo. Most news media were excited to reveal that two Israelis were among those named in the 46-page Interpol report. Less interest was shown in the other international members of the ring – Turkish and Albanian Muslims.
Only one Israeli, Moshe Harel, was wanted by Interpol in connection with the ring. The other Israeli, Zaki Shapira, was listed as an unindicted coconspirator. A Turkish doctor and five Albanians were also indicted for their role in diverse criminal activities such as “trafficking in persons and unlawful exercise of medical activity.”
THE ORIGINS of the ring appear relatively recent. According to reports, Lutfi Dervishi, a urologist and professor at Pristina University, visited Istanbul in 2006 to attend a conference. At the conference he let it be known that he was looking for someone who could perform organ transplants. He was contacted by Yusuf Sonmez, a Turkish national and surgeon who has a history of involvement with illegal organ harvesting.
Sonmez maintains a website which claims he completed his residency in surgery at Istanbul University medical faculty in 1984 and was an expert in kidney transplants. According to a November 3 article in Hurriyet he also worked at the Ministry of Health. He completed his first transplant from a live donor in 1993, and by 2006 claimed he had performed more than,1,300 kidney transplants. In 2005 he was running a private hospital in Istanbul. Turkish websites indicate that his hospital was shut down in 2007 after a police raid, during which his brother Bulent was also detained. He received a suspended sentence.
Sonmez again fell out with the law over organ thefts in 2008. His medical license was revoked and he was banned from the profession for six months – which news outlets criticized as too weak a punishment. At the time Turkish articles called him the “the Turkish butcher” and Hurriyet referred to him as “Frankenstein.” In 2010, when it emerged that he was involved with organ trafficking in Kosovo, he turned up inAzerbaijan, apparently free to go about his bloody business. His status at present is not clear.
In 2006, while at the height of his power, operating his own clinic prior to the police raids, he contacted Dervishi. Sonmez then contacted a Turkish-Israeli, Harel, who according to the government of Kosovo was born in 1950 in Turkey. Harel later allegedly “identified, recruited and transported the victims, as well as managed the cash payments before the surgeries.” Sonmez, it seems, was also the contact for Shapira, who has a history of brushes with the law regarding organ harvesting.
Shapira was once head of kidney transplant services at Beilinson Medical Center in Petah Tikva. He was also a member of the Bellagio Task Force on global transport ethics. In the 1990s he ran afoul of ethics charges in Israel and moved to Turkey. In 2007 Shapira was arrested in Turkey; it seems he was already connected with Sonmez’s hospital. Now Sonmez brought Harel and Shapira to Pristina to help run Dervishi’s clinic. The clinic was operated by Dervishi’s son, Arban. Illir Rrecaj, a Kosovo Health Ministry official, granted the clinic a license to do urological checkups but was, according to Interpol, privy to the actual goings on there.
In October 2008 police suspicions were raised when a poor man was dumped at the Pristina airport and it was found his kidney had been removed. A raid on the Medicus clinic discovered that the organ harvesting ring had been bringing in poverty stricken patients from countries such as Turkey and Russia, promising them 15,000 euros, and then selling their organs for upward of 100,000 euros. Rrecaj was dismissed from his post. On November 4, Harel was arrested.
BUT ACCORDING to other sources it appears the tentacles of the case go deeper.
The Serbian newspaper Blic claims that Dervishi was also involved in the murder and harvesting of organs from Serbs who were captured by ethnic Albanian terrorists during the Kosovo war of 1999. After the war there were rumors that Kosovar Albanians were keeping Serb prisoners in camps near the Kosovo border with Albania.
A Spanish KFOR contingent attempted to penetrate the village of Vrelo but was called back. Carla Del Ponte, the former chief prosecutor of the UN for war crimes committed in Yugoslavia, claimed in her 2008 book that as many as 300 Serbs were murdered for their organs just across the border in the Albanian town of Burrel. The infamous “clinic” in Burrel became known as the “yellow house,” but not until 2004 was it visited by a UN team to investigate the accusations. By then, only a few traces of blood remained.
According to Blic, in 1998 during the Kosovo crises, “[a] witness told Serbian war crimes prosecutors that he saw Dr. Lutfi Dervishi at locations where it was suspected that organs had been extracted from civilian prisoners and sold later.” Another Serbian source alleges that Shapira was also involved in 1999 in instructing those who harvested the organs, and according to the Croatian magazine Politika, he showed up in Macedonia in the same year, connected to a similar operation.
This claim is based on the fact that he had Turkish connections who were supporting the Kosovars during the war.
Whatever the case, it seems the recent organ-trafficking scandal is merely the latest emergence of the dark cloud that has hung over Kosovo for years; it has become a center for human and organ trafficking in Europe.
What makes the present case so shocking is that almost all those involved were respected professionals in their communities.A professor from Pristina, a member of the Kosovo Health Ministry, an Istanbul doctor and pioneer in organ transplants and a former head of transplant services at Beilinson. What made these men turn evil? What sort of strange dark coexistence is this, where Turks and Israelis work together to steal organs?
Does their ring have its origins in the dirty war fought in Kosovo in 1998-1999? The anti-Israel and anti-Semitic media like to shed light on supposed Israeli involvement in organ trafficking, but what this case shows is that the networks behind the story have much deeper and more disturbing roots.
By SETH J.FRANTZMAN
11/23/2010 22:48
The bizarre horror and roots of the Kosovo organ-trafficking ring; almost all those involved were respected professionals in their communities.
In mid-November, the world media reported that Interpol was hunting for seven members of an organ-trafficking ring. They were accused of operating a clinic called Medicus in Pristina, the capital of Kosovo. Most news media were excited to reveal that two Israelis were among those named in the 46-page Interpol report. Less interest was shown in the other international members of the ring – Turkish and Albanian Muslims.
Only one Israeli, Moshe Harel, was wanted by Interpol in connection with the ring. The other Israeli, Zaki Shapira, was listed as an unindicted coconspirator. A Turkish doctor and five Albanians were also indicted for their role in diverse criminal activities such as “trafficking in persons and unlawful exercise of medical activity.”
THE ORIGINS of the ring appear relatively recent. According to reports, Lutfi Dervishi, a urologist and professor at Pristina University, visited Istanbul in 2006 to attend a conference. At the conference he let it be known that he was looking for someone who could perform organ transplants. He was contacted by Yusuf Sonmez, a Turkish national and surgeon who has a history of involvement with illegal organ harvesting.
Sonmez maintains a website which claims he completed his residency in surgery at Istanbul University medical faculty in 1984 and was an expert in kidney transplants. According to a November 3 article in Hurriyet he also worked at the Ministry of Health. He completed his first transplant from a live donor in 1993, and by 2006 claimed he had performed more than,1,300 kidney transplants. In 2005 he was running a private hospital in Istanbul. Turkish websites indicate that his hospital was shut down in 2007 after a police raid, during which his brother Bulent was also detained. He received a suspended sentence.
Sonmez again fell out with the law over organ thefts in 2008. His medical license was revoked and he was banned from the profession for six months – which news outlets criticized as too weak a punishment. At the time Turkish articles called him the “the Turkish butcher” and Hurriyet referred to him as “Frankenstein.” In 2010, when it emerged that he was involved with organ trafficking in Kosovo, he turned up inAzerbaijan, apparently free to go about his bloody business. His status at present is not clear.
In 2006, while at the height of his power, operating his own clinic prior to the police raids, he contacted Dervishi. Sonmez then contacted a Turkish-Israeli, Harel, who according to the government of Kosovo was born in 1950 in Turkey. Harel later allegedly “identified, recruited and transported the victims, as well as managed the cash payments before the surgeries.” Sonmez, it seems, was also the contact for Shapira, who has a history of brushes with the law regarding organ harvesting.
Shapira was once head of kidney transplant services at Beilinson Medical Center in Petah Tikva. He was also a member of the Bellagio Task Force on global transport ethics. In the 1990s he ran afoul of ethics charges in Israel and moved to Turkey. In 2007 Shapira was arrested in Turkey; it seems he was already connected with Sonmez’s hospital. Now Sonmez brought Harel and Shapira to Pristina to help run Dervishi’s clinic. The clinic was operated by Dervishi’s son, Arban. Illir Rrecaj, a Kosovo Health Ministry official, granted the clinic a license to do urological checkups but was, according to Interpol, privy to the actual goings on there.
In October 2008 police suspicions were raised when a poor man was dumped at the Pristina airport and it was found his kidney had been removed. A raid on the Medicus clinic discovered that the organ harvesting ring had been bringing in poverty stricken patients from countries such as Turkey and Russia, promising them 15,000 euros, and then selling their organs for upward of 100,000 euros. Rrecaj was dismissed from his post. On November 4, Harel was arrested.
BUT ACCORDING to other sources it appears the tentacles of the case go deeper.
The Serbian newspaper Blic claims that Dervishi was also involved in the murder and harvesting of organs from Serbs who were captured by ethnic Albanian terrorists during the Kosovo war of 1999. After the war there were rumors that Kosovar Albanians were keeping Serb prisoners in camps near the Kosovo border with Albania.
A Spanish KFOR contingent attempted to penetrate the village of Vrelo but was called back. Carla Del Ponte, the former chief prosecutor of the UN for war crimes committed in Yugoslavia, claimed in her 2008 book that as many as 300 Serbs were murdered for their organs just across the border in the Albanian town of Burrel. The infamous “clinic” in Burrel became known as the “yellow house,” but not until 2004 was it visited by a UN team to investigate the accusations. By then, only a few traces of blood remained.
According to Blic, in 1998 during the Kosovo crises, “[a] witness told Serbian war crimes prosecutors that he saw Dr. Lutfi Dervishi at locations where it was suspected that organs had been extracted from civilian prisoners and sold later.” Another Serbian source alleges that Shapira was also involved in 1999 in instructing those who harvested the organs, and according to the Croatian magazine Politika, he showed up in Macedonia in the same year, connected to a similar operation.
This claim is based on the fact that he had Turkish connections who were supporting the Kosovars during the war.
Whatever the case, it seems the recent organ-trafficking scandal is merely the latest emergence of the dark cloud that has hung over Kosovo for years; it has become a center for human and organ trafficking in Europe.
What makes the present case so shocking is that almost all those involved were respected professionals in their communities.A professor from Pristina, a member of the Kosovo Health Ministry, an Istanbul doctor and pioneer in organ transplants and a former head of transplant services at Beilinson. What made these men turn evil? What sort of strange dark coexistence is this, where Turks and Israelis work together to steal organs?
Does their ring have its origins in the dirty war fought in Kosovo in 1998-1999? The anti-Israel and anti-Semitic media like to shed light on supposed Israeli involvement in organ trafficking, but what this case shows is that the networks behind the story have much deeper and more disturbing roots.
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
The Enigma of Tariq Aziz
Terra Incognita: The enigma of Iraq’s Tariq Aziz
By SETH J. FRANTZMAN
11/16/2010 23:10
Saddam Hussein’s foreign minister, charged with several crimes, may soon find himself at the end of a rope.
When Tariq Aziz is hung, and most likely he will be, he won’t be the first foreign minister to have been executed for taking part in the government of a lethal regime. Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hitler’s minister of foreign affairs during World War II, was executed after being found guilty at the Nuremburg trials. He also feigned innocence, claiming that he was not responsible for the crimes or even the warpath that his country embarked on from 1939.
Aziz, the indomitable foreign minister of Iraq from 1983 to 1991 and deputy prime minister from 1979 to 2003, has been sounding a familiar tune. In a long ranging, and rare, interview with The Guardian in August, he complained that the US was “leaving Iraq to the wolves” and claimed he did not commit any crimes against civilians.
The Iraqi High Tribunal, the court that has sentenced numerous former regime members, disagrees. He has been convicted of a role in the deaths of 42 merchants executed in 1992, planning the displacement of Kurds and persecuting Islamic political parties.
Aziz hasn’t been swiftly executed, as was the case with Saddam Hussein, and demands for clemency have poured in. The Vatican, the EU, the UN and the Greek and Russian governments have all expressed their displeasure over his death sentence. As a Christian, he has received support from Iraq’s bishops. The Chaldean patriarchal vicar, Shlemon Waduni, and the Latin archbishop, Jean Sleiman, have both expressed opposition to the death penalty. Some others have gone further. Muriel Mirak-Weissbach, a radical leftist journalist who has covered Armenia and the Palestinians, wrote in September in Dissident Voice that “Tariq Aziz should be released.”
THE ENIGMA of Aziz is a story that captures both the past and the present of Iraq and the Middle East. He was born Mikhail Yuhanna in 1936 near Bakhdida, a major Assyrian Christian town in northern Iraq. Educated in Baghdad, like many Arab Christians of his generation he became interested in Arab nationalism and socialism. His life mirrored other Christian Arab nationalist leaders who became influential diplomats, such as Boutros Boutros-Ghali (born 1922) of Egypt and the Palestinian Afif Safieh (born 1950). Aziz became the editor of the Ba’ath Party newspaper Al Thawra.
In a declassified interview with the FBI’s George Piro in 2004, Saddam Hussein remembered that in those early days of the party no one distinguished between Christians, Shi’ites, Kurds and Sunnis. Saddam claimed “it was only later that [I] learned that one of the party’s leaders, Tariq Aziz, was a Christian.”
Aziz was seen as a formidable member of the party and became very close to Saddam. In April 1980 members of the Shi’ite Islamic Dawa party attempted to assassinate this Christian consigliore. This was against the backdrop of increasing border tensions between Iran and Iraq. At the time the Dawa party’s headquarters had been relocated to Teheran, whose radical Shi’ite fundamentalist leaders were using it as a tool to topple the Arab socialist regime in Iraq. Saddam’s reaction was calculated. He waited five months and then launched a surprise attack on the mullahs. His model for the attack: Israel’s lightning victory of 1967.
One story that emerged from the FBI interviews with Saddam was that Mahmoud Abbas was present in Iraq at some point and that he “requested money, training, weapons and transportation to carry out missions to attack Israel.” What role Aziz played is not clear and will likely go with him to the gallows.
In the 1980s Aziz was the point man for Iraq’s relations with the West. Donald Rumsfeld, later to be George W. Bush’s secretary of defense, came to Baghdad in 1983 and met with Aziz and Saddam. He agreed that the “U.S and Iraq... [share] many common interests.” In 1984 assistant secretary of state Richard Murphy met with Aziz and discussed possible arms shipments. At this time Aziz was described as a cigar-chomping dandy who sported a military uniform, despite not being a soldier, and wore a pearl handled revolved. He was at the infamous July 25, 1990 meeting with US ambassador April Glaspie at which the Iraqis believed they received a “green light” to invade Kuwait.
The Kuwait crises, which was a strange result of the Iran-Iraq War, brought Aziz into the international limelight. He was tasked with heading off war and met with secretary of state James Baker in Geneva in January, 1991. In the seven-hour meeting he mentioned that the Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait should be tied to the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The US and its allies would have none of it and on January 17 the bombing of Iraq began.
The cigars now discarded, Aziz took on a harried look in the years that followed. His son was arrested for corruption in 2000 and sentenced to prison, although he was subsequently released. Nevertheless he faithfully served his friend Saddam through 2003 when he was tasked with getting the Vatican to intervene on Iraq’s behalf and prevent the US invasion. His Catholic upbringing was often touted during these meetings. But to no avail. On March 20 US troops crossed the sand berms that separate Kuwait from Iraq.
On April 24, 14 days after Baghdad fell, Aziz emerged from hiding and surrendered. He now complains that he wished he had been martyred. At the time he had more pressing concerns. He told The Guardian’s Martin Chulov, “I told the Americans that if they took my family to Amman, they could take me to prison. My family left on an American plane. And I went to prison on a Thursday.”
SO HE has sat in prison for more than seven years, growing gaunt, frail and now looking every bit his 74 years. Ayad Allawi, a Shi’ite former Ba’athist and now head of the Iraqiya bloc of political parties that won a plurality of the vote in 2010 parliamentary elections, has said that Aziz is his friend. It is no surprise. Nuri al-Malaki’s party, the second largest in Iraq, is a religious and ideological descendant of the same Iranian backed Dawa terrorists who tried to assassinate Aziz in 1980. Aziz’s hometown votes heavily for Allawi. So things come full circle.
But was Aziz’s “Christianity” just a shill? Chulov found him wearing a Muslim prayer cap in his recent interview. Did he work to improve the lives of Christian Iraqis under Saddam? It seems that in that period the Christians at least had greater security. Since the US invasion and the terrorist-sectarian chaos that followed, the Christian population has declined almost by half from 1.1 million to 600,000 or less. Their priests have been beheaded and their churches bombed. They have been thrown to the wolves. And their last representative, a member of that uniquely 20th century class, the Christian Arab nationalist, may soon find himself at the end of a rope. He remains a mystery wrapped in an enigma.
By SETH J. FRANTZMAN
11/16/2010 23:10
Saddam Hussein’s foreign minister, charged with several crimes, may soon find himself at the end of a rope.
When Tariq Aziz is hung, and most likely he will be, he won’t be the first foreign minister to have been executed for taking part in the government of a lethal regime. Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hitler’s minister of foreign affairs during World War II, was executed after being found guilty at the Nuremburg trials. He also feigned innocence, claiming that he was not responsible for the crimes or even the warpath that his country embarked on from 1939.
Aziz, the indomitable foreign minister of Iraq from 1983 to 1991 and deputy prime minister from 1979 to 2003, has been sounding a familiar tune. In a long ranging, and rare, interview with The Guardian in August, he complained that the US was “leaving Iraq to the wolves” and claimed he did not commit any crimes against civilians.
The Iraqi High Tribunal, the court that has sentenced numerous former regime members, disagrees. He has been convicted of a role in the deaths of 42 merchants executed in 1992, planning the displacement of Kurds and persecuting Islamic political parties.
Aziz hasn’t been swiftly executed, as was the case with Saddam Hussein, and demands for clemency have poured in. The Vatican, the EU, the UN and the Greek and Russian governments have all expressed their displeasure over his death sentence. As a Christian, he has received support from Iraq’s bishops. The Chaldean patriarchal vicar, Shlemon Waduni, and the Latin archbishop, Jean Sleiman, have both expressed opposition to the death penalty. Some others have gone further. Muriel Mirak-Weissbach, a radical leftist journalist who has covered Armenia and the Palestinians, wrote in September in Dissident Voice that “Tariq Aziz should be released.”
THE ENIGMA of Aziz is a story that captures both the past and the present of Iraq and the Middle East. He was born Mikhail Yuhanna in 1936 near Bakhdida, a major Assyrian Christian town in northern Iraq. Educated in Baghdad, like many Arab Christians of his generation he became interested in Arab nationalism and socialism. His life mirrored other Christian Arab nationalist leaders who became influential diplomats, such as Boutros Boutros-Ghali (born 1922) of Egypt and the Palestinian Afif Safieh (born 1950). Aziz became the editor of the Ba’ath Party newspaper Al Thawra.
In a declassified interview with the FBI’s George Piro in 2004, Saddam Hussein remembered that in those early days of the party no one distinguished between Christians, Shi’ites, Kurds and Sunnis. Saddam claimed “it was only later that [I] learned that one of the party’s leaders, Tariq Aziz, was a Christian.”
Aziz was seen as a formidable member of the party and became very close to Saddam. In April 1980 members of the Shi’ite Islamic Dawa party attempted to assassinate this Christian consigliore. This was against the backdrop of increasing border tensions between Iran and Iraq. At the time the Dawa party’s headquarters had been relocated to Teheran, whose radical Shi’ite fundamentalist leaders were using it as a tool to topple the Arab socialist regime in Iraq. Saddam’s reaction was calculated. He waited five months and then launched a surprise attack on the mullahs. His model for the attack: Israel’s lightning victory of 1967.
One story that emerged from the FBI interviews with Saddam was that Mahmoud Abbas was present in Iraq at some point and that he “requested money, training, weapons and transportation to carry out missions to attack Israel.” What role Aziz played is not clear and will likely go with him to the gallows.
In the 1980s Aziz was the point man for Iraq’s relations with the West. Donald Rumsfeld, later to be George W. Bush’s secretary of defense, came to Baghdad in 1983 and met with Aziz and Saddam. He agreed that the “U.S and Iraq... [share] many common interests.” In 1984 assistant secretary of state Richard Murphy met with Aziz and discussed possible arms shipments. At this time Aziz was described as a cigar-chomping dandy who sported a military uniform, despite not being a soldier, and wore a pearl handled revolved. He was at the infamous July 25, 1990 meeting with US ambassador April Glaspie at which the Iraqis believed they received a “green light” to invade Kuwait.
The Kuwait crises, which was a strange result of the Iran-Iraq War, brought Aziz into the international limelight. He was tasked with heading off war and met with secretary of state James Baker in Geneva in January, 1991. In the seven-hour meeting he mentioned that the Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait should be tied to the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The US and its allies would have none of it and on January 17 the bombing of Iraq began.
The cigars now discarded, Aziz took on a harried look in the years that followed. His son was arrested for corruption in 2000 and sentenced to prison, although he was subsequently released. Nevertheless he faithfully served his friend Saddam through 2003 when he was tasked with getting the Vatican to intervene on Iraq’s behalf and prevent the US invasion. His Catholic upbringing was often touted during these meetings. But to no avail. On March 20 US troops crossed the sand berms that separate Kuwait from Iraq.
On April 24, 14 days after Baghdad fell, Aziz emerged from hiding and surrendered. He now complains that he wished he had been martyred. At the time he had more pressing concerns. He told The Guardian’s Martin Chulov, “I told the Americans that if they took my family to Amman, they could take me to prison. My family left on an American plane. And I went to prison on a Thursday.”
SO HE has sat in prison for more than seven years, growing gaunt, frail and now looking every bit his 74 years. Ayad Allawi, a Shi’ite former Ba’athist and now head of the Iraqiya bloc of political parties that won a plurality of the vote in 2010 parliamentary elections, has said that Aziz is his friend. It is no surprise. Nuri al-Malaki’s party, the second largest in Iraq, is a religious and ideological descendant of the same Iranian backed Dawa terrorists who tried to assassinate Aziz in 1980. Aziz’s hometown votes heavily for Allawi. So things come full circle.
But was Aziz’s “Christianity” just a shill? Chulov found him wearing a Muslim prayer cap in his recent interview. Did he work to improve the lives of Christian Iraqis under Saddam? It seems that in that period the Christians at least had greater security. Since the US invasion and the terrorist-sectarian chaos that followed, the Christian population has declined almost by half from 1.1 million to 600,000 or less. Their priests have been beheaded and their churches bombed. They have been thrown to the wolves. And their last representative, a member of that uniquely 20th century class, the Christian Arab nationalist, may soon find himself at the end of a rope. He remains a mystery wrapped in an enigma.
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
Monday, November 9, 2009
Terra Incognita 100 The Fort Hood Massacre and U.S Post-Humanism
Terra Incognita
Issue 100
“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
November 9, 2009
1) Déjà vu all over Again: Post-Humanism and the Fort Hood shooting: The Fort Hood massacre has all the hallmarks of a typical Islamist terrorist incident and tells us much about the post-human liberal world we live in. It includes the typical devices of liberals: Anti-racism as an excuse not to police people, support for terrorism by not wanting to offend others, different standards for different people based solely on ideas of victimhood, turning the perpetrator into the victim, disregard for the actual victims. All were present when Major Hasan walked onto Fort Hood army base and gunned down 13 men and women from different religious and ethnic backgrounds. Major Hasan murdered diversity and engaged in terrorism because those at the temple of post-humanism would not secure citizens in their own country in the name of not offending others.
Déjà vu all over again: The Fort Hood shooting
Seth J. Frantzman
The dead in the Fort Hood Massacre are: Michael Grant Cahill (62), Major L Eduardo Caraveo (52), Staff Sgt Justin M DeCrow (32), Capt John P Gaffaney (56), Spc. Frederick Greene (29), Spc. Jason Dean Hunt (22), Sgt Amy Krueger (29), Pfc. Aaron Thomas Nemelka (19), Pfc. Michael Pearson (22), Capt Russell Seager, (41), Pvt Francheska Velez (21), Lt Col Juanita Warman (55), and Spc. Kham Xiong (23).
The two policemen who ended the massacre were: Police Sergeant Kimberly Munley Sergeant Mark Todd.
Another mass murder. Another time when we must learn all the details about the “cause” and “reasons” behind the man who murdered people. Another time when the religious community and ideology that spawned the murder is said to be the “victim”, rather than the actual victims. Another time when we learn nothing about the victims, who become another nameless number. Another terrorist act which isn’t called “terrorism”. Another long list of excuses about the “motives” so that by the time you finish hearing them you believe that the killer was actually the real victim because he faced “harassment” or “stress” or “trauma” or “discrimination”.
The November 10th issue of the New York Times explained that despite the fact that the murdered shouted “God is Great (Allahu Akhbar)” as he shot unarmed people down, that he was not motivated by religion. He was a solitary individual. And if we read the rest of the details that the media is telling us we learn more about the supposed victimhood of the murderer. He was supposedly called a “camel jockey” by fellow soldiers. Supposedly he suffered from stress, despite the fact that it was his job as an army psychiatrist to help others with that problem.
We learn other things as well. When the murders became public knowledge on Thursday, November 5th the news media, including Fox News refused to name the killer. The Fox news commentators even admitted “we have a name, but we don’t want to share it, we don’t want people to jump to conclusions, we want to be sure this is the right name, because this name means a lot…” What they meant was that Major Nidal Malik Hasan, the murderer and terrorist, was the name and that his name might lead one to conclude that he was a Muslim. But in order to ensure us that he wasn’t a “real” Muslim, Fox News originally informed the public that in fact he was a convert. It was only after a phone call from his cousin that the media admitted that, Mr. Hasan was in fact a real Muslim, born of a Muslim father.
Outside the major media outlets one can learn a few more details about the life of Mr. Hasan. He attended the Dar al Hijrah mosque in Falls Church, Virginia. The same mosque was attended by at least two 9/11 hijackers (Hizmi and Hanjour and perhaps Midhar). The radical preacher of the mosque, Anwar al –Awlaki (Aulaqi) also knew one of the 9/11 hijackers.
It gets better. During the 2007-2008 year Mr. Hasan had shared his anti-American views with students at a military college (whose name has as yet not been released by the FBI). He supported suicide bombing and said Shariah law should supplant the Constitution. The FBI, of course, did nothing because it did not want to be accused of profiling Muslims in the American military. The FBI was aware that a man called Nidal Hasan had compared the “heroics” of suicide bombing to the heroism of a soldier who throws himself on a grenade. He said “If one suicide bomber can kill 100 enemy soldiers because they were caught off guard that would be considered a strategic victory.” The FBI did not question the Major or keep any tabs on him. For these reasons the Major purchased handguns unimpeded in Texas, said his goodbyes to his friends, gave away all of his furniture to a neighbor and got onto the Fort Hood base, where he worked, with his weapons, which were not supposed to be in his possession on the base.
The Army, prior to the Major’s murdering of its members, had been good to him. He had enlisted as a teenager and it had paid his way through college at Virginia Tech and for training as a psychiatrist at Bethesda’s Uniformed Services University. He was then given the soft job of being a psychiatrist at Walter Reed medical center. He rose quickly through the ranks and as a Major, after receiving several less than great reviews, was sent to Fort Hood Darnell Army Medical Center.
Major Hasan’s family were Palestinians from the Jerusalem area. One of his brothers apparently still lives there. He supposedly became “more devout” after the death of his parents, who had both prospered in the U.S, owning a restaurant and other businesses.
We learn from reports that Hasan was not a very good psychiatrist, that he himself needed counseling. It is not clear but his hatred of the mission the soldiers were carrying out in Iraq and his support of their murder by suicide bombers may not have helped his job in counseling them for PTSD (Post-traumatic stress disorder). Whatever the case, when he was informed that he would be sent to Iraq he hired a lawyer to get out of his service. However the military, which had paid for his two degrees, would not let him leave. Finally they said he would only be deployed to Afghanistan, not Iraq, in deferential treatment to his sensibilities as a Muslim Arab.
Let us review the things Mr. Hasan received in life. His parents were immigrants who came to the U.S and became middle class. The son received two degrees for free. He was given a good job in the army and allowed to remain near home. He progressed through the ranks faster than other individuals even though he received low grades on reviews by superiors. Affirmitive action by those in the Military who wanted to show that the U.S army is good to Muslims helped him succeed. When he was set to be deployed he, unlike the million other soldiers in the army who have seen action in Iraq, received special treatment as a Muslim and was told he would go to a different location. He was allowed, through free speech, to encourage the murder of the same troops he was supposed to counsel. The FBI did not investigate his pro-terror views or his connections to 9/11 hijackers because he was a Muslim and the FBI didn’t want to be perceived as racist. Even the police officers who ended the rampage suffered from a bit of liberalism. After Hasan was wounded soldiers shouted “give him two more” to finish him off but the police officer didn’t. He handcuffed the wounded terrorist. It is a shame, while liberalism says people should’nt “confirm the kill”, this is the best method, by leaving the terrorist alive one must then spend more public money (as if enough hasn’t been wasted on Mr. Hasan) to put him on trial and keep him in prison.
Mr. Hasan prosletyzed t the patients he “counseled.” He wore a white robe type and headcovering as is typical among religious Muslims (although usually only for peasants in Egypt, Saudis and Imams, Mr. Hasan evidently wore it to express himself and because he knew it would shield him from criticism because people would fear profiling a Muslim). While at Fort Hood for the few months he was stationed there he attended a strip club regularly and purchased lap dances, as did most religious-terrorist Muslims such as the 9/11 hijackers (Muslims who critique the west complain about its decadence but it is the most extreme of them who enjoy that decadence the most, the ‘hook’ Imam in London Abu Hamza was a bouncer for a strip club, all the 9/11 hijackers attended them and Saudi royalty usually hire retinues of them when they travel, it is part of the larger Islamist hypocrisy where men do as they please but expect Muslim women to be “moral” all the while the Islamist-Muslim male engages western women in acts of immorality, immorality the Western women supports because she herself is usually blind to hypocrisy and is told by society not to be “racist” against the “other”).
After murdering 13 people and wounding 29, all of whome were unarmed and some of whome were civilians he was hospitalized at an army hospital where he now received free medical care from the same army he tried to murder. As for November 9th few people in the U.S or the world know the names of the victims. However the secretary of the army, a general, has said that the real message of the massacre is that Muslims might face a backlash. Secretary of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano, has warned that she was “part of efforts to reassure the Arab world that US authorities were taking measures to quell anti-Islam sentiments after last week's rampage by an American-born Muslim serving as US Army psychiatrist. “ when speaking of the tragedy she noted “this was a terrible tragedy for all involved…obviously we object to [the fact] that any anti-Muslim sentiment should emenate from this” she said in Dubai while on a trip. So the tragedy is actually the anti-Muslim sentiment, not the murder by a Muslim fanatic of 13 people. She then noted that “her agency is working with state and local groups to try to deflect any anti-Muslim anger.”
General George Casey, the U.S Army Chief of Staff, has instructed soldiers to be on the lookout for anti-Muslim reaction. He said it was “important not to get caught up in speculation” about Major Hasan’s Muslim faith.” He claimed that ‘focusing on the Islamic roots of the gunmen “could heighten backlash” and that “diversity” gives the military strength.
So let’s understand this. The FBI didn’t investigate Hasan because it feared it would be called “racism.” But this allowed Hasan to engage in his own racist murder of non-Muslims, his own murdering of diversity since he gunned down Asians, Hispanics and whites simply because they were’nt Muslim. Thus in pursuit of protecting “diversity” the post-humanists ensure the murdering of that same diversity at the hands of the extremist.
The Army, whose security at Fort Hood was lazy and which could have prevented this massacre by investigating the complaints of soldiers who had received “treatment” by Hasan, has said that the real threat is anti-American backlash. Homeland Security, whose job it is to protect Americans from people like Major Hasan has said that the real victims are Muslims, not the 13 people who were massacred. Had Homeland Security, the FBI and the Army not been obsessed with “diversity” and fearful of being called racist and done their jobs in terms of security than the massacre would have been prevented. Mr. Hasan would be in prison and discharged from the army and 13 people would be alive. Instead what has happened is that liberal let the rot set in and everyone said “I don’t have this hot potato” and passed the buck, even transferring Mr. Hasan rather than punishing him and than giving him more second chances by letting him choose where to be deployed to because of his religion. The agencies and government discriminated in favor of Mr. Hasan, but his pistols did not discriminate when they gunned our soldiers down. The government now claims the “real” victims are American Muslims and the supposed backlash they might receive. This is liberal at its height. It doesn’t do anything to protect the lives of the citizen and then when the citizen is dead it feels sorry for the person who murdered him. Good police work and a color-blind system would have caught Mr. Hasan, instead the same liberalism that created Hasan and let him run wild is the same one that now whines about a backlash, a backlash that doesn’t exist, solely to transfer blame to others.
It may be a supreme irony that the same Homeland Security that refuses to even examine American Muslims for terror potential, a year ago warned that the real terrorism might come from right wing Christian “militias” and discharged soldiers. Homeland Security wasn’t afraid to tar all American Christians veterans as potential terrorists. Had Mr. Hasan been a right wing Christian, rather than a right wing Muslim, would General Casey and Janet Napolitano warn about an anti-Christian backlash? Or would good police work have uncovered a psychiatrist who praised the murder of soldiers on the internet and to fellow soldiers and who gave away all his furniture and purchased two pistols and drove with them onto the base? 13 people are dead because of liberalism, because of the coddling of Muslims, because of General Casey and Janet Napolitano. That is why they are dead. They are dead because of the FBI. The backlash should’nt just be against the extremists at the Falls Church Mosque, but against the government in general which dispatched our people to war and then doesn’t defend them at home, which disarms our soldiers on their bases but lets the terrorist come on the base with his guns, which send our quiet men and women to war but when they whine and complain and have lawyers they get their pick at where and when they are deployed. There should be a backlash, and it should be broad and deep.
Issue 100
“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
November 9, 2009
1) Déjà vu all over Again: Post-Humanism and the Fort Hood shooting: The Fort Hood massacre has all the hallmarks of a typical Islamist terrorist incident and tells us much about the post-human liberal world we live in. It includes the typical devices of liberals: Anti-racism as an excuse not to police people, support for terrorism by not wanting to offend others, different standards for different people based solely on ideas of victimhood, turning the perpetrator into the victim, disregard for the actual victims. All were present when Major Hasan walked onto Fort Hood army base and gunned down 13 men and women from different religious and ethnic backgrounds. Major Hasan murdered diversity and engaged in terrorism because those at the temple of post-humanism would not secure citizens in their own country in the name of not offending others.
Déjà vu all over again: The Fort Hood shooting
Seth J. Frantzman
The dead in the Fort Hood Massacre are: Michael Grant Cahill (62), Major L Eduardo Caraveo (52), Staff Sgt Justin M DeCrow (32), Capt John P Gaffaney (56), Spc. Frederick Greene (29), Spc. Jason Dean Hunt (22), Sgt Amy Krueger (29), Pfc. Aaron Thomas Nemelka (19), Pfc. Michael Pearson (22), Capt Russell Seager, (41), Pvt Francheska Velez (21), Lt Col Juanita Warman (55), and Spc. Kham Xiong (23).
The two policemen who ended the massacre were: Police Sergeant Kimberly Munley Sergeant Mark Todd.
Another mass murder. Another time when we must learn all the details about the “cause” and “reasons” behind the man who murdered people. Another time when the religious community and ideology that spawned the murder is said to be the “victim”, rather than the actual victims. Another time when we learn nothing about the victims, who become another nameless number. Another terrorist act which isn’t called “terrorism”. Another long list of excuses about the “motives” so that by the time you finish hearing them you believe that the killer was actually the real victim because he faced “harassment” or “stress” or “trauma” or “discrimination”.
The November 10th issue of the New York Times explained that despite the fact that the murdered shouted “God is Great (Allahu Akhbar)” as he shot unarmed people down, that he was not motivated by religion. He was a solitary individual. And if we read the rest of the details that the media is telling us we learn more about the supposed victimhood of the murderer. He was supposedly called a “camel jockey” by fellow soldiers. Supposedly he suffered from stress, despite the fact that it was his job as an army psychiatrist to help others with that problem.
We learn other things as well. When the murders became public knowledge on Thursday, November 5th the news media, including Fox News refused to name the killer. The Fox news commentators even admitted “we have a name, but we don’t want to share it, we don’t want people to jump to conclusions, we want to be sure this is the right name, because this name means a lot…” What they meant was that Major Nidal Malik Hasan, the murderer and terrorist, was the name and that his name might lead one to conclude that he was a Muslim. But in order to ensure us that he wasn’t a “real” Muslim, Fox News originally informed the public that in fact he was a convert. It was only after a phone call from his cousin that the media admitted that, Mr. Hasan was in fact a real Muslim, born of a Muslim father.
Outside the major media outlets one can learn a few more details about the life of Mr. Hasan. He attended the Dar al Hijrah mosque in Falls Church, Virginia. The same mosque was attended by at least two 9/11 hijackers (Hizmi and Hanjour and perhaps Midhar). The radical preacher of the mosque, Anwar al –Awlaki (Aulaqi) also knew one of the 9/11 hijackers.
It gets better. During the 2007-2008 year Mr. Hasan had shared his anti-American views with students at a military college (whose name has as yet not been released by the FBI). He supported suicide bombing and said Shariah law should supplant the Constitution. The FBI, of course, did nothing because it did not want to be accused of profiling Muslims in the American military. The FBI was aware that a man called Nidal Hasan had compared the “heroics” of suicide bombing to the heroism of a soldier who throws himself on a grenade. He said “If one suicide bomber can kill 100 enemy soldiers because they were caught off guard that would be considered a strategic victory.” The FBI did not question the Major or keep any tabs on him. For these reasons the Major purchased handguns unimpeded in Texas, said his goodbyes to his friends, gave away all of his furniture to a neighbor and got onto the Fort Hood base, where he worked, with his weapons, which were not supposed to be in his possession on the base.
The Army, prior to the Major’s murdering of its members, had been good to him. He had enlisted as a teenager and it had paid his way through college at Virginia Tech and for training as a psychiatrist at Bethesda’s Uniformed Services University. He was then given the soft job of being a psychiatrist at Walter Reed medical center. He rose quickly through the ranks and as a Major, after receiving several less than great reviews, was sent to Fort Hood Darnell Army Medical Center.
Major Hasan’s family were Palestinians from the Jerusalem area. One of his brothers apparently still lives there. He supposedly became “more devout” after the death of his parents, who had both prospered in the U.S, owning a restaurant and other businesses.
We learn from reports that Hasan was not a very good psychiatrist, that he himself needed counseling. It is not clear but his hatred of the mission the soldiers were carrying out in Iraq and his support of their murder by suicide bombers may not have helped his job in counseling them for PTSD (Post-traumatic stress disorder). Whatever the case, when he was informed that he would be sent to Iraq he hired a lawyer to get out of his service. However the military, which had paid for his two degrees, would not let him leave. Finally they said he would only be deployed to Afghanistan, not Iraq, in deferential treatment to his sensibilities as a Muslim Arab.
Let us review the things Mr. Hasan received in life. His parents were immigrants who came to the U.S and became middle class. The son received two degrees for free. He was given a good job in the army and allowed to remain near home. He progressed through the ranks faster than other individuals even though he received low grades on reviews by superiors. Affirmitive action by those in the Military who wanted to show that the U.S army is good to Muslims helped him succeed. When he was set to be deployed he, unlike the million other soldiers in the army who have seen action in Iraq, received special treatment as a Muslim and was told he would go to a different location. He was allowed, through free speech, to encourage the murder of the same troops he was supposed to counsel. The FBI did not investigate his pro-terror views or his connections to 9/11 hijackers because he was a Muslim and the FBI didn’t want to be perceived as racist. Even the police officers who ended the rampage suffered from a bit of liberalism. After Hasan was wounded soldiers shouted “give him two more” to finish him off but the police officer didn’t. He handcuffed the wounded terrorist. It is a shame, while liberalism says people should’nt “confirm the kill”, this is the best method, by leaving the terrorist alive one must then spend more public money (as if enough hasn’t been wasted on Mr. Hasan) to put him on trial and keep him in prison.
Mr. Hasan prosletyzed t the patients he “counseled.” He wore a white robe type and headcovering as is typical among religious Muslims (although usually only for peasants in Egypt, Saudis and Imams, Mr. Hasan evidently wore it to express himself and because he knew it would shield him from criticism because people would fear profiling a Muslim). While at Fort Hood for the few months he was stationed there he attended a strip club regularly and purchased lap dances, as did most religious-terrorist Muslims such as the 9/11 hijackers (Muslims who critique the west complain about its decadence but it is the most extreme of them who enjoy that decadence the most, the ‘hook’ Imam in London Abu Hamza was a bouncer for a strip club, all the 9/11 hijackers attended them and Saudi royalty usually hire retinues of them when they travel, it is part of the larger Islamist hypocrisy where men do as they please but expect Muslim women to be “moral” all the while the Islamist-Muslim male engages western women in acts of immorality, immorality the Western women supports because she herself is usually blind to hypocrisy and is told by society not to be “racist” against the “other”).
After murdering 13 people and wounding 29, all of whome were unarmed and some of whome were civilians he was hospitalized at an army hospital where he now received free medical care from the same army he tried to murder. As for November 9th few people in the U.S or the world know the names of the victims. However the secretary of the army, a general, has said that the real message of the massacre is that Muslims might face a backlash. Secretary of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano, has warned that she was “part of efforts to reassure the Arab world that US authorities were taking measures to quell anti-Islam sentiments after last week's rampage by an American-born Muslim serving as US Army psychiatrist. “ when speaking of the tragedy she noted “this was a terrible tragedy for all involved…obviously we object to [the fact] that any anti-Muslim sentiment should emenate from this” she said in Dubai while on a trip. So the tragedy is actually the anti-Muslim sentiment, not the murder by a Muslim fanatic of 13 people. She then noted that “her agency is working with state and local groups to try to deflect any anti-Muslim anger.”
General George Casey, the U.S Army Chief of Staff, has instructed soldiers to be on the lookout for anti-Muslim reaction. He said it was “important not to get caught up in speculation” about Major Hasan’s Muslim faith.” He claimed that ‘focusing on the Islamic roots of the gunmen “could heighten backlash” and that “diversity” gives the military strength.
So let’s understand this. The FBI didn’t investigate Hasan because it feared it would be called “racism.” But this allowed Hasan to engage in his own racist murder of non-Muslims, his own murdering of diversity since he gunned down Asians, Hispanics and whites simply because they were’nt Muslim. Thus in pursuit of protecting “diversity” the post-humanists ensure the murdering of that same diversity at the hands of the extremist.
The Army, whose security at Fort Hood was lazy and which could have prevented this massacre by investigating the complaints of soldiers who had received “treatment” by Hasan, has said that the real threat is anti-American backlash. Homeland Security, whose job it is to protect Americans from people like Major Hasan has said that the real victims are Muslims, not the 13 people who were massacred. Had Homeland Security, the FBI and the Army not been obsessed with “diversity” and fearful of being called racist and done their jobs in terms of security than the massacre would have been prevented. Mr. Hasan would be in prison and discharged from the army and 13 people would be alive. Instead what has happened is that liberal let the rot set in and everyone said “I don’t have this hot potato” and passed the buck, even transferring Mr. Hasan rather than punishing him and than giving him more second chances by letting him choose where to be deployed to because of his religion. The agencies and government discriminated in favor of Mr. Hasan, but his pistols did not discriminate when they gunned our soldiers down. The government now claims the “real” victims are American Muslims and the supposed backlash they might receive. This is liberal at its height. It doesn’t do anything to protect the lives of the citizen and then when the citizen is dead it feels sorry for the person who murdered him. Good police work and a color-blind system would have caught Mr. Hasan, instead the same liberalism that created Hasan and let him run wild is the same one that now whines about a backlash, a backlash that doesn’t exist, solely to transfer blame to others.
It may be a supreme irony that the same Homeland Security that refuses to even examine American Muslims for terror potential, a year ago warned that the real terrorism might come from right wing Christian “militias” and discharged soldiers. Homeland Security wasn’t afraid to tar all American Christians veterans as potential terrorists. Had Mr. Hasan been a right wing Christian, rather than a right wing Muslim, would General Casey and Janet Napolitano warn about an anti-Christian backlash? Or would good police work have uncovered a psychiatrist who praised the murder of soldiers on the internet and to fellow soldiers and who gave away all his furniture and purchased two pistols and drove with them onto the base? 13 people are dead because of liberalism, because of the coddling of Muslims, because of General Casey and Janet Napolitano. That is why they are dead. They are dead because of the FBI. The backlash should’nt just be against the extremists at the Falls Church Mosque, but against the government in general which dispatched our people to war and then doesn’t defend them at home, which disarms our soldiers on their bases but lets the terrorist come on the base with his guns, which send our quiet men and women to war but when they whine and complain and have lawyers they get their pick at where and when they are deployed. There should be a backlash, and it should be broad and deep.
Thursday, October 22, 2009
Terra Incognia 99 Chosen Trauma, Why they hate us and Israeli universities
Terra Incognita
Issue 99
“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
October 22, 2009
1) There is no such thing as ‘chosen trauma’: The idea of a “chosen trauma” is a recent development. It is to psychiatry what the “other” is to philosophy and is part and parcel of the post-humanist undermining of history and truth. People do not “choose” to have trauma, they actually have trauma when people commit genocide against them or deport them from their land. Caring about the trauma of the group is not “racist” because it “excludes” others. It is a natural human emotion.
2) Why they hate us?: The West is hated by two groups: Islam and Western women. Not all Muslims hate the West and neither do all Western women. However one can find, in the western female coddling of Islam and the belief that Islam is “exotic” or the feeling sorry for Muslim minorities and the conversion of western women to Islam that western women, freed by the west, desire nothing more than the slavery of Islam. The West fails in its granting of freedom to people and educating them because it educates contempt and its freedom fails when those who benefit the most have the most contempt for it.
2) A Story about Justice and the University in Israel: The University in Israel speaks often of justice. But is it justice when that university protects its academics but those academics, who receive pay from the state, encourage terrorists to murder the students and destroy the state?
There is no such thing as a “chosen trauma”
Seth J. Frantzman
October 22, 2009
In order to punish victims and attempt to destroy identity, post-humanism has created something called “chosen trauma”. Describing what ‘Chosen trauma’ is Vamik Volkan in the publication Group Analysis (2001 University of Virginia) describes it thus “subjective experience of thousands or millions of people who are linked by a persistent sense of sameness.” It is the “mental representation of a massive trauma that the group’s ancestors suffered.” But we also learn that this is inherently negative; “when a group regresses, its chosen trauma is reactivated in order to support the group’s threatened identity. This reactivation may have dramatic and destructive consequences.” Thus any sort of rememberance of suffering is negative in the eyes of post-humanism because it inevitably leads to group identification and causes the group to potentially mistreat others. At the very least it means that the group may identify with itself and thus be “racist”.
Another description of the idea of “chosen trauma” can be found in an article by Ayse Karabat in The Daily Zaman in Istanbul. He describes it as “the mental representation of an event that causes a group to feel victimized. The group mythologizes an event and draws it into its identity, passing the mental representation, along with associated feelings and defenses, from generation to generation.” In writing about the “chosen trauma” he was speaking about Armenians in Turkey and their preservation of their community and attempts by youth to free themselves from the cautious behavior of the “elders” who view themselves, according to the article, too often as victims.
H.D.S. Greenway of the New York Times uses the term to describe the Turkish and Greek Cypriots. He creates yet another definition; “to described the way nations, as well as individuals, can seize upon a wrong done to them to the exclusion of any wrongs committed by themselves.”
The invention of the term “chosen trauma” is deeply connected to the Turks and Cyprus.
Greenway didn’t bother to do the background research and missed the fact that Vamik Volkan, who invented the term, is a Turkis-Cypriot. Born in 1932 he moved the United States at some point. He has done much of his work on the psychology of conflict. Had he been involved in Philosophy he would have preached to us about the idea of the “other” but he has transferred this idea to his own work. In 1988 he spoke of the “need to have enemies and allies”. He has written on “killing in the name of identity” and “from ethnic pride to ethnic terrorism”. He has also written on homosexuality, cross breeding plan species, as well the “animal” and “primitive” instincts and psychological problems that exist within us. For Mr. Volkan it is obvious the experience of being a Turkish Cypriot (a Muslim group that complains of its own victimhood and at the same time has used that as an excuse to cleanse its portion of the island of minorities) lodged deeply in his mind and he has connected all human instincts that involve group identity, pride and dislike of others with being “primitive” and “animal.” It reminds this author of a college textbook on anthropology that spoke of how “primitive people once identified themselves first with their group and were suspicious of outsiders.”
But what about the revenge of the primitive? Post-humanism has tried to convince us that trauma can be “chosen” and that trauma is a “myth” and that its consequence is violence against the “other.” The group “excludes” the things it does in order to remember what was done to it. This discussion therefore concludes that any rememberance of a trauma is not only wrong but that it is primarily mythological and therefore not based on truth. This is part and parcel of modernity’s assault on history.
There are real traumas. When a community is partially destroyed, its women raped and its land stolen it is indeed a trauma. Modernity would tell us that there is no truth behind such events as the Armenians genocide, the Rwandan genocide, the Trail of Tears, the Great Trek, the Holocaust or any other event. It is merely a “chosen trauma”. When the Jews describe the Holocaust as something that “happened to Jews” they are “excluding” the Gypsies and gays and Russians murdered by the Nazis. Thus in remembering their ‘chosen trauma’ they are racist. And, to take the argument one step further, the Jews then use the Holocaust as an excuse to abuse Palestinians, in the words of Avraham Burg they “manipulate the Holocaust.”
This is why people speak of a chosen trauma. The brainwashing of individuals to have no attachment to the group is quite successful. At the Israeli university, which is one of the more liberal and self-hating in the world, the three or four Ethiopian Jewish students who are enrolled there are raised to believe that it is racist for them to take any special interest in their Ethiopian community. Instead they are convinced that the Arabs are the group, the “other”, that they should work to help. Thus poor Ethiopians who live in tenements find themselves graduating with bachelors degrees in sociology and going out to give their free time and energy protesting “Ethiopian jewish racism against Arabs” and defending Muslim cemetaries in Israel. Such is the degree of communal destruction that the leftist post-human university can take people who are penniless and who suffered a terrible trauma coming to Israel (in which tens of thousands died of starvations and thousands were raped) and turn them into people who believe that loving their own community is “racist” and one must work tirelessly for the “other.”
By describing history as “myth” the post-human ideology of “chosen trauma” deconstructs that history. Thus the murder of millions in the Holocaust becomes part of a “Jewish myth of suffering.” Who speaks that way? No liberal would dare say that. But they say it about the Armenians. The Armenians have a “chosen trauma” and they should get over it.
The use of the word “chosen” in “chosen trauma” also degrades the existence of the trauma. The idea is that the individual should choose not to have a trauma. He should mature and become modern and throw off the shackles of the past, a past which involved memory and identity and exclusion. Modern man is just man, by himself, with no group. There is but one race: human.
The question that should be posed about “chosen trauma” is two-fold. Why do certain groups get to have their chosen trauma. African-Americans can never seem to forget the trauma of slavery and they are aided and abeted in this by the same liberal who tells the Armenians or others to forget their trauma. Black blame all their problems on slavery. Whether it is the fact that 80% of black American children are born out of wedlock (what people now glorify as “my baby daddy”) or the fact that black women “relax” their hair, it is all due to slavery, even though it isn’t. But no one tells the blacks to abandon their “chosen trauma” or that in having pride in being black that they are ‘excluding’ others. The same should be said of the Muslims, especially Palestinians. No one asks them to get rid of their chosen trauma of the “nakba” or for Muslims to forget the “crusades”. Instead the west blames all of the problems in the Middle East on colonialism and “western oppression” and the “humiliation of the Crusades and the Israeli Occupation.” So where is the complaints about the Palestinians “excluding” others or the consequences that their obsession with their trauma has on the peace process?
The other question that should be posed is whether or not the murder of leftists can be also described as a “chosen trauma”. We often hear leftists whining when a few of them get suppressed. Whether it is the attempted bombing of Prof. Sternhell or the tyranny of Pinochet, one must always hear about the assault on a few leftists and “dissidents” here and there. But is that not also a “chosen trauma”? Is it not also part of a “myth”?
The last problem with the concept of the “chosen trauma” is that it implies there is no truth. Greenway tells us that in Cyprus the Turks and Greeks each have a “narrative” which excludes the suffering of the other. The Turks don’t mention the expulsion of the Greeks and the importation of settlers. The Greeks don’t mention the assaults on Turks the preceeded the Turkish invasion. Greenway and the promulgators of “chosen trauma” tell us that because the two communities disagree that therefore there is no truth, there is just a “chosen trauma.” But this is an assault on fact and history.
If a hundred people are killed and one group says it was “revenge” and the other group says it was “spontaneous rioting” and another group says it was “freedom fighting” it doesn’t mean that the 100 people did not die. It may be true that the Germans in Poland that were expelled in 1945 were expelled because they were “settlers” or to ‘ensure peace’ or because “it was war” but none of it means that there were millions of Germans living in Poland and the Czech Republic before 1945. People mistake the fact that different people interpret right and wrong differently in order to pretend there are no facts. Did the killers of Gandhi do it out of patriotism or evil, was the deed wrong or did it save a nation from the appeasement of Gandhi. Surely some say that the killing of Gandhi was a great and honorable deed. Most disagree and view it as abhorrent. But that doesn’t mean Gandhi wasn’t killed. In fact we even know why he was killed. Whether that killing was right or wrong cannot be determined, perhaps, but the motives of the killer can, in fact, be explored. When terrorists strike liberals like to say that the terrorist has his own motives and that because he uses the “weapon of the poor” or because he perceived himself as “humiliated” that his actions are justified. Those who disagree that people should blow themselves up and kill children do not define terrorism as “resistance”. They condemn it as wrong. The fact that people disagree on interpreting an event doesn’t mean it is part of a “myth”. It is not a “chosen trauma” that the victims of terror want to commemorate being victims. They are actually victims. Liberalism murders the victim by saying he can “choose” to not have trauma. In fact some liberals do choose to not have humanity. Some victims of terror have sympathy for the terrorists. But that is not an example of the flexibility of victimhood, it is merely another example of the inhumanity of modernity. Modernity murders the soul of man. One more example of the murder of that soul is the idea of “chosen trauma”. The real trauma we face is suffering through modernity until it can finally be destroyed so that we can all return to our “primitive” and “animal” past when we “mistakenly identified with the group and were suspicious of outsiders.”
Why they hate us?
Seth J. Frantzman
There are two groups of people who hate Western Civilization, one is Islam and the other is Western Woman.
Consider the recent events in Israel. The riots in Nazareth in 2001 and at Yom Kippur in Acre in 2008 were both partially caused by pent up anger at Arabs harassing Jewish women. An attempted lynching of two Arabs in Pisgat Zeev in 2008 was for the same reason. The murderer of Dana Bennet and the murderers of Leonard Karp were both aided by Jewish women, in one case a Jewish soldier woman. There are now groups in Pisgat Zeev and Petah Tikva aimed at discouraging Jewish women from dating Arab men. The Ethiopian community is hosting a seminar on the issue. In Kiryat Gat a Jewish 15 year old dated Beoduin men, went to night clubs with them and was then taken by them, handcuffed to a pole and burned to death with gasoline. In the Galilee an Arab gang operated for three years raping Jewish women.
When all these incidents take place one must ask why. The usual explanation by women in Israel is that the Arab men give vulnerable young Jewish women presents and flatter them and that the women come from troubled homes with either absent fathers or abusive strict fathers. This always seems to be the “answer” and no one seems to ask more questions.
However the truth is much more complicated. Arab women also come from broken homes with abusive fathers and strict traditional cultures. Yet they don’t rebel by going out with Jewish men. The excuse of the westerner to this observation is to say “well that’s because their society would kill them.” But this excuse isn’t good enough. I’ve known Arab women, mostly from secular backgrounds, not so different backgrounds than the Sephardie and Ethiopian girls in ‘vulnerable” neighbourhoods who are enticed so often by Arab men. These women don’t mind hanging out with Jewish men and from time to time they are taken with the “exotic” idea of what it would be like to go out with them. But they generally hold themselves back from such behavior. Not because of the men in their society but because they believe they would be betraying their culture. No matter how liberal and open minded they are repelled by the idea. Now why is that? Why is it that the Arab Muslim culture, which beats women, which maligns them, which allows men to go out with all sorts of women, which gives men four wives, which puts women in headscarves and expects them to stay at home and beat children, why does that society, even at its most liberal, produce women who like it, honour it and are patriots for it. Even the women who hate the Hamas brand of the Muslim religion, even the women who find Arab men obnoxious in their behavior, even those women honour their culture and faith. Why? In short, why does the western culture fail when it comes to women?
What does the west not provide the women that she would make her stay part of her own culture and not love the “other” and find the “other” exotic? Is it because the western man is metro-sexy and gay and in touch with his feminine side? Is it because the Western man no longer provides? Or is it the western education system and feminism in general that produce women who hate themselves and their culture? Is it freedom, does freedom ensure that humans, women in this case, will beg for a return to slavery, their natural state? Is the western education system, the idea of freedom, and secularism, a failure?
We in the West condemn those religious groups among us that seem to produce women who actually like being part of the group. Consider the religious Jews. Their women don’t find others “exotic”. They don’t want to learn the language, religion and culture of the “other”. Yet we are told by secular society that they are prisoners, suppressed and beaten. But the secular man who would liberate them would liberate them only to find that they don’t desire him but desire another repressive religious culture, such as that found among the Muslims. Isn’t this a puzzle? The West liberates the woman, only to find that the woman hates the West and prefers other religions and cultures that reminds her of the way it used to be in the “bad old days” of the 1950s or the Victorian period. The same women that will condemn the “conservative, chauvinist” style of the 1950s is the same women that yearns to learn Arabic, to know the difference between the Eids and the various ins and outs of Islamic law. She is the same woman who takes the belly-dancing lessons and travels abroad alone to meet and marry foreign men, never returning home. In fact she yearns precisely for the 1950s culture, because is there any culture that is more like the 1950s in terms of its view of women than Arab culture, is there any culture that is more like Victorian England and its mores and dress codes than that of the Muslims?
This is the brutal truth about the Western world and its system and its promise and its future that few want to admit. The West can be summed up with one word: failure. It is a failure. It may appear a success from certain points of view such as economics or democracy. That is all well and good. We have rights to a free trial and such things like that. But the future of society depends on women and children. The long term future depends on these essential ingredients. In nations such as China and India they murder women in the womb (such is the benefit of that western science called abortion). The brilliant Chinese allow Muslims to have as many children as they want but restrict Han Chinese to one child. Most families abort female babies and have males as their one child. There is now a gender gap in China, with millions of missing women. Muslim countries by contrast happily give birth to women and marry them in the fours to men so as to increase their population. But in Russia and Japan and other highly secular country the birth rate is less than one child for every two people. They simply don’t want children, lest the little brats ruin their pursuit of the secular life. Failure. Failure. Failure. Failure. Yes, those societies are all failures.
Europe is a failure. Its women, and I see them from time to time, are butch, mannish, small breasted, unhappy, self-hating, short-haired, and if they are not, if they are pretty and friendly, then they are only interested in African or Muslim men. Such is the European male and his uselessness as a man that he spends his days pursuing things other than women, dressing like a homosexual and generally expressing no interest in personal responsibility, work or women. The European male is gay and the European women acts like a man. Both are objectionable.
The West failed its women completely and utterly. It’s not a matter of women “getting taken advantage of” or “poor women who are vulnerable”. We have been fed this for years. This was the excuse why half of all Ukrainian women have been trafficked as sex slaves abroad. Its not poverty that caused them to be trafficked. It was teaching them to read. Yes. Isn’t that a sad commentary. They could read the adds for “housekeepers in Turkey” or whatever and they gave away their passports and allowed themselves to become slaves. It wasn’t just teaching them to read but teaching them that they should hate their culture and spurn their men and that they were “independent”. That “independence” led them to servitude. What independence it was! Poverty doesn’t turn whole nations into brothels, like Moldova. No. Yemen is poor and the women are whores. Gaza is poor and the women aren’t whores. The difference between the poor western woman and her Muslim counterpart is that the Muslim women wears a visible prison (the burka) and works as a slave for her husband. The poor trafficked Western women lives in a prison (the sex slave brothel wherever she has sold herself) and works as a sex slave for a dozen men a day. Lets be honest, there is no substantial difference between the position of the Muslim women in Gaza or the western women working as a slave in the UAE. Its not poverty that caused this or “the lure of fast money”. It is independence, equal rights and freedom and the West. It is the western male and his useless impotent culture. It is the West and its culture.
A Story about Justice and the University in Israel
October 20, 2009
Seth J. Frantzman
The University and all its humanism likes to talk about “justice” a lot. It likes to educate students about a “just” society of “equals”. The University serves as a brainwashing tool to mint students who do not think. While the University claims to want people who “think critically” the actual affect of its program is to mint people who all think the same. It is no different in Israel. The Israeli university takes people from a variety of backgrounds and, at least in the social sciences and humanities, mints students who all hate the country they live in and desire to “challenge” its existence and support the Arabs.
The Israeli university system, in terms of the Humanities and Social Sciences, is primarily composed of group think and homogeneity. It is almost exclusively Ashkenazi and leftist and it is primarily male. It excels at signing petitions against the very country it exists in. In one such petition 358 university professors and lecturer signed a petition supporting Israeli soldiers who refuse to serve in the army.
But let us be honest about this. The University prides itself on justice. But let us discuss justice for a moment. Is it justice when a wealthy University professor who receives a huge salary from the government and drives a car home to his village every night supports those who refuse to serve in the army. Is it justice that a student from a poor background must go to the army or face jail time and that this student may die in his service? Is it justice that a student from a poor background ends up working security at the university and must ride the bus back and forth to his tiny apartment and because of riding the bus or working as a security guard that student may die at the hands of terrorism? Is it justice that the student from the poor background must die for the professor who receives his salary from the state and supports the very terrorist who murders the poor? What justice is it when the wealthy who receive the most and who work for the government are the ones who support the murder of the poor?
The wealthy in the states of old may have abused the poor but at least they didn’t encourage those who murdered them? The question at the Israeli university is whether the academics deserve security? Do they deserve that the army should defend their “right” to free speech? When the right to free speech encourages those who murder the students, when the state actually pays those who encourage breaking the laws of the state then what does it say about the “right” of free speech?
One Professor at an Israeli University even told the terrorists who to target and who not to. He said they should murder only “settlers” but not good justice seekers from wealthy neighbourhoods such as himself. The army and the security guards at the university should heed the professors. The Universities in Israel operate on occupied Palestinian land, all of them are, in some way or another, involved in occupying the lands of former Arab villages. So, yes, the security guards should refuse to go to work at the University and the army should refuse to serve in any area near the university.
It is time for the professors to live the life that the rest of the nation has been forced to live. It is time for their neighbourhoods to have no security and no protection. They want to encourage the terrorists to “concentrate their attacks on the settlements”. If the university wants justice the only real justice will be in stripping the professorial elite of their diamond protection plans, stripping them of their villages and their BMWs. Send the professors in Israel to the development towns, to Sderot, to Kiryat Gat, to Kiryat Malaki and Lod and Ramla. The intellectual elite in Israel dumped the immigrants to the country in these neighbhourood and now that same cultural elite encourages terrorists to murder those people who have so little. Those who have nothing and live in poor places are drafted into the army and go without question while the wealthy high school students, the children of the cultured elite, refuse to do their service and go abroad with their European passports. It is impossible to call it justice when the poor must die so that the rich can critique their country.
No, the country does not have justice. There is no justice when those paid salaries by the state encourage the murder of other members of the state. When those paid by the state are ensured security by a state they hate there is no justice.
Issue 99
“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
October 22, 2009
1) There is no such thing as ‘chosen trauma’: The idea of a “chosen trauma” is a recent development. It is to psychiatry what the “other” is to philosophy and is part and parcel of the post-humanist undermining of history and truth. People do not “choose” to have trauma, they actually have trauma when people commit genocide against them or deport them from their land. Caring about the trauma of the group is not “racist” because it “excludes” others. It is a natural human emotion.
2) Why they hate us?: The West is hated by two groups: Islam and Western women. Not all Muslims hate the West and neither do all Western women. However one can find, in the western female coddling of Islam and the belief that Islam is “exotic” or the feeling sorry for Muslim minorities and the conversion of western women to Islam that western women, freed by the west, desire nothing more than the slavery of Islam. The West fails in its granting of freedom to people and educating them because it educates contempt and its freedom fails when those who benefit the most have the most contempt for it.
2) A Story about Justice and the University in Israel: The University in Israel speaks often of justice. But is it justice when that university protects its academics but those academics, who receive pay from the state, encourage terrorists to murder the students and destroy the state?
There is no such thing as a “chosen trauma”
Seth J. Frantzman
October 22, 2009
In order to punish victims and attempt to destroy identity, post-humanism has created something called “chosen trauma”. Describing what ‘Chosen trauma’ is Vamik Volkan in the publication Group Analysis (2001 University of Virginia) describes it thus “subjective experience of thousands or millions of people who are linked by a persistent sense of sameness.” It is the “mental representation of a massive trauma that the group’s ancestors suffered.” But we also learn that this is inherently negative; “when a group regresses, its chosen trauma is reactivated in order to support the group’s threatened identity. This reactivation may have dramatic and destructive consequences.” Thus any sort of rememberance of suffering is negative in the eyes of post-humanism because it inevitably leads to group identification and causes the group to potentially mistreat others. At the very least it means that the group may identify with itself and thus be “racist”.
Another description of the idea of “chosen trauma” can be found in an article by Ayse Karabat in The Daily Zaman in Istanbul. He describes it as “the mental representation of an event that causes a group to feel victimized. The group mythologizes an event and draws it into its identity, passing the mental representation, along with associated feelings and defenses, from generation to generation.” In writing about the “chosen trauma” he was speaking about Armenians in Turkey and their preservation of their community and attempts by youth to free themselves from the cautious behavior of the “elders” who view themselves, according to the article, too often as victims.
H.D.S. Greenway of the New York Times uses the term to describe the Turkish and Greek Cypriots. He creates yet another definition; “to described the way nations, as well as individuals, can seize upon a wrong done to them to the exclusion of any wrongs committed by themselves.”
The invention of the term “chosen trauma” is deeply connected to the Turks and Cyprus.
Greenway didn’t bother to do the background research and missed the fact that Vamik Volkan, who invented the term, is a Turkis-Cypriot. Born in 1932 he moved the United States at some point. He has done much of his work on the psychology of conflict. Had he been involved in Philosophy he would have preached to us about the idea of the “other” but he has transferred this idea to his own work. In 1988 he spoke of the “need to have enemies and allies”. He has written on “killing in the name of identity” and “from ethnic pride to ethnic terrorism”. He has also written on homosexuality, cross breeding plan species, as well the “animal” and “primitive” instincts and psychological problems that exist within us. For Mr. Volkan it is obvious the experience of being a Turkish Cypriot (a Muslim group that complains of its own victimhood and at the same time has used that as an excuse to cleanse its portion of the island of minorities) lodged deeply in his mind and he has connected all human instincts that involve group identity, pride and dislike of others with being “primitive” and “animal.” It reminds this author of a college textbook on anthropology that spoke of how “primitive people once identified themselves first with their group and were suspicious of outsiders.”
But what about the revenge of the primitive? Post-humanism has tried to convince us that trauma can be “chosen” and that trauma is a “myth” and that its consequence is violence against the “other.” The group “excludes” the things it does in order to remember what was done to it. This discussion therefore concludes that any rememberance of a trauma is not only wrong but that it is primarily mythological and therefore not based on truth. This is part and parcel of modernity’s assault on history.
There are real traumas. When a community is partially destroyed, its women raped and its land stolen it is indeed a trauma. Modernity would tell us that there is no truth behind such events as the Armenians genocide, the Rwandan genocide, the Trail of Tears, the Great Trek, the Holocaust or any other event. It is merely a “chosen trauma”. When the Jews describe the Holocaust as something that “happened to Jews” they are “excluding” the Gypsies and gays and Russians murdered by the Nazis. Thus in remembering their ‘chosen trauma’ they are racist. And, to take the argument one step further, the Jews then use the Holocaust as an excuse to abuse Palestinians, in the words of Avraham Burg they “manipulate the Holocaust.”
This is why people speak of a chosen trauma. The brainwashing of individuals to have no attachment to the group is quite successful. At the Israeli university, which is one of the more liberal and self-hating in the world, the three or four Ethiopian Jewish students who are enrolled there are raised to believe that it is racist for them to take any special interest in their Ethiopian community. Instead they are convinced that the Arabs are the group, the “other”, that they should work to help. Thus poor Ethiopians who live in tenements find themselves graduating with bachelors degrees in sociology and going out to give their free time and energy protesting “Ethiopian jewish racism against Arabs” and defending Muslim cemetaries in Israel. Such is the degree of communal destruction that the leftist post-human university can take people who are penniless and who suffered a terrible trauma coming to Israel (in which tens of thousands died of starvations and thousands were raped) and turn them into people who believe that loving their own community is “racist” and one must work tirelessly for the “other.”
By describing history as “myth” the post-human ideology of “chosen trauma” deconstructs that history. Thus the murder of millions in the Holocaust becomes part of a “Jewish myth of suffering.” Who speaks that way? No liberal would dare say that. But they say it about the Armenians. The Armenians have a “chosen trauma” and they should get over it.
The use of the word “chosen” in “chosen trauma” also degrades the existence of the trauma. The idea is that the individual should choose not to have a trauma. He should mature and become modern and throw off the shackles of the past, a past which involved memory and identity and exclusion. Modern man is just man, by himself, with no group. There is but one race: human.
The question that should be posed about “chosen trauma” is two-fold. Why do certain groups get to have their chosen trauma. African-Americans can never seem to forget the trauma of slavery and they are aided and abeted in this by the same liberal who tells the Armenians or others to forget their trauma. Black blame all their problems on slavery. Whether it is the fact that 80% of black American children are born out of wedlock (what people now glorify as “my baby daddy”) or the fact that black women “relax” their hair, it is all due to slavery, even though it isn’t. But no one tells the blacks to abandon their “chosen trauma” or that in having pride in being black that they are ‘excluding’ others. The same should be said of the Muslims, especially Palestinians. No one asks them to get rid of their chosen trauma of the “nakba” or for Muslims to forget the “crusades”. Instead the west blames all of the problems in the Middle East on colonialism and “western oppression” and the “humiliation of the Crusades and the Israeli Occupation.” So where is the complaints about the Palestinians “excluding” others or the consequences that their obsession with their trauma has on the peace process?
The other question that should be posed is whether or not the murder of leftists can be also described as a “chosen trauma”. We often hear leftists whining when a few of them get suppressed. Whether it is the attempted bombing of Prof. Sternhell or the tyranny of Pinochet, one must always hear about the assault on a few leftists and “dissidents” here and there. But is that not also a “chosen trauma”? Is it not also part of a “myth”?
The last problem with the concept of the “chosen trauma” is that it implies there is no truth. Greenway tells us that in Cyprus the Turks and Greeks each have a “narrative” which excludes the suffering of the other. The Turks don’t mention the expulsion of the Greeks and the importation of settlers. The Greeks don’t mention the assaults on Turks the preceeded the Turkish invasion. Greenway and the promulgators of “chosen trauma” tell us that because the two communities disagree that therefore there is no truth, there is just a “chosen trauma.” But this is an assault on fact and history.
If a hundred people are killed and one group says it was “revenge” and the other group says it was “spontaneous rioting” and another group says it was “freedom fighting” it doesn’t mean that the 100 people did not die. It may be true that the Germans in Poland that were expelled in 1945 were expelled because they were “settlers” or to ‘ensure peace’ or because “it was war” but none of it means that there were millions of Germans living in Poland and the Czech Republic before 1945. People mistake the fact that different people interpret right and wrong differently in order to pretend there are no facts. Did the killers of Gandhi do it out of patriotism or evil, was the deed wrong or did it save a nation from the appeasement of Gandhi. Surely some say that the killing of Gandhi was a great and honorable deed. Most disagree and view it as abhorrent. But that doesn’t mean Gandhi wasn’t killed. In fact we even know why he was killed. Whether that killing was right or wrong cannot be determined, perhaps, but the motives of the killer can, in fact, be explored. When terrorists strike liberals like to say that the terrorist has his own motives and that because he uses the “weapon of the poor” or because he perceived himself as “humiliated” that his actions are justified. Those who disagree that people should blow themselves up and kill children do not define terrorism as “resistance”. They condemn it as wrong. The fact that people disagree on interpreting an event doesn’t mean it is part of a “myth”. It is not a “chosen trauma” that the victims of terror want to commemorate being victims. They are actually victims. Liberalism murders the victim by saying he can “choose” to not have trauma. In fact some liberals do choose to not have humanity. Some victims of terror have sympathy for the terrorists. But that is not an example of the flexibility of victimhood, it is merely another example of the inhumanity of modernity. Modernity murders the soul of man. One more example of the murder of that soul is the idea of “chosen trauma”. The real trauma we face is suffering through modernity until it can finally be destroyed so that we can all return to our “primitive” and “animal” past when we “mistakenly identified with the group and were suspicious of outsiders.”
Why they hate us?
Seth J. Frantzman
There are two groups of people who hate Western Civilization, one is Islam and the other is Western Woman.
Consider the recent events in Israel. The riots in Nazareth in 2001 and at Yom Kippur in Acre in 2008 were both partially caused by pent up anger at Arabs harassing Jewish women. An attempted lynching of two Arabs in Pisgat Zeev in 2008 was for the same reason. The murderer of Dana Bennet and the murderers of Leonard Karp were both aided by Jewish women, in one case a Jewish soldier woman. There are now groups in Pisgat Zeev and Petah Tikva aimed at discouraging Jewish women from dating Arab men. The Ethiopian community is hosting a seminar on the issue. In Kiryat Gat a Jewish 15 year old dated Beoduin men, went to night clubs with them and was then taken by them, handcuffed to a pole and burned to death with gasoline. In the Galilee an Arab gang operated for three years raping Jewish women.
When all these incidents take place one must ask why. The usual explanation by women in Israel is that the Arab men give vulnerable young Jewish women presents and flatter them and that the women come from troubled homes with either absent fathers or abusive strict fathers. This always seems to be the “answer” and no one seems to ask more questions.
However the truth is much more complicated. Arab women also come from broken homes with abusive fathers and strict traditional cultures. Yet they don’t rebel by going out with Jewish men. The excuse of the westerner to this observation is to say “well that’s because their society would kill them.” But this excuse isn’t good enough. I’ve known Arab women, mostly from secular backgrounds, not so different backgrounds than the Sephardie and Ethiopian girls in ‘vulnerable” neighbourhoods who are enticed so often by Arab men. These women don’t mind hanging out with Jewish men and from time to time they are taken with the “exotic” idea of what it would be like to go out with them. But they generally hold themselves back from such behavior. Not because of the men in their society but because they believe they would be betraying their culture. No matter how liberal and open minded they are repelled by the idea. Now why is that? Why is it that the Arab Muslim culture, which beats women, which maligns them, which allows men to go out with all sorts of women, which gives men four wives, which puts women in headscarves and expects them to stay at home and beat children, why does that society, even at its most liberal, produce women who like it, honour it and are patriots for it. Even the women who hate the Hamas brand of the Muslim religion, even the women who find Arab men obnoxious in their behavior, even those women honour their culture and faith. Why? In short, why does the western culture fail when it comes to women?
What does the west not provide the women that she would make her stay part of her own culture and not love the “other” and find the “other” exotic? Is it because the western man is metro-sexy and gay and in touch with his feminine side? Is it because the Western man no longer provides? Or is it the western education system and feminism in general that produce women who hate themselves and their culture? Is it freedom, does freedom ensure that humans, women in this case, will beg for a return to slavery, their natural state? Is the western education system, the idea of freedom, and secularism, a failure?
We in the West condemn those religious groups among us that seem to produce women who actually like being part of the group. Consider the religious Jews. Their women don’t find others “exotic”. They don’t want to learn the language, religion and culture of the “other”. Yet we are told by secular society that they are prisoners, suppressed and beaten. But the secular man who would liberate them would liberate them only to find that they don’t desire him but desire another repressive religious culture, such as that found among the Muslims. Isn’t this a puzzle? The West liberates the woman, only to find that the woman hates the West and prefers other religions and cultures that reminds her of the way it used to be in the “bad old days” of the 1950s or the Victorian period. The same women that will condemn the “conservative, chauvinist” style of the 1950s is the same women that yearns to learn Arabic, to know the difference between the Eids and the various ins and outs of Islamic law. She is the same woman who takes the belly-dancing lessons and travels abroad alone to meet and marry foreign men, never returning home. In fact she yearns precisely for the 1950s culture, because is there any culture that is more like the 1950s in terms of its view of women than Arab culture, is there any culture that is more like Victorian England and its mores and dress codes than that of the Muslims?
This is the brutal truth about the Western world and its system and its promise and its future that few want to admit. The West can be summed up with one word: failure. It is a failure. It may appear a success from certain points of view such as economics or democracy. That is all well and good. We have rights to a free trial and such things like that. But the future of society depends on women and children. The long term future depends on these essential ingredients. In nations such as China and India they murder women in the womb (such is the benefit of that western science called abortion). The brilliant Chinese allow Muslims to have as many children as they want but restrict Han Chinese to one child. Most families abort female babies and have males as their one child. There is now a gender gap in China, with millions of missing women. Muslim countries by contrast happily give birth to women and marry them in the fours to men so as to increase their population. But in Russia and Japan and other highly secular country the birth rate is less than one child for every two people. They simply don’t want children, lest the little brats ruin their pursuit of the secular life. Failure. Failure. Failure. Failure. Yes, those societies are all failures.
Europe is a failure. Its women, and I see them from time to time, are butch, mannish, small breasted, unhappy, self-hating, short-haired, and if they are not, if they are pretty and friendly, then they are only interested in African or Muslim men. Such is the European male and his uselessness as a man that he spends his days pursuing things other than women, dressing like a homosexual and generally expressing no interest in personal responsibility, work or women. The European male is gay and the European women acts like a man. Both are objectionable.
The West failed its women completely and utterly. It’s not a matter of women “getting taken advantage of” or “poor women who are vulnerable”. We have been fed this for years. This was the excuse why half of all Ukrainian women have been trafficked as sex slaves abroad. Its not poverty that caused them to be trafficked. It was teaching them to read. Yes. Isn’t that a sad commentary. They could read the adds for “housekeepers in Turkey” or whatever and they gave away their passports and allowed themselves to become slaves. It wasn’t just teaching them to read but teaching them that they should hate their culture and spurn their men and that they were “independent”. That “independence” led them to servitude. What independence it was! Poverty doesn’t turn whole nations into brothels, like Moldova. No. Yemen is poor and the women are whores. Gaza is poor and the women aren’t whores. The difference between the poor western woman and her Muslim counterpart is that the Muslim women wears a visible prison (the burka) and works as a slave for her husband. The poor trafficked Western women lives in a prison (the sex slave brothel wherever she has sold herself) and works as a sex slave for a dozen men a day. Lets be honest, there is no substantial difference between the position of the Muslim women in Gaza or the western women working as a slave in the UAE. Its not poverty that caused this or “the lure of fast money”. It is independence, equal rights and freedom and the West. It is the western male and his useless impotent culture. It is the West and its culture.
A Story about Justice and the University in Israel
October 20, 2009
Seth J. Frantzman
The University and all its humanism likes to talk about “justice” a lot. It likes to educate students about a “just” society of “equals”. The University serves as a brainwashing tool to mint students who do not think. While the University claims to want people who “think critically” the actual affect of its program is to mint people who all think the same. It is no different in Israel. The Israeli university takes people from a variety of backgrounds and, at least in the social sciences and humanities, mints students who all hate the country they live in and desire to “challenge” its existence and support the Arabs.
The Israeli university system, in terms of the Humanities and Social Sciences, is primarily composed of group think and homogeneity. It is almost exclusively Ashkenazi and leftist and it is primarily male. It excels at signing petitions against the very country it exists in. In one such petition 358 university professors and lecturer signed a petition supporting Israeli soldiers who refuse to serve in the army.
But let us be honest about this. The University prides itself on justice. But let us discuss justice for a moment. Is it justice when a wealthy University professor who receives a huge salary from the government and drives a car home to his village every night supports those who refuse to serve in the army. Is it justice that a student from a poor background must go to the army or face jail time and that this student may die in his service? Is it justice that a student from a poor background ends up working security at the university and must ride the bus back and forth to his tiny apartment and because of riding the bus or working as a security guard that student may die at the hands of terrorism? Is it justice that the student from the poor background must die for the professor who receives his salary from the state and supports the very terrorist who murders the poor? What justice is it when the wealthy who receive the most and who work for the government are the ones who support the murder of the poor?
The wealthy in the states of old may have abused the poor but at least they didn’t encourage those who murdered them? The question at the Israeli university is whether the academics deserve security? Do they deserve that the army should defend their “right” to free speech? When the right to free speech encourages those who murder the students, when the state actually pays those who encourage breaking the laws of the state then what does it say about the “right” of free speech?
One Professor at an Israeli University even told the terrorists who to target and who not to. He said they should murder only “settlers” but not good justice seekers from wealthy neighbourhoods such as himself. The army and the security guards at the university should heed the professors. The Universities in Israel operate on occupied Palestinian land, all of them are, in some way or another, involved in occupying the lands of former Arab villages. So, yes, the security guards should refuse to go to work at the University and the army should refuse to serve in any area near the university.
It is time for the professors to live the life that the rest of the nation has been forced to live. It is time for their neighbourhoods to have no security and no protection. They want to encourage the terrorists to “concentrate their attacks on the settlements”. If the university wants justice the only real justice will be in stripping the professorial elite of their diamond protection plans, stripping them of their villages and their BMWs. Send the professors in Israel to the development towns, to Sderot, to Kiryat Gat, to Kiryat Malaki and Lod and Ramla. The intellectual elite in Israel dumped the immigrants to the country in these neighbhourood and now that same cultural elite encourages terrorists to murder those people who have so little. Those who have nothing and live in poor places are drafted into the army and go without question while the wealthy high school students, the children of the cultured elite, refuse to do their service and go abroad with their European passports. It is impossible to call it justice when the poor must die so that the rich can critique their country.
No, the country does not have justice. There is no justice when those paid salaries by the state encourage the murder of other members of the state. When those paid by the state are ensured security by a state they hate there is no justice.
Terra Incognita 98 Polanski, Failure of Feminism and Europeanism
Terra Incognita
Issue 98
“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
October 1, 2009
1) What Polanski says about Europe: The arrest of filmmaker Roman Polanski in Switzerland on a 30 year old warrant for rape and sodomy of a 13 year old has opened up a rift between Europe and the U.S. The New York Times has defended the arrest of this predator but European philosophers and government officials have called the arrest “sinister” and referred to the rape as a “mistake”. Anti-Americanism is also clear in the condemnations. So what is wrong with a continent of people who support the rape of 13 year old girls. Does that continent have something in common, morally, with Somalia where a 13 year old girl was recently stoned to death for being raped?
2) The failure that is Feminism, Women’s education and women’s ‘rights’ in the West: A bunch of recent cases and revelations about Western women being “saved” from their abusive husbands in the West Bank sheds light once again on the phenomenon of women raised in free societies and given equality who desire nothing more than slavery and inequality. Black African women in 1800 had good enough sense to run from the slavers in West Africa who desired to take them in chains to the new world. But white women born today in Moscow, London or New York find a man who wishes to enslave them in Riyadh “exotic” and they run off to marry to him. This says much about the failure that is the West, feminism, women in the west, women’s education, empowerment for women and equality. Failures all.
2) Freeing ourselves from the Europeanism: More calls and more indictments by European courts of people around the world for “war crimes” once again remind us of the subtle hypocrisy that exists in a continent where the judicial system allows for “international jurisdiction” to prosecute people throughout the world but where the same states, such as Spain, give amnesty to their own criminals from the Franco period. The world that spurns this “justice” system is correct. How is it that the committers of the Holocaust are the ones today who preach to us about “human rights”?
What Polanski says about Europe
Seth J. Frantzman
October 1, 2009
In March of 1977 Roman Polanski, a French-born Polish Holocaust survivor, was enjoying himself in Los Angeles as an up and coming film director. He had made friends with Jack Nicholson. One night he met a 13 year old girl named Samantha Geimer who wanted to be a model. He convinced her to take several topless photos “for Vogue” and then invited her back to Nicholson’s Mulholland Drive villa. There he encouraged her to take her clothes off and enter a Jacuzzi, ostensibly for more of a “photo shoot”. He then plied her with alcohol and raped and sodomized her. Polanski was 43. His victim was 13. He was arrested a week later. The celebrity Polanski was given a plea deal that would allow him to serve no prison time, except the time he had spent in prison awaiting trial. When it seemed a Superior Court judge would not honour the deal he fled the United States. Since 1977 he has been on the run, having pled guilty to the crime of rape.
Polanski settled in France and purchased a home in Switzerland. At the time Europeans had no interest in honouring American requests to arrest him. For 30 years the case remained open until the 26th of September 2009 when he was suddenly arrested after disembarking from a plan in Zurich. Immediately people in Europe and Hollywood began leaping to his defense. Otto Weiser, a Swiss filmmaker, said he was “ashamed to be Swiss” and that Polanski made “a little mistake.” More than 130 other movie directors and stars signed a petition for his release. Among them were Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen (who married his own adopted daughter), Spanish director Pedro Almodovar and studio chief Harvey Weinstein. Weinstein claimed that Polanski had “served his time” for his “so-called crime.” Swiss Film Festival Jury President Debra Winger said she was shocked by the arrest and that they “await his release.” She added that she hoped the arrest warrant would be dropped because “it’s based on a three decade old case that is all but dead, except for a technicality.” The French Culture minister said that poor Polanski was being “thrown to the lions because of ancient history.” France’s foreign minister Bernard Kouchner said the arrest was “sinister.” He also said “all this just isn’t nice” because Polanksi had been honoured for his contributions to high culture. Culture Minister Frederic Mitterand expressed his outraged in anti-Americanism, “in the same way that there is a generous America that we like, there is also a scary America that has just shown its face.”
But in the U.s even the more leftist media organs such as the New York Times have tried to explain the logic behind the arrest. “we were glad to see other prominent Europeans beginning to point out that this case has nothing to do with Mr. Polanski’s work or his age. It is about an adult preying on a child. Mr. Polanski pleaded guilty to that crime and must account for it.”
Leftist voices have been the main defenders of Polanski. The World Socialist Website published an editorial accusing the New York Times of “throwing Polanski under the bus.” It accused the evils of the ‘law and order’ lobby of prosecuting Polanski and spoke of “humanitarian considerations and the spirit of forgiveness” being ignored. It accused “reactionary voices” of applauding. The Socialists claimed that “human rights” had been violated in the arrest. It accused the L.A prosecutors of attempting to ruin Polanski’s life the way they had “mercilessly pursued Michael Jackson.” The Socialists accused the Times of catering to the “extreme right” and bowing down to “family values” and other “filthy social elements.” They speak of “Polanski’s plight” as if he is some refugee. The left argues that by arresting him his “personality and entire life” are being judged. The left even goes so far as to claim that Polanski’s hard life, in which his mother died in a Nazi concentration camp and his first wife was murdered by Charles Manson, forced him to rape a 13 year old. The left asks can his past “be entirely unrelated to the crime for which Polanski was charged and to which he pled guilty? What possible value could his imprisonment serve at this time? What danger does he represent to society?” The left concludes “if the worst occurs, the editors [of the Times] will share responsibility for any tragic outcome.”
How can one understand the support for Mr. Polanski? It is not merely the support of friends and family, but the support of the most powerful, the most wealthy, major makers of culture, governments and ministers. It is not merely the support one provides to a friend but attacks on a “so-called crime” and a “little mistake.” They also speak of an “ancient” case. Consider how the French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy described Polanski’s arrest in his petition. He speaks of Polanski being “apprehended like a common terrorist.” He notes that he “risks extradition for an episode that happened years ago.” He notes that prosecution for such a crime would no longer be possible in Europe due to the expiration of the “statute of limitations.” He even says that the arrest is not “worthy of two democracies” like Switzerland and the U.S. Among those signing his petition are Salmon Rushdie and William Shawcross, the latter a U.K intellectual.
This is the way Europe and the left view the Polanski affair. Why is it that in Europe the rape of a 13 year old girl is not a crime? Why is it that in Europe such a rape is just a “little mistake” or a “so-called crime” or an “episode” that “happened years ago”? The reason is partly because of the souless secular nature of the modern day European. Europeans, especially those in Western Europe, don’t have children. They have no understanding of what it means for an elderly man to rape a 13 year old girl because none of them have daughters. Furthermore many Europeans engage in sex-tourism either in Europe with sex-slaves from Eastern Europe, or abroad in Thailand, with teenage girls. This means that don’t feel that raping a 13 year old is a crime or a mistake, it is just something that grown men do.
But there are other reasons for the rampant immorality that is clear from the statements of support for Polanski. Europe is like an Islamic culture. In its liberalism it has become Islamic in its treatment of women. In Islamic societies the rape of a woman is not a crime and in fact she is frequently punished, even by death, for being raped. In one case in Pakistan the rape of a teenage girl resulted in a court ordering the rape of the sister of one of the rapists. In a case in Somalia a 13 year old girl who was gang raped was then stoned to death for “adultery”. Islam views the legal status of a 13 year old girl in much the same way Western Europe views her. Europe is primarily a Muslim culture in is treatment of women, its hatred of them and its spurning of their rights.
But there is more to the case of Mr. Polanski. When Europeans speak of “ancient history” this is part and parcel of a larger European secular culture that has no history. Europeans view the 1970s as “ancient history” precisely because they hate their history, they have no memory, no culture, no heritage. In fact that belief that any crime committed a decade ago is ‘ancient history’ is part and parcel of the way in which Europe frees those who committed the Holocaust. Europe frees Nazis and known terrorists, such as the Lockerbie bomber, because their crimes are “ancient history” and because they are no longer “threats to the public.” But Mr. Polanski is a threat to the public. He is a predator who plied a barely pubescent girl with drugs and alcohol and raped her. Grand Jury testimony from the original crime even show the sickness of Mr. Polanski. He asked the girl when her last period was and if she was on birth control. This was his excuse to sodomize her. When driving her home, after raping her he said “don’t tell your mom about this.” This was no youthful indiscretion of some 19 year old celebrity who meets a 13 year old girl who is pretending to be 17. This is a 40 year old man who lies to a 13 year old girl, tempts her to become a “model” and then plies her with drugs and booze to rape her. This is a sick person. His illness, his criminal behavior, is not because of his having suffered the Holocaust or because the Manson family murdered his wife Sharon Tate. No. There is no connection and his friends playing the “he is a Holocaust survivor” card is beyond disgusting. The fact that European law has a sort statute of limitations on such crimes is not something Europeans should be proud of but in fact means that Europe is a land of criminals who merely have to avoid prosecution for crimes for a few years and can then walk free.
The reaction to the Polanski arrest by Europe’s best and brightest, the intercession by her government officials and ministers, all of this says a great deal about the fact that Europe is very much like a Polanski. It committed the Holocaust and now hopes the statute of limitations has run out on its criminal behavior. Europe established courts with “international jurisdiction” so it can prosecute people all over the world for “war crimes” when it gives its own war criminals amnesty at home. Europeans run around the world on protest tours lecturing people about “human rights” when their continent is drowning in human rights violations. They want the 1970s to be ancient history so that they can live in the mirage that they have a right to tell others how to live. But it is they who are guilty. They are guilty of adopting Islamic law. They are guilty of treating women the way Islam treats them. They are guilty of rape, rape of the soul, rape of humanity, rape of decency, rape of logic, rape of modernity. Polanski has found his greatest support in Europe and among Hollywood’s perverted elite, such as Woody Allen and Harvey Weinstein, both apparent child predators. The support for Polanski is a litmus test for what is good and what is bad in the world.
The failure that is Feminism, Women’s education and women’s ‘rights’ in the West
Seth J. Frantzman
September 17, 2009
Three articles easily located in the press shed light on the West’s failure in its education and nurturing of women. There is no value that the West teaches women that gives them the tools to live the independent life that western feminism supposedly promised them. Let us examine the evidence. In October 1st of 2008 we learn of Colleen Barghouti, a former American waitress turned whining American woman pleading to get her daughters back from her Palestinian husband. Ms. Bargouti had all the freedom that the West could provide. She got spoon fed all the nonsense about women being equal and empowered. She read all the mandatory women’s magazines. And then she locked herself in a prison cell and sold herself into slavery. Her slavery was called Yasser Barghouti, who she met while waitressing when he was a college student in 1993.
Colleen, a single mother apparently, converted to Islam, had her son, Rick, adopted by Yasser and moved to the West Bank village of Kobar in June of 2007. Colleen three good Muslim children for her husband and allowed him to beat her while she lived with him.
Then her romantic exotic life began to fall apart and she left, fleeing back to Chicago. She then began to whine and complain about getting her kids back. She was concerned that her daughters were being forced to wear headscarves in their Islamic school that they attend. Meanwhile Mr. Barghouti works for a UN funded “worker’s rights” organization. The complaining of Mrs. Barghouti eventually resulted in the involvement of the U.S consulate in a situation that she is entirely at fault for. But we in the West have gotten used to these “not without my daughter” stories. No one bothers to ask; when a woman leaves her home country marries a foreign man, converts to his religion, has three children with him, allows herself to get beaten, goes from a culture with equal rights to a culture with sub-standard rights for women, hasn’t she made enough wrong choices that she no longer deserves our interest or support? Isn’t she enough of a traitor to the Western culture that invested money and time in raising her and had to watch her spurn that culture in favor of the foreign “exotic” culture, she we no longer have to waste time and effort on this person. She wanted the exotic life, no doubt she called her friends racist when they objected to her leaving and called others “ignorant” when they noted that Islam has few rights for women. She was arrogant, so why must we now pay the price for her arrogance?
But hers is only one story. In an August 2009 incident the Palestinian police had to intervene to “save” an Israeli Jewish woman. This woman was born into a free culture with equal rights for women. She too wanted to “exotic” lifestyle. She found an exotic Palestinian boyfriend. She went to his house in Hebron and he beat her. He then locked her in the house. She was already known to the Israeli police who man checkpoints outside Arab Hebron because as an Israeli it is illegal for her to enter the city. But she did so anyway, flaunting her relationship to the Jewish Israeli soldiers and showing off her “exotic” Muslim boyfriend. The Jewish men were not good enough for her. But when she needed help suddenly she dialed the Israeli police, whining and complaining of her predicament. The Palestinian police eventually had to intervene to “rescue” this western woman.
Then there is the September 2009 story of another American woman who met an ‘exotic’ Muslim in America and moved with him to a village near the Palestinian town of Tulkarm. She had a child with her new husband. Then the husband, who already had a wife and four children, began to lock her in the house and hit her. The Western woman became unhappy and whined and complained. Her family intervened and hired some Israeli former commandos to go rescue her, risking their lives because of the stupid choices of another Western women. These three cases are just a few in an area of a few hundred square kilometers that is the West bank. All over the world are hundreds of thousands of cases like these, most going un-reported, where the Western Woman, born with equal rights, knowingly gives herself over to slavery, beatings, rape and servitude.
The point must come in the West, when hundreds of thousands of women willingly give themselves into slavery, when we must ask ourselves if the Western system and its “women’s rights” and “female empowerment” is a system that works or is logical. If you educate women to have equal rights and then you find out that large numbers of them prefer a religion where they have half the rights of a man and many of them marry men who beat them and many of them willingly leave the country that grants them equal rights to go to a foreign country where they have no rights, where they don’t know the language and then allow themselves to get pregnant and have a bunch of children and then allow themselves to get beaten, how is the Western system succeeding in terms of these women?
In fact the Western system of women’s rights is a charade. Every culture that has granted women equal rights has found that they do not want those rights and that they do everything possible to leave the countries that grant them these rights. Women from the former USSR, which granted women abortions as early as the 1920s, have fled their countries like the plague, selling themselves in the millions into sex slavery from the UAE to Japan. Consider this. For three or four generations the USSR educated women, gave them rights, gave them the right to an abortion and one finds that in brothels throughout the world that it is these women, the ones with the most rights, who make up the largest number of women trafficked in the world. But are they really being “trafficked”. We are told to feel sorry for the “natashas” imprisoned in brothels and forced to have sex with 13 men a day and beaten and raped and murdered. But why have sympathy? These women created this situation. Without the existence of the USSR, say had it been a Muslim rather than a Communist nation, there would be millions less prostitutes. The Western world excuses the existence of sex slavery by calling it the “oldest profession”. But it doesn’t add up. Muslim women from Gaza don’t sell themselves into sex slavery. Gaza isn’t over-flowing with brothels. But the UAE is overflowing, not with Muslim prostitutes, but with sex slaves from every country in the world that has given women rights, from India to Russia to Poland to Armenia. Find women who are free and you will find women who will sign up to be beaten, raped, tortured and sold into slavery.
That is the irony of the Western world. The savage Africans who were beaten, raped and sold into slavery, as shown in the slightly fanciful film Roots had enough sense to run away from the slavers. They had little knowledge of the outside world, no high science, no university, no geometry or algebra. They didn’t have Vogue or any number of women’s magazines. They didn’t have the vote or abortion. But they knew to run away when people came to enslave them. That means that they were more advanced then we are today. Yes, the West Coast of Africa in 1800 was more advanced than New York or London or Moscow in 2009. That is all one needs to know about Western Civilization and its treatment or its “success” in the realm of women and women’s rights. A woman born today in London, New York or Moscow will have less rights and less of a chance to live a life of freedom than one born in 1790s West Africa. That is the tombstone to the entire movement called “feminism” and the entire lie that has been called “progressive” and “humanistic” in the West.
Freeing ourselves from the Europeanism
Seth J. Frantzman
September 20, 2009
A recent article in the New York Times spoke of the spread of human rights. It was written by Richard Gowan and Franziska Brantner. The writers complained that “this tragedy [of backsliding on human rights] was indicative of a wider erosion of support for Western positions on human rights.” They furthermore complained that “Of the U.N.’s 192 members, 117 voted with the European Union less than half the time on human rights issues in the General Assembly over the last year.” The writers assumed that only the Europeans and the “Western powers” could be correct on human rights. They ignored the possibility that the west is wrong about human rights.
It might seem as odd that a mere fifty years after the Europeans were happily packing people into gas chambers that they should dictate to the world what is right and wrong when it comes to treatment of humans. How did the people who a mere forty years ago still held colonies that had been the scenes of genocide and slavery could dictate to the world about right and wrong. And yet that is what has happened. Human rights, international humanitarian law and all their related concepts are European exclusively. Europeans voted for Nazi and fascist parties and now it is they who call much of the “nazi” and “fascist” and expect us to accept their judgments as based on fact and logical ‘western’ reasoning because only they can know what a human rights violation is, only they can produce international law and only they are qualified to judge war crimes. The supposed basis for this is that they know it because they invented it. They invented systematic genocide and the use of gas and other war crimes. They invented ethnic-cleansing, so only they can know it when it happens.
But is there not something hypocritical about countries like Spain that give their courts “international jurisdiction” so that they can prosecute human rights violations throughout the world and then pass laws giving amnesty to their own Franco era human rights criminals? Is there not something strange about the fact that England and Belgium, both of whome committed human rights violations recently in Northern Ireland and the Congo, also giving their courts the right to investigate crimes throughout the world and yet not prosecuting the aging criminals in their midst who massacred people in Belfast and Kinshasa?
In a logical world free from hypocrisy it would be the opposite. The victims of the Europeans and their hundreds of years of colonialism, genocide, slave trade and Holocaust would dictate to the world about human rights. The Congolese, the Jews, the Aboriginals and Australia, they would be the ones writing human rights law and international humanitarian law. The victims of the endless wars engendered by Europeans would be the one’s writing war crimes law. Countries like Russia which was twice the victim of German aggression would be the one writing about the law of war, not Germany and Italy (ironically the author of the theory of ‘proportionality’ and the home of the ‘Rome statue’ respectively).
Those 70 odd countries who refuse to vote with the Europeans at the UN are not the outsiders but the logical countries. European invented human rights law has become so twisted and hypocritical, a tool in the hand of terrorists and dictators, and one that was invented by the same inventors of the gas chamber and the firebombing, that the world must once and for all free itself from the yoke of Europeanism.
Issue 98
“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
October 1, 2009
1) What Polanski says about Europe: The arrest of filmmaker Roman Polanski in Switzerland on a 30 year old warrant for rape and sodomy of a 13 year old has opened up a rift between Europe and the U.S. The New York Times has defended the arrest of this predator but European philosophers and government officials have called the arrest “sinister” and referred to the rape as a “mistake”. Anti-Americanism is also clear in the condemnations. So what is wrong with a continent of people who support the rape of 13 year old girls. Does that continent have something in common, morally, with Somalia where a 13 year old girl was recently stoned to death for being raped?
2) The failure that is Feminism, Women’s education and women’s ‘rights’ in the West: A bunch of recent cases and revelations about Western women being “saved” from their abusive husbands in the West Bank sheds light once again on the phenomenon of women raised in free societies and given equality who desire nothing more than slavery and inequality. Black African women in 1800 had good enough sense to run from the slavers in West Africa who desired to take them in chains to the new world. But white women born today in Moscow, London or New York find a man who wishes to enslave them in Riyadh “exotic” and they run off to marry to him. This says much about the failure that is the West, feminism, women in the west, women’s education, empowerment for women and equality. Failures all.
2) Freeing ourselves from the Europeanism: More calls and more indictments by European courts of people around the world for “war crimes” once again remind us of the subtle hypocrisy that exists in a continent where the judicial system allows for “international jurisdiction” to prosecute people throughout the world but where the same states, such as Spain, give amnesty to their own criminals from the Franco period. The world that spurns this “justice” system is correct. How is it that the committers of the Holocaust are the ones today who preach to us about “human rights”?
What Polanski says about Europe
Seth J. Frantzman
October 1, 2009
In March of 1977 Roman Polanski, a French-born Polish Holocaust survivor, was enjoying himself in Los Angeles as an up and coming film director. He had made friends with Jack Nicholson. One night he met a 13 year old girl named Samantha Geimer who wanted to be a model. He convinced her to take several topless photos “for Vogue” and then invited her back to Nicholson’s Mulholland Drive villa. There he encouraged her to take her clothes off and enter a Jacuzzi, ostensibly for more of a “photo shoot”. He then plied her with alcohol and raped and sodomized her. Polanski was 43. His victim was 13. He was arrested a week later. The celebrity Polanski was given a plea deal that would allow him to serve no prison time, except the time he had spent in prison awaiting trial. When it seemed a Superior Court judge would not honour the deal he fled the United States. Since 1977 he has been on the run, having pled guilty to the crime of rape.
Polanski settled in France and purchased a home in Switzerland. At the time Europeans had no interest in honouring American requests to arrest him. For 30 years the case remained open until the 26th of September 2009 when he was suddenly arrested after disembarking from a plan in Zurich. Immediately people in Europe and Hollywood began leaping to his defense. Otto Weiser, a Swiss filmmaker, said he was “ashamed to be Swiss” and that Polanski made “a little mistake.” More than 130 other movie directors and stars signed a petition for his release. Among them were Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen (who married his own adopted daughter), Spanish director Pedro Almodovar and studio chief Harvey Weinstein. Weinstein claimed that Polanski had “served his time” for his “so-called crime.” Swiss Film Festival Jury President Debra Winger said she was shocked by the arrest and that they “await his release.” She added that she hoped the arrest warrant would be dropped because “it’s based on a three decade old case that is all but dead, except for a technicality.” The French Culture minister said that poor Polanski was being “thrown to the lions because of ancient history.” France’s foreign minister Bernard Kouchner said the arrest was “sinister.” He also said “all this just isn’t nice” because Polanksi had been honoured for his contributions to high culture. Culture Minister Frederic Mitterand expressed his outraged in anti-Americanism, “in the same way that there is a generous America that we like, there is also a scary America that has just shown its face.”
But in the U.s even the more leftist media organs such as the New York Times have tried to explain the logic behind the arrest. “we were glad to see other prominent Europeans beginning to point out that this case has nothing to do with Mr. Polanski’s work or his age. It is about an adult preying on a child. Mr. Polanski pleaded guilty to that crime and must account for it.”
Leftist voices have been the main defenders of Polanski. The World Socialist Website published an editorial accusing the New York Times of “throwing Polanski under the bus.” It accused the evils of the ‘law and order’ lobby of prosecuting Polanski and spoke of “humanitarian considerations and the spirit of forgiveness” being ignored. It accused “reactionary voices” of applauding. The Socialists claimed that “human rights” had been violated in the arrest. It accused the L.A prosecutors of attempting to ruin Polanski’s life the way they had “mercilessly pursued Michael Jackson.” The Socialists accused the Times of catering to the “extreme right” and bowing down to “family values” and other “filthy social elements.” They speak of “Polanski’s plight” as if he is some refugee. The left argues that by arresting him his “personality and entire life” are being judged. The left even goes so far as to claim that Polanski’s hard life, in which his mother died in a Nazi concentration camp and his first wife was murdered by Charles Manson, forced him to rape a 13 year old. The left asks can his past “be entirely unrelated to the crime for which Polanski was charged and to which he pled guilty? What possible value could his imprisonment serve at this time? What danger does he represent to society?” The left concludes “if the worst occurs, the editors [of the Times] will share responsibility for any tragic outcome.”
How can one understand the support for Mr. Polanski? It is not merely the support of friends and family, but the support of the most powerful, the most wealthy, major makers of culture, governments and ministers. It is not merely the support one provides to a friend but attacks on a “so-called crime” and a “little mistake.” They also speak of an “ancient” case. Consider how the French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy described Polanski’s arrest in his petition. He speaks of Polanski being “apprehended like a common terrorist.” He notes that he “risks extradition for an episode that happened years ago.” He notes that prosecution for such a crime would no longer be possible in Europe due to the expiration of the “statute of limitations.” He even says that the arrest is not “worthy of two democracies” like Switzerland and the U.S. Among those signing his petition are Salmon Rushdie and William Shawcross, the latter a U.K intellectual.
This is the way Europe and the left view the Polanski affair. Why is it that in Europe the rape of a 13 year old girl is not a crime? Why is it that in Europe such a rape is just a “little mistake” or a “so-called crime” or an “episode” that “happened years ago”? The reason is partly because of the souless secular nature of the modern day European. Europeans, especially those in Western Europe, don’t have children. They have no understanding of what it means for an elderly man to rape a 13 year old girl because none of them have daughters. Furthermore many Europeans engage in sex-tourism either in Europe with sex-slaves from Eastern Europe, or abroad in Thailand, with teenage girls. This means that don’t feel that raping a 13 year old is a crime or a mistake, it is just something that grown men do.
But there are other reasons for the rampant immorality that is clear from the statements of support for Polanski. Europe is like an Islamic culture. In its liberalism it has become Islamic in its treatment of women. In Islamic societies the rape of a woman is not a crime and in fact she is frequently punished, even by death, for being raped. In one case in Pakistan the rape of a teenage girl resulted in a court ordering the rape of the sister of one of the rapists. In a case in Somalia a 13 year old girl who was gang raped was then stoned to death for “adultery”. Islam views the legal status of a 13 year old girl in much the same way Western Europe views her. Europe is primarily a Muslim culture in is treatment of women, its hatred of them and its spurning of their rights.
But there is more to the case of Mr. Polanski. When Europeans speak of “ancient history” this is part and parcel of a larger European secular culture that has no history. Europeans view the 1970s as “ancient history” precisely because they hate their history, they have no memory, no culture, no heritage. In fact that belief that any crime committed a decade ago is ‘ancient history’ is part and parcel of the way in which Europe frees those who committed the Holocaust. Europe frees Nazis and known terrorists, such as the Lockerbie bomber, because their crimes are “ancient history” and because they are no longer “threats to the public.” But Mr. Polanski is a threat to the public. He is a predator who plied a barely pubescent girl with drugs and alcohol and raped her. Grand Jury testimony from the original crime even show the sickness of Mr. Polanski. He asked the girl when her last period was and if she was on birth control. This was his excuse to sodomize her. When driving her home, after raping her he said “don’t tell your mom about this.” This was no youthful indiscretion of some 19 year old celebrity who meets a 13 year old girl who is pretending to be 17. This is a 40 year old man who lies to a 13 year old girl, tempts her to become a “model” and then plies her with drugs and booze to rape her. This is a sick person. His illness, his criminal behavior, is not because of his having suffered the Holocaust or because the Manson family murdered his wife Sharon Tate. No. There is no connection and his friends playing the “he is a Holocaust survivor” card is beyond disgusting. The fact that European law has a sort statute of limitations on such crimes is not something Europeans should be proud of but in fact means that Europe is a land of criminals who merely have to avoid prosecution for crimes for a few years and can then walk free.
The reaction to the Polanski arrest by Europe’s best and brightest, the intercession by her government officials and ministers, all of this says a great deal about the fact that Europe is very much like a Polanski. It committed the Holocaust and now hopes the statute of limitations has run out on its criminal behavior. Europe established courts with “international jurisdiction” so it can prosecute people all over the world for “war crimes” when it gives its own war criminals amnesty at home. Europeans run around the world on protest tours lecturing people about “human rights” when their continent is drowning in human rights violations. They want the 1970s to be ancient history so that they can live in the mirage that they have a right to tell others how to live. But it is they who are guilty. They are guilty of adopting Islamic law. They are guilty of treating women the way Islam treats them. They are guilty of rape, rape of the soul, rape of humanity, rape of decency, rape of logic, rape of modernity. Polanski has found his greatest support in Europe and among Hollywood’s perverted elite, such as Woody Allen and Harvey Weinstein, both apparent child predators. The support for Polanski is a litmus test for what is good and what is bad in the world.
The failure that is Feminism, Women’s education and women’s ‘rights’ in the West
Seth J. Frantzman
September 17, 2009
Three articles easily located in the press shed light on the West’s failure in its education and nurturing of women. There is no value that the West teaches women that gives them the tools to live the independent life that western feminism supposedly promised them. Let us examine the evidence. In October 1st of 2008 we learn of Colleen Barghouti, a former American waitress turned whining American woman pleading to get her daughters back from her Palestinian husband. Ms. Bargouti had all the freedom that the West could provide. She got spoon fed all the nonsense about women being equal and empowered. She read all the mandatory women’s magazines. And then she locked herself in a prison cell and sold herself into slavery. Her slavery was called Yasser Barghouti, who she met while waitressing when he was a college student in 1993.
Colleen, a single mother apparently, converted to Islam, had her son, Rick, adopted by Yasser and moved to the West Bank village of Kobar in June of 2007. Colleen three good Muslim children for her husband and allowed him to beat her while she lived with him.
Then her romantic exotic life began to fall apart and she left, fleeing back to Chicago. She then began to whine and complain about getting her kids back. She was concerned that her daughters were being forced to wear headscarves in their Islamic school that they attend. Meanwhile Mr. Barghouti works for a UN funded “worker’s rights” organization. The complaining of Mrs. Barghouti eventually resulted in the involvement of the U.S consulate in a situation that she is entirely at fault for. But we in the West have gotten used to these “not without my daughter” stories. No one bothers to ask; when a woman leaves her home country marries a foreign man, converts to his religion, has three children with him, allows herself to get beaten, goes from a culture with equal rights to a culture with sub-standard rights for women, hasn’t she made enough wrong choices that she no longer deserves our interest or support? Isn’t she enough of a traitor to the Western culture that invested money and time in raising her and had to watch her spurn that culture in favor of the foreign “exotic” culture, she we no longer have to waste time and effort on this person. She wanted the exotic life, no doubt she called her friends racist when they objected to her leaving and called others “ignorant” when they noted that Islam has few rights for women. She was arrogant, so why must we now pay the price for her arrogance?
But hers is only one story. In an August 2009 incident the Palestinian police had to intervene to “save” an Israeli Jewish woman. This woman was born into a free culture with equal rights for women. She too wanted to “exotic” lifestyle. She found an exotic Palestinian boyfriend. She went to his house in Hebron and he beat her. He then locked her in the house. She was already known to the Israeli police who man checkpoints outside Arab Hebron because as an Israeli it is illegal for her to enter the city. But she did so anyway, flaunting her relationship to the Jewish Israeli soldiers and showing off her “exotic” Muslim boyfriend. The Jewish men were not good enough for her. But when she needed help suddenly she dialed the Israeli police, whining and complaining of her predicament. The Palestinian police eventually had to intervene to “rescue” this western woman.
Then there is the September 2009 story of another American woman who met an ‘exotic’ Muslim in America and moved with him to a village near the Palestinian town of Tulkarm. She had a child with her new husband. Then the husband, who already had a wife and four children, began to lock her in the house and hit her. The Western woman became unhappy and whined and complained. Her family intervened and hired some Israeli former commandos to go rescue her, risking their lives because of the stupid choices of another Western women. These three cases are just a few in an area of a few hundred square kilometers that is the West bank. All over the world are hundreds of thousands of cases like these, most going un-reported, where the Western Woman, born with equal rights, knowingly gives herself over to slavery, beatings, rape and servitude.
The point must come in the West, when hundreds of thousands of women willingly give themselves into slavery, when we must ask ourselves if the Western system and its “women’s rights” and “female empowerment” is a system that works or is logical. If you educate women to have equal rights and then you find out that large numbers of them prefer a religion where they have half the rights of a man and many of them marry men who beat them and many of them willingly leave the country that grants them equal rights to go to a foreign country where they have no rights, where they don’t know the language and then allow themselves to get pregnant and have a bunch of children and then allow themselves to get beaten, how is the Western system succeeding in terms of these women?
In fact the Western system of women’s rights is a charade. Every culture that has granted women equal rights has found that they do not want those rights and that they do everything possible to leave the countries that grant them these rights. Women from the former USSR, which granted women abortions as early as the 1920s, have fled their countries like the plague, selling themselves in the millions into sex slavery from the UAE to Japan. Consider this. For three or four generations the USSR educated women, gave them rights, gave them the right to an abortion and one finds that in brothels throughout the world that it is these women, the ones with the most rights, who make up the largest number of women trafficked in the world. But are they really being “trafficked”. We are told to feel sorry for the “natashas” imprisoned in brothels and forced to have sex with 13 men a day and beaten and raped and murdered. But why have sympathy? These women created this situation. Without the existence of the USSR, say had it been a Muslim rather than a Communist nation, there would be millions less prostitutes. The Western world excuses the existence of sex slavery by calling it the “oldest profession”. But it doesn’t add up. Muslim women from Gaza don’t sell themselves into sex slavery. Gaza isn’t over-flowing with brothels. But the UAE is overflowing, not with Muslim prostitutes, but with sex slaves from every country in the world that has given women rights, from India to Russia to Poland to Armenia. Find women who are free and you will find women who will sign up to be beaten, raped, tortured and sold into slavery.
That is the irony of the Western world. The savage Africans who were beaten, raped and sold into slavery, as shown in the slightly fanciful film Roots had enough sense to run away from the slavers. They had little knowledge of the outside world, no high science, no university, no geometry or algebra. They didn’t have Vogue or any number of women’s magazines. They didn’t have the vote or abortion. But they knew to run away when people came to enslave them. That means that they were more advanced then we are today. Yes, the West Coast of Africa in 1800 was more advanced than New York or London or Moscow in 2009. That is all one needs to know about Western Civilization and its treatment or its “success” in the realm of women and women’s rights. A woman born today in London, New York or Moscow will have less rights and less of a chance to live a life of freedom than one born in 1790s West Africa. That is the tombstone to the entire movement called “feminism” and the entire lie that has been called “progressive” and “humanistic” in the West.
Freeing ourselves from the Europeanism
Seth J. Frantzman
September 20, 2009
A recent article in the New York Times spoke of the spread of human rights. It was written by Richard Gowan and Franziska Brantner. The writers complained that “this tragedy [of backsliding on human rights] was indicative of a wider erosion of support for Western positions on human rights.” They furthermore complained that “Of the U.N.’s 192 members, 117 voted with the European Union less than half the time on human rights issues in the General Assembly over the last year.” The writers assumed that only the Europeans and the “Western powers” could be correct on human rights. They ignored the possibility that the west is wrong about human rights.
It might seem as odd that a mere fifty years after the Europeans were happily packing people into gas chambers that they should dictate to the world what is right and wrong when it comes to treatment of humans. How did the people who a mere forty years ago still held colonies that had been the scenes of genocide and slavery could dictate to the world about right and wrong. And yet that is what has happened. Human rights, international humanitarian law and all their related concepts are European exclusively. Europeans voted for Nazi and fascist parties and now it is they who call much of the “nazi” and “fascist” and expect us to accept their judgments as based on fact and logical ‘western’ reasoning because only they can know what a human rights violation is, only they can produce international law and only they are qualified to judge war crimes. The supposed basis for this is that they know it because they invented it. They invented systematic genocide and the use of gas and other war crimes. They invented ethnic-cleansing, so only they can know it when it happens.
But is there not something hypocritical about countries like Spain that give their courts “international jurisdiction” so that they can prosecute human rights violations throughout the world and then pass laws giving amnesty to their own Franco era human rights criminals? Is there not something strange about the fact that England and Belgium, both of whome committed human rights violations recently in Northern Ireland and the Congo, also giving their courts the right to investigate crimes throughout the world and yet not prosecuting the aging criminals in their midst who massacred people in Belfast and Kinshasa?
In a logical world free from hypocrisy it would be the opposite. The victims of the Europeans and their hundreds of years of colonialism, genocide, slave trade and Holocaust would dictate to the world about human rights. The Congolese, the Jews, the Aboriginals and Australia, they would be the ones writing human rights law and international humanitarian law. The victims of the endless wars engendered by Europeans would be the one’s writing war crimes law. Countries like Russia which was twice the victim of German aggression would be the one writing about the law of war, not Germany and Italy (ironically the author of the theory of ‘proportionality’ and the home of the ‘Rome statue’ respectively).
Those 70 odd countries who refuse to vote with the Europeans at the UN are not the outsiders but the logical countries. European invented human rights law has become so twisted and hypocritical, a tool in the hand of terrorists and dictators, and one that was invented by the same inventors of the gas chamber and the firebombing, that the world must once and for all free itself from the yoke of Europeanism.
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